Victor Martinez-Hernandez is a killer who was found guilty of the brutal murder of Rachel Morin. Court documents would show that Victor Martinez-Hernandez would hide in the woods armed with a shovel and would attack Rachel Morin as she came by. The woman would be brutally sexually assaulted and murdered
At the time of the murder Victor Martinez-Hernandez was wanted for a home invasion and assaulted a nine year old girl and her mother in California
Victor Martinez-Hernandez would be found guilty and will be sentenced at a later date
Victor Martinez-Hernandez Case
A Harford County jury on Monday reached a verdict in the case for the man accused of raping and killing Rachel Morin.
Victor Martinez-Hernandez, 24, was found guilty of first-degree premeditated murder, first-degree rape, third degree sexual assault and kidnapping.
Morin, 37, was reported missing on Aug. 5, 2023. Her body was found the next day near the Ma & Pa Trail in Bel Air. The sheriff’s office said DNA recovered from the scene matched that of a man, identified as Martinez-Hernandez, wanted for a home invasion and assault of a 9-year-old girl and her mother in Los Angeles, California.
Martinez-Hernandez was arrested in June 2024 in Tulsa, Oklahoma following a nationwide manhunt. He pleaded not guilty to kidnapping, rape and murder charges.
A Maryland State Police DNA analyst testified on Friday and said the defendant’s DNA was the only male profile found on Morin’s body or other evidence gathered at the scene.
On Thursday, testimony delivered by the prosecution placed Martinez-Hernandez in Bel Air, close to the crime scene for five months before and after Morin’s death.
In state testimony on Wednesday, the jury was presented with evidence by a witness that the defendant hid in the woods with a shovel.
Martinez-Hernandez is also a suspect in the murder of a woman in El Salvador in January 2023. He crossed into the United States illegally in February 2023.
Victor Martinez-Hernandez News
A man was found guilty on Monday of killing Rachel Morin on the Ma & Pa Heritage Trail in Bel Air, a case that received intense national attention and became an issue in the 2024 presidential election.
Victor Martinez-Hernandez, 24, was convicted in Harford County Circuit Court of first- and second-degree murder, first- and second-degree rape, third-degree sex offense and kidnapping.
Circuit Judge Yolanda L. Curtin presided over the trial, which started on April 1.
Martinez-Hernandez has been held in the Harford County Detention Center without bail.
On Aug. 5, 2023, Morin went out for a run at about 7 p.m. on the trail, a winding path that’s surrounded by forest. She was a fitness enthusiast, and loved ones testified that she tried to exercise there every day.
Kyle Stacy and his girlfriend, Olivia, were walking on the trail that evening with their dog when he heard a tree branch snap.
That’s when Stacy testified that he saw a man in the woods, which made him feel “pretty nervous and uncomfortable.” The man was holding a walking stick and wearing sunglasses and a gray sweatshirt with the hood up.
Thirty seconds to one minute later, Stacy said, he and his girlfriend walked past a woman he’d soon learn was Morin. She was alone.
Morin’s boyfriend, Richard Tobin, called 911 later that night to report her missing. Two of Morin’s daughters, Violet Custer and Faye McMahon, also grew concerned when their mother stopped responding to text messages.
Cecilia Occorso heard about the search for a missing person in Harford County through Facebook and wanted to help. So she reached out to her friend, Evan Knapp, and they went out to the trail.
Occorso testified that the two walked down what she described as a deer path. They came upon a bloody rock and leaves.
Knapp then went around a sticker bush, she said, and spotted Morin’s body inside a drainage tunnel that ran under Maryland Route 24.
Law enforcement nearby found her Apple Watch and iPhone XR, and both had been damaged. Detectives took swabs from her body for DNA.
The Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner determined her cause of death was strangulation and blunt force injuries. The manner of death was homicide.
Morin suffered a minimum of 15 to 20 blows to her head and face, said Dr. Zabiullah Ali, a now-retired forensic pathologist with the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.
The lead investigator, Detective Phil Golden, testified that law enforcement received at least 1,000 tips.
The investigation led detectives to an apartment in Temple Hills, Maryland, as well as a home in Alexandria, Virginia.
A cousin, Jose Hernandez, testified that Martinez-Hernandez lived with him at his apartment at the time for about five months.
The FBI visited and, one day, Victor Martinez-Hernandez took off without notice. He left behind belongings including a pair of shoes and dirty clothes, which law enforcement collected and swabbed for DNA.
Another one of his cousins, Tania Hernandez, said Victor Martinez-Hernandez also ditched a toothbrush and blanket at her house.
Detectives collected those items and swabbed them for DNA, too.
On June 14, 2024, Golden testified, he took the swabs to the Maryland State Police for testing. He received the results, and he had his primary suspect.
Golden obtained an arrest warrant. But he did not know where Martinez-Hernandez was at that time.
Law enforcement asked T-Mobile to ping his cellphone for its location and learned the answer: Tulsa, Oklahoma.
The Harford County Sheriff’s Office reached out that night to the Tulsa Police Department for help, and officers found Victor Martinez-Hernandez at Los Dos Amigos Sports Bar.
Tulsa Police Detective Steven Sanders testified that a security guard provided officers with a Samsung Galaxy A15.
Though Victor Martinez-Hernandez initially told police that his name was Juan Carlos, he eventually relented, Sanders said.
Police arrested him.
His DNA was found on Morin’s left wrist, neck and breasts, said Tiffany Keener, a forensic scientist for the Maryland State Police, as well as on her Apple Watch
Following his arrest, Victor Martinez-Hernandez agreed to waive his Miranda rights after requesting to have an attorney present.
Victor Martinez-Hernandez told detectives that he did not know the name Rachel Morin and had never been to Maryland. He suggested that someone wishing to do him harm could’ve planted his DNA at the crime scene.
Harford County Sheriff’s digital forensic supervisor Heather Marsh testified that she later analyzed the phone and recovered evidence that Martinez-Hernandez had watched news reports on YouTube about the investigation.
Detectives also learned that he had worked at Popeyes and Barrett’s On The Pike in Bel Air and lived at a home on George Street near Plumtree Park.
Those places are all about 1 mile from the trail.
Victor Martinez-Hernandez exercised his Fifth Amendment right to remain silent.
“I will not give testimony,” Martinez-Hernandez said through a Spanish language interpreter.
In her closing argument, Harford County State’s Attorney Alison Healey described what happened to Morin as “a mother’s worst nightmare.”
“Rachel never got to wake up from this nightmare,” Healey said. “But she did tell us what happened. Her body told us what happened to her, and who did it.”
Victor Martinez-Hernandez, she said, raped and murdered Morin.
His attorneys, Assistant Public Defenders Marcus Jenkins, Sawyer Hicks and Tara LeCompte, argued that there were unanswered questions in the case and gaps in the evidence against their client.
“Mr. Martinez-Hernandez is still presumed innocent,” Jenkins said in his closing argument. “You have to find him not guilty unless you have been persuaded, all 12 of you, that he is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.”
In 2023, U.S. Customs and Border Protection reported that it apprehended Martinez-Hernandez after he illegally crossed the border into the United States and expelled him to Mexico three times. He’s a native of El Salvador.
Martinez-Hernandez unlawfully entered the United States again on about Feb. 13, 2023, near El Paso, Texas, law enforcement alleges. He’s also wanted in the killing of a different woman in El Salvador.
His immigration status was not an element of the charges. But Presidential Donald Trump seized upon the killing during the 2024 presidential election to push the narrative that immigrants are committing violent crimes en masse, despite extensive evidence that the opposite is true.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice found in a study released in 2024 that undocumented immigrants were arrested at less than half the rate of native-born U.S. citizens for violent and drug crimes.
The report analyzed arrest records in Texas between 2012 and 2018.