said on Tuesday<\/a> that Doyle has agreed to participate in the prosecutions of her mother and the others, while accepting responsibility for participating in Cuevas\u2019 killing. He expects there to be numerous pretrial hearings in the other defendants\u2019 cases, the first likely to be scheduled in about 60 days.<\/p>\nDoyle on Tuesday also pleaded guilty to a second count of third-degree murder, this one stemming from the homicide of 69-year-old Wilkes-Barre resident Debra J. Fox, who had owned the Carlisle Street house and was last seen alive in January 2024. Fox\u2019s body was found in a wooded area near an expressway on March 26, 2024.<\/p>\n
Linnette is also charged with criminal homicide, theft by unlawfully taking movable property, and abuse of a corpse in connection with Fox\u2019s death.<\/p>\n
Sanguedolce alleges the mother-daughter duo of Linnette and Doyle abused Fox to death at a hotel.<\/p>\n
\u201cDebra Fox was regularly starved, made to stand in a corner without her prosthetic leg, beaten repeatedly in the hotel room with hands and fists, and also with her own cane,\u201d Sanguedolce said during a January press conference. \u201cShe had her head shaved. Her head was struck against the hotel room wall. She was strangled, and her body was placed on a luggage cart where it was then dumped behind the hotel.\u201d<\/p>\n
Linnette allegedly continued cashing Fox\u2019s $1,600 monthly Social Security checks after her death.<\/p>\n
Case background<\/p>\n
It wasn\u2019t long after Cuevas and Linnette arrived at their destination that the relationship between them soured, police wrote in their affidavit. Linnette began attacking Cuevas\u2019 character, including accusing her of inappropriately touching one of the children present. <\/p>\n
\u201cInvestigators believe Linnette\u2019s intention was to tarnish Cuevas\u2019 reputation and turn the house against Cuevas,\u201d police wrote.<\/p>\n
Witnesses also told police Linnette \u201cwas calling the shots in the house\u201d and that she supplied the rest with crack cocaine. Within a few days, Cuevas called her mother and asked for money for a bus ticket, saying she was \u201cin Pennsylvania with friends,\u201d the affidavit states.<\/p>\n
She also sent a message through Facebook Messenger to a friend saying Linnette had hit her and she was bleeding and in tears. She was desperate enough to leave that she was considering walking back to Saginaw, she messaged her friend.<\/p>\n
After an unusually long delay, Cuevas\u2019 Facebook account began responding in a more aggressive tone, demanding money and denying she\u2019d been abused, the report states.<\/p>\n
According to police, it was not Cuevas authoring the messages, as Linnette had taken her phone. As witnesses later told police, Linnette and Cuevas got into a fight, with the latter initially getting the upper hand. Beamer and Doyle then joined in and overpowered Cuevas, police wrote.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter that fight, Cuevas was subjected to daily beatings and torture,\u201d police wrote.<\/p>\n
Her confinement and abuse ended with her death on April 21, 2023.<\/p>\n
A witness on Feb. 21, 2024, reported to police that Cuevas had been killed inside the Carlisle Street house. This person and a subsequent witness indicated an 8-year-old girl saw Cuevas\u2019 beating and killing. The girl claimed Beamer and Race were using animal feces and urine to mask the odor of Cuevas\u2019 body, the affidavit states.<\/p>\n
Police spoke with Linnette, who admitted to driving from Saginaw to Wilkes-Barre with Cuevas. She said she left the Carlisle Street house at some point and when she returned, Cuevas was gone. She assumed she had returned to Michigan, she told police.<\/p>\n
Investigators spoke with Cuevas\u2019 mother, who said she contacted Michigan authorities in January 2024 about her daughter\u2019s disappearance. She said she hadn\u2019t heard from her since April 2023, when her daughter asked her for money for a bus ticket. She had sent her daughter $400, but she never arrived home.<\/p>\n
Police on Feb. 27, 2024, entered the house, having obtained permission to do so from its current owner, who bought it at a tax sale the previous fall. Entering the basement, they were greeted with the overwhelming smell of mothballs and noticed an anomaly in the dirt floor, they wrote.<\/p>\n
They returned that day with a search warrant and excavated the basement floor, finding Cuevas\u2019 body buried a foot deep, quicklime and mothballs mixed in with the dirt.<\/p>\n
Her body had been wrapped in a tarp tied with rope and an extension cord. Autopsy results revealed she suffered broken bones and stab and slash wounds before dying of asphyxia, the affidavit states.<\/p>\n
Arrests and admissions<\/p>\n
Police interviewed numerous witnesses and suspects during their probe. Beamer, Doyle, Wolfe, and Race all made incriminating statements, according to the police affidavit.<\/p>\n
Through this, investigators put together a timeline of Cuevas\u2019 final weeks after Linnette, Doyle, and Beamer allegedly beat her.<\/p>\n
Multiple witnesses described Cuevas being handcuffed to items in the house, including a post in the basement. The affidavit states Cuevas had to ask to use the bathroom and was only being fed bread and water at Linnette\u2019s direction.<\/p>\n
Beamer admitted to digging her fingers into Cuevas\u2019 eyes, punching her, and stabbing her, the affidavit states.<\/p>\n
Doyle told police she regularly struck Cuevas and helped Linnette shave her head because \u201cno one could be prettier than Linnette,\u201d the affidavit states. Doyle said the hierarchy in the house had Linnette at the top, followed by Race, then Beamer, then everyone else.<\/p>\n
All the interviewed suspects said Linnette had hit Cuevas in the face with a hammer, causing her to lose a tooth, affidavits state.<\/p>\n
Race and Wolfe also told police they had tortured their prisoner. Wolfe and Beamer told police Cuevas was killed during an escape attempt, with Wolfe saying he and Race kicked and stomped her.<\/p>\n
Doyle gave a slightly different account, saying Beamer, Wolfe, and Race attacked Cuevas after she had soiled herself on being unable to make it to the bathroom. They then fetched a stethoscope, with which they determined Cuevas was dead, the affidavit states.<\/p>\n
The group considered placing her body in an abandoned house down the street before electing to bury her in the basement, the affidavit states.<\/p>\n
Police arrested Linnette, Beamer, Doyle, Race, and Wolfe on April 9, 2024. <\/p>\n
The discovery of Cuevas\u2019 body wasn\u2019t the first time police responded to the Carlisle Street house for violence. In July 2023 \u2014 after Cuevas\u2019 death \u2014 a man was badly beaten in the house, telling police Linnette, Race, and two others kept him captive in the basement for hours and accused him of inappropriately touching a young girl. Linnette and Race are facing a combined 11 charges stemming from that incident.<\/p>\n
Paris Scroggins, Cuevas\u2019 younger brother, has described his sister as an unflinchingly honest woman, a lover of banana splits and vintage arcade games, who was trying to improve her and her children\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe didn\u2019t deserve what happened to her,\u201d Scroggins said of his late sister. \u201cShe didn\u2019t deserve the ending she got. But we want to remember who she was and who she was striving to be.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WILKES-BARRE, PA \u2014 Two years after a Saginaw woman was found buried in the basement of a Pennsylvania…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":117496,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[28,30,29],"class_list":{"0":"post-117495","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-pennsylvania","8":"tag-pennsylvania","9":"tag-pennsylvania-headlines","10":"tag-pennsylvania-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117495","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=117495"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/117495\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/117496"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=117495"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=117495"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=117495"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}