California police have revealed disturbing new details about their confrontation with a man accused of killing an elderly nudist couple.
Daniel Menard, 79, and his wife Stephanie, 73, were reported missing after they failed to show up to church on Aug. 25, prompting Redlands police officers to search the area around their house at the Olive Dell Ranch nudist resort looking for signs of death. couple.
But on the fourth day of their search, police received a phone call from someone claiming to be a relative of the couple’s neighbor, 62-year-old Michael Sparks.
The caller claimed Sparks confessed to them that he had killed two unarmed people and threatened to kill himself as well, Redlands police spokesman Carl Baker said recently. he told PEOPLE.
“He didn’t say it was the Menards, but he said he had killed two people and was planning to kill himself,” Baker said of the phone call.
Daniel Menard, 79, and his wife Stephanie, 73, were reported missing after they failed to show up to church on August 25.
On the fourth day of their search, police said they received a call from a relative of their next-door neighbor, Michael Sparks, 62, who said he confessed to killing two unarmed people.
He said the police department immediately locked down the entire community, while officers made several attempts to contact Sparks, but to no avail.
“They were making announcements over a loudspeaker,” Baker said of the officers at the scene.
However, there were concerns that Sparks had barricaded himself inside the house with a cache of weapons, after officers learned he had built an underground bunker.
So, after several hours with no response, authorities broke a window and sent a Redlands Police Department drone to conduct a remote search of Sparks’ mobile home, which was unable to locate Sparks inside, Baker said.
The police then brought in an armored vehicle with a hydraulic ram to knock down the front wall of his house.
“We used that to get into the house, ripped it off the front wall,” Baker said.
“There was some consideration that he had been booby-trapped, but we determined that the (armored vehicle) would have set off any type of booby trap.”
Officers made several attempts to contact Sparks and eventually had to use a battering ram to knock down the front wall of his mobile home.
Police eventually found Sparks hiding in his concrete bunker, which Baker said was “a little over five feet deep; you could walk up there, but you may have had to crouch down.”
“It ran the length of the mobile home, the length and breadth of the mobile home,” he said.
Sparks was right at the entrance to the bunker and attempted to shoot himself with a rifle but misfired when he was stopped.
Members of the city’s sanitation team later used a camera designed to check for clogs in the sewer system to take a look into Sparks’ basement.
“They could see there were bags of something in there and we determined it was most likely human remains.”
Those remains were then recovered by members of the fire department and confirmed to be those of the Menards.
The San Bernardino County coroner later determined that both died from blunt force trauma to the head and ruled their deaths a homicide.
The couple’s beloved shih tzu, Cuddles, was never located
Baker said police now believe they were killed on their own property, adding that officers were never able to recover their beloved shih tzu, Cuddles, who they were last seen with.
The motive for the murders remains unclear, but viewers have said there was some tension between Sparks and the Menards, and neighbor Tammie Wilkerson said Sparks had an ongoing dispute with the couple.
‘He didn’t like them. “He hated them and told me so many times,” Wilkerson said. CBS News.
‘It’s such a stupid reason. They had a tree that was on the edge of their property and Dan used to go and trim the branches and he hated that. That formed his hatred towards them.’
Sparks is now charged with two counts of murder and two special circumstance allegations in connection with the Menards’ deaths.
He has pleaded not guilty.