The Cartel, the Mistress, and the Mastermind: The Gruesome Truth Behind Four Murders

“I know you know what’s going on and why we’re here,” an officer spoke to the person who’d just opened the door he’d knocked on. “We’re investigating a murder.”
The woman he was talking to was fifty-year-old Ermalinda Palomo, but what the officer didn’t tell her in that initial conversation was that they weren’t there to investigate just one murder, but four.

A Knock on the Door: More Than One Murder

The foundations for those incredibly shocking and devastating murders were laid years before and, almost unbelievably, when one of the victims had been only five years old. But to understand how years of planning and calculations ended in the cruel slaying of innocent children, we have to understand the role their parents played in their demise.

A Fake Cartel and a Web of Lies

It started around 2022, when Ermalinda Palomo realized that her fiancé, thirty-one-year-old Nathaniel Huey Jr., was having yet another affair. This was by far not his first, but if Ermalinda would have her way, it would most certainly be his last. About a year before she’d discovered his latest fling, Ermalinda set up a series of online accounts under different pseudonyms. Through these, she’d convinced Nathaniel that he had been recruited and was now directly working for the Mexican cartel. Ermalinda used social media accounts and phone numbers, and often used them to coerce Nathaniel into treating her quote “better.” She would then force his hand into acting the way that she wanted him to by feeding him details and information about his life and routine, giving Nathaniel the impression that these dangerous cartel bosses had people constantly watching him.

For the most part, Nathaniel did as he was told, but the delicate balance and tentative hold that Ermalinda had on her fiancé became endangered when she found out about thirty-eight-year-old Zoraida Bartolomei.

The Love Triangle That Turned Deadly

Zoraida was in a long-term relationship with thirty-two-year-old Alberto Rolon, and together they had two sons, nine-year-old Adriel and seven-year-old Diego. But for about a year, Zoraida had been in a secret relationship with Nathaniel Huey Jr., a relationship that would tear her entire life apart. That was because unbeknownst to Zoraida, or even to Nathaniel himself, the man behind the curtains of the Mexican cartel was none other than Ermalinda, and she wasn’t about to take Nathaniel’s latest affair lying down.

The accounts that Nathaniel was communicating with them began ramping up the pressure. Now, it wasn’t enough for them that Nathaniel was treating Ermalinda “better,” but someone close to Nathaniel was a mole and had directly targeted him for information. These accounts then went silent for days, leaving Nathaniel to stew and grow increasingly paranoid. He knew that the cartel was not to be messed with, and he knew that if he had knowingly or unknowingly fed information to a mole, the cartel would be coming for him next.

By the time these accounts came back online, Nathaniel was in a complete panic and was tearing his hair out, desperately trying to figure out who it was in his life that was the mole. But finally, the accounts had an answer for him and with it, they would provide a solution to his problem. It turned out that the mole was Zoraida, and her entire relationship with Nathaniel had all been a ruse. She’d only had an affair with Nathaniel so that she could draw information about the cartel out of him, and now his bosses needed Nathaniel to get rid of her.

To help him do that, they put him in contact with a cartel assassin who went by the name “Turtle.” Turtle would help Nathaniel put together a plan to rid themselves of this potentially dangerous mole before she could do any damage to the cartel, or maybe even just attack Nathaniel now that her cover had been blown.

Planning a Brutal Night

A police report detailed the steps that Nathaniel and this mysterious Turtle, AKA Ermalinda using yet another fake, online account, would take next. “They,” the report reads. “Researched Zoraida’s house to determine the layout within. They researched the neighborhood to locate cameras, planned how to get in and out of the house, and learned the house behind Zoraida’s was vacant.”

In messages, Turtle advised Nathaniel on what order he should take care of his victims and that he should mess up the scene to make it “appear to be a burglary committed by kids.” Just three days after he’d been informed that Zoraida was, in fact, a mole, Nathaniel and Ermalinda drove up to Zoraida’s home in the dead of night. Ermalinda stayed in the car with a walkie-talkie that she and Nathaniel used to communicate with each other, while he went in and did what he believed he’d been sent there to do.

Nathaniel used a knife to cut through two screens and then walked through the kitchen to unlock the door, wanting to give the impression that someone had broken into the house to rob it. But further inside the house, Alberto had heard Nathaniel coming in, and he went to investigate.

Alberto only made it a short way towards Nathaniel before Nathaniel spotted him and opened fire. Alberto managed to turn around and started heading back towards his bedroom, where Zoraida and the children were sleeping, but all the while he was being struck with bullets. Alberto died before he could protect his family.

Nathaniel then moved on to the bedroom, where Zoraida and her boys had been sleeping. They’d all woken up from the sounds of the gunfire and had closed the door, but by then it was already too late. Nathaniel shot through the door, hitting Zoraida several times, killing her. Now with all the adults out of the picture, Nathaniel was able to force his way into the bedroom and shot both Adriel and Diego. Together, Zoraida and her family were shot a total of twenty times.

Nathaniel then moved throughout the house and set the scene. He shot and killed all three of the family dogs, tossed furniture about and spray-painted things on the walls, all in an attempt to throw the investigators off of his trail. It was after Alberto failed to show up for work and Zoraida’s family members grew concerned that they couldn’t reach her or the boys that the police were called to perform a welfare check. They found the family butchered in their home on September 17th, 2023.

A Community Shattered

The discovery shocked the community and fueled the investigators’ drive to track down the person capable of massacring an entire family, including two small children. Using doorbell cams, cell towers, and camera systems, the detectives were able to spot a car traveling between Streamwood and Romeoville on the night of the murders. Driving that vehicle was none other than Nathaniel himself. And it was through a series of online investigations and old-fashioned police work that the detectives were able to uncover a dark, complicated web of lies and deceit that had culminated in a quadruple murder.

While Ermalinda had been convincing Nathaniel that he was now working for the Mexican cartel, she had also reached out to Zoraida and her family. Three months before the killings and in a direct message to Alberto, Ermalinda had actually warned him that Zoraida was having an extramarital affair with Nathaniel.

When Alberto didn’t break up with Zoraida, Ermalinda then ramped up her warnings even further. In messages and handwritten letters, Ermalinda told both Zoraida and Alberto that Nathaniel was a dangerous member of the Mexican cartel and that they should stay clear of him for their own safety. “I don’t believe she believes my warnings,” Ermalinda wrote in a message to Alberto about Zoraida. “And for the safety of your family, she really needs to be honest with you. (Nathaniel) has rifles and guns he carries with him. The mother of your children is putting them in danger, and she knows this.”

Just two weeks before she would drive with Nathaniel to Alberto’s home, she sent him one last message. “This will be the last I say of this, Alberto,” she warned. “This-stupid girl will be the reason you have no children.”

The Final Showdown

The police then tracked Nathaniel down at his place of work and confronted him. In the report, they state: “Nathaniel admitted to his relationship with Zoraida but denied any involvement in the murders. He refused to allow police to search his GMC Yukon at this time. Later this day, he was seen transferring a bag containing firearms from his GMC to another person.” From there, officers then went to Nathaniel’s house, where Ermalinda opened the door only to be told that the officers were there to investigate a murder.

Ermalinda feigned ignorance and that night, she and Nathaniel slipped away. They first stopped at a nearby Target store, where Nathaniel met up with his mother and confessed. He told his mother that he had killed Zoraida and her family because “people were after him.” “When asked why he killed the children, (Nathaniel)’s response was ‘because he believed the kids were better off dead than alive without parents.’”

Shortly after that, Ermalinda’s family reported her as missing and expressed concerns to the local police that she had been taken away by Nathaniel against her will. Using cameras, the investigators were able to track Nathaniel and Ermalinda to a Walmart in Oklahoma. The pair of them were confronted by local police in the parking lot, but they managed to get away and began recklessly involved in a police chase. “A short distance later,” the police report read. “The GMC drifted to the center divider and crashed before coming to a stop… Nathaniel shot Ermalinda in the head, killing her. He shot himself under his chin, but that gunshot did not kill him, so he shot himself again in the head. Both died.”

It was later determined that Ermalinda had been the mastermind behind the entire plot, and that she had willingly left with Nathaniel that day.