Our card this week is Melissa Mason and Nicole Glass, the Six of Hearts from Arizona.

Life was good for the 27-year-old best friends and roommates who had big plans on the horizon.

Until one day in the winter of 2010 when someone went into their suburban Phoenix home and

committed a heinous crime.

One that’s left their loved ones and police perplexed for over a decade.

I’m Ashley Flowers and this is The Deck.

It was December 3rd, 2010, about 7.30 a.m. when Melissa Massey called her friend Nicole

Glass to try and make plans for later that day.

But the call went straight to voicemail, which surprised Melissa because Nicole’s phone

was never on.

The two talked on the phone multiple times a day.

In the year they’d become friends, Nicole was always someone she could reach with just

a phone call or a text.

But it was before 8 a.m. so she thought maybe Nicole was sleeping in.

So Melissa headed to her gym and decided she’d just make the 30-minute drive to East Phoenix

to check on Nicole after her workout.

But in the meantime, she also tried Nicole’s roommate Melissa, Melissa Mason, but everyone

called her Bebe.

But Bebe’s phone also seemed to be off because it too went straight to voicemail.

When Melissa pulled up to the house around noon, she noticed that both women’s cars were

parked in the driveway.

Nicole had given her a key to the single-floor ranch-style home, so Melissa tried to let

herself in by unlocking the deadbolt.

Except the door wouldn’t open.

It seemed like the smaller lock on the doorknob itself was in the locked position, which was

never the case.

In fact, Melissa was pretty sure Nicole didn’t even have a key to the smaller lock.

Phoenix cold case detective Dom Rostenberg said that’s when Melissa’s concern for her

friends started to grow.

I wouldn’t say she was panicked at that point, but she was a little concerned.

So she started walking around the house and she looked through a window and she just saw

what appeared to be one of her friends lying on the floor.

Where is your husband?

Um, I just came over to my friend’s house and she’s not answering the door and I went

around to the back and I just see someone laying there.

Because of the angle of where she was peering through a window, Melissa could only see an

arm on the floor near the couch.

But still, she knew this was bad.

Melissa waited for police in the cul-de-sac out front, and when police arrived, one of

them kicked in the front door to get inside.

When police walked through the house, it was Bebe they found first.

She was face down in the dining room, her shirt pulled up from the back toward her head,

and some blood had started to pool beneath her.

Then they found Nicole, who was face down in the adjoining family room.

Both women were pronounced dead at the scene, and based on the looks of things, it was pretty

clear they’d been murdered.

Police quickly checked every room to make sure the killer wasn’t still inside, and

once they’d cleared the house and the backyard, they roped the whole property off with crime

scene tape while simultaneously applying for a search warrant.

While they waited to go back in the house, police set up a mobile command unit in front

of the home, and quickly pulled their first witness, Melissa, in for an interview.

Melissa was overcome with emotion when she learned that both women were dead, and what

she told police only compounded the tragedy.

Bebe had been pregnant, which changed the case for Detective Rostenberg.

So from under the law in Maricopa County, the fact that she was pregnant, it becomes

a triple homicide.

So that’s what we’re investigating here, a triple homicide.

Now Melissa didn’t know Bebe well.

She was much closer with Nicole.

Beyond the fact that she was pregnant, all she could give police about Bebe was the first

name of the baby’s father, Marquis, and she knew that he drove a maroon Chrysler

with quote-unquote fancy wheels.

As for Nicole, Melissa told police that the last time she talked to her was the night

before over the phone.

Nicole said that she was waiting on a ride to a gig that she’d gotten bartending a

private party, but she didn’t say who was giving her a ride or where the job was.

Melissa said the two didn’t talk the rest of the night, but when she woke up on December

3rd, she had missed a text Nicole had sent the night before at around 1115.

The text said, quote, nobody has showed up to get us or called and I’m going to be hot

if nobody shows.

I got ready for nothing, boo, end quote.

In the rest of her hour and a half long interview with the detective, Melissa let police search

her car and she gave them names of several other people that they were eager to interview.

And then, almost like clockwork, a man in a car with what one could consider fancy wheels

showed up.

And he wanted to know what the heck police were doing at his girlfriend’s house.

It was Marquis.

According to police reports obtained by our reporting team, when Marquis showed up at

the crime scene, police immediately pulled him into the mobile command unit for an interview.

By the way, this was between 6 and 7 p.m. and homicide detectives were still waiting

on a judge to sign their search warrant, which was taking a lot longer than usual.

So in the beginning of their interview with Marquis, detectives asked him what he thought

of the police presence at his girlfriend’s house.

And Marquis asked if it had something to do with, quote, last night.

Marquis explained that he’d been at the house with Nicole and BB when Nicole got the

call about the bartending gig, and he found the call kind of suspicious.

He said Nicole convinced BB to go with her because the employer was sending a limo to

pick them up, and they would make like $400 before tips.

Marquis said that BB agreed to go, which was his cue to leave.

But before leaving, BB had gotten upset with him, questioning him about seeing his ex-girlfriend.

And he said that it resulted in kind of a low-key argument, but nothing major, and everything

was pretty much fine between them when he left the house around 8 p.m.

From there, he went out to some clubs and said he didn’t hear from BB again until she

had called him around 1030, but he missed the call.

BB also texted him, asking if Marquis had talked to his ex-girlfriend after he left

earlier, but he didn’t respond to that.

Marquis said that a little after midnight, he tried to call her back, but this time,

she didn’t answer.

According to what he told police, the calls went straight to voicemail.

And five calls later, at 2.07 a.m., Marquis texted BB to inform her that he’d tried calling

her, but she never responded.

And Marquis said that’s about when he left the clubs and went home.

When he still hadn’t heard from her all day the next day, he decided to just drive

over.

And that’s what brought him here now.

A detective asked Marquis if BB had any tattoos, knowing that they’d seen a big one on one

of the women’s backs when they first discovered the bodies.

And Marquis confirmed BB had a cross tattoo across her back.

Realizing it was her, Marquis became emotional.

Up until then, he hadn’t known for sure that BB was in fact one of the victims.

But now, police were officially telling him that his girlfriend and their unborn child

were dead.

Marquis admitted that the baby he was expecting with BB was a surprise, but they were both

committed to having the child, even though she was just eight weeks along.

But Marquis also admitted that he had been seeing other women until he found out BB was

pregnant.

And ever since then, the two had been monogamous.

When asked if he had any idea who would want Nicole or BB dead, Marquis said it couldn’t

have anything to do with BB because she was, quote, the sweetest thing ever.

He said she had no enemies.

And so to him, whoever killed them had to have been after Nicole, who he thought kept

some shady company.

Marquis agreed to give police his DNA, so they swabbed his cheek right then and there.

He didn’t have BB’s family members’ phone numbers, so instead, he left the scene and

drove directly to Tucson to notify her mother of her death.

In a police report, the detective wrote that Marquis was still very emotional when he left

the scene.

Finally, at 10 o’clock that night, this is 10 hours after their bodies were first

discovered, an officer returned with the judge’s signed warrant.

It’s worth mentioning here that 10 hours is an unusually long time for a homicide detective

to get a warrant, because medical examiners and crime scene techs have to wait to get

access to a murder scene.

In most cases, investigators take control of a scene within an hour.

But Phoenix PD didn’t offer any explanation for what took so long in this case.

Anyway, with a search warrant in hand, the forensic part of the investigation finally

got underway.

The inside of the house didn’t present any obvious clues about what had happened to the

women.

The TV in the living room was still on, no rooms appeared to have been ransacked, and

there were no signs of forced entry or a struggle.

Outside, the usually quiet cul-de-sac had become chaotic.

TV news crews had started to show up and began doing live reports from the street while officers

went door-to-door to interview neighbors.

By talking to one neighbor, police learned that Nicole had moved into her house in 2006,

and that she and Bebe liked to host parties that usually went late into the night.

But none of the neighbors reported seeing or hearing anything unusual in the last couple

of days.

Another neighbor told police that the day before, on December 2nd, she observed something

a little out of the usual that kind of stood out.

Contractors were lugging extension cords and buckets to and from the house sometime between

3 and 4 p.m.

That actually made sense, though, because Melissa had also told detectives that Nicole

was having the floors in the house refinished and had hired a crew to get the two- or three-day

job done.

While detectives worked to track down the names of the men who’d worked on the floors,

About 35 miles east of Phoenix, in Apache Junction, Nicole Glass’ mother, Rachel Glass,

had just gotten home from work when a friend called and urged her to turn on the local

news immediately.

When Rachel tuned into the news broadcast, she was lost for words.

I was like, oh my gosh.

I turned it on and there it was, their house.

They said two 27-year-old women were dead inside the house.

They didn’t see a sign of forced entry.

Of course, you know, they didn’t say their names, but it’s Nicole’s car is first, Melissa’s

car is second.

It’s Nicole’s house.

They’re both 27.

Oh my God.

You know, that was really very destructive, very destructive to myself and my family.

While she drove the roughly 40 minutes to Nicole’s house with her husband, Rachel

called the police department to confirm what she knew in her gut to be true.

But the dispatcher wouldn’t confirm anything over the phone.

As she pulled up to her daughter’s house, which was now clearly an active crime scene,

the sight of yellow tape and police cruisers confirmed her worst fears.

When she told officers working in the scene who she was, they couldn’t tell her much.

It was late and Rachel was in the dark as to what had happened inside her daughter’s

home.

She and her husband left and booked a hotel room just down the street.

She wanted to be nearby when police had more information to share.

So she went to bed that night, but she said she barely slept.

And then around 3 a.m., she said police called with official word that her daughter was dead.

Then I needed to find a funeral home.

Hell, I was hoping I would be planning a wedding, not a funeral, you know, because she was,

She was that age where I kept thinking she’s going to find somebody, she’s going to get

married, but it didn’t happen.

Phoenix police publicly identified Nicole and Bebe on Saturday, December 4th.

In a short news brief buried in the Sunday edition of the Arizona Republic, the story

painted a picture of a community unsure of how to process the murders.

The story noted that later that weekend, Nicole and Bebe’s neighbors were in the cul-de-sac

hanging up holiday decorations and talking openly about how shocking it was to have had

a triple murder happen merely feet from their own homes.

The next few days were important ones for the investigation.

The police worked to interview anyone who knew Nicole and Bebe, and they finished processing

the scene and worked to get phone records.

Through interviews, they learned more about each of the women.

Their friends told police that Nicole and Bebe had met a few years earlier working as

bartenders and had pretty big social circles.

But that much had already become apparent to police because it seemed like every person

they interviewed gave them the names of more friends to track down.

Detectives also learned from their friends that beyond their bartending jobs, which paid

the bills, Bebe had her sights set on becoming a dental hygienist while Nicole was going

to school and was a third-year student working toward a degree in communications.

Police also learned that aside from the well-attended parties, their house was just a place where

people were comfortable and liked to spend time.

Here’s Detective Rostenberg again.

We learned that they were loved by many.

They had a lot of friends.

They were gregarious.

They were outgoing.

Everyone that we interviewed about the girls had nothing but good things to say about what

kind, caring people.

They would go out of their way to help others.

They would let people, you know, stay at the house that were having financial problems

or issues or whatever.

They were just good friends and they were good people.

Interviews with the women’s friends were helpful in learning about the women’s lifestyles

and routines, but the interviews weren’t revealing any obvious reasons why anyone would

want them dead.

But later that same day, after their names had been announced to the public, a man named

Jose called the Phoenix Police Department’s Violent Crimes Bureau and said that he was

good friends with the women and that he had been at their house the day before they were

killed.

And he had some information that he thought might be helpful to detectives.

They couldn’t arrange a meeting with him for a few days, so in the meantime, they went

to try and get surveillance video from a few different places, trying to see if there were

any cameras that had an angle of the alley behind the women’s house.

And they even checked a few nearby intersections, but every time they struck out.

It was later that week when police finally met up with Jose at his house, and this was

his story.

He said that on December 2nd, he went to visit Nicole and Bebe, which was normal.

He said they were all friends and hung out often.

Jose said both women were home, along with a guy named Johnny who was working to refinish

the floors.

Jose said when he first got there, Nicole was up and about cleaning the house while

Bebe was lounging on the couch because she wasn’t feeling very good.

He thought Bebe had complained about maybe suffering from morning sickness.

So here’s where things get interesting.

Jose told detectives that upon his arrival, Nicole asked him to take out the garbage.

Nicole told Jose that he would have to walk around the block to get to the alley to take

the trash out because the key to her backyard gate was missing.

Jose jokingly was like, no way am I walking all the way around the block just to take

out your trash.

And so Nicole was like, okay, fine.

Well, then could you just make yourself actually useful and remove the lock to the back gate

so we can at least use it?

So Jose agreed to remove the lock later in the day.

He told police that he hung out for about an hour and at some point during that time,

two more workers showed up to help Johnny with the floors, though he didn’t really

have any interaction with any of them.

Eventually the two women told him that they had to leave for what he called a girl doctor

appointment.

And they invited him to tag along, but he declined saying that he’s going to wait at

their house with the workers and then get to work removing that lock on the back gate.

It took him about an hour to remove the screws.

And eventually he broke the lock off the gate with a hammer.

Jose said that he placed the lock on the kitchen counter so Nicole would see it when she got

home.

He tried to hang around a little longer, even tried calling the two women after they’d

been gone a while, but neither of them answered.

So he said that he left and went to a different friend’s house to hang out the rest of the

day before going home that night.

Now Jose’s comment about the lock immediately made police wonder if Nicole and BB’s killer

or killers entered and exited through the unlocked gate from the alley and backyard.

Or maybe the killer or killers had the missing key to the gate, intending to use it not knowing

the lock was removed.

Jose told investigators that he didn’t remember Nicole saying where she thought the missing

key might be or if she knew who had it.

He insisted that he didn’t have any contact with the women after he left their place on

December 2nd.

And the next day, his brother called him to let him know that the women had been murdered.

But what Jose did have was a business card for Johnny, the worker who’d been refinishing

the floors at Nicole’s house.

And in an effort to fully cooperate, Jose also provided his DNA to police.

The next day, detectives located Johnny and interviewed him.

According to police reports, Johnny told police that Nicole had found his floor polishing

business online back in the fall.

He provided her an estimate in October and the work started December 1st.

He said they were there the full day and then came back on the second at 8 a.m.

When they arrived, BB was home alone.

Johnny told detectives that during the few days that he and his crew were there, he noticed

that Nicole came and went pretty often with several different visitors.

But she always said that she was going to Walmart, though she never returned with any

bags.

Johnny also described several different people, all in different cars, arriving and leaving

at various times during the duration of his work.

And listen, I know how this sounds, but police couldn’t say who these people were or what

business Nicole had with so many visitors.

Investigators definitely know more than they’re sharing, but we kind of have to accept that

they probably have a good reason for not wanting the public to know this kind of information.

Johnny told police that he was supposed to finish the job at Nicole’s house on the morning

of the 3rd, but that another job in Glendale was going to prevent them from showing up

on time.

So he left Nicole a message saying that they’d be over sometime the next day on the 4th to

make up for it.

But he never heard back.

Despite leaving her several voicemails, Johnny said Nicole didn’t answer and never returned

his calls.

So the workers showed up around noon on Saturday anyway, prepared to work.

But when they arrived, police and reporters were still all over the place.

Johnny said the officers wouldn’t let his workers approach the home.

When detectives asked Johnny what else he noticed when spending time at Nicole’s house,

he said it seemed like the women were very trusting because they would always leave the

door unlocked when they weren’t there, and they felt fine with Johnny and his crew being

there even when they weren’t.

Like everyone before him, Johnny agreed to give police a DNA sample, and detectives went

on to interview Johnny’s workers, who also happened to be his siblings.

In separate interviews, Johnny’s brother and sister gave similar statements as Johnny,

and they also agreed to provide DNA.

It was around this time that the medical examiner finally concluded that both Nicole and Bebe

were strangled, and the office confirmed that their manners of death were homicide.

The ME also confirmed Bebe’s pregnancy.

Both women had defensive wounds, which suggested that there was a struggle leading up to their

deaths.

Detective Rostenberg said that while there was no evidence the women were sexually assaulted,

that doesn’t mean it didn’t occur, though he wouldn’t say anything more about that.

But I kind of have to assume that they were able to collect some sort of biological evidence

to test against all the swabs that they were collecting from witnesses.

The ME’s ruling made police ponder more possibilities, because Nicole and Bebe were young, healthy,

and fit.

Investigators had to figure out if the killer somehow detained one of the women while he

killed the other, or if there were multiple killers working in tandem.

Now that the community knew the women’s names and how brutal their murders were, news coverage

picked up again.

On December 13th, 2010, barely two weeks after Bebe and Nicole were killed, Bebe’s

mother, Sandra Menares, who lives in Tucson, told reporters, quote,

Not only did they take my daughter’s life, but they also took my unborn grandbaby.

And that would have been the first, end quote.

What made her statement even more heartbreaking, according to reports by the Associated Press

at the time, was that Bebe’s mother was holding her daughter’s positive pregnancy

test as she spoke to reporters.

Police had found the positive test at the house inside a plastic baggie with Merry Christmas

scrawled in black marker.

I know when Melissa found out she was pregnant, she was really excited about the pregnancy

and I know they were looking forward to having the child and Melissa was looking forward

to telling her parents around Christmas time that she was pregnant.

So it’s, it’s, you know, it’s horrible all the way around.

The renewed publicity garnered a few more tips for police, and on December 14th, a woman

called in and said detectives should interview Bebe’s ex-boyfriend.

The caller said that the two had dated earlier in 2010, and that he’d previously stalked

her and threatened to kill her, and that if he’d known Bebe was pregnant with another

man’s child, it may have set him off.

Tracking down Bebe’s ex wasn’t easy, but police finally arranged to interview him in

early 2011.

The man, who we’re gonna call Frank, said he and Bebe were engaged to be married, but

eventually they went their separate ways.

But before they broke up, they lived with Nicole for a little while, and Frank said

that he never liked how many men were hanging around.

He said they would come and go and it made him uncomfortable.

Frank said that after they split, he and Bebe stayed friends, but he had no idea that she

was pregnant with Marquise’s baby until after Bebe’s death.

Frank admitted to police that he wasn’t happy to hear that because Bebe hadn’t been dating

Marquise very long, and in his opinion, it was too soon for them to start a family together.

But Frank denied having ever threatened Bebe, and he denied having anything to do with the

women’s murders.

When asked what he thought happened to them, he basically told police the same thing Marquise

did.

Nicole must have been the target, not Bebe.

Frank also agreed to provide his DNA, and he gave detectives the names of a few more

men that they should interview.

Detectives worked over the next several weeks to interview the friends of the women.

And every time they interviewed someone, they collected their DNA and were given more and

more names of additional people to talk to.

It’s almost like the women had a never-ending list of friends, mainly through their work

in the Phoenix area service industry.

I can tell you several people were interviewed as far as that previously dated both Melissa

and Nicole.

We’re continuing to look at these people, but as of this time, we have no probable cause

to believe that there’s arrest as imminent with any of these people.

None of the interviews provided a clear suspect or motive.

Police were pretty certain it wasn’t a robbery that resulted in the women being killed.

They figured it had to be more personal than that.

Not long after that, the case went cold.

In 2016, four years after the murders, Nicole’s family decided to hire their own private investigator

to drum up some new leads.

In that same year, the PI actually got an interesting tip, suggesting that while on

probation for a minor drug charge, Nicole was a confidential informant for Phoenix police.

If it was true, it made her family wonder if she was targeted for snitching.

Now Rachel says that police wouldn’t say one way or another, so frustrated and desperate

for answers, she took them to court and officials finally were compelled to answer.

And police said no, Nicole was not a CI for their department.

Over the years, detectives have revisited persons of interest in the case, which is

basically everyone.

They’ve even conducted polygraph tests.

But Detective Rostenberg said not everyone involved is as forthcoming as they used to be.

I can tell you that some of them were initially cooperative and they’re not so cooperative now.

That could mean they’re just frustrated, they’re angry, they’re dealing with this in their own way.

Detective Rostenberg said the pool of physical evidence in the case has remained pretty much

unchanged from 2010, which in turn has stalled the investigation, which he summed up as quote

forensically tapped.

Police have remained in regular contact with the women’s families who still call them

sometimes to check on the case or to offer insight on people they should speak with.

Over the years, Nicole’s mother Rachel has remained especially vocal in advocating for

her daughter.

Rachel still lives in the same Apache Junction home that she did when Nicole and Bebe were

killed in 2010.

When our team visited her, Rachel beamed with pride as she talked about the close relationship

she shared with Nicole.

She had a big personality.

She was the kind of girl that when she walked into the room that everybody go, Nicole’s here.

Yeah, our family get togethers, you know, they just, they all miss her.

We all miss her.

It’s just, it’s tough.

Rachel gushed about Nicole’s natural ability to command a room and to connect with basically

anyone who crossed her path.

She was absolutely darling.

And she just attracted people like flies to honey, you know, I mean, that’s just the way

she was.

And even when she was in high school, my God, at her funeral, there was a lot of people

from high school that she went to school with that came.

I was, I was really happy about that.

Talking about her daughter has become easier with the passing of time, but Rachel still

aches to know who killed her daughter and why.

Until then, she’ll try and keep her daughter’s memory alive.

My grief has changed.

I had friends that have done counseling and that they said, Rachel, lean into the pain

because there is another side to it.

And honestly, I didn’t believe them.

I didn’t believe that there was another side to grief where like, you could get to the

point where you could talk about it and not break down in tears.

It is beyond time to find some answers for these women.

If you knew or were an acquaintance or friend of theirs and think that you have helpful

information, or listen, any information at all about the December, 2010 murders of Nicole

Glass and Melissa Beebe Mason in Phoenix, Arizona, please contact Detective Dom Rostenberg

at 602-534-5920.

If the tip leads to an arrest in the case, there’s a $9,000 reward.

The Deck is an AudioChuck production with theme music by Ryan Lewis.

To learn more about The Deck and our advocacy work, visit thedeckpodcast.com.

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