In the mid-2000s, Albuquerque, New Mexico was gripped by a fear it couldn’t quite name. People were being found dead inside their homes — with no connections and without clear motives. At first, the cases appeared unrelated. Different neighborhoods. Different victims. Different MO. No obvious pattern. Just a growing sense that something was wrong.

It begins with Carlos Esquibel, a 37-year-old designer whose welcoming nature would prove fatal, followed just days later by Josephine Selvage, an 81-year-old retired schoolteacher with Alzheimer’s who was attacked inside the only place she knew as safe. Two years later, the city was shaken again by the brutal murders of Tak and Pung Yi — beloved elders in Albuquerque’s Korean American community — a case so desperate for answers that the wrong men were arrested and imprisoned.

But the true turning point comes six days after a wedding.

Scott Pierce and Katherine Bailey were newlyweds, settling into their first home together, building an ordinary, hopeful future. In the early hours of one June morning, that future was destroyed when a gunman entered their home looking for someone else. Scott was killed defending his wife. Katherine survived — and immediately became both a widow and a suspect.

What followed was a rapid investigation, a seemingly neat explanation, and a case that appeared closed. Until it wasn’t.

When long-untested DNA from the Yi murders was finally processed, it revealed a truth far more disturbing than anyone expected: all of these deaths were connected. The evidence pointed not to a single motive or moment of rage, but to a man who moved through homes at night, escalated without hesitation, and left devastation behind while systems lagged just long enough to fail.

At the center of it all was Clifton Bloomfield — a man who blended into everyday life while committing serial violence, whose crimes reframed everything investigators thought they understood.

Nightmare in Albuquerque is a case that forces an uncomfortable question to linger long after the episode ends: How many lives are shaped — or ended — not just by violence, but by when the truth finally arrives?