Agents from the New Mexico Department of Justice, joined by police and the local sheriff's office, descended on Jeffrey Epstein's former 7,500-acre Zorro Ranch this week to search for human remains. The search began Monday and continued into Tuesday, running in parallel with a truth commission unanimously established by state lawmakers last month to investigate what happened at the sprawling compound outside Santa Fe.
Law enforcement is reportedly looking for the bodies of at least two girls allegedly killed at the property. The ranch's current owners, the family of Texas real estate baron Don Huffines, granted access for the search, which is understood to include the entire property and surrounding public land.
For years, Zorro Ranch has been the quietest chapter in the Epstein saga. Not anymore.
Epstein purchased the property from former New Mexico Governor Bruce King in 1993. He owned it until he died in a New York prison cell in 2019. In the intervening 26 years, the convicted pedophile was never charged with crimes in the state of New Mexico. He was not even required to register there as a sex offender.
That fact alone should have triggered alarm bells in every level of state government. It didn't.
Civil filings and victim testimony paint the 13-square-mile ranch as something far worse than a rich man's retreat. The compound reportedly hosted Prince Andrew, and there have been unverified claims that former President Bill Clinton spent time on the property. Clinton denied he was there in his deposition before Congress last month. Former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who also served as U.S. energy secretary and ambassador to the United Nations, was previously named by Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre as one of the men Epstein trafficked her to. Richardson denied any wrongdoing and died in 2023.
The pattern is familiar: powerful men, categorical denials, and a justice system that never quite got around to asking the hard questions.
The allegations tied to Zorro Ranch are not new. Maria Farmer has said she and her younger sister Annie visited the ranch in 1996 under the guise of an art commission. Maria alleged she was sexually assaulted by Epstein and his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell. Annie Farmer has said she was 15 when flown to the property and directed by Epstein and Maxwell "to take off all her clothes and get on a massage table."
Virginia Giuffre produced photographs and written statements showing she visited the compound between 2000 and 2002, the period during which she was trafficked as a teenager. Danny Wilson, her brother, spoke at a protest held outside the ranch on Sunday, which was International Women's Day. Hundreds of protesters gathered.
Maxwell was found guilty of child sex trafficking in 2021 and is serving a 20-year federal sentence. But the state of New Mexico, where so much of this abuse allegedly occurred, produced zero prosecutions. Gary King served as New Mexico's attorney general from 2007 to 2015, a window that overlapped with peak public awareness of Epstein's crimes. There are widespread suspicions that he avoided investigating Epstein. King could not be reached for comment.
That's not a gap in the system. That's the system working exactly as someone designed it to work.
State Representative Andrea Romero, a Santa Fe Democrat and lawyer, led the fight to establish the commission. She did not mince words about what investigators are hearing from people who have come forward:
We have people coming forward saying they were drugged, had sex organs and sperm harvested from their bodies, and woke up around medical equipment not knowing where they were or what happened to them.
Romero acknowledged the claims sound extreme:
It's so dark and perplexing, and I know that if you mention this to someone, it sounds very conspiratorial. But we need to get down to the truth of what really happened here in our own backyard.
Since late October, when plans for the commission were announced, between 25 and 30 tips and first-hand accounts have come in. As proposed, the state would allocate $2.5 million to the effort. The commission is expected to have subpoena power and would consist of two Democratic and two Republican House members, plus a fifth nonpartisan member. If approved, its yearlong investigation would begin in April 2026.
Republican State Representative Andrea Reeb, a former district attorney with a record of prosecuting crimes against children, has agreed to sit on the commission. Her framing cut straight to the point:
Zorro Ranch has given New Mexico a black eye. We as a state haven't been aggressive enough on figuring out what happened there.
Bipartisan agreement that the state failed its own citizens is rare. That it took this long to reach it is the real indictment.
The article's source material also references Epstein's reported plans to use Zorro Ranch as a base to inseminate multiple women and produce what he considered an enhanced bloodline, a scheme reportedly discussed on multiple occasions in the early 2000s. A 2019 New York Times investigation described a plan involving up to 20 women at a time. The concept drew on ideas from the Repository for Germinal Choice, a controversial sperm bank from the 1980s. Epstein reportedly consulted two award-winning scientists and an adviser to large companies and wealthy individuals about the plan.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It is what Epstein reportedly told people, openly, while the state of New Mexico did nothing.
The commission hopes to question Karen and Brice Gordon, who ran the compound for Epstein. They are said to have fled the ranch and the country after his death, possibly to New Zealand. Romero noted the urgency:
We need to see what they know.
Renee Burns, who worked as a maid at the ranch between 2005 and 2010, said she could "count on one hand" the number of times she saw Epstein. She described her role bluntly:
I was to be seen and not heard. I ironed the sheets, made the beds, rinsed their toothbrushes.
Burns said she never witnessed anything she considered illegal, but added a critical caveat: "I wasn't in every nook and cranny of the place." On the Gordons' disappearance, she was unsurprised:
If I were them, I'd disappear, too. Nobody wants to be associated with the ranch and that scumbag who owned it.
Manolito Royal, who spent 17 years doing maintenance on the property, declined to name the prominent male guests who visited. When asked about the search and the commission, he offered something between weariness and relief:
"It's hard to say what's behind the door when you haven't opened it. I'm kinda surprised it's taken so long.
The Huffines family, which purchased the ranch in 2023, has said they plan to turn it into a Christian retreat. The property, a 26,700-square-foot luxury hacienda with a seven-bay heated garage, was first listed by Epstein's estate in 2021 for $27.5 million, and later dropped to $18 million. Claudia Mardel, a real estate agent working for the new owner, told the Daily Mail that the ownership details are "really nobody's business."
With respect, it is everybody's business. When a convicted pedophile operates a compound for decades under the nose of the state government, and law enforcement is now searching that compound for buried remains, secrecy is not a virtue. It is the problem.
The federal investigations that followed Epstein's death generated headlines but left New Mexico almost entirely untouched. Romero put it plainly:
We have heard years of allegations and rumors about Epstein's activities in New Mexico, but unfortunately, federal investigations have failed to put together an official record.
Conservative voters have long understood that institutional failure is not accidental. It is the product of a political class that protects its own. The names on the guest lists, the governors who sold him the land and socialized in his orbit, the attorney general who never investigated: none of this happened in a vacuum. It happened because people with power decided that looking the other way was easier than looking inside.
New Mexico is finally opening the door. What they find behind it will tell us whether justice in this country still reaches the people who thought they were untouchable.
