EXCLUSIVE: Jeffrey Epstein was robbed of ’30-40′ guns in still unsolved New Mexico ranch case
A New Mexico Department of Public Safety police report obtained exclusively by the Daily Dot details a burglary at pedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch in August 2018 where thieves allegedly stole “30-40” guns. The cache of weapons included handguns, rifles, and antique weapons from a gun locker in a garage at a residence on the ranch.
Epstein’s Zorro Ranch, a sprawling, 8,000-acre property outside of Santa Fe, was home to a huge mansion he bought in the 1990s where some women and children accused him and Ghislaine Maxwell of sexually abusing them.
Maria Farmer, who told the Daily Beast about her and her sister Annie’s assaults by Epstein and his former partner, the convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, once claimed that Zorro Ranch had “pinhole cameras to record everything on every estate. The cameras were ubiquitous.”
Epstein’s goal at the ranch was “to have 20 women at a time impregnated,” reported the New York Times in an article detailing his dream to “seed the human race with his DNA.”
According to the police report, written by Officer Jordan Burd of the New Mexico Department of Public Safety, property managers Amber and Steve Chavez did their regular daily checks of the property on Aug. 26, 2018 around 7:00pm and found nothing out of the ordinary. The owner of the property, in the report, is described as living “out of state.”
The next day, Aug. 27, Amber Chavez checked a residence located in the southwest section of the ranch and found the large, west-facing window of the building’s garage broken out. Amber called Steve, who’s described as her husband in the report, and waited until he arrived to check the garage out.
Steve Chavez “immediately noticed'' that a “very large gun safe located in the garage was stolen,” wrote Burd, the reporting officer. In it were an estimated '30-40' guns.
According to Steve Chavez, the thieves also stole a weed eater, a leaf blower, and several sets of tools from the garage, according to the report.
Amber Chavez said that when they moved on to the residence north of the garage, they saw items had also been moved around, and two rifles were taken out of the closets in the bedrooms.
The Chavezes then told Officer Burd that they found tire tracks “in a southern direction” leading to the front of the garage and back. They traced the tire tracks to a dirt road about 1-2 miles off the property, where they found that somebody had cut through the fence that surrounds the entire ranch.
The Chavezes also said that a log cabin was broken into on the northwest of the ranch, which overlooks a large valley. They said items had been thrown around and broken, but that nothing had been stolen, though a large antique stovetop had been pulled off its base where it lay broken on its side.
A third property, about 200 yards to the east of the log cabin, was also apparently broken into. Amber Chavez said a few antique lamps, as well as a showpiece antique weapon, were stolen as well.
In the first report, Officer Burd tells the Chavezes that he needed serial numbers for the weapons to complete his report, but noted that as of Aug. 30, he hadn’t received any yet. Over the next few weeks, detailed in the follow-up reports, it’s the same story.
On Sept. 18, 2018, Burd wrote that he still hadn’t received any of the gun serial numbers, so he tried to call “Bryce Gordon,” who had originally reported the theft from out of state. Gordon, whose first name is spelled “Brice” in various public documents detailing his role as Jeffrey Epstein’s long-time ranch manager, and was granted a limited power of attorney by Epstein at least once to manage the ranch, is described as being “based out of the Virgin Islands” by Burd in the report.
Epstein’s notorious private island, one of the many places where he was accused of trafficking underage girls, was in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where Epstein’s estate was sued after his death for hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
Burd left several voicemails on his phone but never got a response.
Flights logs showing the movements of Epstein’s private planes compiled from multiple public sources, including data released during the 2021 criminal trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, reveal that Epstein was briefly in New Mexico for a few days at the beginning of June 2018 before flying back to Palm Beach, Florida. The day of the robbery he was in Palm Beach, but had stopped in the U.S. Virgin Islands the day before.
The Daily Dot left a voicemail for Gordon asking about the burglary and his current whereabouts (a Sun story from 2020 claimed that Gordon “vanished” from New Mexico after Epstein died) but got no response.
On Sept. 19, Burd wrote that he called Amber Chavez to ask about the gun serial numbers, but she said she wouldn’t be at the ranch for the next several days.
“Mrs. Chavez then stated she would call me back at a later date to set up an appointment to meet with me and stated she was in a bad cell phone service area,” Burd noted.
On Sept. 25, the reporting officer tried calling Gordon again at his Virgin Island number, as well as the Chavez couple, but couldn’t get in touch with any of them. Because he’d tried multiple times to contact them and heard nothing, he decided to close the case.
In June 2020, a couple from Artesia, New Mexico were arrested and charged with robbing the ranch after they were found with bolt cutters and an antique mirror in their car, reported KRQE News, but there appears to be no link between that robbery and the 2018 theft.
The New Mexico Department of Public Safety didn’t respond to questions asking for more details about the case.
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