Who are Duncan Martinez and Nathaniel Blalock and where are they now?

THE body of 21-year-old Ronald Baker was discovered in June 1990 following the summer solstice.

An investigation into his death was quickly launched after the discovery, leading police to Duncan Martinez and Nathaniel Blalock.

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Who are Duncan Martinez and Nathaniel Blalock?

Ronald Baker was brutally murdered while studying astrophysics at UCLA in the early 1990s.

At the time, he was living in the Los Angeles area with Duncan Martinez and Nathan Blalock.

Baker and Martinez had been friends since their freshman year and they later befriended Blalock, a former football star and Army veteran from Detroit, Michigan, according to Oxygen.

"He was always really personable, very funny, easy going, easy to talk to," Baker's sister, Patty, said of her brother.

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After Baker's body was discovered, Matinez and Blalock were questioned, but to his family, they appeared to just be grieving friends.

However, authorities made them suspects after Martinez put them in close proximity to Baker's body. He also failed a polygraph test, according to Oxygen.

What happened to Ronald Baker?

An autopsy showed that Baker had been stabbed 18 times.

Additionally, his throat was slashed so deep, that his head had nearly been severed from his body, according to the Los Angeles Times.

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Throughout the course of the investigation, police were able to determine that he was murdered in a kidnap plot orchestrated by his roommates.

As a result, Blalock was indicted by a Los Angeles County grand jury on one count of murder in 1993.

During an interview with the police, he confessed to stabbing Baker at least twice with a knife, according to court records.

Police also matched his blood to a sample that was found on Baker's body.

"They had been the focus of the investigation from the onset," Detective Rick Jackson of Martinez and Blalock's involvement, via the Los Angeles Times.

Blalock said during his police interview that Martinez came up with the idea in an attempt to get money from Baker’s parents.

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Martinez also confessed to the killing after he was arrested for burglary in Utah.

“I told Nathan …’You’ve got to finish him off or something because you can’t leave him like that,’” Martinez said, via Oxygen.

“‘You better cut his throat and finish him off or something.’” 

Where are Duncan and Nathaniel now?

Martinez and Blalock were tired and convicted of first-degree murder in connection to Baker's death.

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They both received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole.

However, California Governor Gavin Newsom commuted Martinez’s sentence and he was released on parole in 2020, according to the Los Angeles Daily News.