January 12, 2026 • 12 mins
For nearly a decade, the murder of Mia Zapata haunted Seattle — a crime without a suspect, a voice silenced without answers. In Part Two of The Sign of the Crab, the waiting ends.
As DNA science finally catches up to a frozen piece of evidence, a name emerges from the system — a stranger no one saw coming. This episode follows the match, the interrogation, the manhunt, and the trial that brought justice to the frontwoman of The Gits.
Drawing from court records and investigative reporting featured on Forensic Files, Part Two is a reckoning — with violence, with time, and with the quiet power of truth finally spoken out loud.
Justice took years.
Science took seconds.
And the story, at last, gets its ending.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written by Jonny Hartwell
Voiced by Jonny Hartwell
Music Credit: Reel World Audio.
A iHeart Radio Production
DISCLAIMER: This podcast contains discussions of sensitive topics...Listener discretion is strongly advised. While the stories you’ll hear are rooted in real events, not every detail is strictly historical—some moments are dramatized with creative license to bring the narrative to life. Please keep this in mind as you listen.
Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast
Written, hosted, and produced by Jonny Hartwell.
A production of iHeartRadio Pittsburgh.
Thanks for listening—and for keeping the light on.
As DNA science finally catches up to a frozen piece of evidence, a name emerges from the system — a stranger no one saw coming. This episode follows the match, the interrogation, the manhunt, and the trial that brought justice to the frontwoman of The Gits.
Drawing from court records and investigative reporting featured on Forensic Files, Part Two is a reckoning — with violence, with time, and with the quiet power of truth finally spoken out loud.
Justice took years.
Science took seconds.
And the story, at last, gets its ending.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Written by Jonny Hartwell
Voiced by Jonny Hartwell
Music Credit: Reel World Audio.
A iHeart Radio Production
DISCLAIMER: This podcast contains discussions of sensitive topics...Listener discretion is strongly advised. While the stories you’ll hear are rooted in real events, not every detail is strictly historical—some moments are dramatized with creative license to bring the narrative to life. Please keep this in mind as you listen.
Jonny’s Dead Air Podcast
Written, hosted, and produced by Jonny Hartwell.
A production of iHeartRadio Pittsburgh.
Thanks for listening—and for keeping the light on.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome in. I'm Johnny Hartwell and this is Johnny's Dead
Air Podcast, a production of iHeartRadio. Last Time on Dead Air.
We followed a constellation across the sky and into the
streets of early ninety Seattle, into a music scene boiling
over with hunger and noise, and into the life of
(00:21):
a woman whose voice could pin a room to the floor.
We met The Gits, a band built from rust and rain,
chasing truth one club at a time. We watched them
rise out of the basements and bar rooms, powered by
the raw gravity of their lead singer, Mia Sapatta, a
blues slash punk poet with a laugh that could cut
through the feedback. We followed her into the summer night
(00:44):
of July seventh, nineteen ninety three, from the Comet Tavern
to a quiet corner of the Central District of Seattle,
where a cyclist found her body lying in the street, beaten,
raped and strangled, and we watched a city break. We
saw the investigation turn inward towards friends, toward bandmates, towards
X's because that's where most stories like this usually end.
(01:06):
Time passed, months turned into years, the case went cold.
A single bite mark on her chest and the DNA
inside it sat frozen in an evidence locker, waiting for
science to learn a new language. But the answer stayed
hidden in the dark. And then there was a song,
the last track she recorded, Sign of the Crab, a
(01:27):
violent story sung from the perspective of someone being taken
down a road they didn't want to come back from,
A song recorded weeks before her death, a song that
felt less like fiction and more like a warning, whispered
backward through time. Part one ended with a flicker on
a cold computer screen, a DNA match. Tonight we opened
the door that Part one left trembling. Tonight, we follow
(01:50):
the match. We meet the man under the Sign of
the Crab. Part two is the hunt. Part two is
the trial. Part two is the reckoning, and finally Part
two is just This is Script twenty three, The Sign
of the Crab, Part two, Act five, The Man in
the System. The thing about cold cases is that they
(02:12):
don't solve themselves. They sit, they wait, they gather dust,
and every once in a while, when science and Locke
finally collide, they breathe. This breath happens in two thousand
and two, nearly nine years after Mia Sapata was murdered,
a routine DNA upload, nothing glamorous, not a homicide, not
(02:34):
a violent felony. A burglary in Florida followed by a
domestic violence arrest. A man swabbed, processed, and entered into
the system like thousands of others. He's not thinking about Seattle.
He's not thinking about nineteen ninety three. He's not thinking
about the bite mark he left on a woman he
never met until the moment he chose to kill her.
(02:57):
But the database is match. When the profile hits Cotis,
the system runs it automatically against old unsolved crimes. The
link happens in seconds, no drama, no music cue, just
a computer registering a near perfect genetic overlap with the
DNA from MIA's chest. A lab tech sees the alert,
(03:20):
a phone call is made. A cold case detective looks
up from paperwork and feels something shift. The name, the
name tied to the match. Jesus Meskia, not a Seattle scenester,
not a musician, not an ex boyfriend, a stranger, A
man who had never been on any suspect list, any
(03:41):
rumor list, any whispered late at night list. Because he
was exactly the kind of man. MIA's song warned about
someone you don't know until it's too late. So who
is he? Jesus C. Meskia was born in Cuba in
nineteen fifty. At some point immigrated to the United States
(04:03):
versus Miami, later drifting west. He had a criminal record burglary, assault,
domestic violence, and a long pattern of violence towards women.
Nothing that brought national attention, nothing that would tie him
into a famous murder, but enough to build a picture
a man who hurt people, especially women, whenever he thought
(04:23):
he could get away with it. And in nineteen ninety three,
the year Mia was killed, Meskia was living in Seattle.
He was drifting between low wage jobs. He was not
part of the music scene. He was not connected to
the gets either. He was just there. A predator with
no mythology, a man who walks sideways through life, like
(04:46):
the crab itself, never straight, always circling weakness, looking for
an opening. Police now have a suspect, but a name
isn't enough. They need a match. Twice DNA from Cotis
is only the first strike. They need confirmation, so they
go looking the manhunt. Detective track Mescilla through addresses, employer
(05:09):
records in old contacts. He's moved back to Florida, living
a quiet, forgettable life. Seattle police coordinate with Florida authorities
and set up surveillance. They look at photos, they look
at his record, and they look at the timeline. Everything fits.
The detectives wait until they have a warrant, and then,
after nearly a decade of dead ends, they move. He's
(05:33):
arrested without incident, No dramatic chase, no defiance. He looks puzzled, irritated,
like a man being inconvenienced by a parking ticket. He
has no idea the world is about to learn his name.
Seattle detectives take a fresh DNA sample, they run it.
It matches the nineteen ninety three bite mark perfectly. It
(05:54):
also matches the trace DNA found on her clothing. When
detectives sit across from him in the interview room, they
slide a photo of Mia across the metal table. They
ask him if he's ever seen her before. No, ever
talked to her, No past her on the street, No,
(06:15):
bumped into her at a bar, anything. No. He shakes
his head and then he says it louder no, no, No,
emphatic and absolute no. He has never seen this woman
in his life, and the detectives exchange a glance, because
in that instant the mask slips. If you've never met her,
(06:41):
if your lives never crossed, then how does your DNA
show up on her skin, on her clothes, on the
place where she fought for her life? They knew right then,
long before the jury heard a word, that that man
sitting across the table was the man who killed Mia.
(07:04):
The trial next the trial In two thousand and four,
Jesus Mesquilla was extra dotted to Seattle to stand trial
for first degree murder. The trial became a raw, open
wound for the people who loved her. Reporters sit and rose.
Friends show up in dark clothes. The gets older, now
(07:27):
still carrying a hole where Mia used to be, take
their seats in the gallery. The prosecution lays out the evidence.
DNA match from the bite mark, DNA from the clothing,
no prior connection between killer and victim, Miskia's pattern of
violence towards women. The defense tries to claim contamination. They
(07:48):
argue coincidence. They suggest alternative sources for the DNA, all
of which crumble under scrutiny. Friends testify they talk about
MIA's last night, They talk about who he was, They
talk about what the world lost, and the jury deliberates
for less than two days. They returned the verdict guilty
(08:09):
of murder in the first degree. The judge sentence Heyesus
Meschia to thirty six years in prison, and because of
his age, it's effectively a life sentence. In two thousand
and five, after a brief appeal, the sentence is upheld
and reimposed for the first time in over a decade.
The long dark corridor of this story has a door
(08:31):
at the end. It doesn't open into light exactly, but
it does open. The man who murdered Mia Sapada finally
has a name, and that name is Jesus C. Meskilla.
Not a monster from a campfire tale, not a ghost,
not a familiar face, just a man who chose violence
(08:52):
and was finally caught by the science he never understood.
The y epilogue and Justice for Miya next the epilogue, Justice
for Mia. Justice is a strange word. People think it
(09:14):
means closure. It doesn't. Closure is a myth made for television.
What justice really looks like is consequence, a door shutting,
a system working, a truth finally allowed to speak for
the people who love Mia, her bandmates, her friends, her family.
Justice was never going to undo the night of July seventh,
(09:36):
nineteen ninety three. It wasn't going to bring her home,
but it was going to give her back the dignity
of a story with an ending instead of a wound
left open. In twenty twenty one, in a Washington State prison,
Jesus Mescia died at the age of sixty six. No headline,
(09:56):
no tears shed for him, just a short obituary on
a corrections log, marking the end of a life defined
by harm. So what remains MIA's voice, snarling and soulful,
laughing between lines, still lives in the grooves of two albums,
Frenching the Bully and Enter the Conquering Chicken, and in bootlegs,
(10:19):
in flyers, and in memories. But more than that, her
legacy lives in what the Seattle scene did after her death.
It lives in Home Alive, the Self Defense and Anti
Violence Collective founded in her name, an organization that taught
thousands of women, queer people, and vulnerable communities how to
(10:39):
protect themselves, how to say no, and how to survive.
It evolved fractured, reformed, lived online, and lived still in
the skills people passed down. It lives in the bands
who played, the benefits in the friends who refuse to
let her name fade in jon Jet and the gits
reimagining themselves as evil Stig, which gets live spelled backwards
(11:02):
so her voice could echo again in new rooms. And
it lives in the city she loved, the city that
felt the loss like a rip down the middle, the
city that still remembers the girl who could turn punk
into prayer years later. When people talk about Mia Sapata,
they don't talk about victimhood. They talk about strength. They
(11:23):
talk about artistry. They talk about a woman who stood
on stage and handed the room its own heart. They
talk about the light she carried and the darkness she
refused to sing quietly, you're there one last time. You're
standing in a club, could be anywhere, could be tonight.
(11:45):
Some young band is on stage, sweaty, loud, good. The
singer steps to the mic and does that thing Mia
used to do. Chin tilted feet, planted voice coming from
somewhere deeper than lungs. For a second, in the amp glow,
you see a silhouette that feels familiar, not a ghost,
(12:07):
a lineage. The downbeat hits, the crowd rises, and the
moment lives in that place between sound and silence. You
feel her mia under the same sky, under the same constellation,
under the Sign of the Crab. This has been Script
(12:34):
twenty three, The Sign of the Crab, The Miya Sapota Story,
Part two. I'm Johnny Hartwell, this has been Johnny's Dead
Air podcast. Thank you so much for listening.
Welcome in. I'm Johnny Hartwell and this is Johnny's Dead
Air Podcast, a production of iHeartRadio. Last Time on Dead Air.
We followed a constellation across the sky and into the
streets of early ninety Seattle, into a music scene boiling
over with hunger and noise, and into the life of
(00:21):
a woman whose voice could pin a room to the floor.
We met The Gits, a band built from rust and rain,
chasing truth one club at a time. We watched them
rise out of the basements and bar rooms, powered by
the raw gravity of their lead singer, Mia Sapatta, a
blues slash punk poet with a laugh that could cut
through the feedback. We followed her into the summer night
(00:44):
of July seventh, nineteen ninety three, from the Comet Tavern
to a quiet corner of the Central District of Seattle,
where a cyclist found her body lying in the street, beaten,
raped and strangled, and we watched a city break. We
saw the investigation turn inward towards friends, toward bandmates, towards
X's because that's where most stories like this usually end.
(01:06):
Time passed, months turned into years, the case went cold.
A single bite mark on her chest and the DNA
inside it sat frozen in an evidence locker, waiting for
science to learn a new language. But the answer stayed
hidden in the dark. And then there was a song,
the last track she recorded, Sign of the Crab, a
(01:27):
violent story sung from the perspective of someone being taken
down a road they didn't want to come back from,
A song recorded weeks before her death, a song that
felt less like fiction and more like a warning, whispered
backward through time. Part one ended with a flicker on
a cold computer screen, a DNA match. Tonight we opened
the door that Part one left trembling. Tonight, we follow
(01:50):
the match. We meet the man under the Sign of
the Crab. Part two is the hunt. Part two is
the trial. Part two is the reckoning, and finally Part
two is just This is Script twenty three, The Sign
of the Crab, Part two, Act five, The Man in
the System. The thing about cold cases is that they
(02:12):
don't solve themselves. They sit, they wait, they gather dust,
and every once in a while, when science and Locke
finally collide, they breathe. This breath happens in two thousand
and two, nearly nine years after Mia Sapata was murdered,
a routine DNA upload, nothing glamorous, not a homicide, not
(02:34):
a violent felony. A burglary in Florida followed by a
domestic violence arrest. A man swabbed, processed, and entered into
the system like thousands of others. He's not thinking about Seattle.
He's not thinking about nineteen ninety three. He's not thinking
about the bite mark he left on a woman he
never met until the moment he chose to kill her.
(02:57):
But the database is match. When the profile hits Cotis,
the system runs it automatically against old unsolved crimes. The
link happens in seconds, no drama, no music cue, just
a computer registering a near perfect genetic overlap with the
DNA from MIA's chest. A lab tech sees the alert,
(03:20):
a phone call is made. A cold case detective looks
up from paperwork and feels something shift. The name, the
name tied to the match. Jesus Meskia, not a Seattle scenester,
not a musician, not an ex boyfriend, a stranger, A
man who had never been on any suspect list, any
(03:41):
rumor list, any whispered late at night list. Because he
was exactly the kind of man. MIA's song warned about
someone you don't know until it's too late. So who
is he? Jesus C. Meskia was born in Cuba in
nineteen fifty. At some point immigrated to the United States
(04:03):
versus Miami, later drifting west. He had a criminal record burglary, assault,
domestic violence, and a long pattern of violence towards women.
Nothing that brought national attention, nothing that would tie him
into a famous murder, but enough to build a picture
a man who hurt people, especially women, whenever he thought
(04:23):
he could get away with it. And in nineteen ninety three,
the year Mia was killed, Meskia was living in Seattle.
He was drifting between low wage jobs. He was not
part of the music scene. He was not connected to
the gets either. He was just there. A predator with
no mythology, a man who walks sideways through life, like
(04:46):
the crab itself, never straight, always circling weakness, looking for
an opening. Police now have a suspect, but a name
isn't enough. They need a match. Twice DNA from Cotis
is only the first strike. They need confirmation, so they
go looking the manhunt. Detective track Mescilla through addresses, employer
(05:09):
records in old contacts. He's moved back to Florida, living
a quiet, forgettable life. Seattle police coordinate with Florida authorities
and set up surveillance. They look at photos, they look
at his record, and they look at the timeline. Everything fits.
The detectives wait until they have a warrant, and then,
after nearly a decade of dead ends, they move. He's
(05:33):
arrested without incident, No dramatic chase, no defiance. He looks puzzled, irritated,
like a man being inconvenienced by a parking ticket. He
has no idea the world is about to learn his name.
Seattle detectives take a fresh DNA sample, they run it.
It matches the nineteen ninety three bite mark perfectly. It
(05:54):
also matches the trace DNA found on her clothing. When
detectives sit across from him in the interview room, they
slide a photo of Mia across the metal table. They
ask him if he's ever seen her before. No, ever
talked to her, No past her on the street, No,
(06:15):
bumped into her at a bar, anything. No. He shakes
his head and then he says it louder no, no, No,
emphatic and absolute no. He has never seen this woman
in his life, and the detectives exchange a glance, because
in that instant the mask slips. If you've never met her,
(06:41):
if your lives never crossed, then how does your DNA
show up on her skin, on her clothes, on the
place where she fought for her life? They knew right then,
long before the jury heard a word, that that man
sitting across the table was the man who killed Mia.
(07:04):
The trial next the trial In two thousand and four,
Jesus Mesquilla was extra dotted to Seattle to stand trial
for first degree murder. The trial became a raw, open
wound for the people who loved her. Reporters sit and rose.
Friends show up in dark clothes. The gets older, now
(07:27):
still carrying a hole where Mia used to be, take
their seats in the gallery. The prosecution lays out the evidence.
DNA match from the bite mark, DNA from the clothing,
no prior connection between killer and victim, Miskia's pattern of
violence towards women. The defense tries to claim contamination. They
(07:48):
argue coincidence. They suggest alternative sources for the DNA, all
of which crumble under scrutiny. Friends testify they talk about
MIA's last night, They talk about who he was, They
talk about what the world lost, and the jury deliberates
for less than two days. They returned the verdict guilty
(08:09):
of murder in the first degree. The judge sentence Heyesus
Meschia to thirty six years in prison, and because of
his age, it's effectively a life sentence. In two thousand
and five, after a brief appeal, the sentence is upheld
and reimposed for the first time in over a decade.
The long dark corridor of this story has a door
(08:31):
at the end. It doesn't open into light exactly, but
it does open. The man who murdered Mia Sapada finally
has a name, and that name is Jesus C. Meskilla.
Not a monster from a campfire tale, not a ghost,
not a familiar face, just a man who chose violence
(08:52):
and was finally caught by the science he never understood.
The y epilogue and Justice for Miya next the epilogue, Justice
for Mia. Justice is a strange word. People think it
(09:14):
means closure. It doesn't. Closure is a myth made for television.
What justice really looks like is consequence, a door shutting,
a system working, a truth finally allowed to speak for
the people who love Mia, her bandmates, her friends, her family.
Justice was never going to undo the night of July seventh,
(09:36):
nineteen ninety three. It wasn't going to bring her home,
but it was going to give her back the dignity
of a story with an ending instead of a wound
left open. In twenty twenty one, in a Washington State prison,
Jesus Mescia died at the age of sixty six. No headline,
(09:56):
no tears shed for him, just a short obituary on
a corrections log, marking the end of a life defined
by harm. So what remains MIA's voice, snarling and soulful,
laughing between lines, still lives in the grooves of two albums,
Frenching the Bully and Enter the Conquering Chicken, and in bootlegs,
(10:19):
in flyers, and in memories. But more than that, her
legacy lives in what the Seattle scene did after her death.
It lives in Home Alive, the Self Defense and Anti
Violence Collective founded in her name, an organization that taught
thousands of women, queer people, and vulnerable communities how to
(10:39):
protect themselves, how to say no, and how to survive.
It evolved fractured, reformed, lived online, and lived still in
the skills people passed down. It lives in the bands
who played, the benefits in the friends who refuse to
let her name fade in jon Jet and the gits
reimagining themselves as evil Stig, which gets live spelled backwards
(11:02):
so her voice could echo again in new rooms. And
it lives in the city she loved, the city that
felt the loss like a rip down the middle, the
city that still remembers the girl who could turn punk
into prayer years later. When people talk about Mia Sapata,
they don't talk about victimhood. They talk about strength. They
(11:23):
talk about artistry. They talk about a woman who stood
on stage and handed the room its own heart. They
talk about the light she carried and the darkness she
refused to sing quietly, you're there one last time. You're
standing in a club, could be anywhere, could be tonight.
(11:45):
Some young band is on stage, sweaty, loud, good. The
singer steps to the mic and does that thing Mia
used to do. Chin tilted feet, planted voice coming from
somewhere deeper than lungs. For a second, in the amp glow,
you see a silhouette that feels familiar, not a ghost,
(12:07):
a lineage. The downbeat hits, the crowd rises, and the
moment lives in that place between sound and silence. You
feel her mia under the same sky, under the same constellation,
under the Sign of the Crab. This has been Script
(12:34):
twenty three, The Sign of the Crab, The Miya Sapota Story,
Part two. I'm Johnny Hartwell, this has been Johnny's Dead
Air podcast. Thank you so much for listening.
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