State Police last year recovered bones of man who died in 2002 near Santa Cruz.

Two Mexican nationals -- 30-year-old Rigo Trejo Camacho and 24-year-old Ruben Peralta -- went on trial in Santa Fe Monday, both charged with second-degree murder, conspiracy and tampering with evidence in the death of a still nameless man whose bones were unearthed from a drainage pit near Santa Cruz last September, The New Mexican reported today on its Web site.

State Police last Sept. 18 found the bones wrapped in a blanket at the bottom of a hole dug to catch drainage from a washing machine on property owned by Donald Moe, who tipped off police that month that he had been told some four years earlier about three men carrying a body out of a trailer, The New Mexican said.

"We don't know anything about this individual except that at the hands of Rigo Trejo Camacho and Ruben Peralta, he met his death in 2002," prosecutor Sarah Garcia said in her opening statement on Monday.

But Camacho's attorney Earl Rhoads scoffed at the prosecution's theory, The New Mexican said.

"What the evidence will show is that this case is about nothing," said Rhoads, who said that while an autopsy showed the man had been stabbed, there was nothing to show that he had been murdered, the paper reported.

The nameless man may have committed suicide or "fallen on the knife," said Rhoads, who faulted police for a "sloppy" and "haphazard" investigation and for not considering the property owner, Moe, as a suspect.

"They arrested the first people they could," Rhoads told jurors. "There's no excuse for it."

Moe's daughter Angela testified at a hearing in November that she had heard Peralta, one of the defendants and the father of Angela Moe's four children, talk about the incident several times over the past four years, saying that Peralta and Camacho had helped a third man -- known only as "Angel" or "Chino" -- kill the unnamed victim, The New Mexican reported.

Peralta also is charged with one count of intimidation of a witness, the paper said.

The trial is expected to wrap up on Thursday, according to The New Mexican. 

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