Murdered couple ID'd as educators

ALBUQUERQUE (KRQE) - Police have identified the two people found murdered in a southeast Albuquerque home as a Bernalillo High School teacher and University of New Mexico professor who had been dating.

Hector Torres, 54, and Stefania Gray, 43, were found shot to death Monday Torres's home in the 2700 block of Santa Monica SE.

Ralph Montoya, said by investigators to be Gray's ex-boyfriend, has been arrested and charged with the murders. The motive for the killings was jealousy, according to police.

The University of New Mexico Web site identifies Torres as an English professor whose focus was contemporary postmodern Chicana and Chicano studies. Gray taught 9th-grade English in Bernalillo, and a statement from UNM said she was working on a graduate degree there.

According to police Montoya first went to an attorney Monday and turned himself in telling police they would find the bodies at the home. Police went to the home around noon.

Investigators said Montoya had gone to the home Sunday night to confront the couple.

The investigator's statement accompanying the arrest warrant alleged Montoya broke into the home, shot the victims and placed the pistol in Torres's hand pointed toward his head in an attempt to make the crime look like a murder and suicide.

Court records obtained Tuesday by KRQE News 13 indicate Montoya had forced his way into the home in January and threatened the couple with a knife. He backed down but was later arrested on multiple counts for the incident.

He was free on bond with those charges still pending, according to the records.

Montoya is scheduled to appear in court later Tuesday afternoon on two open counts of murder. He's currently being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center on a cash-only bond of $250,000.

UNM released this statement on Torres late Tuesday morning:

Professor Torres was on faculty in the UNM Department of English since 1986. He was born in Tijuana, Mexico, raised in El Paso, Texas and, with the benefit of the GI Bill, earned all his degrees, including a doctorate in English language and literature from the University of Texas at Austin. Currently, he was currently teaching a course on Chicano Culture, a theory course and was directing an independent study.

In a 2007 interview he said, “I think being a Spanish speaker who learned English in school drove my interest in linguistics, language and literature.”

His research and scholarship focused on contemporary, postmodern Chicana and Chicano literary discourse and film, literary and critical theory. He teaches courses in literary and critical theory, postmodernism and contemporary Chicana and Chicano literary discourse and film, English syntax and discourse analysis, as well as courses on writing about film.

In 2007, with UNM Press he published, “Conversations with Contemporary Chicana and Chicano Writers.” The impetus for the books was in his study of social linguistics – or the relationship between language and society. “The language of literature is language of reflection rather than language through interaction, but the social linguistic approach still interests me,” he said in a 2007 interview.

Stephania Gray was a graduate student in comparative literature in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures. She was working with Raji Vallury, assistant professor in French, on her thesis, “Dreams of Andalusia: Women, Gender, Memory and Nation.” She was to defend the day after spring break.

Vallury remembers her as “vibrant, beautiful and strong.” She was a heritage Spanish speaker who earned her undergraduate degree and then went out to the workforce where she was a flight attendant. She came back to school and was the first woman in her family to do post-graduate study. She was already planning to pursue a doctoral degree, Vallury said.