Man Confesses To Burying Girlfriend And Baby In Her Family's Yard

LOS ANGELES, CA — A woman's desperate search to find her missing daughter and grandson ended in horror this week when the daughter's boyfriend confessed to murdering them and burying the woman's grandson in her own backyard. The daughter he buried in her sister's backyard.

Thomas Riffenburg, 31, a prisoner in Oregon serving a life sentence for stomping a cellmate to death, confessed to suffocating 23-year-old Jennifer Anne Walsh and her 16-month old son, Alexander, in a letter to an Oregon Department of Justice agent. Walsh and her baby had been reported missing in Los Angeles in 2009, CNN reported Thursday. Riffenburg has since provided hand-drawn maps showing the supposed the locations of the buried bodies in the Los Angeles area, according to the CNN report.

Details of Riffenburg's confession were contained in a search warrant affidavit filed in Los Angeles.
When Walsh's mother Joanne Fern reported her missing on Jan. 11, 2009, she told Los Angeles police that Riffenburg told her he last saw the young woman when he drove her to an unemployment office in the San Fernando Valley.

Riffenburg showed up with the child at Fern's Palmdale house and told her that her daughter had been caught with a bag of marijuana while at the unemployment office and ran out to where Riffenburg was waiting in a van and handed him the boy and told him to flee so that the child would not be taken by authorities, according to CNN.

After three days, Fern filed the missing persons report, but when she returned home Riffenburg and Alexander were gone.

Fern later learned Riffenburg, her daughter and grandson had stayed at the Palm Springs area home of another of her daughters, but that the three had left.

About a year later, Fern learned that Riffenburg had been arrested for burglary in Oregon about a month after Walsh and Alexander went missing, CNN reported.

Riffenburg told a detective in Oregon that his girlfriend and son had been killed in a car accident, but police there did not connect him to the missing persons case, according to CNN.

In June 2013 Riffenburg's cellmate was found beaten and unconscious and he died soon after, according to CNN. Riffenburg's had been convicted of a wide range of crimes including a string of robberies and assaults.

Riffenburg was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of aggravated murder in 2015 and phoned the agent two years later, CNN reported.

Riffenburg's maps pointed to Walsh's sister's backyard, where remains believed to be Walsh's were found, and the 14-acre property in Palmdale where Fern lived as the supposed location of the boy's buried remains, which have not been found.

Testing is pending on the remains thought to be Walsh's, Fern told CNN.

As for the motive for killings, Riffenburg said he did it out of loyalty to former prison mates, who he called "his family," according to CNN.

Riffenburg told Jodi Shimanek, the Oregon DOJ agent to whom he had written, that he had promised his prison family they would always come first and he couldn't make good on that vow if his girlfriend and son in his life, according to CNN's report.

For the full CNN report, click here.

City News Service and Patch Staffer Paige Austin contributed to this report. Photo: Youtube screengrab