In August 2003, Juan Catalan was arrested for the murder of 16-year-old Martha Puebla. It was alleged that Catalan shot Puebla after she testified in his brother’s homicide case. A witness reportedly spotted Catalan at the scene of the crime, but Catalan maintained that he was at Dodger Stadium with his daughter when the murder took place. He spent over five months behind bars before getting released and suing the city of Los Angeles for false imprisonment.
The most widely circulated story following Catalan’s release was that outtakes from a Curb Your Enthusiasm episode proved that he was innocent. The Season 4 episode “The Car Pool Lane” was being filmed at Dodger Stadium the day of the murder, and the footage shot appeared to show him at the game, just as he said he was. “I got one of the scenes, and there is my client sitting in a corner of the frame eating a hot dog with his daughter,” said Catalan’s lawyer, Todd Melnik, in 2004. “I nearly jumped out of my chair and said, ‘There he is!’”
Time codes on the tapes helped Melnik pinpoint when Catalan and his daughter were at the ballpark. However, Melnik told Snopes in 2025 that the Curb Your Enthusiasm footage that gets all the credit for clearing Catalan wasn’t the thing that ultimately got his client off the hook. While he acknowledges that the connection with the show “certainly makes the case sexy,” he also points out that the timestamp on the film showed that it was shot an hour and a half before Puebla was killed. On top of that, Melnik said that, within a minute or two of Puebla’s death, Catalan had actually dropped his cousin off right around the corner from where she died.
Since the footage didn’t prove much, Melnik had to keep digging for evidence. At the end of the day, he said, “the most important thing [was] the cell tower records.” The “complicated” case against Catalan was eventually dismissed thanks to Catalan and his cousin’s cell phone records and the call records from Puebla’s home phone, some of which revealed that Catalan had already arrived at his house by the time Puebla got killed. Police also managed to track down an eyewitness to the murder after he dropped his cell phone while fleeing from the actual killer.
In 2008, a local gang member, Jose Ledesma, was sentenced to life in prison for ordering Puebla’s murder; she’d testified against him during a previous trial.
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