MEXICO CITY — The FBI bulletin included a questionnaire and a plea: “If you and/or your loved one(s) were victimized by Aurora Phelps, or have information relevant to this investigation, please fill out this form.”
The questionnairespelled out the modus operandi of a woman who, the agency says, used dating apps to meet men decades her senior to gain access to their bank, Social Security and retirement accounts. Sometimes, she incapacitated the men by drugging them. Sometimes, the FBI says, she killed them.
Authorities describe Phelps, 44, as a fast-talking charmer who cozied up to men in their 60s and 70s looking for companionship. A longtime friend recalled her as short-tempered and quick to lash out at those who she thought had wronged her.
Phelps has dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship and hooked up with men on both sides of the border. All these hookups were going on, authorities say, while she was married to William Phelps of Las Vegas.
“We’ve known each other for 14 years and she’s never shown a sign or an ounce of this,” he told The Times last year. “If she did do it, damn, she put one over on me.”
Phelps has been charged with murder in Mexico and indicted in the U.S. on fraud charges and two counts of kidnapping, one resulting in death. The FBI has identified 11 possible victims so far.
“The white-collar criminal, especially when it comes to Aurora Phelps, is no different than a violent criminal,” said Christopher Delzotto, FBI special agent in charge in Las Vegas. “They are psychopaths. She truly believes her lies. She visualizes all of this stuff. She believes it. It has become her reality.”
The questionnaire released by Delzotto’s office asks, “Was anything unusual about your interactions or meetings with this individual?”
As U.S. and Mexican authorities learned as they pieced together the story of Aurora Phelps, “unusual” is an understatement.
Robert Erbach, who once owned a company that staged concerts in the U.S., had retired to a home near Guadalajara, in a lake resort community popular among expatriates.
They connected on Tinder — Phelps under the username “Sissy” — and met at a casino Erbach frequented in Guadalajara, friends of his said.
Separated from his wife and in divorce proceedings, Erbach was 67. Phelps was 40.
In December 2021, after about three months of dating, he invited her to the Hard Rock Hotel in Guadalajara to see a friend’s rock band perform, friends said.
It was the last time Erbach was seen alive.
According to U.S. and Mexican court records, Phelps began driving Erbach’s white BMW SUV and headed north until she reached Las Vegas, where she opened a Wells Fargo account in his name, using some of his personal documents.
The FBI later obtained surveillance video that showed her making cash withdrawals from a Wells Fargo ATM using Erbach’s debit card. In all, authorities say, Phelps drained $50,500 from two Erbach accounts.
In January 2022, a month after Erbach’s date with Phelps, his son received a text from his father’s phone in poorly written English. The son told Mexican investigators that the sender, purportedly his father, said he was moving to Quito, Ecuador, and directed the son to tell family members and police to stop looking for him.
Not long after, the Local 16 Union received a note from Erbach’s email account saying he had changed his bank account information for direct deposit. But the company managing the pension fund refused to update information without a wet signature. Emails, written in increasingly irate, fractured English, demanded that the union help fix the problem.
“I rely on my pension money to pay my bills my food right now I have no money and I am struggling a lot,” read one email. “I have no food in my fridge!”
Erbach, meanwhile, remained missing.
At this point, Mexican and U.S. authorities did not realize the significance of a discovery made near Guadalajara two days after Erbach met Phelps at the Hard Rock Hotel. It was a middle-aged man’s body, without identification, found on alongside a road. He’d been asphyxiated.
She was born in Arkansas in 1981 and her parents brought her to Guadalajara as a toddler. She was known as Aurora Flores back then, and her family bounced back and forth across the border, which might explain her sometimes ungrammatical English.
When she was 17, she placed an announcement on a Guadalajara radio station: Singers wanted for a pop band. Blanca Jimenez, whose family had just moved there from Long Beach, Calif., responded, and the two hit it off when they met at a karaoke club. They soon became inseparable and began writing songs together.
But the relationship began to sour when Jimenez met her first boyfriend. Phelps became jealous of the time she spent with her boyfriend, Jimenez said, and demanded she choose between her and him. The friendship survived, but with every new boyfriend, their relationship became more strained, and Jimenez began to distance herself from Phelps when she moved back to California in 2005.
That’s when Jimenez noticed something odd about her email. She couldn’t access her account. Then worried friends began calling because they’d received threatening messages.
One friend was warned that if she didn’t wire money to a certain account, something terrible would happen to her family.
Jimenez confronted her friend, who denied sending the threats. But strange emails continued to appear, and Jimenez stopped talking to her altogether.
Ten years later, Phelps called Jimenez out of the blue. “Don’t hang up on me,” Jimenez recalled her saying. “My husband is beating me.”
In the intervening years, Phelps had married a man she met in Guadalajara. They moved to Arkansas around 2006 and had three sons.
Ever persuasive, she asked if her old friend could take her in, Jimenez said, and apologized for her past actions. Jimenez gave her a second chance.
She moved into Jimenez’s apartment in Las Vegas, where Jimenez worked in the marketing department of a casino. Phelps got a job there too, and the pair were best friends again.
Jimenez learned that when Phelps was in Arkansas, she had worked as a Walmart pharmacy technician — a bit of work history that was still listed on her LinkedIn page. Her knowledge of medications, including relaxants, would later pique the interest of law enforcement.
Jimenez would later tell the FBI that Phelps occasionally brought home married co-workers, slept with them and later texted them images of positive pregnancy tests she’d plucked from the internet. She threatened to tell the men’s wives unless they paid her money, Jimenez said.
By 2015, Phelps’ activities had become too much, and Jimenez again cut off their relationship. A year later, Phelps and her husband divorced and she met William Phelps. They went on to marry and have a daughter.
Her first husband had won custody of their children, and according to Arkansas court records, she concocted a plan to show that he was an unfit parent. Communicating via Skype, Phelps taught her brother in Mexico, Abraham Flores, how to use an app that makes a call appear to come from any phone a user chooses. The app also can distort a speaker’s voice.
Four days later, court records show, Phelps received a voicemail, purportedly from her ex-husband’s phone. “Leave our kids alone or I will kill you,” a gruff voice said. Death threats, via text, arrived next.
A social worker in charge of the child custody case also received a call appearing to come from the ex-husband, according to court documents. “Bitch, you and the cops leave me alone or I’m going to kill these kids,” the message said.
Phelps presented screenshots of the threats in court to show that her children were in danger, but law enforcement subpoenaed her phone and found the text chain telling her brother how to use the spoofing app.
A judge issued an arrest warrant for Phelps, who was charged with making terrorist-style threats and false reports to law enforcement.
She was arrested 10 days later, then released on bond in March 2018. Phelps then fled the state.
In 2022, Phelps returned to Mexico and in May, six months after Erbach disappeared, met a 69-year-old chiropractor on Tinder, calling herself “Sisy.” A divorced expat from the United States, he had a thriving practice in Guadalajara with a staff of 10. He asked that his name not be used out of fear for his safety.
She asked whether he would like to go to Puerto Vallarta for a romantic weekend. He declined, but two days later they met at Sanborns, a Denny’s-like restaurant chain.
What followed, according to court testimony, was a chaotic night that would include, among other things, the chiropractor lying unconscious in a bathtub, a suspicious milkshake, a rush to a hospital and the chiropractor’s staff arguing with Phelps, who within a few hours alternately identified herself as his landlady, cousin, fiancee and, finally, his wife.
In a hearing held as a precursor to a civil trial, the chiropractor and Phelps gave sometimes conflicting accounts about what happened that night. But a few things are clear.
At Sanborns, the chiropractor ordered a chocolate milkshake and they spoke of Mexico and life. He excused himself to go to the restroom, and after he returned, they agreed to check into a hotel. Phelps, still using Erbach’s BMW, drove.
In their hotel room, they ordered drinks and at some point the chiropractor passed out. Phelps testified that he had gotten drunk, but police later concluded that he had consumed 1,000 milligrams of benzodiazepines, also known as Valium, most likely added to his drink or the unattended milkshake.
He regained consciousness enough to ask to be taken to his house, which is equipped with a security system. A surveillance camera captured the pair arriving around 4 a.m. Barely able to walk, he fell by the front door, cracked his head on the concrete and began bleeding.
When Phelps finally got him in the house, she and the chiropractor’s live-in maid drew a bath believing it would help him wake up.
“He was really just sitting there,” Phelps testified. “He wasn’t doing anything more than just being asleep.”
Phelps said she told the maid that she was the landlord, and that the maid should consider herself fired. In court, Phelps said she was just following the chiropractor’s orders — that he had asked her to pretend to be the landlord and that she was to fire the maid because she had stolen from him.
The maid, suspicious, called Carmen Garduño, a trusted clinic employee, at 7 a.m. The maid said the chiropractor seemed to be very drunk, which Garduño found odd. She’d worked with him for 13 years and had never seen him drink.
“Don’t go anywhere,” Garduño told her. “I’m on my way.”
Then the maid called back. “She now says she’s his cousin,” she told Garduño. The chiropractor didn’t have family in Mexico.
Garduño brought a friend as backup and arrived at the house at 8:30 a.m. Forcing her way into the bathroom, she saw him in the bathtub, unconscious. Even stranger, he was wearing his doctor’s scrubs backward.
Pale and breathing heavily, “he was practically absorbing his lips into his mouth,” Garduño said.
In court, Garduño recounted the next exchange with the woman she would later learn was Phelps. Why, Garduño asked, was he in the tub?
“To revive him from his blackout,” Phelps said.
But he doesn’t drink, Garduño said.
“See, you clearly don’t know him,” Phelps said. “We kicked him out of the U.S., because he’s a drunk. His family doesn’t want him because he’s an alcoholic.”
Garduño and her friend got him out of the tub and she began doing CPR. He vomited and began to breathe more regularly but remained unresponsive.
What followed, according to court records, were hours that were even more chaotic. The police were called, and an officer believed Phelps — who now said she was his fiancee — when she insisted he was just drunk.
At one point, Phelps told Garduño and the maid to make chilaquiles for “my baby” for when he woke up. She would have some too. In her testimony, Phelps acknowledged that she asked “for some crackers or something.” She was starving, she explained. Garduño and the maid refused to make the chilaquiles.
Someone called for a paramedic, who agreed with Phelps that “the gentleman apparently has a bad hangover,” Phelps testified.
Undeterred, Garduño and fellow clinic workers got their boss, now in dry clothes, into a car for a ride to a private hospital.
Phelps reached the hospital ahead of them and told the staff at the front counter that she was the chiropractor’s wife, according to court records.
When a doctor asked who was to pay for his treatment, Garduño saw an opportunity and said that clearly his wife would pay. Phelps left the hospital.
Blood tests would later reveal the Valium in his system. He would remain unconscious for nearly a week.
A month later, Phelps met Miguel Carrillo, a dual Mexican American citizen, in Chapala, near Guadalajara, the FBI said. He was found dead days later in an abandoned lot and his car was found outside a bank. His bank account was drained.
In November, six months after her date with the chiropractor, Phelps hooked up with another older American. John Wiens, a divorced and retired mechanical engineer living in Las Vegas, connected with Phelps, now using the username “Bora,” via the dating app Plenty of Fish, people familiar with the case said. He was 78.
His son, Michael Wiens of Santa Cruz, had left him a voicemail that month, but Wiens never called back, which was strange.
Stranger still, his Facebook profile now featured a picture of Wiens photoshopped into a city in Brazil. Michael Wiens told Mexican investigators that he received a text message from his father’s phone saying that he had moved there, though Wiens spoke no Portuguese.
In Las Vegas, one of Wiens’ neighbors saw that the door of his home was open. Concerned, he went in and found Wiens’ dog by itself with no food or water; feces were everywhere. The neighbor called the housing manager, who contacted Michael Wiens.
“He always took great care of his dog,” Michael Wiens said in an interview. “And would hire someone to watch it if he was going anywhere overnight.”
Michael Wiens called the police, who did a wellness check and told him it appeared his father had left in a hurry. Michael Wiens traveled to Las Vegas and could tell that his father’s fish tanks hadn’t been cleaned in weeks. The fish were nearly dead. His Chrysler minivan was gone.
He took his father’s laptop back to California and noticed his email account was not password protected, according to his testimony. The inbox was crammed with orders from Christian Dior, Gucci and other designer brands for women’s apparel.
The purchases were sent to Phelps’ Las Vegas home under the name of her daughter or to “Abraham Flores,” the name of her brother. Months later, Michael Wiens noticed an email from the Social Security Administration saying the password on his father’s account had been changed.
After his minivan was found at the Las Vegas airport, FBI agents secured surveillance video showing Phelps and Wiens boarding a plane for San Diego on Nov. 4, 2022, just one day after their first date. He appeared listless and wasn’t wearing his glasses, which was odd, his son said.
Another surveillance video showed Wiens disembarking in San Diego in a wheelchair. He had never used a wheelchair. He and Phelps made their way to Tijuana and flew to Mexico City.
The FBI would later obtain recordings of calls that had been made to credit card companies to inquire about Wiens’ accounts, and they allowed Michael Wiens to listen to them, to see whether he could identify the voice of his father.
In one recording, Phelps could be heard guiding a disoriented Wiens through the process of verifying a purchase. “She had to tell him what to do,” he said.
In another recording, a representative from a credit card company asked, “Are you John Wiens, and are you trying to make this purchase?” A man responded, “Yes, I’m John Wiens” in a heavy Spanish accent.
When Phelps and Wiens flew to Mexico City, they checked into a hotel. That next day, Wiens was found dead in a hotel room bathtub.
The FBI said that when authorities arrived at the hotel, Phelps identified him as José López from Ecuador.
The hotel management had thought there was something peculiar about Wiens when he checked in. Still in a wheelchair, he was lethargic, held his head up with his hand and had bloodstains on his shirt. Managers decided to save the surveillance video, a move that would prove valuable later.
An autopsy would conclude that he died of a heart attack. Unaware of his identity, Mexican authorities buried him in a common grave where the remains of unidentified people are sent, piled one on top of another.
Authorities in the U.S. and Mexico believe that Phelps used multiple names on dating apps and that while she primarily targeted men such as Erbach, the chiropractor and Wiens, she approached people of all ages, including women.
“It is a skill, on her part, to identify people that are lonely or susceptible to fraud, don’t practice good cyber hygiene and are willing to provide personal, identifiable information,” said Delzotto, the FBI special agent.
Thanks to a DNA match, authorities eventually determined that the corpse found along a road outside Guadalajara 2½ years earlier was Erbach’s.
FBI agents located the hotel where Wiens died and then traveled there to review the surveillance video saved by the management. They alerted Mexican police, who determined that the man identified by Phelps as José López and buried in a potter’s field, was, in fact, Wiens.
After recovering from the overdose, the chiropractor filed a report against Phelps with the Jalisco state police, alleging she stole about $25,000 in cash, jewelry and electronics, including his wedding ring and Apple watch.
The chiropractor’s maid testified that she saw Phelps rummaging through his belongings. Surveillance cameras showed she had donned a hoodie and a face mask. Phelps has insisted that video from multiple security cameras would exonerate her.
A Jalisco state judge issued an arrest warrant for Phelps for aggravated theft. The chiropractor then got a call from a voice he did not recognize. Speaking in a thick Mexican accent, the man’s voice said, “Drop the case or I will kill you.”
Terrified, the chiropractor stopped pushing his case.
The FBI had learned of the chiropractor while investigating the death of Erbach. He initially declined to cooperate, but agents assured him the threatening call had come from Phelps using a voice-altering app. The call echoed the threats made years earlier in Arkansas during the custody battle over Phelps’ children.
The chiropractor agreed to help authorities and to pursue his own civil suit against Phelps.
On Feb. 27, 2023, Mexican authorities arrested Phelps at a bank in Guadalajara, and she remains in custody.
In February 2025, the U.S. attorney’s office in Las Vegas charged Phelps with 21 criminal counts, including identity theft and fraud and two counts of kidnapping, one resulting in death.
Her murder trial in the death of Erbach began Tuesday. She is expected to be sent to the U.S. after the legal proceedings in Mexico conclude. The Mexican government has already approved her extradition.
The post She met older men on dating apps. Aurora Phelps drugged and sometimes killed them, FBI says appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
