Two women who spent years fighting for justice for a double homicide tied to a sex trafficking ring of underage girls killed themselves within five months of each other.
One of the mothers was a judge who quit her job over a year ago to investigate the alleged cover-up by the Las Vegas Metro Police Department to avoid an ethics probe.
Judge Melanie Andress-Tobiasson, 55, committed suicide inside her Las Vegas mansion on January 20. According to the coroner’s office, the former judge died from a gunshot wound.
Connie Land, 53, shot herself on August 10, 2022, at her home in Las Vegas after fighting for more than six years to get justice for her daughter.
In October 2016, Land’s daughter, 21-year-old Sydney Land, was killed alongside her boyfriend Nehemiah “Neo” Kauffman, 19, a reported pimp. To date, the two homicides remain unsolved.
According to court documents, Judge Andress-Tobiasson started tipping off law enforcement to an underage sex trafficking ring about a year before the murders to protect her teenage daughter and other girls.
According to judicial officials, the judge began meddling in the investigations of the Land and Kauffman murders, which they considered to be overstepping her boundaries.
Judge Andress-Tobiasson believed that a man who had tried to get her daughter into prostitution, known as Shane Valentine, was the same person that killed Land and Kauffman.
Police investigated Valentine twice for the double murders, but he was never charged.
Andress-Tobiasson and Connie Land became friends after both faced frustrations from the police in solving the murders.
Before her death, the judge said she had once gone to Valentine’s house and kicked the door in, and testified in 2019 during a judicial discipline hearing that she had threatened Valentine.
Both women were in the middle of divorces when they died.
A friend of the judge, Dana Gentry, said that Andress-Tobiasson had told her several times that if she ever died, she should remember that she wasn’t suicidal.
Andress-Tobiasson tried to warn the police about a local clothing store that was a front for sex trafficking and an underage nightclub in 2015. She died while still trying to fight against alleged sex traffickers.
