Officer who questioned Justin Bieber’s stalker details castration plot

A New Mexico corrections officer is opening up about his encounter with the man who plotted to have Justin Bieber kidnapped, castrated, and murdered.

“One morning, he wanted to talk to me personally, in private. Right away, he started talking about his tattoo of Justin Bieber,” Edgar Pinon, a Sergeant at the New Mexico Department of Corrections, recalled on “Stalking the Stars,” the April 28 episode of Investigation Discovery docuseries Hollywood Demons.

Dana Martin, then an inmate at a prison in Las Cruces, N.M., was already serving two life sentences for the 2000 rape and murder of 15-year-old DeAndra Florucci.

“He went on and on about how he’s been trying to make contact with Justin,” Pinon continued. “That’s when he started telling us a story. He had arranged for two individuals to travel to the East Coast, and he gave them a hit list.”

Martin’s associates — Mark Staake, who Martin had previously met in prison, and Tanner Ruane, Staake’s nephew — were apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol on Nov. 19, 2012, when they attempted to cross back into Vermont after taking the wrong road and ending up in Canada.

“Their vehicle was searched, and they were able to find shears and neckties. Those were the tools necessary to commit the crimes,” Pinon said.

Having caught “Bieber fever,” Martin wrote letters to the “Baby” singer, then only 18, and had felt rejected when they weren’t answered, the prisoner explained in an interrogation.

“There’s these people I wanted to get killed,” Martin said in the interrogation. “What we wanted to do for possible notoriety, which was, you know, kidnapping him… I was going on the hope that, ‘Oh, they’re just going to go up there and kill a couple people in Vermont, so they can probably head out to wherever Bieber is.”

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The full extent of Martin, Staake, and Ruane’s plot was to kill a couple in Vermont, then travel to New York to kill Bieber and his bodyguard. In a phone call Ruane made to Martin the day after he was released from custody following the arrest at the border, he referred to the targets of their scheme as “dogs” and confirmed they would be castrated using hand-held hedge clippers.

Staake was convicted in 2015 on two counts of conspiracy to commit first-degree murder and sentenced to nine years, with another nine years to be served concurrently. Ruane was similarly convicted of conspiracy to commit murder in 2014. Martin was moved to the maximum security New Mexico State Penitentiary in 2013, bragging the year after, “I completely got away with putting a hit on Justin Bieber.”

“In my opinion, I don’t think Dana actually wanted to murder Justin Bieber,” Pinon shared. “Because if he does, he can’t get no more music from him, no more news of what’s going on with him. My impression is Dana wanted Justin Bieber to know who he was, he wanted him to say, ‘Hey, I am here, I am a huge fan.'”

In the interrogation, Martin explained, “I’m a nobody in prison. I want Justin Bieber to know who I am. It’s crazy, isn’t it?”

“Stalking the Stars,” the last episode of Investigation Discovery’s new series Hollywood Demons, premieres April 28 from 9-11 p.m. ET on ID and streaming on Max.