Ramirez and his wife, Dawn, were divorced in 1995 and two years later she began dating Nemecio Nandin, a fireman and part-time repairman of washing machines and dryers.
Tim Hoogstra, a paid police informant, would later testify that Bell said he had been offered $1,000 to kill Nandin.
Once at the Miles, Texas home of Bell, Nandin was led to a chicken coop, where he was handcuffed and shot once in the head with a shotgun.
On 19 October 2005, the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles denied a request to commute the sentence to life imprisonment.
Although new evidence placed Luis Ramirez at a gas station in a different city at the time of the murder the Supreme Court denied him stating (in short) he was convicted for remuneration not for pulling the trigger.