Jeffrey Epstein's Ranch That Was Never Searched Is Now Owned by a Man Who Funds Newborn Heart-Cell HarvestingAnd his son Russell Huffines is in the Trump administration.
By Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez
Last week, I published the first and second installments of a four-part series I’ve written in which I follow the money related to Jeffrey Epstein’s Zorro Ranch which, alone among the dead pedophile’s many properties was never investigated or searched, despite being the largest of them all, largely because the federal government under Donald J. Trump intervened to halt state investigations, and the state, under then-attorney general Hector Balderas, complied. Then everyone let the matter die with Epstein in 2019.
In Part One, I described how child rapist and trafficker Jeffrey Epstein used his “Zorro Trust” company to buy a 7500-acre tract of land here in New Mexico in 1993 from a politically connected New Mexico family drowning in debt; how he renamed it “Zorro Ranch” used it for years as a documented site of child rape, trafficking, and possible murder; and how two days after he began serving his 2008 prison sentence, an entity called the Zorro Trust won $85 million in the Oklahoma Powerball.
In Part Two, I traced the threads of that lottery win through a web of interconnected figures — a lottery official with a pattern of approving suspicious anonymous trust claims, a convenience store chain whose owner had ties to Ronald Perelman (who printed Oklahoma's lottery tickets and appears in Epstein's black book), and a Dallas bank board that connects directly to Donald Blaine and Mary Catherine Huffines, patriarch and matriarch of the wealthy Texas family that bought the ranch from Epstein’s estate in 2023. Huffines had tried to keep his identity secret vis-a-vis owning the ranch, but he was outed last month by Clara Bates, a reporter at the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper.
Today we go deeper into the Huffines family, to find out who they are, and to see if there are any more connections to be drawn between the previous owner of the ranch, and the current one.
Spoiler alert: There are.
Donald Blaine Huffines, born in 1958, is a Dallas real estate developer, investor, and multimillionaire who served in the Texas State Senate from 2015 to 2019, where he distinguished himself as one of the most conservative members of that body — no small feat in Texas.
Don (we’ll be talking about a lot of Huffines here, so I’ll use first-names) lost his re-election bid in 2018, then ran for governor in 2022, challenging incumbent Greg Abbott — from the right. Yep. Don thinks Abbott, who is about as far right as you can go without meeting Hitler, is too liberal.
Don is currently the Republican nominee for Texas Comptroller — the office that serves as the state's chief financial officer, responsible for collecting taxes, managing the state treasury, and overseeing how Texas spends its money. He has the endorsement of Donald Trump. He won the primary on March 3, 2026.
And back in 2023, he bought Zorro Ranch in secret, named it San Rafael Ranch, and began doing massive excavations and constructions there, some of it — possibly all of it — without proper permits. This, despite witness reports that at least two girls were raped to death there, and buried on the grounds. This, despite aerial shots showing that the ranch had its own industrial-grade landfill, which is not normal for a ranch. This, despite one retired police officer’s concern that there was what appeared to be a crematorium on site, and a barn with prison doors. And as for the new name? It’s impossible to know whether Don knew, at the time the new name was chosen, that Saint Raphael is the patron saint of youth, ordained marriages, and miraculous healings and resurrections of lost fortunes.
Take a look at Zorro Ranch before the Huffines bought it, and after. This is not simple landscaping. This is a massive excavation on a ranch where witnesses say the bodies of at least two girls who were raped to death are buried.
With the release of 3.5 million new pages of Epstein files by the U.S. Dept. of Justice in January 2026, New Mexico lawmakers grew concerned by these allegations, and by the lack of investigation at the ranch. The state has created and funded an Epstein Survivors Truth Commission to pick up the ball dropped by former New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas when he halted all investigation in 2019 because the feds told him to. Whether any evidence is left on site is yet to be discovered.
But if there isn’t anything left, that will be due in part to the secretive and illegal actions of its new owner, Don — and a whole hell of a lot of other people, too.
Though he’s best known as a guy who builds tract home subdivisions and buys ranches from the estates of pedophiles who knew his friends, Don Huffines also runs a venture capital family office called HEST Investments — which stands, formally, for Huffines Enterprises Science & Technology. A couple of weeks ago, when you googled the company name, their official website was the first thing you found. Now? It has been buried and can’t be found at all unless you specifically search for “official website,” and even then it’s not the homepage.
Somebody done scrubbed it for ‘em.
They also scrubbed the TEAM page. Well, deleted it. Before they did this, it showed that Don’s son Russell co-ran the company with him. You know, Russell. The Associate Director of Agency Outreach in the White House Office of Cabinet Affairs under U.S. President Donald J. Trump, a position he has held since June 2025, which gives the Huffines family a direct line into the executive branch of the United States government at the exact moment that government is overseeing — or choosing not to oversee — the investigation into what happened at the ranch his father bought from Epstein’s estate.
Let aaaaallll of that land.
HEST Investments, meanwhile, focuses on health technology, life sciences, biotech, and cybersecurity, with Don Huffines describing the firm’s philosophy as being about seeing “beyond the obvious” and investing in ventures with “the potential to make a transformative impact for humanity.” That language — transformative impact for humanity — carries a particular charge when you understand who else used almost identical language to describe his science investments, and what he was actually funding.
The Science Epstein Loved:
Epstein spent the last two decades of his life positioning himself as a science philanthropist. His foundation funneled money into Harvard’s Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, MIT’s Media Lab, and transhumanist organizations, presenting himself as a visionary patron of human advancement. What he was actually advancing, according to the documentary record, was something far darker: a sustained obsession with eugenics dressed up in the language of science.
Epstein told at least one fellow eugenicist that he hoped to freeze his brain and his penis at death, so his organs could be revived for future use in transhumanism. Multiple sources told the New York Times that he described plans to use his New Mexico ranch to impregnate dozens of women at a time, to seed the human race with his genetics. We already know from the DOJ files that at least one girl was imprisoned at Zorro Ranch, impregnated by Epstein multiple times, and forced to hand her newborn over to Ghislaine Maxwell at birth. The “baby ranch” was not merely an aspiration. There is evidence it was operational. Consider, for a moment, that Sabrina Bittencourt, a whistleblower in a similar baby farm in Brazil who named Epstein as running the same kind of operation in the United States, wound up “committing suicide” days after she said she’d hired bodyguards because of death threats.
Epstein’s foundation also paid the salary of the vice chairman of the World Transhumanist Association, a group whose stated goal is “to deeply influence a new generation of thinkers who dare to envision humanity’s next steps.” He funded George Church, the Harvard geneticist who developed an app to match people based on genetic fitness. He bankrolled the Edge Foundation, the intellectual salon that brought together Silicon Valley’s most powerful men for what were called Billionaires’ Dinners — from which women were systematically excluded, and at which Epstein’s teenage victims were kept out of the photographs.
The throughline of all of it was this: Epstein believed certain people — people like him — were biologically superior, and that science was the mechanism by which that superiority could be propagated and preserved.
Now look at what Don and Russell Huffines are funding.
Secretome Therapeutics, a Huffines-funded biotech company, is a clinical-stage biotechnology company developing therapies derived from neonatal cardiac progenitor cells — cells harvested from the hearts of newborns under thirty days old — for the treatment of cardiovascular disease. The company’s lead asset, STM-01, received FDA Fast Track designation in March 2025 for the treatment of heart failure with preserved ejection fraction.
HEST Investments led a $1.8 million special purpose vehicle investment in Secretome Therapeutics in September 2024. Don Huffines announced the investment personally, saying it “aligns perfectly with our vision of driving innovation and changing the perspective of how we advance human health.”
I want to be precise here, because precision matters: Secretome Therapeutics states explicitly that its cells are sourced from ethically consented neonatal cardiac tissue collected during medically necessary surgeries in full-term newborns treated for congenital heart defects, and that it does not use embryonic stem cells or tissue derived from elective terminations. I am not alleging that Secretome is doing anything illegal or unethical. I am reporting a fact: the man who bought Epstein’s ranch — the man whose son now works in Donald Trump’s White House — has invested in a company that harvests and develops therapies from the hearts of newborns. I’m noting, too, that there are only three scientists in the world who specialize in this research, and one of them, Eric Olsen, appears twice in the Epstein files.
And I am noting that Jeffrey Epstein’s documented scientific obsessions included the biological manipulation of human reproduction and development, the harvesting and preservation of biological material, and a sustained interest in what he called improving the human species. He funded scientists working at the intersection of genetics, longevity, and human enhancement. He dreamed, documented in writing, of a world shaped by his biology.
The question I cannot answer — but that investigators with subpoena power could — is whether Epstein’s interest in this specific field of science, and the Huffines family’s investment in a company working in it, are merely two unrelated facts that happen to sit in close proximity. Given everything else we’ve established in this series, I do not think that question is unreasonable to ask.
Nor do I think it is unreasonable to note that the company’s name, which describes the part of the neonatal cardiac cell to be used, is also a homophone for Secret Home, created by a family that bought Zorro Ranch and tried to use the law to avoid anyone knowing who they were, the same family that, as soon as news broke that they owned it, had HEST’s website scrubbed, deleted and hidden, too.
If they have nothing to hide, one wonders, why are they hiding it?
Secretome is not HEST’s only investment. HEST has also made a $1 million strategic investment in American Binary, a post-quantum encryption company, which the firm described as “a significant step towards fortifying digital security as civilization moves toward the quantum computing era.” HEST has additionally invested in Valerion, a battery technology company based at the University of Michigan.
The portfolio, taken together, reads like a particular kind of ambition: control over biological raw material, control over energy infrastructure, control over the encryption layer of the digital world. These are not random bets. They are bets on the chokepoints of the next century.
The Ground Is Being Changed:
While the Truth Commission was getting organized this past February, aerial photographs showed something disturbing at the former Zorro Ranch: the helipad and surrounding grounds had been extensively excavated by the Huffines, leaving a deep, open scar in the earth. Witnesses in the DOJ files alleged that two “foreign girls” were raped and murdered at Epstein’s direction and buried somewhere in the hills of the ranch.
State and county officials ordered the Huffines to halt construction after determining work had begun on a new front gate featuring concrete turrets without proper permits. The Huffines’ stated explanation was that they planned to develop the property into a Christian retreat. But there was no paper trail indicating any such thing.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez has since announced the state is reopening its investigation, and the Truth Commission — which holds subpoena power and includes a former prosecutor and a retired FBI agent among its four members — has held its first meeting.
A makeshift memorial placed at the ranch’s entrance by community members, bearing crosses and photographs of Epstein’s known victims, was removed this week by persons unknown. Under New Mexico state law, the destruction of a roadside memorial is a criminal offense. Whoever removed it may be on video.
The ground at what used to be Zorro Ranch is being disturbed. Some of that disturbance is institutional, legal, and overdue. Some of it, apparently, is being done by the new owners with a backhoe and no permits.
Who Are These People, Exactly?
Don Huffines presents himself with the polish of a man who has spent decades curating a brand. His campaign website describes him as a “fifth-generation Texan, husband, father of five, grandfather of twelve, courageous MAGA Republican, and self-made businessman,” guided by “faith, family, and freedom.” He talks about God. He talks about Texas. He posts everything — Mar-a-Lago dinners, ribbon cuttings, handshakes with senators, all of it documented in real time for the faithful to admire.
Let’s start with the “self-made” part.
Don Huffines’ grandfather founded Huffines Motor Company in 1924. His father, James Lecil “J.L.” Huffines Jr., built that automotive empire into a dynasty of North Texas car dealerships, ran two Dallas banks as president, served on the Texas A&M Board of Regents by gubernatorial appointment, endowed cancer research chairs at UT Southwestern Medical School — and, the detail conspicuously absent from his son’s campaign biography, was a minority partner of H.R. “Bum” Bright in the ownership of the Dallas Cowboys football team. Don Huffines graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with a BBA in Finance, co-founded Huffines Communities with his twin brother Phillip in 1985, and has spent his career building on the family name, the family money, and the family network that his father spent a lifetime constructing. He is as self-made as his bed. Which is to say: someone else made it, and he just gets to sleep in it.
Which makes the Moscow trip all the more interesting.
In August 2018, then Dallas state Senator Donald Huffines, along with his twin brother (yes, folks, there are TWO of them) and former Dallas County Republican Party Chair Phillip Huffines -- and, inexplicably, Don's wife Mary Catherine -- spent much of a Monday in Russia meeting with senior Russian officials. It wasn’t a publicized trip — both brothers’ social media accounts were completely silent about the excursion. The only reason anyone found out was because wire photos started coming across the AP feed, showing the Huffines twins seated across a conference table from Russian senators — images taken by Russian state media and distributed by the Russian government. Rand Paul, who had organized the trip, was also in the photos.
Naturally, most of the photos of this trip that existed last week online have been scrubbed. But not all of them.
Among the Russian officials at the table was Sergey Kislyak, the former Russian ambassador to the United States — a central figure in Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible ties between the Russian government and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.
The same day the news broke, Don Huffines’ Facebook page featured a video of him practicing to throw out the first pitch at a Rangers game. Not a word about Moscow.
When caught, his office reached for an explanation. His chief of staff told reporters that Huffines had gone to Russia because “Don Huffines regularly hears from Texans who are concerned about the security of our elections, and who are alarmed by Russia’s efforts to undermine our democratic institutions.” He had flown to Moscow, the story went, to look the Russians in the eye and tell them not to meddle in Texas elections.
Let that breathe for a moment. Don Huffines is a state senator from Dallas. He builds tract housing in the suburbs. He has no foreign policy portfolio, no intelligence briefing, no diplomatic standing. An SMU political science professor noted at the time that Huffines was “talking to the wrong people — Putin and his national security services are doing the messing. Russian legislators don’t have a lot of control over President Putin.” The U.S. Embassy in Moscow disavowed the trip entirely, describing it as a private group visit, not official diplomacy.
So a Dallas real estate developer and state senator, who usually posts his every public movement on his Instagram account, flies to Moscow in secret with his twin brother, sits down with Russian officials including the former ambassador implicated in the Mueller investigation, says nothing publicly until Russian state media publishes the photographs — and his explanation is that millions of Texans were worried about election integrity, and he personally went to fix it.
This is the same man who told the public, seven years later, when Clara Bates of the Santa Fe New Mexican found his wife’s name buried in a tax protest document and exposed the family’s secret purchase of Epstein’s ranch, that the whole thing was perfectly innocent — that they had simply, aw shucks, bought themselves a nice Christian retreat out in the New Mexico desert. Only problem is there is exactly zero paper trail to indicate the Huffines had any such plans, though they’re likely to create one now, after the fact.
Two cover stories. Two explanations that rely on the audience not asking obvious follow-up questions.
Don and Mary Catherine Huffines (maiden name Myers) have been married 37 years and have five children: Colin, Devin, Terence, Deirdre, and Russell. Mary Catherine is the quieter half of the public partnership — a Dallas philanthropist who appears in society pages and charity event roundups. She is also the woman whose name, on page 78 of an 87-page tax protest filing, unraveled the entire fiction of the anonymous ranch purchase. She is listed in court filings as the trustee of the LLC whose acquisition of what used to be Zorro Ranch was structured to keep the family’s identities completely secret. She is the person who signed.
Colin co-manages the family’s real estate ventures. An earlier version of New Mexico’s public business filings listed Colin Huffines as manager of San Rafael One LLC, the entity linked to the ranch — until earlier this year, when his name quietly disappeared from the filing. This is a family about whom the silences and erasures are often more revealing than what’s visible. An anonymous LLC, a vanishing name in a public record, a road renamed, a memorial removed by persons unknown, an invisible trip to Russia. The Huffines don’t erase things carelessly. They erase things deliberately, and they do it until someone catches them.
Devin is the one who followed the family template most faithfully. He played defensive back for the University of Texas Longhorns for four years, earning Academic All-Big 12 honors twice, then earned his BBA in Finance from UT Austin — the same degree his father holds, the same degree his brother Russell would later earn at the same school. After a stint as a junior broker at CBRE, he landed at Four Rivers Capital, a Dallas private equity and development firm, where he has been a senior associate since 2017. He married Katie Snyder, an Alabama sorority world alumna who worked as a publicist for the Panhellenic society before transitioning to social media management — a woman whose entire professional formation has been in the management of image and institutional reputation. Their wedding, documented on a videographer’s YouTube channel, featured a live reindeer brought in for the occasion. The reindeer looked like it would rather be anywhere else. Russell gave the toast. You can see the whole family in the footage — tanned, pressed, smiling in the way that people smile when the photographer is watching.
Deirdre, now Deirdre Hairston, is the daughter who became a minor far-right celebrity during the pandemic. She was presented at the 60th International Debutante Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City in 2014 — one of the most elite social rituals in American aristocratic life. In March 2021, she was escorted out of Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Dallas by police for refusing to wear a mask while kneeling in prayer with her baby, pregnant with her second child. The story went viral almost immediately, laundered through the right-wing media ecosystem as the spontaneous martyrdom of a random Dallas mom. She appeared on Steve Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic” podcast and on the video channel of a prominent traditionalist Catholic commentator to tell her story. What those audiences were not told was that her father had been one of the first elected officials in Texas to call for an end to pandemic restrictions, that he had spoken at protests outside the governor’s mansion demanding the state reopen, and that his office had commented approvingly on his daughter’s podcast interview on his own Facebook page. Too convenient. Too on the nose. Too connected to the levers of power to be accidental.
Terence is, from a storytelling perspective, the most interesting of the five — precisely because he appears to have made at least some effort to be something other than his father. He has a SoundCloud page where he posts his original compositions: house music, trancey, saxophone-threaded, the kind of sound that drifts toward sensitivity and interiority rather than dominance and spectacle. He seems to have been drawn toward libertarianism — not a raging rebellion, but perhaps the ideological pressure valve available to a freethinking temperament born into an authoritarian household.
That said, Terence has not exactly been roughing it. Getty Images archives show him attending the 62nd International Debutante Ball at The Pierre Hotel in New York City on December 29, 2016 — an event whose ticket prices run to $22,000 a plate, whose guest list includes daughters of presidents, ambassadors, billionaires, and European nobility. Also documented at the surrounding festivities: Don and Mary Catherine themselves, attending the bachelors brunch at P.J. Clarke’s, along with Russell. The whole family was there, dressed to the nines, embedded in exactly the kind of Manhattan elite social world that Don Huffines’ MAGA base in Texas — the ones who picture him as a golly-gee bootstrapper in a cowboy hat fighting the coastal elites — has been told to despise.
Russell, meanwhile, is not merely a young man who once worked at a family investment office and sold fireworks. He is, as of June 2025, a White House official — seated inside the executive branch, in an office whose function is to manage the relationship between the White House and the federal agencies. Including, potentially, the agencies that would be responsible for any meaningful federal investigation of what happened in the hills of a New Mexico ranch that his family purchased in secret and started excavating without permits.
I keep returning to the shape of this family. A patriarch who flies to Moscow in secret to meet with officials including the man at the center of the Mueller investigation, and whose cover story embarrasses the U.S. Embassy. A wife who is the legal trustee of the shell company that bought Epstein's ranch. A son who quietly vanishes from a public LLC filing the moment journalists start asking questions. A daughter deployed as a sympathetic media figure in a disinformation campaign whose beneficiary was her father. A son posting saxophone house music to SoundCloud while his family dances at The Pierre. A son in the White House. And a family venture capital firm that is actively investing in therapies harvested from the hearts of newborns under thirty days old — the same category of human biological material that Jeffrey Epstein, the previous owner of their ranch, spent years and millions of dollars dreaming about controlling.
In the final installment of this series, I’ll follow the money one last time — to its logical and terrifying conclusion: what the full picture of the network described across these four parts suggests about who is actually protecting it, and what it would take to make them stop.
Photo of the whole fecund Huffines klan - er, clan.
