A New Mexico judge who worked for more than a decade at the Los Alamos National Laboratory was apparently murdered by her husband, who then killed himself, the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office said Saturday.
“Eric Pinkerton is believed to have shot his wife and several animals in the house before shooting himself,” the sheriff’s office wrote on Twitter. “The decedents have been confirmed as: Diane Albert- 65 and Eric Pinkerton- 63.”
The sheriff tweeted Friday that it was investigating a homicide in the town of Los Ranchos near Albuquerque.
Albert, listed by the Los Ranchos Municipal Court as a judge at the time of her death, worked at Los Alamos from 1993 to 2004, according to her law office’s website. She worked as a program manager just before leaving Los Alamos and began her time at the lab as a postdoctoral research scientist, according to her law-office bio. Albert held a PhD in materials science and engineering from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
She left the lab in 2004 to pursue her legal career and earned a juris doctorate from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque in 2007.
The sheriff’s office tweeted Friday that it was investigating a homicide “near the 800 block of Ranchitos Road” in Los Ranchos. The town, officially Los Ranchos de Albuquerque village, is about 15 miles north of downtown Albuquerque and had a population of just under 6,000 people, according to the 2020 census.
