Who Killed These Girls?

by Beverly Lowry

  After lawyers on both sides promised to follow the judge’s instructions, the lead defense attorney stood. Perfectly tanned and immaculately dressed in his seasonal best—wheat-colored linen jacket, dark trousers, a crisp white shirt perfectly accessorized with a silk tie and cuff links made of gold coins—he epitomized the “white-shoe lawyer,” his silver hair shaped in a perfect razor cut and his black cowboy boots polished to a high sheen. You will rarely see him dressed less elegantly. Joe James “Jim” Sawyer was known for his flamboyance, literary references and courtroom maneuvers, as well as his movie-star smile and love of the camera. When I asked why he took on Yogurt Shop, he smiled broadly. “I have a big ego,” he said. “It was the biggest thing to hit Travis County and I wanted in.”

  It was Sawyer who’d requested the hearing. During the past few weeks, press reports had been constant. In addition to the reversals, it seemed, a new kind of DNA test result had damaged the state’s case. The defense had become aggressive.

  Sawyer addressed the bench. He was in court today, he assured the judge, only to discuss results and to ask that his client be released from jail pending a trial. “We can’t replace or give Robert Springsteen back the ten years he’s lost sitting in jail,” he pointed out, but there was a scientific incentive to give him his freedom now. Loath to wearing reading glasses in court, Sawyer nonetheless donned them now. The Y-STR DNA report, issued by an identity lab in Fairfax, Virginia, was complicated and he wanted to get it right. He read it word for word.

  When he was finished, the lead prosecutor said only that they were continuing to do their own testing and that those DNA results were not conclusive.

  Lynch looked up, making sure nobody had anything else to say, then promised to make his decision on Monday, banged his gavel and swept out. It was Thursday. Springsteen was escorted back to a holding cell in county, where he would remain for the next four days. The hearing had lasted maybe twelve minutes.

  I had not come to District Court 167 to find out whether or not Rob Springsteen would be granted bail reduction or even released, as Sawyer had requested. I’d already gone to the basement of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to read the original trial transcripts. I knew what the customers who’d been to the shop that night had reported having seen and heard. I’d read how the parents of the murdered girls described their daughters on the stand. And I’d seen photocopies of the gruesome crime-scene photos, including close-ups of the girls’ genitals. From autopsy shots, I knew what death looks like when incinerated corpses have been cleaned up and laid stiff and medically prepped on a table in the morgue. By the time I went to the hearing, I knew a lot. Bail reduction didn’t mean much by comparison.

  Nor did any other legal shenanigans. Writers don’t pick their subjects out of the clear blue. What mattered to me and drew me to this particular story was the uncertainty of the parents of the dead girls, the not-knowing they might well have to accept as their lifelong fate. This was something I knew about myself, having lived with it since 1984, when my son Peter was killed by a hit-and-run driver who was never identified.

  —

  Jury selection was scheduled to begin three weeks later in the retrial of Robert Springsteen’s onetime roommate and convicted collaborator, Michael James Scott. His case had, in fact, already moved into pretrial. Scott’s lead attorney, Carlos Garcia, had chosen not to participate in the bail-reduction hearing. He was too busy working on his client’s case, which he thought he had a good shot of winning this time around.

  In the meantime, the press, the families of the victims and the city of Austin itself geared up to suffer through a rehash of a case they’d thought was finished. Until then, we awaited Lynch’s decision, after which the Travis County DA, Rosemary Lehmberg, would announce hers. In the face of a failed, outlawed strategy and the new DNA test results, she’d been ordered to come up with a new case to present.

  Or else what? Lynch had not spelled that out.

  Only six months into the job, Lehmberg had become DA in a special election after her boss, Ronnie Earle, who’d held the job for thirty-two years, retired. When I asked a friend of hers if dismissal was likely, she shook her head. “Rose never gives up on anything,” she firmly declared. When I started to protest, my friend shushed me and said, “She’ll find a way.”

  But justice is local, and it’s culturally affected. In the ten years since the four boys were arrested, public attitudes had shifted. In 1999, we hadn’t yet become dependent on forensics and DNA to solve cold cases and correct old mistakes. The first episode of the CSI series hadn’t yet run. Colleges hadn’t added special degrees in crime-scene forensics. Bookstores didn’t display copies of Forensics for Dummies. Even into the new century, confessions were considered golden. Juries loved them and, as a result, so did DAs. We all did. We still do. “Just tell me what happened,” we say to those who betray or assault us. “Then tell me why.” So what if there wasn’t a shred of evidence linking the two convicted guys to the crime? They confessed.

  As for the suggestion that someone might be convinced to give what is called a “false confession,” few among us think we’d confess to something we didn’t do.

  By 2009, however, a number of confession-based convictions had been overturned when DNA testing offered scientific proof that police departments and DAs all over the country had bagged the wrong person. It turned out that getting a suspect to falsely confess wasn’t all that difficult, even without rubber hoses or a telephone book to the kidneys. These were big-time cases, widely covered. And when those wrongly convicted individuals were exonerated after spending a significant chunk of their lives in prison, the public mind turned a corner. Was it possible that you or I could fall for an interrogator’s tricks, as the five boys arrested in the Central Park Jogger Case had? The Norfolk Four?

  I left the courtroom without saying anything to anybody. In the hall outside, Jim Sawyer was giving a dramatic interview while reporters scribbled and photographers snapped his handsome picture.

  I was in. I knew that. This is right, I wrote in my notebook.

  —

  Sometimes a homicide rocks a city to its bones. People wake up and find themselves living in a place they no longer recognize. The extent of the shake-up depends on many things: the age, sex and skin color of the victims; the specific location of the murders (home being possibly the most horrific, as the sanctity of our safest refuge is destroyed, as when twelve-year-old Polly Klaas was taken from her home in Petaluma, California); whether the nature of the crime is familiar—man shoots wife, children and self, wife shoots husband and girlfriend, drug dealer shoots customer, customer shoots dealer—or so outside the norm that it makes residents wonder what kind of place they’re living in and even if they should move.

  When the Herb Clutter family was murdered in their wheat-field home in western Kansas, the local response was, These things don’t happen here. A “senseless” killing particularly disturbs a community that has defined itself as the ideal spot to raise a family. There are many examples of this: the murder of JonBenét Ramsey in Boulder; the trail of dismembered body parts scattered by Edmund Kemper around Santa Cruz; the sixteen-year spree of Gary Ridgway, dubbed the Green River Killer, in Seattle; Lizzie Borden in Fall River; the boys from Columbine High; the horrific murder, rape and burning of the family in wealthy Cheshire, Connecticut; the children in Newtown.

  Austin was never without its high-profile homicides, but most are easier to understand. In 1966, when Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the Texas Tower at the University of Texas and—having already murdered his wife and mother—killed fourteen people and wounded thirty-one others with his deer rifle, UT, the city and the nation were shocked, without question. Soon afterward, the top floor of the tower was closed, and today it can be visited only on strictly regulated tours that prohibit—among other things—bags, backpacks and “wristlets.” In a part of town with few tall buildings, the light on the tower remains a fixed point, both as a signal of victory by a Lon
ghorn sports team and a reminder of the day when Whitman opened fire. But he was a familiar kind of guy: ex–Eagle Scout, ex-Marine, owner of a rifle used by many hunters. He didn’t emerge from the shadows, but operated in broad daylight and was soon shot down himself when police stormed the tower. We knew Whitman. He was a Lone Star guy gone haywire. And we killed him on the spot.

  The murder of the four girls was different. The predators came, it seemed, from out of nowhere, as if from the winds of El Niño, or perhaps from the trashy vacant fields along the banks of nearby Shoal Creek or a transport truck passing through on Highway 1. And once they’d done their quick, ugly work, they vanished into a moonless fog, not through the parking lot of one of the many boozy music halls that line Sixth Street downtown, and not on the east side of town, where crack killings had reached a new high, but from a family-friendly frozen-yogurt shop on the west side of town. There wasn’t much money to steal and the killers left behind a good bit of what there was.

  Did this mean that Slackerville had grown up and become Houston? Were we a real city now? As Barbara Ayres-Wilson (then Barbara Suraci), both of whose daughters were killed that night, told People magazine in 1992, “What did we do wrong here? We moved to a nice house in a good neighborhood. We did all the middle-class American things that you do to protect your family and make it wholesome and right. If this can happen to us, it can happen to anyone.”

  In Crossed Over: A Murder, a Memoir, I wrote about Karla Faye Tucker, who had confessed to participating in a gruesome double murder in Houston. Over the course of our many conversations in the maximum-security unit of the Texas women’s prison system, Karla and I became friends. We talked about her life and the lives of her victims, and we talked about the violent death of my son. Our situations, of course, were very different. She knew what she’d done and why she’d been sent to death row. In the early years of her incarceration, she felt pretty sure she deserved execution. I, on the other hand, had come to understand that I would never know what happened to Peter that night, whether the driver realized what had happened and just didn’t stop or never even felt the impact. We talked about how hard it was to accept uncertainty and if it was possible to do what people almost always suggest, which is to “move on” from a terrible event. We agreed that what psychologists call “closure” was not a possibility for either of us. After the arrests of the four suspects in 1999, the father of the youngest murdered girl told the press his wife hated the word. “There’s no such thing as closure,” she had declared.

  This book is about memory and uncertainty, loss and grief. It is about how we know what we think we know and where the information comes from, and how we sometimes manage to dream up memories of an event that never took place and at other times conversely remember what we perhaps most wanted to forget, despite our best efforts. It is about an overworked, dedicated homicide cop who was later branded a failure when a different single-minded cop was given credit for cracking the case after using questionable interrogation techniques. It’s about persuasion, suggestion, science and law. The sadness that won’t end for the parents of dead children. The effect an event can have…on a family, an entire police department, a city and on hapless strangers who, walking down a certain street, might suddenly realize where they are and say, “Isn’t that where the yogurt shop was?”

  Dark things attract us. We criticize the media for its overwrought coverage of such events. Yet we watch, we read and reread, because we’re relieved it’s not us and to imagine what it would be like if it were us, because the unfolding narrative speaks to our deepest fears, to figure out why these things happen and what we should do next. Wondering why anybody would confess to something he or she didn’t do, we long to know who did the unspeakable thing if the one who claimed to have done it in fact hadn’t. And when, twenty-five years later, we still don’t know, we’re downright flummoxed by how badly things have gone. Could these four layabout teenagers have been guilty? Or did the cops figure out how to make two of them think they were? And what about those other guys who confessed and the ones in the hoodies who were there that night? Would we ever know anything?

  Uncertainty jangles the nerves, but sometimes it’s what we have to live with.

  And now everything was starting all over again.

  THE GIRLS

  December 6, 1991, fell on a Friday, for public school kids the end of the next-to-last week of the fall semester. The day had dawned gray and sour, with no sign of a breeze. By the time classes ended, nothing had changed. Early December had brought a damp chill, down into the thirties at night, but by Thursday the air had turned sulky, with an unnatural stillness that makes people testy as they wait for whatever’s about to happen next. Austin winters can be like that. Not cold, exactly, but rank and unsettling.

  Nineteen ninety-one was an El Niño year, the first since the winter of 1986–87. Born of unusually warm temperatures in the Pacific, these unruly, mad-dog weather systems sometimes roll in from the ocean east across California and into the Southwest, bringing nonstop downpours and lower temperatures. In October, The Washington Post predicted a “wimpy” El Niño this year, although in the end, of course, nobody really knew.

  On December 6, the moon was new and the night sky black, the darkness further compounded by fog that by nine o’clock had settled in, bringing with it a spitting drizzle. More than likely, the four girls paid little attention. Friday offered better things to think about than meteorology.

  As soon as the bodies had been identified and their names made public, the girls quickly merged, as if they were alike or even the same. They were good girls, white girls, our angels. “We know them,” one city official declared; “they are ours.” In newspaper, magazine and television coverage, in the billboard announcing a reward for information leading to the conviction of their killers, they became representatives of a highly desirable kind of American girlhood. Beneath their posed photographs, the billboard asked, WHO KILLED THESE GIRLS?

  It is important to know them separately and not as angels, symbols or the personification of innocence, but as four very young girls who at the time of their deaths were doing no harm to anyone. Nothing else matters, really.

  THE SISTERS: JENNIFER AND SARAH HARBISON

  By four-thirty that afternoon, when Barbara Suraci came home from work as a credit officer at Team Bank, her younger daughter was already there, sitting on the living room couch and peeling an orange. Fifteen-year-old Sarah Harbison was in a good mood. She had a new boyfriend, who after only three weeks of dating had given her his senior ring. And since she didn’t have basketball or volleyball practice the next day, she told her mother she was going out.

  Barbara’s a feisty, passionate woman, warm, forthright and pure Texas. “Oh, yeah?” she said. She and her girls were close, almost like sisters. She’d grown up in New Boston, a small town in East Texas near the Arkansas line. Having married her high school sweetheart, she’d been young when she had her babies; then, when her husband decided to enroll in graduate divinity courses at the university, they all moved to Austin, where Barbara worked to support the family until he got his degree and they could go back home. But city life had opened her mind to new possibilities, and when the girls were five and two and a half, she left both Mike Harbison and New Boston and set off in her little hatchback, figuring she and her daughters could lead more interesting, informed lives in Austin. And have more fun.

  Sarah’s big sister, Jennifer, had driven her home in her 1991 dark blue Chevy S-10, then turned around and gone on. Before showing up for work, she wanted to spend some time with her boyfriend, who, because of his grandfather’s funeral, hadn’t been at school that day. The Harbison sisters lived with their mother and stepfather in a big brick house in a secluded suburban development with curvy streets in northwest Austin. Jennifer’s boyfriend, Sammy Buchanan, lived in a nearby apartment complex with his mother. She also had to go by a friend’s house to retrieve her wallet and then back to school to pick up a form she needed to fill
out to run for queen of the local chapter of the Future Farmers of America (FFA). She’d return home sometime around seven to put on her work clothes.

  Soon after arriving in Austin with her two little girls, Barbara had met Frank Suraci, a technician at Dell Computers, whom she married in 1980. For Barbara, “Skip” was exotic: easterner, Italian, Catholic, sexy. A woman of impromptu choices, she dove full force into the relationship. To enable them to exchange marriage vows in church, she and her daughters had taken lessons at St. Louis King of France on Burnet Road. She says her girls liked going to Catholic middle school and attending Mass, but they were eager to transfer to a public high school when the time came.

  Only eighty-six pounds and five feet tall, a relay runner on the Sidney Lanier High School varsity track team, Jennifer was a mosquito-size girl who had little time for meals and no patience for standing still or waiting around. Seniors, she and Sammy were already wearing their 1992 graduation rings—gold, with a green stone—and hoping he’d win a baseball scholarship to a college Jennifer could also attend, so that after graduating they could get married and move forward into a life together.

  The S-10’s a small, peppy pickup, especially prized among the country-western set. Mike Harbison had bought the truck new, and Jennifer took a job at the I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! (ICBY) shop in part to help him make payments on the loan. Before that, she’d worked at a nearby Albertson’s, sacking groceries and, despite her size, hauling them through the parking lot into customers’ cars. She’d hired on at ICBY in July, after her friend Eliza Thomas, who’d been working there for six months, told her what a great job it was. Brice Foods, which owned the franchise, was a Texas operation, founded in 1977 by a brother and sister from Dallas, Bill and Julie Brice, while they were enrolled at Southern Methodist University, using their tuition money as collateral for a loan to buy and revamp two existing yogurt shops. They came up with a logo and a name, emphasized the product’s nonfat status and forgot about college.