Who Killed These Girls?

by Beverly Lowry

  The shop was pleasant and nicely furnished, the customers friendly. No cooking, no waitressing. And although Brice had a lot of rules, for the duration of a shift you were pretty much on your own. The Anderson Lane ICBY shop was a neighborhood gathering place, where families and young couples went after shopping or a movie, and sometimes Governor Ann Richards stopped in. Both girls worked mostly weekend nights, although Eliza did take an occasional weeknight shift.

  As always, Jennifer operated on a tight schedule. To keep up, she wore a Timex wristwatch with a big face and a sturdy black band. She will die wearing the watch; it will stop at 11:48, marking the time of the fire’s most intense burst of heat.

  Curled on her side, she’ll lie close to the melted steel shelves against the south wall, wrists pressed against her spine—one in the thoracic area, the other nearer her waistline—exploded cans of toppings, paint and cleaning supplies on the floor around her, her face obliterated, a steel girder between her legs. She will be burned worse than the other three girls, the curled brown skin of her top leg peeled back like a stocking. When store manager Therese “Reese” Price comes, she won’t be able to identify the two girls who worked for her. “They had no faces,” she will testify.

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  Sarah also attended Lanier, where, now a sophomore, she played basketball and volleyball and was a member of the FFA and the student council. For an FFA project, she and Jennifer were raising lambs to show at the annual Austin Livestock Show and Rodeo the next spring. That morning after breakfast, the sisters had gone to the ag barn—some three miles away—to feed the lambs and muck out their stall. The barn wasn’t much more than a shed in the middle of a fenced field donated by its owner, but they went there twice every day. In the morning, they’d return home to shower and change before Jennifer then drove them to school. That was part of the arrangement she’d made with her father, to give her sister—who wasn’t old enough to drive—rides wherever she needed to go. After school that day, Jennifer had also driven Sarah’s new boyfriend home, after which the two girls made their second stop at the ag barn.

  Later that night, when ordered to strip, Sarah will slide Mike McCathern’s ring from her finger and place it between items of her own clothing, along with her wallet and her Mickey Mouse watch. She would die, however, wearing her own ring and the gold cross around her neck, both of which melted. From the witness stand, McCathern will identify his ring, gold, with a green stone, with a tractor on one side and his initials on the other.

  In death, Sarah will lie less than three feet from her sister, on her back, still gagged, wrists bound behind her, blackened legs spread and an ice scoop on the concrete floor between her thighs, its handle pointed toward her pubic bone.

  At five one and 125 pounds, Sarah was a little heavy, especially compared to her sister. “Why,” she often asked Barbara, “do I have to be the big one?” But like her mother, Sarah loved food. “She was always hungry,” Barbara says. “And she would eat anything.” As for Jennifer, she took after Barbara’s mother, who never hit 100 pounds in her life.

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  When festivalgoers come to Austin, they experience only the smallest part of the city and never quite understand that we are a city perched on an edge, straddling a divide. Two highways run crookedly north and south through town: Interstate 35, which extends from Laredo, Texas, to Duluth, Minnesota, and west of the interstate, State Highway 1, called MoPac for the railroad it parallels, the Missouri Pacific. MoPac runs along the Balcones Escarpment, which separates the coastal plains from the Edwards Plateau. East of the highway, the land goes flat pretty quickly and rolls on from there to Houston, where the topsoil runs deep and dark and ancient live oaks guard the sidewalks, and then into bays and bayous and, eventually, the Gulf of Mexico. Due west of Highway 1, the countryside changes astonishingly fast, the land suddenly cratered with fault lines and rocky jags, the soil thin and sandy, the trees small, with scrubby, short limbs gnarled like arthritic fingers. Out there, you might well think you’re in the West.

  But you’re not. In the late nineteenth century, when geologists tried to distinguish the generally moist East from the arid West, they settled on the 100th meridian, which stretches through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and then to Texas, where it falls past Abilene, San Angelo and Laredo to Mexico. The longitude was chosen because the country east of it generally received upwards of twenty inches of rainfall annually, while everything to the west got much less. Crops planted in the former needed little or no irrigation, but watering was essential in the latter. Austin’s some two hundred miles east of the line.

  Lanier High School and the ICBY shop were both situated east of MoPac, between rocky Shoal Creek—which runs south through downtown and sometimes overruns its banks—and Burnet Road, a north-south farm-to-market road that connects Travis and Williamson counties. In 1990, Skip and Barbara and her daughters had moved from a small house in a dicey neighborhood into a roomy, barnlike structure west of MoPac, on a street called Tamarack Trail, seven miles from the school.

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  By seven-thirty that evening, in addition to running errands and giving rides, Jennifer would have made two round-trips up and down either MoPac or a through street. The S-10 had a standard transmission. With traffic, she’d have been shifting down, working the clutch, waiting, shifting up, making lists, figuring out times and schedules, checking her Timex. A tiny, light-haired, doll-like girl. Organized. Always thinking ahead. Keeping secrets. Once her beloved S-10 has been thoroughly checked by the police, Mike Harbison will come get it and park it in his yard in New Boston.

  ELIZA THOMAS

  For her FFA project, dark-haired Eliza Thomas was raising another pig. She’d done well at last year’s show, when her pig won a ribbon and was auctioned off for a good price. She was hoping to win again, but Stony was ailing. The vet had prescribed shots twice a day. On the morning of December 6, Eliza asked her mother to go with her to the ag barn and help her give 254-pound Stony an injection.

  Maria Bancheri Thomas wasn’t particularly drawn to animal husbandry, but because she especially doted on her elder daughter, she agreed to try. Eliza drove her bright green 1971 Karmann Ghia to Lanier and parked it there. Maria followed in her car and the two drove together to the barn.

  A beautiful girl with deep brown eyes and a wide, lush mouth, Eliza had taken the $4.35-an-hour job at the ICBY shop in January, to supplement another job—escorting a nine-year-old boy to gym lessons twice a week. A lot of what she made went to maintain the VW, which was extremely sporty back then. That car, Maria would tell People magazine, was Eliza’s pride and joy. “Her birthstone was an emerald so she just knew that car was meant for her.” Another girl who worked at the yogurt shop told a police officer that Eliza was always trying to make more money because her mom, whose current job was as an artist’s assistant, didn’t bring in all that much and she often switched interests and careers.

  Bereaved parents rarely talk about what their dead children might have grown up to be, but Maria Thomas went all out. Eliza, she declared, was special. She read constantly and had a gift for language; she could have become a writer, maybe a poet. But Eliza’s father, James, took his daughter at her word when she said she wanted to go to Texas A&M and become a vet, that she “had always been nuts about animals.” For a couple of years she’d kept a bowl of crawfish, then white rats. James Thomas thought FFA was the best thing that ever happened to Eliza. Mechanically inclined, she could also weld and keep up with repairs on the Karmann Ghia. For Christmas this year, she’d asked for car parts.

  At the ag barn, Maria wasn’t much help. “I’m not too good with pigs,” she said on the stand. In the end, Eliza found a fellow FFA member to help with the injection while her mother—anxious to contribute—mucked out the pen.

  Divorced since 1981, when Eliza was seven, James and Maria Thomas had shared custody until she turned fourteen, when they let her decide for herself which parent she wished to live with. During the spring an
d early summer of 1991, she’d lived with her father and his second wife, but in July she’d moved in with her mother. That week in early December, Eliza’s younger sister, Sonora, thirteen, was staying with their father in his home on Skylark Drive, only blocks from the yogurt shop. Sonora described her sister as popular, friendly and chatty, which made ICBY a perfect place for her to work. Eliza often called from there and asked her to ride her bike over, to bring something she’d forgotten or just to visit.

  Neither Barbara Suraci nor Maria Thomas had raised their daughters to be country-western girls. Barbara had, after all, escaped small-town rural life. As for Maria—born in Italy, naturalized at an early age—she assumed her daughter’s Aggie phase was just a teenager’s infatuation and soon would fade.

  Once she dropped Eliza off at Lanier at around 8:45, Maria went home to prepare for her workday, which began at 11:00 a.m.

  After being forced to strip, Eliza will place her run-over white Reeboks alongside Jennifer’s black pair in a neat pile against the wall next to the steel back doors. She’ll be found lying spread-eagle on top of Sarah, placed there by the killers, the skin of her athletic young legs split apart by the radiant heat of the sweeping flames. Bound, gagged and, like Jennifer, burned bald and faceless. In years to come, Maria Thomas will refer to December 6, 1991, as the night “they burned up my daughter.”

  AMY AYERS

  When Sarah said she was going out, Barbara Suraci knew what she meant. She wanted to go to Northcross Mall, not especially to buy anything—according to the incident report, Sarah’s wallet contained the same five-dollar bill she’d left home with—but just to go out. In the early nineties, mall crawling had become a fact of life for suburban kids all over the country, a new version of hanging out on Main Street or driving up and down it in their cars. Austin was no different. Weekend nights, kids from all over the city either drove to or were dropped off at Northcross to window-shop, eat pizza, smoke cigarettes, drink sodas, maybe go to a movie or even ice-skate on the only rink within two hundred miles.

  Located at the intersection of Burnet Road and West Anderson Lane—at that time the city’s northernmost major intersection—the mall had opened with huge fanfare in 1975, when developers were trying to improve Austin’s reputation as a stoners’ paradise. Even former first lady Lady Bird Johnson was there, showing her gratitude to the Northcross founders for the donation they’d made to the ten-mile hike-and-bike trail that encircled Town Lake. Diana Hobby, the wife of Texas’s lieutenant governor, had cut the ribbon to allow the first customers to enter. Touted as one of Austin’s biggest retail attractions ever, the mall had a high-fashion Frost Bros. store, a six-screen movie theater, the ice-skating rink, wheelchair accessibility and artwork throughout the concourse. It offered, as all the ads promised, a new world of shopping.

  But Austin wasn’t Dallas, and by 1989 Frost Bros. had been liquidated. When other upscale stores closed, Northcross became a major teenage scene. For a while, LSD was the drug of choice among mall moles, especially those who came to the midnight movies on Friday and Saturday nights: the animated Heavy Metal, Pink Floyd’s The Wall and, beginning in 1983, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. The Goth element—pierced and tattooed kids whom local cops tagged “PIBs,” for people in black—showed up wearing studded dog collars, their lips inked black and their hair cut in Mohawks dyed fluorescent pink or blue, in time to see the movie they called the Rocky Show and watch the shadow cast of costumed and made-up locals act out the story as it progressed on-screen.

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  Sarah had no interest in going to the mall alone, so she asked her mother’s permission to invite thirteen-year-old Amy Ayers to go along and afterward have a sleepover. Because Amy was younger and attended Burnet Middle School, these two best friends of the closest sort hardly ever got to see each other. Barbara agreed and suggested that if Sarah went with her sister when she drove to work, they could pick Amy up en route; then Jennifer could drop them off at the mall and go get them when they were ready to leave. They could also help Jennifer and Eliza close up: with all four of them pitching in, they’d be out of there in no time.

  Sarah called Amy, whose parents were going Christmas shopping. Pamela Ayers had seen a watch she wanted to buy for her son, Sean, at Sheplers, a western store only ten or fifteen minutes away. She and her husband, Bob, were also planning to buy western clothes for Amy.

  The Ayerses are small people, quiet, reserved, religious. On the witness stand, Amy’s father will describe his daughter as a private girl who kept to herself. Having spent a good part of her childhood on a ranch, Amy had been riding horses since she was three. She could, Bob Ayers testified, ride all day without getting tired or bored. She often wore a cowboy hat to school, and sometimes she leashed up one of the two pigs she and Sean were raising and took it for a walk. She liked to do needlepoint. Like Eliza and a lot of other adolescent girls, she wanted to grow up to be a veterinarian. Though still an eighth grader, she’d been given permission to become an active junior member of the Lanier FFA. When asked if his daughter was “something of a cowgirl,” Bob Ayers said no. She was all cowgirl.

  Knowing that the Harbison girls took special precautions to look after their young daughter—they’d often promise that nothing would happen to Amy when she was with them—the Ayerses said yes to the sleepover and, presumably, to Northcross, which was a first. “That’s the thing,” Barbara Ayres-Wilson told me. “That was the first time either one of those girls had been to the mall on their own.”

  When Jones and the other investigators walk through the back doors, they might not immediately realize that the pale, shimmering mass beyond the worst of the destruction and away from the three hideously burned bodies is actually another body, another girl. There will be much speculation about Amy’s position and why she wasn’t lined up with her friends near the seat of the fire; as a result, she was burned less severely, her skin blistered and raw but not charred. In police photos taken from the back door, she looks almost like the distant ghost of a naked dead girl.

  ON THE STREET ALL THE TIME

  By the time Jennifer arrived home, the sky was dark. Greeting her mother, she looked quickly away and, after agreeing to drive Sarah and Amy to Northcross, rushed upstairs to change. Noting her evasiveness, Barbara figured she was keeping a secret that more than likely had to do with Sammy. Probably, she assumed, they were having sex, a suspicion confirmed when vaginal DNA swabs were taken and Sammy was questioned and then summoned to testify.

  Upstairs, Jennifer changed into work clothes. Both her bedroom and Sarah’s were decorated with FFA and sports memorabilia, stuffed animals, school photographs and country music CDs. On her wall Jennifer had hung a collage she’d made of pictures of barrel-racing girls on horseback that was captioned The Boots, the Jeans, the Dream.

  ICBY regulations required employees to wear Brice’s official open-necked knit polo shirt—white, with pink-and-green trim and the company’s logo—tucked into dark jeans, and white or black athletic shoes. Once she’d changed, she tied her black high-top Reeboks, put on a jacket, grabbed her purse and went downstairs.

  —

  A young woman I met, Kate Wallace McClung, was fourteen when the girls were killed. She and her parents and her younger sister lived on Janey Drive in the Allandale neighborhood, some twenty blocks from Northcross Mall. A bright, headstrong girl, Kate had cut a secret flap in her bedroom window screen so that at eleven on Friday and Saturday nights she could scramble out to the mall and, as a member of the Rocky Show shadow cast, dress up like Magenta and act out her part.

  “Kids were on the street all the time,” she said. “Nobody thought anything about it.” She was never afraid, even though some of the streets were heavily shadowed.

  In the coming years, new growth would push the desirable residential and commercial properties farther north and west, in the process stealing away not only many businesses but also much of the resale value. In a rapidly growing city where real estate inventory is low,
prices in this area temporarily stalled. Out to the north and west, the Domain shopping center—with Neiman Marcus, Tiffany, Ralph Lauren and Louis Vuitton—has erased any chance of a Northcross revival. Even though each turnover or reinvention is cheerily announced in the Austin American-Statesman and the Austin Business Journal as a “makeover,” Northcross is all but dead now. No anchor store, no movie theater, only a mattress shop, a guitar shop, a business center for annual meetings, a slew of beauty salons, a ballroom-dance studio and the ice rink. Everything else is gone. The once-grand venue has become a beige creep show, so empty that when you walk the halls, your footsteps echo. Residents who tried to forestall the construction of a Walmart next door lost that battle, and the giant discount store is thriving.

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  At six-thirty, Eliza had arrived home and was getting ready for the short drive to the yogurt shop when her mother phoned to ask if Eliza wanted her to bring her a sandwich. Eliza was in an especially good mood because both she and Jennifer had been nominated for FFA queen, but she wasn’t hungry. After their brief conversation, she donned her ICBY outfit, pulled her thick dark hair into a scrunchie and left home in time to make her seven o’clock shift. She’d had a difficult time the previous night, when she’d subbed for another girl and her former boyfriend, Roger Kerduka, had convinced a pal to call the shop and ask about all the flavors of yogurt they had. Eliza could hear Roger in the background, laughing and making remarks. Something about the prank had really upset her, leading cops to consider Kerduka a possible suspect, but, as John Jones says, “Back then we considered everybody a suspect.”