Who Killed These Girls?

by Beverly Lowry

  Around this same time, Jorge Barney was closing the Party House for the night. He’d owned the store—previously called the Party Pig—for only three months and was working late in anticipation of the Christmas season. He already had a Santa Claus on his roof, complete with sleigh and reindeer. He then walked three stores down to Mr. Gatti’s for some takeout. Barney’s office was in the back of the store, near the wall he shared with the yogurt shop’s storage room, and that’s where he would work on his books while watching a little TV and eating his pizza.

  —

  How do we know all of this, and why does it matter what time anybody did anything or that Eliza’s ex-boyfriend was mad at her? We know because we are still trying to figure out what happened and who the killers were—how they entered the shop, where the exit point was—and because the state, in order to negate reasonable doubt, had to re-create, from police reports, a detailed time line of the night on which the crime occurred. Everything matters, especially in a capital case. The fact that Jorge Barney ate supper at his desk while working on Christmas plans and watching a Cheers rerun mattered. He doesn’t remember hearing pistol shots but, on the other hand, was the first person to smell smoke and take note of the flames from the adjacent store. The layout of the yogurt shop’s back room and the position of the bodies relative to walls, shelves, sink, doors and one another will be of prime importance. “Evidence is everything,” Jones will remind his people, his job being to find, record, collect and preserve.

  —

  Eliza took the office keys from the cash register’s ledge and walked to the end of the counter and through an open door on her left into the storage area. Past the two bathrooms, mop sink and walk-in cooler, she swung to the right and unlocked the ICBY office door. Inside, she laid her jacket, car keys, purse and maroon-and-white Texas Aggie backpack on a filing cabinet, then locked the door behind her and retraced her steps. Following Brice rules, she put the keys back on the cash register, where they’ll be found hours from now, long after the flames have been doused and the four bodies discovered.

  Once the girl finishing her shift had left, Eliza would run the store alone until Jennifer arrived at eight; then they’d share responsibility. Ten minutes before the eleven o’clock closing time, they would lock the front door from the inside, turn the OPEN sign to CLOSED and leave the key in the lock, even if last-minute customers were still in the shop. They would deposit the night’s proceeds in a floor safe in the office and clean up according to Brice’s precise schedule. When they were finished, they’d remove the key and lock the door again from the outside, then put the key in an envelope and slide it under the door, where the manager would retrieve it in the morning. Because Eliza arrived first, she would run the cash register while Jennifer took orders. The tape in the machine—an old-fashioned paper roll—would record every transaction Eliza—cashier 13—rang up, including the last one of the night, a “No Sale” at 11:03 p.m., some thirteen minutes after the front door was locked and three minutes after the shop was officially closed.

  —

  In 2010, I talked to Peggy Sanders, the general manager of a locally owned coffee and tea store not far from Hillside Center, who spoke of the risks of working in retail, especially in small shops without a security guard. “You never know who’s coming in that door,” she said. In her view, those little girls wouldn’t necessarily have realized if somebody might be suspicious, or if it was okay to let somebody use the bathroom, or when, maybe, they should call the police.

  A late-night ICBY regular will echo her thoughts. Having noticed the lack of adult supervision, he’d often wondered if the girls who worked there were too trusting and naïve to recognize a potentially dangerous situation and if security shouldn’t have been a pressing concern.

  All the West Anderson ICBY girls were close to the same age, seventeen. For Brice, this was normal. When Reese Price began working there seven years earlier, that’s how old she was. Afterward, people did raise the issue of workplace safety, but back then Austinites didn’t worry that much about crime and, besides, this was a safe part of town. One Hillside business didn’t even bother to switch out a defective lock. Anyway, who was going to make trouble in a frozen-yogurt shop?

  In a city that prides itself on its liberal, classless attitudes, the murders brought a few surprising opinions to the surface. “We never thought our daughters would have to have a job,” one mother told me. “I felt bad for those girls that they did.”

  “What were they thinking,” another woman wondered, “letting those little girls work by themselves after nine, when the other stores were closed? I would never have allowed it.”

  Actually, Barbara Suraci had encouraged Jennifer not to take a job during her senior year, to, instead, “do wild and crazy things and have fun.” But she wasn’t surprised when her daughter insisted. “It’s what we do in our family. We work. We build things. We have jobs.”

  —

  By seven-thirty, Sarah had donned a black denim jacket with a pseudo-Aztec lightning bolt across the front. As she and Jennifer headed to the S-10, their mother shouted out her usual “Be safe!” and Jennifer backed down the driveway and drove toward Amy’s house on Ohlen Road in a neighborhood of smallish brick bungalows on rather large flat lots, only five blocks from Burnet Middle School and seven from West Anderson Lane.

  At the front door, Bob and Pamela Ayers had kissed their daughter good night and told her they loved her; outside, they heard the lock turn behind them. Once her parents had left to go shopping, Amy packed her pajamas and other necessities in her Jiminy Cricket tote bag.

  When the S-10 pulled up, she emerged wearing her brother’s leather bomber jacket, her turquoise Wranglers and black lace-up boots; her watch, her shrimp earrings, the three-string friendship bracelets she never took off and, around her waist, a wide leather belt threaded with multicolor lacing and fastened with a large heart-shaped buckle she’d borrowed from her mother. The buckle will be among the items of clothing found on the yogurt shop’s floor, but neither the belt nor the bomber jacket will ever be recovered.

  Minutes later, Jennifer dropped the two girls off at the mall and, after settling on a time and place to pick them up, drove past Hooters, Walgreens and a number of strip shopping centers to the Hillside lot, where she parked next to Eliza’s Karmann Ghia and went inside, leaving Amy’s tote bag on the seat. Four hours from now, police will begin to figure out who the murdered girls are by examining registration papers in Jennifer’s truck and Eliza’s VW.

  A woman who worked at Suzanne’s, an adjacent dress shop, described Jennifer and Eliza as “squeaky-clean.” Another Hillside shop owner called them “innocent little girls.” The day after the murders, John Jones sent a cop he considered the most cynical guy in Homicide to examine the girls’ bedrooms to see if he could find something indicating drugs, secrets, a bad-guy boyfriend, uncle or stepfather; anything at all. He came back shaking his head. Those girls, he reported, were pure. Both of them got good grades, had dreams of college and were true to the popular image of middle-class Texas girls who loved animals, family, George Strait, Garth Brooks and western gear. Whether or not they became farmers, ranchers or even veterinarians, thinking they might gave them energy and structured their lives. They wore their FFA jackets proudly, raised their animals devotedly, listened to country music, wore tight jeans with belts, rooted for the Aggies, liked their snap-button shirts tight and their jeans long enough to reach past the arch of their boots.

  Walking my dog along a leash-free trail on Austin’s Redbud Isle, I once ran into a man named Doug Tash, whose mother still ran a pet-grooming shop two doors down from where ICBY used to be.

  Oh, yeah, he told me, his family was in business when the murders occurred. Their shop had filled with smoke from the fire. A window got broken and some cats they were boarding escaped. They managed to catch them, but it wasn’t easy.

  As for the girls, he said, “They were rednecks, you know. Their friends put FFA jackets on the
caskets. I was there. I saw it.”

  Tash went to a different high school, McCallum, where a lot of kids were more into acid than pigs. When subpoenaed as a potential witness, he asked the judge to release him. When Lynch asked why, Doug said, “I’d like not to be a part of this.”

  “Kickers,” another McCallum student called the girls. “You don’t want to fool around with shitkickers.”

  —

  At Northcross, APD officer Malcolm Wilson moonlighted weekend nights as a uniformed private security guard. From six until closing at nine, he and his partner walked a regular beat: around the concourse, outside to the parking lot, back inside. Shown photographs of Sarah and Amy, Wilson (who would soon play a significant role in the ICBY investigation) couldn’t remember having seen them, probably because the mall had been packed with kids all night long. After the murders, a boy who knew Sarah from Catholic school would call the special APD tips line to report having seen her with Amy near the Hallmark shop. He didn’t know Amy, but Sarah introduced them, then laughed about not having any money for Christmas presents. When the boy’s mother showed up, everybody wandered away and he didn’t see the girls again. He remembered the leather bomber jacket but thought Sarah was wearing it, not Amy. And maybe he had it right. The girls might well have switched.

  MISSING BOYS

  That same morning, at 8:44, about when the girls were entering their classrooms, Austin Teleserve received a missing-person report. Identifying himself as Robert Springsteen, Sr., the caller said he hadn’t seen or heard from his son since ten o’clock on Wednesday night, December 4. The boy hadn’t attended school on Thursday and wasn’t there today, either.

  Teleserve had been set up to field calls about minor incidents that didn’t require sending out an officer: old burglaries, lost pets, missing adults. Sidelined from street duty by an injury, ten-year APD veteran Mary Ann Hueske took the call.

  Springsteen gave his address as 3839 Dry Creek Drive, Apartment 129, and his date of birth, January 18, 1945. His son’s name, he said, was Robert Burns Springsteen, Jr., known as Rob, whose date of birth was November 26, 1974, his address the same as his father’s but one apartment over. He described Rob as six feet tall, slim, 150 pounds, light complexion, hazel eyes, brown hair styled in a buzz cut with a tail—a mullet. He then noted that Rob’s roommate, Michael James Scott, was also missing. The two had been sharing the apartment for three, maybe four weeks. The last time he’d seen Mike was also on Wednesday at ten. He happened to know that Mike’s date of birth was February 6, 1974.

  After asking a few more questions, Hueske asked Mr. Springsteen to please call back if his son returned.

  He said he would. The officer filed the report.

  And that was it. There was no follow-up call on either side. And no way to know why Rob’s father had added “Sr.” and “Jr.” to his and his son’s surnames when, legally, they were “III” and “IV.”

  CRIME SCENE

  The first report was made at 11:48 by Troy Gay, an APD rookie on DWI patrol who—crossing Highway 1 on Anderson Lane—spotted a column of smoke rising from the hackberry trees lining Shoal Creek and drove toward it. When he came to the alleyway behind Hillside and saw yellow flames shooting out between two steel doors, he turned in. Beyond a blue dumpster, a man appeared in the next set of doors and waved him forward. When Jorge Barney saw smoke seeping around the electric panel in the north wall of his shop, he’d opened his back doors in time to see the police car edging toward him.

  Gay drove to the front of the strip center and called in a general dispatch: “Have a fire inside a business,” he said. Unfamiliar with the neighborhood, he gave the wrong address, but his mistake was soon corrected by another officer, Dennis Smith, who headed to the scene. By then, the yogurt shop’s window and the glass panes in the front doors were completely black and smoke was pouring from the roofs of adjacent businesses.

  An ordinary kitchen fire, people thought. Somebody left a burner on, closed up the shop and went home. Happens all the time.

  Station Eight of the Austin Fire Department sent four units: an aerial ladder company, an engine company carrying hoses and water, an Emergency Medical Service ambulance and a battalion chief’s car. A separate victims’ rescue team rode in a Chevrolet Suburban. Because the engine company’s job was to “make entry, find the fire and put it out with the water and hoses,” that unit parked closest to the shop so that two of its specialists, Rene Hector Garza and David Deveau, could quickly connect and charge the hoses. Once they’d done that, the two men, already dressed in turnouts and equipped with a Handy-Pak radio, donned air packs, face masks and gloves.

  Garza pulled on the front door, but the lock didn’t give, so he used a crowbar to pop it open, and smoke banked to the ceiling and poured out. To get under it, he and Deveau dropped to their hands and knees. After bumping headfirst into the service counter, they regrouped and crawled into the back room, where they stood up and took in the situation.

  Garza: “We located the fire. We began knocking it down. We found the seat, went and put the fire out. After we had knocked it down, there were some hot spots, just small bits and flames here and there. And once you put water on a fire, it creates steam, so it knocks down the visibility some.” The hottest flames, he testified, came from halfway up the south wall of the storage room, where they assumed the stove was located.

  Hoping to ventilate the room, Garza had taken a tentative step into the darkness when he felt Deveau’s hand on his shoulder. Because of the masks and packs, the firefighters communicated primarily through gestures and touch. “Deveau kind of shakes me…” Garza remembered. “He’s got a hand light; he points it at the floor.”

  “Is that a foot?” Deveau yelled through his mask.

  Garza looked down and then, to get a better view, stepped back and saw it, too.

  “I proceeded to back up, you know, startled a little bit,” Deveau said, “and we found the second body.”

  Garza told him to stay put. Outside in the staging area, where firefighters were climbing ladders and knocking open doors of the other businesses, he told his battalion chief what they’d found. Two victims, he said. Kids. Nude. When a member of the rescue team wanted to go in, he shook his head. “Let’s not move them,” he said. “Something is wrong.” Then he walked toward the alley, to try to open the back doors.

  Rene Garza will relive these moments at least three times: once for the official AFD incident report and, years later, during the two trials. His testimony will be among the most compelling and moving the juries will hear, a tribute to articulate simplicity and honest recall.

  When he pushed at the back doors, they swung open easily, allowing smoke and steam to pour out. He looked inside. There was no kitchen, no stove. When he stepped in, he saw the lower half of yet another dead girl. Asked to describe his experience that night, Garza always said the same thing. “The foot,” he said. “I remember the foot.”

  Just as the battalion chief was telling the two policemen on the scene about the bodies, another cop, Joe Pennington, showed up, and the three officers entered the shop together. Once inside, they could see enough to verify the information, but the storage area was still full of smoke and steam, and without masks it was hard for them to breathe. “So it was walk in, look around, walk right back out. Maybe a minute, minute and a half tops.”

  That was when Gay called for a homicide cop: “Two bodies, probable arson, probable homicide.” This brought other policemen and an arson investigator. Having been released from further duty, Garza and Deveau walked away together and sat talking in the cab of their truck until they felt ready to emerge, when they were reassigned.

  —

  Cops hate arson. Any trace evidence left untouched by fire gets either soaked or washed away once firefighters arrive. John Jones knew all about this. Fourteen months earlier, barely into his second week in Homicide, he caught his first case of arson-murder after a man with a grudge over an eight-dollar drug debt torched an apartme
nt complex with a flare gun and burned it to the ground. It was nighttime, and people were sleeping; there were numerous injuries and two fatalities. One man suffered burns over 80 percent of his body when he carried his wife out through the flames and went back to find their baby. It was Jones who had to travel to the burn center in San Antonio to tell him that his wife and child were dead. What he didn’t say was how long it took cops and firemen to find the baby’s body.

  —

  In a trial, crime-scene photographs are called “exhibits.” They are not evidence, merely pieces of information that both the prosecution and the defense use to support their version of events: the position of the bodies; location and trajectory of wounds; fire damage to particular objects and burn patterns on the walls; blood spatter, fallen debris, the placement of ligatures, the tying of knots. These exhibits tell us how things looked afterward, leaving interpretation and imaginative scenarios to the viewer.

  For me, everything changed when I saw those photographs. After that, I understood why the firefighters couldn’t bear to leave and why in the coming months Homicide would go all out in pursuit of Austin’s self-proclaimed Satanists and devil worshippers. Garza said wrong. I thought evil, without knowing whether I even believed in it. As for Jones, he looked at the photos only once, a couple days after the murders. “I don’t need pictures,” he declared. “That scene is burned into my memory.”

  Months from now, when a television reporter asks what he saw when he first stepped into the shop, Jones will give a quick answer: “Wholesale carnage.” But he’s good at sound bites and in person he agrees with me: The real horror, beyond the unspeakable condition of the bodies, was that the girls had become one with the scene—melted, merged, blackened—and all but indistinguishable from the fallen girders, insulation and soundproofing tiles, the exploded cans and spilled syrups, the wet black splatters of muck and char, the aluminum ladder missing its top two rungs, the metal shelves along the south wall softened into swooping hammocks, as if made of candle wax. “Everything looked black at first,” he says now, “except, of course, Amy.” He shrugs. “But that’s fire.”