My grandson is a welder. To determine the composition of the shelves, I showed him a photograph. “Stainless,” he said. “Standard restaurant supply—but wait.” He took a breath. “Is that a body?”
It was Jennifer, burned beyond recognition. I shut down my computer screen.
Ignoring the firefighters, who either milled around or just stood there looking down, Jones stepped gingerly around the bodies. Having been schooled in evidence collection and processing, he felt competent to handle 95 percent of most crime scenes, but this one lay well beyond his expertise. In a memo to the DA’s office, he will describe the situation as “Robbery + Sexual Assault + Multiple Child Victims + Bondage + Gunshot Wounds + Fire/Heat/Smoke/Water Damage + No Known Witnesses = the Homicide, Arson and DA’s worst nightmare.”
In old-school police work, a lead cop struggled to solve the crime on his own. From the beginning, Jones knew he needed a team and he needed experts. But an officially sanctioned task force wasn’t easy to come by, and besides, protocol said he couldn’t make significant decisions without the approval of a unit supervisor—either Senior Sgt. Hector Polanco or Lt. Andy Waters. Since Polanco was out of town, he called Waters, who quickly dressed and headed over. Awaiting him, Jones began snapping black-and-white Polaroids, as he’d been taught to do when processing a fire scene. By then, longtime AFD arson investigator Melvin Stahl had arrived and was also taking pictures. But according to Jones, “We were photographing for different reasons. He was looking for signs of arson and to find out how the fire started and progressed. I was trying to solve a crime.”
In his official report—written Saturday, December 7—Stahl would estimate that the fire had been set somewhere high along the south wall of the storage room toward the east end of the steel shelves at approximately 11:42, thirty-nine minutes after Eliza rang up “No Sale.”
YOUR YOGURT GIRL
In many instances, to write about a murder is to write about a trial. Consider O.J., or Lizzie Borden, Ted Bundy, Smith and Hickock, McVeigh, the West Memphis Three. Information comes slowly but in minute detail. In this instance, Precisely at what time did you arrive, who else was there and who arrived next and when exactly; can you describe the path of the bullet and tell us about latent fingerprints, blood spatter, backdraft, accelerant, fire science, flashover? How do you know the girls were dead before the fire was ignited? Can you explain that for us?
From testimony and transcripts we learn things—the woman who heard the dog bark at the very instant forensic investigators say the knife sliced across Nicole Brown Simpson’s jugular; the bloody dress taken from Lizzie Borden’s washtub; Karla Faye Tucker’s taped boast that murdering victims with a pickax gave her sexual satisfaction (“I come with every stroke”); the celebrated expert witness who helped convict the West Memphis Three by citing examples of Satanism among fans of Iron Maiden and Metallica….From photographs of the accused, by checking out the look in their eyes for signs of otherness and guilt, we make judgments. From all such fragments we can create a story that after a while seems real. We think we were there. If the victims are all dead, how else could we know?
—
The Hillside parking lot extends for a city block and can accommodate about two hundred cars, with an additional four or five head-in spots in front of each business. But by eight o’clock, when Jennifer began her shift, only Sun Harvest (a large natural-foods grocery store), Mr. Gatti’s and the yogurt shop remained open, so there was plenty of space. At nine, Sun Harvest—now called Fresh Plus Grocery—would close as well.
Between eight-fifteen and eight-thirty, fifty-one-year-old Lusella Jones parked in one of the ICBY spots and got out. A resident of nearby Allandale, she’d come to get a quick takeout for her husband, who’d had dental surgery and could eat only soft food.
By then, the four girls’ parents had relaxed into their normal Friday-night routines. Barbara and Skip Suraci had eaten a quiet dinner and retired to their bedroom to watch television. Mike Harbison was in New Boston with his second wife, Debbie; they had no children of their own. When Maria Thomas got off work, she drove to the HQ Fitness Center on Far West Boulevard, hoping to do a short workout before dropping by the yogurt shop to say hi to Eliza. Having finished their shopping, Bob and Pam Ayers returned home with Sean’s Christmas watch and new jeans and a fancy belt buckle for Amy. James Thomas, a social worker, and his second wife, Norma Fowler, a University of Texas economics instructor, were attending a graduate student party but planned to leave early and pay Eliza a visit at work. Because Sonora was home alone, they wouldn’t stay long.
Heading inside, Lusella Jones noticed only two other vehicles in the lot: Eliza’s VW and Jennifer’s S-10. Had she bothered to look through the ICBY front window, she could’ve seen the entire service area—booths, tables, chairs, customers, the toppings display and yogurt machines, the girls working there. To the right of the window were two heavy wooden doors with plate-glass inserts. The left-hand door—bolted shut with top and bottom sliding locks—held product-display posters and a cardboard OPEN sign. A frequent customer, Jones went in through the other door.
The interior had a cheerful southwestern look, with dark red Mexican tile floors and walls lined with light oak-toned wood paneling. Along the north wall were three booths covered in forest green vinyl, each with a blond wooden chair at the end. There were five more booths against the south wall and, in the middle of the room, three tables. The serving counter extended from the cash register on Jones’s left to within five feet of the other wall, where there was a freezer chest filled with prepackaged cakes, pies, frozen-yogurt sandwiches and treats for special occasions. Beyond the space at the end of the counter, an open door led into the back room. Today, the storage area is pretty much as it was then: an open space sectioned off into partitions using fake, or stub, walls. Dark. Efficient. Windowless. Smaller than you might think, given the events that took place there.
Eliza stood behind the cash register while Jennifer manned the toppings display—chocolate, hot fudge, caramel, strawberry, cherry, carob chip, chopped nuts, M&M’S, granola, chunks of syrupy fruit, aerosol cans of whipped cream—as well as the five large dispenser cans on a shelf behind her, each filled with a particular flavor of yogurt. The chocolate and vanilla cans sat side by side, with a common spigot that delivered ICBY’s favorite selection, the vanilla-chocolate swirl.
As the door closed behind her, Lusella Jones came to an abrupt halt. Only two other customers were in the shop, teenage boys who’d taken the table nearest the door and were focusing intently on something between them, a small sack of some kind. One sat with his back to her, leaning on his elbows and slumped over the table, while the other stood behind it, facing her.
Something about them unnerved Jones, though she couldn’t say exactly what, only that she felt immediately fearful.
They were, she testified, probably between fourteen and seventeen and had a kind of “hippie” look. The one facing her was between five four and five seven, had medium-dark hair and weighed something like 130 to 140 pounds. She wouldn’t call his hair messy, but it certainly wasn’t clean-cut. Since the other boy never turned around, she couldn’t describe him at all. As for ethnicity, they were “possibly Hispanic but may have been Anglo.” Dark-skinned, in other words, in a white neighborhood.
When the standing boy stuck his hand down in the sack and stirred it around, there was, Jones said, a clicking sound, like marbles striking one another. Or coins. Maybe keys.
There was no sense to it. For one thing, Jones told a BATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) agent who was trying to help her analyze her suspicions, neither of them appeared to be eating anything. In the next moment, however, she modified her statement. “I don’t remember,” she said, “any containers on the table.” And then she softened her certainty again: “I did not have a clear view of the entire table.”
Pulling herself together, Jones eventually moved past the boys to the counter, where she ordered a fresh strawbe
rry sundae from Jennifer, then went to the cash register to pay. She remembered wondering if maybe she should ask the girls if they were okay there by themselves or if they wanted her to call somebody, but Eliza and Jennifer were chatting happily and so Jones figured perhaps her premonition didn’t amount to anything. She paid by check, took her sundae and left without looking back.
Memory’s fungible, eyewitness accounts notoriously unreliable. People call in a tip or show up at a police station for many reasons, one of which is to contribute to the righting of a wrong, which sometimes causes potential eyewitnesses to embroider or imagine particular details in order to shape events to match either what they think happened or what somebody else had reported or suggested. Knowing this, cops withhold certain details, hoping a witness will cite them without being prompted.
By the time Lusella Jones testified in 2001, her memory had sharpened enough that she could come up with previously unmentioned details, one of which was that the standing boy had rolled his hand around inside the sack in a threatening manner. This, in retrospect, made her wonder if the clicking she’d heard hadn’t been marbles, but bullets. What she emphasized most strongly, ten years later, was a sense of foreboding, a feeling that these boys were up to no good.
It could well be that the more Jones concentrated on dredging up her memories of that night and the more she told friends and family about being in the yogurt shop only hours before the girls were killed, the more positive she became of the boys’ ill intentions. By 1999, when police arrested the four young men and the mayor said that we could now begin to heal, she might have come to believe she had a duty to help put them away. At both trials, she gave a partial description of the boy who’d sat with his back to her. He was, she said, older than the other one, with a broader, thicker physique.
But who knows, maybe her instincts were correct; maybe they were about to make trouble, perhaps even to tie up the girls and rob the store. Or possibly they were just fooling around, making pests of themselves, as bored young slackers often do, if only to attract notice. All Lusella Jones really knew was they weren’t the kind of boys she was used to seeing at the yogurt shop and that they weren’t from around here, either. After midnight, when police collected evidence, they found her check in a money bag inside the cash register drawer, right where Eliza had put it.
—
At about nine, Jennifer drove to Northcross to pick up Sarah and Amy. Back at Hillside, the two younger friends went to get take-out pizza before Mr. Gatti’s closed at ten.
We are two hours and forty-two minutes away from the fire.
—
The gym had closed by the time Maria Thomas got there, so she drove on to the yogurt shop. When she arrived at about nine-thirty, Eliza was on the phone, trying to convince her little sister to ride her bike to the shop. But Sonora couldn’t leave without her father’s permission, so Eliza handed the phone to her mother and went back to work. Soon afterward, Sarah and Amy returned with their pizza, opening the box on the table between them. Other customers will have a vague recollection of two girls with long hair sharing a pizza, nothing more specific. This might’ve been because the girls were so wrapped up in each other that they were, in effect, absent. Maria ended her conversation with her younger daughter and went to the cash register to confer with Eliza. (This information comes from Maria’s testimony, with backup from James Thomas and various other customers.) When the ICBY phone rang, Jennifer rushed to answer it, knowing it was Sammy calling to make breakfast plans for the next morning.
Later, once news of the murders spread, reports of suspicious persons and vehicles streamed into Homicide. One woman said she had been at the shop four days prior to the killings, at about four in the afternoon, when a tall, thin, young white man walked up to the counter but “did not act as though he wanted to order anything.” About twenty-three years old, with wavy shoulder-length blond hair parted in the middle, he stood beside the freezer display, looking not at the frozen pies and cakes but at the door to the rear of the shop, which everybody knew, by the time this woman called, was where the murders had taken place. Anyway, he finally, “with much indecision,” placed an order. Still, his skittish ambivalence had made the caller feel so jumpy that she decided to leave. Driving out of the parking lot, she saw him again, getting into a light-colored vehicle, either a big car—perhaps a Delta 88—or a small pickup. Another woman said that on the night of the murders, she’d seen several dubious-looking people outside the shop between six and nine o’clock, but she was unable to offer a description. A couple called in about a questionable van, and so did another man, who said the van was white. Somebody else saw a boy on a skateboard rolling around the parking lot, alone and late in the evening.
—
Between nine-thirty and ten, Dearl (pronounced Darrell) Croft—a fifty-two-year-old former military policeman and current owner of Longhorn Security Company—parked his company car, a tan Ford station wagon with a rack of blue warning lights across the roof, in front of the Party House. After dining at Fuddruckers, he and two female companions had gone to ICBY for dessert.
After the women told him what they’d like, Croft entered the shop alone and surveyed the place: the girls behind the counter, Maria by the cash register, two young people—a boy and a girl—sitting in a booth along the right-hand wall, another couple standing close to the counter, studying a wall menu, and, just behind them, a fidgety young man in a green jacket that might have come from a military-surplus store. In his early to mid-twenties—medium build, 155 to 170 pounds, maybe between five ten and six feet—he was white, like everybody else in the shop. Having spent most of his life in law enforcement of one kind or another, Croft prided himself on his ability to note aberrant behavior, and right away he thought (or remembers thinking) there was something odd, something off, about him.
Having made their decision, the couple studying the menu moved forward and ordered. The jittery young man was next.
Croft was a regular at the yogurt shop and, like Maria and Eliza Thomas, belonged to the HQ Fitness Center, where he’d once run into them in the coed steam room. “Hi,” Eliza had said. “I’m your yogurt girl. Remember me?” Like most people who hold security jobs, he believed in order and his responsibility to enforce it upon a sometimes-resistant populace. When the fellow in the green jacket hesitated instead of moving to the counter, Croft took a step toward him. At that, the young man turned around.
Was that his car out there, he asked Croft, with the lights on top? When Croft said yes, he asked was he police? Security? “What are you?”
His voice was deep, clear and distinctive, which Croft found unusual for someone in his twenties. In interviews he will sometimes mention a long, pointy nose. He thought it odd that this screwball guy would’ve noticed his car in the first place—and who did he think he was, asking what he was? But he held his tongue, avoided confrontational eye contact and said only that he owned a security company, at which point the fellow turned back around, to find Jennifer urging him to come forward, so he moved up and asked for a 7UP. When Jennifer said they had only Sprite, he said okay, so she put the can in a paper sack and handed it to Eliza to ring up.
Croft moved to the counter and gave Jennifer his order. But before he got to the cash register to pay, the unpleasant youth had gone around the end of the counter and through the door to the back room. Unaware that customers were allowed back there, Croft asked Eliza where he was going. When she said the bathroom, he told her he didn’t know they had one, and Eliza laughed. The bathrooms weren’t really open to the public, she explained, but the guy said he had to go, so she let him.
It’s not clear why Eliza said that, or even if she did, because, as she well knew, the ICBY shop had two bathrooms—as required by city regulations—one for men and one for women, both open to the public. But that’s what Croft remembered. Stalling for time, hoping to get another look at the nervous stranger, he initiated a conversation with Maria about the gym. Once he’d paid his tab and
Jennifer set out his three cups of yogurt, however, he had no choice but to head toward the door.
Before he got there, Eliza stopped him. “Dearl?” she called. “Your yogurt?” Rattled, he went back, and they all laughed.
The next day, Croft drove to Houston for a football game. When he got home Sunday, he read about the four deaths and went immediately to the yogurt shop to tell a policeman about his experience and to sign an official APD incident report. Knowing that policemen generally regard the testimony of wannabe cops with suspicion, I asked Jones what he thought about Croft’s account. Was it reliable? After hesitating a moment, all he was willing to say was, “He was okay. He didn’t hurt the investigation.”
Two years later, in an attempt to mine his memories for more specific details, Croft will undergo voluntary hypnosis, to no avail. In 1999, after the arrests, a homicide detective will show him a four-page photographic lineup of possible suspects, but he will not identify any of them as the snarky fellow he encountered.
A few minutes after Dearl Croft drove away, Maria Thomas left as well. Almost immediately afterward, James Thomas and his wife dropped by. Business had slowed again, giving Eliza an opportunity to tell her father and stepmother about an economics class she was taking. Thomas recalled seeing two girls in a booth with a Mr. Gatti’s box on the table between them, but he hadn’t ever met Jennifer’s family and had no idea who they were. Neither he nor his wife remembered a young man in a green jacket. They stayed about fifteen minutes, maybe twenty.
Who Killed These Girls? Page 5