During the next week or so, a number of others will call the special APD tips line to report having been to the yogurt shop between nine-thirty and ten-thirty: two African-American women in their late twenties, there for maybe half an hour; two male-female couples who lingered over their yogurt for some time; regular customers Joseph Sauter and Eva Reed, who entered the shop at about ten. Jennifer and Eliza talked with them about their FFA projects and both seemed to be in their usual good mood. At ten-thirty, a customer became uneasy when she saw a “white or Hispanic” man sitting in an older white vehicle in front of the shop, not doing anything, just sitting. When this customer went back out, the white car was gone. Another couple claimed to have seen a suspicious van in the lot between ten-thirty and eleven.
—
McCallum kids sneered at these nervous reports. They knew things their parents and other people didn’t, like how high school boys hung out with armed skinheads down at the skanky field they called “the Fungus,” many of them dropping acid and even doing heroin not just there but in the Northcross parking lot and all around Shoal Creek, Hillside and Allandale. Young kids, thirteen, fourteen. Girls, boys. So what if a kid rolled marbles around in a sack? Or even bullets? The neighborhood wasn’t as white-bread predictable as folks thought.
“We did everything,” says Kate Wallace McClung with a smile. “The streets were safe, so kids roamed around at all hours doing all kinds of things.”
Once the four young men have been arrested, Dearl Croft’s description will hew more closely to the appearance of the suspect thought to be the ringleader. Maybe that jittery guy was smaller than he thought, younger, no pointy nose or mature voice. In her testimony during the second trial, Maria Thomas will add to her memories a young man in a green jacket who was acting strange.
Working in his back room, Jorge Barney thought he might have heard something on the roof at about ten-thirty and halfway remembered that, worried about his Christmas decorations, he had gone outside to check. But later, he wasn’t sure whether he really did or, for that matter, if he’d heard anything to begin with.
What do we actually know and how do we know it? Neuroscience teaches us that our brains are never still, even when we’re asleep and have plunged into dreams. Neurons still continue to spark and fly, jumping synapses, digging up memories, creating new ones, adding, subtracting, removing, revising. Until the story feels right. Correct. What we want it to be.
—
At 10:42—eighteen minutes before closing time—Eliza will ring up the last real sale of the night. The couple who placed the order, Tim Stryker and Margaret Sheehan, had been to a movie and were stopping by for dessert before heading home. Entering the shop, they noticed only two other customers: large people in hooded jackets sitting across from each other in the last booth on the left, closest to the cash register.
Eliza—“the girl with the gorgeous eyes”—stood alone behind the counter, Jennifer having moved into the dining area to wipe down the tables, turn chairs upside down on top—two facing diagonally on the tables and one at the end of each booth—and refill the napkin holders. Sheehan ordered a small cup of vanilla with carob-chip topping and, once Eliza handed it to her, went to the booth next to the one already occupied to wait for Stryker, who hadn’t yet made up his mind. For no important reason, she sat facing the front of the shop, so when looking up, she saw herself reflected in the plate-glass window and, behind her, the people in the next booth.
She couldn’t really describe their facial features or even accurately pinpoint their gender, though because of their size she assumed they were men. The one sitting with his back toward hers was larger and his jacket, either khaki-colored or beige, was padded. The other had a thinner build and light brown hair. She sensed something odd about them, nothing she could articulate, but since they leaned across the table to huddle close together, she thought they might be homosexual.
Tim Stryker eventually ordered a large cup of vanilla with hot fudge topping and, after paying the $4.42 tab, sat down across from her. Neither of them noticed Sarah or Amy. Later, the pizza box will be found in the back room on a table adjacent to the big sink, where someone had begun washing utensils and topping containers. Presumably the girls had taken the box to the back and started doing dishes. There is no chance of knowing this absolutely.
Stryker thought they should take their yogurt and go, but Sheehan wanted to finish hers inside. When questioned, she remembered Jennifer and Eliza discussing the upcoming week’s schedule and a friend they hadn’t seen lately. She had a feeling the men in the hoods were listening as well. Something about their stillness. Neither she nor Stryker recalled seeing any food on their table and were pretty sure they weren’t eating or drinking anything.
Minutes later, Stryker upped his argument. Since the girls were cleaning up, they should get out of their way. This time, Sheehan yielded, but as they left, she checked her watch, and it was 10:47. Out front, she noticed a green car, maybe Eliza’s Karmann Ghia. Under hypnosis, she said she’d seen the same car when they arrived.
When asked by the APD about Eliza’s temperament and habits, a coworker recalled her strictness about following Brice rules to the letter when she was in charge, especially when it came to cleaning up and closing. Therefore, soon after Sheehan and Stryker left, one of the girls—almost certainly Jennifer—must have locked the front door with a single key and turned the OPEN sign around to CLOSED. Because she’d already wiped off the tables, she then pulled a step stool close to the big silver swirl dispensers so she could remove the lids, drain the yogurt and bend into each can to clean and sanitize it. When the shop manager took stock of the dining area the next morning, she could tell investigators exactly how far the girls had proceeded before they were interrupted.
Jennifer’s back was to the front door. Close to or behind the cash register, Eliza was running a rag over the counter when something happened.
An unexpected something.
She lifted her hand, left the rag on the stainless rim of the serving area and didn’t pick it up again.
Early the next morning, once the bodies had been taken to the morgue, investigators took pictures of the rag—piled up unevenly, shaped by a hand—and the cash register tape and the open vanilla yogurt dispenser with the stool pulled up to it. The drawer of the register was open, but the till had been removed and was now lying on the storage room floor beside the place where Amy Ayers’s shoulder had been, with coins scattered around her face.
At five or ten minutes past eleven on the night of the killings, Kate Wallace McClung had walked down Rockwood Lane on her way to Northcross Mall. Looking to her left, she’d noticed the lights were still on in the yogurt shop. Unusual, she thought, and then, not wanting to be late for her Rocky Show rehearsal, kept walking.
Though no one except Margaret Sheehan and Tim Stryker mentioned the people in hooded jackets, by then everybody else had left. While these were solid eyewitnesses, they could remember only so much. They will both provide signed APD incident reports yet won’t be asked to testify in either trial, which defense attorney Carlos Garcia says was because what they had to say didn’t match the confessions of the defendants, who said they’d parked in the alley and entered through the back door.
Maybe so, but why blame the prosecution? The oversight falls more heavily on both defense teams, who might have called Stryker and Sheehan to help them establish a plausible theory that didn’t involve their clients. This they did not do.
Garcia readily accepts the accusation, citing his last-minute appointment to represent Michael Scott and the subsequent lack of time to properly prepare a defense. By 2009, when Scott’s retrial was scheduled to begin, Garcia and his tireless intern, Amber Farrelly, were ready to put the Stryker-Sheehan testimony to good use. Then the case was dismissed. Mention of these two figures wearing hoodies won’t surface in the press until 2011, during intense local coverage of the murders’ twentieth anniversary, when reporter Jordan Smith, of the free weekly A
ustin Chronicle, asked Garcia what he thought really happened that night.
“It’s the only explanation that makes sense,” he told me, repeating what he’d said to the reporter. That the killers were already in the shop when it closed. Sitting at a table. Watching the girls clean up. Waiting. When one of them pulled a gun on Eliza, she rang up “No Sale” and handed over the cash drawer.
Reese Price has a different take. She thinks Eliza was simply closing out the register. Or maybe checking the till one last time.
As for John Jones, he brushed Garcia’s theory aside. “Could be,” he said, “but…”
I finished his sentence. “Can’t prove it.”
He nodded, shrugged; we moved on.
As for why this case had gone unsolved for so long and caused so much grief to so many people, Garcia had a simple answer: “Evil,” he said. “Yogurt Shop was an act of pure evil. And when evil is let loose, it spreads. And doesn’t stop.”
TASK FORCE
John Jones has a wicked, often impertinent sense of humor. In the days ahead, he will be criticized by a superior for inappropriate wit. A black man in a white city might well decide to keep a low profile, but not Jones. Irony’s his special gift; it gives him distance and keeps him sane.
Homicide, he has also said, is like being on an assembly line, watching as the bodies roll by. In his years as a cop, including accidental deaths and suicides, he figures his count comes to about 150, the last four being Eliza, Jennifer, Sarah and Amy.
As far as I can tell, police and prosecutors alike take murders personally, especially if they’ve been to the crime scene and viewed the butchery firsthand. Cops say they get used to it, but I’m not so sure. Ask them about a case, particularly one involving a child or a young person: They remember names, circumstances, smells, the pervasive sense of wrongness it is their job to correct. Assistant District Attorney Robert Smith visited the yogurt shop on Saturday, December 7. When the time comes to prosecute whoever is eventually accused of this unspeakable crime, he will devote all of his considerable intellectual and strategic energies to a conviction. Not that he wouldn’t have anyway. But this one demanded payback. Including a trip to the execution chamber.
For his partner, Jones requested Sgt. Mike “Huck” Huckabay, a friend he’d worked with previously. Both were fathers, both had daughters; most important, they trusted each other. Working together, they would divvy up the responsibilities—Huck doing interviews and negotiations; Jones, the technical side. When Huckabay is interviewed, he’ll admit that while homicide cops get used to seeing terrible things, the ICBY scene hit him hard and made him wonder where his own daughter was, especially since one girl owned a Mickey Mouse watch, just like his daughter did.
“I saw things in Vietnam,” he told a reporter, “and I thought nothing will ever match that. Well, this matches that. Because it’s in Austin, Texas, right down the street from where we live.”
On Saturday, once they’d gotten the nod from Waters and Polanco to stay on as lead investigators, the two men made a private pact. This was, they agreed, an unusual case, and it called for unusual methods. To get an arrest warrant or an indictment, they were required to provide a pile of evidence solid enough to constitute what the DA’s office considered probable cause. Both Huck and Jones were determined to do right by Yogurt Shop. They would not request an arrest warrant or an indictment form until they felt they had solved the crime to the furthest extent of the law: beyond a reasonable doubt. They didn’t ask for permission to do that. They just did it.
—
Austin is a city of white and brown people and not so many blacks, who make up about 8 percent of the population. Jones grew up in this racially mixed city, where his stepfather worked as a baker and his mother as a teacher’s aide. When it was time for her eldest child and only son to enter first grade, she insisted on enrolling him at a Catholic school, where she thought the teachers were better.
“So,” Jones told me, “I was a good Catholic boy five days a week, and on Sunday, I listened to the Baptist preacher rail against ‘dem damn Catholics.’ ”
In sixth grade, he transferred to public school.
Those of us who live in Travis County, where the arts thrive and Democrats run the show, tend to think that because we’re liberal we aren’t racist. But when working undercover in narcotics, sporting a bushy beard, beat-up straw hat and baggy clothes, Jones regularly had to stave off the natural tendency of young cops who, when he showed up with a suspect, assumed he was the detainee. Not me, he’d have to tell them. The white guy.
“An ego the size of a washtub,” a fellow officer anonymously quipped to a news reporter when describing Jones. Another cop once said “nigger” in his presence and afterward expressed surprise that Jones might have been offended. “I didn’t mean him,” he explained.
Jones is short and stocky, powerful in his trunk and legs. In 1972, he was attending the University of Texas as a music-education major—he sings bass and plays a couple of instruments—when his summer job waiting tables at a local country club ran out. Since the APD was advertising for cadets and Jones needed a job, he signed on for a temporary gig.
“I was black, a college kid; they snapped me up,” he told me. He’d already looked ahead at career possibilities for a music-ed major. Church-choir director was at the top of the list; after that, high school teacher/director of the marching band. He thought maybe he needed a different line of work, one that paid better and offered solid benefits and advancement potential. After graduating from cadet training, he stayed on. He and his wife, Yolanda, raised four daughters on the salary of what he calls the “po-po.” When he retired in 2004, he became security manager of Capital Metro, Austin’s public transportation system, so he’s still the po-po. During the heat of the ICBY investigation, he converted to Catholicism and now sings bass in the twenty-five-member St. Louis the King choir, acting as cantor and participating in oratorios and concerts not just in local churches and concert halls but also, every couple of years, in Europe. He has a snatch of Bach oratorios on his cell phone’s voice mail. In his spare time, he referees amateur soccer matches.
He’s a private man and, like a lot of cops, thin-skinned. He doesn’t much keep up with the APD officers he knew back then. When I mention his musical education, lawyers and former colleagues are often surprised.
—
On that Friday night at ICBY, waiting for Lt. Andy Waters to give Jones and the others permission to proceed, Joe Pennington began taking measurements and drawing stick-figure pictures showing the exact position of the bodies relative to one another and to certain points of reference: the walls, shelves, doors, freezer, office. Having been trained to diagram vehicle crashes, he had exactly the expertise Jones needed.
Here, for example, are his written measurements for Amy Ayers:
Victim #1. Head: 15 Feet East of the West Wall 76 Inches from East Side of Office Wall. 72 Inches South from Bathroom Wall (North Side). Right Foot: 59 Inches East of Office Wall, 14 Inches South of Bathroom Wall. Left Foot: 22 Inches South of Bathroom Wall. Victim Was on Her Stomach or Right Side.
After sending out a mandatory dispatch to city departments and the media, Jones went back to his car and told the television reporters they could get out now and, incidentally, that they might not need to go to Houston after all. So by the time other press arrived—within three minutes—the KTBC duo were already videotaping firefighters on the roof, cops traipsing inside and out, the flashing lights, the store’s sign, the Party House’s red balloons.
Back inside, he conferred with the arson investigator, Stahl. They agreed that the situation required—“screamed for,” Jones would write in a memo—processing and analysis far beyond the reach of the APD, which, along with many other small-city police forces at that time, had no forensic unit other than an old-fashioned fingerprint detail, useless in cases involving fire. The Texas Department of Public Safety did have a CSI lab and a criminalist trained in DNA collection. Although the lab
was fairly new and its staff relatively inexperienced, calling them was really their only option (a decision both Jones and Huckabay will reiterate later when the work of DPS technicians comes in for lacerating criticism).
Jones also wanted to call Charles “Chuck” Meyer from the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm’s National Response Team, who, along with Stahl, had worked with him on the other arson-homicide. Meyer had helped out enormously and both men trusted him utterly, but once Jones made the suggestion, Stahl hesitated, worried that summoning a federal agent might ruffle some feathers. Undaunted, Jones persisted. If they drew Meyer into the investigation, they’d gain access to federal wiretaps, search warrants and a trustworthy polygraph expert, as well as FBI behavioral analysts, ViCAP (the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program) and whatever else Quantico could offer. Stahl soon concurred.
The right to use federal resources in a local crime emerged during Ronald Reagan’s war on drugs when, two years after Congress passed the Comprehensive Crime Control Act ordering mandatory sentencing for drug dealers and killers with previous felony convictions, BATF—often called simply ATF—developed its own program to ensure implementation of the stiffer penalties. Project Achilles allowed federal agents to work alongside local and state officers even when no state lines had been crossed.
After Andy Waters arrived and gave his approval, Jones called Chuck Meyer, then the DPS crime-lab manager, who, in turn, phoned the head of their DNA operation, Irma Rios. She agreed to meet her team at the DPS lab, where they would gather their equipment and aim to be at West Anderson Lane within two or two and a half hours. Waters himself called Huckabay. When he got there twenty minutes later, Homicide desk sergeant Jesse Vasquez was already on site, and Meyer soon followed. Attempting to identify the bodies, Waters began tracking down the store manager. Once he found her, he put in a request for crisis teams to notify the victims’ families.
Who Killed These Girls? Page 6