Heavy on the cops’ minds was the issue of the medical examiner. For the most part, the APD and the ME’s office had managed to establish a relatively cozy working relationship—except in homicide cases, and for good reason. “Dead body belongs to the ME,” Jones says. “That’s how it works. We call him ‘the body snatcher.’ ”
But because of the water and fire damage and the potential loss of biological evidence when the bodies were lifted, the investigators—Jones, Stahl, Huckabay, Meyer and Waters—agreed that DNA swabbing and evidence processing should be performed at the scene. Jones had hoped to wait a while before calling the ME’s office, but Jesse Vasquez, following APD rules, had already done so and been informed that since Roberto Bayardo, the chief medical examiner, was out of town, his deputy, Les Carpenter—a known tight-ass when it came to protocol—was en route, accompanied by his “transporters”—the men who would zip the bodies into bags and drive them, one by one, to the morgue.
Taking photos, Stahl noted the large amount of blood on the floor. He could see and smell it. This meant the girls were almost certainly dead from gunshot wounds when the fire was lit. Noting that containers on the steel shelves were more heavily damaged at the top, he took careful pictures of anything that might indicate the origin, progress and temperature of the flames: burn patterns on the walls, the distorted shelves, the melted aluminum ladder, the charred mop handle, products stored on the kitchen shelving that had burst, sending streams and puddles of sticky, combustible material across the floor. The disappearance of the ladder’s top two steps was of particular interest since it indicated a very hot fire—at least 1,221 degrees Fahrenheit—that had originated above the floor level, swept across the ceiling and then moved down.
When Reese Price arrived and couldn’t make any positive identifications, she opened the ICBY office to check the schedule for her employees. At about the same time, APD officers were unlocking the only two privately owned vehicles in the parking lot. Inside the S-10 there were purses and Amy’s overnight tote bag; in both glove compartments, DMV registration papers. Eliza’s Karmann Ghia was registered in her name; Jennifer’s truck in her father’s.
Because James Thomas lived nearby and his address was on Eliza’s car registration, the crisis team went there first and then to Maria’s house. By then, the girls had been dead for about four hours. Barbara Suraci said when somebody knocked at her door at three-thirty or so in the morning and she and Skip went to see who was there in the middle of the night, she felt so certain of her daughters’ well-being that when asked where they were, she said, “In bed, sleeping.” And when they were given the terrible news, they wanted to shut the door in the strangers’ faces so that they could go on with their lives and wait for Jennifer and Sarah to get home. When the time came to tell the girls’ father in New Boston, Barbara dialed his number but couldn’t say the words, and so the job fell to Skip. Standing there with the phone in his hand, he went blank. “Am I saying the right thing here?” he asked his wife. “Jennifer and Sarah were murdered? Burned?” When he finally managed to explain the unthinkable truth, Harbison hung up the phone, and his wife had to call back to find out why he was weeping and screaming.
“And Amy?” Barbara had to ask. Was little Amy dead, too?
As for Les Carpenter, he showed up long before the DPS team did, and when Huckabay and Jones told him of their decision to have the bodies processed at the scene, the deputy ME went into a professional snit. The bodies were his. He could do whatever he wanted with them. Huckabay, who had seniority and was a better negotiator than Jones, said he knew that but hoped Carpenter would bear with them “because if we don’t solve this in a few days, we are going to be in so much trouble.”
After the autopsies, Assistant DA Terry Keel asked Jones to write a memo explaining the disagreement between Homicide and Les Carpenter. The wrangling, Jones admitted, was not pretty. And he listed the reasons he and Huckabay felt the DPS needed to act before the bodies were removed. One, the likelihood of trace evidence being lost during transport. Two, the likelihood of trace evidence being washed away by water from broken overhead pipes and firefighters’ hoses. Three, lack of trace evidence due to body-temperature changes between there and the ME’s office. And four, evidence being added or subtracted due to contact with sheets and plastic containers the personnel used there.
Carpenter’s response? “Les was unimpressed.”
Perhaps feeling outgunned, Carpenter eventually backed down and told his team to wait. But he spent all night at the ICBY shop and was, Jones reported, a source of constant irritation, threatening to load the bodies on his own and making nonstop disparaging remarks about the skills and methodology of the DPS and the APD.
If a homicide ever needed a thorough crime-scene investigation, it was this one. Considering the multiple victims, the fire and water damage and the lack of any obvious motive, evidence should have been examined in excruciating detail. There should have been a log signed by everyone who set foot inside, with time in and time out down to the second. DPS staff and everyone else should have worn booties. The bathrooms should have been dusted for latent fingerprints and the trash bags combed through. The metal shelves, the mop with the charred handle and the lock on the open back door should have been preserved. The list of “should haves” grew longer and longer.
In her entire career, Irma Rios had previously processed—“maybe,” she would tell a defense attorney when he questioned her—one other case of arson-homicide. And while she did acknowledge that the DPS indeed had compiled a handbook of proper procedures, she wasn’t all that familiar with the guidelines. And Rachel Riffe, the latent-fingerprint expert, thought of her job as mostly visual: If she saw a fingerprint, she examined and recorded it.
No one knows what happened to the metal shelving. Rios testified that she and her team used the shelves as a convenient place to store potential evidence. In a Polaroid photo taken by Hillside fire insurers over the weekend, the shelves have been wrapped in crime-scene tape and moved into the alley, along with the truncated aluminum ladder, the charred mop and the mop bucket. At some point, all of these things disappeared, and although one of Rios’s responsibilities was to maintain custody of evidence collected at the scene, nobody has ever owned up to knowing who took them, where they went or why nobody went wherever that was—dump, landfill—to find them. The next day, the lock on the back door—crucial in determining the entrance and exit routes of the killers—was replaced with a new one purchased by Jesse Vasquez from a local locksmith and charged to APD Homicide; the original has never been found. The melted body of the wall telephone ended up at an AFD training location.
That Austin wasn’t ready for a crime like this seems obvious; even the lead prosecutor in both trials said as much in his opening statements. But in fact, what city would have gotten it right? When you look at other big murders, the shocking cases that land on page one of the local paper and stay there, you start to understand what are called “botched investigations.” JonBenét Ramsey, Nicole Simpson, the children in West Memphis, the Central Park Jogger, Sharon Tate, Rosemary LaBianca…Politics often interfere. Cops get testy. Newspapers, television stations and Internet news-media sites all scramble to tell the hottest story. Professional rumormongers feast on cooked-up outrage. People talk. Information spreads, much of it inaccurate. Things quickly get out of hand.
Certainly the processing team could have done better, especially Irma Rios, who never took full responsibility for her errors and misjudgments. But Jones thinks she’s been unfairly maligned, and years from now, her “scene swabs” will prove crucial to the eventual dismissal of the state’s case against the two boys—now men—who’d been convicted.
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Just after seven o’clock on Saturday morning, Les Carpenter instructed his crew to zip the body of Amy Ayers into a body bag and transport it to the morgue. Because a homicide officer had to be present at the autopsy, Huckabay and Waters accompanied the van in a police vehicle. Jones would s
oon show up with Vasquez. Once Amy’s body had been delivered, Carpenter’s team went back for Eliza’s. The autopsy of Amy Leigh Ayers began that morning at seven-fifteen; Eliza Hope Thomas at nine-thirty; Sarah Louise Harbison, noon; Jennifer Ann Harbison, one-thirty that afternoon.
All four autopsies were conducted by Dr. Tommy J. Brown, from the Harris County Medical Examiner’s Office in Houston, who had signed on to do the occasional weekend stint in Travis County. In his memo to the DA’s office, Jones reported that Les Carpenter groused throughout the morning, directly influencing Brown’s attitude toward Homicide, the DPS and everybody else involved. As Jones put it, “By the time we got down to the ME’s office, the air was cooler than it normally is in there…and it took a while for Dr. Tommy Brown to warm up.”
Among the routine procedures conducted at any morgue after an arson-homicide is the swabbing of bodies for the presence of an accelerant—generally, lighter fluid or gasoline. But in this case, that didn’t happen, a mistake both Huckabay and Jones blamed on Carpenter, who had so poisoned the air that Dr. Brown might have done his job more quickly than usual. At the crime scene itself, there hadn’t seemed to be any reason to conduct this test. Everybody there—APD, ATF, AFD—agreed that the sharp, enduring smell they all were familiar with simply was not present: on the bodies, on the painted floor where they’d lain or on any of the ligatures that bound them. Nobody could have known that the possibility of an accelerant would become a major issue in the pursuit of certain suspects, leading Jones—who by then had been taken off the case—to wish they’d performed an exhumation.
THE FIRST WEEK: INNOCENCE
On the morning of December 7, the Austin American-Statesman ran a small, error-ridden story in the “Metro-State” section, getting the number of bodies right but much else wrong. Based on Jones’s middle-of-the-night dispatch and testimony from an EMS shift commander, it described the victims as two white females, one white male, a fourth of unidentifiable race and gender, all “ranging in age from 18 to 30,” and quoted Jones as having said he was handling the incident as a homicide because one of them had been struck on the head.
But word had gotten out fast, and many Austinites already knew far more than was in the paper: that the victims were four young girls, two of them sisters, were naked and bound and had been shot point-blank in the back of the head, then burned, with at least two of the bodies stacked up. What they didn’t know was that one girl had been hit in a sideways trajectory, didn’t die right away and had been shot again with a larger-caliber gun, a fatal shot that was known as a “through-and-through”—a round that pierced and then exited her body.
Early on the morning of December 7, Kate Wallace McClung’s mother heard about the ice scoop when a lawyer friend called. Don’t say anything about this. I’m not supposed to tell you….But one of the EMS guys had told him. Or maybe a cop. And maybe he said an ice-cream scoop.
Jones doesn’t think the killers put the ice scoop between Sarah’s thighs. “No telling how it got there,” he says. “Probably fell off a shelf.” Others blame the high-intensity spray of the fire hoses. But, whatever the truth, for many people the most hellish version of this story is the one that remained fixed in their minds.
In the autopsy reports submitted on Saturday, the cause of death was listed as “shot by another person,” but two days later District Judge Jon Wisser ordered the reports sealed, “because the details [are] essential to [APD’s] investigation.” And, he added, “whenever you arrest someone and they decide to give a confession, you have to have stuff that no one other than the one confessing knows about.” In accordance with this ruling, the DA’s office released a sanitized version to the press, despite knowing full well that in Travis County autopsies are public documents and by law cannot be sealed.
This case was huge, however, the manner of death grisly in the extreme, the victims young white girls. Wisser’s decision harkens back to the days when the names of rape victims, whether girls or boys, were omitted to protect them from shame and ruin. In years to come, Roberto Bayardo will say that in his fourteen years as a medical examiner he’d never heard of a sealed autopsy report. But at the time he remained silent, like everybody else.
—
By that afternoon, Jones and his colleagues had created a list of thirteen pieces of evidence to be held back, in police terminology, from public notice:
1. How and where the fire was started
2. The key in the front door
3. How much money was taken
4. How the girls’ bodies were arranged
5. What was used to bind the girls
6. That the office was not entered
7. That the office key was still under the cash register
8. The caliber of the weapons [a .22 and a .380]
9. That two pairs of the victims’ underpants were missing
10. Amy’s missing leather bomber jacket
11. Amy’s bruise under her chin from a blow of some kind
12. That Amy was strangled and what she was strangled with
13. That Amy was shot twice with two different-caliber guns
This list will have to be revised several times.
—
Because the APD had no public information officer, Jones himself issued a press release stating that the bodies of four young women had been found “in an area near the back door to the ICBY shop at 2949 West Anderson Lane” and that “each of the victims suffered gunshot wounds to the head and severe burns as a result of the fire.” Half an hour later, with Huckabay and other APD representatives, he met with the girls’ immediate families at the main police station downtown.
After Jones gave a preliminary outline of what they knew so far, the families wanted to know if their daughters had died fast (yes) and if they had been raped (to be determined). Barbara Suraci also wanted to know if her daughters were close to each other when they were killed and if there was any part of their bodies that hadn’t burned. Jones was straight with them. He hoped the vaginal and rectal swabs would preclude sexual assault but could make no promises. And, no, he regretted to say, there was no part of Jennifer, Sarah or Eliza that was unburned, only Amy.
CEO Bill Brice flew in from Dallas to meet with the families and to announce that Brice Foods was offering a $25,000 reward for evidence leading to a conviction. After declaring the company’s outrage, Buddy Harvey, a vice president based in Austin, turned defensive. Yes, the girls had been alone in the shop after closing, but Brice had two other shops here and hundreds more in other states and countries and these were the first killings in the firm’s fourteen-year history. When asked if Brice would reopen the Hillside shop, Harvey said possibly not, but that they were always on the lookout for new locations.
That Sunday, the Statesman was all Yogurt Shop, featuring photographs of the four girls accompanying a front-page story that began, “Austin police, calling the killings of four teen-age girls in a Northwest Austin yogurt shop among the worst they had ever seen, said Saturday that robbery was the apparent motive.”
As APD spokesman, Mike Huckabay speculated about motive and cause. “The first thing that comes to mind,” he was quoted as saying, “is crack cocaine. I’ve been in homicide a pretty good time and this is the worst one I’ve seen considering it involved four young ladies at the same time.” He also disclosed that firefighters had found the back doors unlocked and that the girls were apparently closing the shop when “I would say they were killed one after another…” and that they probably were left “where they were shot, in the rear of the store.” After giving two call-in numbers, he issued a general plea, asking people who’d been in the store that evening to come forward.
There were interviews with Lanier students and teachers. By that afternoon, flowers and potted plants had been piled on the sidewalk in front of the ICBY shop, festooned with teddy bears and scribbled notes proclaiming love for the victims. Young people carrying candles paraded in front of the crime-scene tape. Girls screamed and cri
ed. Even weather did its part, winter darkness setting in early as El Niño rolled closer.
On Monday, the APD sent out a nationwide dispatch asking other police departments to contact them about similar crimes in their jurisdictions. This described the weapon used as a “small-caliber gun” and noted that the store was set on fire “to cover the crime.” Also revealed was that materials found at the store were used to bind the girls and to set the fire, and that there was no evidence of forced entry. Another front-page Statesman story quoted investigators as saying that some of the victims were tied up and that when firefighters arrived, the front door was locked but the back door was not.
That night, St. Louis the King held a Rosary for Sarah, Jennifer and Eliza, all Catholics. Skip Suraci asked that, in lieu of flowers, contributions be made to either the Lanier chapter of FFA or the Jennifer and Sarah Harbison FFA Scholarship Fund. An Amy Ayers FFA Fund would soon be established, as well.
Searching through the lingering muck, a DPS agent found the spent shell casing from the .380 pistol used to shoot Amy the second time in a clogged drain under the main sink, not far from her body. By then, Chuck Meyer had been in touch with ViCAP, which, after a thorough analysis, had discovered nothing on their database that matched a crime involving four young girls stripped, bound, gagged, arranged and burned. “It’s all yours,” an FBI agent told Jones, adding that if the APD hadn’t solved it in two to three weeks, well, good luck.
—
On Tuesday, Andy Waters told the Statesman that more than one person was involved in the killings and issued a warning to the perpetrators that while they might have believed that torching the shop would obliterate the evidence, “they were not successful,” a ploy used by all police departments to lure criminals and accomplices out of the woodwork. He also revealed that Amy Ayers had been shot twice; the other girls once, in the back of the head. And that the APD assumed the motive was robbery.
Who Killed These Girls? Page 7