So, little by little, information seeped out and rumors spread, providing those who yearned for notoriety a credible base for a detailed confession and forcing the APD to modify the hold-back list.
Also on Tuesday, Mayor Bruce Todd attended the girls’ funeral, as did Chief of Police Jim Everett and a number of school officials. Speaking from behind four matching white caskets, the Reverend Kirby Garner officiated before an estimated one thousand people inside St. Louis the King, with another five hundred on the lawn outside. “It’s not just Austin,” he declared. “This is happening all over the country….When we point the finger at the culprit, three fingers are pointing back at us…the individual, the community and the society.”
Barbara Suraci—who had worked with Child Inc., an organization that focuses on early childhood education and care—agreed. Whoever did this, she suggested in a remarkable display of compassion, had not been loved enough. “We have to love our children from the first day.”
The funeral procession to Capital Memorial Gardens was said to extend for five miles. Three of the girls were buried side by side. When grief rendered Maria Thomas unable to make a decision, her ex-husband made it for her, and Eliza was buried in Austin Memorial Park Cemetery, closer to where her parents lived. Brice had covered the funeral expenses, but some years later, when Maria expressed regret at not having had her daughter buried with the other girls, Barbara Ayres-Wilson looked into the cost of exhuming Eliza’s body and moving it. But Maria still couldn’t decide, and the idea soon lost immediacy.
The APD videotaped the funeral services in case the criminals showed up, whether out of curiosity, pride or remorse. They also planted a still watch—cops doing surveillance—at the graves.
Within days, the city had gone even crazier, spouting rumors, theories and surefire clues. It seemed everybody knew somebody who’d been acting weird, a kid who came home with blood on his shirt, a boy who liked to set fires, another creepy-looking person at the yogurt shop. A teenage girl came in and explained that her boyfriend had left their apartment at ten-thirty on the night of the killings and didn’t come back until one in the morning, sweating and nervous and anxious to change his clothes. Young people sat around imagining how the thing had gone down. When some boasted how they would’ve done it if they’d had a mind to, others made mental notes and some called the tips line to report the conversation. And when Mike Huckabay made the comment about crack cocaine, everybody knew what that meant—the black man’s drug. To score in Austin, you went to the east side, around Chicon and Twelfth streets, miles away from West Anderson Lane and the ICBY shop.
On Wednesday, a theme was born in another front-page Statesman story: “Austin buried a part of its innocence Tuesday.” The mayor quickly seized upon it. “We think of it,” he told the St. Petersburg Times, “as innocence lost for Austin. Not that we haven’t had violent crimes before, but this took out four young girls in their prime.” And then he rolled out a larger premise: “I think people realized more than anything else that it could happen to them. It could happen in the most innocent place to the most innocent people.”
The battle was between innocent and weird, familiar and suspicious, certainty and mystery. After being hauled in for questioning, one young member of the so-called people in black said, “It was a bizarre crime and so they questioned the most bizarre-looking people in town and I was one.”
On Thursday, December 12, in a telephone survey, the Statesman asked its readers to answer two questions: “Have you changed your habits or lifestyle out of concern about crime?” and “Have you or has someone you know in Austin been a victim of a crime during the last two years?” Participants could help construct a theory, not about who they thought the murderers were but on what effect the killings were having on the city.
To some, the concept of innocence seemed a little too convenient. In Austin in 1983 in the early-morning hours, somebody had doused opposite corners of the first floor of a boardinghouse with an accelerant, probably gasoline, and flicked a match. Four people were killed, all Latinos, as were the other residents. Nobody spoke much English. This happened on the east side, in what was considered the Mexican part of town. The only Spanish-speaking policeman in APD Homicide at the time, Juan Gonzalez, was overwhelmed and eventually gave up looking for the perpetrator. Besides, he said, no families came forward pushing for the case to be solved. “Nobody knew them,” said a neighbor of the victims.
This article had run in the B section of the Statesman, with only one follow-up until a 1993 story contrasted the lack of interest in this arson-murder to the nonstop focus on Yogurt Shop. The boardinghouse was torn down and replaced by an apartment building; the original address no longer exists, and the arsonist has never been found.
As Jones says, “Yogurt Shop wasn’t about innocence. It was about crime comes to West Austin.”
DARK DAYS, BLACK NIGHTS
The bad news kept coming. On December 14, APD Homicide was called out again when a father and son were found stabbed to death in their South Austin apartment, each knifed more than a dozen times—savagery that led detectives to look for Yogurt Shop connections. But the killer, an unemployed chemist and their housemate, was quickly apprehended when, during the investigation of a bank robbery committed that same day, his license plate number was discovered. He still had the knife on him but also had a solid alibi for December 6.
Two days later, the Statesman’s front-page story, “The Spark of Fear,” reported on the telephone surveys. Callers said Austin wasn’t the place it used to be. Not long ago, girls could go anywhere without fear. Now you couldn’t trust anybody. A lot of people blamed drugs, especially crack cocaine. Some said it wasn’t just Austin, that murder could happen anywhere. Look at Killeen just two months ago, when George Hennard crashed his pickup truck into the front window of a Luby’s Cafeteria and opened fire with a Glock and a Ruger, stalking and killing twenty-three people and injuring another twenty before shooting himself in the head. The owner of the Cutting Edge gun shop said that since Yogurt Shop he was getting fifteen to twenty calls a day asking about the legality of carrying a gun or arming employees. People were putting burglar bars on their windows and alarms in their cars. According to realtors, women were requesting second-floor apartments. One mother said she was worried for her child. “What has happened to our little city?” she’d asked her own reflection in the bathroom mirror. An angry young man said he was taking his family and leaving. “We want to get the hell out of this town,” he said. “We moved here twelve years ago. Austin was beautiful. You didn’t worry about gangs or anything.”
Gangs? many citizens wondered.
Statistically, with a population of 465, 622, Austin was still among the safest in the country among cities of comparable size. In 1991, Fort Worth homicides totaled 180, Cleveland 183, and New Orleans topped the list with 313. By the middle of December, Austin had fifty-two.
Much of the self-protection rush wouldn’t last, nor would the emphasis on workplace safety. But the mood of the city had shifted, and more dark surprises were in store before the end of the year: another murder and a shocking abduction at a downtown car wash.
As if in kinship with these dark events, El Niño disproved the predictions. On Wednesday, December 18, the day Jones ordered the removal of the ICBY crime-scene tape, a thundering Pacific system dumped an inch and a half of rain into the region’s saturated river basin. Rainstorms that fill rocky-bottomed creek beds and cause flash floods are not uncommon in central Texas, especially along the Balcones Escarpment, but they usually hit in late spring. The Christmas Flood of 1991 shattered all records.
On Friday the twentieth, the father and son knifed to death by the chemist were buried at Travis County International Cemetery in paupers’ graves. A newspaper article began, “The rain was unrelenting, the gray skies somber, as a dozen friends huddled beneath umbrellas….” No relatives of the two men—who, it turned out, were using pseudonyms—had been located. Friends from the neighborhood
insisted on having a graveside ceremony despite the weather, but the matching metal caskets were wrapped in plastic and left in the hearses. One man offered to give a eulogy he’d written, but he couldn’t read it because the words smeared and ran “like the tears on the friends’ faces.”
Five inches fell on that day. By Christmas Eve, more than fourteen inches had fallen, breaking the previous monthlong record of 5.91 inches, set in 1944. Lake Travis crested at 710 feet. Ten people died, most in flash-flood accidents, some sitting in their cars at a low-water crossing despite the frequent EMS warnings to “Turn Around. Don’t Drown.” The governor called for federal disaster relief, and the National Weather Service deemed the storms “catastrophic.” And when Shoal Creek overran its banks, the APD lost any opportunity of finding a gun or any other evidence left along its banks.
Between his office and his home in northwest Austin, John Jones had to drive through pounding rain, flooded streets and wild jabs of lightning, sometimes in the dark hours of very early morning.
—
On the morning of Sunday, December 29, as church bells rang and Austin looked toward the end of a troubled year, its fifty-third murder arrived when twenty-two-year-old Brenda Lee Anderson was shot three times at the Studio M massage parlor, where she worked. The killer—said to be a big man wearing a cowboy hat—was seen fleeing in a white pickup truck, and that was the end of it. Her killer was never found.
That afternoon, Jones—now concentrating exclusively on Yogurt Shop—followed a hot tip about a black man named Cornelius, who, friends said, had been bragging about killing white girls. Given his history as a reputed drug dealer and former member of the L.A. Crips, Jones had him brought in. But Cornelius, too, had a solid alibi, which the APD confirmed.
And just when it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, they did.
On that same Sunday, the rain let up, but the night was unpleasant and cold, the air heavy with dampness. At about nine-fifteen, Colleen Reed, a twenty-eight-year-old accountant, pulled her small black Mazda into a popular twenty-four-hour self-service car wash on West Fifth Street. She’d done volunteer work at the Lower Colorado River Authority phone bank that morning, taking emergency calls from people whose houses were flooded out or without power. Afterward, she attended Mass, had lunch with her boyfriend and went home to take a nap. That evening, she’d driven downtown to make a deposit at an ATM and shop at Whole Foods Market on North Lamar. Then she decided her car needed a wash. After parking in the third bay, she stepped out, slid coins into the water and soap dispensers and unhooked a wand from the appropriate canister, leaving her purse and groceries on the front seat. There were no other customers.
That area was especially well lit, since one of the city’s moonlight towers stood 165 feet above it, casting a silvery white light over a radius of about seven blocks. Such towers were popular across the country during the mid- to late 1800s, but only Austin still uses them. According to local historians, they were erected downtown in 1894, after a number of maids and servants had been raped, disfigured and murdered nearby, and it was hoped they would discourage the killer, who was never apprehended. But in 1991, fifteen of these “moon towers,” as they were popularly called, remained standing, and this one, on Sixth Street at West Lynn, was within two blocks of the car wash.
On a nearby front porch, four people saw a tan Thunderbird driving west on Fifth Street and yelled, “One way!” But the car kept going. From their position, they could see the vacuum canisters at the car wash but little else. They heard a scream and a car door slamming shut. Then the Thunderbird reappeared, going the wrong way—east—on Sixth. The witnesses were slack-jawed. What the hell?
When the police arrived, Colleen Reed’s car was still sitting in the third bay with the driver’s door open. On the front seat, her purse, groceries and an ATM receipt were covered in soapsuds. Her identity was easily established. But she herself was gone.
In certain respects, this abduction was almost as shocking as Yogurt Shop. What did the abductors want if they didn’t take her money or her car?
Austin closed out 1991 with Colleen Reed’s whereabouts and status still unknown. On New Year’s Day, when the Statesman asked John Jones about prospects for 1992, his response echoed the pessimism of a lot of residents. “It ain’t looking good….The light at the end of the tunnel? It’s the headlights of a train. [Nineteen ninety-one’s] been a bad year. A real bad year.”
Was this Austin?
UNTIL THIS CASE IS SOLVED
On January 3, Jones wrote Police Chief Jim Everett a long, forthright memo. It began: “The investigation of the I.C.B.Y. Murder has been in progress now for 3 days shy of 1 month. The volume of phone tips has slowed to approximately 10 per day, down from a high of 50 to 75 per day the first two weeks of the investigation. Homicide is in the process of re-verifying all the call-ins, making sure no lead has slipped through unchecked.” Three promising leads, he explained, had already fizzled under scrutiny, none able to go beyond what was common knowledge about the crime scene.
To date, he continued, the team had interviewed all merchants in the shopping center, all customers who were at the shop between eight o’clock and closing, all area bus operators from Cap Metro, the victims’ families and boyfriends. They had also inspected area phone calls within a thirty-day period as well as traffic tickets from that night and videotapes of the girls’ funeral service. Most important, information about the crime had been submitted to the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, which had created a “personality profile” of the offenders. Led by nationally acclaimed Judson Ray, members of the unit had arrived in Austin that very day to discuss their findings and suggest how to use the press to draw out one or more of the offenders. Pending those discussions, plans to spotlight the crime on Unsolved Mysteries and America’s Most Wanted were on hold. As a side note, Jones further advised the chief that although he spoke with the families of the girls twice a week and so far they had the utmost confidence in the APD, their frustration was growing.
That was the catch-up part of the memo. Then Jones got down to it. Manpower, he declared, was his biggest single problem. While the four uniformed patrolmen assigned to the investigation had been invaluable, it was Jones’s understanding that they’d leave the team that day. “Now we are in trouble. It is a simple matter of numbers, we (Homicide) start out with only 6 investigators, 2 are on nights which leaves 4 investigators to continue this case and still handle the other murders, suicides and deceased persons continuing to come in. I need at least 4 investigators totally dedicated to this case and this case only for at least 60 days or until ‘it is solved,’ whichever comes first. I appreciated the patrolmen, but they are patrolmen. What this case needs now is experienced investigators to continue follow-ups and interrogations of suspects and witnesses.”
He summed up:
1. The F.B.I. will be assisting us with bringing an extreme amount of psychological pressure to bear on the suspect. It is therefore important that an experienced investigator screen all calls from here out and personally handle the call-ins.
2. An experienced investigator will be better able to evaluate a potential witness as to whether or not he has useful information or just hearsay.
3. The F.B.I. will be providing us with a list of 14 to 18 questions for any suspect that will tell whether or not he has information pertinent to the case or not.
4. D.P.S. lab was able to narrow down one of the guns used to an exact brand name. The pawn shops were searched for this gun and need to be searched again, then sellers/purchasers interviewed.
—
The manpower issue was something both the FBI and DPS had urged him to address immediately. As they saw it, the case needed at least five investigators: Jones as case agent to keep up with paperwork and act as liaison between the three agencies; the other four to handle the actual investigation. For a pro, clearing a suspect took up to eight hours. The three mentioned earlier had required between thirty-six and seventy-two.
In response, Chief Everett made an official announcement that, to bring the Yogurt Shop case to a close, he was giving Sgt. John Jones the opportunity to create an officially sanctioned task force, made up of an alphabet soup of representatives from APD, AFD, BATF, FBI, Texas DPS Intelligence, TCSO (Travis County Sheriff’s Office) and the Travis County DA’s office. Its goal: to identify, arrest and prosecute those responsible for the murders of the four girls by developing a “major crime assessment based on an in-depth examination of the details of the crime,” as well as to provide the expertise of the FBI Behavioral Science Unit, which would filter crime scene details through its database of ten thousand murders nationwide and create the personality profile. The press would play its part by presenting this profile to the public.
Jones referred to the group from Quantico as “the Silence of the Lambs folks,” after the best-selling 1988 thriller. Within a month of the FBI’s arrival in Austin, the film version would open as a huge box-office hit, enabling moviegoers to toss profiling terms into a conversation as casually as if they had the expertise down pat.
For most of us, profiling seems a stretch. How predictable is behavior? Can we pin particular acts of violence on certain life experiences? The idea is thrillingly seductive: figure out what kind of person would or would not commit a specific crime, exclude the latter—even those who’d confessed—and eventually you’d zero in on the perpetrator. When I asked Jones if this really works, his answer was a simple “Hell, yes.” One of the lead defense attorneys told me the same thing.
The meeting with the FBI team lasted all day. Late that afternoon, having been prepped by the experts, Jones talked to Statesman reporter Enrique Gonzales.
The Behavioral Science people, he told Gonzales, “helped us focus, sift through and evaluate” the case. Things were “real positive” now, he said, and he didn’t think the current situation would drag on much longer. “It would be safe to say an apprehension is imminent. We are confident about what happened today.” The APD had even scheduled a news conference for the following Monday, the one-month anniversary, at which time Police Chief Everett would reveal the FBI’s official findings. And, further, “we may have some names to name.”
Who Killed These Girls? Page 8