Who Killed These Girls?

by Beverly Lowry

  Gonzales’s story ran on the front page the next day, headlined, INVESTIGATOR SAYS ARRESTS IMMINENT IN TEEN KILLING.

  At Monday’s press conference, after assuring the public that the police department was doing everything possible, Everett issued a curt apology. John Jones must have been misquoted and would not have said “imminent.” The information they’d received had helped them eliminate several suspects, nothing more.

  Gonzales insisted the quote was accurate, that he had called Jones and read it back to him before the story ran. The chief made no further comment. Embarrassed, Jones stepped to the microphone and gave details of the FBI profile:

  1. More than one person was involved, one of them with a dominant personality.

  2. The assailants are probably white, in their late teens to mid-20’s.

  3. The one with the dominant personality in all probability did not finish high school. In school would have been considered an underachiever with less than average grades. Resents discipline, would have been a discipline problem for school officials and parents. Has an explosive personality, angers easily especially when drinking alcohol or using drugs. An impulsive person who acts without considering the consequences. Will engage in physical confrontation only when he has the advantage. Will not engage in any confrontation with adult male without friends present. Probably unemployed or working in a menial job. Will have a history of changing jobs, is not dependable as an employee with high degree of absenteeism. Lives in dependent relationship with older person, possibly a parent. Frequents the area of the ICBY shop. Familiar with the streets and stores in the area, probably a resident of neighborhood. Probably has a criminal record, may be abusive to women, may seek out women who are younger and “less adequate” than himself. Has no remorse about killing the victims but is under tremendous stress from fear of apprehension because crime may not have gone as planned. Also very concerned about loyalty of his accomplices because they may be feeling regret. Disharmony may be developing between the offenders as stress level rises as well as increased paranoia, because of which they may maintain close contact with each other in order to keep a close watch. In time this may change into a falling-out leading to violence.

  4. Immediately after leaving the crime scene, offenders would have gone to a secure location to clean up or change clothes, although the crime scene does not indicate they would have had a lot of blood on them.

  5. Offenders may have returned to the area that night to watch police and fire departments. Or they may have left town. May have missed some work days.

  That’s it, and of course this could describe a lot of aimless young men. As for apprehension is imminent, Jones swore years later that the FBI gave him the line as a strategy meant to encourage an informant or accomplice to come forward. “I did what the FBI told me to do,” he said, “and got slammed for it.”

  The FBI profile appeared in all Austin news outlets. The Statesman donated a full page to it, with MANY PEOPLE KNOW THIS KILLER, DO YOU? in blaring letters above it.

  What Jones didn’t tell his chief or the public was that, like ViCAP, the profilers had declared the Austin crime unique. The one that came the closest, they suggested, was the Atlanta child murders, and they weren’t that similar. Which meant their database had come up empty and the psychological profile was based on supposition.

  —

  The Sunday before, January 5, The Washington Post ran a long front-page story by biographer David Maraniss entitled “Parent, Child and Death’s Dominion; Texas Family’s Dreadful Pain Began with a Knock on the Door.” It began, “This is the saddest story any parent could ever tell.” Primarily an interview with Barbara and Skip Suraci—their first—it emphasized lyrics from Jennifer Harbison’s favorite Garth Brooks song, “The Dance”: “Yes, my life is worth the chance. I could have missed the pain but I’d have had to miss the dance.” It ended with a quote from Barbara Suraci: “Our house was a total disaster most of the time. We were never living up to our expectations of what life was supposed to be. We were noisy and always talking and doing things and arguing and going and going, and I never had enough time. And, damn, I miss that. I miss never having enough time. Now I have so much.”

  Two days later, the Post ran a follow-up that covered the FBI profile and Everett’s press conference. Over the next few months, there will be stories and photos in the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today and People. Later in the spring, The New York Times will quote an Austin public school counselor as saying, “It’s been very hard on some kids to accept the idea that a place like a yogurt shop or a cafeteria can suddenly become a scene of violence. It makes them aware not just of death but of danger. It produces both grief and anxiety…and can push them to self-destructive or violent behavior.”

  Locally, there was no stopping the repercussions. Cashing in on Yogurt Shop and Colleen Reed’s kidnapping, a suspended Austin lawyer running for Travis County sheriff promised that if elected, he would form a people’s posse to “get together and attempt to find out who these killers are.” When the city manager was asked about the local crime rate, she flatly stated that Austin’s number-one enemy was drugs, and crack cocaine an epidemic. Mayor Todd declared the 7 percent rise in murders “disturbing,” something that “sort of shatters the myth that Austin is a small community where violent crime doesn’t occur.”

  Toward the end of the month, Jones composed another long memo, on the one hand thanking Chief Everett for the additional personnel and on the other wondering how fifteen investigative and support personnel were supposed to operate in a “space designed to hold 9 on a good day,” sharing desks, phones, files, computers and storage space. And there was also the issue of curtailed overtime pay—an economic measure put into effect by the city council, about which Jones pulled no punches. “Attempting to hold us to 20 hours a week overtime is paramount to answering ‘No’ to the question, ‘Do you really want to solve this case?’ ”

  Eight weeks in, they were still interviewing customers and employees. Jones continued to maintain solid rapport with the families, as a result of which they’d cooperated in every way he’d asked them to, including not speaking to the press or filing a civil lawsuit against Brice. But he hadn’t had time to take affidavits regarding their daughters’ clothing and daily routines. He and his assistant were able to keep up with paperwork—managing a six-hundred-name database, looking for suspects, tips, witnesses, customers, family, not to mention additional law-enforcement personnel—thanks to equipment donated by IBM and CompuAdd. But there were still approximately fifty potential witnesses they hadn’t had time to interview. For this investigative unit to evolve into a true task force, he needed a separate work space with enough offices for investigators, supervisors and the case agent, as well as conference and interview rooms, furniture, mainframe terminals, ten telephone lines, a fax line, a tips line…the list went on and on.

  By February 1, he’d been given everything he’d asked for.

  In years to come, when offered the opportunity to criticize his supervisors, Jones refuses. “The chief, the mayor, the DA? They gave us whatever we needed,” he’ll say again and again. “A task force? We got it. Equipment? Offices? Yes. Everybody wanted to see this case solved and nobody wanted to go on record as the one who stood in the way.”

  In the meantime, Chuck Meyer exploited his access to federal agencies and their information, including the newly created (1989) CODIS database (Combined DNA Index System), to check out leads from all over the country: from Waco, where he interviewed a convicted serial killer, to Florida, to talk to another one, to San Marcos, to speak to a young man whose violent episodes included raping his little sister. He also traveled to Las Cruces, New Mexico, where in 1990 two people carrying small-caliber pistols had herded seven others into an office at a bowling alley and restaurant, made them all lie facedown and shot them one by one in the back of the head; after robbing the business of five thousand dollars, the killers set the building on fire. While acknowledging the similar
ities between the two cases, federal agents couldn’t see how to connect them. Whenever a Crime Stoppers bulletin prompted calls—from Michigan (Kalamazoo), Virginia (Roanoke and Manassas) and elsewhere in Texas (Killeen), one of which involved a man who’d been in Austin on December 6 and had threatened a female with a small silver gun—Meyer set off again, often accompanied by FBI polygrapher Jack Barnett. They went everywhere and got only garbage possibilities.

  BILLBOARDS

  Later in February, a local sign company donated twelve public-service billboards for three months. People driving to work looked up and there they were, as familiar as family. Lined up across the top of the sign were black-and-white yearbook photographs: on the far left, dark-eyed Eliza, head dipped fetchingly to one side, long hair falling down the side of her face; next to her, young Amy with a formal straight-on smile, chin resting in her cupped palm, a big watch on her left wrist; then serious Sarah, her big eyes lit up with that skeptical “Oh yeah?” expression; and on the far right, tiny, electric Jennifer, pretty as a fairy-tale heroine, long hair rolling down her face in springy curls.

  Beneath the photos, an angry slash of red spanned the sign, within it a stark question in white: WHO KILLED THESE GIRLS? Below that, Brice’s $25,000 reward and the number of the tips line. There was no need to give the girls’ names or say anything else. Everybody already knew.

  On Amy Ayers’s birthday, Burnet Middle School planted a fifteen-foot crepe myrtle in her memory. The Lanier High School FFA voted in a new president to take Jennifer Harbison’s place. Friends of Amy and the Harbison sisters volunteered to show their animals at the livestock show; Eliza’s sister, Sonora, would show Stony. A psychic from California called to say that the main offender was afraid of roller coasters but rode them all the time. More hold-back information was leaked, which, according to one defense attorney, should have come as no surprise, since so many people were in and out of the crime scene that night, “chock-full of what they know or think they know.” Jones tracked down three of the leaks, including one that involved a woman who’d heard about the ice scoop and the arrangement of the bodies from her hairdresser, who also did the hair of someone in the ME’s office, and who herself was the mother of a suspect who’d subsequently included that information in his “confession.”

  The first two homicides of 1992 occurred during crack-cocaine transactions, one in the backyard of a rumored dope house, the other after an argument in the street. The next two were less predictable: the shooting deaths of two brothers, ages eight and twelve, while their mother was in the shower. Hearing the shots, she stepped from the bathroom to find her boys dead and the seventeen-year-old killer still in the room. She wrestled him to the floor. After telling her he’d been feeling like killing somebody since December, he broke loose but was quickly captured a few houses away. Huckabay talked to the culprit but found no connection with Yogurt Shop.

  End of February, into March. As the three-month anniversary approached, Jones assured the chief that “EVERYTHING THAT CAN BE TRIED IS, INCLUDING SOME THINGS THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN TRIED AND THAT GO AGAINST THE PREVIOUS CONVENTIONAL WISDOM OF HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION IN THIS DEPARTMENT” (his caps and underlining).

  When I asked him about possible motive, he said he wasn’t interested in why, just who. The hope was, the FBI profile as well as its interview guide with its “Indicators of Innocence vs. Others” would help, if not locate the actual killers, at least narrow the field.

  —

  Soon after the signs went up, Jones heard from CBS News producer Jon Klein, who wanted to shoot a 48 Hours episode about the “yogurt murders” and “the community and the fears triggered by a few sensational cases.” He sent a videotape of the show they’d done on the Luby’s massacre so that the APD could get an idea of the kind of access they needed. Within a week, Klein had visited Austin and persuaded Chief Everett and the mayor to allow police participation during two to three days of taping. The city also provided the CBS crew not just with an office but with full access to the department’s Homicide Unit, which was extremely unusual in an open investigation.

  In late March, CBS aired “Who Killed These Girls?” the first of three 48 Hours episodes featuring Yogurt Shop. As the opening credits ran, the voice of veteran newscaster Dan Rather introduced that night’s theme: “Four all-American teens, executed. A crack police squad desperate to solve the case. And a city on edge, frightened by a new reality: it can happen here.” Rather himself then appeared, sitting at a glass-topped table and surrounded by photographs taken at several different crime scenes as well as by the billboard portraits of the ICBY girls.

  “Are you safe,” he asked, looking square into the camera lens, “sitting where you are right now? The people of Austin thought they were, until one horrifying night brought home the truth: there is no safe haven anymore.” And he went on to cite an FBI report from the previous year indicating an “alarming” rise in violent crime in the suburbs, “the very place Americans have sought sanctuary from big-city fears.” Tonight, he told viewers, they’d be joining the investigation into the murders of four innocent girls, “to see what crime in America is doing to families, communities, even the tough cops who live with it every day.”

  Reporter Erin Moriarty, who will host each of the ICBY episodes, then appears on-screen. “It started out,” she begins, “as just another night in Austin, Texas, for homicide sergeant John Jones…when a call came in that would change his life.” A strain of dramatic music is interrupted by the crackle of Jones’s mobile and a video of his car flashing its rooftop warning lights. Then there he is at the wheel, filmed from the backseat by the KTBC videographer, talking to the reporter over his shoulder as his siren wails and I-35 exit signs flash by. Suddenly, his mobile, clamped to the dash, lights up.

  “Jonesy,” a voice calls out. “Make that four.”

  Falling back on the “sleepy town” stereotype, Moriarty echoes Rather’s warning: Although Austin was known as a place people moved to so they could feel safe, they might well discover that beneath what seemed like the placid surface of everyday life there roiled an “undercurrent of violence.” To illustrate this, Moriarty runs through the chronology—Troy Gay’s discovery of the smoke, the fire department, the water, the discovery of one body and then another, the call to Jones—while video clips show firefighters and cops in black slickers moving in and out of the shop and, eventually, the money shot: two people from the morgue struggling to heave a body bag onto a stretcher.

  The scene then shifts to the new task-force offices, where we see Jones at work, Huckabay taking a call (“Whadd’ya got?”), Chuck Meyer pacing nervously behind the others, Hector Polanco at a table overrun with incident reports and printouts from the database Jones has created. When interviewed, Huckabay acknowledges that Homicide is taking this crime particularly seriously because of the age of the girls, and because “if we don’t catch the guy, he wins.” Barbara Suraci, Maria Thomas, Bob and Pamela Ayers make brief appearances. There are heartbreaking home videos of the girls, tussling, laughing, tending livestock. We see Jones at his desk in earbuds and hear what he’s listening to—an operatic aria.

  At the time, Homicide’s focus was on the Satanists, a circumstance that fed directly into the show’s undercurrent-of-violence theme. In one scene, Moriarty and a cameraman accompany Jones, Huckabay and other cops in a raid on the small home of a reputed high priestess of darkness who called herself Claire Lavaye, after the founder of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey. But the raid proved a bust and a public embarrassment for the cops when the woman was discovered naked and alone in her bed—taking a battery-powered time-out from the rigors of life—and the skull on her mantel turned out to be a clay doodad. Other bones in her collection were in fact real but came from rats and squirrels. Although nobody said so, the obvious conclusion was that the APD was very wide of the mark, and that while this woman might have been involved in some offbeat graveyard capers, she was no murderer.

  The show also touched on Colleen
Reed. There were clips of the Fifth Street car wash and an interview with her sister, who had repeatedly accused the APD of ineptitude and a halfhearted investigation. Other segments dealt with a drug deal gone wrong as well as the unsolved murder of Harold Carter, who’d been robbed and killed only four months before Yogurt Shop as he walked from his car to the furniture store where he’d worked for twenty-eight years.

  Local CBS affiliate KTBC-TV also ran studio interviews with Barbara Suraci and the Ayerses, who said there were things they thought they’d put behind them which got stirred up again. “It is just a reality,” Bob Ayers went on, “and you’ve got to face it.” Suraci said when they saw the girls’ pictures hanging in the APD offices, it touched her heart, “because I know those people are working so hard to help us find the murderers of our babies.” Maria Thomas watched at home with Sonora. “Like pouring salt in the wound,” she later commented.

  Overnight ratings ranked the undercurrent-of-violence episode among the ten most watched in the show’s four-year history. Hundreds of new tips rolled in, many focusing on the occult, which by the time the show aired had become pretty much a moot point, and local teenager Maggie Halliday remembers being called from her junior high class to talk to an FBI agent—in her view, a big joke. She and her black-garbed friends buckled on spiky dog collars, dyed their hair blue and colored their lips black because they wanted to be different. They never, she added, called themselves PIBs. They thought of themselves as part of the Austin party scene and a force to counteract the “We’re so liberal and love everybody” Austin bullshit. But their difference had made them vulnerable. “Little Dracula hippies walking down the street are pretty easy to spot,” said another girl.