But in Mexico, Deputy Attorney General José Luis Romero Apis stood firmly against extradition. Texas had the highest rate of executions in the United States, while in Mexico the maximum murder-rape penalty was fifty years, with a possible good-time reduction of one-third, even if there were multiple victims. Even if the men were convicted of all the Yogurt Shop charges, they could be out in thirty-five years.
When brought before reporters, handcuffed and without representation, Saavedra admitted to killing the girls. When asked why, he shook his head and then was quickly led away.
Jones called the families. There was, he warned, no telling what that confession would establish, exactly, so they should hold off believing anything they might hear. That same day, in a televised announcement, a Mexican official did exactly what Jones had feared by announcing that Saavedra had “forced the girls to submit, then he raped them, tied them up and shot them.”
Jones heard about this statement from the local news, but Huckabay, who was already in Mexico City, didn’t know about it until he called the home office. The APD had been careful not to mention rape, or the DNA found inside the girls’ vaginas, so for Homicide, this development was another setback.
“A feeling of helplessness went over us,” Jones recalled, deeming October 22 “Black Thursday.” Barbara Suraci described being sick to her stomach when she heard the statement. “You want to feel good about it, but it brings the reality back….”
When asked for an official response, the APD maintained a wait-and-see attitude. Meantime, Huckabay asked Chuck Meyer to join him in Mexico City to help out with the questioning, and Jones sent two Spanish-speaking detectives, Ociel Nava and Hector Reveles. At first they felt optimistic, Reveles testified during the Scott trial, and were hoping that this would be a “satisfactory conclusion to the case.” To speed up the process, he urged Jones to honor the Mexican request for full, uncensored autopsy reports.
But Jones refused. “If we’d have done that,” he reasoned, “they’d have had every piece of information they needed to charge them, try them, find them guilty, put them away for life. And we weren’t convinced they were even there.”
In his first interview with Huckabay and Reveles, Saavedra seemed to have little knowledge of the crime. Yes, he’d said, they’d killed girls at an ice-cream shop, but he didn’t know how many—three? And yes, they’d “mutilated the girls, cut up their breasts, arms and vaginas, tied them up with rope…”
By the end of the first day, Reveles was convinced “these persons were not responsible for the murders.”
Within three days of his confession, Saavedra recanted, repeatedly saying, “I didn’t do this.” Both he and Cortez, who was interviewed separately, claimed to have been tortured during the flight to Mexico City, with plastic bags pulled over their heads, threats to attack their families and violate their wives, daughters and sisters.
But nobody wanted to give up on these perfect suspects. By then Barnett had arrived, and he and Meyer kept scheduling polygraph tests, which were either postponed or canceled. And when they finally did manage to prep Cortez, he told them he would say nothing against his friend, that they’d shared a cell for weeks and had been in the same gang for much, much longer. “We are,” Saavedra informed the federal agents, “united as one.” Barnett unhooked the machine.
This calamitous investigation would continue for years, with no further progress. Cortez and Saavedra were eventually tried and convicted of the Cavity Club charges, but nobody in Austin seems to have heard about the outcome. Ricardo Hernandez was never apprehended.
We can’t always trust what suspects say, for obvious reasons, but in hindsight these two men sound convincing. When Huckabay and Reveles confronted Cortez with the testimony of a woman who said she’d seen him sitting in a car in the Hillside parking lot only minutes before the girls were killed, his (translated) answer was, “I wasn’t there. I didn’t see who did it….Perhaps you will find me guilty. I’m going to tell you this, I was never there and I never did any of that….It could have been someone that looked like me; I am not the only one who has long hair or the only car. Does she have a license plate? She should have given a license plate….They are going to dispose of my life…my time and my thoughts…and do you know what, you can give me the death penalty and…I am going to die telling the truth because I didn’t do anything.”
As for Saavedra, he simply said, “Just because I [am] a criminal…doesn’t mean I killed them. That’s not what that means. I know you are going to take me, but I will never say that I did something I did not do. This is a total waste….Since I am a criminal, then no one believes me.”
A year from now, Jones will ask the Mexican government to provide information on the status of the charges against these two. He will also ask about Ricardo Hernandez. More often than not, his requests will be ignored. The suspects and the cases were, as the Mexican attorney general had declared, their own business.
But Skip Suraci and other family members held on to their certainty: Those three thugs had killed their daughters. Some people still agree. “But didn’t the Mexicans do it?” they say to me. “Didn’t they have the real guys back at the beginning?”
ANNIVERSARY
All initial optimism had fallen away before long. More confessions and more tips, a bigger reward, even Barbara and Skip Suraci talking on Geraldo about establishing a new reward for information leading to Ricardo Hernandez’s arrest.
Homicide came in for more trouble, and even humiliation, when Ronnie Earle, Mayor Bruce Todd and incoming chief Elizabeth Watson held a joint press conference. Flanked by the two men, Watson stood there looking small but confident. At forty-three, she had short, curly hair and wore button earrings, a double-breasted suit jacket and a dark blouse with a bow at the neck. After a brief introduction, she handed things over to the DA, who announced from a prepared statement that because of recent incidents suggesting possible misconduct among investigators, all ninety pending homicide cases would be reviewed. This process, Earle assured the public, was not about one bad cop, but a general attitude throughout the unit that “the end justifies the means” and “anything goes.”
When it was her turn to speak, Watson—who hadn’t yet been sworn in—took the high road. “It is shocking to me,” she said, “that there could be this breach of ethics….I cannot fathom it.” That seemed quite a stretch, since she’d spent twenty years on the force in Houston, from street cop to chief, and must have seen and fathomed plenty of disagreeable things.
The reaction was immediate. Hector Reveles described the announcement as “demoralizing,” a “bombshell” and a “blanket indictment of the entire unit.” Since the APD divided its Crimes Against Persons Division into four components—Sex Crimes, Child Abuse, Homicide and Robbery—singling out one detail seemed particularly vexing. In addition to which, because cops were regularly transferred from one unit to another, which one were Earle and Watson referring to? The one handling Yogurt Shop?
For Earle, this was especially risky, given that prosecutors and cops are on the same team. He’d turned against his own players, some think because this might help establish him as hard-nosed if he ran for state attorney general.
The next day, the soon-to-be chief tried to cover her tracks by assuring the public and the APD that the current Homicide Unit wasn’t the problem, and, in fact, had been improved back in April when “certain individuals”—mentioning no names—had been transferred out. She also announced two new requirements, the first being mandatory supplemental narratives. These reports filled in the basic incident report with details: how many cops were there, who made the arrest, who did the interview, what happened next. Supplements were already part of the process, but because of funding cuts and reduced overtime pay, investigators often sloughed off the duty as the least important part of their job. Second, and perhaps more significant, Watson ordered that all interrogations be recorded in their entirety, by video or audiotape, to keep tabs on the unit’s tactics and t
o make everything as transparent as possible. Because the state’s case against Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott will rely almost exclusively on videotaped confessions, this new development will eventually play a crucial part in their arrests, indictments and trials.
In December, homicide cops received an administrative questionnaire divided into five sections: “Training,” “Inadequate Resources,” “Case Preparation and Review,” “Management/Personnel Deficiencies” and “Malfeasance.” Comprehensive answers to the questions posed in each were to be submitted by early January. A few cops like paperwork, but most despise it, and Watson was becoming more unpopular by the minute. The following day, she was sworn in as the first female police chief in Austin’s history. Introducing her, the mayor extolled her long stint in the Houston department and boasted that she came from a family of cops and was, he declared, a “cop’s cop.” Dressed in policeman’s blues, Watson said she was “fiercely proud” to serve Austin.
—
The months following the arrest of the Mexican nationals did not, of course, seem flat at the time, especially not to Jones, Huckabay and Meyer—and certainly not to the families. But looking back from some twenty-odd years out, the repetition and frustrations of the fall of 1992 into the winter of 1993 seem to have a predictable refrain: And then…nothing. Every time a promising possibility showed up—phone call, visit, scribbled note, hopeful message—it quickly evaporated. Nothing again.
There were still more than four thousand entries in the database. Daily, John Jones chose one to explore; when it didn’t pan out, he picked another. “The investigators in the yogurt case have lived with that case every day,” George Phifer, now the assistant chief, told a reporter. “They go to bed with it and wake up trying to solve [it].” Mike Huckabay’s twelve-year-old son asked him most every night, “Daddy, did you solve the yogurt case?” Then, in his dreams, he saw the dead girls again. Sometimes Jones couldn’t look the girls’ parents in the eye. Sorting through leads, he drifted into an “ozone layer,” where time blurred but the names and faces still jumped out at him. And he would ask himself the same questions again and again: What have I missed here? What is it I’m not getting? Huck, remember so-and-so? Did we clear him too soon? What about…
Jones’s supervisor, Ron Smith, tried to be upbeat. “Being a cop,” he said, “you can become pretty cynical. You see the worst side of people. But in this case, the community support has been overwhelming….When you’ve got twenty years of cynicism it helps bring you back to earth, that there is a good grain in humanity.”
But in Homicide, clearing a case is everything. What cops can’t bear is the possibility of a case never going to trial. “The only way you can face this,” Lt. David Parkinson commented, “is by thinking that someday, somewhere, you’ll find information that leads to solving it.”
Jones wasn’t sleeping. His marriage was falling apart. He paid little attention to his daughters. He was starting to withdraw into a small, dark shell.
—
On December 6, 1992, the Statesman ran a front-page story on the status of the year-old case, as well as a feature about the families, what it was like when Victims’ Services came to their door and what their lives had been like since then. They commented on the warmth and generosity of the police department and people from all over the city. They said how much they missed their daughters. When asked how he planned to get through the anniversary, Jones said he intended to sleep all day. And then he unearthed a previously unspoken fear. “What I dread,” he said, “is the trials. When I testify about how those girls died, for the families it’ll be December sixth all over again.”
Two days later, three Austin cops on a domestic-disturbance call fired twenty-eight shots at a twenty-three-year-old when, during a drunken fight with a girlfriend, he turned a pellet pistol in their direction. Seventeen shots hit home. The dead man’s relatives admitted that he’d made a mistake, but couldn’t they have shot him just once? Within a week, Betsy Watson voiced her support for the cops, who were not indicted. The APA reluctantly congratulated her for doing the right thing, but its gratitude didn’t last long. Within two months, Watson fired a ten-year veteran for use of excessive force in the beating of a fourteen-year-old suspect with a nightstick. This case had, in fact, preceded her. When the incident occurred in July, acting chief Phifer recommended a five-day suspension, but the cop’s attorney quickly said that five days was unwarranted. Obviously, Watson disagreed.
If the Yogurt Shop case had stalled, no wonder. The APD lacked leadership, constancy, solidarity. Homicide detectives were spending precious time answering the new chief’s questionnaire. By March, as the publisher of Texas Monthly conducted a tireless campaign against Elizabeth Watson, the APA had raised $21,000 with which to investigate her background. Within two years of her swearing-in, people were buying bumper stickers and T-shirts saying LIFE IS A BITCH…THEN YOU GET ONE FOR A POLICE CHIEF.
Austin Chronicle reporter Jordan Smith dubbed this the era of cop wars. Which continued for years.
FATHER CONFESSOR
It is time now to go back to February 1992 and the man who played an important role in those wars, Senior Sgt. Hector Polanco. As one local attorney declared, “If you want to know about APD Homicide in the eighties and nineties, you have to know about Polanco…the father figure of all the detectives who came in his stead…with the same ‘convict-at-any-cost’ mentality.” As Jones says, “Everybody had a Hector story. Everybody.”
Dark-eyed, handsome, supremely self-assured, Polanco was known for his sexual appeal and his interrogation skills, assets that aren’t unrelated. Beloved by Ronnie Earle for his record—100 percent clearance rate during his tenure—he had a special knack for obtaining confessions, often without evidence and almost always without producing any incriminating weapons.
According to some jailhouse and courtroom insiders, Polanco believed he’d been endowed with mystical powers that enabled him to pluck guilt from a suspect’s heart, especially when he was Latino. Mexican-American boys revered their mothers (Don’t shame her! Tell the truth!) and the Virgin Mary (She wants you to confess!) and were terrified of prison rape (You’re young, you’re new, they’ll have you.) and the enforced deportation of undocumented relatives (I can make it happen!). These characteristics gave Polanco the leverage he needed. In his community, he was known as “the Bogeyman” or “El Diablo.” Lawyers and cops called him “the Cobra.”
One defense attorney told me he loved calling Polanco to the stand, not so much for his testimony as how he delivered it, looking straight at the jury and focusing particularly on the females. “You could see the women melting under his gaze.”
Polanco was loved, hated, respected, distrusted and often feared. Everybody I talked to said Jones didn’t like him and that the hostility was returned, but when Jones was asked about this by APD Internal Affairs officers investigating a perjury charge against Polanco, he dodged the question.
APD: Do you like him?
JJ: Do I like him? I don’t understand that question.
APD: Do you like Hector as a person?
JJ: Yeah. I mean. Yeah.
APD: Do you respect him?
JJ: He’s my supervisor.
And when that question was repeated, Jones elaborated: “I’ve always done what Hector said because he’s supervisor.”
As a community, cops value solidarity beyond personal opinion, and Jones is no exception. He calls Thou shalt not speak ill of thy fellow officer the Eleventh Commandment.
—
Boys are important to this story. Many will come into it, some to lie through their teeth about where they were that night and who they were with—not to escape detection, but to attract it. Using leaked, rumored or reported information, they show up at the police station, declaring, I’m the one you’re looking for, and, when interviewed, go to great lengths to create a grisly description—drove a stake through her heart, gouged out her eyeballs, stuffed yogurt in her vagina, nailed her breas
t to the wall—that, while often wildly inaccurate, usually includes at least a few precise details. And because it’s a big part of their job, the cops listen.
Criminalists, social scientists and those who study aberrant behavior define false confession as an “admission to a criminal act that the confessor did not commit, usually followed by a narrative of how and why the crime occurred.” They divide these phony unburdenings into three categories, the first of which they call “voluntary.” To no one’s surprise, the APD heard a lot of these. After a splashy murder, people go haywire. Craving the spotlight, they will simply lie, passionately and with conviction. More often than not, they retract their statement once the polygraph machine appears.
The second kind, called “coercive-compliant,” usually occurs after an intense, often lengthy application of what to the suspect feels like intolerable pressure from an exterior source—an interrogating officer, for example. Most people who fall into this group say the same thing: I thought if I could just get out of that room and away from those guys pounding away at me, I could take a lie-detector test and give a DNA sample and prove I didn’t do it. This happens more often than you might imagine. People convince themselves that giving the examiner what he’s asking for is the most rational response they can come up with—a notion cited throughout recorded history. Tell me what you want me to say, victims plead, and I’ll say it.
Who Killed These Girls? Page 11