In the third category, the suspect becomes so thoroughly persuaded of his guilt that he actually begins to hear and see himself in the act of committing an offense he previously had no memory of. This one, called “coerced-internalized,” is the rarest of the three and can be invoked only by an investigator with special gifts.
Like Hector Polanco.
In 1988, during one of his best-known cases, he questioned Christopher Ochoa, a twenty-two-year-old intelligent Mexican-American boy who, along with his friend Richard Danziger, was a suspect in the brutal, high-profile rape and murder of Nancy DePriest, a young woman working at a local Pizza Hut. Polanco invited Ochoa into the interview room; somebody else took the other boy. That was before Betsy Watson became chief, so the interrogations weren’t taped.
At first (according to Ochoa) hoping to “get this Chicano bond thing,” Polanco spoke to him in Spanish. Danziger was about to talk, he told him, and when he did, he’d be the one to “get the deal.” But when Ochoa answered in English, his interrogator switched.
Hispanics like us, he assured him, always get shafted; the white guy gets the deal. When Ochoa said he didn’t know what he was talking about, Polanco showed him the autopsy photos. And when Ochoa still denied having taken part, Polanco told him he was tired of the bullshit and was going to go ahead and book him, that he was young and fresh and the other inmates were going to “have” him. Then he pointed his finger into the crook of his own arm and said, “Right there. That’s where they’ll put the needle.”
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Years later, Ochoa described what that moment was like for him. “You’re just like shaking because you don’t know. If you knew, you’d tell him because you don’t want to die….You’re thinking, I don’t want to die; I got to think of something.”
He signed a statement. Then he signed another, implicating Danziger. The last step was to convince him to take the stand, which Polanco and his colleagues accomplished by telling Ochoa they didn’t think he was the main guy, just the lookout, and that if he agreed to finger Danziger, he wouldn’t get the death penalty. “Okay,” he told the cops, “yeah, I was the lookout.” There was no evidence tying either boy to the crime, but Ochoa’s lawyer pleaded him out, swapping his testimony for a life sentence. Danziger, on the other hand, maintained his innocence throughout his interrogation and trial, though after Ochoa testified against him in excruciating detail, even his own lawyer considered him guilty. Danziger also received a life sentence.
Six years later, a Texas inmate decided to clear his conscience by writing letters to the APD and the Austin American-Statesman, confessing that he had raped and shot DePriest. Achim Josef Marino backed up his statement with details that included the whereabouts of the stolen Pizza Hut money bag, the handcuffs he’d forced on the young woman and the gun he’d used to shoot her. But because of ingrained prosecutorial reluctance to back down from a conviction, nothing happened. A year later, Marino sent another letter, this one addressed to Governor George W. Bush, Travis County DA Ronnie Earle and the APD. This time, a cop and a Texas Ranger were sent to interview Christopher Ochoa.
Fearing a trick, the distrustful young inmate refused to retreat from his confession until a lawyer convinced him to ask for a DNA test. Results were definite: Both he and Danziger were excluded as suspects and, in 2001, released after twelve years in prison. Achim Marino’s DNA was a match, and the items he mentioned were found in his mother’s house in El Paso, exactly where he said they’d be. But by then Danziger had been attacked by a fellow inmate who came at him while he was watching television, threw him to the floor and kicked him repeatedly in the head with the pointed ends of his steel-toed boots. Parts of Danziger’s brain had to be removed, leaving him permanently damaged. The convict with those boots offered a lame excuse: He’d gone after the wrong guy.
Attempting to explain why he confessed to a heinous crime he didn’t commit, Christopher Ochoa has said, “It’s like you don’t have a choice. Life sentence, death penalty. Life sentence in prison…you’re going to die a slow death at an old age—or you’re going to die in the death chamber. It was no choice. You’re twenty-two years old. What do you do?”
John Jones provided the cop’s perspective: “People say they’d never confess to something they didn’t do. Until you get put into a six-by-six room with no windows and two armed guys going at you, you don’t know what you’d do.”
According to the Innocence Project, between 1989—when DNA testing was first used in this country in a postconviction appeal—and 2013, some 308 men and women have been set free, 29 of whom had served time on death row. Most of the convictions were based on false or improper forensic evidence, prosecutorial misconduct, incorrect eyewitness accounts or false confessions.
As a homicide supervisor and a member of Jones’s team, Polanco had considerable influence on the Yogurt Shop case, and by early February of 1992, he’d already come up with a credible confession. He’d been on early-morning duty when a tip came in from the Del Valle jail, where an inmate had reported overhearing a fellow prisoner, Shawn “Buddha” Smith, brag about having “done” the yogurt girls. Polanco had Smith brought downtown and then interrogated him alone, in a room with no recording device. Six hours later, he emerged with a signed statement.
He called Jones and Jones called Jack Barnett, who prepared to fly in from Quantico, and soon everybody was thinking this nightmare was, by God, about to get solved. Jones even asked ADA Terry Keel to initiate indictment procedures to take to the grand jury. Later that day, Barnett hooked Buddha Smith up to a polygraph machine.
As the test was about to begin, Smith backed down. What if he’d made it all up? Still suspicious, Jones had the polygraph run anyway, and it showed discrepancies, holes, deception. Barnett flew back to Virginia. But the confession had a good many details right, which confirmed Homicide’s worry that leaks had spread so widely that there was no chance of differentiating between what any single person knew and what he merely had heard about.
Why did Shawn Smith sign this document? After six hours with Polanco, he believed what the detective had told him. He could actually see himself and his friends at the yogurt shop, raping and killing.
A month later, in March, another young man—Alex Briones, previously arrested but not yet tried for tying a sixty-year-old woman to a chair, then raping her and burning her to death—also confessed to the Yogurt Shop Murders, once again during an interview conducted by Polanco without witnesses or a recording device. He then called Jones and Huckabay, and Huck got there first. This time, they definitely had their man, Polanco told him, but there was one small problem: Briones wouldn’t talk to anyone except him. Ignoring Polanco’s seniority, Huckabay stood his ground: If somebody else didn’t hear the statement, it wouldn’t stand up in court.
Polanco was forced to relent. By now, Jones had arrived.
Ten years later, during the Michael Scott trial, Huckabay described his own interview technique. “What I do is just…continue to talk with them, and just by the grace of God…every one of them will eventually say something that, bam, strikes a nerve and…once you get that, then you can just start attacking another way.”
The first thing he asked Briones was about the four girls. “Four?” Briones said. “I thought there were three.” Jones says Huckabay came out in a state. “Hector?” he said. “This guy don’t know jack.” And that Polanco resisted. “Wait right here,” he said. Then he went back in, came out and said, “Okay, he’s ready now.” So Huckabay gave it another try, but Briones wouldn’t sign a statement until he talked to Polanco one more time.
By then, Barnett was on the scene and had begun setting up the polygraph test, when suddenly Briones coughed up the truth: He’d been threatened and told what to say. When pressed, he fingered Polanco. But he wondered, since he had committed another crime, couldn’t his family—who’d turned him in—still get the reward money for these killings? He had a brother who was dying of AIDS and they could use the cash.
&nb
sp; Within ten days of the Briones interrogation, Hector Polanco was taken off Yogurt Shop and in September would be fired on grounds of suspicion of perjury, misuse of authority and witness tampering during a different arrest. In retaliation, he immediately sued the city for racism and was reinstated by acting chief Phifer, who, allegedly, was hoping this might help him win the job that soon went to Betsy Watson.
Over the years, Polanco will get promotions and eventually retire with full benefits and pension. Magic Man. Teflon Man. The Cobra. He cleared his cases. Looking back at the Yogurt Shop files and time lines, we need to consider Polanco and his shining record as an indication of how things were done in the APD during those long years of cop wars.
Jones again, to the Internal Affairs investigators: “If there’s any kind of problem with Hector, it’s never understanding where he’s coming from….I’ve told Hector this. I never know what song book we’re singing out of, what song we’re singing, what verse we’re on, what key we’re singing in, and that kind of stuff is important to me.”
PTSD
On May 10, 1993, Senior Sgt. Ron Smith announced the disbanding of the Yogurt Shop task force and its attendant focus group as of May 21. John Jones would work exclusively on the case, but only between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. He heard about this when everybody else did and blew a gasket. From home at 3:15 the next morning, Jones composed an emotionally charged eight-page memo, which began, “I’m tired of this case. Everyone is. The difference is, Jones, John W., #839 [his city of Austin employee number], is at the bottom. J. Jones #839 will be the Task Force after May 21.”
After listing the seven major suspects and some of the numerous tips as yet unexplored, he went on: “This case controls us, we don’t control it. We can’t control it because we have never had the resources to control it. When we were getting 700 tips a month we had to ‘triage’ them, work on the ones that ‘sounded’ good because we only had 5 full-time investigators. That situation forced us to be in the predicament we’re in now, still working tips that are over a year old….Is this case a priority or isn’t it?”
The memo was the cry of an exhausted man who’d become an insomniac and was considering converting to Catholicism, in part to have someone to talk to. Two months earlier, in early March, six patrolmen had been assigned to the case for ninety days. Chosen not for their investigative skills but for high scores on a promotions exam—most of them rookies—they were supposed to dispose of all remaining tips, one way or the other. “There simply comes a time when you spend so much time on a case without results and you have to move on,” the assigning officer had drily commented.
Concerning the patrolmen, Jones wrote, “We found out early on last year that it takes about a month for anyone coming into this case to get enough of a feel for it to where they are both comfortable and productive. I addressed this last year by asking for four patrol officers that had already been assigned to the case and knew the routine…request denied. Is this case a priority as the families have been led to believe or what? The six patrolmen have been great. Given another month or two, we could probably whittle those 250–300 tips down to less than 100. But no. June 1st was always someone’s deadline….The members of this Task Force want to end this case much more than anyone else in the department. You would think our input would be appreciated; apparently it is not….Who’s kidding who here? This case is being shoved in a corner with me along with it. Worst, the families have been lied to. I’ve been lied to. Is this how a Priority Case is treated, is this how the department treats its investigators who have been thoroughly used up by this case?”
Toward the end of the memo, he answered a question his superiors never asked: “Why am I depressed? I’m depressed because I will no doubt have to sit down at the computer and punch out another memo detailing why it’s important to travel out of town to interview suspects….I’m depressed because I’m being told this case is a priority but in reality it’s being treated as just another unsolved case….I’m depressed at the thought of a return to the crowded conditions we fought so hard to leave…depressed because this is definitely a ‘Take Home’ case yet I must fight for a ‘Take Home’ car I might not get….”
He went on, ending with the memo’s theme and the question he’d repeatedly asked his superiors: “Is this case a priority or isn’t it?”
Although there was no written response to Jones’s memo, certainly Homicide supervisors took it into consideration when they changed their minds and gave him permission to work full-time on the case—including overtime hours, if necessary—for another ninety days. Huckabay and others would assist when they could. After that, another lead investigator should be appointed, giving #839 a break from burnout, exhaustion, stress and depression.
Without telling anybody, Jones had begun seeing a psychotherapist, who was helping him feel somewhat less lonely, especially now that his marriage was in shambles. On his own and sometimes with the help of Chuck Meyer—who would continue working on the case until after the 1999 arrests—he combed the database and followed phone tips, including one from an anonymous caller who’d picked up a hitchhiker who told him Eliza Thomas was a dope dealer and that her mother’s boyfriend was the murderer. A Tennessee detective suggested Jones might want to interrogate a convicted serial killer who liked to kill women in ice-cream shops and set fires afterward. Meyer went to check him out, and again…nothing. Somebody called about a guy who didn’t work, smoked pot, carried around a jar of peanut butter and had the billboard photographs of the girls on his wall. Texas Crime Stoppers—a state program that invites citizens to provide anonymous information about unsolved crimes—planned a closed-circuit interview with Jones to show inmates in the state prison system. “They know more about what goes on than we do,” a spokesman there said.
Ronnie Earle still thought McDuff had done it, or one of his buddies. So did Chuck Meyer, who spent a great deal of his time driving up and down I-35 between Austin and Waco, following up leads there. Back in April, he’d participated in Operation Trojan Horse, the attack on David Koresh’s Branch Davidian compound. Because four ATF agents had been killed in the February shoot-out and Meyer’s wife hadn’t heard from him in several days, Jones and other APD cops had driven up to Mount Carmel to make sure he was okay, and they found Meyer—a helicopter pilot in Vietnam—safely hunkered down in a ditch. A federal agent there asked Jones to create the kind of database for this debacle that he’d designed to handle information on Yogurt Shop. Grateful for the praise, he agreed to do it.
The DA’s office issued a report summarizing Chief Watson’s Homicide inquiry, which cited a vacuum of leadership, undertrained officers and unethical practices leading to dismissals and lawsuits, as well as detectives writing reports that omitted information they felt was either untrue or “not good for our side.” Also noted was their use of the phrase “misdemeanor murders” when referring to cases that might receive little media attention.
The APD’s confident response stated that all these problems had been addressed. Video and audio equipment had been purchased and would be installed in Homicide’s three interrogation rooms during the next week. Lt. David Parkinson praised this development as a benefit for both sides, protecting the investigator from false accusations and eliminating any confusion about what was said during interviews. “We will record everything in its entirety,” he said. “You leave yourself open to question if you try to edit.”
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The families of the girls erected a memorial to their daughters in the Hillside parking lot; made of pink Austin stone, it was set beneath a scrub oak and inscribed, In Loving Memory of Amy Ayers, Jennifer Harbison, Sarah Harbison, Eliza Thomas. Forever in Our Hearts. There’s no grass around the stone, just white landscaping pebbles that cover the ground between gnarled, runty trees. By now, the glass facade of the ICBY had been bricked over, leaving the shop a dark splotch between Suzanne’s Dress Shop and the Party House.
By this time, Jones had become friend
ly with Bob Ayers, the two sometimes going to Spurs games in San Antonio. On one outing, Ayers told Jones he wasn’t looking well; maybe he should take a break. Struck by the fact that a grieving parent was saying that he looked bad, Jones asked for a fifteen-day administrative leave, suggesting that the time off would allow him to return with a better attitude, renewed energy and a fresh commitment to “winding down the case” by January. Chief Watson refused to approve the request but authorized a sick leave that required medical approval before he could return to work. Clearly, she wanted him to just step aside, but Jones refused. And then he made a mistake.
Mexican officials still claimed to be trying to arrange a time when Austin cops, federal agents and a Travis County prosecutor could again talk to Saavedra and Cortez. Impatient with the endless to-ing and fro-ing, the families, led by Skip Suraci, asked Jones if they could do anything to help speed up the process. When Jones said this was doubtful, Suraci took it upon himself to call the Mexican consul in San Antonio. After receiving a response that sounded positive—at least to him—Suraci organized the families to write a joint letter that this attaché could forward to his attorney general’s office.
Improvidently—and fully aware he was disobeying departmental rules—Jones faxed the letter to San Antonio, which his superiors viewed as both grandstanding and evidence that he’d grown too close to the families, giving them information that only the APD should be privy to; he was even accused of soliciting them to write this letter. On October 20, Jones received a Record of Sub-Standard Performance, with Parkinson citing “conduct or work habits which conflict with departmental policy or orders.”
This was a low blow. And by his own admission, Jones cratered on the spot, right there in Homicide. When he’d calmed down, he told Parkinson, “I did what I thought I had to.” Two days later, his psychologist wrote the APD to say that after carrying sole responsibility for Yogurt Shop for six months and as a result of a “critical memo from a superior officer,” Jones was exhibiting more than 90 percent of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), including recurrent dreams of the event and intense distress at exposure to things—such as anniversaries—that symbolized the original trauma, feelings of detachment from others (including his family), insomnia, irritability, difficulties in concentrating, jumpiness and hypervigilance.
Who Killed These Girls? Page 12