She recommended a one-month leave, which was granted, but by mid-November he was back on the job. Despite the damage that Parkinson’s report might have done to his reputation, he felt no animosity toward him. “I’d have done the same thing,” he says now.
As for his relationship with the families, he admits that by department standards, he might have gotten too close to them. But at the time, it felt right. “We were all crazed and obsessed, so for us that was normal. Nobody seemed crazy. Because we all were.”
—
Four days before the second anniversary of the murders, Jones received a subpoena from attorneys for five of the family members to appear in a pretrial hearing in civil court, where he would be asked to produce his complete investigation file as well as the unedited autopsy reports from the ME’s office. The families—with the exception of James Thomas—were revving up to sue Brice Foods and Morrison Properties, owner of the Hillside Center, for damages. Barbara Suraci and Michael Harbison, Pamela and Robert Ayers and Marcia [Maria] Thomas v. Brice Foods, Inc., I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt, LTD, Rockwood Plaza Associates, LTD and Charles Morrison Individually and D/B/A Morrison Properties charged that lax security contributed to the likelihood of assault at the yogurt shop and other stores. The suit also noted how late the ICBY stayed open and that teenage girls ran it alone. When, in response, the city filed a motion to keep the autopsy reports sealed, Mike Harbison called Jones to lambaste him for thwarting their intentions. Bill Brice, he claimed, was as guilty of his daughters’ murder as the men who shot them.
On December 6, 1993, the St. Albert the Great Catholic Church held a Mass in memory of the girls. At ten o’clock that evening, friends again participated in a vigil at the yogurt shop, which the Statesman called a “shrine to innocence lost.”
A month later, in January, Brice Foods and Morrison Properties escaped the embarrassing publicity of a trial by agreeing to pay the victims’ families twelve million dollars in a civil-suit settlement. Having formed a nonprofit organization called We Will Not Forget SAJE (an acronym of the girls’ first names), the families intended to use some of the money to teach teenagers about workplace safety. The lawsuit was sealed, but rumor suggests they had information about the lock on the back doors—faulty, possibly unlocked, now missing—which left the workers at risk. But by now, the families have closed ranks. “Hush-hush,” one parent called their pact. “Blood money,” said Doug Tash from the nearby pet store.
Later that month, Jones traveled to FBI headquarters in Quantico with Chuck Meyer and Mike Huckabay to discuss their difficulties with the Mexican attorney general’s office. Foremost among the topics to be covered was the ongoing DOJ request to interview and polygraph Saavedra and Cortez in the United States under the provisions of the Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with Mexico, established in 1991; this created an opportunity for cooperation between the two countries, but each new instance had to be negotiated by both Justice Departments—therefore slow going.
As Austin lost faith and Yogurt Shop’s immediacy faded, other crimes moved into the spotlight. In northeastern Travis County, near Pflugerville, a baby-sitter named Cathy Lynn Henderson either accidentally dropped three-month-old Brandon Baugh on a concrete floor or delivered the infant a killing blow with a blunt object. Instead of calling 911, she wrapped the dead baby in a blanket, taped him up in a wine-cooler box and absconded up I-35 North, burying him beside the interstate in a shallow grave near Temple. The search for Henderson took over front-page news until she was located in Independence, Missouri, with dyed hair and a changed name, a month’s rent paid in advance. To some, this incident was as disturbing as the Yogurt Shop Murders. After Henderson’s lawyer was forced to give Travis County officials the map her client had drawn, showing where she’d buried the baby, his body was dug up and brought home for a funeral. In 1995, after Medical Examiner Roberto Bayardo testified that the injuries could not have resulted from an accident, Henderson was found guilty of capital murder and sentenced to death by lethal injection. After Bayardo changed his testimony in 2012, stating that new scientific procedures suggested that the baby’s death might well have been an accident, her conviction was overturned and a new trial ordered. But the ailing fifty-eight-year-old Henderson waived that right and, after pleading guilty to first-degree murder, agreed to a twenty-five-year sentence with credit for time served—which meant she’d have been released in four years. But two months later, she had a stroke and, while in the prison hospital, developed pneumonia. When she died, Brandon Baugh’s parents said now they could move on.
—
On Friday, May 6, his day off, John Jones received a call from Bruce Mills, whom Watson had appointed deputy chief, telling him he was being replaced. Four days later, Mills announced that Jones and Doug Dukes, of APD’s Child Abuse detail, would trade positions. The transfer, he told the press, was mainly at Jones’s request, because of burnout and a recent promotion. “John Jones is not being thrown off the case. He will continue to act as a consultant.”
The next day, Jones publicly begged to differ. He’d asked for a 50 percent reduction, not a transfer. “I’d always expected to be a part of any decision,” he told a Statesman reporter. “I expected to be sat down and asked what do you think is best here.” Instead, he said, they “called me and said you got a week and goodbye.”
Pam Ayers spoke for the families. “We want him to stay….This is a complex case. It can’t just be handed off.” She also complained that they weren’t told about the change from the APD, but “heard it through the grapevine.”
No matter, Jones was out. And once again, Yogurt Shop slipped off the front pages. In June, O. J. Simpson was arrested for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole. Four months later, Susan Smith confessed she’d lied when she reported that a black man had carjacked her Mazda Protegé with her two little sons inside, when in fact she herself had rolled the car into a lake. Even as the national crime rate fell, random crime in Texas was reportedly on the rise, partially due to the popularity of home-cooked meth. In Austin, people interviewed by the Statesman still cited Yogurt Shop and the abduction of Colleen Reed as the chief reasons to be fearful.
The Yogurt Shop families used the money from the settlement to buy new homes. The Ayerses moved out of Austin onto acreage outside of Blanco, where Bob could fulfill his dream—and Amy’s—of being a rancher. Maria Thomas purchased a house in Oregon. Barbara and Skip Suraci sold their house on Tamarack Lane and bought one in a new suburban development slightly closer to Capital Memorial Gardens, where Sarah, Jennifer and Amy were buried. After the murders, their daughters’ friends had often come to Tamarack Lane, asking to sit in the girls’ rooms and look through their stuff, perhaps spend the night in their beds. Barbara always said yes. The new home was bigger, more formal, but she turned one of the bedrooms into a kind of shrine, with twin beds and a display of cheerleader uniforms, teddy bears, FFA jackets and certificates, toys and Jennifer’s The Boots, the Jeans, the Dream collage. The girls’ friends still visited.
Bored with management and computers, Skip enrolled in law school at the University of Tulsa. For a while, he and his wife shared a commuting marriage and spent a lot of time on the road. They hired an attorney to conduct their own investigation, concentrating on the two imprisoned Mexicans and the one still on the loose. But once again Barbara found herself in a familiar role, adjusting her own life to accommodate a husband reinventing his, and she began to feel edgy, impatient.
When John Jones was transferred to Child Abuse, he hotly protested. Child Abuse? Really? So the APD changed his assignment to Assault and Family Violence. He’d been taking instruction at St. Louis the King, which might seem more dramatic than it was. Having spent those years in Catholic school, he was familiar with the ritualism and formalities. His wife and daughters were Catholic. Once he converted, he joined the choir.
But he was still a cop, working for the APD. And failure was a bitter pill to swallow.
II
THE PAUL
JOHNSON SHOW
THE NEW GUY
Cop wars continued. In October 1995, Chief Watson enrolled Austin in a task force code-named Mala Sangre, a federally funded initiative designed to attack organized drug trafficking and money laundering. But the local chapter quickly imploded when undercover informants accused APD officers of protecting the dealers the task force had already put under surveillance, in exchange for cocaine, sexual favors and, for some, an expense-paid trip to the Super Bowl. This discovery led to prolonged allegations, denials, reassignments, lawsuits and whistle-blower complaints, along with further attacks on Watson. She then, possibly hoping to save face, focused on the best-known unsolved homicide in Austin’s history.
The following January, she announced a “fresh take from within” on the ICBY murders. When she selected homicide detective Paul Johnson to reorganize existing files and search for evidence of leads, tips, suspects and statements that might have been insufficiently investigated or unjustifiably cleared, nobody was surprised. Known as meticulous and persistent, a bottled-up guy who didn’t much care whether colleagues liked him or what he did or how he did it, he’d been with the APD for some twenty years, serving nine on patrol duty, a year in general assignment, five in Sex Crimes and five in Homicide, during which time he’d won awards for public service and commendations from within the department. Most important, he liked to work alone.
In its early stages, cold-case work is archival. You sit in a room to see what’s already been done. You read incident reports, witness interviews and supplemental narratives many times over, looking for careless processing, missed opportunities, the palm print not taken, the question not asked, the gun not properly tested, the tip overlooked or taken too lightly. You reorganize information, examine crime-scene photographs and create a time line that reaches back to the beginning, then study the drift of events and reports for coincidences and patterns. A lot of cops go stir-crazy, just sitting there. Not Paul Johnson, whose cell phone’s ringtone, I’m told, was the overture to William Tell, popularly known as the Lone Ranger theme song.
As his partner, Watson assigned Sgt. J. W. Thompson, who had worked on Yogurt Shop with Jones and Huckabay. He was pretty much Johnson’s opposite—outgoing, talkative, likable—and the two would divide the work similarly: Johnson the hard files and computer database; Thompson the fieldwork and active investigation, the kind of shoe-leather beat he preferred. Instead of being given leave to work exclusively on the case, each would remain in regular Homicide rotation. When asked, both of them would play down their new assignment, saying that Yogurt Shop was just one of many cases they were working on.
Johnson soon became as obsessed as Jones, but with a difference. In the four years since the murders, the ardent confessions had ceased and the special tips line had been disconnected. Discouraged, the families had retreated. Reporters weren’t jamming microphones in Johnson’s face. He could work when he liked, at quiet times in the office and at home nights and on days off. As a kind of cop-ascetic, he became a scholar of Yogurt Shop, not as it had happened but as it had been defined and refined and reframed.
Yet many refer to the case from here on out, through the initial arrests and trials, as “the Paul Johnson Show.”
—
In March, Watson set up a meeting with Chuck Meyer and representatives from the APD, the FBI, the AFD, the DPS and the DA’s office. Having still received no response from the Mexican attorney general’s office, she wanted a reassessment of the Yogurt Shop strategy, from not only the lead cops but all the relevant agencies.
Some people thought a reappraisal from within guaranteed a rehash, and in some respects this was correct. The same things kept happening. Meyer took more trips; Ronnie Earle’s office made lists; Paul Johnson kept analyzing. Despite persistent attempts at editing it down, the Jones database still held some five thousand entries, in addition to four four-drawer cabinets jammed with hard files. In the years to come, Johnson would heavily criticize the operational strategy he had inherited as being obscure, wrongheaded and even—despite Jones’s reputation—unmanageable.
The two men were destined never to become friends. A retired cop I know said that given Johnson’s inscrutability and Jones’s ego, he wasn’t surprised. They were both thin-skinned and irascible, and each was known to hold a grudge.
In August, when Crime Stoppers ran its interview with Jones on its closed-circuit prison network, some 130,000 prisoners watched, but nobody came forward with information, despite a sizable reward. Governor Bush offered to write a letter to the Mexican government, as did State Attorney General Dan Morales, but for one reason or another, the letters were never sent.
Forging through Jones’s list of major suspects, Johnson soon came to the Maurice Pierce file but, finding no reason to pursue these tips, moved on. He would work on the ICBY files through 1996 and seven months into 1997; in that time, he reduced the database to some 2,080 reports. In 1999, he explained his methodology: “We started generating offense reports for each tip….A tip would be a particular suspect or group of suspects….All the searchable fields, names, descriptions, vehicles, anything that’s searchable would be set out and locate-able. And then a file of actual paper and any other evidence would be kept by that number for each tip.” When asked who did most of the work, he said, “As I was making each of these [supplements and tips] into offense reports, which we classify as open or closed…if it appeared that a group of suspects had not been cleared appropriately or if it wasn’t clear why they were cleared, I kept that open. And then the open tips were assigned to Sgt. Thompson,” who would go out and conduct interviews.
By this time, Jones and his wife were “divorced in place,” sleeping in separate bedrooms, leading separate lives. His older daughters were in their last two years of high school, the younger ones entering first and second grade. “I’d never believed people who said they stayed together for the children,” he says now. “But that’s what we did.” Every time he reread the symptoms of PTSD, he felt like he was looking in a mirror.
He and his wife and daughters lived in a ranch-style home in the Quail Creek subdivision, where he “was the only guy in the house.” He pauses. “Except for the dog.” When he flashes a bemused smile, you know a sardonic wisecrack is forthcoming. “And he ran away.” Then he thinks of an addendum. “Oh, and there was a fish. But the fish didn’t care.”
He was now in the process of failing, not just as a cop but as a husband and father.
Johnson’s part-time assignment continued until July 31, 1997, by which time the embattled Elizabeth Watson had left Austin for a job with the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C., and Bruce Mills had been appointed the interim chief. Popular on the force, Mills had begun his APD career at nineteen as a dispatcher and been steadily promoted. Like every cop, he knew full well that police chiefs never come from within the ranks. But while he was interim chief, he decided to give Paul Johnson a different team. And if this helped solve Yogurt Shop, he might well have a shot at the job.
Because the planning meetings were held in Attorney General Dan Morales’s office, cops called Mills’s new team “the AG task force.” There were five representatives from Morales’s office, one from the U.S. attorney’s office, Chuck Meyer from BATF and several prosecutors from the DA’s office, including Robert Smith. Nobody from the DPS. Nobody from the AFD. Mostly lawyers.
In an official statement, an APD assistant chief cautioned the public against undue optimism. The team was purely investigative, he said, not a task force. Chief Mills’s action didn’t imply the possibility of new leads, only that they wanted to take “a fresh look at the existing evidence.” Ronnie Earle lent lukewarm support. A lot of hard work had been done on the case, he said, and “it helps to get the whole team together from time to time.” A spokesperson for Morales gave a rather muddled explanation. They hoped, he said, “to make use of persons and a perspective that has not yet seen the evidence, seen the information, that may not have any preconceived ideas a
bout the case and may not be influenced in any particular direction.”
Homicide was incensed, feeling that Yogurt Shop belonged to them. When asked for a comment, Lt. David Parkinson had none.
Johnson and Thompson were given permission to work exclusively on the case for five months. During that time, Johnson returned once again to the early tips files and the parameters of the original FBI profile. Rereading the Maurice Pierce file, even though the suspect was too young to match either the profile or any eyewitness description, he found the tip “did not appear to have been closed justifiably.” They began actively to pursue Pierce and his friends—Forrest Welborn, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott.
Jones hotly objects to this assessment. His people didn’t close the Pierce file; neither did they clear it. They came to a dead end and felt that without additional information, they could go no further. Had they found more evidence, they would’ve revisited it.
But Johnson thought he might be onto something, and in September he sent Pierce’s 1991 lie-detector test results to APD polygrapher Bruce Stevenson, who reported that while the suspect had “scored out truthful” back then, those particular tests were no longer used and the best score he personally would give was “inconclusive.” Although most APD cops didn’t have a lot of confidence in Stevenson’s abilities, and Johnson didn’t much like polygraph tests anyway, he chose to interpret this response as an encouragement.
Who Killed These Girls? Page 13