NORTHCROSS
The initial incident report was dated Saturday, December 14, 1991, eight days after the murders. At about six o’clock that evening, sixteen-year-old Maurice Pierce tucked a loaded .22 pistol into his left-hand jeans pocket and jammed sixteen extra rounds into the other one. An energetically imaginative boy with flashing blue eyes and spiked hair, Maurice had taken the gun off thirteen-year-old Johnny Holder, who’d lifted it from his father’s gun collection. Satisfied with his attire—shirttail out to hide the weapon—he picked up his dad’s car keys and left their apartment, followed by his disciple, fifteen-year-old Forrest Welborn.
Both were enrolled at McCallum High, but Maurice almost never went. Nobody in his family seemed to mind. And when his father wasn’t using his car—a sky blue, pristine 1985 Ford LTD—he allowed his son to drive it.
Maurice drove with Forrest to Northcross Mall. Inside, he strolled around the concourse, the pistol warm against his skin. It didn’t take long for another kid to notice it. Maurice might’ve lifted his shirt to show him.
This kid reported what he’d seen to Malcolm Wilson, the moonlighting off-duty cop whose name we remember from the night of the murders. When Wilson found Maurice and Forrest wandering around in a store, he took possession of the pistol and ammunition and escorted the boys to the security office. The .22 had three rounds in the chamber. When asked why he would bring a loaded gun to a shopping mall, Maurice shrugged.
“Just to be carrying it,” he said.
Of all the statements he would make on this day and over the next ten years, perhaps Just to be carrying it rings the truest. Texas is well known for its avid gun culture, and Maurice’s father was a gun guy. What better way for a small, quick-tempered boy to take on tough-guy status than to pack a loaded pistol and show it off in a public place, not for any particular reason, not to shoot anybody, just to be carrying it.
Wilson called the APD to arrange for their transfer to the juvenile detention center. Within minutes, a policeman arrived at Northcross and, after charging Maurice with unlawful possession of a weapon, took both boys in. When Hector Polanco heard about the arrest, he wanted to interview them himself. The confiscated weapon and ammunition were put in APD custody, where they remain to this day.
So this is how it began, with the brainless antics of a hotshot, smart-alecky kid.
By the next morning, Maurice had announced to Polanco that his .22 was probably the gun used to kill the yogurt girls and that Forrest might be the one who had done it. On the night in question, he said, he and Forrest had gone down to the Fungus at ten or ten-thirty and hung out with a skinhead group led by a guy named Mace. At some point, Forrest borrowed the .22 and went off with the skinheads. When he came back, the gun had been shot six times. There was a scratch on Forrest’s neck and he smelled of hair spray.
Hair spray? There was that thing you could do—spray it in the air, apply a lighter flame and WHOOSH! That was how they’d started the fire. Forrest told Maurice he’d done something bad and wanted to do it again. To kill more girls.
Maurice was quick on his feet, but the story made little sense. Nobody’d ever heard of anybody called Mace. And hair spray? To start a fire hot enough to melt aluminum?
When Polanco asked who he’d been with earlier that night, Maurice told him that except for the hours he spent baby-sitting for his sister, he’d been with Rob Springsteen and Mike Scott, who lived together in a condo on some little street on the other side of MoPac.
Polanco called Jones, who had Springsteen and Scott picked up. The two boys went willingly, having no idea that at the very same moment their friend Maurice was being wired up by a BATF specialist.
There was more. In the early-morning hours of December 8, 1991, Maurice had taken those same three friends on a wild ride to San Antonio in a Nissan Pathfinder he’d stolen from a car lot. He hadn’t been caught, but when Polanco started questioning him, it seemed likely the Pathfinder would soon come up. And it did.
ROB
Seventeen-year-old Robert Burns Springsteen IV had lived in Austin less than four months. Born in Chicago and raised by his mother and grandparents in Cross Lanes, West Virginia, after his parents divorced, he’d called his father late that August to ask if he could live with him for a while; he was having trouble getting along with his new stepfather. Robert Burns Springsteen III didn’t immediately concur. He had to talk with his girlfriend first, especially since the two condos they lived in were in her name.
Known in West Virginia as “Robby,” the boy had dark, darting eyes, a notable widow’s peak, devilish eyebrows and a habit of carrying his chin cocked to one side, as if to indicate his readiness to take on all comers. Quick-tempered and boastful, he seemed too swaggery for his own good. In junior high he’d been characterized by teachers and school administrators as a misfit who wore out his welcome in a hurry wherever he went. Because of his temper, his absences and an attitude of unearned and unapologetic entitlement, he’d been assigned to an alternative-learning center with other disruptive students. Counselors also singled him out for sporting weird clothes to get attention—a Nehru jacket one day, a bandanna around his head the next—though this complaint might say more about the town than the boy. Nobody called him bad, exactly. He had roots in Cross Lanes, and his mother worked hard and was respected. He was just one of those boys.
When his father and his partner agreed to convert the second condo, which they’d been using as a guest and family room, into temporary quarters for Rob, he traveled to Austin and moved in. The condos were small—maybe 750 square feet—but Rob would have his privacy, and his father agreed to give him some slack when it came to discipline. His plan was to see what the boy could handle and then start applying some rules.
A week or so later, Rob registered for the fall semester at McCallum High, and since he needed to repeat a grade, he’d be a sophomore. Tall and somewhat athletic, he turned out for football but in no time got into a squabble with the coach and quit before making a down. “Me and him,” he said later, “didn’t see eye-to-eye.” Not long after that, he became involved in a lunchtime scrap at a nearby McDonald’s. When words were exchanged, Rob pulled a knife.
Because of this incident and his poor attendance record, teachers and counselors wanted to send him to their own alternative school, but the McCallum principal overrode them. He was a new student, Penny Miller explained to her staff, the semester had barely begun, and he’d written a letter of apology about the knife, which he said belonged to somebody else. She executed this decision with stipulations: Rob had to be where he was supposed to be—in class—and follow administrative rules and show signs of academic progress.
When he quickly resumed his habits, Miller ordered him to the alternative-learning center. In December, when an APD cop asked how long it was since he’d been to class, Rob drew a blank. “A week? Two weeks? I don’t know…probably at least a month. Maybe a month and a half or two months….Because they sent me [there] and that’s when I just quit. I was like, Screw this.”
In late November, shortly after his seventeenth birthday, when Rob asked if his friend Mike Scott could move in with him, his father was skeptical. But Rob assured him that Mike was a good guy and would be no trouble at all; besides, he had a situation at home.
Robert Burns Springsteen III decided to trust his son’s judgment, and his girlfriend agreed to go along on one condition: If the boys quit school, they had to get jobs. Both of them agreed. The truth is, they’d probably already stopped attending class. In 1999, Mike Scott will say that by December of that year, he hadn’t attended class once since September 30. He will contradict this statement a number of times, however, and in the end, when it comes to Springsteen père et fils and Mike Scott, there is so much Who knows? to their stories we have to take it as a given that whatever has been said or attested to, whatever has been vowed, promised or testified under oath, might or might not be actual fact. This goes for cops as well, who in the interest of collaring the boys wi
ll tell them they know things they don’t and warn them of consequences that will never occur. We have to swing with that and depend to some extent on what in the detective business is called “heuristics”: rule of thumb, instinct, a hunch, likelihoods based on given assumptions.
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Located about three miles from McCallum and seven from the ICBY shop and Northcross Mall, the condominiums where the Springsteens and Mike Scott lived are well maintained and attractive. Two-story, built of local stone, with landscaped surroundings and carefully placed rocks and boulders, they are shaded and quiet, far enough from the university to lack the beer-party atmosphere that often rules in many apartment complexes in Austin.
When he called Teleserve, on the morning of December 6, to report that his son was missing, the elder Springsteen, a contract computer programmer, was between jobs and therefore was at home a good bit of the time, and he might’ve noticed if the boys weren’t going to school. When called to the stand, he will testify that he has no memory of making the call. And when the chief prosecutor hands him the incident report taken by Teleserve officer Mary Ann Hueske, he will sit there looking at it and still claim not to remember.
When, in 2010, I visited Rob in West Virginia and asked where he’d been those nights his father claimed he was missing, he waved the question away. “Oh,” he said, “my dad. My dad and I don’t get along too well.”
But if he had been gone for two nights, where might he have been?
He shrugged. On some friend’s couch, maybe playing video games all night. He did that a lot. Maybe…oh, who knows? He stayed away from home quite a lot in those days and had no idea why his father had made the report.
“I may have been gone,” he concluded. “But I wasn’t missing.”
MIKE
Michael Scott also had no idea why Rob’s father had made the report, because, as he told an APD detective, he and Rob had spent that Thursday night at the condo and the next morning had gotten up early and, after smoking weed by the swimming pool, left as if they were off to school. Like many young and not-so-young people in Austin, Rob and Mike smoked pot pretty much on a daily basis. They also dropped acid, ate psilocybin mushrooms and drank endless cans of beer. Mike will one day describe himself as the “Mushroom King” of Austin, while Rob, a follower of the Grateful Dead, recalls dropping acid in seven states.
Born in Micronesia, where his family had gone to live after his grandfather served in Guam during World War II, Mike had moved around a lot as a child, but during most of his school years he lived in Austin and struggled, having received an early diagnosis of severe dyslexia. But in his freshman year at McCallum, 1989–90, he made the freshman football team, joined the drama department’s Royal Court Players and played viola in the school orchestra. He was also active enough in Boy Scouts to become a Life Scout at sixteen. A photograph in that year’s school yearbook shows him with a short haircut, wearing a white dress shirt and tie, smiling faintly. He looks tense, shy, cautiously hopeful and very young.
But the dyslexia balled up his mind and he didn’t do well academically. “School was boring, really,” he told cops, as if having hit on a new idea. “Very boring.”
By his sophomore year, his parents were divorced and his mother was suffering from serious emotional disorders. Mike grew his hair long and quit orchestra, football and the Royal Court. He began to dress, according to a friend, “like he didn’t care much about his appearance.” When required to repeat his sophomore year, he began skipping school, shuttling between his parents’ homes and often spending nights with friends. A classmate of all these boys described Mike as the one who was “always trying to cheer everybody up,” but socially awkward and, like Forrest Welborn, a follower.
He was handsome, tall, with straight light brown hair and a wide smile. There’s a blandness about him, in his eyes a soft, sweet look of perpetual questioning, as if he’s lost and can’t find his way home. By the time he moved in with Rob, he’d become one of many do-nothing boys forever hanging around, with no plans beyond figuring out what to do that night. Lookin’ for some trouble to get into, he often said, describing their aimless itineraries. Being a general pest. Mostly what they did was wait.
Unlike the others, Mike had interests. At the time of the murders, he was involved in a branch of the Explorer Scouts devoted to the study of the dress and culture of pre-1840 Native Americans. There are photos of him in Indian dance attire he made himself, having been mentored by an Explorer leader who taught him how to tan leather for leggings and breeches. Mike’s hair flowed unbound behind him when he performed. A few years later, he’ll wear different costumes when he joins a medieval reenactment group.
Although in 1999 Michael Scott would apologize for having a “piss-poor memory,” he supplied a good many interesting, if wobbly, details about his and his roommate’s actions on December 6, rattling them off in a kind of verbal shorthand: “Got up, got high, screwed around, made some phone calls, smoked a joint by the condo pool, rode the city bus to McCallum to see what was going on.” In the big fields around the school where students gathered during lunchtime, there was a girl who’d caught Mike’s eye. Went there, he said. Saw Amber.
From the condos, McCallum was a straight shot east. Built in 1953, an assortment of low-slung redbrick buildings and temporary classrooms surrounded by fields, parking lots and chain-link fencing, it closely resembled a prison. When asked how he got to school that day, Rob Springsteen made one thing clear: “I guarantee you,” he said, “I didn’t walk.” Three miles isn’t very far, but in a car-and-pickup culture a boy wanting to man up and attract girls didn’t ride the school bus or walk.
In a later statement, Mike Scott came up with an entirely new and different account: “Went up to school Friday morning, eight a.m. Talked to Rob in front of school. I don’t know how he got there. I told him I would be at the bowling alley at lunch. Left school at lunch with Rob and Maurice and Forrest around two-thirty. Went to Capital Bowl, had lunch, then left thirty minutes later. Amber was at the bowling alley. From the bowling alley went to Northcross, a little after three.”
In an interrogation, cops look for inconsistencies and discrepancies. While a practical tool, this omits many possible influences: drugs, alcohol, a braggadocio temperament and the inborn tendency, for boys like this, when faced with trouble, to serve up what they figure the authorities want to hear. People misremember or re-create, think they remember things that never happened, then back up their memories with reasons dreamed up on the spot. Sometimes, for one reason or another, they just lie.
Cops start with that assumption: Everybody lies.
FORREST
However Rob and Mike got to McCallum, they seem to have arrived around lunchtime, about when Forrest Welborn emerged from class. Known as the “quiet one,” Forrest had once been musical, too, playing stand-up bass in the Lamar Middle School orchestra. Also like Rob and Mike, he had moved between parents and stepparents for much of his life, his mother and father having gotten divorced when he was in the first grade. His mother currently lived in Lockhart, twenty or so miles from Austin, while Forrest lived with his father in Austin. Elementary school teachers commented on his lack of attention in class. He liked to draw—superheroes, weapons, gun blasts, villains. He would sit in the back of the room and sketch one picture after another, never lifting his head, never hearing anything that went on in class.
Forrest had a long face, deep-set eyes and a lean, loping frame. A tall boy, six one, in years to come he would grow his dark brown hair long and let it hang loose down his back. By the time of Yogurt Shop, he was beginning to let go of ambition and, perhaps, hope…except when he was with Maurice, who fired him up. Maurice explained his appeal straightforwardly: “I was the one with the car, so he came with me a lot.” Rob Springsteen put it differently: Forrest would do anything Maurice told him to.
A soft-edged boy who drank too much beer and couldn’t quite pull himself out of the morass his life had tumbled into, Forrest did
n’t do well with girls and once got arrested while just sitting in the car waiting for a friend who went into a convenience store and stole a twelve-pack. And later, when his driving tickets mounted up, instead of coming up with a way to pay them off, he decamped to Lubbock and lived in an abandoned family trailer. He was good at one thing: fixing cars.
Rob couldn’t remember how he and Mike met up with Forrest that day. “Sometime,” he said, “somehow, I ran into Forrest and Maurice. Or I had gone over to Forrest’s house and Maurice came by. Or—I don’t know….Some days I was with so-and-so and some days I was sitting at the house by myself for eons….Sometimes I get things in my head I can’t get out.”
If the three guys—Mike, Rob and Forrest—actually went to the bowling alley, they didn’t stay long. A sign posted there said that kids under eighteen had to bowl, order food or leave. Forrest lived right across the street from the school. Maybe they went there or to a field to smoke a joint; nobody quite remembers. What they all recall, however, is that at about two or maybe two-thirty—just before the end of lunch period, when Forrest had to go back to class—Maurice showed up in his dad’s LTD with the mag wheels and razor rims and the handcuffs hanging from the rearview mirror, and from then on everything was different. Better. Filled with possibilities.
RINGLEADER
Small guy. Built low. Glittery blue eyes. Spiky haircut. Wired, nervous. That’s Action Man. And there was the car, immaculate as always. No smoking, nobody else could drive, no trash on the floor or seats. Mike said Maurice cared more about his car than anything, including girls and booze. A female friend agreed. What Maurice was about, she said, was cars, just like his father, who was always selling or trading one in for another. Cars and guns, guns and cars, that was really it.
Who Killed These Girls? Page 14