Of the four boys, Maurice was the only one who’d been in serious trouble with the law. In 1990, age fifteen, he was picked up for unauthorized use of a motor vehicle (UUMV) twice, once after he drove off in a car whose owner had left the key in the ignition, then after his own father reported him. Maurice, his dad told the police, had driven his car to Houston; and though he’d brought it back, he shouldn’t have taken it in the first place. That same year, he was suspended from school for fighting and for having a knife and then arrested for stealing fire extinguishers. Earlier in 1991, he’d been charged with criminal trespass, having jumped the fence of an apartment complex with a double-edged knife in his belt, and then for possession of a stereo believed to be stolen, and for criminal trespass in a schoolyard after allegedly threatening to cause bodily harm to a student, somebody said with a bomb, and finally for assault.
The mix was perfect: three aimless dudes, one troublemaker with firepower and wheels.
As for the guns, Mike said on the day or maybe two days before the murders—he wasn’t exactly sure of the date—they’d all been together in the LTD when Maurice pulled over and hollered at some Mexicans to come over to the car—Mike suspected to buy some grass. But Maurice bought a gun instead, a .38, Mike thought, shiny black. They went up to Lake Travis that afternoon and shot at trees. Maurice, he remembered, couldn’t shoot worth shit. As for the .22, he’d gotten it from Johnny Holder and didn’t plan on paying the hundred-dollar asking price.
After Forrest went back to class, Rob and Mike had a conversation with Rob’s girlfriend, Kelly Hanna, in the parking lot, next to her brown pickup. She said she’d be hanging out with a few girlfriends that night, and after Rob said they might swing by if they got a ride, Kelly returned to class.
At about two-thirty, Maurice had to run an errand, so more than likely he dropped his buddies off at Northcross, close to the video arcade. Mike remembered drinking beer while driving over, even though they were underage and couldn’t buy it. He couldn’t remember where the beer had come from, maybe a guy named Larry, maybe somebody else. What he did know was that the three of them scored a twelve-pack of Bud and polished it off before arriving at the mall, and by then they were, in his words, “buzzing pretty good.” He and Rob went straight to the food court to sit at a table and sober up a little.
Then what? Mostly nothing, killing time until Maurice came back. Play games, smoke cigarettes, watch the ice-skaters, wait, dick around. Mike said the only reason they went to Northcross was to watch girls, play video games and look for trouble to get into. Some boys they knew came by their table. Mike marveled when a fat Mexican kid drank a whole bottle of ketchup. Asked if it was just the three of them at the table after Forrest got there, Rob said it was never just them, that other people came and went. Nobody cared about last names or made any plans; they were happy to sit bullshitting and pestering the shoppers and mall walkers. After sunset they went outside to watch the Hooters girls come in to work. Dudes without dates, John Jones called boys who didn’t bathe enough, had little ambition, clustered in video arcades, drank ketchup straight from the bottle and ogled girls.
Sometime after four o’clock—after Jennifer Harbison had left in the S-10 to go see her boyfriend and just before Barbara Suraci arrived home from work and found her younger daughter, Sarah, sitting on the couch, peeling an orange—Forrest showed up and, soon afterward, so did Maurice, but not for long. He had to baby-sit for his sister, Renee Reyna, and he wanted Forrest to go with him. When Rob and Mike protested, Maurice concocted a story about some dangerous Mexicans who might be after them and then left with his sidekick, promising to return. So Mike and Rob were stuck. And without wheels, there was no hope of swinging by Kelly Hanna’s.
When asked about the crucial hours between eleven and midnight, Rob, Maurice and Mike told different stories (and Forrest none at all).
Rob said he sneaked in to see the midnight Rocky Horror Picture Show, as he always did on weekend nights, and that Mike failed to get in and had to wait in the lobby until the show was over, around 2:00 a.m. They were hoping to go to a cast party Rob had heard about, but when they couldn’t find it, some dude dropped them off at Mike’s mother’s place because it was close.
Mike, however, said Maurice took them down to Sixth Street and they partied like everybody else; then he dropped them back off at the condo by ten-thirty or so—early for them on a weekend. They turned on cable TV and watched that Robin Hood flick with Kevin Costner before falling asleep, Rob first.
Messed around, Maurice reported, partied, went down to the Fungus; Forrest borrowed his gun, went off with skinheads, came back smelling of hair spray. Got home, crashed.
After being picked up with Maurice at Northcross, Forrest wasn’t questioned by Polanco or any other cop. Homicide had another plan in mind for him.
PATHFINDER
When Polanco asked Maurice what he and the others had done between late Friday night and Sunday, the eighth, the boy sighed. Here it came.
December 7, everybody slept late: Rob and Mike at the condo, Forrest and Maurice at Renee’s until one o’clock that afternoon, when they had to baby-sit her three kids until she got off work at nine-thirty, when they had to go pick her up. Renee worked close to Northcross and, getting in the car, she said everybody was talking about the murders at the ICBY shop. Whatever Rob did the rest of the day was nothing he could exactly remember, maybe video games or Dungeons and Dragons at a friend’s house, normal stuff, same as any other Saturday. Mike, on the other hand, had a schedule. Early that afternoon, a Scout leader drove him to Round Rock, north of Austin, for a craft session. There, he and other Scouts spent all afternoon sewing turkey feathers together to create sweeping garments to attach to the back of their leather breeches. To the leaders, Mike seemed like his regular self, good-humored, easy. While the boys worked, the adults talked in the kitchen about the murders, careful to speak quietly.
When Mike returned to Dry Creek, Rob was there. They waited around, did nothing. Maurice picked up his dad from work at ten, after which he was allowed to use the LTD. Forrest was with him. They headed down MoPac to grab the other guys and drive to Sixth Street, where they hung out until the bars and music joints closed at two. In Rob’s words: We, you know, whoopied. After dropping Rob and Mike off, Maurice and Forrest left the car at Maurice’s dad’s and started walking toward Renee’s, taking a shortcut through the Town North Nissan lot. In no time, Maurice spotted a gold Pathfinder with keys in the ignition.
They jumped in and Maurice rammed the SUV through a low chain blocking the exit and returned to the condo, where Rob and Mike piled in. Wild boys. Roaring west up Farm-to-Market Road 2222 to the rocky back roads, four-wheeling, acting wild. Maurice still had Johnny Holder’s .22 on him, so they stopped at a lake and shot at light posts. Pitch-black out there, all curvy roads, no other cars or signs. Maurice got lost and drove in circles for a while, so by the time they made it back to the highway, they were low on gas. Maurice pulled into a Stop ’n Go and Rob went inside to buy the Sunday paper and a soda. When he came out, Mike was filling the tank. After Rob got in, Mike dropped the hose and jumped in after him. Go, he told Maurice. Just go.
That early on a Sunday morning, four kids in a big gold car? Of course the manager was watching. He took down the plate number and called the cops, and the APD tracked the car to the dealership. But the officer on the line recorded the time and date of the incident as early morning on December 7—Saturday—a minor mistake under ordinary circumstances.
With a full tank and time to burn, the boys wanted to keep going. Mike offhandedly suggested San Antonio, because he wanted to break up with a girl who lived a little northwest of the city, in the suburb of Helotes. Rob had never been to San Antonio, and Forrest and Maurice figured why not, so in no time they were heading south down I-35. Delayed by a blowout after Maurice more than likely nodded off and skimmed a median, they didn’t make Helotes until nine or nine-thirty. In the meantime, Mike had changed the tire—he told
the cops Maurice didn’t know how—and in Helotes he called the girl, who agreed to meet him, but not at her house. She was alone; her parents were at church and wouldn’t like it if she let somebody in. The other boys waited in the Pathfinder while Mike took her for a walk. To pass the time, somebody, probably Rob, opened the Sunday Statesman and read the story about the murders at the ICBY shop out loud. All three remembered that.
Mike came back, saying the girl had burst into tears, and they all cheered. Maurice dropped Rob and Mike off at a little past one that afternoon. Town North Nissan was open by then, so he parked the Pathfinder in a remote corner of the lot and returned to Renee’s with Forrest. Once he copped to the theft, the APD charged him with unauthorized use again. He had to pay for the damaged tire rim.
Ordinarily, a joyride in a stolen car is no big deal, not unless you get hauled in for something else and law enforcement wants to know precisely where you were that day and who was with you and what you did and why you bought a Sunday paper if you didn’t read much. Close to eight years from now, when a new APD team develops a plan to investigate Maurice Pierce, this caper will become a narrative chink in the prosecutorial time line of a crime spree that began with boys on the loose, as reported at 8:44 a.m. on December 6, when Rob’s father called Teleserve to report his son missing, continuing with an afternoon of drink and weed, rolling into a night of murdering four girls and lighting a fire to cover their tracks, ending in car theft the next morning, the joyride to Helotes, gas theft and a suspicious newspaper purchase before they drove back to town. That the cop who wrote up the gas theft got the date wrong won’t be noticed by the APD until after the arrests.
Back home in Austin, the four boys crashed and did the usual: sleep, drink, smoke, work the video knobs, drink, sleep, smoke, go whoopying, sleep, wait.
WIRED
After Maurice signed a statement saying that Forrest probably used his .22 to kill the yogurt girls, John Jones and several other cops took him to the apartment where he lived with his father. There, he and his dad, William “Bill” Pierce, showed them other guns, shells and bullets, then Maurice led them to the Fungus, where he said a communal .22 pistol was either buried or stored in a drainpipe, but nothing turned up. Later that day, under the guidance of Jones and Chuck Meyer, and with the permission of Bill Pierce, Maurice agreed to interrogate his young friend. After the specialist wired him up, he drove to Forrest’s house and knocked, but nobody was there, so he went next door. The girl who answered said she’d seen Forrest earlier but that he’d gone somewhere, so Maurice drove around the neighborhood, looking for him, tailed by the cops, who sent frequent instructions: “Don’t drive so fast. Don’t look around. Act normal.”
Two hours later, Forrest finally strolled down Koenig Lane toward Woodrow, and when Maurice called to him and asked him to get in the car, the unsuspecting Forrest complied. Maurice then drove into the parking lot of a nearby Laundromat and general hangout spot called Woodrow Washateria, and the two went inside.
“Where’s your hair?” was Maurice’s first question.
“Huh?”
“What happened to your hair?”
The newly shorn Forrest said his dad had it cut off, apparently in an attempt to disguise his identity.
Maurice then began pounding away. “What did you actually do that night, that Friday?”
Forrest: Pardon?
Maurice: That Friday when the girls were dead.
Forrest: Huh?
Maurice: And you said you wanted to use a gun.
Forrest: When I wanted to use a gun?
This went on until, a few minutes later, Maurice made a direct accusation: “You said that you wanted to use the gun. And that you had killed the girls.”
But Forrest said he was only playing; he was joking; he never killed anybody. And when Maurice lost his temper—“Don’t play that game, Forrest….Don’t jack with me”—he became even more confused, and wondered why Maurice was getting so mad.
Polanco had finished with Maurice at six that morning; Jones took down his signed statement at two-thirty. It was now around 6:00 p.m., and Maurice was frazzled, fearful and exhausted. He started to cry a little. “You know I ain’t got the guts to kill them girls,” he said. But the gun was his and the cops had him in their clutches and barely let him go, and if anybody was going down for those murders, it was him. And so he was scared.
Well, Forrest said, he was scared, too.
They argued about who was more scared and then got back in the LTD and Maurice drove Forrest home.
—
Jones, Meyer and the other cops considered the interview a complete bust. Forrest clearly had no idea what Maurice was talking about, and after several hours face-to-face with Polanco, the panicky Maurice had simply lied to save his own skin. Convinced that their case against the four boys had come to a dead end, Jones inactivated them as suspects and filed their names separately from those they’d either cleared or were aggressively pursuing.
When asked if he thought Maurice Pierce was a hothead, Jones shrugged. “He was a kid. A kid.”
And that was that for a while. The boys went on with their lives. In late February, Rob would move back to West Virginia. Mike hit the road, taking whatever odd jobs he could find. Forrest moved to Lockhart. Maurice kept on being Maurice. The APD filed the reports away. But here’s the dumb-luck thing: If Maurice Pierce hadn’t shoved the loaded pistol in his jeans just to strut around Northcross like a movie badass, if he hadn’t implicated Forrest or brought Rob Springsteen, Mike Scott and the Pathfinder into the picture…if none of that had happened, there’s no reason to think anybody working on the case would’ve ever paid them any attention at all.
THE BOYS, 1997
They’re now twenty-one (Forrest Welborn), twenty-two (Maurice Pierce) and twenty-three (Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott).
They no longer hang out together. They aren’t friends. They lead separate lives in different towns and cities. The strongest friendship, between Forrest and Maurice, has been permanently poisoned by the older boy’s accusations. Although one of them earned his GED, when arrested they will all be labeled high school dropouts.
By that summer, Maurice has married his high school sweetheart, Kimberli, and is living in Lewisville, Texas, not far from Dallas. They have one daughter, Marisa, who is five. He has worked at construction, car-detailing and in the shipping and receiving department of a local wholesaler, loading trucks. He still drives fast cars, currently a Mustang.
Forrest is working in a car-repair and body shop in Lockhart. He has one daughter with a girlfriend he hasn’t married. He was caught driving with a suspended license but will soon open his own shop.
Mike has been on the move again, having worked near Austin at an adult video store and as a roofer in Dallas. He drove to Evansville, Indiana, when a friend needed company, then back to Texas, doing automobile repair in San Antonio. Married to a computer technician, Jeannine Marie Stark, he has assumed fatherly responsibility for her four-year-old daughter, Jasmine. In 1999, when Jeannine is given a promotion at UniSys Corporation’s Austin office, they will house-sit a friend’s trailer near Buda until they find their own place.
Rob is in West Virginia, working for minimum wage, flipping burgers, selling newspaper subscriptions door-to-door, living with his mother. By the end of 1998, he will be married, working double shifts at two jobs, renovating a cabin his wife has inherited and living in a small two-story house set on a hillside, taking prescription drugs for ADD and seeing a doctor for chemical imbalances.
If they’re waiting for something to happen, they won’t have to much longer.
NOT A TASK FORCE
In October 1997, Stan Knee—formerly chief of police in Garden Grove, California—was sworn in as head of the Austin force. After the Betsy Watson debacle, he seemed a safe choice, being a longtime rank-and-file cop and a Vietnam vet. But because of Mala Sangre and continuing budget cuts, the APD hostilities lingered on.
Later t
hat month, after reactivating the tips files and changing Maurice’s ranking from “major” to “likely,” Paul Johnson began looking for accomplices, friends and witnesses. In early November, he called Pierce, arranged for a meeting and drove north to Lewisville, where he and a fellow detective sat with the suspect in his living room.
Friendly and helpful, Maurice signed a sworn statement that began, “Me and my friends always used to hang out at Northcross Mall. I am having trouble remembering the exact day of the yogurt shop murders but I can remember the night that me and some of my friends went out and shot a gun that I had….” On the night of the murders, he thought he either went to the mall with Forrest or met up with him there.
He then repeated the story about Forrest borrowing the .22, but this time he changed the location from the Fungus to a video arcade. He mentioned Rob Springsteen and a longhaired guy whose name he couldn’t remember. He said when Forrest returned the gun and told him he’d done something bad, he seemed to be joking, but when he then asked to use the gun again to kill more girls, Maurice had to wonder.
He summed up: “I know I made a statement when I was arrested that said that Forrest told me other details about the murders. I don’t remember any of that now. I know I was very nervous and I was trying to say things to help me get out of the police interview and they were twisting my story up.”
Johnson next drove to Lockhart, only to discover that Forrest Welborn was on the lam for unpaid driving tickets. When police found him in Lubbock, Johnson interviewed him there. Forrest didn’t specifically remember the night of the murders—once, when detectives asked him, he had the date wrong—but he thought he was probably at Northcross, because that’s where he hung out, and probably with Maurice, because that’s who he hung out with. After denying any involvement in the crime, he was given a polygraph test that registered him as truthful. In his report, Johnson noted that Forrest was helpful, credible and cooperative, and that he now had doubts about his participation. He also made phone calls to Springsteen and Scott, but neither offered anything new or of interest. Rob talked about sneaking into the Rocky Show, hanging out with somebody named Travis, looking for a friend who never showed up. Mike rambled on in his usual scattered fashion.
Who Killed These Girls? Page 15