—
In February 1998, Johnson again called Mike, Rob and Maurice, who gave him nothing useful. In March, twenty months after its formation, the AG Task Force was disbanded. Hoping to shine a positive light on yet another failure, a spokesman praised the team for its work clearing leads and making the caseload more manageable. Paul Johnson was transferred out to work the streets, but he couldn’t let go. In September, he sent Maurice Pierce’s .22 and ammunition to ballistics to be checked again. The result was the same: This was not a gun used at the ICBY.
Looking for a new tack, he moved his attention from the weapon to the fire. The original arson investigator, Melvin Stahl, had retired. And even though Chuck Meyer had agreed with Stahl about the origin of the fire, Johnson decided to get in touch with former APD officer Marshall Littleton, who for the past ten years had been living in San Antonio and working for the BATF as fire investigator for Central Texas. In Austin, Littleton and Johnson had worked as partners for a year and a half, sometimes taking late-night shifts together, a duty that inevitably created trust and loyalty.
Meyer met with Littleton first and asked if the fire at the yogurt shop could be “modeled,” scientifically re-created on computer software that could be run backward, from extinguishment to origin. Littleton advised against it, as fire modeling might “eliminate a possible suspect.” When defense lawyers later questioned the ethics of that, Littleton quickly shifted the topic of discussion. But when asked again if he’d made the statement, he answered without hesitation: “That’s correct.”
In late fall, Johnson once again drove to Lewisville, where Maurice agreed to undergo hypnosis, against his lawyer’s advice, but even that yielded nothing new. A few days later, Forrest provided a written statement echoing Pierce’s account. Undeterred, Johnson asked DPS for more gun and blood tests.
In December, former ICBY manager Reese Price called. Now a Travis County deputy, she wondered if Johnson had been told that in the months prior to the murders, both she and Jennifer Harbison had received harassing phone calls at home and at work, and that her apartment had been burglarized. The intruder had left behind valuables, including a television set and jewelry, but had taken the time to arrange some of her underwear in a neat pile on her bed with a kitchen knife on top. When she heard there’d been clean cuts in the collars of Jennifer’s and Eliza’s shirts, she remembered the weird feeling she’d had when she saw the knife. She and Jennifer Harbison resembled each other, both tiny, with long light brown hair. Might there be a connection?
Intrigued, Johnson asked Price to come to the station. During her visit, she told him about the crawl space above the ceiling connecting one Hillside shop to the next; she and the other girls had heard noises up there. And then there was the night when, checking out the bathrooms, she found shoe prints on the toilet seat in the men’s room and noticed that a ceiling tile above it had been moved. She used a broom handle to shift the tile back in place.
She and Johnson also talked about Brice protocol, the shop layout and the metal shelves. Afterward, writing up the interview, he described the shelves as where the “fire had been concentrated” and listed the items Price said they’d kept there: paper cups, cans of toppings, cleaning supplies, bug spray, oven cleaner, paint for the concrete floors, a gallon can of a gelatin-based product they used to clean the waffle maker. As for the back doors, she thought maybe they’d once used a padlock, but as she recalled, they couldn’t keep track of the key, so they switched to a double-cylinder dead bolt or else a single-cylinder with a knob on the inside—she couldn’t say which. A couple of other girls also had keys. Maybe one of them knew for sure.
Concerning the photograph of the unopened Coke can sitting next to the cash register and the Styrofoam cup beside it, Price said one of the girls might have been buying a soft drink for herself, but since the purchase didn’t appear on the register tape, it seemed clear there hadn’t been time to ring it up. And when Eliza rang up “No Sale,” Price thought she might have been simply closing down the register for the night.
A few days later, Johnson asked Amy Dreiss to come in. Having worked with Eliza a few nights before the murders, she confirmed Price’s report that Eliza Thomas had been upset about breaking up with her boyfriend, and said she thought the back-door lock had a “knob” on the inside but wasn’t certain. Dreiss also described Eliza as a fair and thorough coworker, especially concerning Brice protocol, which she insisted on following to the letter. Jennifer, on the other hand, was always anxious to skim through the necessities and get home. Ordinarily, Dreiss told Johnson, Friday nights were hers, but the week before the murders she’d asked to take December 6 off. Eliza had volunteered to work her shift.
One thing to note here is that during the investigation, no one described the lock on the back door as a “thumb latch,” always referring to it as a “knob” or a “twist lock.” But once one of the arrested suspects used the term, “thumb latch” stuck. Prosecutors called it that and so did witnesses, including former ICBY employees. This is the kind of stealth trial lawyers often use, knowing that casual repetition can draw disparate testimonies together and give an impression of unanimity.
Marshall Littleton finally met with Paul Johnson early in 1999 and again advised against fire modeling. There were too many oddities, and too many grievous consequences for screwups. If the aluminum ladder and metal shelving were available, they might yield important clues, but they weren’t. For the time being, they should just wait.
POWERPOINT
After nine months on the job, Chief Stan Knee offered Paul Johnson yet another opportunity to organize a Yogurt Shop team, this one focused primarily within Homicide and known generally, if not formally, as the Cold Case Task Force. Senior Sgt. John Neff would serve as unit supervisor, Johnson as case agent, with six homicide detectives working under him—Ron Lara, J. W. Thompson, Robert Merrill, John Hardesty, Doug Skolaut and Manuel Fuentes—along with Texas Ranger Sal Abreo and the tireless Chuck Meyer. The team would work out of the Twin Towers, two reflective gold buildings, north of the main offices, where the APD undercover division was based.
Having been transferred to Homicide in May, Ron Lara had been working with Johnson for two months, tasked “to go out and interview any individuals that may not have been spoken to” and, more important, “to re-evaluate the Maurice Pierce tips.” Lean and tightly wound, perfectly coiffed, with black eyes and high cheekbones, Lara was one of the growing number of Latino officers in the APD and, like Johnson, known for his knife-edge tenacity; together, they made for a power couple in the land of cold-case work. Within a month, Lara had organized and distributed a detailed briefing “about the Maurice Pierce tip, the times that he was arrested, some of the people he hung out with….The profile that was established back during that time frame [and] primarily updated everybody to where we were at now.”
Other active suspects included Kenneth McDuff, the Mexican nationals, a few Satanists and others. But one name attracted the most heat.
“Maurice Pierce,” Lara would explain, “was an individual that we were trying to either pursue or eliminate.”
On August 6, at the Twin Towers, the task force held its first formal meeting. Johnson gave a four-hour PowerPoint presentation with some 205 slides he and Lara had pulled together. Once the room had been darkened, the computer screen flashed electric blue and then the title came up, in jagged yellow and white letters: The Investigative Plan to Pursue Maurice Pierce. Clearly, pursuit had won out over elimination.
Computerized presentations can be teacherly and static, but Johnson’s had narrative suspense and front-loaded drive. There were color photos of the yogurt shop on the night of the crime; the billboard portraits of the murdered girls, followed by photos of their burned bodies; mug shots of various suspects, jazzy graphics, time lines, charts, even sound effects—a drumroll to introduce particularly important items, the sound of hands clapping when an officer’s name appeared. To no one’s surprise, John Jones’s name rarely
came up.
Johnson had made his choice.
Jones himself remained skeptical. “The fact is,” he said later, “whoever was charged in this case was going down.”
Using FBI profiling and DPS crime-scene conclusions as background and backup, Johnson’s presentation created a story line of unraveling possibilities, often featuring a photo of the spiky-haired Maurice at the center of the screen. Like rays of the sun drawn by a child, straight lines led from Maurice to other suspects or possible witnesses—friends, running buddies, family members, girlfriends—and then to scenes where, at one time or another, he’d claimed to have been on the night of the murders, including the area behind Hillside where he said he’d met up with the skinheads. Forrest Welborn’s photo was one from school days, when his hair was cropped; underneath it, a caption described the Northcross incident. Rob Springsteen’s yearbook photo showed an unkempt boy, wired and alert. For some reason, Mike Scott’s picture was noticeably absent, perhaps because the last time cops had talked to Pierce, he couldn’t even remember Scott’s name.
One slide featured Officer Joe Pennington’s diagrams. The stick figures had blossomed into more realistic, computerized representations of the girls’ bodies arranged as they had been found, with their names written across the bodies. The layout of the shop was pretty complete, down to chairs on the tables in the front room and an outline of the office in the back. On a long rectangle representing the steel shelving along the south wall of the storage room was an italicized notation: Origin of the Fire.
—
However promising Pierce looked, so far he’d given them nothing to work with. They needed somebody else, a second-tier associate, friend or girlfriend, somebody attached to any of them who could be persuaded to tag the foursome’s weak link, the one who’d be most likely to burn Maurice. Somebody wondered if Rob Springsteen’s girlfriend was still around. Maybe Kelly Hanna knew something she’d be willing to tell them.
Paul Johnson had called Hanna in 1998. She’d acknowledged then that, yes, she and Springsteen had dated for about three weeks in November and early December of 1991, and that on December 6 Rob had told her he might swing by that evening with Mike and Maurice. But when he didn’t show, she wasn’t all that surprised. And no, she hadn’t been at Northcross that afternoon or night, nor had she gone to San Antonio. They’d come by her house and asked her to, but she wasn’t interested and, once she found out the Pathfinder was stolen, she’d said absolutely not. So whatever they’d told the police, she hadn’t gone joyriding with them.
That wasn’t much, but she did know all four guys. Maybe she’d overheard Maurice say something. Or maybe Rob and Mike had witnessed what happened at the yogurt shop and Rob had bragged to Kelly about what he’d seen. The girl still lived right there in Austin. Ron Lara and John Hardesty were assigned to talk to her, while other members of the task force were given other duties. But Johnson had a feeling they were on the right track.
—
On August 26, when Lara and Hardesty knocked at her door, Kelly Hanna was twenty-four and in the third trimester of her third pregnancy. The detectives politely introduced themselves and said they had a few questions they wanted to ask about Rob Springsteen and his friends, some inconsistencies they needed to clear up about the night the girls were killed at the yogurt shop. Hanna had an honest, open face and a straightforward manner and didn’t seem mindless or drug-sodden like so many of the others. They talked with her at home for fifteen or twenty minutes, then wondered if she’d be willing to go down to the police station the next day to help them out. They could talk there in a private, quiet place, say at three-thirty the next afternoon?
Kelly said she would, of course. She had nothing to hide, but they should understand, Rob had been a part of her life for only about a month and she hadn’t seen him since he left Austin in late December of that year. She was raising two kids now, with a third coming, so high school wasn’t something she thought much about anymore. Still, she considered herself a good citizen, a person who trusted the police, so of course she’d do what she could to help.
THE PURSUIT OF MAURICE PIERCE, ROUND ONE
Government agencies aside, Carlos Garcia has become keeper of the Yogurt Shop archives. Transcripts, crime-scene diagrams and photographs, DVDs, Paul Johnson’s PowerPoint presentation…he has pretty much everything. Sometimes he thinks about burning the folders and files just to get them out of his life. But he doesn’t. Because even if he did, he’d still have the digitized copies. And the memories.
It’s unlikely he’ll ever use his collection in court. Not long after preparing for Mike Scott’s canceled retrial, Garcia abandoned private practice to become a senior staff attorney for the Texas Defender Services, a nonprofit watchdog organization that aims “to improve the quality of representation afforded to those facing a death sentence and to expose and eradicate the systemic flaws plaguing the Texas death penalty.” For ten years he traveled all over the state teaching defensive strategies, from plea bargaining to jury selection to final argument.
Yogurt Shop, he says, changed him and everybody else who had anything to do with it.
His bookshelves are crammed with tomes purchased during Scott, including books on the art of persuasion, the mind-set of serial killers and the Reid Technique of police interrogation. When I asked him if the questioning of Kelly Hanna had been videotaped, he said yes and that he had the DVD, but why was I interested in it? He’d already given me the Scott and Springsteen discs. Honestly, I said, I didn’t know why. Maybe it was because without her, the APD might not have gone after Mike Scott when they did, and also because it wasn’t shown in court. He burned me a copy.
My son and daughter-in-law were living with me during the weeks it took me to watch her interrogation, along with Mike Scott’s and Rob Springsteen’s. Anytime one of them walked past my door and heard the thin, wavery voice of a young person under fire, their footsteps quickened and they hastened past, not wanting to hear. I, on the other hand, was transfixed: zooming back to catch a muffled phrase and then forward again to stay on track. My own life fell away and I was so much in the present with the person being questioned that it might as well have been me getting hounded in the hot seat, contradicted and lied to, videotaped without either knowledge or consent. Our job is to get the bad guys, I know the questioners would say to this, and this is how we do it. You do want us to get the bad guys, don’t you?
Of course the answer to that is obvious. But in this and many other cases, it’s not always clear it’s bad guys who are getting the third degree.
—
APD headquarters are located in a pale stone building downtown at the corner of East Eighth Street and the I-35 access road. Driving south down the freeway past the UT football stadium and the capitol, you can see the Main, as it’s called, rising up ahead, a hunkering five-story structure with an attached garage. Built in the early eighties, it’s far too small for Austin now and has been for many years. Inside are holding cells, a county jail and the offices of various police units.
Held up by traffic and a confusing maze of one-way streets, Kelly Hanna arrived a few minutes late for her appointment and was sent up to the second floor, where Lara and Hardesty escorted her past the Homicide offices to a narrow hall containing three interview rooms.
When I insert the “Hanna-1” DVD, the screen fills with jumpy geometric shapes that quickly yield a bird’s-eye view of a small windowless room furnished with a round white table that takes up most of the space. Around it are four government-issue chairs; on top, an open computer with its screen facing away from the camera. When the door opens, we hear Kelly’s voice, light and girlish, a musical burble.
Hardesty enters first and, after ushering her in, moves briskly to his left. “Have a seat,” he says, pointing, “in this chair right here.”
Wearing a dark, long-sleeved V-neck top and light-colored pants, her hair pulled back loosely from her face, Kelly sidles around the table and sits in the indicated ch
air, having no idea that—thanks to the Elizabeth Watson directive—she has been seated squarely in front of a video camera attached to a light fixture hanging high on the opposite wall. Looking relaxed and unbothered, she straightens the APD access badge pinned to her shirt and then, after she and Lara exchange small talk about downtown traffic, moves right to the topic at hand. There’s something, she says, she needs to tell them.
Lara responds brightly. “That’s what we like to hear,” he says. Hardesty’s beside him, setting up the computer, both men facing her.
Kelly tells the detectives that when she saw them the day before, she’d said Springsteen had left Austin in late December, but afterward she recalled seeing him at a party in January, so she’d gotten that date wrong….
Hardesty interrupts to ask if the rest of what she’d said was accurate.
“Yes, sir.”
Fingers on the keyboard, he moves on. “Date of birth?”
In the black-and-white tape made that day, Kelly’s face will be the only one we can see, and only, of course, from above. The image isn’t sharp, but her features are pretty clear. Of Lara and Hardesty, we see only their scalps, shoulders, arms, hands, torsos. Of considerable importance is the dance they perform, moving from one chair to another, leaning back or forward, coming close or pulling away, clasping their hands—elbows out—behind their heads or cupping them between their knees as if in prayer. Occasionally one of them walks abruptly out the door without explanation, then returns. The table—so white, it seems to glow—takes center stage; they have to move sideways to get around it. And although the chairs look wildly uncomfortable, Kelly sits politely for the whole two and a half hours they keep her there, despite the pull of her swollen belly.
Who Killed These Girls? Page 16