“Not a whole lot.”
“Not a whole lot.” A flat statement, then waiting.
“Used their own clothes to tie them up.” He’s getting it now.
“Used their own clothes to tie them up. You and Rob. And by the time you were done, what were they wearing? Say it.”
“Nothing.”
“Right.”
That done, Hardesty takes the next step: “What did the other boys make you do to those girls?”
Mike thinks he sees girls getting hit in the back of the head with the butt of a gun, was that it? No. Did they make him kick them? Hardesty brushes past that one and returns to his original question: “They made you do something, what did they make you do?”
Mike thinks maybe one of the girls was strangled to death. “I didn’t choke one with a garrote, did I?” Hardesty waits. Mike keeps trying. Did they make him bludgeon them, even rape one of them? He answers that one for himself. No, he didn’t rape anybody, “that’s not me.” But he did have a pocketknife on him, was that it?
Hardesty, stepping in: That’s four. Kicking, strangling, bludgeoning, knifing. No.
Mike, fearfully: They didn’t make me shoot them, did they?
Hardesty: Well, did they? Tell us. I want to hear it. Did they? Say it, Michael, is that what happened?
Mike: I think so.
Hardesty: You think so?
He does.
—
The TCCA opinion noted a significant number of other errors in Mike’s confession. For one thing, in the interrogation room, he repeatedly insisted that the girls were shot one by one behind the counter. In a crude, haphazard drawing, he drew four vertical lines behind the horizontal line that represented the counter. Girl, girl, girl, girl. But he later stated for the record that the girls were taken to the back of the shop, where they were sexually assaulted and then shot. And after his assertion that he shot a girl in the face gained no traction with the detectives, he altered that to the forehead and finally—after they again waited for him to get it right—to the back of the head. Which was a bingo.
—
Judge Tom Price was elected to the court in 1996 and remained on the bench until his retirement in 2015. He is particularly remembered for publicly taking an eloquent stand against the death penalty—a distinctly unpopular opinion in Texas—and for quietly wondering, in a Texas Monthly interview, “How far to the right is this court going to be?” Even Republicans, he added, “want there to be fair trials.” The dissenting opinion on Mike Scott’s appeal was written by Presiding Judge Sharon Keller.
—
At 5:35 that afternoon, Mike will wonder if maybe he should get a lawyer. At that, the detectives quickly suggest another break, and when they come back, Hardesty says they need to clear up this thing about a lawyer, at which point Mike backs down. What do they think he ought to do? Dodging the question, Lara encourages Mike not to do anything until he remembers everything and can go on with his life and be a good husband and father, not a dirtbag like the others.
Other members of the Cold Case Task Force will join the interrogation that evening, including tall, lean, self-assured BATF agent Chuck Meyer and, from Homicide, Sgt. Manuel Fuentes and burly, seasoned Detective Robert Merrill, whose folksy manner and country-boy humor will charm Scott and give him the confidence to share some embarrassing details—for one, that Rob called him a “pussy” that night and bullied him into raping one of the girls. Merrill does a real man-to-man about the shame of being called a pussy. Mike says it didn’t matter much; he couldn’t get an erection anyway. But Rob? He raped the shit out of one of those girls, the girl he spun around in the front room.
The questioning shifts gears again and the detectives turn to the fire. Mike first says Maurice piled Styrofoam cups and napkins close to the girls, then changes that to on top of the girls, and started the fire with a Zippo. Then he insists he was in the car and didn’t see the fire and, a little later, that actually Maurice instructed him to spread cups and napkins on the girls’ piled-up bodies, then go to the car and get a can of lighter fluid and pour it all over them. And then use the Zippo. Which, he says, he did.
At about eight o’clock, Lara and Merrill take Mike to the yogurt shop, which by now has become a check-cashing and quick-loan operation. They’ve arranged to have a video camera there to catch any significant information he might come up with, but he just walks around, saying little. On the drive back to the station, they buy him a burger and another soft drink.
—
It’s 10:22 when Lara opens the door to the interview room the final time, and past eleven when Mike gets home. By then, his step-daughter’s asleep and Jeannine’s still suffering from a migraine. To keep the peace—and abide by the detectives’ instructions—Mike won’t divulge anything to her about his ordeal. Tomorrow, he’ll tell the detectives he didn’t sleep much the night before, and it isn’t difficult to picture him lying in bed beside his wife in the small hours, jabbing at his mind and memory, trying to piece together the facts and possibilities the cops have hammered into him, insinuations and suggestions, as well as his own attempts to remember what really happened all those years ago.
Maybe the Buda trailer finally goes dark. Perhaps Mike sleeps. Early the next morning, as if spellbound, he’ll walk the half mile from the trailer to the highway in time to meet Ron Lara, who arrives at a little before eight and is surprised to find Mike standing at the top of the gravel road, alone, waiting for him.
THE PURSUIT OF MAURICE PIERCE, ROUND THREE
In the car, Mike again speaks first, but this time Lara has brought a tape recorder. Last night, he says, when he tried to replay what he’d told them, all he could really remember about the yogurt shop was that the walls and hallway were white, nothing else; but then, he doesn’t even remember what happened last week and the only way he knows today is Friday is because his wife is wearing jeans for dress-down day.
When Lara doesn’t respond, he keeps talking.
“What scares me the most is, I can’t recall a lot of the specific details of what happened that night. I’m scared I’m going to prison. I’m scared I’m going to get the death penalty….I’m scared what’s going to happen to me and how my wife is going to take this. And I’m scared when this is all over I’ll be walking down the street and somebody will have seen me on TV or read my name in the newspaper and shoot me.”
When Lara congratulates him for facing up to what he’s done, Mike says he just wants to put it all behind him, to open the doors to his head and “fucking talk to y’all and finish this.” And he wishes he had a photographic mind or could plug into one of those machines like the one they had in the movie Total Recall; then he’d know everything.
He remains silent for a bit, then continues: “I keep asking myself do I want a lawyer and I keep telling myself no….But, man, I still don’t believe I did this.”
Lara, driving, says, “What’s that?” As if he hadn’t been listening.
In the interview room, Mike wraps himself in a blanket they’ve provided and sits hunched over, bundled up to his chin. He’s been thinking, he tells Lara and Manuel Fuentes, that maybe he lied yesterday, because his heart tells him he didn’t kill the girls, rob the store, set it on fire. But his brain tells him something different. On TV, he heard about something called “hypnotic regression,” which would put him under and let him float while the memory tape played. Maybe they could help get him into that. Then he’d know.
But when the detectives ignore that and press for further details, he suddenly remembers having seen the keys in the front door of the shop, and when Lara assures him that he definitely was inside and “pulled the trigger,” Mike craters, saying he “probably” shot one of the girls, although he’s not quite sure which one. And when the detective then accuses him of having shot all four, he says, “I can’t remember shooting anybody. You all are telling me that I did. I was telling you all what you wanted to hear.”
Later in the day, Merrill returns. Alon
e with Mike, he takes out a pistol and puts it to the back of Mike’s head. A clip from the video showing that scene will later surface on its way to the Internet and cause something of a scandal. When a story by Michael Hall appears in the January 2001 issue of Texas Monthly, it will open with:
It’s a gun, all right, and Detective Robert Merrill is holding it to the back of Mike Scott’s head. The detective is standing as if braced for action; the suspect is sitting at a small, round table, his left hand resting on the white surface. From the camera’s angle, up high in the cramped interrogation room, you can see Scott’s receding hairline. His body language says he is sitting perfectly still. This is his second day of interrogation, and Merrill and a series of other Austin policemen have been yelling and cursing at him for hours. Their frustration is, perhaps, understandable. This is no ordinary interrogation. Scott, they believe, has details about the biggest and most horrific case in the Austin Police Department’s history, the slaughter of four teenage girls at an I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! store on December 6, 1991.
—
Merrill had been given the gun by Paul Johnson, who thought it might scare Mike into talking. Instead, as Merrill will acknowledge during Mike’s trial, it shut him down.
By the time Texas Ranger Sal Abreo enters, it’s two o’clock and Mike is exhausted. But the soft-spoken Latino detective has a gift for intimacy and, like Hector Polanco, knows how and when to put it to good use. Alone with Mike, he places a comforting hand on his shoulder and, sitting close, practically whispers in his ear. He’s there to help get the girls’ screams out of his head; it’s okay; he only wants to help. And he describes the “little girls” tied up on the floor and they’re squirming and he’s raping them—was it from the front or back?—and then they’re lying on top of one another and he’s squirting lighter fluid on their little bodies. “It’s all right to tell us, it’s important, Michael. It’s all right.”
Mike is weeping and all but gone, but, like a preacher pushing the Gospel, Abreo presses on. Think about it, he says. “Up to that point you could hear them screaming, crying, begging not to be killed, but at some point they stopped screaming, didn’t they?”
Mike: Yes, sir.
Abreo: Why? Lean your head back and think about it. Why did they stop screaming, why did that happen?
Abreo keeps repeating the question, until Mike finally gives him what he’s after: They were gagged.
Abreo: Yes.
Mike: But I don’t know with what.
Yes, he does, Abreo tells him. And again he reminds him of the little girls squirming while he was raping them, but was something stuffed in their mouths? Can he see what it is? And can he see the face of the girl he’s raping?
When Mike says he doesn’t, Abreo says that’s because he’s found a way to take her face away and now must put it back on.
By the time Merrill reenters and asks if he got his “wanger” up that night, Mike’s bent over with his head between his legs and he’s sobbing.
At 2:45, Merrill calls for a break. Half an hour later he returns with a diagram of the shop, which Mike wants to take home and study, but Merrill says no; they’re going to take him home now, and he should get things in order over the weekend, on his own.
—
The following day, Saturday, Lara will call Mike at home and tell him he doesn’t sound so good—as if to say, No wonder, now that you’ve remembered killing those girls. On Sunday, Lara and Fuentes tape a session at Mike and Jeannine’s home, using a battery Mike takes from his wall clock when their audiocassette recorder goes dead. In his living room, Mike strokes a stuffed cat while fielding questions. He likes cats, he tells them. They can’t have a real one because his wife’s allergic, but this one’s okay. The detectives have already had a run-in with Jeannine in which she called them names and accused them of turning her husband into a liar. After she leaves, they ask Mike if they can call him on a mobile phone, so they can avoid his wife from that day forward. Mike says no. She’s pissed at them and won’t let up.
On Sunday, Mike wants to visit high bridges in the vicinity of the yogurt shop, thinking maybe he’ll recognize the one they drove to after the murders, where he supposedly threw up over the railing and tossed a set of ICBY keys into the lake. Lara and Fuentes drive him around for hours, but Austin is ringed by five lakes and none of the bridges resembles the one he remembers—“that rust extension bridge with that big shit over the top.” And anyway, no keys were reported missing from the yogurt shop. And neither was the bottom half of a blender he mentioned for the first time that day.
They then take him back to the scene of the crime, but nothing much happens. Mike just looks around, saying nothing. During both trials, however, Lara and Fuentes will each note a moment when the three of them were sitting on a fallen tree limb, taking a break, and Lara asked Scott point-blank if he still had the .22 pistol used in the murders. Both officers say that Mike looked Lara straight in the eye and said, “It’s no longer in my possession.” Though none of this was recorded, that statement confirmed the detectives’ gathering belief that they had the right man—not just a link to Maurice Pierce but a participant.
In Mike’s final, brief interview—Monday, September 13—he remembers gagging one of the girls with a paper towel and seeing Maurice with another one in a separate room that might have been an office. He’s still saying they tied the girls’ feet together, which the detectives—rather than question how they were able to rape them then—choose to ignore. And he thinks the gun he’d used came from Rob, not Maurice, and was a .22. As for the caliber of the second gun, he thinks it was a semiautomatic .38. Getting nothing but contradictions and discrepancies, the detectives take him home.
—
On Tuesday, at Ron Lara’s request, Manuel Fuentes drives to UniSys and finds Mike sitting on the curb in front of a Grandy’s restaurant, across the street from Jeannine’s office. Mike tells Fuentes he called a lawyer his family knows, Betty Blackwell, who wasn’t inclined to represent him, or even offer much advice, but did strongly suggest that he quit talking to the police and find a criminal attorney to represent him, because otherwise he might well be looking at a prison sentence or even the death penalty.
So why is he sitting there waiting to be picked up?
The last thing he needs, Scott tells Fuentes, is a lawyer.
So does he want to go to APD with Fuentes or not? It’s up to him.
Scott gets in the car. When asked why, he just shrugs.
On his own, Fuentes has decided to take a written statement, just because nobody had done it yet. Mike agrees to comply, but only if Sal Abreo is present. By phone, Abreo agrees to join them but will need a good twenty minutes to get there.
At Fuentes’s office on the second floor of the Twin Towers, at 10:39, after issuing a Miranda warning, Fuentes sits at his computer and brings up a blank APD statement page, asking Mike to stand behind him as he types. Abreo takes his place at the end of the desk.
Five hours later, at 3:45, the officers locate two civilians in the building—statistics and computer guys—to serve as witnesses when Michael Scott signs the fourteen-page written document admitting his participation in the Yogurt Shop Murders and implicating Robert Springsteen, Maurice Pierce and, to some extent, Forrest Welborn. The signing wasn’t videotaped. When asked why it took so long, Fuentes will say Mike talked slowly and kept excusing himself to go outside and smoke a cigarette.
Neither Lara nor Hardesty was there at the signing. Lara had already left on a flight to Charleston, West Virginia, to question Robert Springsteen, and his partner was tending to other Yogurt Shop business. When Mike’s statement veered significantly from his videotaped confession, Fuentes didn’t correct or question him. He knew only scraps of what the interrogation had produced, just what Lara had told him. (See Appendix 1 for Michael Scott written statement.)
Although Mike won’t be arrested for several weeks, the task force is certain he knows the location of at least one of the murd
er weapons, so they keep him under surveillance. When he’s officially charged, he’ll be at his and Jeannine’s storage locker on South Congress. Hearing cars drive up, he’ll look around and see two cars and a slew of cops. They tell him he’s under arrest for capital murder, for killing Amy Ayers, and for robbing the ICBY shop. Then they cuff him and take him in.
Mike Scott will remain incarcerated from that day in September 1999 until the summer of 2009, when he’s released on a personal recognizance bond.
THE PURSUIT OF MAURICE PIERCE, ROUND FOUR
The first mistake Robert Springsteen IV made on the Monday afternoon of September 13, 1999, was to answer his phone; the second, to accept a free cell phone offer made by an anonymous caller; but it was the third mistake that sank him. When the caller asked for the lucky recipient’s name and address, promising to call back later with details, Springsteen complied.
Chuck Meyer made the call. Right guy, right number. Let’s go.
On Tuesday, while Manuel Fuentes was at the Twin Towers taking Michael Scott’s statement, the big guns—Lara, Merrill, Meyer and task-force supervisor John Neff—left for Charleston. With Scott a sure thing and Springsteen directly implicated, they could skip the friendly overtures and jump to the accusations. Although on the stand Merrill will say they went to West Virginia to find out what Springsteen had to say about Mike Scott’s declarations, their behavior hardly confirms this. They were after another killer. Once they linked Springsteen’s account with Scott’s, they could go after Pierce and Welborn. And if those two continued to stonewall, they’d go back to the first two and make a deal.
Legal advice from the DA’s office supported their basic strategy, which was once again to bypass Miranda requirements by assuring Springsteen he wasn’t in custody, not charged, that they just needed his help to clear up a few inconsistencies.
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