The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

by Laura Tillman

  In 2008, the old brick apartment building sometimes called Hotel Imperial or Hotel de los Chiflados—Hotel of the Stooges—by its neighbors, was less than half-occupied. Together, photographers Brad, Daniel, and I walked the few short blocks from the paper and through the unlocked entrance. They began to snap pictures of every detail—the stairs, the bars on the windows, the empty hallway. Every inch that was accessible was recorded by the soft clicks of camera shutters. We were documenting the building because of John and Angela’s crimes, but at the time I felt little emotion about the assignment. When I walked through the hallways, the hairs on my neck did not stand on end. I simply held out the recorder and captured tape of my sandals slapping the stairs as I ascended, preparing the audio for a slide show I was to make for the paper’s website.

  Brad sensed something different. He was entering a landmark, one he’d documented during its darkest hours, when neighborhood children left stuffed animals at a makeshift shrine out front, and the apartment was sealed up as evidence. But most of his photos had been shot from the exterior, the way the majority of the community experienced the building. Now he was within it, and he walked through the hallways with a care and attentiveness that approached reverence.

  We peeked inside empty rooms on the second floor. A few stray items had been left behind. A wire hanger and a religious calendar. A sign for the men’s bathroom with an oversize playing card—a jack of hearts—pinned up next to it. I tried to talk to a couple of the remaining tenants. One opened the door, heard out our request for an interview, then closed it with a few muttered words. Another spoke vaguely about her desire to stay. I couldn’t tell who was living in the building lawfully and who might be squatting, which apartments were occupied and which had been abandoned years ago, after tenants were spooked by what had taken place.

  We walked back down the staircase and into the sun. Brad and Daniel had gotten good photographs—the building was full of the idiosyncrasies that make interesting pictures.

  On our way back to the Herald, I stopped to interview Minerva Perez and Alejandro Mendoza, the building’s neighbors. Both elderly, they had lived in their homes in the little barrio nearly their whole lives. Minerva, a sweet and accommodating woman with an open smile and short hair dyed red, felt strongly about the ­building. She didn’t like to walk on the same side of the street when she passed by, a constant inconvenience because she lived two doors down. Since that March day when the bodies were discovered and the street was swarmed with police, Minerva had urged the county commissioner for her district to tear the building down.

  Alejandro, on the other hand, was unaffected. “They hear noises, they hear babies crying,” he said of the other neighbors. “They move out of here.”

  For Alejandro, a hunched, soft-spoken widower, it was about “them,” not him. He didn’t hear spooky noises, he didn’t care much whether 805 East Tyler remained or came down. It had been present his whole life, and the murders didn’t change the way he felt. His home, a small wood house painted blue, abutted the side of the building. Pragmatically, he saw this as an advantage: the wall provided protection from cold fronts during the winter. Alejandro described himself as someone who “never liked anything.” Other people liked to dance, go to movies, spend time outside, but not him. He wasn’t enthusiastic about life, and that extended to his feelings about the building, where his late wife had worked as a maid in the early days of their courtship.

  Later that day, I interviewed Mark Clark, a transplant to Brownsville who had opened an art gallery downtown after leaving a career at the Smithsonian. Clark sat on the Brownsville Heritage Council and was skeptical about the plan to tear the building down. To him, the city was attaching a stigma to a structure—a collection of bricks and concrete.

  “I feel that the building is getting a death sentence for the crimes of its occupants,” he said. “Is there any such thing as an evil building?”

  Clark said he was the only member of the Brownsville Heritage Council to vote against the demolition permit, and he was frustrated with his fellow committee members. If it were up to him, demolition of any of the city’s antique buildings would be avoided at all costs, regardless of whether they were especially attractive or could lay claim to a famous lineage. Instead, he said such permits were granted regularly, allowing Brownsville’s architecture to be slowly, almost imperceptibly depleted, until only the best-financed restoration projects remained. In such a poor city, it might take decades to get beyond the upper echelon of preservation initiatives and finally begin to work on homes that were less architecturally or historically significant, but still helped Brownsville retain its identity. Any building over fifty years of age is worthy of special consideration if a city wishes to use federal funds for its alteration or demolition, according to the Texas Historical Commission, though structural integrity and significance are also weighed to assess the import of preservation.

  Over my years in the Rio Grande Valley, I lived in several homes—historic, suburban, and modern. After I arrived from the Northeast, my first home in Brownsville was on the north side of town in a subdivision. The house was not well cared for, but it was relatively new, located in a safe, middle-income area where families with modest means bought modest homes.

  At night I’d drive home, feeling as if I were entering an anonymous part of America. The houses could have been in most any city, styled by a faceless architect. But the subtropics persistently encroached, even in the subdivision. A kigelia tree leaned over the back fence, its banana-size seedpods dangling from its branches like earrings, and a tarantula sometimes stood guard on the front stoop.

  Brownsville’s downtown, where the Tyler Street building is located, is the opposite of the sterile subdivision. In the morning on my way to work, I’d drive off the highway and see a lake on my right, where anhingas and egrets and pelicans, clean and white against the muddy water, dove for meals. Then, the side of the zoo, with just enough wildness peaking over the top of the fence to suggest a foreign universe inside. I’d see the park to my left and the federal courthouse, and then turning toward work, the peeling paint on the small houses beaten down by weather and lack of care, and the purple petals of a tree I couldn’t name, the parrots cawing and flashing green in front of my windshield, the lonely dog with the floppy teats weaving out of the street, done with nursing but not ready for death.

  I spent just five days in my next residence. I’d convinced the owner to allow me to rent out the finished rooms of a historic house that was undergoing renovation, an idea that quickly proved untenable. I could manage the nails and the sawdust on the floors, but when a swarm of termites descended on my bedroom, I realized I had to find a new place to live.

  Next came the Sethman Building, an eight-unit brick apartment building on the lake with the pelicans and anhingas, a half mile from downtown. It was my favorite part of Brownsville, the palm-lined boulevard bordered by grand old homes, tropical trees, and Spanish-revival ironwork. The apartment complex—two buildings joined by an arch—somehow made it into the mix once upon a time, perhaps for visitors who wanted a vacation bungalow on the lake.

  To say the word “lake” is also a misnomer. In the Rio Grande Valley, these oxbow lakes, bands of the Rio Grande that have since disconnected from their mother river, are called resacas. Now, most are stagnant. You wouldn’t want to swim in one, or even dip your toe. But they create an endemically scenic landscape for the city, a sense that it’s woven together around the remnants of a once-raging river that’s petered out to a gently flowing shadow of its former self. These resacas give Brownsville a singularity that reveals itself with casual grace, as you watch a great blue heron crane its neck against the buttery light at sunset. Sitting beside a resaca in the warm evening, the city’s beauty becomes undeniable, even in the roughness of its poverty, all its edges frayed.

  The Palm Boulevard apartment was charmingly eccentric. Everything was white or beige—the walls, the ca
rpets, the kitchen tile, the claw-foot bathtub, the wicker chairs on the porch. In the backyard, a towering avocado tree dropped green jewels of fruit. Termites gnawed at the window frames, and an army of pharaoh ants set up camp inside the walls. The faux-wood tiles of the kitchen floor would come unglued and shift beneath my feet, and in the summer the kitchen became a sauna whenever I cooked because the air conditioner was at the opposite end of the apartment. The screened-in porches gave me a front row seat to Palm Boulevard, and to the woodpeckers that made a home in the trunk of a dead palm tree.

  • • •

  Before I moved to Brownsville, murders were distant events, painted by the homogenous voices of TV anchors. They didn’t have much to do with me, and I didn’t see any frailty in maintaining a respectful distance. Working in journalism quickly narrowed that space.

  After five months at the Herald I covered my first murder, in part assigned to me because I’d taken an interest in local women’s issues, and the story was of teen-dating violence at its most extreme.

  Brenda Lee Nuñez was an academic star, scheduled to graduate from high school early. She was dating a young man, Hector, who was wildly fixated on her, and from all appearances the two were in love. He would call and text her constantly whenever they were apart. Then he began to criticize her body, and soon she began skipping meals and surviving off diet drinks.

  Brenda’s family got her away from Hector on a vacation, and in the space of that separation, they were able to communicate with her about the danger he posed. When she returned, Brenda broke it off. Hector found a new girlfriend and Brenda was happy, believing he wouldn’t bother her again.

  But Hector never stopped thinking of Brenda. After he broke up with his new girlfriend, he started asking Brenda out again. She said no, and one Saturday morning in February he came to her house, went up to her bedroom, and tied her up. He raped her and stabbed her twenty-eight times. She was seventeen.

  Shortly after the murder, I stood on the family’s doorstep. To my surprise, Brenda’s family let me into their kitchen and talked with me while they sat stuffing poblano peppers with white cheese. Her death was raw, and I could barely imagine their living in that house under her bedroom, still splattered with blood. They seemed shell-shocked, preparing for a new reality without their daughter. They remembered what led up to the murder—how the mother of the killer had reasoned with them to please convince their daughter to take back her son. He loved her so much.

  The next murder I wrote about was of a man who’d been found by the side of a country road. Police said it looked as if he’d been dragged by a vehicle. It was a Saturday, and my boyfriend drove with me to the edge of town where the police had blockaded the road. We didn’t find much besides the tall grass and a ditch. The suspect hadn’t been identified and his profile was generic: Hispanic male in his twenties. Without the details, what was there to glean from such a death? Had he died there, in this ditch? Or did the story of his death happen far away?

  The next victim was someone I knew. Barry Horn, the director of the Brownsville Museum of Fine Art, was a cheerful man in his late fifties with a coif of blond hair and the charisma of the TV personality he once was in Houston. One of his friends described him to The Brownsville Herald as Houston’s Truman Capote.

  Barry was found stabbed to death outside his bedroom in his home the day of the museum’s annual gala. The circumstances of his death—killed by a young man who police said might have been his lover—confused those who knew him. They couldn’t believe that the person they held in such high esteem could be secretly dating a nineteen-year-old. Could the story the killer told—that Barry had raped him and the killing had been done in retribution—hold any seed of truth?

  I was out of town, visiting friends, when another reporter called and gave me the news. But the story couldn’t be conveyed in that conversation. Barry’s dead. They’re calling it homicide. Found in his house.

  The day his body was discovered, his friends and colleagues went on with the gala Barry had planned. As the guests arrived at the museum, dressed to the nines and ready to eat good food and drink champagne, they asked for Barry, to give a word of congratulations. People always looked for him at events like this. He was uncommonly good at small talk, always ready with a funny anecdote, a kind word, or an introduction to someone with common interests. Instead, the gala attendees were informed of his death. Soon, the police would be searching a resaca for the murder weapon.

  I returned to Brownsville from New York in time for his funeral. The crowd was large, perhaps a hundred people. I took my turn walking to the front of the church and saw him laid out, skin waxy and false with his eyes closed, missing the whole thing. He’d been murdered. The fact gripped me, a cold hand around my throat.

  Untimely deaths rattle us, cause us to question our priorities. Murder unhinges at a deeper level. Barry’s life and death lacked finality, and a mystery lay at its heart: why and how he died. A film reel projected in my mind. The drawn-out pain of more than seventy stab wounds, those lonely, terrifying last moments of life. Finally, the adrenaline dissipating, a veil of darkness falling, until the world was blotted out.

  Generally, crime coverage didn’t fall to me, and I wasn’t ­especially attracted to it. I wrote about the university, politics, culture, art, and health. I spent weekends at festivals, concerts, exhibitions. I learned many more good stories than bad. I boarded a tiny plane and braced myself while an elementary-school student trained on a flight-­simulation program took her first try at piloting a real airplane. I ­visited the colonias, where residents had waited for decades for paved roads and indoor plumbing, but managed to prepare their children for college, and I saw schools train their chess teams to compete at the national level. During my first month on the job, I boarded an ­eighteen-­wheeler filled with donated supplies after flooding d­evastated the Mexican state of Tabasco and watched the country unfurl for thirty hours through a tiny window before visiting refugee camps and lush countryside. I made true friends, at last, and was welcomed into their families. That’s how I discovered that the Rio Grande ­Valley is a lonely place only if you don’t have a family of your own.

  But murders occupy a specific space in a newsroom, and when a new killing occurred, my colleagues at the Herald would often recount stories they deemed more sinister or bizarre from days gone by. I’d sit at my desk in the small, aging building and ask questions. The faces of the other reporters registered emotions from decades past: the shock and wonder, the sadness, the disgust, and the triumph in bringing criminals to justice. Emma, the senior investigative reporter, perpetually wore a black sombrero and a dark poncho. “Ay, chinelas!” she’d say, releasing her raspy smoker’s laugh. The expression was her PG version of a common Mexican swear word.

  High on the list were the stories of Mark Kilroy and Joey Fischer, both young men full of promise and possibility, killed in 1989 and 1993, in disconnected and startlingly strange circumstances. Joey went to Saint Joseph Academy, the wealthy private school hidden in the historic subdivision near my apartment on Palm Boulevard. Joey was a senior, eleventh in his class, immediately accepted to the ­University of Texas honors program. He was a popular, good-­looking boy who had a facility with language. Getting ready for school one morning, he was gunned down in his driveway. He had briefly dated Cristina Cisneros and, when they broke up, her mother, Dora, visited Maria Mercedes Martinez, a folk healer, who saw clients at a secondhand clothing store. When Maria told Dora that Joey didn’t want to marry her daughter anymore, Dora asked Maria to cast a spell on Joey. She refused. Dora came up with a different plan. She asked Maria to help her assassinate Joey. Maria advised another of her clients that his marital problems would be solved once Joey was dead. The client hired two other men to complete the job, with the agreement that Dora would pay $3,000. The story was chronicled by Marie Brenner, Joey’s cousin, in a September 1993 edition of The New Yorker.

  Hearing thi
s story in its barest essence is like taking a slippery trip down the rabbit hole. It sounds more like the stuff of a soap opera than a real-life transgression. Joey’s life was ended with a few abrupt gunshots that morning as he stood cleaning the windshield of his mother’s car in his sunny suburban neighborhood.

  Another young man, Mark Kilroy, came to Brownsville during spring break of 1989 while he was attending the University of Texas at Austin. College kids commonly walked to Matamoros for a night of partying and easy underage drinking at the clubs and bars near the international bridge. Usually damage to students was limited to hangovers, maybe a risky liaison at a strip club. But Mark, a twenty-one-year-old premed student, disappeared from the street, scooped up as if by the wind, with no news of him for weeks.

  Mark’s parents came to Brownsville and searched for him doggedly, but information was scarce until a man speeding through a checkpoint caused officers to give chase. They found Rancho Santa Elena, where Mark had been decapitated, dismembered, and used in a ritual cauldron. He was one of more than a dozen killed by the small group of drug traffickers who subscribed to a combination of Afro-Caribbean Palo Mayombe Santeria and Mexican witchcraft and went out one night in search of an Anglo spring breaker to ­sacrifice.

  Pictures of Mark—with a kind, open face reminiscent of a young Matt Damon—show him with a smile so wide as to suggest a belly laugh. They’re easy to find online, many posted in 2009 to mark the twentieth anniversary of his death. His parents were astonishingly graceful as the media circus swirled around them, according to a Texas Monthly report.

  “I don’t feel any anger at all, to be honest with you,” James Kilroy, Mark’s father, is quoted as saying, adding that he hoped the killers would apologize to his son in heaven.