The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

by Laura Tillman

  There was no evidence that John or Angela abused the children before the crimes, but scenes such as one in neighbor Nydia Hernandez’s statement to police about an incident two weeks prior to the murders added to a concerning portrait:

  “I saw the male subject and the female subject together and they had one of the children in the stroller. The male subject allowed the stroller (with the child in it) to go and it rolled down the sidewalk and it slammed into my truck. The child who was in the stroller started to cry. Neither one of the subjects did anything. All that the male subject did was pull the stroller back.”

  I found a few images of the children online and in the court record. A Polaroid shows John Stephan sitting on the floor in diapers, with aviator sunglasses and an oversize cross around his neck, a sly smile on his face like a baby Hells Angel. In a photo of John Stephan and another little boy, John Stephan is wearing a blue-and-yellow-striped polo shirt, a tiny pair of jeans, and sneakers, and he gazes up at the camera with a tuft of dark hair swept across his forehead. In the several photos of Julissa at various ages of toddlerhood, she has curly jet-black hair, sometimes pulled into pigtails. In one, she is smiling fiercely, all her teeth bared. In another, she is snuggled with John and John Stephan on a bed, with a soft, close-lipped grin. In the only image of Mary Jane, a healthy and happy-looking John is holding her up for the camera, bursting with paternal pride. She’s tiny and wears a red-and-blue onesie and looks up and to the left, her soft, toothless mouth open and her tongue sitting near her lips.

  One day, when I was trying to find neighbors willing to be interviewed, a young woman with bright-pink lipstick wearing a pink silk blouse and daisy dukes approached me. She looked as if she’d stepped out of a photo shoot. Her car was idling by the curb while she glanced anxiously at the house I was approaching. She was waiting for her boyfriend, she said, and he was at his grandmother’s house. She wanted to know if I would knock on the door because his grandmother intimidated her. Dogs were in the yard and I paused. Maybe we could call him? She asked if she could borrow my phone. A couple minutes later Miguel Angel Ramos, tall and lanky, walked out of his grandmother’s house and onto the curb.

  “She’s writing about that family in that building,” the girlfriend told him. Then to me: “He knew them, he used to tell me about it. He used to play with the kids.”

  Miguel Angel’s eyes grazed the building, as if he could see the family walking around the corner. “I used to play with them on the basketball court when they were little. The mom and dad were always at the crack houses.”

  Miguel Angel told me that John and Angela would often leave Julissa and John Stephan at the Boys and Girls Club, catty-corner to the apartment building. The children, just toddlers, would play for a while with the other neighborhood kids, their unchanged diapers weighed down, and then, as if an inaudible whistle had blown, they’d return home.

  Miguel Angel was young when the murders happened—around eleven years old. It’s easy to imagine him wading deeper and deeper into the mythology of the murders like a character in The Goonies. Across the street, there was a family with fourteen children. Miguel Angel said he and his friends called them Los Hernandez, like a gang. That’s whom Miguel Angel hung out with, along with the little kids from the Rubio building.

  Then, on March 11, cop cars swarmed the street. The area was barricaded and the apartment cordoned off as evidence. When the police departed, Miguel Angel remembered going into the apartment and seeing the blood on the floor, the porn magazines. He even said that he had had a confrontation with John the day before the murders. John, Miguel Angel said, was standing on the sidewalk, hitting little John Stephan. Miguel Angel’s friends, a few of the Los Hernandez siblings, told John they were going to call Child Protective Services. According to Miguel Angel, John said he didn’t care if they called CPS. Miguel Angel said that a friend of his did, indeed, make a call, but that the children were dead the next day. I asked Miguel Angel why he wasn’t subpoenaed, why no one had heard this perhaps crucial piece of information during either of the trials.

  “We were always out there,” Miguel Angel said, indicating the corner where the neighborhood kids used to hang out across from the building. “They didn’t even ask us any questions. They just told everyone to clear out.”

  I found an article in The Houston Chronicle quoting a Maria Hernandez, mother of fourteen, who told the paper she had called the Brownsville Police Department shortly before the murders and reported that people in the apartment were using drugs.

  “They never listened when I made the call,” she told the Chronicle. “It didn’t have to happen.”

  In the article, Police Chief Carlos Garcia said the department did get a call about the apartment. “But with those kinds of calls, you have to corroborate the information. We consider it intelligence,” he said. “You don’t just go and knock on people’s doors and violate their rights. Even if we had followed up on this information, that doesn’t mean these killings wouldn’t have happened.”

  Miguel Angel still kept watch on the building when he came to Brownsville and noted the changes. Even with my regular pilgrimages, I’d failed to notice a new fan in a second-floor window, above the Rubio apartment.

  “Someone’s living in there,” he said.

  His girlfriend had heard the stories many times. The tale of the crimes had become part of Miguel Angel’s story. He looked over the evidence like a kid detective; through that final confrontation with John, he was linked to the day the crimes took place.

  An intangible echo of the children’s essence began to manifest through Miguel Angel’s stories. They were like shadows to me now: long and inexact and opaque, but a whisper more than nothing.

  At Good Neighbor, a couple of toddlers were eating lunch. One had curly hair, one straight. Their young mother scooped them up soon after I sat down at their table, along with slices of bread and cookies folded into napkins, taken home for later. Sister Luz Cardenas testified that she often saw John, Angela, and the children at Good Neighbor. John was always polite, she told the court, and would compliment the food. He was gentle with the children, serving them before he served himself. Angela, she said, was usually quiet.

  Within a few minutes I was asked if I was married by a large, sweaty man with a dead front tooth and was told a series of incoherent conspiracy theories by a kind-faced former scientist in need of psychiatric medication. The latter presented me a manila envelope full of papers and told me we were going to write a Nobel Prize–winning article together. Two of the documents were apparently from government entities in Switzerland and Mexico. One letter thanked the man for his paper and stated that it had indeed been accepted for a 1978 conference in Zurich. One sheet listed random names and phrases: Leon Panetta; Nikola Tesla; Cure for Cancer; Michael Faraday; Elixer; $93 Billion (ESCROW). He read these off to me as if they were part of a coherent whole. I told him I had to go, that I had a meeting, but he insisted that we make copies in the front office.

  As I walked out to my car, the director of Good Neighbor approached me. I asked him if he knew anything about the scientist’s backstory.

  “He showed us some pictures where he was in a classroom setting and of course he was much younger, and it looked like he was lecturing, and from what I understand at one time he was a very bright, very intelligent guy.”

  “I believe it.”

  “He has a lot of knowledge up there.”

  “So what do you do for someone like that? I mean, is there anything you can do, or do you just help him when he comes in?”

  “There really isn’t much we can do. He doesn’t want to be helped. He’ll want to call up the president. . . . He calls a lot of people.”

  I went back to Good Neighbor to check out a crafts class, where a group of women were given free materials, with the goal of ­helping them make a profit from their crafts and create a self-sustaining enterprise. That week, in prep
aration for Thanksgiving, they were using ribbon, thread, and hot glue guns to make turkey pins. The tail ­feathers were yellow, and the turkeys, with googly eyes, had little orange feet hanging down at the bottom. A petite, enthusiastic woman from Matamoros had started the class two years earlier. She’d come to Good Neighbor to spread God’s word, but realized that the soup kitchen’s patrons also needed a way to make money. She changed the arrangement, teaching one hour of art, one hour of Bible study each week. After the turkey pins were done, a plain-looking woman who had formerly said little took charge of a microphone attached to a ­karaoke machine.

  She spoke excitedly about passages from the Bible. “Lo que Dios dice, se cumple.” What God says, he does.

  The two dozen women in the room joined in on the se cumple.

  • • •

  On Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, I’d sat in a synagogue listening to a reform rabbi deliver his sermon about a familiar passage in the Torah: the story of Abraham and Isaac. God orders Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, and Abraham endeavors to comply with God’s command. But just before the moment of sacrifice, God sends an angel to Abraham to grant Isaac a reprieve. Instead, Abraham sacrifices a ram, and father and son return safely home together.

  Many of the stories in the Torah drift away, but that of Abraham and Isaac sticks. A father is told to kill his own child and says yes. God commands, “Thou shalt not kill,” but he directs his disciple to do exactly that.

  If one believes in God’s might, and the direct intervention of God in one’s life, wouldn’t it follow that Abraham would comply with this directive? Abraham is proving his absolute allegiance to a single God, a concept that was radical at the time. When that God, all-powerful, issued a command, it stands to reason that Abraham would obey. If he did not, the consequences could be incomprehensibly worse than the loss of one life, even if that loss was his own child. On the other hand, it’s possible that killing one’s own child sits at the limit of the horror we are capable of comprehending as human beings. Perhaps a reasonable person trying to evade this fate would be willing to gamble on any other consequence.

  As I listened to the sermon, it took me a moment before John, Angela, and the children flickered into mind, like a lightbox faltering as it switches on. According to John, something told him that killing the children was imperative, that he was engaged in a battle of good and evil, and he was on the side of good. He said that he had long seen himself as exceptional, chosen by God for some purpose, and had dreams where he battled demons. Where those thoughts and the message to kill his children came from is debatable, but John said he believed at the time that it was divinely sent. Regardless of whether the culpable influence was psychosis or a spiritual force, there was no contradicting intervention at the final moment. No angel of God was present to stop John’s actions. If any of us today were to kill his or her own child and attribute the imperative to do so to God, we would be labeled monsters of the most repulsive nature. The excuse of being commanded by God rings hollow, deceptive, or insane in a modern context.

  I was stuck in my own thoughts on John and Angela when the rabbi’s voice, rumbling with conviction, broke through.

  “You say, ‘I would not do that.’ And you would be saying that you would not do what the source of all, the Creator of the world, God Almighty, told you to do,” Rabbi Robert Levy said.

  It can be difficult to conceptualize God’s direct intervention in our lives, where “what God says, as we’ve learned, is what happens,” as the woman at Good Neighbor told the group. We follow our own instincts, believing them to be our own. And we abide by the rules of society. These laws may be based on the codes of the Old Testament, forbidding us from killing or stealing, but if we break them, we will be punished concretely by a group of people who represent the modern rule of law.

  Levy explained that, in the story of Abraham and Isaac, components of the Torah that usually work in union—righteousness and compassion—are separated from one another, acting independently. Abraham is the righteous one, behaving like a good disciple by doing as he is told. God eschews righteousness by issuing a despicable directive, one that seems seeded in the most jealous and manipulative impulse (prove to me how much you love me by sacrificing what is most precious to you), but then sweeps in at the final moment, offering compassion. Levy told the congregation that it is up to us to look for the points where righteousness and compassion intersect, and that we must find balance in our lives between what is merely right and what is compassionate; we must be neither the bighearted rube acting on pure emotion, nor the coldhearted realist who uses the rule book as his only guide.

  When we dole out punishment to criminals, we usually begin with righteousness, as we apply the rule of law, and then, later, we might consider compassion. In capital cases, this plays out when defense attorneys present mitigating factors, reasons that the person on trial might be deserving of compassion and therefore be spared the harshest punishment—death—and instead serve life in prison. The guilt or innocence of the person is not addressed at this stage, but rather how much of our compassion he or she deserves.

  The binding of Isaac has been interpreted for centuries as a story with a lesson that we’re meant to learn, while the crime on East Tyler Street seems worthless as any sort of guide. Rather, it’s what crops up in the wake of the crime that summons tricky questions. How do we, as bystanders, react to an atrocity? Here, Levy’s sermon is germane. How do we become the best versions of ourselves when confronted with another person who exhibits the worst behavior within humanity? Letting righteousness or compassion guide us would be simple. We could let either impulse take us by the hand, leading us willingly toward uncomplicated forgiveness or vicious revenge. Putting the pair together simultaneously, while also weighing the rest of the ingredients of the event, is a vast and consuming task.

  • • •

  I walked to the building, a few blocks down East Tyler Street. It stood, menacing and comforting as ever, indifferent to my attentions. Here was Mount Moriah, the site of the slaughter. I walked a few doors down, toward the house where I’d met Miguel Angel. No car pulled up this time. No glamorous girl was walking toward the house, bringing her Austin dazzle to the neighborhood. A speckled Chihuahua walked out of the narrow crack in the gate of Miguel Angel’s grandmother’s house, but the lanky young man was nowhere to be found. The German shepherds in the neighbor’s yard rose and gnashed their teeth. I crossed the street.

  I’d written to John asking about his children’s names. During the trial, testimony indicated that his youngest was named after a volunteer at Good Neighbor—Mary Jane—but I wanted to verify the origin. Julissa, he said, was a derivation of her biological father’s name, Julian.

  Johnny was named after me, I changed his middle name though to Stephon after the carector alter ego of Steve Ercal named Stephon Arket, the cool guy. Because my son would be cool like his daddy!

  You might recognize that character from the 1990s sitcom Family Matters.

  Mary Jane was named after a name I liked the sound of when I was about 15 or 16 when I first started smoking marijuana. Meaning Mary Jane. I know it was inappropriate to name her after a drug but the name had grown on me through the years and I like how it sounded. Mary Jane Rubio. I liked it.

  In another letter, I asked John about his children’s personalities. Mostly, he wrote about Julissa. It made sense—she was the oldest.

  Julie was my baby girl, I would shower her with kisses and hugs which she loved and drove her crazy with joy. She was alot like me, very energetic almost bouncing off the walls like me when I was a child. She was very sweet, loving, caring and innoccent. If I was sad she would hug me and pat my shoulder and tell me there there but in Spanish whish was all she spock. She was so silly and made me laugh alot seeing her. Rarely she would fight with Johnny my baby boy over things. She would share everything with him and even her baby sister Mary Jane. She was not always like
this though. When I first met Angela and Julie they had it bad. Angela was with this guy that beat her and cheated on her but there she stayed becaue he would always tell her taht noone else would ever want her. It took me alot of work to get that kind of thinking out of her head but she started reallizing she was of great value and not worthless like both of us had been told all our lives.

  John saw himself as Angela’s and Julissa’s savior.

  All the fighting and screaming would scare Julie and I honestly believe she was tramotized because even though she was 1 she did not speak a word nor was she potty trained yet. Girls develop faster than boys so she should have been talking by then but she was not.

  Within 6 months of being with me she was talking non stop and even learned to use the potty. Angela would tell me she was too little for that but I told her she was not and I was right. One afternoon Angela and I were enjoying talking like we always did like good friends and out of nowhere Julie comes saying “look daddy, I did poo-poo.” With the potty I had bouth her in her little hands. She really did go by herself and I was soooo proud of her, hugged her and told her she made me very happy. From then out she would just run to me and tell me “Daddy, daddy me pee-pee or poo-poo.” I would take her bottoms off and she would go running like that to the restroom while I laugh from how cute she looked. Johnny was more of a tough guy, trying to boss everyone around even though he could not talk at 1 yet except some small stuff but I taught him to walk. He would pull on Angela, Julie or me if we tryed to get off the bed because he wanted us to be with him. He would get ontop of us to try to pin us down or rap his little legs around us. I would play with him a lot by pushing him down on the bed or lift him up and throw him gently on the bed, he loved that and would laugh like a maniac, jumping to try and get into my arms so I can throw him again. He liked to play ruff and sometimes Julie would complain to me Johnny was being mean. Then there is my Marie jane, sooo small, with the most angelic smile I had ever seen. She never cryed that I can remember because she was hungry, soiled herself or because she was sad. She was only 2 months but most kids that age cry alot. Johnny cryed but not alot alot. Mary Jane was somewhat darker skinned like my dad and looked to me a lot like my dad’s mom whom didn’t like me I may add.