The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

by Laura Tillman

  Legends were piling up like a stack of bodies.

  “I’m going to tell you something. Keep digging and you’re going to learn more.”

  As I moved to turn off my tape recorder, I noticed a splotch of black ink on the plane of brown skin in the unbuttoned V of his shirt. Felix pulled down his collar so I could see. Jesus Christ presided over his chest.

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  Angela

  I don’t know what happened to my mind.

  —ANGELA CAMACHO

  I looked for Angela’s mother’s home on the outskirts of Los Fresnos, Texas, ten miles from Brownsville. Los Fresnos, a sparsely populated ranching town, stretched from Brownsville toward the Gulf, alongside resacas and salt flats and the rodeo fairgrounds, with grapefruit groves and trailer parks, the land as unruly as its residents.

  I had a possible address for Angela’s mother from an online database and drove off a farm road and into a little neighborhood—two dozen houses on big lots along a road shaped like a figure eight. The neighborhood was a mixture of country and suburb. Some yards were filled with junked cars, others with chickens and turkeys. Idling slowly down the street, I searched in vain for the number. A man was trimming his hedges and I stopped to ask if he knew which house the woman lived in, referencing what had happened. Just ten miles away in Brownsville, everyone I met immediately understood what I meant by the Rubio murders. Here there was no such recognition. “I think I heard about that, a long time ago” was the closest I could get. I was further impeded by confusion over Angela’s mother’s name, of which I’d seen multiple versions. No, they didn’t know her. They didn’t know which house. In this way I continued, around the figure eight, looking for any house where someone was home.

  Finally, I walked up to the stoop of a neat home on a smaller lot, and the family inside directed me to the correct one, just two doors down from theirs. The entrance to the porch of the small yellow house was blocked with a piece of plywood. I called out until a woman came to the front door. I told her whom I was looking for. This woman, large and intimidating but not unfriendly, recalled merely hearing something about the crimes.

  “She’s my mother-in-law,” she said of Angela’s mother. “But she’s not here. She’s away.” I asked her if she knew about the crimes, and she, too, said she’d heard something about them, but didn’t have much information. Her statements had a finality, and I left my name and number on a little note, explaining why I wanted to speak to Angela’s mother. I got in my car feeling hopeful. Maybe I’d hear from her soon.

  A couple of days later I went back. Maybe this time she’d be home. The woman came outside again, and again I told her that I was checking to see if her mother-in-law was home. No, she explained, she’s not here. And she’s not going to be back for a while. She’s up north. I didn’t understand what “up north” meant, exactly. Dallas? Canada? Everything was north except Mexico and the rest of Latin America. She said that her mother-in-law didn’t have a phone, and they didn’t have a phone or electricity at the little house. I wondered how she would contact me when she did get home and got the message.

  I waited a week and tried again. This time the woman had a visitor and seemed less sympathetic to my mission, or maybe I was just interrupting some important business.

  “I don’t think she’s coming back,” the woman said.

  I asked if she’d received this news since the last time we met.

  “I just don’t think she’s coming back.” I stood there for a minute more, hoping for some additional bit of information, but that was it.

  I looked again at the house and the goat with icy-blue eyes standing in the neighbor’s yard. The children lived here for a few months in 2002, after they were examined at the Brownsville Kiddie Health Center and found to show signs of medical neglect. Angela’s mother took them in, until John and Angela completed parenting classes and drug testing.

  Where does Angela belong in this story? She, too, is in prison for murder, serving three simultaneous life sentences that will leave her eligible for parole in 2045. I wrote to her several times requesting an interview but never got a response. At first I wondered if maybe she couldn’t read, but when I called the prison, they told me that another inmate could easily read a letter to her, and I realized that she must be ignoring my request. I could only speculate: Was the subject too painful? Perhaps she didn’t have anything more to say. Maybe she was just sick of being asked the same things over and over or was afraid that giving away new information could jeopardize her chances at parole. Maybe she was suspicious of the media, as she had every reason to be. When I found out that she had responded to a television reporter, Mireya Villarreal, and granted an interview, I wondered if my correspondence with John might be the reason—maybe she saw me as an ally to a man who had become her enemy.

  Angela has a low IQ, tested at 62 as a fourteen-year-old. The threshold for mental retardation is 70 or below. In 2004, she tested at 51. According to criminal law, when a defendant is assessed for mental retardation, both aptitude and adaptive behavior are taken into consideration. Angela pled guilty and, in exchange, avoided a possible death sentence.

  Her attorney, Ernesto Gamez, has a law office on Eighth Street, one block down from the building. You can see it from his parking lot. I was seated in a conference room with two taxidermied wildcats, both wide-eyed as they identically caught a pheasant with an outstretched paw. Though not large in stature, Gamez was a brooding, intimidating presence. I asked him how he felt when he saw the building, which was incredibly close to his office.

  “It has a stigma of an evil presence of what happened. It reminds me of the horror that took place, the carnage, of the kids.” He spoke slowly, looking at some point in space with intensity.

  Gamez said Angela was quiet.

  “She was easily influenced. She was limited in conversational skills, and she was so docile and passive. And she felt that her kids were not being adequately provided for and that they would be in a better place somewhere else than what she could provide for them. At times she was psychotic and hallucinating of seeing a lady in black who was always around. A lady-shadow was always around.”

  Gamez spoke about darkness again and again as he talked about her case. He called the building a “historical remembrance of black death,” said Angela’s look had a “blackness,” and, of course, spoke of the image of a lady in black.

  I asked Gamez whether he thought Angela believed these hallucinations were real.

  “I know there are dark forces, having experienced, not a near-death experience, but a death experience,” Gamez said.

  In May of 2008, five years after John and Angela were arrested, Gamez said he saw demons for the first time. “I didn’t imagine it.” Gamez had suffered a heart attack that left him legally dead for several minutes, and in a coma for six days after that. “There is no rational, logical medical explanation, other than the grace of coming back and giving me a second chance.” To him, the demons are not a vague vision, but a specific memory.

  “They were compelling to take me to hell. They were reaching out. They wanted me but they couldn’t get me. The grace of God wouldn’t let them get me, but let me know they’re there.”

  Gamez believed he’d been enlightened to another dimension.

  “There is an inner being, soul, within us and wants to live and wants everlasting life. And it fears the abomination of everlasting darkness. I really appreciate, when I crossed over, my ranches meant nothing, my property meant nothing. I’m left with nothing. Nothing was important. You speak, not with your mouth, but your mind. You have no physical form. And I can prove it because I was dead. And all that spirit of yours wants is to reach that light I couldn’t reach.”

  His voice commanded the empty room, rough and croaking, pushing past my attempts to ask questions during the long pauses between phrases.

  “So I cannot say th
at what she saw wasn’t real,” Gamez said. “I don’t make that judgment anymore—if she’s crazy or sick or mentally retarded—no. I know they’re there, and they make people do very bad things. Evil things. Demons’ purpose in life is for us—to compel us to do bad things. There is no love with these creatures.”

  Gamez now visits churches to speak with their congregations about his experience. He brings his cardiologist to support the scientific aspect of the story.

  To Gamez, Angela was like a child—quiet and aloof. She showed little facial expression and didn’t have a complex understanding of what was happening around her.

  “Other than she’d done something wrong,” he said. “And there was remorse, remorse, remorse.”

  Ultimately, he was glad Angela got a plea deal. She would serve three concurrent life sentences and be spared the death penalty. Prosecuting attorneys were aware she could be found incompetent to stand trial and that her Mexican nationality might prompt added attention to her case, since Mexico opposes the death penalty.

  The closest I’ve come to meeting Angela was the hour or so I spent watching a video of her telling two detectives how her children died. The recording was made on her third day in custody. She wore an oversize blue shirt, and she was small and sweet looking, dwarfed by her thick, wavy hair. Her face was absent of guile or virtually any emotion. She’d been through the worst trauma imaginable, and the tape portrays a woman with nothing left inside. With the detectives she was calm and compliant and respectful, in a way that disturbed me: Had she simply been compliant during the murders? Was compliance the essence of her crime?

  Angela told the detectives about coming to Harlingen from Matamoros as a child. She didn’t detail what this meant exactly—swimming across the river or walking across the bridge and overstaying a visa. She went to Los Fresnos High School until she was a semester shy of graduation, then got pregnant with Julissa and dropped out. She was living with her boyfriend, she told detectives, until he got arrested for burglary and went to prison for six months. Then she went to live with her mother and then her sister, moving back and forth. I went to Cactus Road in Los Fresnos, which Angela mentioned in her interview with detectives, and found a neighbor who remembered the family. He told me where to locate the plot where their house once stood—a grassy field directly next to the railroad tracks. The house had since burned down, he said, and only a pile of debris beside a stand of trees and the faded path of a dirt driveway remained. This was a parallel in John and Angela’s lives: both lived in homes that eventually burned to the ground.

  Angela knew her boyfriend, Julissa’s father, was cheating on her, and she in turn cheated on him with John. When her boyfriend found out, Angela said he threatened her and her child, but before he could act, he was thrown in jail and she went to live with John.

  Angela believed she was pregnant when she and John first got together, but only by about a month. She named her son John Stephan Rubio, and the couple lived with Julissa and the newborn in an apartment on Jackson Street, also in the downtown area. John had a job at McDonald’s, and Hilda came to live with them. John said that they were given free rent in exchange for some work he did painting and fixing things around the apartment complex. Soon, Angela would tell detectives, things changed.

  A.We stayed there for some months, and then we were on the street—on the street. Yes, on the street.

  Q.What do you mean by “on the street”?

  A.Because we didn’t have any place to stay.

  Q.Where did you stay exactly?

  A.In parks.

  Q.Here by downtown?

  A.Wherever we would go, like corners—

  Angela said that the children were placed with her mother around the time she became pregnant with Mary Jane, when Julissa was two years old and John Stephan was about four months old. John and Angela took parenting classes for several months to get the children back. By the time they did, they had an apartment in the building on Eighth and East Tyler, though not the same unit where they would commit the murders. John had been working at the Golden Corral, a buffet, and Hilda continued staying with them in their new apartment, though they tried to hide this from CPS. Lorena, a prostitute, also stayed with them for a couple of months, Angela said. She and John had become friends after partying together at the Hotel Economico.

  Angela told the detectives that an employee from CPS visited two or three times a week, and admonished her for the dirty state of the apartment, but also brought free diapers. The CPS employees stopped monitoring them several months before the murders, once the family had completed all of the necessary requirements and John was working again at the Golden Corral.

  The detectives were big men and asked the questions precisely and patiently, reviewing answers and saying them back to Angela to ensure their veracity. About halfway through the video, the detectives asked Angela to show them the placement of different events on a rudimentary map of the apartment, sketched in chalk on a blackboard. The camera zoomed in on the blackboard as Angela drew a stick figure of John, showing the spot where Mary Jane’s life ended. Throughout the interview, Angela adds the diminutive ita to the end of words, as in Julissa’s cabecita, in place of cabeza. Her daughter’s “little head.” It’s a term of endearment, jarring in the context of the conversation.

  In the video, twenty-three-year-old Angela looks calm, much as Gamez described. She’s detailing the gruesome deaths of her three children, but she explains the specifics with no agitation. She’s so young, petite, and has a kind, cherubic face. In subsequent photographs and on the witness stand, the Angela who has spent time in prison is scowling, and her short frame carries extra weight.

  Angela gave three different statements, on three consecutive days—the day the crime occurred, and the two days following. The first two were written, and the third was videotaped. In the first, she said fears of witchcraft accounted for her and John’s actions. In the second, financial stress was to blame. In the third, which was videotaped, she fused these two statements, relating that both issues were at play. During the competency trial in 2010, Angela said that she gave the second statement, about financial strain, after a detective told her that was John’s story. She seemed most intent on protecting John—matching his story if she thought it would help. When questioned in court, she said that she had lied to do so.

  I’d asked Gamez whether he had a sense of Angela and John’s relationship.

  “In her own way she loved him, yes, and believed she was doing the right thing or involved in the right thing.”

  I asked Gamez if the tools that a court of law uses to treat such actions could be reconciled with the spiritual powers he now believes to hold such influence over people’s actions.

  “There seems unfortunately to be a disconnect in our law and the actuality of demonic presence that overtakes one’s soul and mind. The law says if you do this, this is how you should pay.” He knocked on the table. “But the disconnect is, the law doesn’t balance out that this type of earthly demonic presence is capable of making, having people do evil things, that they wouldn’t normally do, but for that demonic persuasion.”

  The rule of law was not sympathetic to the influence of religion, no matter how those enforcing the law might privately feel.

  “They just say, ‘You do it, you pay for it,’ ” Gamez said. “They say, ‘You’re responsible for your own actions.’ However, the Bible is filled with lessons and parables of Jesus Christ casting out demons, and these people become whole and forgiven of their sins. The law doesn’t have that forgiveness. It doesn’t matter if you’re possessed or have a presence of evil. You’re responsible for it, period.” Gamez saw this as a double triumph of the demons. They managed to both push the individual to commit the act and fool his fellow man into condemning him for that transgression.

  “I really thought about having a defense that this was potentially a person who might have got involv
ed in doing something that it wasn’t the person doing it, it was the possession having them do it,” Gamez said. “That makes them not responsible for the conduct, and they have this evil possession. Because what happened here was just horrific and not ordinary and not common.”

  Because of the disconnect he spoke about, such a defense couldn’t realistically be pursued. Instead, he had his client choose between the possibility of the death penalty, and a plea bargain.

  “These are high stakes: life or death. So, she chose life.”

  Mireya Villarreal, a correspondent for CBS, had once been a reporter for a Rio Grande Valley news station and interviewed Angela on camera in 2007. Due to the gag order during the trial, Angela hadn’t yet told the community what had happened in her own words, outside of being questioned on the witness stand or shown speaking to detectives in video footage.

  “Some people would say this type of thing scares them,” Villarreal said. “I was always more intrigued than anything.”

  Villarreal wrote Angela a letter, and she wrote back. “It was kind of like exchanging letters with a child, with a kid. Everything from her handwriting to her grammar, the way she wrote sentences and described things, she didn’t have the same level of communication as other adults.”

  Angela agreed to have Villarreal visit the prison and conduct the interview on camera. The letters were indicative of what Villarreal would find when she met Angela in person—a grown woman whose affect reminded her of a child.

  When they met, Angela denied stabbing the children or helping John kill them. She said John convinced her that witchcraft had been performed upon them and that the kids were possessed.

  “I start believing everything like a little girl,” Angela told Villarreal. “I don’t know why, but I start believing everything like a little girl.”