At the time the Frias case was revived in 1985, Eckert was fresh from a Brazilian expedition to identify the remains of Josef Mengele, the chief doctor at the Nazis’ Auschwitz concentration camp who vanished after the war and secretly continued medical experiments in South America. The team concluded the corpse in Wolfgang Gerhard’s grave in a small coastal town was indeed Mengele (and DNA confirmed it in 1992).
Later, Eckert was part of an eight-person team of pathologists—all fascinated by the new “science” of criminal profiling—who reopened the coldest case in modern history: Jack the Ripper’s slayings of seven prostitutes in London in the late 1800s. They concluded the faceless killer had probably been a butcher by trade.
Although nobody had ever heard of or even cared about Martin Frias, this invisible immigrant laborer who lived on the margin of a small town in an alien place called Wyoming, his case was more important than finding Jack the Ripper or Josef Mengele. They were dead, and no amount of forensic skill would bring justice to them or their victims. But we had a chance to right this wrong and let an innocent man live the rest of his life, free.
Aside from the gross error on the bullet wound, Eckert was also perturbed that the scars on Ernestine’s wrists—artifacts of prior suicide attempts—had been ignored, and how the original pathologist had overstated his qualifications to do forensic work. In the hearing for a new trial, Eckert had spoken eloquently about how good forensic pathologists work tirelessly to find the right answer.
Now he joined the prosecution’s doctors at the graveside of a troubled young woman whose violent death had sent a man to prison. A year after she was buried in a Cheyenne grave, could she tell us anything new?
On a frosty autumn morning in 1986, a small army of doctors and lawyers—the defense lawyers, the hospital pathologist who performed the original autopsy, the state’s hired experts, and my old colleagues Drs. Charles Petty and Irving Stone from the Dallas Medical Examiner’s Office, Dr. Eckert, and some state investigators—converged on Ernestine’s grave in Cheyenne’s Olivet Cemetery, where her father had buried her four days after she died. Her obituary had asked that in lieu of flowers, mourners contribute to crime prevention programs, a subtle but deliberate accusation of murder.
Around dawn, more than two years after her funeral, they lifted Ernestine’s coffin from the high plains earth and drove it an hour west to a basement morgue at the university in Laramie. Because of a ripe odor emanating from the box, the pathologists opened the casket in the ambulance garage.
Inside lay Ernestine, wearing her glasses. Although she’d been embalmed, her remains had naturally flattened out somewhat. She looked as if she’d been left out in the rain; her body was covered in large beads of condensation, formed by the change of temperatures between her cold grave and the warm hearse.
In the morgue, new X-rays were taken of Ernestine’s remains from every angle, and Eckert observed that Ernestine’s liver was shredded by the blast. The state’s pathologists used a reciprocating saw to remove her spine where it had been hit by the bullet, then sent it to Dr. Petty’s state-of-the-art crime lab in Dallas for analysis.
When science had finished with her, most of Ernestine was returned to the frigid earth in the Cheyenne cemetery, where she could lie unmolested for the rest of eternity.
After the second autopsy, the state’s doctors stuck to their opinion, but Moxley was more firmly convinced she had died in a tragic suicide, not a homicide.
Both sides were utterly convinced their theories were correct.
And Martin Frias’s freedom hung in the balance.
* * *
In December 1986, almost exactly two years after he was convicted of murdering Ernestine Perea, Martin Frias’s new trial began. But this time, his defense team came loaded for bear.
For seven days, the prosecution pushed its same old theory: Ernestine had been shot from behind during a struggle with someone in her bedroom, fell onto her back, and died as her assailant staged the room to look like a suicide. Lack of gunshot residue and char on Ernestine’s cotton-knit, blue-striped tank-top suggested to state crime technicians that the shot had come from at least three feet away, from an assailant lying on or crouching near the floor. That assailant was an enraged, jealous Martin Frias, they said.
This time they put the eminent Drs. Petty and Stone on the stand to say the physical evidence pointed to homicide.
Then all of Moxley’s forensic experts took the stand—blood-spatter expert Judy Bunker, forensic pathologist Dr. Bill Eckert, acoustics expert Dr. Harry Hollein, electron microscopist Dr. Robert Lantz, and others—to connect the dots that ended in Ernestine’s suicide.
The blood spatters were consistent with a contact wound in the belly as Ernestine sat on the floor, and gunshot residue was present but nearly invisible to the prosecution’s outdated technology, they said. The sights and sounds were consistent with Martin’s account, they said. And Ernestine’s past flirtations with suicide suddenly weighed heavier.
I testified again how the telltale clues around the young mother’s belly wound told us everything we needed to know about the shot that killed her, from the seared edges of her wound to her torn jeans.
And this time around, the investigators’ failings loomed larger. They had made no diagrams of the crime scene, taken no measurements. Some crucial tests were never done. The jury was left with reconstructions based largely on crime scene photos.
Bottom line: Moxley’s experts—who all worked for free—agreed that Ernestine almost certainly shot herself. And in the end, even the small-town coroner admitted that he now believed our suicide theory, too.
This time the jury deliberated for less than three hours. At one point in the jury room, they even requested Martin’s rifle and reenacted how Ernestine might have shot herself while sitting on her floor. It was possible and now it all made sense to them.
As they announced their “not guilty” verdict, Martin Frias wept and hugged Moxley. His two years and ten days in prison had been hard on him, but now he was free.
In coming days and weeks, he was granted citizenship under new federal amnesty legislation, and he petitioned the court for custody of his children. Ultimately, he moved away from Wyoming, remarried, and had another child, although, tragically, he never won back custody of his kids with Ernestine. And even today, his prosecutors, investigators, and many locals in the town of Wheatland continue to believe he’s a murderer.
But he’s free.
Martin Frias’s case had to be recognized as a puzzle before it could be solved. Sometimes these mysteries are never recognized and justice isn’t done. Murders sometimes present as suicides, accidents as murders, or suicides as accidents. It’s not just the stuff of Hollywood drama. Humans are imperfect and they sometimes see only what their subconscious is secretly whispering for them to see. Real-life mysteries often unfold into unexpected conclusions.
I’ve seen more than my share of cases where the first conclusion isn’t always the best conclusion. Sorting them out is one of the few real rewards of the grim work I’ve chosen.
Forty-two percent of Americans die from natural causes, and 38 percent in accidents. Nine percent are suicides, and 6 percent are homicides (not always murder, but always deaths caused by other humans). That leaves 5 percent of deaths that we simply can’t explain.
So in America today, almost one of every five Americans dies in a suspicious way. Something is out of time or place, and we must go deeper to find answers.
Frias’s puzzling case wasn’t the first time nor the last that poor police work, shoddy forensics, and rushed conclusions clouded the real cause or manner of a death. It is the bane of medical examiners everywhere. A gut reaction isn’t always correct. Sometimes, as Martin Frias’s experience proved, the most significant clues aren’t always obvious, but they’re there. We must only be willing to see them and open-minded enough to interpret them honestly—and even then, as we’ve seen so often in the relatively recent shooting deaths of Tray
von Martin and Michael Brown, the world might prefer its own conclusions, in spite of the facts.
Like I said before: The forensic pathologist’s only mission is finding the truth. It’s not supposed to be for the police or against the police or for a family or against a family. I’m supposed to be impartial and tell the truth. Now, sometimes what I told them they didn’t want to hear, and sometimes they did. But I didn’t care, because I was telling them the truth.
The truth isn’t always satisfying.
SAN ANTONIO. WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 11, 1984.
Something wasn’t right.
A cold wind blew out of the north, plunging the normally balmy South Texas temperatures well below freezing. A low, sepulchral sky made this morning feel like death.
Ann Ownby didn’t sleep well the night before. Her husband Bob hadn’t come home. He hadn’t even called to say he’d be late. So before dawn, she drove to the Army base where he’d gone that night, Fort Sam Houston, to see if he was still there.
She entered the two-story building where he kept an office, but it was locked. She drove around a while, then returned, but he still wasn’t there, so she left.
Then there was a sudden commotion in the building. At 0640, the duty day hadn’t even really started, but a base employee coming to work early had used a vaulted stairwell toward the rear of the building and found Bob.
He’d been hanged, dangling in the cold open space between floors. The noose around his neck was tied to the stairway’s handrail on the floor above. There was a little blood on his face and his hands were tied behind his back with a military-style web belt.
Pinned to Ownby’s sweater was a chilling typewritten message, in all capital letters:
CAPTURED. TRIED. CONVICTED OF CRIMES BY
THE UNITED STATES ARMY AGAINST THE PEOPLE
OF THE WORLD. SENTENCED. EXECUTED.
In the next hour, investigators found another foreboding note on Ownby’s office desk, hastily scrawled in the general’s own handwriting:
10 Jan 84. I started out of the building and caught a glimpse of some people inside who quickly moved toward the back. I don’t know who they are or what they are doing. They were apparently startled. I came back here to call the MPs, however I cannot get any of the telephones to work. Just as a precaution, I am placing my office keys in my shoe. I will call the MPs as soon as I can get to a working phone.
Reserve major general Robert G. Ownby—a two-star general in charge of the 90th Army Reserve Command, and at forty-eight, the youngest general in the Reserves’ history—had been murdered.
And his killers might be terrorists who’d infiltrated an Army base on US soil.
Anti-American terrorism didn’t start on September 11, 2001, not by a long shot. We’ve been in revolutionaries’ and anarchists’ cross hairs for at least a century, and our military provides the easiest target. A steady stream of menacing attacks made headlines in the early 1980s.
In 1981, US brigadier general James Dozier was kidnapped in Italy by the radical Marxist terror group known as the Red Brigades, who threatened to kill him. After forty-two days in captivity, he was rescued by an Italian counterterrorist team, but the terror was just beginning.
Nine months before General Ownby’s body was found, a suicide car bomber crashed a stolen van full of explosives into the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon, killing sixty-three people. Eighteen were Americans.
Less than three months before he died, another suicide car bomber crashed through the gates of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, killing two hundred and forty-one American servicemen and wounding eighty-one. And only two months before, a time bomb exploded in the US Senate as a protest against the invasion of Grenada, hurting nobody but sending a shock wave through the government, especially the Pentagon.
It wasn’t terribly far-fetched to think evildoers might steal across the porous US-Mexican border and in a mere two hours be in the heart of one of America’s biggest military cities.
So on this unseasonably cold day in January, when they found a dead US Army general with a chilling death message pinned to his chest, the possibility of a terrorist hit against the military wasn’t unthinkable. In fact, it might even have been some investigators’ first fear.
General Ownby commanded sixty-three reserve combat units in Texas and Louisiana, more than four thousand reservists who were ready to deploy to any trouble spot in the world. He wasn’t the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but he was an easier target at Fort Sam Houston, an unfenced, ungated post in the middle of sprawling San Antonio. What self-respecting terrorist wouldn’t leap at the opportunity to kill a two-star general if his front door were left open, literally and figuratively?
The Army issued an immediate alert, asking border authorities to watch for terrorists fleeing into Mexico. It issued bulletproof vests to two other generals at Fort Sam Houston, and warned high-ranking reservists to be especially vigilant.
But federal agents and Army investigators weren’t ready to call it an act of terror. Despite the sinister message left on Ownby’s body and his hastily scrawled note about mysterious intruders, the evidence didn’t add up to the violent invasion of a military post.
For one, other than a small smear of blood on Ownby’s face, we found no bruises or other marks on him suggesting a beating or struggle. There was no sign of forced entry. In fact, his jacket was found neatly folded on the second-floor landing, with his wallet lying tidily on top. His eyeglasses, folded closed, had been laid beside it.
Also, no group claimed responsibility for the assassination, as commonly happened in such crimes.
And the building’s telephone system had been working properly all day and all night before, despite Ownby’s note about phones not working.
Our only evidence suggesting a terrorist slaying was the note pinned to Ownby’s sweater.
Good investigators keep open minds. For several days, they pursued other leads, looked at evidence from all angles, and considered alternative explanations. Yes, it might have been a terrorist execution, they knew … but it might also have been a murder staged to divert attention away from the real killer, or maybe an elaborate ruse to camouflage a suicide.
We began to look closer at General Ownby. Who might have wanted him dead? Might we find clues to his killer in his life story and his final days?
Robert Ownby was born on September 9, 1935, in Durant, Oklahoma. He was steeped in public service: His father, then Durant’s postmaster, had risen through the ranks from a buck private in World War I to colonel in World War II. His mother was a public school teacher.
He grew up on Main Street, a quiet, studious kid who was well liked by his neighbors and classmates. He had a paper route and joined the Boy Scouts. A member of the high school honor society, student council, speech club, and Future Farmers of America, he was the epitome of small-town America in the 1950s, a golden boy full of wholesome promise.
In 1957, with a degree in animal husbandry and a commission from the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, Ownby started two years of active duty in the infantry. He attended basic infantry and parachute schools at Fort Benning, Georgia, before becoming a platoon leader in Washington’s prestigious Old Guard unit that, among other solemn duties, escorts dead soldiers to their final resting places in Arlington National Cemetery and elsewhere.
After three years in the inactive reserve, Ownby joined the Texas National Guard and switched to the Army Reserve in 1972. In the 90th Army Reserve Command at Fort Sam Houston, he quickly rose through the ranks. In 1981, the youngest major general in Army Reserve history took command of the entire unit.
Ownby seemed equally successful in civilian life. He and his wife Ann had three children, and they lived in a big house in an upscale neighborhood. He could afford it: He was president and CEO of the Bristow Company, which made metal doors and frames for commercial buildings, and director of the Liberty Frost Bank.
His life was full of other strategic mo
ves, some better than others. In 1982, he had left an executive job at a soft-drink maker to become an executive vice president at an independent oil company in San Antonio, but left after a few months, as drilling started to bust.
So why had this deeply religious community leader and exemplary father of three died? His autopsy quickly showed the cause to be asphyxiation by hanging, but was it murder or suicide?
Bureaucratic and jurisdictional confusion had delayed the Bexar County Medical Examiner Office’s first examination of Ownby’s body for nine hours after he was found, so it was impossible for me to determine the precise moment of death.
That’s another Hollywood myth, that time of death is a simple, quick, infallible calculation.
When I was young, when you watched TV or went to the movies, the medical examiner or coroner was always this cadaverous guy who showed up at the murder scene carrying this small physician’s bag—let’s just call him Doc. Since a real forensic pathologist is not supposed to manipulate the body at the scene, I assume Doc carried his lunch in his little valise.
A cop always asked Doc the time of death, and Doc always had an answer. “Oh,” he’d say gravely, “between one and one thirty this morning.”
In real life, detectives might have arrested him immediately because the only person who could give the time that exactly was the murderer himself. Estimation of the time of death is usually an educated guess. Many factors affect a corpse after death, slowing or speeding natural processes, and they can occur in myriad combinations. Time of death might be a good investigative tool, but it is not exact science.
When I was in training, I was instructed to determine when the individual was last seen alive and when he was found dead, then to say he died some time in between. In court, my answer is usually something like “He was dead about twelve hours—give or take six hours.”
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