Jennifer was not home yet.
Sandra began to panic. Jennifer always called to make sure it was okay to spend the night at one of her friends’ houses, such as Elizabeth’s or Gina’s. This time, however, she did not call home to verify. It was unlike Jennifer not to call her parents.
Sandra darted out of bed and headed for the telephone. She dialed Jennifer’s beeper number, then hung up the phone. After she placed the page, she realized it was a futile gesture, for Jennifer would have removed her pager and turned it off to go to sleep. Regardless, it did not stop her from dialing the pager again.
“I was a little frantic,” Sandra recalled. “Panic ran over me because she hadn’t verified staying over, and Jennifer had never done that before in her life.”
Sandra calmed down long enough to lie back in bed. She was unable to fall asleep because she was too busy running various scenarios through her mind of what may have happened to her daughter.
At 6:30 A.M., Randy Ertman woke up from his night’s slumber. When Sandra sensed her husband’s stirrings, she also got out of bed. She did not want to make him nervous, so she masked her anxiety in front of him.
Randy noticed his daughter’s bedroom light was still on. “Oh, did Jennifer spend the night at Gina’s or Elizabeth’s?” he asked his wife.
“Well,” Sandra began cautiously, “she said she might spend the night.”
She failed to tell her husband their daughter had not called to check in. “That was one of the laws of our house,” Sandra later recalled, “I didn’t say to him that she didn’t call me back, because I knew it would have made him angry. So I kind of kept it to myself.”
Sandra kept a lot more inside as well. Over the next several hours, she became even more worried, because she knew whenever Jennifer spent the night with a friend, she would usually wake up around 11:00 A.M. or noon and immediately call her mom to come pick her up. Whenever Jennifer slept over at a friend’s house, she always slept in her jeans and shirt; as a result, she always wanted to get home and shower because she felt dirty.
Sandra was even more concerned because she knew her daughter’s period would probably start on Saturday, June 26. “She always wanted to be home and get that shower, clean up, and have her own [feminine hygiene] products that I purchased for her.” Jennifer was very fastidious about her cleanliness and it was surprising she had not called to come home to take care of it. “So I was really getting worried about that.”
By the time 11:00 A.M. rolled around, Sandra still had not heard from her daughter. She finally relented and told her husband. He was surprised she hadn’t told him sooner and was irritated that Jennifer had not bothered to check in. “I am always used to her keeping her word,” Randy noted later. In fact, she was always so good about keeping her word, he didn’t even bother to wake up around her curfew hour.
He instantly reached for the telephone and dialed the phone number for Adolph Pena, Elizabeth’s father. No one answered. He then dialed Gina Escamilla’s phone number. Again, no one answered.
Randy looked at his wife and declared, “I’m not going to wait.” He grabbed his keys and headed for the door. “I’m going over to Elizabeth’s house,” he said as he took off.
Randy drove four-and-a-half miles to the Pena residence. Along the way, he traveled down T. C. Jester Boulevard, alongside the park and over the train tracks that crossed over White Oak Bayou. He pulled up to the curb in front of the Penas’ home, jumped out of the car, and up to the front door. Ertman knocked politely at first. After several seconds and no answer, he rapped harder with his large knuckles.
Again, no answer.
He could not hear any stirring in the house.
Randy started to worry. He continued banging on the door. When no one answered, he went around back and banged on the windows. He called out for Adolph, he called out for Elizabeth, and he called out for Jennifer— no one answered. He could hear the phone ringing inside, but no one answered it.
After approximately fifteen minutes, Randy gave up and drove back home. The Ertmans, worried and a bit angry, decided to go about their business, at least for a little while.
That lasted for fifteen minutes.
“I’ve got to go back over there again,” Randy exclaimed to his wife.
“Okay, honey. I’ll keep calling.”
Randy returned to Lamonte Lane and the Pena house. He went straight for the front window and banged on it so hard, he thought it would shatter. Still, no one answered.
Melissa Pena paged her daughter from work at noon. She did not want to do so any earlier because she knew Elizabeth and Jennifer liked to sleep late during the summer. She did not get an immediate callback, so she assumed they were still asleep.
By 2:00 P.M., Randy Ertman had become even more frantic. He jumped back into his vehicle and drove over to the Silver Creek Apartments to find Gina Escamilla. She was not home from summer school just yet, but he did speak with her mother. As Randy spoke, Gina arrived.
“Have you seen Jennifer?” Randy asked the young girl without so much as a hello.
“Not today, Mr. Ertman,” she replied, a bit stunned by the tone of his voice.
“Have you talked to Jennifer or Elizabeth?” Randy barked at Gina. “Have you seen them?”
Gina had never seen Jennifer’s father act this way. To Gina, Randy Ertman looked “scared, nervous, and worried.” She replied she had not seen them since late the night before. “Let me page them,” she suggested. She dialed the girls’ pagers and left messages, but never received any callbacks. Gina then told Randy that she would call some of their mutual friends to find out if any of them had seen the girls.
None of them had seen Jennifer or Elizabeth.
Randy started to get even more visibly upset. He asked Gina to come with him to the Pena house. She agreed and they took off for the short distance. On the way over, Gina told Randy she had seen his daughter around 10:45 P.M. and that she and Elizabeth were walking home to Elizabeth’s house. She assumed they were spending the night there.
Randy pulled in front of the Pena home for the third time.
“I want you to show me which room is Elizabeth’s,” Randy said to Gina.
She walked around to the back of the house and pointed out Elizabeth’s window. “It’s that one right there, Mr. Ertman.”
Randy startled Gina as he banged on Elizabeth’s window “like a madman.” He seemed crazed. He began running around the house and banging on every window again and screaming for someone to come outside.
“Mr. Ertman, I think the neighbors are going to call the police,” Gina tried to warn him. Indeed, some of them stepped outside their homes to see what all the commotion was about. They wanted to know who he was and why he was banging on the Penas’ windows.
Randy ignored the neighbors and told Gina to come with him. He took her back to her apartment, dropped her off, and then drove back home to his wife.
Sandra Ertman was unable to sit still. She located her daughter’s phone book. Inside were three handwritten pages with phone numbers for more than sixty friends. She began to call as many of them as she could. Many did not answer. Some went to answering machines. The people she did get through to had neither seen nor heard from Jennifer. Instead of easing her nerves, the phone calls only made her more anxious. Sandra asked Jennifer’s friends to page her daughter. She also had Jennifer’s aunt page her and she herself continued to page her daughter.
“I just kept paging her out of insanity,” Sandra recalled.
Unfortunately, she never received a response from her daughter.
Later that afternoon, Randy met the Penas for the first time. Elizabeth’s parents informed Randy they had not seen their daughter or Jennifer. Randy asked if he could use their telephone to contact the police. He spoke to a representative from the Juvenile Division and with someone in Missing Persons. He reported both his daughter and Elizabeth Pena as missing since at least eleven the night before.
Once they were made aware
the girls were nowhere to be found, the Penas also began frantically paging their daughter. They never received any callbacks. They contacted Elizabeth’s friends to find out if anyone had seen her or knew where she might have gone. Not one friend had any idea where she was.
Melissa and Adolph jumped in their car and drove in the direction of T. C. Jester Park, just east of their house. Melissa dropped Adolph off at the Spring Hill Apartments, where the girls were last seen. He walked through the entire complex and did not see a thing. Melissa picked him up and took him to T. C. Jester Boulevard so he could walk along the railroad tracks.
Adolph searched through the thick wooded area just south of the railroad bridge. He pulled back big branches and tore through dense underbrush. He overturned rocks and lifted up fallen trees. He found nothing.
Adolph decided he wanted to cross over the bayou on the railroad tracks. As he approached the end of the bridge, now on the north side of the bayou, he stopped. “I didn’t see any need to go any farther. I assumed that if the girls took the shortcut on the train tracks and over the bridge, there would be no reason for them to be on that other side.” He stopped his search and stared at the woods off to the side of the train tracks, near the flattened area in the grass, and thought, I should probably take a look in these woods over here.
Instead, Adolph turned around and called it off. He went away empty-handed. At the time, he thought it was a blessing.
As Adolph emerged from the railroad tracks onto T. C. Jester Boulevard, Melissa saw him, picked him up, and took him back home. They went in to call even more of Elizabeth’s friends; unfortunately, the results were the same: no one knew where the girls were.
Adolph recalled speaking to Elizabeth’s friend Gina Escamilla. “That poor girl. She was probably scared to death of me. I was going so ballistic.”
There was one advantage to Adolph’s state of mind. “They (Elizabeth’s friends) were so afraid of me I knew I was getting nothing but honest answers from them. I know they weren’t lying to me, for a fact, because they knew that I was not right and that the last guy they were going to lie to was me.”
Adolph also called as many of his friends as he could muster up.
“As soon as my buddies knew that there was something wrong,” Pena recalled, “everybody was coming over and they came by and helped put flyers out.” One of those who came to help out was Adolph’s brother, Carlos, from San Antonio. “He was there with me the whole time.”
“I was going crazy,” Adolph vaguely recalled. “I was going ballistic. I was doing everything I possibly could to find out where those girls were. I was talking to everybody. We were trying to figure out who she might have talked to, where she might have been. We tried to do everything to find those two girls. I was going nuts.”
According to Sandra Ertman, her husband was beside himself with anger. She said Randy was “lashing out at everyone” and “could not control his temper.” She added that a friend of hers gave her a Valium to calm down her nerves. She said Randy chose beer as his sedative.
Each family member had his or her own way of dealing with the stress and frustration of not knowing where the girls were.
Chapter 23
Friday, June 25, 1993—3:50 P.M.
Houston Recovery Campus
Lyons Avenue
Houston, Texas
Raul Villarreal and his family kept their appointment with Norberto Torres for Raul’s potential drug intervention. The meeting was scheduled for 3:30 P.M., but the Villarreal family was running late. Torres, nonetheless, agreed to speak with the family.
The counselor soon realized, however, the meeting was futile. He described Raul Villarreal as “tired, lethargic, hungover, nontalkative, nonverbal, and laid-back.” Torres also stated that Raul ignored the suggestions made to him concerning his drug problem.
Torres concluded he had gotten nowhere with the young man when Raul Villarreal started “chuckling” during the meeting.
Needless to say, it was not a successful intervention.
Friday, June 25, 1993—9:00 P.M.
Sandoval residence
Ashland Street
Houston, Texas
O’Brien, Cantu, and Joe Medellin arrived at Frank and Ramon Sandoval’s doorstep.
“They looked like they wanted to go out and party,” Frank Sandoval recalled. “You know, drink beer.” However, they had no alcohol with them.
“Dude, where’s your brother?” Cantu asked. “We want him to go out with us so we can go drinking.”
“Um, he’s asleep, dude,” Frank cautiously lied to Cantu. He didn’t want his brother getting mixed up in any more trouble with these guys. “He can’t go out tonight, guys.”
This bit of information did not please Cantu. “Get his lazy ass up,” he demanded.
Just then, the Sandovals’ father came to the door to see what was going on. He made it clear his son would not be going out with them. He then slammed the door on the trio.
Chapter 24
Saturday, June 26, 1993—8:00 A.M.
Pena residence
Lamonte Lane
Houston, Texas
The following morning, Randy Ertman created a missing persons flyer with pictures of and information about Elizabeth and Jennifer. As he designed the flyer, Melissa Pena called around to several copying shops to see who could print them up. The owner of Texas Art Supply told them not only could he do the work for them, but he would do it at no cost. He printed up nearly three thousand copies for the families and wished them luck finding their daughters.
“We had fifteen of our closest friends come over to our house and some of the kids come and we started handing them out,” Melissa recalled. The Ertmans had nearly thirteen people at their house and they began distributing the flyers as well.
The Penas posted flyers in the Heights area, the Oak Forest area, near White Oak Bayou and the train track trestle, and then branched out to a sixty-mile radius that encompassed Loop 610.
The Ertmans went to the Spring Hill apartment complex, where the girls were last seen. “We put flyers up in the laundry rooms of the complex. We made sure they were everywhere in that area,” Sandra Ertman recalled. Gina Escamilla, along with four of her friends, helped the Ertmans and Penas post flyers.
Sandra ran into resistance from a few nearby store owners who did not want the flyers on their property. “The girls’ friends were determined. They would stand on each other’s shoulders, put them high above the buildings, above the doors.” She marveled at the teenagers’ tenacity. “They wanted to find their friends. They made sure those flyers got out.”
Unfortunately, the flyers also brought out the worst in some people. Inevitably, the Penas and the Ertmans received several crank phone calls from people who thought it would be funny to get the families’ hopes up. As soon as Randy Ertman fielded a call and received information that his daughter was alive or where she was last seen, “he would run out the door and follow up on the lead.” Unfortunately, they never panned out.
Chapter 25
Saturday, June 26, 1993—9:00 A.M.
Cantu residence
Ashland Street
Houston, Texas
Christina Cantu had to get out of the house. She badgered her husband, Joe, to walk with her. He reluctantly agreed and they headed outside to nearby Love Park. At first, Christina did not talk to her husband. She merely kept to herself and kept a steady walking pace.
After several minutes of intense walking, Christina stopped next to a park bench. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the ring that Peter had given her. She laid it on top of the bench and proceeded to move on.
“I can’t live with this anymore,” an anguished Christina told her husband. “I can’t stand knowing what they did to those girls.” She was on the verge of tears. “It’s not right,” she said, and became more animated. “It’s not right!” she screamed. “They’re just a bunch of assholes!”
“They’re family,” Joe Cantu answered back.
“They’re not my family!” Christina shot back. “They’re your family, not mine.”
Joe laid into her and the couple argued for all to see.
“I can’t live knowing what they did,” Christina tearfully cried. “My conscience is getting to me. I can’t take it anymore.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do?” Joe pleaded with his wife.
“I don’t know. I mean, c’mon, what if it was your sister or even your mom?” Christina begged. “It could have been me or my sister. It could have been someone you know.”
“But it wasn’t,” Joe responded.
“That’s beside the whole point!” she screamed at her husband. “Why are you protecting them?”
“Because Peter’s my brother,” he told her.
“What if it was your sister? Your mom?” she asked again.
Joe did not respond. He just shook his head and glanced downward. “I can’t believe this,” he stated through clenched teeth.
“We gotta do something,” Christina informed him.
“What? What the hell can we do?”
“I don’t know. Call the cops. Isn’t there one of those tip lines you can call in to report a crime?” she wondered.
“Crime Stoppers,” he responded. “We gotta call Crime Stoppers. I think they even give you a reward or something.” Joe stopped for a moment. “I don’t know, man. I don’t want anyone to know I ratted them out.”
“I think those things are anonymous,” she reassured her husband. “You don’t have to tell them who you are. Just that you know something went down and you know where the bodies are.” Christina put her hand on her husband’s shoulder. “If you don’t want to turn Peter in, at least tell them where the bodies are so their parents can put them to rest.”
“Okay,” Joe replied. “You’re right.”
Pure Murder Page 16