Chapter 26
Sunday, June 27, 1993—9:00 A.M.
Cantu residence
Ashland Street
Houston, Texas
The following morning, Joe Cantu was nervous as hell. He could not stand to see his wife so upset. She had been having nightmares all weekend long about what her brother-in-law and his friends had told them.
Joe also could not fathom the idea of ratting out his brother and his friends. He knew he needed to make the call. He decided the time had come. He had to do the right thing.
Joe picked up the phone and dialed Crime Stoppers. He had not seen his brother since the night of the murders, but he was worried Peter would walk in on him while he was making the call. After two rings, a Crime Stoppers representative answered the phone.
“Crime Stoppers. How can I help you?” the representative queried.
“My name is Gonzales,” he lied in a whisper. “I know where you can find those dead girls. Right off of T. C. Jester, next to the bayou. White Oak Bayou.” Joe Cantu did not know exactly where the bodies were located; he was merely going off the information that his brother had given him. He did not say who was responsible for the girls’ deaths or how he knew about the killings. Just the location of the bodies.
Joe Cantu hurriedly hung up the telephone. He felt a strange mixture of guilt and relief. He knew his brother was going to be in some serious shit, but he also realized he could not live with himself if the girls’ parents were unable to find their daughters’ bodies.
Police officers drove over to T. C. Jester Park to check out the tip. Instead of crossing over and searching the wooded area northeast of the bridge, they stayed on the west side of the bayou. They searched the wooded areas on both sides of the train tracks, but they found nothing.
Later that night, Joe and Christina nervously watched the news to see if there was anything about the discovery of the two girls’ bodies.
Nothing.
They did not know what to do.
Joe told Christina he would call back the next morning and try to give a better description of the area based on what Peter and his friends had told them.
Chapter 27
Monday, June 28, 1993—12:06 P.M.
T. C. Jester Park
T. C. Jester Boulevard and West Thirty-fourth Street
Houston, Texas
Houston police officer Mike Cromwell was cruising solo, as he always did. The twelve-year veteran did not have a partner, and he did not mind. He liked working the sprawling streets of Houston, never quite knowing what he would stumble upon next.
When the call came in, Cromwell turned his car around and headed for T. C. Jester Boulevard and West Thirty-fourth Street. It was only a few miles away from Waltrip High School. The park area was usually populated with several joggers and bicyclists who beat down a well-trodden path through the narrow grass field park. On one end of the park, approximately two miles from where the officer was being dispatched, there is a swimming pool, baseball fields, and a large playscape for children. At the other end where he was going was a jogging trail, lots of oak and pine trees, and a railroad trestle, which hovered thirty feet over the White Oak Bayou concrete floodgate.
Cromwell parked his police cruiser in a nearby apartment complex parking lot across the street from a cluster of trees located southeast of the railroad tracks and shy of the train trestle. Cromwell headed over to the woods and started to scan the area, looking for any signs of foul play. He checked the perimeter of the mini-forest and then stuck his head inside the trees, but he did not see anything.
After approximately twenty minutes of searching, Cromwell was joined by more officers at the scene. With police cars came onlookers. People in the nearby apartment complexes poured out in droves to see what was going on.
One of the officers on the scene told Cromwell he was not looking in the right area. He needed to cross the railroad bridge and look on the other side of the tracks. Cromwell headed across the bridge. As he crossed over, he noticed a path that led down the side of the embankment toward a large bald spot in the grass, approximately twenty feet from another cluster of trees. Cromwell did not head in that direction; instead he continued along the side of the railroad tracks and next to the wooded area.
Cromwell continued his search as he walked up a slight hill that graced the edge of the tree line. He walked up the hill and closer to the tree line, when something caught his eye. He paused and walked up to the trees, pulled back some branches, and looked inside. He spotted what appeared to be clothing. Cromwell then attempted to get a better look, so he pulled the thick brush to one side and tried to peer even farther inside. This time, he spotted what he believed to be a body. He attempted to enter through the wooded section; however, it was too thick, so he headed back toward the bald spot in the grass. Once there, he noticed an open entrance to the wooded area, almost like the entrance to the Bat Cave. He headed up a path that led directly to the opening.
Cromwell moved some branches to one side and stepped into the woods. The sunlight peering through the enormously tall pine trees lit up the area in a hallucinatory manner. Various particles of dust, pollen, and grass floated up in the air and passed through the sun’s rays with urgency. Pine needles littered the dirt floor and felled trees lay on their sides as if taking a nap. It was a beautiful yet eerie sight.
What Cromwell saw next was far from beautiful.
Less than twenty feet from the entrance, Cromwell spotted two dead bodies lying on their backs. He immediately contacted dispatch, set up a perimeter around the crime scene, and called for assistance from Homicide.
Two of the people allowed to enter the crime scene were veterans of the Houston Police Department Brian Horowitz and Beverly Trumble. The crime scene investigators were greeted inside the wooded area of the crime scene by Sergeant Robert “Bob” Parrish. Horowitz and Trumble instantly spotted the two corpses in the enclosed area. Their first job was to make an assessment of the overall crime scene. The pair noticed various pieces of clothing strewn about the pine-covered dirt floor around the bodies. Upon closer inspection of the bodies, they could see nature had taken over. The seasoned investigators were shocked by what they saw.
Two bodies, seriously decomposed, lay within feet of one another. Both bodies were partially naked. The first body had a shirt pulled up over the head of the victim. They could not see any features of the corpse’s face. The body, however, was not a pleasant sight. The genital region seemed to shimmer in the sun’s rays. Investigator Horowitz thought his eyes were playing tricks on him as he swore something moved in the crotch region. He was correct. The corpse’s genitalia had been decimated and infested with live maggots. Thousands of them. They were still crawling over the moist region of the victim. Their feeding frenzy did not stop.
Horowitz gained his composure and made note of the physical appearance of the rest of the body—at least of what he could see. He noted the victim’s left foot was adorned in a purple Converse high-top sneaker and a white ankle sock. The right foot wore no shoe, just a sock. There was a large bloody gash on the left shin and cuts and scrapes on both legs. Maggots had dribbled down from the crotch area and were feeding on the open sores on the legs. Several more maggots had fallen to the ground between the corpse’s thighs. The mass collection of maggots looked like a large pair of movable panties on the body.
Horowitz also noted large clusters of maggots on the female victim’s belly button and on her left rib cage area. The victim still had a silk purple bra in place that was exposed, as her shirt was pulled up over her head. He also noted that her body was bright orange and rusty red.
The corpse lay on the ground on its back, almost as if it were a young girl sunning herself out by a swimming pool. Her arms were extended over her head and nearly crossed over each other. Both arms were rusty-orange-colored. They, too, were sprinkled with maggots. The investigators did not remove the shirt from the victim’s face.
Horowitz and Trumble carefully moved up
toward the second body. This one, too, was only partially clothed. It appeared to be bloated from the sweltering Texas heat, which had hovered above ninety degrees for several days in a row.
The victim’s right arm was partially covered with dead pine needles, which covered up the rusty red coloring of her skin. Her right hand peered out from the needles and was pale with bright red polish on her neatly manicured fingernails. The rest of her arm did not look as good. Nature again had taken over. All of the skin and muscle had been removed, exposing only bone from the right wrist all the way to the shoulder. Her left arm had turned almost completely black.
The crime scene investigators shifted their attention to the head of the corpse. Horowitz, an eleven-year veteran in crime scene investigation, was taken aback by the gruesome display before him. What had once been a beautiful, vibrant, and young Hispanic girl now resembled a creature from a horror movie. All of the skin had been completely picked from her entire head, thereby leaving only a muddy skull. The eyes had been picked out, as had the tongue. One of the animals in the park must have been forceful with the girl’s corpse, as the lower jaw was unhinged and dangling wide open beyond any human threshold of pain.
At approximately 1:00 P.M., Gina Escamilla’s telephone rang. It was one of her good friends, Vanessa Rivera. She sounded as if she were on the verge of tears when she blurted out to Gina, “They found them! They found their bodies!”
“What are you talking about?” Gina tried to quiet her hysterical friend. “Calm down. Tell me what you’re talking about.”
“Jennifer and Elizabeth. I think they found their bodies!” Vanessa’s voice trembled as she spoke.
“Oh, my God!” Gina exclaimed. “Where? Where are they?” she begged to know, while trying to stay calm.
“Right by your apartments. Over there on the bridge and the train tracks. Near the bayou. I think the police are out there right now.”
“Oh, my God. How do you know it’s them?” Gina asked as she held out any last vestige of hope. “How do you know it’s them?”
Vanessa could not answer her. “I’m coming over right now,” she declared, and simultaneously hung up the phone.
Vanessa arrived at Gina’s apartment within minutes. They met up with another one of their friends, a teenage girl named Dallas Young. The three girls were afraid of what they might learn; however, they knew they needed to be there for Elizabeth and Jennifer in case they were alive.
The trio of girls hurried to the well-worn walking path just north of White Oak Bayou, which led to the train trestle. By the time they made their way around the bend, they could see there were literally dozens of people standing around and on top of the train tracks. They also saw dozens more lined up on the other side of the bayou looking toward something north of the water. The girls ventured forward.
When they made it to the train tracks, they were not allowed to go any farther. A police officer stood on the edge of the tracks that led down a gravel slope to another footpath and to a large clearing in the grass. Several police officers stood in the circle. Meanwhile, several more officers could be spotted coming in and out of a small cavelike entrance from the woods.
Gina, Vanessa, and Dallas had no idea what was going on. Gina scanned all of the gawkers at the scene until she spotted someone she knew. It was a young black boy who lived in one of the nearby apartment complexes. She recognized him from over the previous two years. They were not friends but more on a head-nodding “Hello, how are you?” basis with one another.
She had no idea his name was Sean O’Brien.
Gina stood near O’Brien and could hear the young man talking in a slightly too loud voice to a couple of black boys. Gina was not sure, but she believed he may have been babysitting them.
“I’m never gonna let y’all come back here anymore,” O’Brien told the two boys. His voice turned stern as he boldly declared, “I hope that whoever did this, they get them. I hope they find the bastards.”
Gina did not speak to O’Brien, because she was only concerned with whether or not the bodies that had been discovered were Elizabeth’s and Jennifer’s.
Sergeants Ramon “Ray” Zaragoza and Bob Parrish helped out at the crime scene. Zaragoza assisted the Crime Scene Units (CSUs) with the collection, bagging, and tagging of evidence. Parrish canvassed the crowd and questioned any potential witnesses.
More officers arrived to help control the crime scene. It was a good thing they were all in place when Randy Ertman showed up. The officers truly empathized with the grieving and hysterical father, but they had a job to do and they were going to make sure the crime scene remained uncontaminated at all costs. Luckily, they were able to calm Ertman down. They then had the misfortune of letting him know they would need copies of his daughter’s dental records to determine if one of the bodies was actually hers. They managed to get him out of the crime scene area and onto his task at hand.
Not long after they were assured Randy Ertman had left the area, the medical examiners began the unpleasant but necessary task of wrapping the bodies and placing them on gurneys. They needed to be transported to the coroner’s office for a full examination. Two rolling gurneys were carried back into the woods to begin the process.
Less than one hundred yards away, police spokesman John Leggio gave a brief news conference to the assembled media. Several onlookers were standing directly behind the officer, including the girls’ friends Dallas Young, Vanessa Rivera, and Gina Escamilla. As the officer spoke, he confirmed that two female bodies had been discovered. When he mentioned they were partially nude, Dallas Young broke down in a bout of hysterical tears on camera. They never mentioned Elizabeth’s or Jennifer’s name, but she knew. After the conference ended, the police gently asked the crowd of onlookers to clear the area.
A group of six tired-looking police officers rolled the first gurney out of the woods, over the downtrodden grass, and up the gravelly slope to the railroad tracks. On top of the gurney lay one of the two dead girls’ bodies wrapped in a royal blue crushed-velvet blanket with CY-FAIR NORTHWEST printed in large white letters on its side. The officers crossed over the tracks, went down the other side of the slope, and proceeded to unsteadily remove the corpse. They transported it several hundred yards across a dirt trail that paralleled the Clearbrook Apartments until they finally came to the medical examiner’s vehicle located on West Thirty-fourth Street.
The same process was repeated a second time with the second body.
Dallas Young was beside herself with shock. “They were just walking home. They were walking home. It’s not that far away and somebody has to do that to them. Why?”
With the assistance of the channel 13 news cameraman, Randy Ertman returned to his home in the Heights to find the phone number of Jennifer’s dentist so he could retrieve her dental records. When he arrived, he realized his wife was nowhere to be found. Another reporter stayed behind to inform Randy that his wife fainted after she heard the news of the discovery. Yet another reporter had taken her to the hospital and made sure she was okay. The reporter called back and stated that Sandy was fine, but doctors had given her a sedative to help calm her nerves. She would return home later that evening.
After all of the hubbub at the Pena residence, with so many people coming and going, things finally slowed down for a brief moment. Adolph Pena looked around his small home, which was packed to the rafters with so many loved ones who were looking for his sweet little girl. It was then, he knew, his daughter was not going to be found alive.
“I knew right away that there was something wrong,” the in-tune father remembered. “She would always let us know where she was at, when she would be home, and this time she didn’t.
“When we paged her and she didn’t call . . . I knew exactly right then that something was very wrong.”
Adolph could not remember how his brother found anything out, but stated “he heard from someone that something was going down in T. C. Jester Park, so he took off and went down there to the park. S
omehow or another, Randy Ertman had also known that something was going on down at that park.”
Carlos Pena returned to the Pena house. He found Adolph and told him, “Man, they don’t know if it is the girls or not.” His brother tried to remain optimistic.
“I know it’s the girls,” Adolph said in a resigned voice. “I know it’s them.”
Adolph Pena was furious.
He never received a call from the police in regard to the discovery of his daughter’s body. He found out about it from a television newscast. He was sitting in his living room with his wife and dozens of friends when the channel 26 news broadcast came blaring over the airwaves.
“Police have discovered the bodies of fourteen-year-old Jennifer Ertman and sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Pena,” the newsreader declared.
Adolph was in a state of shock and disbelief. He could not believe what he heard. He looked to his wife for confirmation. Her mouth was agape and tears were welling up in her eyes. Once Adolph saw his wife’s reaction, he knew he had heard correctly.
The dead body of his firstborn child had been discovered.
Adolph was mad as hell that the media broadcast her name all over the airwaves before they even bothered to contact him. Soon after the initial airing of the discovery, the media finally started calling. Not only was he furious because the police failed to contact him first, he was also ticked off because they ignored his pleas over the weekend when there was a slim chance Elizabeth might still be alive.
This was in the days before AMBER Alerts, search teams like Texas EquuSearch, and twenty-four-hour cable-news coverage where missing girls have become a top priority. Adolph Pena and Randy Ertman tried everything they could to get help from the media, but they all refused. Some even told Pena since his daughter had run away before, she would probably be located at a friend’s house in a matter of time.
Pure Murder Page 17