Pure Murder

by Corey Mitchell

  Of course, as soon as the bodies were discovered, the media came slithering into the Penas’ life. “These sons of bitches,” Pena heatedly referred to the media, “I said, ‘I tried to call you to get you to help me find my daughter and you wouldn’t do it. Now that you know she’s dead and you want to talk to me—get your ass out of my face.’ I went ballistic.”

  Adolph also iterated that the police were not much better. “I don’t remember who came up and told me. You know, I don’t think anybody came to the house and told me that they found the girls. I don’t believe anybody from HPD came and talked to us about finding Elizabeth and Jennifer.”

  The Penas were not the only ones upset with the way the Houston Police Department failed to respond when it became apparent the girls had not come home the previous Thursday night.

  “She just had a birthday three nights ago from that night,” stated an angry Vanessa Rivera. “There would be no reason for her to run away and we told them that, but no one believed us.”

  Randy Ertman added, “I think it’s a sorry dog-damn world where the police—when I have to wait from Friday afternoon when this is put out until today, when a police officer finally shows up at my house.”

  Chapter 28

  Monday, June 28, 1993—5:00 P.M.

  Cantu residence

  Ashland Street

  Houston, Texas

  Despite the lack of police participation during the beginning of the ordeal, there were several officers on the case now. Two of the key lawmen involved, Ray Zaragoza and Bob Parrish, confirmed with Crime Stoppers that the tip that led to the bodies came from the residence of a Rudy Cantu Sr., despite the fact the tipster claimed his name was “Mr. Gonzales.” The officers paid a visit to the house, where they discovered Joe Cantu was the caller. Joe told the officers what his brother Peter and his friends had confessed to the previous week.

  The two officers then waited in their police car until they received an arrest warrant. It would be several hours before they could make their move.

  Tuesday, June 29, 1993—3:30 A.M.

  Cantu residence

  Ashland Street

  Houston, Texas

  Zaragoza and Parrish finally received their arrest warrant for Peter Cantu. It was a coordinated effort amongst several officers to arrest all six young men at the same time. Cantu’s arrest went down without incident, as did the arrests for Efrain Perez, Joe Medellin, and Yuni Medellin. Sean O’Brien attempted to escape when police knocked on his door, but officers were stationed outside both the front and back doors of his apartment.

  The police did not know who the sixth person was because Joe Cantu had never met him before that night. They had no problem locating him, however, because when Joe and Yuni Medellin were being transported to the police station, one of the officers asked where “the other guy” lived. Joe Medellin readily gave up the name “Raul” and told the officer where he lived. The officer drove to Villarreal’s house on Chapman Street and added the young man to his haul.

  Once all six teenagers were brought in, they were separated into different rooms and questioned by police. It did not take long for each one of them to admit their presence at the rape and homicide of Elizabeth Pena and Jennifer Ertman. Most of the young men, however, laid blame on their supposed good friends. Everyone admitted to being there, but they begged off on specific participation. It was always: “He raped her, but I didn’t touch her” or “He pulled the belt around her neck and choked her, but I only watched.”

  After several hours of interrogation, the police were able to create a picture of what actually occurred that night. It was obvious all six of them were directly involved in the kidnapping, rape, torture, and murder of the two girls.

  Once again, the Penas heard about another major breakthrough in their daughter’s case via the media. For whatever reason, no one from the HPD bothered to contact them to let them know their daughter’s killers had been apprehended.

  “I really didn’t think they were going to find the killers,” Adolph Pena exclaimed. “I had real bad feelings about that. And then to be caught that quick.”

  The one person who did keep in touch with the Penas as their daughter’s case evolved was Harris County district attorney (DA) John B. Holmes Jr., who assured the Penas that Elizabeth’s murder was his “number one priority.” Holmes added, “I am going to take care of this case before I die. Believe me you, I hope to God that I’m still alive when they execute the sons of bitches. I will make it a point in my life to see these bastards fry.”

  The Penas were stunned when they heard the news. “I was in disbelief.” Adolph shook his head. He also could not believe there were so many people involved. “I was expecting one, maybe two killers. It really freaked me out that the girls had to be gang-raped by so many individuals.”

  Adolph was stunned that none of the boys stopped what they were doing. “If it were that many of them, surely one of them out of the five or six would have some kind of freaking sense to say, ‘Hey, let’s not do this.’ But you know what? There wasn’t none of them that had the brains. Not one of them.

  “I thanked God about a million times that day,” Adolph recalled. “I kept thanking that poor little girl that turned them in, Cantu’s sister-in-law. I still praise that woman every day. If it wasn’t for her, they probably would have never found them.”

  Ertman family friend Khris Burling spoke with the local Fox television station about the Ertmans. “They’re doing a lot better than they were yesterday,” Burling reassured. “Especially hearing some news that they had been caught, the suspects.” Burling was later interviewed and informed Fox News reporter Olga Campos that the medical examiner’s office had contacted the Ertman family and stated it was definitely Jennifer who had been discovered.

  Later that day, all of the suspects, except for Yuni Medellin and Raul Villarreal, were transported to the courthouse for their initial bond hearing. All four men were read their rights and had their bonds set at $100,000 each.

  Afterward, the four suspects were led on a perp walk in front of television news crews outside the courthouse, located at 61 Reisner Street. Joe Medellin, dressed in a blue oxford long-sleeved shirt and white shorts, walked next to the substantially taller Efrain Perez, who was dressed in a white short-sleeved T-shirt and black jeans, and was handcuffed to Medellin. Perez’s left arm was in a splint up to his elbow.

  Sean O’Brien, who wore a black short-sleeved Los Angeles Raiders T-shirt, followed close behind. The three boys were not being escorted personally by any police authorities and calmly walked along the sidewalk into the building. They kept their heads bowed down so as not to have their faces appear on television. Perez, however, was grinning slightly as he bounced toward the police station.

  Joe Medellin eventually looked up at one news cameraman and said, “I’m gonna mess you up, man” while he shook his head.

  Behind them a local television news cameraman walked backward and filmed Peter Cantu. The alleged ringleader, who was dressed in black jeans, a short-sleeved, collared black shirt, and a pair of gleaming white low-top sneakers, was being personally escorted by two police officers, who had their arms hooked through his while his hands were handcuffed behind his back. The diminutive Cantu was not pleased to have his mug photographed and put on display for live television.

  Fox News reporter Olga Campos walked directly up to Cantu and stuck her microphone in his face. The tiny reporter asked, “What happened to you? You looked pretty tough in that courtroom.”

  “Shut up, bitch,” Cantu replied halfheartedly.

  “Is that what you called Elizabeth?” Campos quickly shot back without missing a beat.

  “I called your momma that,” Cantu responded, like the teenager he was.

  “Did you kill her?” Campos pressed.

  Cantu spit on the ground and then repeated what he had said, “I called your momma that.” Cantu realized he did not listen to her question, and when it finally sunk in, he immediately turned on
the much older Campos. His face turned from a sarcastic badass to an anger-filled grimace; he yelled at her, “If you don’t get away from me, I swear to God, man!” Cantu then kicked his right foot up and attempted to break one of the cameras. He spat out, “Get that goddamned camera out of my face.”

  A friend of both girls, Joey Ruiz, spoke with the CBS local television affiliate KHOU-TV about Elizabeth and Jennifer while standing on the railroad tracks near where the girls’ bodies were found. “We all hung out,” the young man declared. “We’re all like a family. All of us. They always hung out at our apartments. We’re all close. All of us.”

  Ruiz was aggravated with the Houston Police Department. “Why didn’t they look around searching where they were missing?” the young man queried. “I feel it would have been good if they had done that when the girls had gone missing. Now they’re gone, there’s nothing we can do. There’s nothing nobody can do. But grieve, forever.”

  When asked if the train tracks were a hangout for troublemakers, Ruiz angrily replied, “That’s bull! That’s bull! That’s media. That’s what they want you to believe so you will be afraid.” Ruiz continued, “This was our park. It grew from generation to generation. There was no crack, none of that stuff here. If anything, they had beer, man. They come out here to kick back and talk about school.”

  Ruiz then spoke more about the girls and what they meant to him. “They were real sweet. Why would someone want to take away our friendship? We loved them. There’s just no way I can express more grief.”

  Ruiz also spoke of how he hoped others remembered his friends. “I don’t want them to think they were just two more girls, because they meant much too much to everybody.” Ruiz did not want to hear people say, “‘Oh, it’s just two dead girls.’

  “They didn’t get to see nothing,” Ruiz added about the girls. “They didn’t get to graduate. Nothing. All they get to see is the harsh life and to get murdered. The least we can do is build a memorial here for them so that every time someone walks in here, they won’t be forgotten.”

  Many more friends were frustrated with the police’s handling of the missing persons reports on the girls. Dallas Young broke down in tears as she said, “No one would listen to us. No one would take us seriously. They didn’t believe us. Now they’re dead.”

  Randy Ertman also bemoaned HPD’s lack of rapid response to the missing persons report. “The police over at the Shepherd Substation,” Randy claimed, “were offered pictures of my daughter, but they did not take them. They took my daughter’s description and that was all.”

  Randy was dismayed that his concerns were not taken seriously. “No one believed me,” the stunned father told a Fox News reporter. “No one cared. No one.”

  More of Jennifer and Elizabeth’s friends spoke out about the killers. “I don’t know what was going on in their heads at the time they killed my friends. It’s happening to us too many times,” Dallas Young bemoaned to a local reporter. “It’s getting sickening. You can’t even walk home. You can’t even walk to the store. You can’t even walk to school anymore.”

  Dallas asserted neither Elizabeth nor Jennifer ran around with the wrong crowd. “They never messed with anybody. They never bothered anybody. They were good people. They were two good girls.”

  Dallas was determined to make sure her friends’ killers were put away for good. “I will fight and keep fighting and keep fighting until these people have been put behind bars forever.”

  Dallas also expressed the sorrow she felt over the loss of two of her best friends. “Just this morning, I was walking through this hallway”—she referred to the hallways of Waltrip High School, where she and her girlfriends used to traipse up and down every day, sharing a laugh or two—“you don’t know . . . how you feel when your friends are not walking there beside you.”

  One of Elizabeth’s best friends, Vanessa Rivera, told a local TV reporter, “She called me and told me that she was at her friend’s house and she never . . . she just told me she was going to go home. She never got home.”

  Vanessa also stated Elizabeth was very conscientious about letting her family know where she was at all times. “Even if they were only ten minutes away, she would say, ‘Pull over, I need to call my parents to let them know where I’m at.’ And we did this, God only knows how many times, and we knew that when they didn’t call us back, something had really gone wrong.”

  Word got around quickly in the Harris County Jail about the latest celebrity inductees. Of course, most of that had to do with the young men bragging about their exploits to some of the other inmates.

  The bizarre honor code in jails and prisons placed the young men at the bottom of the food chain—as child rapists and murderers.

  That same day, Joe Medellin, Villarreal, O’Brien, and Perez had another court hearing. The four men were escorted into the courtroom shackled with chains and decked out in beige jumpsuits. Three of the men had a little extra something on their uniforms for the court’s amusement.

  On the back of Perez’s jumpsuit, scribbled with a Sharpie, was I’m a baby killer. Cantu’s was I’m a fag. O’Brien’s, I’m a bitch. The other inmates had gotten hold of their clothes and applied some of their own decorations.

  At a police press conference the following day, outside the Harris County Courthouse Annex, Captain John Silva stressed the murders were not a part of the initiation of Villarreal. “We think that these girls happened along and that they were in positively the wrong place at the wrong time. We feel like as they happened by, these guys saw their chance to do what they did and . . . they did.”

  Prosecutor Denise Oncken also spoke to the media about the charges against the young men. She partially described how the girls were attacked. “Both of the complainants were sexually assaulted and we’re not sure if both of them were strangled. We don’t have the autopsies yet.”

  The media also tried to track down one of the members of the Cantu family. One news crew had a camera trained on their house. They shot footage of Suzie Cantu driving away in a small red car. She pointed at the camera as she drove off and said, “That better not be nothing, ’cause I will sue!”

  An unidentified neighbor spoke to the media and expressed shock at the news of Cantu’s involvement. “So far as I know, they’re a quiet family,” the man stated. “No trouble. I mean, we hadn’t had no problems at all.”

  An unidentified female neighbor countered with, “There’s a lot of teenagers hanging around there. A lot of them. And loud music, too. And the neighbors have been complaining about the loud music.”

  Chapter 29

  Thursday, July 1, 1993

  Heights Funeral Home

  Heights Boulevard

  The Heights

  Houston, Texas

  Less than five miles away from where the bodies of Jennifer Ertman and Elizabeth Pena were discovered, friends and family gathered to mourn Jennifer’s passing. Several hundred teenagers, most from Waltrip High School, clutched one another inside and outside the Heights Funeral Home. They gathered strength from their numbers and their common cause: to say good-bye to Jennifer Ertman.

  The normally vibrant crowd conducted themselves in the most respectful of manners. The hush over the gathering belied their usual vivacity. Most of the kids were still in a state of shock—not only because they had lost two of their own, but several of their own had been responsible for their deaths.

  “It’s hard,” observed sixteen-year-old Monica Alvarez, a friend of Jennifer’s. “It’s supposed to be a free world and you can’t go out. Jennifer was innocent. She had her whole life, and dumb guys like that come and take it all away.”

  Most of the teenagers at the funeral home felt the same way as Monica Alvarez. Many others were in shock. Others were still seething with rage. The entire gamut of emotions, however, seemed bottled up inside the somber setting.

  Jennifer’s service was swift and devastatingly emotional. Her father, Randy Ertman, had written a eulogy for his beloved daughter; ho
wever, he could not bring himself to read the words. The grief was too overwhelming. He asked a family friend to read his parting words about his only child.

  “Her life was short,” the friend recited, “but everyone here cared. That’s a lot right there,” he said as he acknowledged the overflowing crowd.

  Dallas Young attempted to focus on the good memories of her lost companion. “The thing I’ll miss the most about her,” Dallas recalled as she looked directly at Jennifer’s casket, which was adorned with flowers, “is the way she laughed.” Warm tears streamed down the young mourner’s face as she addressed the crowd.

  Dallas still seemed to be in a state of shock at the murder of her friend. Denial had crept in in a big way. “I keep expecting Jennifer to come bounding out of the woods, saying that she was embarrassed by all the fuss her disappearance caused.”

  Longtime Ertman family friend and neighbor Earl Hatcher came to the front of the congregation next. He struggled to get out the words. “Jennifer. We love you, we need you. We miss you. We are here for you.” The tears became more audible in the hushed setting.

  Hatcher began to cry as well. “I watched her grow up.” He smiled as he recalled how she used to flash by him as she raced her go-kart up and down the street. “Her interests changed from go-karts to cars. She was becoming a woman and, like a butterfly, I saw the transition.”

  More people spoke about their cherished friend they had lost. The feelings for Jennifer, for her mother and father, for those who cared for her, were palpable. The caring helped the Ertmans as they—along with the entire gathering—quietly passed their daughter’s casket. The Ertmans could see the oversized photograph of their daughter next to the closed coffin. The sound of Whitney Houston’s voice filled the room with the strains of “I Will Always Love You.”