Strangler

by Corey Mitchell

  King looked down at the tiny, half-naked body of nine-year-old Diana Rebollar. Her body lay in a near-fetal position on the asphalt of the service driveway entrance at the back of the vacant building. She lay approximately four feet from the ramp that was used to tow heavy items into the building. Her head, which pointed north, lay on its right cheek with the majority of it in the asphalt area of the driveway and the top portion in a patch of grass located between the driveway and a sidewalk next to the building.

  Diana looked like a skinny brown capital letter R. The tiny little girl lay on her right side with her right arm sticking out to the west, pointing toward the cemetery. Her left arm pointed down and was draped over her left leg, just below the knee and above her thin thigh. Her legs were almost at a 90-degree angle from her trunk. Her right leg slightly extended out in front of her left leg, with her left arm dividing the two. Her entire body was rigid due to rigor mortis.

  Officer King could plainly see that Diana’s bottom and genital regions were completely exposed, for the corpse wore no shorts, pants, panties, or skirt. He also very obviously saw that blood had cascaded from the virginal nine-year-old little girl’s hairless vagina. Four large dried-up blood streaks desecrated her right upper thigh just below her bottom. To make matters worse, there were feces smeared on the little girl’s left butt cheek, as well as a two-inch stool protruding from her anus.

  The little girl was so scared she had literally shit herself.

  It was obvious to everyone at the scene that the little girl had been raped vaginally, as well as anally.

  Detective King, unmoved and undeterred, noticed that her black T-shirt had been pushed up above her chest area exposing her nonexistent prepubescent breasts and nearly all the way up her back. The detective noted what appeared to be a large amount of dried vomit on her right sleeve from the shoulder to the bottom of the short sleeve.

  King also noticed that the color of the girl’s skin was mottled, and that she had been covered in ant bites. The detective had no idea her body had been out in the sweltering, oppressive Houston heat, but it appeared as if a large portion of her chest, stomach, and back had been severely burned from the sun’s persistent rays. Further still, the little girl appeared to have been practically devoured by Texas fire ants.

  The color had drained from the little girl’s face so that most of it was a ghostly white. Her eyes and lips, however, had turned almost black, as if she had on tons and tons of black eyeliner and lipstick, of which she wore none.

  When asked how he felt looking at the body of Diana Rebollar, King stated, “It didn’t affect me that much. It did not. I mean, because it’s just another murder.”

  Just as Detective King finished his cursory inspection of the body, the paramedics arrived on the scene. As one of the technicians moved Diana’s stiff corpse, her long brown hair shifted off her tiny neck. It was then that King saw the ligature for the first time. He described it as “an olive drab nylon cord” that “had been tightened around her neck with a bamboo stick,” which rested on the left side of her throat toward the front of her body. He did not get a good look at it, since they were moving the body; however, he could tell that the cord appeared to have been tightened into her skin very deeply. Detective King also assumed that the cord and bamboo stick worked in concert so the killer could tighten the cord around the victim’s neck or loosen it as he or she pleased.

  Unbeknownst to King, the tourniquet setup was almost identical to the one used on Carmen Estrada two years earlier.

  Monday, August 8, 1994, 5:00 A.M.,

  6600 block of North Main Street,

  Houston, Texas.

  Houston Police Department captain Richard Holland spoke with Bob King about Diana Rebollar. He wanted his detective to notify the little girl’s parents before the news was splashed all over the Monday-morning local television broadcasts.

  Detective King knocked on the Salazars’ front door well before the sun rose. No one was asleep inside the duplex. The family had been on pins and needles throughout the evening. Jose Salazar opened the door quickly, and Detective King walked inside the small home. He looked around to see if he could spot Virginia Salazar. He did not want to break the news in front of her. Once he realized that the fragile mother was not in the front room, he pulled Mr. Salazar aside.

  “Mr. Salazar, I’m sorry to tell you, we found your daughter’s dead body just a few hours ago,” said King, trying to muster up as much sympathy as the all-business detective was capable of showing.

  CHAPTER 11

  On Monday evening Detective King received a solid tip that he believed might help crack the case. According to Heights-area resident Diego Dehoyos, he and his best friend, Ernesto “Ernie” Perez, decided to head out to Kemah, a coastal fishing town on the way to Galveston, to pick up some fish for a Sunday cookout. It was the same day that Diana Rebollar went missing.

  The two men hopped into Perez’s pickup truck and drove north on Main Street at approximately the same time Rebollar would have returned from the Wing Fong grocery store. They took their time driving and headed for the entrance ramp to the freeway. As Perez drove past the C & F Drive Inn, Dehoyos spotted something highly unusual—a white man stuffing a rolled-up carpet into the back of a van. The man’s vehicle was parked in the gravel parking lot next to the lounge. Dehoyos saw the man struggle as he threw the carpet into the back of the van.

  “Now that’s what it would look like if somebody was getting kidnapped,” Dehoyos offhandedly remarked to his pal. Perez nodded in agreement, but kept on driving. Dehoyos naturally assumed it must have been someone moving. Perez drove on and Dehoyos looked back at his passenger-side mirror. He caught a glimpse of the van and made a note of the color—beige. He did not give it a second thought.

  At least, not until the following day.

  On Monday, Perez stopped over at Dehoyos’s house. Dehoyos did not feel well so he called in sick for work. Perez knocked on Dehoyos’s door and let himself in. He walked back and found his friend in bed.

  Perez skipped any pleasantries. “Hey, did you hear about the little girl that got kidnapped?” Perez had heard on the news the night before about the disappearance of Diana Rebollar.

  “Don’t you remember what I told you that’s what it would look like if somebody got kidnapped?” Dehoyos asked.

  Perez nodded affirmatively and then asked Dehoyos if he could use his telephone to contact Crime Stoppers.

  Eventually the police were called out to Dehoyos’s home. They asked the two men to take a look at various photographs of vans to see if they could spot one similar to the one they saw near the C & F Drive Inn. Dehoyos was able to pick out a similar-looking van.

  There was another suspect—someone who was at the scene of the crime when Bob King arrived. “A homeless guy,” King recalled, “Hyman Dale Luster. He was just in that parking lot and there was a grassy space, kind of a curved area. He had set a sheet down there and was drinking a beer and he had seen the body. He had been in jail Saturday night and got out of jail Sunday morning and so he walked from the central police jail up to his digs, up around Airline and the North Loop. Around Airline and Thirty-third.”

  Apparently, Luster brought some friends with him. “He walks up there with a box of kittens he’s taking care of. He went up to a convenience store and some people give him a couple of bucks and he’d get a beer for himself and a little food for the kittens. So, he goes walking back there and he sees that body and he thought it was a grown woman. Then he finished his beer and he walked back. He went to a store and bought some more beer. He went to a pay phone outside the store at Airline and North Loop.” King marveled as he told the story.

  “Of course, he’s crazy. And he thought he was being watched, so he did not use the phone, but a police car drove by on the Loop and he waved at them.” King laughed. “And it went on by, of course. So he walked into the Western Inn and into the lobby. He walked just a few paces in there and there was a girl behind the desk, and I think he
mouthed ‘Call 911’ and then he just walked out. He walked back there and sat behind that office building. The security guard says ‘Well, I found this body and there he is sitting over there.’ So, I threw him in my car and I retraced all of his steps for the night and we got hair and blood and saliva from him.”

  King continued to recount suspects.

  “The biggest tip was this.” King laid it out. “There were two little boys and a little girl riding their bikes—this is fifty minutes before Rebollar was snatched. These are like little cousins, little kiddos, riding their bikes.

  “A man in a tan van, a solid tan van. They were riding their bikes in front of a house with a big driveway. He drove by them and he looked over where a yard sale was going on at a house. The kids, they’re looking at him drive by. And he’s looking over them. He smiles. He’s wearing wraparound sunglasses. Blond hair. He keeps going.” King paused. “He passes the yard sale and keeps going. One of the little boys says to the other, ‘I bet he makes the block and goes to the yard sale.’ Right about that time the two little boys ride their bikes off to chase a dog. The little girl sees her cousin riding her bike down the street. She rides her bike over and they both start riding their bikes in circles. Now the mother of the little girl, Marilou Mirales, is sitting on the top of the stairs on the phone talking to her niece. And the guy does make the block.” King continued, “Now he drives by just past the little girls, and he pulls over to the side of the road and he parks. There’s no reason for him to park there because this is like a fenced-off vacant lot with nothing there. He got out and walked to the back of the van. One of the little girls had her hair bobbed off short and the other one had a long ponytail and he concentrated on the girl with the long hair and he smiled and he said ‘Hi’ and then he went to the back of the van and started to open the door.”

  King continued, “Well, now Marilou is talking to her niece on the phone and she says, ‘That’s strange. This guy just pulled up his van, he parked, and he’s looking at the kids, and I wonder what he’s doing.’ Her niece said, ‘Wake up, Marilou, he’s gonna snatch those kids.’

  “At that point, Marilou took one step down the steps and he’s standing at the back of the van, saw her, shut the door, got back in the van, and he drove off.” King stated that Mirales described the man as a white male in his early thirties with blond hair pulled back into a ponytail. Blond eyebrows, fair complexion, white T-shirt tucked into blue jeans and work boots. He was slim, trim. He wasn’t unneat. Clean shaven, everything. He has this solid tan van and he drives off fifty minutes before she is snatched.

  “Marilou’s aunt, Hope El Campo, called in that day,” King remembered. “The desk people wrote the message down on one of those little phone chits and they put it on my desk, and my desk was so buried with paperwork, I didn’t find it. But they [Marilou and Hope] went to the house where Rebollar lived and said, ‘Hey, you need to tell the police I think we may have seen the guy who snatched your girl just before he did it. ’Cause he almost snatched one of our girls,’” King continued. “They kept calling back and it was like Wednesday before I got the message. So, I went out and talked to those folks. Got Marilou in for a composite drawing of the suspect and this blond guy with the ponytail and Marilou spotted a van just like the one she saw. She got the license plate number, told us about it.”

  King added, “Rick Maxey went out to that guy’s house and just took pictures of it. It was a solid tan van. Chevy, Ford, Dodge, they all make the same kind of van. They look exactly the same. This solid tan van. Butterscotch-colored. So we had that.

  “Then Diego Dehoyos gave us a composite drawing of the van he saw. Now, the van he saw was a tan van with, like, a brick red stripe all the way around it. We were sure that these people had seen the guy and they had a better look at the van,” King said about Marilou Mirales and the kids on the bikes. “A longtime look at the van. They just didn’t see it in passing. We put out the composite of this blond guy and the look-alike picture of the tan van to the news, thinking that was the right one. We never showed the news the van with the stripe on it that Diego Dehoyos saw; however, we passed copies of that composite around to Central Patrol, which patrols inside the Loop here and North Shepherd Patrol, which patrols outside the Loop.

  “At first, the leads were hot and heavy, and when we would go to investigate a person, a man, we would try to get his cooperation. We might say, ‘Hey, would you give us consent to search your vehicle? To search your house? Give us hair, blood, and saliva samples?’ And to a man, they all did,” King declared, somewhat amazed. “One guy called about himself. He calls in—apparently, on the news broadcast with the composite drawing of the blond guy, we must have said we wanted to interview this guy as a witness, and this guy calls in and says, ‘Looks just like me and what’s it about?’” King could not believe it.

  “I said, man, this guy, I think he probably thought his neighbors were gonna call in because he had been arrested and charged with indecency with a child and he worked as a maintenance man in an apartment and he was watching the Hispanic kids a little too close and they made him go work at another apartment. He was a pack rat too. Floor to ceiling. Newspapers in boxes. I found a complete motorcycle in his linen closet. Standing upright on end. We got all kinds of weirdos.”

  But that was not the end of the line when it came to suspects.

  “And then we got regular guys that people called in because they might look like the composite and might live over there,” King continued. “We had this one guy whose ex-wife said, ‘You’ve got the wrong guy. He’s the nicest man you’d ever want to meet and he would never do anything like that.’ And he was a nice guy.”

  King even had members of the media calling him with tips. “Years later, Randy Wallace, from channel 26, calls in about some guy who was arrested and charged with molesting some little girls in the neighborhood where he lived, off the Hardy Toll Road. Long blond hair and I spent a lot of time with that guy and he was in jail. I had Marilou and the kids come out and try to spot him in a lineup and they couldn’t,” King added. “Talked to [the suspect] after the lineup and he says, ‘You’re trying to nab me for something I didn’t do. You need to talk to my lawyer.’ Well, I did talk to his lawyer. His lawyer was a real nice guy and the lawyer said he would talk to him. That lawyer talked to him and came to my office on a Sunday and wanted to know why I was going after his client. So, I laid it all out for him. I showed him the composite drawing, the pictures of the van. I laid out the whole case to him. ‘I don’t think my guy did it, but I’ll talk to him and get back with you.’ And then he got back with me and he says, ‘He didn’t do it. He just didn’t do it.’”

  King lamented the wasted opportunities.

  “I spent a lot of time on that guy. I spent a lot of time on several guys. A bunch of guys. And then there were one hundred forty guys whose names came up through various ways.” King shook his head. “There might be some news reports about some girl getting killed somewhere and some blond guy did it. Not [on] all of those did we get hair, blood, and saliva. Some of them we never talked to, we never met. Some of them we could clear out by [the] timeline because he was in jail during this one....

  “I had Diana Rebollar’s picture always where I could see it,” recalled Bob King. “I had a box, I had several boxes.... I had the ‘Favorite Suspects’ box. Those are guys like the blond guy that Randy Wallace from channel 26 called me about or other really good ones. Really favorite guys, we had twenty,” King said. “You can approach these guys and [say], ‘Your name has come up and may I tell you why your name has come up?’

  “You talk to them and say, ‘Look, okay. If it’s not you, then we need to eliminate you as a suspect. Can we search your car? Can we search your house? Will you come down to the police station with us and we’re gonna get some hair samples from you?’ Back then, it was blood and saliva, all three back then. Now it’s just the buccal swab. And those men did supply all of those things.”

  King spoke of
an international plot in the case. “One lead stayed down in Mexico,” King stated. “They kill each other left and right down there. They have family vendettas. It came in through Univision. They say Diana Rebollar was killed in retaliation for the murder of some rival family from their home state. We got with Diana’s mother and she confirmed that there were deaths on both sides of this family rival,” King recalled.

  “The tipster said the guy that killed Diana is living and working in Houston now and we went out and found him. Had Chicano Squad come out. He didn’t speak any English. Put him on a polygraph and he passed, and I remember Cecil Vasquez interviewed the guy and said, ‘I’m not getting any bad vibes from this guy. I don’t think he did it.’ Basically, we ruled that guy out.”

  And on it went.

  CHAPTER 12

  Monday, August 8, 1994, 8:55 A.M.,

  Office of the Medical Examiner of Harris County,

  Joseph A. Jachimczyk Forensic Center,

  1885 Old Spanish Trail,

  Houston, Texas.

  Dr. Harminder Narula had the unenviable task of performing the autopsy on young Diana Rebollar. Dr. Narula observed the physical condition of the nine-year-old little girl. Diana measured four feet eleven inches and weighed only sixty pounds. The once-beautiful little girl was now a tragic sight. Her body was still in a state of general fixed rigidity, so she remained in the fetal position at the beginning of the examination. She was also in an unfixed state of lividity and had purple spiderweb-like spots of ecchymosis under the pleura, all across her chest and face, known as Tardieu’s spots. Her body was having epidermal slippage and her skin was sliding off, which left patches of white circles on her face the size of silver dollars.