Strangler

by Corey Mitchell

  Houston, Texas.

  Detectives Bill Valerio and Bill Taber made the dreaded trip out to Dana Sanchez’s parents’ apartment, near Waltrip High School. The officers brought with them four different rings that were on the decomposed corpse they discovered earlier that day. The body had two rings on each hand. One ring was a yellow metal band with a center blue stone surrounded by two circles of clear stones. The second was white metal with a clear solitaire-style stone. The third had yellow metal that formed a loop and had a clear stone surrounded by two red stones. The fourth and final ring was made of white metal with a single red stone in the center.

  “Mrs. Sanchez, can you please describe to me some of the rings your daughter wears?” Detective Valerio asked Fidelina Sanchez, consciously referring to Dana in the present tense.

  Mrs. Sanchez seemed apprehensive as she began to describe a piece of her daughter’s jewelry. Detectives Valerio and Taber wanted to know if Mrs. Sanchez had ever seen any of the rings and if they may have belonged to her daughter.

  As soon as they showed the rings to Mrs. Sanchez, she broke down and started to sob. She knew right away that they belonged to her beloved daughter. Mrs. Sanchez had been distraught by the fact that she and Dana had not been speaking to one another. It was unfathomable to her that she would never get to see her precious daughter graduate from high school, from college, get married, have babies, and grow old and happy.

  Mrs. Sanchez gave the officers further descriptive details about her daughter: that she had never been to a dentist, so her teeth were nasty-looking; that she had a mole on the right side of her cheek; and that she had a crooked left pinkie finger.

  CHAPTER 19

  Saturday, July 15, 1995, 3:30 P.M.,

  Office of the Medical Examiner of Harris County,

  Joseph A. Jachimczyk Forensic Center,

  1885 Old Spanish Trail,

  Houston, Texas.

  Deputy Chief Medical Examiner Eduardo Bellas was set to perform the autopsy on what was left of Dana Sanchez. The gruesome collection of bones, rope, and hair was startling even to the seasoned Bellas.

  Dana Sanchez was literally a bag of bones. Her total body weight was now only twenty-five pounds. Dr. Bellas noted that the majority of her skin had been eaten away by maggots. There was no skin on her pelvic, neck, head, chest, and abdominal areas. Additionally, there was no skin on her face and her eyes were missing. What little skin remained was in a nearly mummified state, due to advanced decomposition. However, all of Dana Sanchez’s long thick hair remained intact.

  Dr. Bellas spotted a yellow nylon rope tied around the neck area, which was double knotted on the right side, and a blue plastic toothbrush near the knot, which he assumed to be a tourniquet. Dr. Bellas also spotted a black plastic belt in the right side of her hair, which had been knotted once.

  * * *

  Fidelina, Cesar, and the rest of the Sanchez family could no longer take the pain. They moved out of the cramped apartment less than one month after Dana’s body was discovered. Mrs. Sanchez stated that the memories in the apartment were too strong and too painful.

  CHAPTER 20

  Tuesday, September 19, 1995,

  12300 block of T. C. Jester Boulevard,

  Houston, Texas.

  Two months after the discovery of Dana Sanchez’s corpse, a cable television lineman called the Houston Police Department. He had just finished reading an article in the Houston Chronicle about the murder of Sanchez and it ignited a memory.

  The repairman was convinced that he had seen a pile of clothes out in the middle of a grass field that matched those supposedly worn by Dana Sanchez.

  The Houston police sent an officer to the location to check it out. Sure enough, the officer discovered clothes that matched the description of those worn by Dana Sanchez. The clothes were collected and sent off to be tested.

  Wednesday, September 27, 1995,

  Houston, Texas.

  More than 2½ months after her daughter’s murder, Fidelina Sanchez was still in shock. Not only had she lost her oldest child, but her daughter’s killer had not been caught.

  “Sometimes I still listen to her,” Mrs. Sanchez admitted. “It’s hard to believe she is not here with us anymore.” Tears streamed down her tired cheeks as Mrs. Sanchez spoke of her daughter.

  “The hardest part is trying to explain to her brothers where Dana is,” said Mrs. Sanchez. “The two-year-old does not really understand what is going on, only that his sister never comes home.”

  She continued on that the oldest boy was very close to Dana. “For him, it’s just not real. He never says anything, but I have found him writing her. I guess he expects a miracle.”

  She also mentioned that he now lived in fear. “He’s only seven and he’s afraid . . . whoever killed his sister will come and get him.

  “Not knowing anything makes it so much harder,” she pleaded with the local media in hopes of trying to drum up some eyewitnesses who may have had some knowledge as to her daughter’s murder.

  “I know my daughter,” she continued. “She would not have gotten in [a vehicle] with a stranger.”

  Mrs. Sanchez also feared for the lives of other innocent young women in Houston. “If he could do it to her, he could do it to another girl, that’s why anyone, anyone who knows anything, should call.

  “She loved children,” Mrs. Sanchez went on as a solitary tear ran down her cheek. “She helped me so much with her little brothers. I miss her so much.”

  CHAPTER 21

  Within days of the discovery of Dana Sanchez’s decomposed body, the Houston Police Department, the Harris County Sheriff’s Department, and the FBI pulled together a task force to work on the murders of Carmen Estrada, Diana Rebollar, and Dana Sanchez. They believed they had a serial killer in their midst.

  “I believe it was early September when we formed the task force with the county and the FBI, and our crime analyst people were really geared up for it,” Detective Bob King recalled.

  Apparently, the task force was not always a well-oiled machine. “The FBI brought in a computer system for them to use to tie in all the leads together. It’s called Rapid Start, though it was anything but. It took too long to set up. And ultimately after so much effort all that information was lost. Some kind of computer glitch.”

  King talked about what happened to the cases he was working on when he was assigned to the task force. “They take us out of the call-up which means we’re not getting any new cases while we’re assigned to this, which means the other guys are getting more than their fair share.

  “In homicide, I was a workaholic,” said King. “You can work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week up there and never get caught up. If I didn’t have to eat and sleep, I’d a done it. I just stayed late every day. I’d work for free overtime like late, late, late.

  “When we formed the task force in ’95, there was a Hispanic girl who was kidnapped in Southeast Houston and raped by a wrecker driver. I spent a ton of time chasing down this wrecker driver with long brownish blond hair and tattoos of spiderwebs on his elbows and I didn’t think he was a good lead. I didn’t think he was my guy.” King was, however, able to bring the guy in.

  “I remember he gives hair, blood, and saliva because he knew he didn’t do it. He did kidnap that girl in Southeast Houston. Got sent off for twenty-five years. He was an ex-con anyway. But he wasn’t our guy and I didn’t feel like he was our guy. It took a lot of time away from [our case].”

  King noted that there were plenty more suspects to come.

  “There was a guy that killed a little girl in Hockley, in his own neighborhood. Eric Charles Nenno,” who was arrested in early March 1995.

  King continued, “[Nenno] took her up into his home, sexually molested her, and took her body into his attic. Well, that too was investigated by Harris County. They had a big eighteen-wheeler and they set it up right where the little girl went missing. They set up roadblocks into this little subdivision. Nobody went in or out withou
t having his or her car checked. Nobody. And they started talking to kids in the neighborhood who said, ‘Well, that man over there, he did something to a little girl about a year-and-a-half ago.’ Nenno had touched a little girl inappropriately as he was repairing her bicycle. A report was made on it, but the parents of the little girl didn’t want anything to do with it.” King shook his head at the memory.

  “So the detectives, including Detective Roger Wedgeworth, went to talk to him at his house. Roger asked the man, ‘What kind of person do you think we should be talking to?’ Nenno answers, ‘A person like me.’

  “They had a polygraph set up in that eighteen-wheeler and set him down there and an FBI agent ran a polygraph. Bombed it. He confessed and said, ‘She’s up in my attic and she’s dead.’”

  King was hopeful. “So, we wanted to see if Nenno is the guy who did Estrada and Rebollar and I went out there and talked to the county guys and said, ‘We have this tourniquet issue. Anything like that?’ and they said no. So, I walked through his house and there was nothing there to suggest any tie-ins with the Hispanic girls. That may be the first time they were made aware.”

  King spoke of the day Dana Sanchez’s body was discovered. “The detectives saw the yellow nylon rope, I call it ski rope, and a toothbrush. On that day I happened to be with two witnesses in a dope killing, taking their statements, so I couldn’t go out to the scene. But Wayne Wendel went out there and then, the next day, we went to the morgue and looked at the body.”

  Task force member Sergeant Stuart “Hal” Kennedy was responsible for a crucial task. According to Kennedy, the HPD property room tended to bulge at the seams with evidence from their multitude of cases. Periodically, usually on an annual basis, the property room staff disposes of unwanted or unacknowledged items of evidence to make room for more evidence from newer cases. The staff sends out a form to the various officers and asks if the evidence needs to be held.

  Sergeant Kennedy received such a request nearly every year since 1992 in regard to the fingernail clippings of Maria Estrada, but he made sure they preserved the evidence.

  He resubmitted DNA samples from suspects each year because there were constant advances being made in DNA technology and he hoped that one day they would find a match.

  Unfortunately, nothing turned up for several years.

  CHAPTER 22

  Monday, November 11, 2002, 10:00 P.M.,

  KHOU-TV, Channel 11,

  Houston, Texas.

  Seven years later, local CBS News affiliate KHOU-TV—Channel 11—aired what would be the first part in an ongoing investigation into the Houston Police Department Crime Lab. The expose was the culmination of a three-month-long investigation conducted by KHOU along with the help of several outside forensic sources. The problems uncovered with the HPD Crime Lab were vast and their conclusions could have had a lasting impact on hundreds of criminal cases.

  KHOU’s televised report focused on forensic analyses that were conducted by the DNA/Serology Section of the crime lab. The chief complaint was that it took far too long to receive DNA-testing results for criminal cases, thereby leaving several defendants sitting in jail for months on end.

  According to the Houston Police Department’s own internal-investigation report, the problems with the crime lab began in the mid-1990s. The basis for the problems began with silly personal politics in the office, which led to a severe lack of supervision. The crime lab “began performing its own restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) DNA analysis” by May 1992.

  At the time James Bolding was the Criminal III supervisor and Dr. Baldev Sharma was one of two Criminalist II senior bench analysts in the department. The following year Bolding received a promotion to Criminalist IV, where he oversaw the Trace and DNA/Serology Sections, in addition to the crime lab’s Central Evidence Receiving (CER) Unit. Likewise, Dr. Sharma received a promotion as well to Criminalist III for DNA/Serology.

  Things seemed to run smoothly for the next year-and-a-half until October 1994, when Bolding and Sharma got into a spat. The two disagreed over the inclusion of a new analyst in the DNA/Serology Section. According to Sharma, Bolding took his frustration out on him by lowering his evaluation scores the following year. Sharma, in turn, filed a grievance against Bolding, which led to a seven-month investigation.

  On February 2, 1996, Bolding allegedly struck back at Sharma by filing a formal complaint against him with the Internal Affairs Division for “official repression” and for several cases of misconduct. According to the report, the bitter feud took its toll on everyone in the DNA/ Serology Section line and spread throughout the entire crime lab.

  Later that year, on October 11, 1996, the Houston Chronicle reported on the case of Lynn Jones, a man charged with sexual assault. Jones sat in jail for nearly nine months while awaiting DNA test results from the HPD Crime Lab that eventually cleared him.

  As a result of the report, crime lab chief Donald Krueger removed Dr. Sharma from his post as the line supervisor for the DNA/Serology Section. Sharma retained his Criminalist III title, but was no longer in charge. The department, however, never found a replacement for Dr. Sharma as the Criminalist III line supervisor.

  On September 14, 1999, three years after Dr. Sharma was removed from the supervisory role, six analysts sent a memorandum to HPD chief Clarence O. Bradford. The memo “Restoration Criminalist III Position to Serology /DNA Section” castigated the former supervisor, Sharma, and declared that the years from 1993 to 1996 were a “total disaster” because of his “mismanagement.” The analysts informed the chief that it was imperative to fill in the position with one of the top criminalists already in the section.

  The following month, on October 20, 1999, several of the analysts met with Chief Bradford about the possibility of installing a line supervisor for the DNA/Serology Section. By all accounts, the meeting was a huge success and, apparently, Chief Bradford gave off a vibe of proactivity to the analysts who collectively described themselves as “euphoric” at the chief’s realization.

  But their euphoria was short-lived, for Chief Bradford sent out a memo soon thereafter that stated that the “Criminalist III position has been put on hold until sufficient funding is acquired.”

  Simultaneous to the DNA/Serology Section’s difficulties was the dramatic increase in the use of DNA as a forensic tool. The crime lab was missing the boat on this new technology.

  Another critical and far more egregious practice was uncovered in the crime lab in the HPD internal investigation report: “drylabbing.”

  Drylabbing is the act of fabricating forensic analysis. In the HPD Crime Lab, the drylabbing consisted of “controlled substances analysts creating false documentation intended to reflect analytical procedures that were never performed.” The report stated that HPD was aware of at least four instances of drylabbing that were committed by two Criminalist I analysts in the Controlled Substances Section between 1998 and 2000. The incidents were detected by a Criminalist III line supervisor.

  One instance of drylabbing involved a case against a suspect who allegedly poured an illegal substance into another person’s beverage. The analyst misidentified the substance as flunitrazepam, a tranquilizer considered to be a date-rape drug. When the results were passed on to the Criminalist III supervisor, they were double-checked and actually discovered to be clonazepam, possession of which is only a misdemeanor. Instead of actually testing the substance used by the suspect, the analyst used a standard sample of flunitrazepam and those results instead.

  In 2000, the same analyst used a report in a separate case from a different analyst that stated the steroid stanozolol was present in a substance. The unrelated results were incorrectly included in the case file and the careless analyst was about to be placed on indefinite suspension, but quit instead.

  By December 2002, less than one month after the KHOU-TV News investigative report on the HPD Crime Lab was unveiled, the Houston Police Department decided to place a moratorium on all DNA.

  The fo
llowing October 2003, all toxicological analyses were suspended in the Toxicology Section. That same month, Irma Rios, who had previously worked on the “Austin Yogurt Shop Murders” case back in 1991 (see Murdered Innocents by Corey Mitchell, Kensington/ Pinnacle, 2005), was named the new head of the HPD Crime Lab.

  It was against this uncertain backdrop that Bob King was faced with a choice, the decision of which had been made for him.

  CHAPTER 23

  “It was about February of 2003,” Bob King recalled, “and Danny Billingsley called Captain Holland, the captain of Homicide, and said, ‘I’d like to reform that task force.’ He said, ‘We have a cold case squad over here now. It’s Harry Fikaris and Roger Wedgeworth. I would like for you to send Bob King and maybe John Swaim over here to work out of the Harris County Homicide Office. I’d like to work out all of the leads on these cases that haven’t been worked out.”

  King continued, “Not everyone in homicide thought these three cases [the three Hispanic girls] were related. We couldn’t prove they were related by DNA. We could only prove they were related by MO. Captain Holland thought they were related, and through the years, I kind of became the keeper of the leads.”

  King talked about one of the suspects. “The truth be told, Danny Billingsley had a favorite suspect—a Hispanic guy who lived in an apartment complex on Cavalcade, where Dana Sanchez was staying when she disappeared. So, Captain Holland decides to send me and John Swaim over to Harris County Homicide to work out these leads.

  “I talked to Roger Wedgeworth and he asked me to come on over. The Cold Case Unit (CCU) had been kicking over there and they’re solving all of these old cases. I got over there and said, ‘John and I are supposed to come over here pretty soon. What do you think we’ll be doing?’ They said, ‘Danny’s got a favorite suspect and we don’t want to go tracking down all of these leads.’” King assumed he knew what they wanted to do.