CHAPTER 8

Saturday, April 18, 1992,
Houston, Texas.

 

Sergeant Kennedy was feeling a bit overwhelmed with the Carmen Estrada case and enlisted the assistance of HPD sergeant Jim Ramsey. Kennedy asked Ramsey to take Estrada’s daily route to work, be it by bus or on foot, so he could question the young woman’s neighbors.

Kennedy thought one possibility may have been that Estrada had been abducted while walking to work or while waiting for her bus. So, Ramsey also knocked on several hundred residents’ doors along her route to see if anyone saw anything. Unfortunately, he struck out.

Kennedy also had members of the Chicano Squad create flyers with Estrada’s photo and plaster them all over the Spring Branch area. The Chicano Squad also contacted the local Spanish-speaking media to help spread the word requesting information about the murder. This lit a fuse, and the police department received hundreds of calls in regard to the murder. Unfortunately, as is usually the case, almost all of them came from crackpots or vengeful boyfriends or girlfriends. The police, however, had no choice but to look into each and every single lead for fear of leaving the appropriate stone unturned.

Sergeant Kennedy also enlisted the help of Sergeant Bill Dunn, from the HPD Sex Crimes Unit (SCU), whom Kennedy asked to try and find any similar cases to the Estrada murder. Unfortunately, despite Sergeant Kennedy and his staff sifting through hundreds of cases, they could not come up with anything in regard to Carmen Estrada.

But one benefit of requesting help from Sex Crimes was that Sergeant Dunn was able to have suspects come in and give up DNA samples to see if he could match the DNA recovered from under Carmen’s fingernails and the semen allegedly discovered in Carmen’s mouth. No matching DNA samples turned up, but Kennedy and Dunn were able to rule out certain suspects.

Sergeant Kennedy then contacted the Houston Chapter of Crime Stoppers for their assistance. Crime Stoppers, a crime-fighting organization that offers money to potential witnesses if their information leads to the arrest and conviction of criminal suspects, broadcasted information on the local media, but again, they received several tips that turned out to be worthless.

Despite the efforts of Sergeant Hal Kennedy, all roads led to dead ends in the case that came to be known as the “Dairy Queen Girl Murder.”