CHAPTER 10
Monday, August 8, 1994, 12:15 A.M.,
1440 North Loop West,
Houston, Texas.
Ian Biel was a simple man. Well, boy, really. The eighteen-year-old had dropped out of school at Navarro Junior College, in Waco, Texas, and moved back home to Houston, where he scored work as a security guard for Hamm Security Services—the semi-graveyard shift, from 10:00 P.M. to 4:00 A.M. He was responsible for checking up on several buildings all over the city, every night. Some buildings he would simply drive by in his white Mazda pickup truck and survey the scene to make sure there were no vagrants hanging around urinating on the buildings or vandalizing the area. Other buildings he would survey, then get out of his truck with a flashlight and walk around the building. Still other buildings he would drive around, walk around, and then enter the building, where he would also check on specific suites.
It was an easy job, but he got to wear a uniform and strap on a gun, which he felt restored a little bit of the dignity he lost by having to move back home.
This particular night, Biel had been on his route for a couple hours. As usual, things were pretty uneventful, which was the way he liked it. At just after midnight he found himself at an abandoned three-story office building located at 1440 North Loop West, also known as Loop 610.
Biel was creeped out by the building. First of all, it was located next door to the private, larger-than-it-looks, Adath Emeth Jewish Cemetery. The entire area had an eerie, off-kilter ambience to it. That, combined with the unsavory element that tended to populate the area at night—specifically, prostitutes who allegedly worked out of the Western Inn Hotel located next door and took their tricks behind the building for blow jobs, crackheads who used it to hide out and spark up, and intoxicated homeless people—did not excite Biel. Since it had so much potential for trouble, the security guard was required to get out of his truck, cover the perimeter, and take a peek inside.
Not fun.
Unbeknownst to Biel, the abandoned office building was located only two miles from the Spring Branch Dairy Queen, where Carmen Estrada’s body was found less than two years earlier.
Biel pulled off the Loop 610 feeder road and into the building parking lot up a steep incline. He drove slowly in front of the building, shining his flashlight as he passed. He then made his way to the large parking lot in the back of the building, where he turned right. This was the area where he usually found the aforementioned trespassers engaging in unsavory activities and he would have to run them off. On this night he did not see anything out of the ordinary, so he continued to drive along the back side of the building until he came to the driveway area in the back southwest corner.
As he turned the corner to the right, he spotted what looked like a skinny black woman lying on the ground. Biel assumed it was one of the area prostitutes who may have been beaten up by one of her customers. Biel stopped his car and exited, walked up to the seemingly unconscious person, stopped about three feet away, and drew his revolver. He was not sure if the trick may still be lurking in the shadows nearby. Once he determined that no one was in the vicinity, he radioed for help. First he called 911; then he called his boss.
Upon further examination of the body, he realized that emergency services were not going to be able to help this person. She was already dead.
The first patrol officers on the scene were Art Mejia and Steve Castro. They were soon joined by an ambulance and also members of the local television media. Officers Mejia and Castro took control and kept the cameramen far away from the body. After cordoning off the area, the patrol officers followed correct department protocol and made a call to Homicide.
* * *
Homicide detective Robert E. “Bob” King was awoken from his peaceful slumber at 12:48 A.M., Monday, August 8, 1994, by the incessant, high-pitched ringing of his home telephone. The forty-one-year-old detective was a seventeen-year police force veteran, who transferred from Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) to Homicide nearly two years earlier.
King started out on patrol on the evening shift. He then switched over to the night shift, where he focused on accidents, which he did for less than one year. He then returned to patrol at the central patrol station for the night shift, where he worked until January 1, 1988.
After eleven years of patrol he then transferred to SWAT, where he worked for 4½ years.
On September 12, 1992, he transferred to the Homicide Division of the Houston Police Department. Homicide was definitely his favorite assignment.
Detective King had worked on a few high-profile cases, including the case of Michael Durwood Griffith, a former Harris County sheriff who was charged and convicted of killing Deborah McCormick in her flower shop. King and fellow detective Hal Kennedy’s successful police work was chronicled in Bill Cox’s Shop of Horrors (Kensington/Pinnacle, 1998).
King was handsome and clean-cut, but most important, he was all business. He answered the call, darted up, and headed out the door toward the crime scene.
King pulled his vehicle into the front entrance of the vacant office building at 1440 North Loop. He was instantly approached by Officers Mejia and Castro, who informed the detective that they believed the body might be that of a little girl from the neighborhood that had gone missing the day before. Detective King absorbed everything and walked toward the area where the girl’s body lay. When he came upon the little girl’s naked body, he did not flinch. He kept his steely reserve in check. The sight before him would have turned a weaker man into a quivering bowl of jelly—a response no one would have mocked.
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.