For her FFA project, dark-haired Eliza Thomas was raising another pig. She’d done well at last year’s show, when her pig won a ribbon and was auctioned off for a good price. She was hoping to win again, but Stony was ailing. The vet had prescribed shots twice a day. On the morning of December 6, Eliza asked her mother to go with her to the ag barn and help her give 254-pound Stony an injection.
Maria Bancheri Thomas wasn’t particularly drawn to animal husbandry, but because she especially doted on her elder daughter, she agreed to try. Eliza drove her bright green 1971 Karmann Ghia to Lanier and parked it there. Maria followed in her car and the two drove together to the barn.
A beautiful girl with deep brown eyes and a wide, lush mouth, Eliza had taken the $4.35-an-hour job at the ICBY shop in January, to supplement another job—escorting a nine-year-old boy to gym lessons twice a week. A lot of what she made went to maintain the VW, which was extremely sporty back then. That car, Maria would tell People magazine, was Eliza’s pride and joy. “Her birthstone was an emerald so she just knew that car was meant for her.” Another girl who worked at the yogurt shop told a police officer that Eliza was always trying to make more money because her mom, whose current job was as an artist’s assistant, didn’t bring in all that much and she often switched interests and careers.
Bereaved parents rarely talk about what their dead children might have grown up to be, but Maria Thomas went all out. Eliza, she declared, was special. She read constantly and had a gift for language; she could have become a writer, maybe a poet. But Eliza’s father, James, took his daughter at her word when she said she wanted to go to Texas A&M and become a vet, that she “had always been nuts about animals.” For a couple of years she’d kept a bowl of crawfish, then white rats. James Thomas thought FFA was the best thing that ever happened to Eliza. Mechanically inclined, she could also weld and keep up with repairs on the Karmann Ghia. For Christmas this year, she’d asked for car parts.
At the ag barn, Maria wasn’t much help. “I’m not too good with pigs,” she said on the stand. In the end, Eliza found a fellow FFA member to help with the injection while her mother—anxious to contribute—mucked out the pen.
Divorced since 1981, when Eliza was seven, James and Maria Thomas had shared custody until she turned fourteen, when they let her decide for herself which parent she wished to live with. During the spring and early summer of 1991, she’d lived with her father and his second wife, but in July she’d moved in with her mother. That week in early December, Eliza’s younger sister, Sonora, thirteen, was staying with their father in his home on Skylark Drive, only blocks from the yogurt shop. Sonora described her sister as popular, friendly and chatty, which made ICBY a perfect place for her to work. Eliza often called from there and asked her to ride her bike over, to bring something she’d forgotten or just to visit.
Neither Barbara Suraci nor Maria Thomas had raised their daughters to be country-western girls. Barbara had, after all, escaped small-town rural life. As for Maria—born in Italy, naturalized at an early age—she assumed her daughter’s Aggie phase was just a teenager’s infatuation and soon would fade.
Once she dropped Eliza off at Lanier at around 8:45, Maria went home to prepare for her workday, which began at 11:00 a.m.
After being forced to strip, Eliza will place her run-over white Reeboks alongside Jennifer’s black pair in a neat pile against the wall next to the steel back doors. She’ll be found lying spread-eagle on top of Sarah, placed there by the killers, the skin of her athletic young legs split apart by the radiant heat of the sweeping flames. Bound, gagged and, like Jennifer, burned bald and faceless. In years to come, Maria Thomas will refer to December 6, 1991, as the night “they burned up my daughter.”