The first report was made at 11:48 by Troy Gay, an APD rookie on DWI patrol who—crossing Highway 1 on Anderson Lane—spotted a column of smoke rising from the hackberry trees lining Shoal Creek and drove toward it. When he came to the alleyway behind Hillside and saw yellow flames shooting out between two steel doors, he turned in. Beyond a blue dumpster, a man appeared in the next set of doors and waved him forward. When Jorge Barney saw smoke seeping around the electric panel in the north wall of his shop, he’d opened his back doors in time to see the police car edging toward him.
Gay drove to the front of the strip center and called in a general dispatch: “Have a fire inside a business,” he said. Unfamiliar with the neighborhood, he gave the wrong address, but his mistake was soon corrected by another officer, Dennis Smith, who headed to the scene. By then, the yogurt shop’s window and the glass panes in the front doors were completely black and smoke was pouring from the roofs of adjacent businesses.
An ordinary kitchen fire, people thought. Somebody left a burner on, closed up the shop and went home. Happens all the time.
Station Eight of the Austin Fire Department sent four units: an aerial ladder company, an engine company carrying hoses and water, an Emergency Medical Service ambulance and a battalion chief’s car. A separate victims’ rescue team rode in a Chevrolet Suburban. Because the engine company’s job was to “make entry, find the fire and put it out with the water and hoses,” that unit parked closest to the shop so that two of its specialists, Rene Hector Garza and David Deveau, could quickly connect and charge the hoses. Once they’d done that, the two men, already dressed in turnouts and equipped with a Handy-Pak radio, donned air packs, face masks and gloves.
Garza pulled on the front door, but the lock didn’t give, so he used a crowbar to pop it open, and smoke banked to the ceiling and poured out. To get under it, he and Deveau dropped to their hands and knees. After bumping headfirst into the service counter, they regrouped and crawled into the back room, where they stood up and took in the situation.
Garza: “We located the fire. We began knocking it down. We found the seat, went and put the fire out. After we had knocked it down, there were some hot spots, just small bits and flames here and there. And once you put water on a fire, it creates steam, so it knocks down the visibility some.” The hottest flames, he testified, came from halfway up the south wall of the storage room, where they assumed the stove was located.
Hoping to ventilate the room, Garza had taken a tentative step into the darkness when he felt Deveau’s hand on his shoulder. Because of the masks and packs, the firefighters communicated primarily through gestures and touch. “Deveau kind of shakes me…” Garza remembered. “He’s got a hand light; he points it at the floor.”
“Is that a foot?” Deveau yelled through his mask.
Garza looked down and then, to get a better view, stepped back and saw it, too.
“I proceeded to back up, you know, startled a little bit,” Deveau said, “and we found the second body.”
Garza told him to stay put. Outside in the staging area, where firefighters were climbing ladders and knocking open doors of the other businesses, he told his battalion chief what they’d found. Two victims, he said. Kids. Nude. When a member of the rescue team wanted to go in, he shook his head. “Let’s not move them,” he said. “Something is wrong.” Then he walked toward the alley, to try to open the back doors.
Rene Garza will relive these moments at least three times: once for the official AFD incident report and, years later, during the two trials. His testimony will be among the most compelling and moving the juries will hear, a tribute to articulate simplicity and honest recall.
When he pushed at the back doors, they swung open easily, allowing smoke and steam to pour out. He looked inside. There was no kitchen, no stove. When he stepped in, he saw the lower half of yet another dead girl. Asked to describe his experience that night, Garza always said the same thing. “The foot,” he said. “I remember the foot.”
Just as the battalion chief was telling the two policemen on the scene about the bodies, another cop, Joe Pennington, showed up, and the three officers entered the shop together. Once inside, they could see enough to verify the information, but the storage area was still full of smoke and steam, and without masks it was hard for them to breathe. “So it was walk in, look around, walk right back out. Maybe a minute, minute and a half tops.”
That was when Gay called for a homicide cop: “Two bodies, probable arson, probable homicide.” This brought other policemen and an arson investigator. Having been released from further duty, Garza and Deveau walked away together and sat talking in the cab of their truck until they felt ready to emerge, when they were reassigned.
Cops hate arson. Any trace evidence left untouched by fire gets either soaked or washed away once firefighters arrive. John Jones knew all about this. Fourteen months earlier, barely into his second week in Homicide, he caught his first case of arson-murder after a man with a grudge over an eight-dollar drug debt torched an apartment complex with a flare gun and burned it to the ground. It was nighttime, and people were sleeping; there were numerous injuries and two fatalities. One man suffered burns over 80 percent of his body when he carried his wife out through the flames and went back to find their baby. It was Jones who had to travel to the burn center in San Antonio to tell him that his wife and child were dead. What he didn’t say was how long it took cops and firemen to find the baby’s body.
In a trial, crime-scene photographs are called “exhibits.” They are not evidence, merely pieces of information that both the prosecution and the defense use to support their version of events: the position of the bodies; location and trajectory of wounds; fire damage to particular objects and burn patterns on the walls; blood spatter, fallen debris, the placement of ligatures, the tying of knots. These exhibits tell us how things looked afterward, leaving interpretation and imaginative scenarios to the viewer.
For me, everything changed when I saw those photographs. After that, I understood why the firefighters couldn’t bear to leave and why in the coming months Homicide would go all out in pursuit of Austin’s self-proclaimed Satanists and devil worshippers. Garza said wrong. I thought evil, without knowing whether I even believed in it. As for Jones, he looked at the photos only once, a couple days after the murders. “I don’t need pictures,” he declared. “That scene is burned into my memory.”
Months from now, when a television reporter asks what he saw when he first stepped into the shop, Jones will give a quick answer: “Wholesale carnage.” But he’s good at sound bites and in person he agrees with me: The real horror, beyond the unspeakable condition of the bodies, was that the girls had become one with the scene—melted, merged, blackened—and all but indistinguishable from the fallen girders, insulation and soundproofing tiles, the exploded cans and spilled syrups, the wet black splatters of muck and char, the aluminum ladder missing its top two rungs, the metal shelves along the south wall softened into swooping hammocks, as if made of candle wax. “Everything looked black at first,” he says now, “except, of course, Amy.” He shrugs. “But that’s fire.”
My grandson is a welder. To determine the composition of the shelves, I showed him a photograph. “Stainless,” he said. “Standard restaurant supply—but wait.” He took a breath. “Is that a body?”
It was Jennifer, burned beyond recognition. I shut down my computer screen.
Ignoring the firefighters, who either milled around or just stood there looking down, Jones stepped gingerly around the bodies. Having been schooled in evidence collection and processing, he felt competent to handle 95 percent of most crime scenes, but this one lay well beyond his expertise. In a memo to the DA’s office, he will describe the situation as “Robbery + Sexual Assault + Multiple Child Victims + Bondage + Gunshot Wounds + Fire/Heat/Smoke/Water Damage + No Known Witnesses = the Homicide, Arson and DA’s worst nightmare.”
In old-school police work, a lead cop struggled to solve the crime on his own. From the beginning, Jones knew he needed a team and he needed experts. But an officially sanctioned task force wasn’t easy to come by, and besides, protocol said he couldn’t make significant decisions without the approval of a unit supervisor—either Senior Sgt. Hector Polanco or Lt. Andy Waters. Since Polanco was out of town, he called Waters, who quickly dressed and headed over. Awaiting him, Jones began snapping black-and-white Polaroids, as he’d been taught to do when processing a fire scene. By then, longtime AFD arson investigator Melvin Stahl had arrived and was also taking pictures. But according to Jones, “We were photographing for different reasons. He was looking for signs of arson and to find out how the fire started and progressed. I was trying to solve a crime.”
In his official report—written Saturday, December 7—Stahl would estimate that the fire had been set somewhere high along the south wall of the storage room toward the east end of the steel shelves at approximately 11:42, thirty-nine minutes after Eliza rang up “No Sale.”