Later in February, a local sign company donated twelve public-service billboards for three months. People driving to work looked up and there they were, as familiar as family. Lined up across the top of the sign were black-and-white yearbook photographs: on the far left, dark-eyed Eliza, head dipped fetchingly to one side, long hair falling down the side of her face; next to her, young Amy with a formal straight-on smile, chin resting in her cupped palm, a big watch on her left wrist; then serious Sarah, her big eyes lit up with that skeptical “Oh yeah?” expression; and on the far right, tiny, electric Jennifer, pretty as a fairy-tale heroine, long hair rolling down her face in springy curls.
Beneath the photos, an angry slash of red spanned the sign, within it a stark question in white: WHO KILLED THESE GIRLS? Below that, Brice’s $25,000 reward and the number of the tips line. There was no need to give the girls’ names or say anything else. Everybody already knew.
On Amy Ayers’s birthday, Burnet Middle School planted a fifteen-foot crepe myrtle in her memory. The Lanier High School FFA voted in a new president to take Jennifer Harbison’s place. Friends of Amy and the Harbison sisters volunteered to show their animals at the livestock show; Eliza’s sister, Sonora, would show Stony. A psychic from California called to say that the main offender was afraid of roller coasters but rode them all the time. More hold-back information was leaked, which, according to one defense attorney, should have come as no surprise, since so many people were in and out of the crime scene that night, “chock-full of what they know or think they know.” Jones tracked down three of the leaks, including one that involved a woman who’d heard about the ice scoop and the arrangement of the bodies from her hairdresser, who also did the hair of someone in the ME’s office, and who herself was the mother of a suspect who’d subsequently included that information in his “confession.”
The first two homicides of 1992 occurred during crack-cocaine transactions, one in the backyard of a rumored dope house, the other after an argument in the street. The next two were less predictable: the shooting deaths of two brothers, ages eight and twelve, while their mother was in the shower. Hearing the shots, she stepped from the bathroom to find her boys dead and the seventeen-year-old killer still in the room. She wrestled him to the floor. After telling her he’d been feeling like killing somebody since December, he broke loose but was quickly captured a few houses away. Huckabay talked to the culprit but found no connection with Yogurt Shop.
End of February, into March. As the three-month anniversary approached, Jones assured the chief that “EVERYTHING THAT CAN BE TRIED IS, INCLUDING SOME THINGS THAT HAVE NEVER BEEN TRIED AND THAT GO AGAINST THE PREVIOUS CONVENTIONAL WISDOM OF HOMICIDE INVESTIGATION IN THIS DEPARTMENT” (his caps and underlining).
When I asked him about possible motive, he said he wasn’t interested in why, just who. The hope was, the FBI profile as well as its interview guide with its “Indicators of Innocence vs. Others” would help, if not locate the actual killers, at least narrow the field.
Soon after the signs went up, Jones heard from CBS News producer Jon Klein, who wanted to shoot a 48 Hours episode about the “yogurt murders” and “the community and the fears triggered by a few sensational cases.” He sent a videotape of the show they’d done on the Luby’s massacre so that the APD could get an idea of the kind of access they needed. Within a week, Klein had visited Austin and persuaded Chief Everett and the mayor to allow police participation during two to three days of taping. The city also provided the CBS crew not just with an office but with full access to the department’s Homicide Unit, which was extremely unusual in an open investigation.
In late March, CBS aired “Who Killed These Girls?” the first of three 48 Hours episodes featuring Yogurt Shop. As the opening credits ran, the voice of veteran newscaster Dan Rather introduced that night’s theme: “Four all-American teens, executed. A crack police squad desperate to solve the case. And a city on edge, frightened by a new reality: it can happen here.” Rather himself then appeared, sitting at a glass-topped table and surrounded by photographs taken at several different crime scenes as well as by the billboard portraits of the ICBY girls.
“Are you safe,” he asked, looking square into the camera lens, “sitting where you are right now? The people of Austin thought they were, until one horrifying night brought home the truth: there is no safe haven anymore.” And he went on to cite an FBI report from the previous year indicating an “alarming” rise in violent crime in the suburbs, “the very place Americans have sought sanctuary from big-city fears.” Tonight, he told viewers, they’d be joining the investigation into the murders of four innocent girls, “to see what crime in America is doing to families, communities, even the tough cops who live with it every day.”
Reporter Erin Moriarty, who will host each of the ICBY episodes, then appears on-screen. “It started out,” she begins, “as just another night in Austin, Texas, for homicide sergeant John Jones…when a call came in that would change his life.” A strain of dramatic music is interrupted by the crackle of Jones’s mobile and a video of his car flashing its rooftop warning lights. Then there he is at the wheel, filmed from the backseat by the KTBC videographer, talking to the reporter over his shoulder as his siren wails and I-35 exit signs flash by. Suddenly, his mobile, clamped to the dash, lights up.
“Jonesy,” a voice calls out. “Make that four.”
Falling back on the “sleepy town” stereotype, Moriarty echoes Rather’s warning: Although Austin was known as a place people moved to so they could feel safe, they might well discover that beneath what seemed like the placid surface of everyday life there roiled an “undercurrent of violence.” To illustrate this, Moriarty runs through the chronology—Troy Gay’s discovery of the smoke, the fire department, the water, the discovery of one body and then another, the call to Jones—while video clips show firefighters and cops in black slickers moving in and out of the shop and, eventually, the money shot: two people from the morgue struggling to heave a body bag onto a stretcher.
The scene then shifts to the new task-force offices, where we see Jones at work, Huckabay taking a call (“Whadd’ya got?”), Chuck Meyer pacing nervously behind the others, Hector Polanco at a table overrun with incident reports and printouts from the database Jones has created. When interviewed, Huckabay acknowledges that Homicide is taking this crime particularly seriously because of the age of the girls, and because “if we don’t catch the guy, he wins.” Barbara Suraci, Maria Thomas, Bob and Pamela Ayers make brief appearances. There are heartbreaking home videos of the girls, tussling, laughing, tending livestock. We see Jones at his desk in earbuds and hear what he’s listening to—an operatic aria.
At the time, Homicide’s focus was on the Satanists, a circumstance that fed directly into the show’s undercurrent-of-violence theme. In one scene, Moriarty and a cameraman accompany Jones, Huckabay and other cops in a raid on the small home of a reputed high priestess of darkness who called herself Claire Lavaye, after the founder of the Church of Satan, Anton LaVey. But the raid proved a bust and a public embarrassment for the cops when the woman was discovered naked and alone in her bed—taking a battery-powered time-out from the rigors of life—and the skull on her mantel turned out to be a clay doodad. Other bones in her collection were in fact real but came from rats and squirrels. Although nobody said so, the obvious conclusion was that the APD was very wide of the mark, and that while this woman might have been involved in some offbeat graveyard capers, she was no murderer.
The show also touched on Colleen Reed. There were clips of the Fifth Street car wash and an interview with her sister, who had repeatedly accused the APD of ineptitude and a halfhearted investigation. Other segments dealt with a drug deal gone wrong as well as the unsolved murder of Harold Carter, who’d been robbed and killed only four months before Yogurt Shop as he walked from his car to the furniture store where he’d worked for twenty-eight years.
Local CBS affiliate KTBC-TV also ran studio interviews with Barbara Suraci and the Ayerses, who said there were things they thought they’d put behind them which got stirred up again. “It is just a reality,” Bob Ayers went on, “and you’ve got to face it.” Suraci said when they saw the girls’ pictures hanging in the APD offices, it touched her heart, “because I know those people are working so hard to help us find the murderers of our babies.” Maria Thomas watched at home with Sonora. “Like pouring salt in the wound,” she later commented.
Overnight ratings ranked the undercurrent-of-violence episode among the ten most watched in the show’s four-year history. Hundreds of new tips rolled in, many focusing on the occult, which by the time the show aired had become pretty much a moot point, and local teenager Maggie Halliday remembers being called from her junior high class to talk to an FBI agent—in her view, a big joke. She and her black-garbed friends buckled on spiky dog collars, dyed their hair blue and colored their lips black because they wanted to be different. They never, she added, called themselves PIBs. They thought of themselves as part of the Austin party scene and a force to counteract the “We’re so liberal and love everybody” Austin bullshit. But their difference had made them vulnerable. “Little Dracula hippies walking down the street are pretty easy to spot,” said another girl.
Jones defends the Satanist push. They’d received some 230 calls implicating the devil worshippers, so his job was to check them out. And indeed, a good many unconventional folks were out there pulling off weird stunts, but they were mostly interested in creating theater and raising a ruckus, not committing murder. The only offense a person in black was charged with was “burglary of a mausoleum.”
There would be two more 48 Hours featuring Yogurt Shop, one in 2000, after the arrests, and another in 2010, once the cases were dismissed. But the first gave the case its official title. Previously also called the ICBY killings or slayings or murders, it was now and forever indelibly known as “The Yogurt Shop Murders.”
In late March, a man left a message saying he’d seen the killers put yogurt in the girls’ vaginas. “I know who did it,” he whispered, “but I need protection. We’ll talk later.” After TrapTrace located the call, Jones and a partner paid him a visit. He denied having left the message until they played the tape, then said he was only joking. A young woman phoned in to report that her boyfriend told her he did it. A man said a friend of his had witnessed the girls being cut up in pieces. A late-night downtown regular described the girls being sliced open and chickens put inside them. Somebody blamed the KKK, while another swore he’d heard at a party that the girls’ heads were cut off and dropped in a well; the man who told him had smelled the putrid water and seen their hair.
Around that same time, lawmen working on the Colleen Reed investigation put together information that placed paroled serial killer Kenneth McDuff in Austin when she was abducted. A group of ATF agents, U.S. marshals, a DPS criminal investigator and several McClennan County deputies zeroed in on one of McDuff’s closest running buddies. Haunted by the memory of December 29, Alva Hank Worley quickly broke down and admitted he’d driven from Waco to Austin with McDuff that night, planning to score weed and meth or cocaine. But before Worley knew it, they were headed into the car wash and the hulking six-foot-four McDuff was grabbing Reed by the throat and carrying her—screaming “Not me! Not me!”—to their car. She was so small, Worley remembered, her feet didn’t even touch the ground. After throwing her in the backseat, McDuff told Worley to keep her under control.
He confessed to having forced oral sex on Colleen Reed and then raping her vaginally while McDuff drove. Once they got back to Waco, McDuff burned Reed with cigarettes and raped her repeatedly, until at one point she laid her head on Worley’s shoulder and begged him to please not let McDuff hurt her anymore. After driving to an open field, McDuff told Worley he was going to “use her up,” a line he’d used before when he was ready to kill a woman, usually by stretching her out on the ground, laying a broomstick across her neck and pressing down until it snapped. Worley said he didn’t know how McDuff had killed Reed, but he’d buried her in a field somewhere up near Waco; and he didn’t know where McDuff was now, though he didn’t think in Waco. Once incarcerated, Worley admitted that he’d actually watched McDuff break Colleen Reed’s neck, this time without the broomstick.
When I suggested to Jones that of all the suspects they investigated, McDuff was the one most likely to have committed the Yogurt Shop Murders, he agreed. “No question,” he replied. McDuff was capable. There was only one problem.
He paused. Waited.
“It wasn’t him?” I asked.
He shook his head. McDuff had alibis. He told Chuck Meyer if he’d done the yogurt girls, he’d be proud to say so. Anyway, these weren’t his kind of murders.
Capable of was a long way from did it.
After a number of people claimed to have seen a Latino man sitting in an older light-colored American car in the yogurt shop parking lot at closing time, the APD had a composite sketch drawn. Another “Have you seen this man?” notice ran in the Statesman and on local television news programs. And then, in his April report to the BATF, Chuck Meyer mentioned a search for “three Hispanic males” who—on November 17, 1991, only two and a half weeks before Yogurt Shop—had raped a woman at gunpoint in a car parked outside a heavy-metal bar called the Cavity Club, just off Sixth Street, then driven her to San Antonio and dumped her. The suspects were soon identified as Mexican nationals: Alberto Jimenez Cortez, aka El Brujo (the Warlock), who had allegedly fled to Mexico; Ricardo Hernandez, aka Dienton (Big Teeth), who was missing but thought to be in California; and Porfirio Villa Saavedra, aka the Terminator, who might still be in Austin. They belonged to a sixty-member motorcycle gang called the Mierdas Punks, specializing in drug trafficking and car theft. Several people called in to say they knew Alberto Cortez and that he resembled the composite sketch.
A day later, Jones sent out a dispatch about another man whose resemblance to the sketch had been noted. Armando Razo also fit aspects of the FBI profile: He had a penchant for physical violence, carried a pistol under the front seat of his white 1977 Pontiac and had bragged about a drive-by shooting he’d gotten away with in San Antonio. After the sketch appeared, the nineteen-year-old Razo quit his job at the Sonic Drive-In and told friends he was going into hiding. As a suspect, he looked promising. But before the APD could locate him, the Statesman got wind of Jones’s in-house memo. When a reporter called, Jones emphasized that while Razo was wanted for questioning, he was not a suspect and that putting his name in print would be a disservice both to the families of the victims and to the wanted man.
Early the next morning, Pam Ayers called. Some of her friends had heard on the radio that a suspect had been arrested. Within minutes, Skip Suraci called to say the same thing. Jones made a general statement to the press, saying that Razo only looked like the composite, which meant only that he might have been in the parking lot on the night of the murders. He was not a suspect. Later, Jones arrived at his office and saw the Statesman’s headline: TEEN ARRESTED IN YOGURT SHOP MURDER.
In his opinion, media one-upmanship caused many of their biggest problems. Nobody wanted to come up short, so they all rushed to break a story. That afternoon, Jones interviewed Razo, who offered to bring in three solid alibi witnesses. All of them checked out. He’d been in some trouble with the law and was wanted for forfeiture of a bond. But he wasn’t a killer.
In April, Eliza’s 254-pound pig won the 1992 Grand Champion prize of the Austin–Travis County Livestock Show. At auction, Stony fetched six thousand dollars. Amy’s light-heavyweight hog, weighing in at 235 pounds, won fourth in his class. Sarah Harbison’s lamb got sixth, Jennifer’s ninth. Stony’s life was spared when he was given back to the Thomas family, who sent him to Crowe’s Nest Farm, a pretty place north of town where unwanted animals lived long, quiet lives, being petted and pampered by schoolchildren on field trips. In a front-page Statesman story entitled “In the Shadow of Death,” Maria Thomas described her feelings. “It doesn’t seem like it can possibly be true. I’ve been out of my mind since Eliza’s been gone. I wish she would come back and end this terrible nightmare.” She’d been able to work only a few days at her job, and was having dark thoughts. “You live one more day when you don’t really want to.”
Mayor Todd proclaimed April 6, the four-month anniversary of the murders, “Let Your Lights Shine for Them Day,” and encouraged motorists to drive with their headlights on.
When Hector Polanco was investigated by Internal Affairs for questionable practices during an arrest, he was taken off Yogurt Shop and replaced by Senior Sgt. Ron Smith, who had never worked in Homicide and, further, had had a checkered career, having shot and killed an unarmed seventeen-year-old boy and once participated in the smothering death of a handcuffed Nigerian by sitting on his head and forcing his face into a water bed. Smith had been cleared in both cases. And despite his inexperience, Jones liked him.
“He was a good administrator,” he says now. “A street guy who wasn’t afraid to take heat. He didn’t insert himself unnecessarily into an investigation and provided us with a measure of stability.”
Unlike Polanco?
Jones declined to comment.
By then, 485 tips had rolled in and the database had rocketed to 2,200 records, of which 800 were suspects. Twenty more WHO KILLED THESE GIRLS? billboards went up, this time with a reward of $100,000, the increase donated by local businesses. Jones was given office space and equipment for another six months. By the middle of the month, sealed indictments had been obtained for the three Mexican nationals whom the Sex Crimes Unit had identified as the men who had raped the woman outside the Cavity Club.
The rains continued, and water stood in pastures from South Austin to San Antonio, nearly eighty miles to the south. Livestock were sheltered on high ground, and to feed them, ranchers had to paddle out in rowboats.
When no Yogurt Shop news was forthcoming, the Statesman ran more stories about crime and fear. Gun shops reported that sales were up some 10 to 15 percent, especially among women. To take advantage of the trend, Nova Technologies advertised a half-price sale of a stun gun for $49.95. Alarm companies and shooting ranges reported increased business. One story about the changes in the city borrowed its lead from Dan Rather: “Four girls die in a yogurt shop murder and months later, the killers remain free. A woman is abducted from a car wash and…”
For backup, reporters found residents who no longer drove anywhere after dark but stayed home instead and watched videos. Others considered moving somewhere else. Even Ronnie Earle, the Travis County DA, contributed. “The world,” he said, “is turning upside down on us here. This is not the way we thought we’d be living, with hostilities walking among us. They don’t wear uniforms and it’s hard to tell who they are….And it is the most disturbing thing that can happen to a community because it makes us distrust each other.”
Two days later, fifty-five-year-old Police Chief Jim Everett shocked the APD and the city by announcing his retirement. Asked if this had anything to do with low morale on the force, he said no, that he’d been planning for a while to live a peaceful life in the hills of western Arkansas. In a leaden response, DA Earle said it was “a hard time to be head of a law enforcement agency….The problems will not diminish with the next chief.”
A career cop, George Phifer, was named acting chief. Addressing the recent incidents and internal uproar, Phifer transferred six experienced homicide detectives, including Andy Waters and Bruce Boardman, to other units. During the move, Boardman might have misplaced a number of files, including unsigned, handwritten notes taken during interviews with future suspects Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott.
As it turned out, Jim Everett had no intention of retiring. He’d already applied for a chief’s job in Aurora, Colorado. After he won the job seven months later, he paid off his mortgages in Austin and Arkansas and moved to a town that, until the 2012 Dark Knight Rises massacre, seemed the safe sort of place that others were now looking for.
In early May, Kenneth McDuff was arrested in Kansas City, Missouri, working as a city garbage collector under a name he took from a stolen Social Security card. Worley was convicted and given a life sentence for the rape charge, but he never confessed to Reed’s murder, and neither did McDuff, who in 1993 would be sentenced to death for the 1992 murder of a pregnant twenty-two-year-old store clerk at a Waco Quik-Pak. Chuck Meyer immediately went after him about Yogurt Shop, and also talked to associates who said McDuff made regular trips to Austin because he couldn’t get resale-weight cocaine in Waco.
Colleen Reed’s body would not be found until 1998, when McDuff agreed, a few weeks before his execution, to give up the location in exchange for a reduced sentence for his nephew, in federal prison on a meth charge. He also provided directions to the burial spots of two other women he’d raped and murdered. A low estimate of his total assaults amounts to fourteen. After his execution, Texas Monthly published a story about him called “Free to Kill,” and ran his mug shot on the cover with the word MONSTER across his forehead. People still shiver a little whenever McDuff’s name comes up—even cops, lawyers and at least one judge—and serial-killer lists dub him “the Broomstick Killer.” To this day, some people still believe he either killed the Yogurt Shop girls or had sent two or more of his coked-up wannabes to Austin to perform a rite of initiation.
Confessions, tips and accusations came and went. An incarcerated man named Steve Sharber spoke of strangling the girls, defecating on them, scooping out their left eyeballs and having sex through the empty sockets. The Iowa Department of Corrections called to report that a former inmate named Darrell Duane Ochs might be of interest. A violent criminal, paroled in November 1991 after kidnapping and sexual-assault convictions, Ochs had ties to San Antonio, and during his exit interview he’d told a social worker he was going to commit a crime that would put him on death row. The Des Moines ATF agent who—at Chuck Meyer’s request—interviewed him reported that while Ochs bore a startling resemblance to the composite sketch, he could find no evidence that he had been in Texas in 1991. Meyer and Jones also followed tips from all over the state, driving to Midland and Lubbock in pursuit of a confidential informant called “Mike-Mike”; to Taylor, north of Austin, to interview a boy who told his sister he knew exactly who had killed the Yogurt Shop girls; to Temple, Belton and Waco to question McDuff’s cronies. Meyer also fielded out-of-state calls, one from an ATF agent in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, about two drug dealers who’d been in Austin that weekend to purchase narcotics; another from the Arcadia Parish, Louisiana, jail about an inmate who’d made incriminating comments.
Governor Ann Richards declared June 6, the six-month anniversary, “We Will Not Forget Day,” and local musicians wrote and performed a song about the girls, also called “We Will Not Forget.” To mark the occasion, Austin was awash in WWNF buttons, T-shirts and coffee mugs, and white ribbons adorned clothes, trees and cars. A parade of an estimated twelve hundred people marched from the Congress Avenue bridge to the capitol, carrying white candles and WWNF banners. In a speech on the capitol steps, Ronnie Earle declared, “These four girls belong to all of us; they are all of our responsibility.” At eleven o’clock that night, at a candlelight vigil held at the empty, dark, boarded-up yogurt shop, people brought flowers and letters to the dead girls. There wasn’t much to do there except sing the song and say the same things over and over again.
That summer, America’s Most Wanted ran the composite sketch and a brief story about Yogurt Shop. Afterward, Barbara Suraci exulted, “Getting those pictures out there, we’ll find them. Everybody watches America’s Most Wanted.” The following week, the sketch ran again and new tips streamed in. The task force figured only 10 to 15 percent were useful, but a familiar name resurfaced a couple of times. One caller said the man in the composite was absolutely Alberto Cortez, and that if El Brujo was involved, so were Saavedra and Hernandez. They were probably together somewhere outside of Mexico City, where they’d grown up.
Everybody liked having suspects like these—brown-skinned noncitizens, out-and-out bad guys known for brutality, drug trafficking and crimes against women. After informing the families, Jones again warned them not to get their hopes up, but Chuck Meyer requested advance permission to travel to Mexico City with Jack Barnett and a bilingual ATF agent once the men were located. Jones wanted to go as well, but Ron Smith wouldn’t let him. If the lead cop went down there, he reasoned, people would jump to overblown conclusions. Jones should send Huckabay and direct proceedings from Austin.
In August, Ronnie Earle’s office conferred with the Mexican consulate in San Antonio and agreed to turn the Cavity Club kidnapping and rape case over to the Mexican government, in return for which he would be allowed to file an order of detention—in effect, enabling him to interrogate the three of them about a different crime. This was risky, and APD Homicide didn’t like it, but once Earle had made the deal, they had to live with it.
That same month, APD morale hit a new low when city manager Camille Barnett announced that Jim Everett’s replacement would be Elizabeth “Betsy” Watson, formerly Houston’s chief of police, and Mayor Todd stood behind Barnett’s choice. “Watson,” he said, had “big-city experience” and that “certainly some of the things we’re going through now have happened in Houston.” He set the swearing-in ceremony for December.
Watson was considered a New Age believer in the evolving law-enforcement philosophy known as “community policing,” or sometimes, the “broken windows” theory. This settled cops into their precincts, not as outsiders come to enforce the law, but as members of the community. The neighborhood cop, its advocates held, would notice when broken windows weren’t replaced. The department could then pinpoint the area as one in which the breakdown of standards might foreshadow the onset of failing ethical values that often led to criminal behavior. This would bring residents into a “shared relationship” with the police, in which both recognized the obligation to do what was necessary to maintain order and peace. It also matched Ronnie Earle’s beliefs about his duties as the district attorney. Moreover, he had ambitions to run for statewide office and needed fresh ideas for his campaign.
Nothing about Watson appealed to Austin’s cops. Like many others, they generally believed there were bad guys they were duty-bound to go out and round up, regardless of broken windows or community togetherness. Besides, by hiring Watson in secret, the city manager had disrespected the force by ignoring protocol, which demanded that the Austin Police Association (APA) be consulted before a new chief was appointed.
John Jones, however, has a simpler explanation for the hostility. “Sexism,” he believes. “Pure and simple.”
In October, prior to Watson’s arrival, Porfirio Villa Saavedra and Alberto Jimenez Cortez were arrested on suspicion of the Yogurt Shop Murders. Both were flown to Mexico City, where they were also charged with the Cavity Club kidnapping and sexual assault, as well as drug trafficking and gun smuggling. The third suspect, Ricardo Hernandez, had not yet been found. In a prepared statement, Ronnie Earle expressed gratitude to the Mexican government for its police work. “Not only the people of Texas but the entire United States have grieved with us over our loss,” he said. “This case represents an unprecedented level of cooperation and we look forward to continuing to work with the Mexican officials.”
But in Mexico, Deputy Attorney General José Luis Romero Apis stood firmly against extradition. Texas had the highest rate of executions in the United States, while in Mexico the maximum murder-rape penalty was fifty years, with a possible good-time reduction of one-third, even if there were multiple victims. Even if the men were convicted of all the Yogurt Shop charges, they could be out in thirty-five years.
When brought before reporters, handcuffed and without representation, Saavedra admitted to killing the girls. When asked why, he shook his head and then was quickly led away.
Jones called the families. There was, he warned, no telling what that confession would establish, exactly, so they should hold off believing anything they might hear. That same day, in a televised announcement, a Mexican official did exactly what Jones had feared by announcing that Saavedra had “forced the girls to submit, then he raped them, tied them up and shot them.”
Jones heard about this statement from the local news, but Huckabay, who was already in Mexico City, didn’t know about it until he called the home office. The APD had been careful not to mention rape, or the DNA found inside the girls’ vaginas, so for Homicide, this development was another setback.
“A feeling of helplessness went over us,” Jones recalled, deeming October 22 “Black Thursday.” Barbara Suraci described being sick to her stomach when she heard the statement. “You want to feel good about it, but it brings the reality back….”
When asked for an official response, the APD maintained a wait-and-see attitude. Meantime, Huckabay asked Chuck Meyer to join him in Mexico City to help out with the questioning, and Jones sent two Spanish-speaking detectives, Ociel Nava and Hector Reveles. At first they felt optimistic, Reveles testified during the Scott trial, and were hoping that this would be a “satisfactory conclusion to the case.” To speed up the process, he urged Jones to honor the Mexican request for full, uncensored autopsy reports.
But Jones refused. “If we’d have done that,” he reasoned, “they’d have had every piece of information they needed to charge them, try them, find them guilty, put them away for life. And we weren’t convinced they were even there.”
In his first interview with Huckabay and Reveles, Saavedra seemed to have little knowledge of the crime. Yes, he’d said, they’d killed girls at an ice-cream shop, but he didn’t know how many—three? And yes, they’d “mutilated the girls, cut up their breasts, arms and vaginas, tied them up with rope…”
By the end of the first day, Reveles was convinced “these persons were not responsible for the murders.”
Within three days of his confession, Saavedra recanted, repeatedly saying, “I didn’t do this.” Both he and Cortez, who was interviewed separately, claimed to have been tortured during the flight to Mexico City, with plastic bags pulled over their heads, threats to attack their families and violate their wives, daughters and sisters.
But nobody wanted to give up on these perfect suspects. By then Barnett had arrived, and he and Meyer kept scheduling polygraph tests, which were either postponed or canceled. And when they finally did manage to prep Cortez, he told them he would say nothing against his friend, that they’d shared a cell for weeks and had been in the same gang for much, much longer. “We are,” Saavedra informed the federal agents, “united as one.” Barnett unhooked the machine.
This calamitous investigation would continue for years, with no further progress. Cortez and Saavedra were eventually tried and convicted of the Cavity Club charges, but nobody in Austin seems to have heard about the outcome. Ricardo Hernandez was never apprehended.
We can’t always trust what suspects say, for obvious reasons, but in hindsight these two men sound convincing. When Huckabay and Reveles confronted Cortez with the testimony of a woman who said she’d seen him sitting in a car in the Hillside parking lot only minutes before the girls were killed, his (translated) answer was, “I wasn’t there. I didn’t see who did it….Perhaps you will find me guilty. I’m going to tell you this, I was never there and I never did any of that….It could have been someone that looked like me; I am not the only one who has long hair or the only car. Does she have a license plate? She should have given a license plate….They are going to dispose of my life…my time and my thoughts…and do you know what, you can give me the death penalty and…I am going to die telling the truth because I didn’t do anything.”
As for Saavedra, he simply said, “Just because I [am] a criminal…doesn’t mean I killed them. That’s not what that means. I know you are going to take me, but I will never say that I did something I did not do. This is a total waste….Since I am a criminal, then no one believes me.”
A year from now, Jones will ask the Mexican government to provide information on the status of the charges against these two. He will also ask about Ricardo Hernandez. More often than not, his requests will be ignored. The suspects and the cases were, as the Mexican attorney general had declared, their own business.
But Skip Suraci and other family members held on to their certainty: Those three thugs had killed their daughters. Some people still agree. “But didn’t the Mexicans do it?” they say to me. “Didn’t they have the real guys back at the beginning?”