All initial optimism had fallen away before long. More confessions and more tips, a bigger reward, even Barbara and Skip Suraci talking on Geraldo about establishing a new reward for information leading to Ricardo Hernandez’s arrest.
Homicide came in for more trouble, and even humiliation, when Ronnie Earle, Mayor Bruce Todd and incoming chief Elizabeth Watson held a joint press conference. Flanked by the two men, Watson stood there looking small but confident. At forty-three, she had short, curly hair and wore button earrings, a double-breasted suit jacket and a dark blouse with a bow at the neck. After a brief introduction, she handed things over to the DA, who announced from a prepared statement that because of recent incidents suggesting possible misconduct among investigators, all ninety pending homicide cases would be reviewed. This process, Earle assured the public, was not about one bad cop, but a general attitude throughout the unit that “the end justifies the means” and “anything goes.”
When it was her turn to speak, Watson—who hadn’t yet been sworn in—took the high road. “It is shocking to me,” she said, “that there could be this breach of ethics….I cannot fathom it.” That seemed quite a stretch, since she’d spent twenty years on the force in Houston, from street cop to chief, and must have seen and fathomed plenty of disagreeable things.
The reaction was immediate. Hector Reveles described the announcement as “demoralizing,” a “bombshell” and a “blanket indictment of the entire unit.” Since the APD divided its Crimes Against Persons Division into four components—Sex Crimes, Child Abuse, Homicide and Robbery—singling out one detail seemed particularly vexing. In addition to which, because cops were regularly transferred from one unit to another, which one were Earle and Watson referring to? The one handling Yogurt Shop?
For Earle, this was especially risky, given that prosecutors and cops are on the same team. He’d turned against his own players, some think because this might help establish him as hard-nosed if he ran for state attorney general.
The next day, the soon-to-be chief tried to cover her tracks by assuring the public and the APD that the current Homicide Unit wasn’t the problem, and, in fact, had been improved back in April when “certain individuals”—mentioning no names—had been transferred out. She also announced two new requirements, the first being mandatory supplemental narratives. These reports filled in the basic incident report with details: how many cops were there, who made the arrest, who did the interview, what happened next. Supplements were already part of the process, but because of funding cuts and reduced overtime pay, investigators often sloughed off the duty as the least important part of their job. Second, and perhaps more significant, Watson ordered that all interrogations be recorded in their entirety, by video or audiotape, to keep tabs on the unit’s tactics and to make everything as transparent as possible. Because the state’s case against Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott will rely almost exclusively on videotaped confessions, this new development will eventually play a crucial part in their arrests, indictments and trials.
In December, homicide cops received an administrative questionnaire divided into five sections: “Training,” “Inadequate Resources,” “Case Preparation and Review,” “Management/Personnel Deficiencies” and “Malfeasance.” Comprehensive answers to the questions posed in each were to be submitted by early January. A few cops like paperwork, but most despise it, and Watson was becoming more unpopular by the minute. The following day, she was sworn in as the first female police chief in Austin’s history. Introducing her, the mayor extolled her long stint in the Houston department and boasted that she came from a family of cops and was, he declared, a “cop’s cop.” Dressed in policeman’s blues, Watson said she was “fiercely proud” to serve Austin.
The months following the arrest of the Mexican nationals did not, of course, seem flat at the time, especially not to Jones, Huckabay and Meyer—and certainly not to the families. But looking back from some twenty-odd years out, the repetition and frustrations of the fall of 1992 into the winter of 1993 seem to have a predictable refrain: And then…nothing. Every time a promising possibility showed up—phone call, visit, scribbled note, hopeful message—it quickly evaporated. Nothing again.
There were still more than four thousand entries in the database. Daily, John Jones chose one to explore; when it didn’t pan out, he picked another. “The investigators in the yogurt case have lived with that case every day,” George Phifer, now the assistant chief, told a reporter. “They go to bed with it and wake up trying to solve [it].” Mike Huckabay’s twelve-year-old son asked him most every night, “Daddy, did you solve the yogurt case?” Then, in his dreams, he saw the dead girls again. Sometimes Jones couldn’t look the girls’ parents in the eye. Sorting through leads, he drifted into an “ozone layer,” where time blurred but the names and faces still jumped out at him. And he would ask himself the same questions again and again: What have I missed here? What is it I’m not getting? Huck, remember so-and-so? Did we clear him too soon? What about…
Jones’s supervisor, Ron Smith, tried to be upbeat. “Being a cop,” he said, “you can become pretty cynical. You see the worst side of people. But in this case, the community support has been overwhelming….When you’ve got twenty years of cynicism it helps bring you back to earth, that there is a good grain in humanity.”
But in Homicide, clearing a case is everything. What cops can’t bear is the possibility of a case never going to trial. “The only way you can face this,” Lt. David Parkinson commented, “is by thinking that someday, somewhere, you’ll find information that leads to solving it.”
Jones wasn’t sleeping. His marriage was falling apart. He paid little attention to his daughters. He was starting to withdraw into a small, dark shell.
On December 6, 1992, the Statesman ran a front-page story on the status of the year-old case, as well as a feature about the families, what it was like when Victims’ Services came to their door and what their lives had been like since then. They commented on the warmth and generosity of the police department and people from all over the city. They said how much they missed their daughters. When asked how he planned to get through the anniversary, Jones said he intended to sleep all day. And then he unearthed a previously unspoken fear. “What I dread,” he said, “is the trials. When I testify about how those girls died, for the families it’ll be December sixth all over again.”
Two days later, three Austin cops on a domestic-disturbance call fired twenty-eight shots at a twenty-three-year-old when, during a drunken fight with a girlfriend, he turned a pellet pistol in their direction. Seventeen shots hit home. The dead man’s relatives admitted that he’d made a mistake, but couldn’t they have shot him just once? Within a week, Betsy Watson voiced her support for the cops, who were not indicted. The APA reluctantly congratulated her for doing the right thing, but its gratitude didn’t last long. Within two months, Watson fired a ten-year veteran for use of excessive force in the beating of a fourteen-year-old suspect with a nightstick. This case had, in fact, preceded her. When the incident occurred in July, acting chief Phifer recommended a five-day suspension, but the cop’s attorney quickly said that five days was unwarranted. Obviously, Watson disagreed.
If the Yogurt Shop case had stalled, no wonder. The APD lacked leadership, constancy, solidarity. Homicide detectives were spending precious time answering the new chief’s questionnaire. By March, as the publisher of Texas Monthly conducted a tireless campaign against Elizabeth Watson, the APA had raised $21,000 with which to investigate her background. Within two years of her swearing-in, people were buying bumper stickers and T-shirts saying LIFE IS A BITCH…THEN YOU GET ONE FOR A POLICE CHIEF.
Austin Chronicle reporter Jordan Smith dubbed this the era of cop wars. Which continued for years.