In October 1997, Stan Knee—formerly chief of police in Garden Grove, California—was sworn in as head of the Austin force. After the Betsy Watson debacle, he seemed a safe choice, being a longtime rank-and-file cop and a Vietnam vet. But because of Mala Sangre and continuing budget cuts, the APD hostilities lingered on.
Later that month, after reactivating the tips files and changing Maurice’s ranking from “major” to “likely,” Paul Johnson began looking for accomplices, friends and witnesses. In early November, he called Pierce, arranged for a meeting and drove north to Lewisville, where he and a fellow detective sat with the suspect in his living room.
Friendly and helpful, Maurice signed a sworn statement that began, “Me and my friends always used to hang out at Northcross Mall. I am having trouble remembering the exact day of the yogurt shop murders but I can remember the night that me and some of my friends went out and shot a gun that I had….” On the night of the murders, he thought he either went to the mall with Forrest or met up with him there.
He then repeated the story about Forrest borrowing the .22, but this time he changed the location from the Fungus to a video arcade. He mentioned Rob Springsteen and a longhaired guy whose name he couldn’t remember. He said when Forrest returned the gun and told him he’d done something bad, he seemed to be joking, but when he then asked to use the gun again to kill more girls, Maurice had to wonder.
He summed up: “I know I made a statement when I was arrested that said that Forrest told me other details about the murders. I don’t remember any of that now. I know I was very nervous and I was trying to say things to help me get out of the police interview and they were twisting my story up.”
Johnson next drove to Lockhart, only to discover that Forrest Welborn was on the lam for unpaid driving tickets. When police found him in Lubbock, Johnson interviewed him there. Forrest didn’t specifically remember the night of the murders—once, when detectives asked him, he had the date wrong—but he thought he was probably at Northcross, because that’s where he hung out, and probably with Maurice, because that’s who he hung out with. After denying any involvement in the crime, he was given a polygraph test that registered him as truthful. In his report, Johnson noted that Forrest was helpful, credible and cooperative, and that he now had doubts about his participation. He also made phone calls to Springsteen and Scott, but neither offered anything new or of interest. Rob talked about sneaking into the Rocky Show, hanging out with somebody named Travis, looking for a friend who never showed up. Mike rambled on in his usual scattered fashion.
In February 1998, Johnson again called Mike, Rob and Maurice, who gave him nothing useful. In March, twenty months after its formation, the AG Task Force was disbanded. Hoping to shine a positive light on yet another failure, a spokesman praised the team for its work clearing leads and making the caseload more manageable. Paul Johnson was transferred out to work the streets, but he couldn’t let go. In September, he sent Maurice Pierce’s .22 and ammunition to ballistics to be checked again. The result was the same: This was not a gun used at the ICBY.
Looking for a new tack, he moved his attention from the weapon to the fire. The original arson investigator, Melvin Stahl, had retired. And even though Chuck Meyer had agreed with Stahl about the origin of the fire, Johnson decided to get in touch with former APD officer Marshall Littleton, who for the past ten years had been living in San Antonio and working for the BATF as fire investigator for Central Texas. In Austin, Littleton and Johnson had worked as partners for a year and a half, sometimes taking late-night shifts together, a duty that inevitably created trust and loyalty.
Meyer met with Littleton first and asked if the fire at the yogurt shop could be “modeled,” scientifically re-created on computer software that could be run backward, from extinguishment to origin. Littleton advised against it, as fire modeling might “eliminate a possible suspect.” When defense lawyers later questioned the ethics of that, Littleton quickly shifted the topic of discussion. But when asked again if he’d made the statement, he answered without hesitation: “That’s correct.”
In late fall, Johnson once again drove to Lewisville, where Maurice agreed to undergo hypnosis, against his lawyer’s advice, but even that yielded nothing new. A few days later, Forrest provided a written statement echoing Pierce’s account. Undeterred, Johnson asked DPS for more gun and blood tests.
In December, former ICBY manager Reese Price called. Now a Travis County deputy, she wondered if Johnson had been told that in the months prior to the murders, both she and Jennifer Harbison had received harassing phone calls at home and at work, and that her apartment had been burglarized. The intruder had left behind valuables, including a television set and jewelry, but had taken the time to arrange some of her underwear in a neat pile on her bed with a kitchen knife on top. When she heard there’d been clean cuts in the collars of Jennifer’s and Eliza’s shirts, she remembered the weird feeling she’d had when she saw the knife. She and Jennifer Harbison resembled each other, both tiny, with long light brown hair. Might there be a connection?
Intrigued, Johnson asked Price to come to the station. During her visit, she told him about the crawl space above the ceiling connecting one Hillside shop to the next; she and the other girls had heard noises up there. And then there was the night when, checking out the bathrooms, she found shoe prints on the toilet seat in the men’s room and noticed that a ceiling tile above it had been moved. She used a broom handle to shift the tile back in place.
She and Johnson also talked about Brice protocol, the shop layout and the metal shelves. Afterward, writing up the interview, he described the shelves as where the “fire had been concentrated” and listed the items Price said they’d kept there: paper cups, cans of toppings, cleaning supplies, bug spray, oven cleaner, paint for the concrete floors, a gallon can of a gelatin-based product they used to clean the waffle maker. As for the back doors, she thought maybe they’d once used a padlock, but as she recalled, they couldn’t keep track of the key, so they switched to a double-cylinder dead bolt or else a single-cylinder with a knob on the inside—she couldn’t say which. A couple of other girls also had keys. Maybe one of them knew for sure.
Concerning the photograph of the unopened Coke can sitting next to the cash register and the Styrofoam cup beside it, Price said one of the girls might have been buying a soft drink for herself, but since the purchase didn’t appear on the register tape, it seemed clear there hadn’t been time to ring it up. And when Eliza rang up “No Sale,” Price thought she might have been simply closing down the register for the night.
A few days later, Johnson asked Amy Dreiss to come in. Having worked with Eliza a few nights before the murders, she confirmed Price’s report that Eliza Thomas had been upset about breaking up with her boyfriend, and said she thought the back-door lock had a “knob” on the inside but wasn’t certain. Dreiss also described Eliza as a fair and thorough coworker, especially concerning Brice protocol, which she insisted on following to the letter. Jennifer, on the other hand, was always anxious to skim through the necessities and get home. Ordinarily, Dreiss told Johnson, Friday nights were hers, but the week before the murders she’d asked to take December 6 off. Eliza had volunteered to work her shift.
One thing to note here is that during the investigation, no one described the lock on the back door as a “thumb latch,” always referring to it as a “knob” or a “twist lock.” But once one of the arrested suspects used the term, “thumb latch” stuck. Prosecutors called it that and so did witnesses, including former ICBY employees. This is the kind of stealth trial lawyers often use, knowing that casual repetition can draw disparate testimonies together and give an impression of unanimity.
Marshall Littleton finally met with Paul Johnson early in 1999 and again advised against fire modeling. There were too many oddities, and too many grievous consequences for screwups. If the aluminum ladder and metal shelving were available, they might yield important clues, but they weren’t. For the time being, they should just wait.