In the spring of 2014, when his old friend Howard Williams asked if he’d give a talk at the Texas Citizens Police Academy convention in San Marcos, John Jones said, “Talk about what?” Williams had been the San Marcos police chief for eleven years, but he’d begun his career in Austin and he and Jones had worked together.
Williams said Yogurt Shop, what else? As for the specific topic, it could be anything Jones wanted to talk about. Hour and a half, July 29. Embassy Suites Conference Center. I-35 South. Eight in the morning. Probably between sixty and eighty people in attendance. It didn’t take Jones long to figure out what he had to say that hadn’t already been talked to death, so he said yes.
The TCPA is a statewide organization of citizens who want to learn about and support police work. To become members, they attend a course that lasts anywhere from ten to thirteen weeks and covers what an officer has to know in order to do his job. The instruction is free and lectures include DWI procedures, the use of force, patrol tactics, the protocol and procedures used in drug enforcement, criminal investigations and evidence collection. How to be a cop, in other words. After graduating, members are sometimes asked to participate in neighborhood-watch activities and ride out with cops. Vigilantism is not encouraged, but keeping vigilant is.
When the convention schedule was released, Jones’s talk was announced as the feature presentation. His subject, “Police-Officer Stress in a High-Profile Investigation: A Case Study, the Yogurt Shop Murders of 1991.” He’d decided to take the conventioneers “behind the curtain” and talk about the toll taken not just on police officers but on their whole families. He’d initially convinced his ex-wife, Yolanda, to participate, but she pulled out two days before the meeting. Though their four daughters tried to persuade her to go, she refused. That time, she said, was too painful. She didn’t want to relive it.
Just as well. There must have been three hundred people sitting eight to a table in the ballroom, waiting for techies to set up Jones’s PowerPoint presentation. Jones said he’d gone to smaller rooms first, looking for where he was supposed to speak. He’d hoped to wander through the audience while images flashed by on the screen, then found himself onstage with little room to move—and all those people out there. I sat in a chair pushed against the wall, too far away from the lectern to see much, but I did notice he was wearing a bow tie and a black suit jacket with wide, satiny lapels. I knew he was a spiffy dresser—but a tux and patent-leather shoes at eight in the morning?
The computer guys got the software ready to go, but Jones didn’t use it much. He just talked, and mostly rambled. “My rambling,” he said, “may give you an idea of what goes on inside.” Yogurt Shop, he said, had had a profound, ineradicable effect on him. When his wife sued him for divorce on grounds of nonperformance as a husband, he agreed with her charges. Since the night he became case agent of the multiple murders at the ICBY shop, he had been obsessed, single-minded, snarly, socially incapacitated and a total loser as both husband and father. He’d converted to Catholicism in 1994, and his wife was a lifelong Catholic; even so, for the divorce he had to go to court and face the music. “Cops hate to admit they’re wrong. And they hate to fail.” He’d done both, and was here to tell us that the reason was Yogurt Shop. The pressures of living in a glass house that was more in a political spectrum than one of law enforcement, then coming home to a family in chaos, with two daughters in their teens and two who were three and four at the time of the murders, then in the early years of elementary school as the case dragged on. He’d never believed it when people said they stayed together because of the children, but that’s what he and Yolanda had done. Then, three of the victims’ parents had come to him to say he wasn’t looking so good, that maybe he should go see somebody, and he thought, Wait, they’re the victims’ parents, not me. So he’d taken their advice and been officially diagnosed as having PTSD and ADHD. He listed some of the symptoms: insomnia, inability to trust or show love, inwardness, tension. After he was taken off the case, he went into hiding. Stayed away from folks. Didn’t make friends. All of the symptoms he’d shown at the time of his diagnosis still affected his life and made him who he was. And so, he said, “I ramble.”
Most of the members of his audience weren’t from Austin, and many who were didn’t know the details of Yogurt Shop, so people began squirming in their seats. But Jones recaptured their attention when he told the story of his first newsworthy case, which came in 1989, when a 180-year-old live oak—said to have been the site of an important treaty signing between Texas hero Stephen F. Austin and local Indian leaders—was poisoned and began to die, the culprit having used enough of the powerful herbicide Velpar to kill a hundred trees. Jones’s assignment was considered a joke by his supervisor, a kind of initiation when he moved from Assault and Family Violence to Robbery. They called the crime an “arborcide.” But the poisoning of the Treaty Oak went viral, and as the APD spokesperson, he found himself interviewed day and night. They solved the case pretty quickly after a woman called and said she thought her ex-boyfriend had done it. When they went to the guy’s apartment, he immediately confessed.
“He was a member of the Aryan Nation,” John said. “So me and him, we got along real good.” This—his only reference to his race—got a big laugh, and from then on, the audience was with him.
Calling himself a “supervisory nightmare,” he compared a stint in Homicide with an assembly-line job, but there, “you measure time by the number of bodies that roll by.” He had seen 150, he said, and the last four were the girls at the yogurt shop.
He told about that night and the television reporter who rode out with him and how the footage the videographer shot of him driving to the ICBY shop was later used on 48 Hours. And he described the “hideous green-and-white shirt” he had on when he got the calls saying a fire, a homicide, three girls…no, four…as he drove north up the interstate, and about Troy Gay getting to the yogurt shop within five minutes of a flashover, which would have destroyed whatever evidence they could manage to collect. He explained why he’d automatically been made case agent and quickly chose Mike “Huck” Huckabay as his partner and told of their mutual agreement that if you didn’t solve a crime in three days, you were going backward in a hurry. And also that because this was an unusual case requiring unusual methods, they would not file for an arrest warrant until they had a suspect or suspects they felt sure were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, even though they didn’t need to be that certain. All they needed to arrest a suspect in a criminal investigation was probable cause, and in civil cases, a preponderance of evidence. Probable cause wasn’t that hard to come by, and the DA’s office expected cops to supply only that level of certainty. But he and Huck decided between themselves not to go that route. And that’s how they operated during their years on the case.
Then he told about the Mexican nationals and the six written confessions, the 240 witnesses, the 203 affidavits and the 159 apartments they’d searched, the moving violation citations they’d gone through, the people in black, the witches and Satanists. But what got him in trouble with his boss was getting too close to the families of the victims, especially after he okayed that letter they wrote to the Mexican attorney general.
As for the harsh criticism he, Huck and the others received for their conduct at the crime scene and collecting the evidence, he defended himself and all the agencies that worked with him that night by saying, “Look. Back then we called the DPS evidence-collecting unit the ‘fingerprint team.’ That’s what they had in 1991. But in fact, everybody did their job.” Might not have been perfect. But they did their job.
When an official held up a ten-minute warning sign, Jones mentioned his attire. He’d decided to wear his tux this morning, he said, admitting that he did have a flair for the dramatic. “But I hate jackets,” he said, removing his coat, folding it carefully and setting it aside. “This is me,” he said, holding his arms out. “Bow tie, suspenders, white T-shirt, no sleeves.” Beneath the jacket his arms were bare. “I brought out the guns,” he said later, laughing.
He ended on a final note about the effect of PTSD on a human being, whether a police officer or a soldier. “Damage,” he said. “Damage, damage, damage.”
And when someone asked if he thought those four guys were guilty, he said, “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
It wasn’t a great talk, but it pretty much summed up the effect of Yogurt Shop on every single person involved in the case in any way. Nobody escaped unscathed: not cops, firefighters, FBI and BATF agents, lawyers, the judge, the families and friends of the girls, other ICBY employees, customers….
Carlos Garcia agrees. “Of course he has PTSD,” he says. “Everybody who was at the crime scene has it, him probably the worst.”
As I made my way out of the hotel, a conferee sidelined me and asked why I was leaving. Wasn’t I going to the body farm?
I’d read about the impending TCPA trip to Texas State University’s Forensic Anthropology Research Facility, where donor bodies are allowed to decompose in various conditions of climate and topography.
I said I had to get home.
Oh, she said, she wouldn’t miss it for anything.