Santa Barbara, California, December 20, 1958
The next morning, a guard brought Augustine Baldonado into the ten-by-ten interrogation room with dirty white walls and gray linoleum where DA Investigator Henderson and Ventura County deputy sheriff Ray Higgins waited.
Higgins was an excellent interrogator, but he’d failed the written civil service exam for promotion numerous times, and at the age of forty he still hadn’t made detective. Nevertheless, he was a much-admired deputy, a soft-spoken, understanding, and patient man who took crime, especially murders, personally. His identification with the victim and the pain of the victim’s family was a huge motivation for him, yet he always played the “good cop” at interrogations.
The guard pushed the prisoner into a chair, took the handcuff off one of his wrists, and reattached it to the metal arm of the chair. There were no windows in the room except for a small pane of glass in the door so the guard could keep an eye on the inmate.
Henderson began the interview by reminding Baldonado, “We got two witnesses say you and your buddy Luis Moya kidnapped and murdered Olga Duncan for her mother-in-law.”
“How many times I got to tell you? I got nothing more to say.” He looked everywhere but at the faces of his two interrogators. Finally, his gaze rested on the ceiling tiles. “Wonder how many little holes they got in one of those square things up there?”
“Don’t think you can count that high,” Henderson said.
Higgins exchanged a look with Henderson. “Oh, I don’t know about that. I remember T’lene here when he was a smart little boy. Outfoxed me one time.”
Baldonado tilted his head forward. A puzzled expression crossed his face.
“That’s right, T’lene. Camarillo. Deputy Higgins. Ring a bell? Remember how Mr. Ellis called all the time to say you and your brother were stealing apples from the bin out front of his store?”
Baldonado twisted his mouth to keep from smiling.
“Yeah, you remember.” Higgins chuckled, then turned to Henderson. “I never could get the goods on those boys, though. By the time I caught up with them, I couldn’t find a thing. Those Baldonado boys always got away with it.”
Henderson made a sour face.
“What’d you do with those apples, anyway?” Higgins asked. “Where’d you hide them?”
Baldonado bit his lip. “It’s a secret.” He burst out laughing. “We ate the evidence.”
Higgins laughed a little, too. “Well, you really got me all right. Too bad I didn’t have any corroborating witnesses back then. Might have been different.”
None of the men spoke for a moment. Sounds from the jail—shouting voices, clanging metal doors—grew louder in the quiet of the little room.
Higgins stopped smiling. “But we got a witness now, T’lene. Mrs. Esquivel says you had blood on your clothes the night Olga Duncan disappeared.”
Baldonado shifted his gaze from Higgins to Henderson. “You got nothin’.”
“We got Mrs. Esquivel, and Mrs. Short, too,” Higgins said. “They both say the same thing: you kidnapped Olga and got rid of her for Mrs. Duncan. Come on, T’lene, tell us what you did with Olga’s body.”
Baldonado hunched his shoulders. “Nothing. I told you. I didn’t even know that woman. Why would I do something like that?”
“Money,” Henderson said.
Baldonado laughed and then stopped abruptly. His gaze zigzagged around the closed-up little room. “You’re crazy. Whatever comes out, comes out. That’s all I got to say. I want to go back to my cell.”
After the guard took Baldonado away, Henderson tossed his pencil onto the table. “Well, that was productive.”
Higgins looked sideways toward the door that led back to the jail. “Wait until tomorrow.”