WANDA JEAN VARGAS LOPEZ DIED AT WORK at a Sigmor Shamrock gas station in Corpus Christi, Texas, on February 4, 1983. She was twenty-four. Wanda’s only brother, Richard Vargas, would hear her utter her last words, but they gave him no solace or peace. They just made him angry.
Richard was at his parents’ house that Friday night, waiting for Wanda to get off work so they all could go out to celebrate. Wanda had insisted. She had good news to share.
Wanda worked the 3:00 to 10:00 P.M. shift alone at the small gas station and store in a poor part of town. She stood behind an 18-inch counter with a lift-top entryway. Unlike at some other stations, no glass or barrier separated her from the customers. To her right was a single cash drawer. Beside it sat the console used to regulate the gas pumps. Above the cash drawer and console, a window looked south over the pumps and beyond to South Padre Island Drive, a controlled-access highway that people call “SPID.” Behind Wanda, another window faced west, across a dark, narrow street to a “gentlemen’s club” named Wolfy’s.
Wolfy’s was a landmark back then. Its giant cutout of a buxom, scantily clad woman loomed over SPID. The club attracted a rough crowd of bikers and men from the area. The bar’s customers often stumbled across the street to the Sigmor to buy cheap cigarettes or beer. Wanda dealt with them as best she could on her own. She warned her brother more than once that she’d better not catch him in a place like Wolfy’s.
North of the station, to Wanda’s left as she faced the counter, was a poor residential neighborhood, a warren of narrow streets and shabby frame houses with front and backyards open to each other or bounded by rotting slat fences.
Wanda was a divorced high-school dropout with a young daughter to support. Her husband left when she was four months pregnant, and she hadn’t heard from him since. To support herself, she took whatever work she could get, while her parents minded the baby. She was a good worker, cheerful and reliable, and she followed the rules. She had been at the station for only a few months and already was an assistant manager.
Richard and his parents worried about Wanda, trapped in that 4- by 6-foot space, with only a counter separating her from whoever came in the door. They told her that she needed a safer job in a better neighborhood. Sometimes her father would sit in the Sigmor parking lot in his pickup truck until her shift ended. Robert Mayorga, a police officer whom Wanda went out with now and then, also checked on her when he could. They worked out hand signals for when he was too busy to leave his patrol car.
. . .
Neither Wanda’s father nor Officer Mayorga was at the gas station on the night of February 4. Richard and his father were at home watching television, waiting for Wanda to finish work and for her mother to come home from her weekly bingo game. Earlier in the week, Wanda had told them that she wanted to celebrate that Friday night after getting off work and sharing her good news.
At first, Richard had declined Wanda’s invitation. He worked late himself most nights and had the month’s bills to pay. But when Wanda said she’d do Richard’s paperwork for him so they could all go out, Richard laughed and agreed to join the celebration.
Wanda was excited about a new boyfriend. After her husband left, she sometimes went to clubs and parties on the weekend, but she never dated anyone for long, and never anyone she wanted the family to meet. Now, though, Wanda had found someone she was proud of and wanted to bring home. She called him Green Eyes. They say the man came to Wanda’s funeral to pay his respects, but Richard never met him.
Sometime after 8:00 P.M., a kid from across the street crashed his bicycle onto the Vargases’ driveway and ran to the door. He was breathless, yelling. He said that something had happened at the gas station. Wanda was hurt. They’d better get there fast. Richard recalls the boy saying that it didn’t look good.
Richard left alone, telling his father that he’d report back as soon as he could. His father drove over to the bingo game to get his wife.
When Richard arrived at the Sigmor, he found chaos. There were patrol cars and officers everywhere, emergency lights flashing, police radios blaring. An ambulance, a fire engine, and television trucks were parked in the gas station lot. Fifty or sixty people from the neighborhood were milling around.
Richard rushed toward the store. His little sister was lying on a backboard on the sidewalk just outside the door. She was soaked in blood, and so was the sidewalk. A firefighter stood over her with an IV bag. She had a tube in her mouth and was hooked to a large plastic machine with more tubes that went into her chest. Paramedics were lifting her onto a stretcher on wheels.
“That’s my sister,” Richard yelled. “Let me through.” The cops held him back, telling him to meet the ambulance at the hospital. He asked what had happened, but all they would say was that there’d been a tragedy.
Richard looked inside the store for clues. It was lit up, and people in plainclothes were rushing around, looking worried. There was blood everywhere. Immediately, something caught his eye. He thought that he was imagining things, but he looked closer and it was real: two people were scrubbing the floors as fast as they could. He couldn’t understand why they were cleaning up the crime scene already.
The ambulance left, headed east on SPID toward Mercy Hospital. Richard followed in his car. Once inside the emergency room, he heard the words that he had dreaded since he saw his sister on the sidewalk: “Your sister is dead.”
Richard called his parents, and they met him at the hospital, bringing Wanda’s five-year-old daughter with them. They learned that Wanda had been stabbed once through the left breast with a knife. The blade went most of the way through her lung. She bled to death within minutes. No one told the family how it had happened, only that someone had stabbed her.
Later they heard more, in Wanda’s own words and screams.
They were at home with the television going when the news came on. There was a report about the robbery-murder at the Sigmor Shamrock station on SPID. Reminding viewers that Wanda Vargas Lopez, a store clerk, had been stabbed to death, the reporter turned excitedly to a new development. It turned out that the store clerk had been on the phone with the police when she was killed. Police had the crime on a 911 tape.
The television station played the tape. Wanda’s words were typed out at the bottom of the screen. At the first sound of Wanda’s frightened voice, Richard’s mother rushed his niece out of the room. Both were crying. They didn’t have to hear this. Both started counseling soon after Wanda died and continued receiving it for years.
Richard didn’t move. Wanda was pleading with the 911 dispatcher: “[C]an you have an officer come to 2602 South Padre Island Drive? I have a suspect with a—a knife inside the store. . . . He’s a Mexican. He’s standing right here at the counter.”
Richard heard fear in his sister’s voice. But he heard something else, too: expectation, even confidence. She believed that help would come soon.
What came instead was a litany of questions that the dispatcher directed back at Wanda. The longer Richard listened, the angrier he got. “What’s he doing with the knife? Has he threatened you or anything? Huh? Ma’am? Where is he at right now?” “What does he look like?” And again, “What does he look like?” “Is he a white male?” “Black? Hispanic?” “Tall? Short?” “Tall?” “Does he have the knife pulled out?” “Is it in his pocket?”
Even before Wanda whispered that the Mexican man was “standing right here at the counter” and then said, “Can’t talk,” Richard could tell that the man was right there, buying an 85-cent pack of cigarettes. He could hear Wanda telling the man, “Okay. This? Eighty-five.” Her voice quivered a little, but she managed to keep the pitch and volume normal.
When she tried to answer the dispatcher’s questions, her voice went low and her words were clipped. Her lips must have been barely moving, answering, “I don’t know.” “Not yet.” “Por qué?” “Can’t talk.” “What?” “Right here.” “No.” “No.” “Yes.” “Un-huh.” “Yeah.” Richard could hear his sister’s poise collapsing, along with her confidence that there was a lifeline out that would save her.
When the 911 operator asked a second time whether the knife was out, Wanda’s voice for the first time rose in fear and exasperation: “Not ye-et!” she said again. Every muscle in Richard’s body tightened. “Stop asking questions!” he wanted to shout. “Send out a squad car. There’s time!”
Then it was done. Wanda gave up on the 911 operator and spoke directly to the man, begging for her life. “You want it? I’ll give it to you. I’m not gonna do nothing to you. Please!!!!” Then she screamed. Six unbearable seconds of wordless scuffling followed. The phone dropped. Wanda moaned.
Then came an incessant dial tone, as the killer hung up the phone.
Why, Richard wondered, didn’t they send out a cruiser first thing? And why did the guy stab her? She didn’t do anything to him. He didn’t even have to ask for the money. Wanda just offered it to him. It must have been all the questions, Richard thought. The man must have realized that she was on the phone with the cops and gotten mad. But if he knew that the cops were on to him, why not just run? Why take the time to hurt Wanda, scuffle with her, and then run? It made no sense.
. . .
Forty minutes after Wanda’s call, the police closed the case with an arrest. They caught Carlos DeLuna in a residential neighborhood a few blocks east of the Sigmor. Sometime later, police officials gave television stations the 911 tape, dramatizing the cops’ quick work.
The stations played the tape over and over for days. And for months, they played it again every time something new happened in the case. Richard heard it twice more, alongside the jury, at DeLuna’s trial. That was five months after the crime.
Richard was infuriated that he first learned of his sister’s last words on television, without warning, along with everyone else in Corpus Christi. When he showed up at the Sigmor station, the police wouldn’t tell him what “tragedy” had befallen his sister. But before he knew it, they were telling everyone else, in her own words. And for months afterward, every time he turned around it seemed, the tape was being played again, with no concern for the pain it brought him and his family.
The police, the television stations, and everyone in town had a good story. A 911 tape captures the chilling sounds of a young woman pleading for her life and her brutal murder. The community is safe, though, because the cops acted fast, made an arrest within minutes, and solved the case.
For Richard and his family, Wanda’s last words were a monument to their unspeakable pain and a boundary between the lives they lived before Wanda’s death and the ones they struggled through after. But Richard couldn’t see what the tape had to say to everyone else. Not who killed his sister. Not why. Not even much about how. For them, Wanda’s last words, played over and over again like that, were just a cheap piece of entertainment.