ON A LATE NOVEMBER EVENING, twenty-one years after Wanda Lopez collapsed in his arms, Kevan Baker was in the living room of his rural southern Michigan home. A middle-aged African American man in an overcoat and tie appeared at the front door, introducing himself as a private investigator from Chicago.
Baker wasn’t surprised. “This is about that case in Corpus Christi, isn’t it?” he said.
The former car salesman had been expecting this visit for years, maybe even hoping for it. He’d left Corpus Christi soon after testifying, under oath, that Carlos DeLuna was the man he’d seen taking the life of Wanda Lopez. He knew that DeLuna had been on trial for his life. Baker had a lot to get off his chest. Even after forty-five minutes of talking, he made the investigator keep his tape recorder running so he could come back one more time to the question that most weighed on his mind.
Had he done the right thing that night at the gas station?
“It’s just,” he said, “I wish this never happened, you know what I’m saying.” His voice trailed off. Then, seeing himself at the Sigmor that night, he continued. “I don’t want to be there. . . . I’m going, ‘God, this sucks, it really does.’ But I tried to do the right thing. I walked towards the store, and I tried to help her out. That’s basically what it was about.”
And that, Baker told the investigator, was how it went for him at every step of that chilly Gulf Coast night. It was Friday and he was ready to party, but it didn’t happen. At every turn, he thought, “Oh fuck, I don’t want to be here. Get in [the] car and leave.” But instead, he ended up staying and doing what he decided was the right thing, ignoring what his instincts were telling him.
When he heard the Sigmor clerk bang on the window, he was late to pick up his wife and head out to the clubs and was rushing to pump gas. He ignored the thump on the window and tried to pump the gas anyway, but the nozzle was dry and he had to look at the store clerk. That’s when he saw her wrestling with a man.
They must be horsing around, he remembered thinking. Lovers’ play. None of his business. But when he looked again, he realized that she was in trouble. He wanted to leave, but he knew that the right thing was to go to the door.
That’s what he did, and he got his life threatened in return. Then Wanda was in his arms, bleeding to death.
When the cops came, they wanted to know what the guy looked like, but he and the other witnesses standing together near the ice machine couldn’t agree. Baker gave his description and then stayed out of it. It mattered more to the others to have it their way.
Then, Baker recalled, the cops put him through what they called a “show-up identification.” Instead of lining up different people at the police station and asking if he could pick someone out through a one-way mirror, they wanted him and the other witnesses to go face-to-face with the guy at the scene of the crime and see if someone could identify him right there.
At first Baker refused, along with the other witnesses; everyone was terrified. But the police lieutenant pleaded with them—it was important for witnesses to come forward—so Baker agreed to do what the lieutenant asked.
The cops surrounded Baker and walked him over to the patrol car. They had a young man in the backseat of a squad car without a shirt, his hands cuffed behind his back. “Is this the guy you seen?” the lieutenant asked. “It was really tough, you know,” Baker recalled, “saying yes or no.” But the police were waiting, the crowd was watching, and “it seemed like the right guy.” So he said it was.
It was tough later on, too, when they asked him to identify DeLuna in court. “But,” as Baker told the private eye, the guy in the squad car “was Hispanic,” like the man he’d seen running out of the store. “Whether I was right or wrong . . . ,” he began. Then his voice trailed off.
“But it just seemed right,” he said, finally. “That’s kind of the way I went.”
. . .
Twenty-four-year-old Mark Schauer was the officer who had arrested and handcuffed DeLuna and driven him over to the Sigmor station. It was 8:49 P.M. when Schauer reported that he had the stabbing suspect in the rear seat of his squad car and “was transporting him back to the crime scene.” At the time, Schauer’s car was at Nemec Street and Franklin Drive, near the police staging area for the last part of the manhunt, and only 875 feet from the Sigmor along Nemec and Dodd Street.
For reasons Schauer never fully explained, it took him fifteen minutes to arrive. He reached the gas station at 9:05.
During the ride to the gas station and thereafter, Schauer reported, DeLuna “was not silent even for a moment.” The suspect asked what he was being charged with. He said, “‘Hey, man, you take care of me and I’ll take care of you.’ He said this over and over.”
. . .
For the preceding forty minutes, the cops had made Baker, Aguirre, and the Arsuagas remain at the ice machine outside the east wall of the store.
The machine was a few feet from the front corner of the store. For the first half hour, they stood there with a direct view of Wanda on the sidewalk outside the door, maybe 25 feet away. They watched the medics work on her.
To their left, as they watched, were the gas station parking lot, the frontage road, and the highway, South Padre Island Drive, beyond. To their right was a narrow passageway between the brick eastern wall of the store and a storage shed. The passageway led past the ice machine to a grassy area behind the store. The temperature was in the mid-fifties, cold by Corpus Christi standards. An eighth of an inch of rain had fallen that morning, and there were some damp stains on the pavement. Most of the moisture had evaporated, though, and the grass was firm.
Patrol cars were scattered around the station, lights flashing. Officers roamed the area. Joel Infante, a police photographer, arrived, followed by Olivia Escobedo, a police detective dressed in a fashionable white raincoat and high-heeled leather boots. The two waited in the parking lot while the medics worked on Wanda, blocking access to the store.
Trucks from the local television stations pulled into the southeast side of the parking lot and started filming. Traffic slowed on the frontage road, and people were gawking. Some parked and got out to look. There were several dozen onlookers, many in the Wolfy’s parking lot across Dodd. They watched the techs work on Wanda and wondered how a clerk behind the counter could have gotten stabbed. If she died, it would be the first convenience store killing in Corpus Christi that anyone could remember.
Officers kept abreast of the manhunt on their car radios and walkie-talkies. The witnesses and onlookers listened, too.
Sigmor area supervisor Pedro (Pete) Gonzalez was among those at the gas station. He’d received a call about an unexplained emergency and was told to go to the store. When he got there, he found the place swarming with police. His employee Wanda Lopez was on the ground, drenched in blood, and paramedics were frantically trying to revive her. Scuttlebutt in the crowd was that the techs got her back to consciousness a couple of times, but only briefly.
Recollections differed about whether police put up crime scene tape. There was none in the police photos taken outside the store and in the gas station lot, and Escobedo, the lone detective on the case, recalled much later that the department didn’t use police tape to secure crime scenes at the time. “We just had to yell at people to stay back and not step on our crime scenes,” she explained.
Gonzalez and station manager Robert Stange were able to wander between the frontage road and gas pumps and into the wing lots on either side of the store. They picked up information from brief conversations with police officers and chatter on police radios. The first thing they heard was that it was a robbery.
The ambulance left for the hospital around 8:40 P.M., and Escobedo and the police photographer were able to get inside the store.
Ten minutes later, information about a suspect began flying around the parking lots at the gas station and Wolfy’s. “It started as a rumor,” store manager Stange recalled. Police car doors were open, and windows were down. “Radio transmissions were coming back that they had somebody under a car they were going to bring back to the location for identification.”
Stange heard that police had found a suspect a few blocks away hiding under a car. Someone said that they found a bloody shirt near the suspect. Although Stange didn’t know it, the first statement was true, but the second was not. No shirt was found until the next day, and police needed lab tests to see if Wanda’s blood was on it.
. . .
Lieutenant Eddie McConley was the second-ranking police officer at the gas station. Looking through the windows, he had immediately noticed a bloody scene inside the store and disarray from a violent struggle. Even after Escobedo and Infante went inside, he kept an eye on the doorway to be sure no one else entered and spoiled the scene. He positioned himself midway between the door and the witnesses at the corner of the building near the ice machine, remaining about 10 to 12 feet from each (figure 3.1).
On his walkie-talkie, McConley heard Schauer’s broadcast about the arrest. He told Schauer to bring the suspect “back” to the Sigmor for a show-up identification.
Eventually, Schauer arrived with DeLuna in his squad car. He navigated the potholes on the western edge of the Sigmor lot and parked parallel to Dodd Street, directly across from Wolfy’s. People pressed forward to see the suspect sitting in the rear seat on the gas station side.
FIGURE 3.1 The police diagram of the Sigmor Shamrock gas station on the night of the murder of Wanda Lopez, with typewritten additions by the authors.
Sigmor supervisors Gonzalez and Stange made their way to the sidewalk on the west side of the car, 2 feet from the vehicle. They traded places every once in a while so each could get a better view inside the car. The gas station lighting was poor. It was hard to see the man inside the car.
. . .
When McConley saw the squad car pull in with the suspect, he walked over to the ice machine to talk to the witnesses. They already knew that the police had caught someone.
“Here comes a cop,” Baker recalled, reliving the scene and replaying the cop’s words. “‘We found him. Is this the gentleman? He was hiding underneath a car.’” Julie Arsuaga later remembered being told the same thing by the officer.
McConley asked the four witnesses to go over to the man to see if they could identify him.
Immediately, all the witnesses got upset. Everything they’d seen and heard—the man opening a long knife and putting it in his pocket, the threat to shoot Baker, the wound in Wanda’s chest, her lifeless body being lifted into the ambulance—told them they didn’t want to be anywhere near the guy.
Julie said what they all were thinking: “No, I don’t want to see him.” It was too dangerous and scary. John refused, too. Baker said he just wanted to get his gas and go. He remembered thinking that he was lucky to be alive and didn’t want to take any more chances. The next day, he clipped an article from the newspaper and sent it home to his folks in Michigan with a note saying, “thank God, I didn’t die.” Aguirre also demurred.
After some coaxing, however, Lieutenant McConley convinced Baker and Aguirre to go over to the man. McConley promised that he and the other cops would shield the witnesses from the suspect. The Arsuagas still refused.
Baker went first. Led by McConley, cops surrounded him and walked him to the car. Officers shined flashlights through the windows directly into the suspect’s eyes to blind him—so “there would be no revenge kind of thing,” an officer said.
Store manager Stange watched from a few feet away. He remembered Baker “standing at the front of the car. . . . [H]e didn’t want to get any closer. He was terrified, he just did not want to be involved.”
Accounts differed about what happened next. Some witnesses at the trial testified that officers stood DeLuna up outside the squad car, shirtless and shoeless in the cold air. Officer Schauer, who had driven the suspect to the gas station and stayed with his squad car the whole time, testified that DeLuna remained inside the car: the “[suspect] was in the back seat of the car and somebody was flashing the light in his eyes.” That was also what Robert Stange remembered: DeLuna “never got out of the car. He was sitting in there with no shirt” while Baker “looked through the windows.” Baker told the private investigator the same thing.
By all accounts, Baker stood behind McConley. At 5 feet, 6 inches, Baker had to look over the cop’s shoulder. He never got a full view. “Keep the light in [the suspect’s] eyes,” someone said.
Baker told the private investigator that the suspect looked “distraught”—“like, ‘I’m in the back of the police car. I’m fucked,’” “whether . . . innocent or guilty, you know, ‘I’m fucked.’”
Again, Baker found himself wishing he wasn’t there. There was so little to go on. He’d seen the man for only a few seconds as he ran out of the store, and right away the guy had said he had a gun. At the mention of a gun, Baker told the Chicago detective, “I was on 110 percent hype.” He had locked eyes with the man, willing him not to pull a weapon: “[T]here was other more important things to worry about” than how “long [the guy’s] sideburns” were.
Now, peering at the man from behind the police lieutenant, Baker tried to focus. The man had his shirt off. He was Hispanic, dark hair, dark complexion. “Okay,” Baker thought, “it might be him; it might not be.” The cops were watching and waiting. So were the people in the crowd. Baker took a few seconds, “five, ten,” he had said at the trial, “fifteen at the most.” “Yeah, that’s the guy,” he told the tall cop. Then he got the hell out of there.
Police repeated the process with Aguirre. He, too, identified DeLuna.
Later that night at the police station, Detective Escobedo showed John and Julie Arsuaga mug shots of six men, including Carlos DeLuna. Both eventually identified DeLuna as the man they’d seen taking a leisurely jog in his dress clothes east of the gas station, before disappearing into the yards along Nemec Street near Franklin Drive.
. . .
Asked at the trial about his identification of DeLuna, Kevan Baker described two differences between the man he saw wrestling with Wanda and the man he saw in the squad car. One was obvious. The man who ran out of the store had a gray sweatshirt and a flannel jacket on. The man in the patrol car was naked from the waist up.
Baker puzzled over the other difference. The man he came eye-to-eye with outside the Sigmor had no marks or scratches on his face. The man in the squad car had a “scarred up” face with blood on it.
Although Baker didn’t know it, Julie Arsuaga had noticed something similar. At a pretrial hearing, she examined a black-and-white photo of Carlos DeLuna, who she then said was the jogger who’d passed in front of her car that night near the Phase III. She noted, however, that DeLuna had a fatter face in the photo than did the jogger she’d seen and speculated that DeLuna must have lost weight since the picture was taken. After being told that police took the photo at the police station on the night of the crime, Julie admitted that DeLuna’s puffy face in the picture was “different to a degree” from the face of the man she had seen jogging by.
Years later, when Wanda’s family sued the Sigmor Shamrock for damages, another—color—set of photos of DeLuna came to light, also taken at the police station on the night of the murder. The new photos confirmed Baker’s and Julie Arsuaga’s observations, especially when compared with other photos of DeLuna from around the same time. After his arrest, DeLuna had a cut on the bridge of his swollen nose. There were bruises on his right cheek and under both eyes. He had a fat lower lip.
Shown the color photos twenty years later, DeLuna’s sister Rose wept at the sight of her brother’s banged-up face (figure 3.2). She recalled the first time she had visited him in jail while he was waiting to go on trial for killing Wanda Lopez. He told her that the cops had beaten him after they pulled him out from under the truck. One of them said he recognized DeLuna as a smart-ass drunk he’d arrested at the Casino Club a couple weeks earlier.
Aguirre also had a problem in court when asked whom he’d seen at the gas station. At the same pretrial hearing where Julie had testified, a prosecutor named Steven Schiwetz Aguirre to point out the man he’d seen with a knife. DeLuna was sitting between his two lawyers at a table a few feet away. Schiwetz asked, “Do you see him in the courtroom today?”
AGUIRRE: I’m not too sure. I can’t—
SCHIWETZ: I want to direct you to the man sitting in between the two lawyers over here. Do you know whether or not that’s the man you saw that night?
AGUIRRE: It’s been a while. I couldn’t—
SCHIWETZ: Can’t say?
AGUIRRE: I can’t say.
SCHIWETZ: Fair enough.
In the end, only Baker testified in court that he had seen DeLuna at the gas station that night.
FIGURE 3.2 Carlos DeLuna at the police station immediately after his arrest for the murder of Wanda Lopez (left) and in July 1983 (right).
In his testimony, Baker noted another discrepancy between DeLuna—in this case, as he looked in court—and the man who had tussled with Wanda at the Sigmor. “I would say the gentleman on your left,” Baker pointed to DeLuna, wearing a button-down dress shirt and dress pants, “looks very much like a lawyer or a doctor.” The man Baker had seen coming out of the Sigmor store had looked different—like “someone who had been on the street and was very hungry.” His clothes were dirty and disheveled. He looked “like a transient.”
. . .
At his home in Michigan twenty-one years later, Baker told the private detective that he was 70 percent positive that the man in the police car was the man he’d seen wrestling with Wanda.
“[S]eventy percent is not 100 percent,” the detective said.
“Right. It’s not,” Baker agreed.
Baker explained. “I’m going, ‘God that looks like him, you know, it really does.’” Then he reflected, “[I]t goes back to, I’m a [short] white guy. . . . [T]o you,” he said to the black detective, “which one of these five blond short guys is it?” Baker didn’t mince words. He had trouble recalling Hispanic names; they were all “Julio” to him, he said. And he had trouble telling Hispanics apart and judging their age. “It’s tough,” he said, “to identify cross cultures.”
He hadn’t wanted to “screw anybody,” he said, but at the same time, he had to make an “adult judgment,” “try to connect the two together.” “I wasn’t all that sure,” he later said to a news reporter. “But him being Hispanic and all . . . I said, ‘Yeah, I think it is him.’”
There was one thing, though, that had bothered Baker at the time and had concerned him ever since. He brought it up several times to the detective and later to a news reporter: “I will say this. One of the police officers did mention to me that ‘we found this guy hiding underneath a car without a shirt on, two blocks north of us or three blocks north of us.’” Baker thought that “might have tinged my—not tinged, but maybe tried to direct me that this is the guy or something [by saying] right there, ‘we found him a couple blocks north.’”
And again: “The cops told me they found him hiding under a truck. That led me to believe this is probably the guy.” “That’s probably why I was 70 percent sure.”
Would he have been less than 70 percent sure if a cop had not told him that? On the audiotape, Baker’s answer is emphatic. “Yes.” In that case, it would have been only “fifty-fifty.”
The private detective pressed Baker on the point:
DETECTIVE: When they asked you if this is the guy, and you said “yeah, it is.” Even though you said, “yeah it is,” in your mind, were you 100 percent sure?
BAKER: Oh no.
DETECTIVE: You weren’t 100 percent sure?
BAKER: No.
DETECTIVE: And you responded “yeah, it is,” because—
BAKER: . . . I went to facial features, basically eye-to-eye contact. . . . I was waiting for a gun to come out.
. . .
Schauer and DeLuna were at the Sigmor for less than five minutes. Immediately after Baker and Aguirre identified the suspect, Schauer took him to the police station. Before he transported DeLuna, Schauer reported, “The suspect . . . said, ‘I didn’t do it, but I know who did. I know who did.’”
“[A]gain and again, he said I’ll help you if you help me.’” He kept asking to speak with a sergeant, and he “kept trying to make deals.”
At the police station, DeLuna answered all the questions the cops put to him. No one asked if he committed the crime, or if he knew who did.
In the meantime, the tragic news that Wanda Lopez had died came in from the hospital. Schauer booked Carlos DeLuna for capital murder.
