PRICILLA HERNANDEZ GREW UP at her grandmother Fidela Hernandez’s house on Carrizo Street. For Pricilla, the street was a sinister backwater cut of from the rest of the world.
Carrizo Street is only two blocks long, in the heart of the Corpus Christi barrio. It starts at Blucher Street on the north, passes Kinney Street, and dead-ends at a weedy embankment just before Laredo Street on the south. Because the street jogs at Kinney, the dead-end block where Pricilla lived is cut off from even the other block with the same street name.
Fidela’s house was at the very end of the cul-de-sac, farthest from the outlet on Kinney, on the west side of the street. Like the other structures on the block, it was a ramshackle, wood-frame affair. But it sat apart from the others up a little hill from the street.
The Tapias’ and other dwellings across the street backed onto an empty lot abutting Blucher Park, across Kinney Street. The neighbors called the lot “the park,” but it was just an open space, strewn with litter and shaded by a few trees. People hung out there, drank, and used drugs. There wasn’t much else to do on Carrizo Street.
. . .
Pricilla was Paula Hernandez’s first child, conceived out of wedlock. Soon after leaving the hospital following the car wreck in which her brother Carlos killed her fiancé, seventeen-year-old Paula had slept with Beto Vela. Beto was a force at the Casino Club, known for his one-night stands with many of the young women there. He was in his first of several marriages at the time.
Paula was ashamed of her illegitimate daughter. When she married Freddy Schilling, she wanted a fresh start, so she left Pricilla behind on Carrizo Street with Fidela and her three uncles: Carlos, Javier, and Frankie. Pricilla lived there until she was thirteen, when she walked out.
. . .
Life was hard for the young girls on Carrizo Street. When Margie Tapia was only fifteen, her mother arranged for her to move in with Pricilla’s uncle Carlos, even though he was a lot older and not the father of her child. As Margie and Carlos turned the tiny Hernandez living room into a bedroom, Pricilla couldn’t help but notice that Carlos’s new “wife” wasn’t much older than Pricilla herself or her playmate Beatrice Tapia, Margie’s sister. Then there was the pregnant twelve-year-old down the street who was forced by her mother to have sex with men to raise money for an abortion. The problem went away, however, when the girl miscarried while playing basketball.
Years later, Pricilla told the private investigators that she couldn’t wait to leave Carrizo Street and, especially, to put behind her the things that happened at Fidela’s house. Asked why, she answered through tears: “A lot of violence. A lot of hurt.” Carlos and her other uncle Javier would fight, knives would come out, and soon someone was bleeding. There was “always blood” at Fidela’s house. One time, Pricilla saw Carlos stab Javier in the shoulder. Lucky for Javier, he was wearing a coat, or it would have been worse.
One of the most vicious fights Pricilla remembers was between Carlos and her stepfather, Freddy Schilling. Carlos was arguing with Freddy about a woman named Dahlia. The fight ended in a stabbing, and an ambulance came. Freddy wasn’t a violent man, Pricilla said. Unlike Carlos, Freddy didn’t carry knives.
. . .
As far as Pricilla was concerned, however, it wasn’t her uncles but her grandmother Fidela who caused most of the trouble in the family. “A witch,” Pricilla called her, who never showed love to anyone. No hugs. No kisses. None of the normal things a grandmother does.
Thanks also to Fidela, Pricilla’s home was permeated with sex. It was “ugly” and “dirty,” and it was constant. Everyone in the neighborhood knew that Fidela had men in and out of her home for money. When he was a kid, Javier told neighbors he watched his mother having sex with one of them. She didn’t hide it.
Fidela’s appetite was also directed at her granddaughter. She made Pricilla take showers in front of her, as she previously had done to Pricilla’s mother, Paula. Sometimes Fidela forced Pricilla to sleep in a bed with her and her uncle Carlos.
Worst of all, in the Hernandez household, sex and violence went hand in hand.
When Pricilla was nine, Carlos started molesting her—exposing himself at first, then forcing her to perform oral sex, then worse. He raped her repeatedly until she was a teenager and left the house.
Nobody did anything to stop it. Carlos told her not to tell anyone, because no one would believe it. Once, Javier walked in on Carlos unzipping his pants in front of Pricilla. After a fight with Carlos, Javier told his niece that he would protect her, but he never did. When Pricilla told her mother what was happening, Paula just cried. When Pricilla told Fidela, she called Pricilla a liar and told her granddaughter to keep her mouth shut. The best Pricilla could do was to stay around other people and avoid being alone with her uncle.
Carlos was “sick,” she told the investigators, and did nothing but harm her and everyone else.
. . .
Carlos molested other children. His younger brother, Frankie, told neighbors that Carlos raped him all the time. When he went to Fidela for help, she told him to “fight like a man.”
The abuse reached outside the family as well. Pricilla heard from one of Carlos’s lady friends that he molested a little girl on Seventh Street. He was twice caught molesting another girlfriend’s five-year-old niece but was never reported. Carlos tried to rape the daughter of a next-door neighbor who was at Fidela’s house playing with Pricilla. He pulled her behind the house, but she was able to kick him and get free. She ran home and told her mother, but no one called the police. Just six months before the private investigators came to Marcella Brown’s house to ask about Carlos, a friend from years before, she learned from her adult son that Carlos had molested him in the 1980s.
That’s how Carlos was, Pricilla said. “He thought he was untouchable.” He didn’t think the rules applied to him. He scared people and got away with things. Carlos was arrested for many crimes in his day—armed robbery, grand theft, dealing heroin, assault with a deadly weapon, attempted burglary, murder, and attempted murder—but he almost never went to prison for them. When he committed crimes in the neighborhood, no one ever turned him in, not even for abusing their own children.
For Freddy Schilling, it was Carlos’s brazen abuse of his own niece Pricilla and other young girls that summed up his brother-in-law best. Carlos Hernandez, Freddy said, was
no good, man. The dude was no good, no good. And it wasn’t just my daughter [Pricilla], believe me, because I’ve seen him. He used to hang around this laundry right there on Park and Staples. . . . It used to be kind of the hangout for the neighborhood there. And he would constantly hang out there [and] try to make passes at . . . girls 13, 14 years old. He was always trying to get them. In fact, some of them were my daughter’s friends. My daughter could tell you that, that Carlos tried to put his hands on them. The dude was sick, man. He was throwed off, he was throwed off, believe me. [H]e used to scare the shit out of me.
. . .
It wasn’t just the abuse that made Pricilla decide to run away, however. There was something else.
She was eleven or twelve at the time, around 1983. Carlos and Javier were sitting outside on the porch, talking and drinking beer. She and a friend were playing on the grass near steps that ran down the slope from the porch to the street (figure 8.1).
Carlos was playing with his buck knife and bragging about it to Javier. He said he’d hurt someone with a knife, stabbed her. Her name was Wanda, he said, and Javier knew her.
“Nah, you didn’t do that,” Javier said. “Yes,” Carlos said, he did. But he didn’t think anyone would find out.
. . .
In 2004, investigators also visited Beatrice Tapia, Margie’s younger sister, asking about their former neighbor Carlos Hernandez. Bea hadn’t seen her childhood friend Pricilla Hernandez in years, but she remembered the same terrifying conversation that Pricilla had overheard.
The two girls were on the steps going up to the Hernandez porch talking to each other and listening to Carlos and Javier, who were drinking beer on the porch. Bea heard Carlos tell his brother that he had done something wrong, and he mentioned the name Wanda. He said he’d hurt her—he’d killed her—and he felt sorry about it.
FIGURE 8.1 The Hernandez house on South Carrizo Street where it dead-ends near Laredo Street: (top) steps up from Carrizo Street, where Pricilla Hernandez and Beatrice Tapia were sitting when they heard Carlos and Javier Hernandez talking on the porch; (bottom) the porch.
Carlos’s admission scared Bea. Like Javier, she knew who Wanda was. She remembered Carlos talking about a woman by that name who worked at a gas station near Wolfy’s. Carlos seemed to be sweet on this Wanda and talked about going over to the station to see her.
Later Bea got really scared when she heard on television that a woman named Wanda Lopez had been stabbed to death at the Sigmor Shamrock on SPID.
After Carlos had said what he’d done to the woman, Bea looked at Pricilla, who put her finger to her lips. Bea kept the secret until investigators came around twenty years later, after Carlos Hernandez had died in prison. Until then, no one had ever asked questions about Carlos Hernandez and Wanda Lopez.
. . .
Bea and Margie’s mother, Janie Adrian, had her own memories of Carlos around the time of the killing at the Sigmor Shamrock. Those days, she was friendly with Fidela. They went out drinking and dancing together.
Janie told the investigators that she remembered Carlos Hernandez coming to her house one night looking for Margie. The two had broken up years before, and although Carlos still came by to see Margie’s son Eric, this was different. He said he really had to talk to Margie.
Carlos pulled up in a car and honked for Janie to come over.*1 He didn’t get out of the car but opened the door and hung halfway out of it. He was nervous and agitated. Janie told him that Margie wasn’t there, and he left.
Janie recalled Carlos coming by not long before she heard on the news that Wanda Lopez had been stabbed at the Shamrock station. At the time, she didn’t think much about Carlos’s anxious visit. That changed, however, when she overheard Carlos talking in the “park” behind her small apartment. The guys who hung out there often gabbed loudly enough for her to hear, and Janie didn’t mind keeping track of the goings on.
Worried to this day that she’s in trouble for not telling the police—and angry at Carlos for breaking the neighborhood code by saying things he should have kept to himself—Janie haltingly told the investigators what she heard Hernandez say.
Misspelling the Spanish word, the investigator recorded Janie’s statement in his notes:
Bragging. . . . He said it, he hurt Wanda, and he said (Janie Adrian is crying now) Carlos DeLuna took the fall. Wanda Lopez. My tocallo took the blame. When he was drinking he didn’t keep his mouth shut.
Carlos Hernandez, she later elaborated, said “he stabbed this girl.” Her name was Wanda. His “stupid tocayo took the blame for it.”
“Tocayo,” Janie explained, means “namesake” or cuate (twin). She volunteered that she had seen Carlos Hernandez and Carlos DeLuna together on Carrizo Street before. They “look the same,” she said.
Janie recalled that Hernandez sounded proud as he talked to the other guys. If he hadn’t used Wanda’s name, she said, he might as well have been talking about “kill[ing] a dog or something.”
Janie made a connection to the night Carlos had come by desperately looking for Margie. She wondered whether maybe he hadn’t felt so proud then, before they got DeLuna for the crime.
Asked whether she called the police, Janie was at once indignant and defensive. That’s not the type of person she is, she said. In her world, when “you hear something, you just shut up and that’s it. You don’t know nothing, you didn’t hear nothing.” No one wanted to be seen as a “stoolie.” It was a running joke, she said, between her and Fidela. “I’m not going to make it easier” for the cops, they’d repeat to each other. “Let them do their job.”
That’s why Janie was irritated at Carlos for running his mouth. It was dangerous to learn “more than what we were supposed to have known”—especially when it was Hernandez himself you knew something about. Hernandez “would really really remember stuff that people would do to him,” Janie recalled, “and he would go back” for them.
Luckily, Janie said, the police never came around asking if anyone knew anything about Hernandez and Wanda Lopez. Although Carlos was bragging about it up and down Carrizo Street, they never came around. It was decades before anyone did.
“Maybe I should have said something at the time,” Janie said, “but we’re not like that. We’re not.”
Asked her opinion, twenty years later, about who killed Wanda Lopez, Janie said “Carlos Hernandez,” because that’s what had “come out of his mouth. . . . There was a stabbing and her name was Wanda Lopez.” When she heard that, she said, “It came into my head, how could this be?” But she decided it was none of her business. “I mean, he shouldn’t be saying nothing like that.”
. . .
When Pricilla Hernandez was thirteen, she left Fidela’s house on Carrizo Street to live with her mother, Paula. When that didn’t work out, Pricilla moved in with her father, Beto Vela, and his wife, Linda Perales Vela (later Ayala).
Beto told Linda that he didn’t even know that Paula had a daughter by him until Pricilla showed up on his doorstep once when she was twelve years old. Pricilla remembered Fidela pointing Beto out to her as her father and encouraging her to go live with him.
Beto and Linda took Pricilla in, but that didn’t work out either. Pricilla’s new parents discovered that she was pregnant and believed the father was their own fifteen-year-old son, Pricilla’s half-brother Paul. Beto and Linda kicked both of them out after catching them in bed together. Linda ended up raising Pricilla’s daughter and maintained an on-again, off-again relationship with Pricilla herself.
Over the years, Pricilla told Linda a lot about what went on in Fidela’s house on Carrizo Street and what her uncle Carlos Hernandez did to her. That helped Linda make sense of her stepdaughter. Knowing that Pricilla had seen men going into and out of the house for sex with her grandmother, and that the young girl had been raped by her own blood relative, Linda figured that Pricilla was bound to end up doing something like that herself.
Strangely, Linda Perales Vela was also connected to Carlos DeLuna’s family. She met Manuel DeLuna in church when she was ten, around 1970. In the mid-1970s, they began dating and hanging out at the Casino Club. Linda met Manuel’s brother Carlos at the club. He was “real hyper,” she remembered—“not a fighting person,” she said, but “he talked fast and drank a lot.”
In 1983, Linda heard that her name had come up in connection with the killing of Wanda Lopez at the Sigmor Shamrock gas station. Carlos DeLuna had been arrested for the crime, and he had said something about running into Linda and her sister Mary Ann at the skating rink that night. Linda heard about this from Mary Ann, who went to court to testify about it.
No one had contacted Linda at the time. Reflecting on it later, she doubted she saw DeLuna at the skating rink that night, but she wasn’t sure. She used to go to the rink a lot, but by 1983 she was probably home with her children.
Years later, right after Linda divorced Beto Vela, she reconnected with Manuel DeLuna, and they were married for a short time in 1998. That’s what brought the killing of Wanda Lopez and the two Carloses together for Linda.
Manuel told her that his brother was innocent and that Carlos Hernandez was the killer. Manuel had heard that from another guy in prison, who’d heard it from Hernandez himself.
What really made Linda pay attention, though, was what her stepdaughter, Pricilla, told her after learning that Linda had married Carlos DeLuna’s brother. Pricilla had overheard her uncle Carlos Hernandez saying it was he, not Carlos DeLuna, who had killed Wanda Lopez.
. . .
Others heard Carlos Hernandez say things as well. Lina Zapata first met Carlos in the 1980s, when her family moved to Carrizo Street. Lina’s father told her to stay away from him because he’d been in prison and was violent.
Lina got to know Carlos better in the early 1990s, when she moved into an apartment complex on Hancock Street, where Carlos lived with his girlfriend, Cindy Maxwell.
One time, she and Carlos were drinking together, and out of the blue he said he’d killed before, as if that was a normal thing to say in the middle of a conversation.
“No shit, you killed someone?” Lina asked. “Yeah,” Carlos said. He didn’t elaborate. Asked later if she ever heard Carlos talk about Dahlia Sauceda, Lina said the name wasn’t familiar. She did remember him talking about a woman named Wanda.
Carlos Hernandez met Cindy Maxwell in 1979, and he lived with her on and off into the 1990s. An African American woman with a mental disability whose parents acted as her legal guardians throughout her adult life, Cindy was working as a custodian at a public library when she met Hernandez.
Although Carlos had relationships with many other women in those years, he always went back to Cindy. She took care of him. She paid for everything. She bought him beer—a twelve-pack a day—and whatever else he wanted. She loved Carlos in spite of his drinking problem and the violent incidents she sometimes reported to the police. On one occasion, he threatened to “cut her,” and on another he “accidentally” cut her son.
According to Cindy’s niece, Cindy knew more than just that Carlos drank and had a temper. Cindy told her that Carlos had killed a woman during a robbery. Cindy didn’t offer details. Around the same time, Hernandez told Cindy and a friend, Michelle Garza, “that he had killed a lady in a van.” Garza later told the investigators that she “thought [Hernandez] was just making it up, until Cindy told me he had stabbed some other lady,” too.
When the investigators came around, Cindy had nothing bad to say about Carlos. She’d heard from a friend that he killed a lady in a robbery, and she heard Carlos say a lot of things himself over the years. But when Carlos talked like that, Cindy said, she wouldn’t listen.
. . .
At some point between 1987 and 1989, when Manuel DeLuna was in state prison, he ran into a young kid from Corpus Christi he remembered as Ortiz—“Carlos” Ortiz, he thought, but he wasn’t sure.
“I was walking down the hallway at the Old Clemens Unit,” Manuel told the investigators, “and ran into him in the classification [office, when] he was just coming in from the chain [the bus for new inmates].” Ortiz “asked me if my name was Manuel DeLuna from Corpus Christi and if Carlos was my brother.”
Ortiz said he had something to tell Manuel, and they agreed to meet in the rec yard. When they did, Ortiz started talking about Carlos Hernandez and Carlos DeLuna.
Ortiz said he met Hernandez at Armada Park in Corpus Christi, where a bunch of guys were drinking beer. Hernandez “started bragging about all his killings”—three of them, all women. There was one in a van, one at gas a station, and one under a bridge.
“I killed this chick, this chick, this chick,” is how Manuel remembered Ortiz describing the conversation. Hernandez was a “woman killer,” Ortiz had said, someone “who actually liked to hurt women.”
The main reason Ortiz wanted to talk to Manuel, however, was something that Hernandez said about the “gas station” killing he had committed. On that one, Hernandez had bragged, “Carlos DeLuna took the fall.” “DeLuna” took “Hernandez’s rap.”
“Everyone knows that your brother was not guilty,” Manuel remembers Ortiz saying.
For months, the private investigators looked in vain for a Carlos or Charles Ortiz from Corpus who’d been in prison fifteen years earlier. Near the end of their work on the case, they homed in on a detail Manuel had given. He and Ortiz had taken the same plumbing course in the Old Clemens Unit. A search of prison records identified a Miguel Ortiz from Corpus Christi, several years younger than Manuel, who was in the same prison and plumbing class.
News reporters later caught up with Miguel Ortiz in Corpus Christi. It was a short conversation. Ortiz said that he and Carlos Hernandez “were drinking in a park when Hernandez talked about a clerk he had ‘wasted’ at a gas station. ‘I just let that go,’” Ortiz told the reporters.
. . .
Even Jesse Garza’s lawyer, Albert Peña, heard the rumor that it was Carlos Hernandez, not Carlos DeLuna, who had murdered Wanda Lopez.
Speaking about it years later, the accomplished lawyer choked up at the thought of someone facing the death penalty for a crime another person had committed. “I heard through police sources and through people at the courthouse, people in the know, that Carlos Hernandez was suspected of doing it,” Peña said. But they put “blinders on.”
In Peña’s mind, everything went back to what happened in 1980. They should have put Carlos Hernandez away then for killing Dahlia Sauceda. If Olivia Escobedo and Kenneth Botary had done their jobs, Wanda Lopez would still be alive. And maybe others, too.
Note
*1. Carlos Hernandez only rarely had regular access to a car. One period when he did, however, was in 1983, when he commandeered Rosa Anzaldua’s 1975 Mercury. Anzaldua and Hernandez were married in 1982. In November 1983, after Hernandez attacked her and her children with a baseball bat, Rosa sued for a divorce and also asked for an order of protection and an order requiring Hernandez to return her Mercury. In early 1984, the court granted all three requests.