The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts (10 page)

I'd asked Gamez whether he had a sense of Angela and John's relationship.

“In her own way she loved him, yes, and believed she was doing the right thing or involved in the right thing.”

I asked Gamez if the tools that a court of law uses to treat such actions could be reconciled with the spiritual powers he now believes to hold such influence over people's actions.

“There seems unfortunately to be a disconnect in our law and the actuality of demonic presence that overtakes one's soul and mind. The law says if you do this, this is how you should pay.” He knocked on the table. “But the disconnect is, the law doesn't balance out that this type of earthly demonic presence is capable of making, having people do evil things, that they wouldn't normally do, but for that demonic persuasion.”

The rule of law was not sympathetic to the influence of religion, no matter how those enforcing the law might privately feel.

“They just say, ‘You do it, you pay for it,' ” Gamez said. “They say, ‘You're responsible for your own actions.' However, the Bible is filled with lessons and parables of Jesus Christ casting out demons, and these people become whole and forgiven of their sins. The law doesn't have that forgiveness. It doesn't matter if you're possessed or have a presence of evil. You're responsible for it, period.” Gamez saw this as a double triumph of the demons. They managed to both push the individual to commit the act and fool his fellow man into condemning him for that transgression.

“I really thought about having a defense that this was potentially a person who might have got involved in doing something that it wasn't the person doing it, it was the possession having them do it,” Gamez said. “That makes them not responsible for the conduct, and they have this evil possession. Because what happened here was just horrific and not ordinary and not common.”

Because of the disconnect he spoke about, such a defense couldn't realistically be pursued. Instead, he had his client choose between the possibility of the death penalty, and a plea bargain.

“These are high stakes: life or death. So, she chose life.”

Mireya Villarreal, a correspondent for CBS, had once been a reporter for a Rio Grande Valley news station and interviewed Angela on camera in 2007. Due to the gag order during the trial, Angela hadn't yet told the community what had happened in her own words, outside of being questioned on the witness stand or shown speaking to detectives in video footage.

“Some people would say this type of thing scares them,” Villarreal said. “I was always more intrigued than anything.”

Villarreal wrote Angela a letter, and she wrote back. “It was kind of like exchanging letters with a child, with a kid. Everything from her handwriting to her grammar, the way she wrote sentences and described things, she didn't have the same level of communication as other adults.”

Angela agreed to have Villarreal visit the prison and conduct the interview on camera. The letters were indicative of what Villarreal would find when she met Angela in person—a grown woman whose affect reminded her of a child.

When they met, Angela denied stabbing the children or helping John kill them. She said John convinced her that witchcraft had been performed upon them and that the kids were possessed.

“I start believing everything like a little girl,” Angela told Villarreal. “I don't know why, but I start believing everything like a little girl.”

Villarreal wasn't living in the valley when the crime happened and said she entered the situation judgment-free. She thought Angela had clearly been deeply in love with John at the time of the crime. It was the two of them against the world, outcasts even within their own small circle.

“She was very cognizant that the intoxication of being in love with him was part of what drove her to do it,” Villarreal recalled.

Some were sympathetic to Angela's plight. In 2010, a letter to the editor of the
Herald
titled “Give Angela Camacho a Second Chance” read, “Poor Angela was one of the victims of John Allen Rubio and she gets punished. It seems to me that not enough justice has been given to her. If Angela is going to live in her own hell knowing that her children are gone and not coming back, is that not punishment enough?”

But most reactions to Villarreal's interview were vitriolic.

“They were so disgusted by her,” she said, “and didn't think she deserved a platform to explain what happened.”

As for Villarreal, she found the story made her a more sensitive reporter. Once she landed a gig in a larger market, San Antonio, she was quickly tasked with covering several more cases of mothers murdering their children. Three occurred in six months.

“I felt like I had a better idea of what these women were going through,” she said. “It's easier not to rush to judgment and to be fair in these kinds of stories.”

• • •

I went to Angela's mother's house again after several months. Two cars were parked out front this time, which seemed promising. One of them looked to be in good shape. Someone must be home.

As I approached I heard a jingle. A skinny cat with a tan coat and piercing blue eyes walked through a hole in the neighbor's fence. It wore a ribbon with a little bell around its neck, the kind that looked as if it had come off a Christmas tree. The cat approached me with caution.

A little green car, one I recognized from months ago when I'd
come to the yellow house, sped down the road and then pulled into the yard. The driver, a middle-aged man, waved at me.
Buenos días,
I said when he got out of the car, and approached him with a notepad. I told him whom I was looking for.

“No vive aquí,”
he told me. She doesn't live here.

Did she move?

“Sí, qué necesitas?”
Yes, what do you need?

I want to do an interview with her, I said, about her daughter Angela Camacho.

The man looked at me again, and I could see the traces of revulsion on his face. Reporters are always coming here from the TV channels, he said. She's not here. He waved his hand, the way I had to the cat a little while earlier, as if to say “scat
.
”

I figured it was time to give up. I closed that line of inquiry in my mind. But I'd never spoken to Angela's mother, and the possibility was, however minute, that she would have been willing if she had the choice. After two years, I drove back again. The same man was there, and this time he told me that he was Angela's stepfather and explained at length why he didn't want to talk to me. I saw myself then through his eyes, as an emissary of sorrow. I asked if I could return again when Angela's mother was home and did so at a day and time he named. She walked into the front yard, listened to me for a minute, then dismissed me. She was courteous. I got into my car and drove around the figure eight, back onto the country roads, and back to Brownsville.

John with Mary Jane

Angela with John Stephan

(Photos courtesy of John Allen Rubio)

CHAPTER 9

Don't Read This Chapter before Going to Bed

I would do anything for them.

—JOHN ALLEN RUBIO

I
n the beginning of March 2003, John and Angela saw friends, ate their meals at Good Neighbor, and took care of their children. John had lost his job busing tables at the Golden Corral in December, and Angela had given birth to Mary Jane in January. By March, Mary Jane was two months old, John Stephan was fourteen months, and Julissa three years old. Angela was twenty-three, and John was twenty-two.

The apartment was crowded with several other people who helped pay the rent. Hilda, often a roommate in other residences, was living in the rental, sometimes with a male companion. So was Lorena, a prostitute John had met at the Hotel Economico, whose legal name was Jose Manuel Hernandez. Lorena's boyfriend, Penguino, stayed over, too. Sometimes Lorena brought men to the apartment, and Penguino slept on the floor.

Without his position at the Golden Corral, John needed to find new ways to get his half of the rent together. He also, evidently,
needed money to buy drugs: when tested during his probationary period for possession of marijuana, his urine was found positive for cocaine and marijuana in January and cocaine in February, and his probation officer filed to have his probation revoked. John did odd jobs, but that wasn't enough.

A. I had to sell my body. Not sell it, sell it. I mean, I would go to—downtown. My mom taught me this. She told me, “You want to make money, Son? I know an easy way for you to get money. You look good. You have a nice body. Men will pay for people like you, and they have and they all will.”

Q. So you were basically a male prostitute downtown?

A. Yes.

John said he brought in about $80 a day and could usually make rent when he combined it with the money from other gigs. But John downplayed his sex work and told me it was not the norm.

He was also sexually involved with Jose Luis Moreno, whom he'd known as a young boy and met again as an adult. Angela seemed bothered by these extramarital activities, but John apparently didn't care. John wrote that Moreno gave him money, and that the relationship was “business and friendship only. He was the one who thought of us as a couple yet I never agreed to that.” In court, Moreno called the relationship a “boyfriend, girlfriend thing,” and said he never paid John to go out with him. Moreno was also seeing another man, Ivan.

John wrote to me that he tried to make the relationship clear to Moreno.

He was somewhat a friend but he wanted something more and that I could not give to him. I told him strat out from the first time I saw he wanted something more. He knew I could not nor would I love him or leave Angela for him. Angela did not like him or me doing that. She wanted for me not to go with him anymore. She said that she could find work as a baby sitter while I find a job. I didn't let her for fear that she too would be to independant and leave me as Gina did. Selfish I realize that now but back then I only wished to stay with her and my kids forever.

Moreno, a nurse, testified at the trial that he wanted John to leave Angela and live with him, and that he noticed John having what he called “absent seizures,” or moments when John would stare blankly and unresponsively into space. Part of the prosecution's argument was built on the idea that, free of the burden of their children, John intended to run away from Angela and establish a new life elsewhere.

Two weeks before the murders, John and Julissa went to Bigo's, a Mexican restaurant, to celebrate Hilda's birthday. John put in an application to work at the restaurant. Afterward John and his brothers went out bowling. John was smiling and laughing, Manuel recalled. It should have made a good memory.

Hilda testified that, when the family got home from this outing, Angela told her she didn't want her living there anymore. Hilda went to stay with a friend nearby.

In the days immediately before the murders, Lorena was staying at the Hotel Economico with a client, a man who worked at a carnival that was in town. Penguino had stopped by the apartment smelling of spray paint, and John chastised him, Penguino would
testify. It put a rift between the two men, and Penguino decided to leave. He didn't return.

John often huffed paint, but would tell a psychiatrist that he'd been on a binge for two weeks straight, and hadn't been eating or sleeping. While he claimed he stopped a few days before the murders, he could still feel the spray in his system. The drug had put a rift between John and Angela. She didn't approve of it, John told the psychiatrist.

Moreno's testimony portrayed John as frequently out of the house socializing, even though he had a new baby at home and two other small children. On the Friday before, John went to the carnival with Moreno and Ivan. They stayed out until three in the morning, then Moreno dropped John off at the apartment without going inside. The next day, Moreno came by to pick John up, but John told him he was busy taking care of the children. John's brother Rodrigo dropped his kids off and John watched them for a few hours. That night, John asked Rodrigo for money.

“I asked to see if he can try and get a job,” Rodrigo remembered. “And if not, I would help him out then.”

Rodrigo had helped John in the past and didn't always approve of his choices. Once he lent John $10, only to find that he'd spent it on Polaroid film to take pictures of the kids. Those would be among the only images of the children when they were alive.

“I thought it was kind of dumb,” Rodrigo would say of the Polaroid purchase on the witness stand. “He needed something else at the house, like cleaning supplies or food.” Ultimately, Rodrigo said the decision to buy the film to take pictures of the kids was “thoughtful” of John.

The question of money wasn't unusual.

“He was pretty much dependent on most of us.”

That night, after 11:00 p.m., John left with Moreno and they watched a movie at Ivan's house. On Sunday, Moreno wanted to take John to the beach, but when he came by the house John told him to leave—Angela was angry with John, apparently for spending so much time with Moreno.

At trial, many of those testifying had trouble remembering precise timelines, so it's not always clear what happened when, or whose memory is the most accurate. During that week, a friend, Maria Elena Alvarez, also known as Beva, came by the apartment with another friend. It was Beva whom John and Angela had stayed with for a couple of months when Child Protective Services placed the kids in Los Fresnos. The kids had been sick days earlier, but Beva said medicine was in the apartment, which was dirty.

“Well, it was always dirty,” she testified. “In other words, it didn't look like anything out of the ordinary.”

John and Angela ate at Good Neighbor, where they also received their mail and got a notification that there was a problem with the paperwork for their food stamps.

Irma Longoria, an employee at Good Neighbor, saw John on Monday, March 10, the day before the murders, his eyes swollen. She'd never before seen him like that.

“Are you sick?” she asked.

“No,” John said. “I haven't slept all night.” He told Irma that he didn't have money to pay the rent, and that they were going to be thrown out of the apartment. But he didn't ask for help—instead, he walked out.

It was a beautiful day, sunny and in the seventies, with a breeze that usually came in from the Gulf that time of year. In the afternoon, John walked to the home of a man who knew one of his brothers, near Good Neighbor. John didn't know the couple, but he'd seen their car. He needed a ride, and it didn't hurt to ask.

The man's girlfriend, high school senior Melissa Nuñez, answered the door. John seemed to know that the car was hers, she testified, and asked for a ride to the Brownsville Medical Center—he was hoping to get Julissa's medical records and straighten out their problem with the food stamps. Melissa agreed to drive them
.
John sat in the passenger seat, despondent. He stared out the window in silence, making no effort at small talk. Angela was quiet, and the kids were asleep in the backseat.

“Thank you,” John said when the ride was over. Angela said nothing.

The children hadn't been well, Angela would say in court. They'd been acting restless, crying through the night. It was different from the image John conveyed in his letter, of baby Mary Jane who hardly ever shed a tear.

It's hard to say when the story of the murders began, precisely. There are many potential beginnings—the childhoods of the parents, the first time John did drugs, or when the children returned from Angela's mother's house. But the afternoon of March 10, 2003, is the turning point. That date marks the confluence of those other stories with other beginnings, when the trajectories of their lives converged like sea winds fitting together into the twist of a hurricane.

John and Angela came home from the Brownsville Medical Center on a bus. In looking back, it's tempting to wonder how small changes in the day could have shifted things in another direction.
What might have happened if Angela had offered a thank-you to Melissa, and she'd stayed to drive them home, avoiding a bus ride during which John's paranoia seemed to amp up? Is it possible that they could have come home and gone to sleep, woken up in the morning, and walked, as a family, to Good Neighbor for breakfast? Or what if someone at the medical center had recognized that John was acting strangely? One hopes, looking back, for the events of the day to veer in another direction. Every moment feels like one in a series of mistakes.

On the bus ride back to downtown, another passenger offered a piece of candy to little John Stephan, and John told Angela it could be poison, an alarming logical leap. They got off in Market Square. There—surrounded by little restaurants; La Movida, the bar where Hilda worked; the Hotel Economico, where a Molotov cocktail would crash through a window and envelop the top floor in flames; and the tower of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral—John and Angela said they saw a woman with scratches on her forehead. They were less than a mile from the apartment. The woman, John claimed, had the mark of the beast.

“Run, run,” Angela would recall John saying. “Don't allow her to look at your eyes.”

They ran back to the apartment
,
a couple toting an infant and two little children, careening
down the sidewalks of the city's one-way streets, past the used-clothing stores, the palm trees, the
hierberias
, the cats prowling in front yards. Also: the police cars, the county and federal courthouses, and the city jail.

When they returned home, Angela said they used the ritual of the
huevo
to “sweep” Julissa, passing the egg over her body and
then cracking it open in a glass to check its yolk. They looked at how the egg floated. What did it tell them?

“That they did evil to her,” Angela testified. Later, an expert on the use of the
huevo
would tell me this version of the ritual was inauthentic—eggs are usually used to heal rather than diagnose, and Angela and John would have needed a
curandera
to interpret the meaning of what they saw when the egg was cracked open.

Beva stopped by the house that night, and said John didn't permit her to see Angela. However, in her statement to detectives, Angela remembered seeing Beva and telling her that she was feeling strange. “I feel very bad,” she said. “I feel as though something is happening to me.” Beva had come by several times over the previous few days, so it's possible that Angela incorrectly recalled when this conversation took place.

Angela also told detectives that a friend had asked John to come with him to buy beer, so he could use John's ID. Later, when they looked for his wallet, which held their share of the rent, they couldn't find it. Police would locate the wallet, with more than $100 cash, under one of the beds.

Near midnight, Hilda came by the apartment after her shift at La Movida.
She testified that she could earn more when she drank with her customers, so she would often lose track of the half glasses of beer she imbibed during a shift. Her friend gave her a ride to the apartment. She stood outside knocking for half an hour, but this didn't strike her as unusual because John and Angela often couldn't hear knocking if they were in their bedroom. Finally, her friend beeped the car horn and John answered the door. Hilda's intention, she said in court, was to give John $125 toward the
rent  the next day, when it was due. But she didn't tell John about this plan.

Angela was cuddling with the sleeping children when Hilda's arrival woke her up. “We were hugging each other, the girl on one side and the other girl in my arms.” Hilda testified that John was mopping the floor in the third room of the apartment, and though it was near midnight, she didn't see anything strange about that. Instead she offered to help and rinsed the mop with Clorox. In her statement, Hilda said the children “looked okay.” She changed into her nightgown and planned to go to bed at the apartment, despite Angela's insistence a couple of weeks earlier that she leave.

John asked Hilda about the rent. Rather than engage, Hilda stuffed a few items of clothing into a plastic grocery-store bag and prepared to go.

“Mom, why have you been doing witchcraft on me?” John asked Hilda calmly.

Hilda was surprised at the question. “I don't do it to my own enemies, much less my sons.”

In Angela's version of the events, Hilda left the apartment at around 3:00 a.m., but John put the timing at around midnight. During that time, Angela felt increasingly tense.

When the family was alone, Angela said the children woke up and started crying. They seemed frightened and wailed for several hours. Angela thought about taking them to a doctor, but because of the notification they had received about other benefits, she worried they wouldn't be able to use Medicaid to pay for the visit.