The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts (12 page)

“What happened here?” he would recall asking on the witness stand. He couldn't believe his eyes.

John, who had been seated, stood up and put his wrists together. “Arrest me.”

Cervantes told everyone to exit what was now a crime scene. For years, the dirty clothes, deflated balloons, broken exercise bike, baby bottles, mattresses, shopping cart full of purses and debris, used condoms, and porn magazines would remain, waiting for jurors to walk through the evidence.

When backup arrived, John was transported to the police
­station, about a quarter of a mile away. Officer Mike Cardiel ­patted him down outside the apartment, then put him in the center of the backseat of Cardiel's patrol car. On the short drive to the station, Cardiel testified, John calmly told him, “I cut my daughter's head. She was talking to me like she was possessed.” After a silence, he added, “I remember seeing a bunch of cats outside of my ­window.”

Q. So you took care of them, you fed them, you—how did you feel about the children? Did you love them?

A. Yeah. I adored my children.

Q. You loved them very much?

A. Of course. I would do anything for them.

John would also volunteer some thoughts about the murders in a letter.

The Bible says All things happen for good, though I still have trouble excepting that this had to happen for God to get my attention it sure worked. I've had to learn to forgive myself even though it still eats at me and it has been the hardest thing I have ever had to do. Just wanted you to know this so you can understand me a little. I have gone through a tramendence lose and tramatic event. No one seems to want to get to know how I feel about all of this. If you think about it, I mean really think about it and I really did believe I saw all that I saw and heard, the reality of having lost my children would and was a terrible hit to me once it sunk in.

John goes on to say that the motive presented by the prosecution—that he killed the children because he was overwhelmed by poverty—doesn't make sense. After all, they got their meals from Good Neighbor and knew where to find the city's free shelter—the Ozanam Center—though it's several miles from downtown. John says that the only “rational” reason for the murders was because “somethings crazy happened and I just snapped.”

In another letter, John said he once poked his head into a bird's nest as a little boy.

i was looking at some beautiful bird eggs, white with some blue dots when something started attacking me from above. I looked and it was abird, not I am not going to say super man, a real bird like the eggs mama bird or the dad. i wasn't going to hurt them but she or he didn't know that so she/he was diffending its young. I tryed to swat it away and lost my grip.

John said he hit every branch as he fell down the tree.

CHAPTER 10

After

This type of thing happens once in a lifetime, no more. Hopefully we'll never know something like this again, because it's not pretty.

—
FELIX SAUCEDA, NEIGHBOR

M
acarena Hernández was the Rio Grande Valley bureau chief for the
San Antonio Express-News
at the time of the murders. She drove out to Brownsville from her office that evening and pulled up to the building late at night. News cameras, police, and dozens of neighbors loitered in front, hoping to learn some new tidbit. But for Hernández, those details—the ones that made other reporters' pulses race—plunged her deeper into distress.

“It just kept getting worse. And worse. And worse,” she said. “Police always say in press conferences, ‘This is one of the worst cases we've seen,' so I was used to hearing that. But this really was. Just the fact that the three little kids were all so young . . . It was just, like, how? What?”

After John and Angela were brought to jail, the street corner in front of the building quickly became a stage for votive candles, flowers, and stuffed animals. A cardboard sign was placed outside that
proclaimed
ESTAMOS CON USTEDES, ÁNGELITOS
. We are with you, little angels. For a time, an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe graced the doorway. On the Thursday after the murders, a memorial was held on the basketball court of the Boys and Girls Club across the street, with about three hundred people in attendance. A neighbor, Nancy Garcia, sobbed as she told
T
he Brownsville Herald
that she'd never spoken to the family. “I feel so sad because I couldn't do anything. I wish I would have known.”

Reporters came from all over the country to cover the story. Hernández's editors were eager to have her write regular follow-ups and attend the funeral. The mortician had carefully placed the heads back on the bodies of the children to allow for open caskets.

“It took many hours, but they were viewable,” funeral director Lillian Kaye Guerra told the Associated Press at the time. “Everyone said they looked like little porcelain angels.”

Julissa wore a white satin gown, Mary Jane a dress with flowers and a matching hat, and John Stephan a white suit and bow tie.

Before the service, Officer Cervantes, who'd been flagged down by Jose Luis, came by the funeral home. The murders were the first he'd dealt with in his career, and he was struggling. It had taken him two and a half hours and five attempts to write a police report less than two pages long. Cervantes didn't get home until five thirty the next morning because, he said, the police department was triple-checking every detail, to ensure that a technical error wouldn't get in the way of the criminals' prosecution. As the week progressed, he decided he needed closure.

“They opened the funeral home for me so I could go in and see these kids with their heads on,” he told me. “I wanted to see them
complete.” The children, he said, looked beautiful. Peaceful. He carried that image with him from then on and, in the decade that followed, rarely spoke of the crime outside the courtroom, even to his wife.

Looking back, Cervantes could clearly see how the case had altered his life. At work, he'd proven his professionalism, and colleagues told him he'd learned more in a single day than he might have in years on the job. From then on, he approached every call skeptically, cognizant that a superficially routine visit to a Brownsville home could morph into something unimaginable.

It also affected his personal life. Cervantes had been young when his wife got pregnant, and he spent the next seven years working at a grocery store before putting himself through the police academy and becoming a cop. During those years of early fatherhood, he was focused on work and equated parenting with providing for his family rather than being present. But after he discovered the crime scene, his priorities shifted. When he went home the next morning, he walked past the shelf with his kids' storybooks and toys and kissed each of his daughters, one sleeping beneath a Hello Kitty comforter, the other under a SpongeBob blanket. As he looked at his five-year-old, he thought of Julissa. In the months and years that followed, he spent more time with them, fitting in an extra hour at home when he could.

The weekend after the children died, pallbearers carried the white caskets into the Guerra Funeral Home and laid them alongside one another. The aisles were filled with toys.

Elsa Guerrero, a seventy-six-year-old employee of the Lopez supermarket, told Hernández she had a soft spot for Julissa.

“What a beautiful family. I know I'm older, but if they'd given me the three-year-old I would have tried my best.”

Angela's mother wept uncontrollably while Hilda silently cried. Later, they both released doves for the children, as did Julissa's aunt. After the funeral, it began to rain, and a woman told Hernández, “Heaven is crying.” Angela and John were both on suicide watch in their respective jail cells, being checked every fifteen minutes.

Hernández grew up in the border town of La Joya, and as she reported on the murders, she was frustrated. “I hated that the only time we wrote about these towns along the border was when these really horrible things happen. This isn't really the narrative of the border. When it happened, I knew: we're going to spend a lot of energy on this story. In journalism we try and be objective, but we're also not objective when we only cover these types of stories and leave everything else out.”

Journalism has its shorthand. “Run and gun” reporting refers to speed: get to the scene immediately and photograph or report as much as possible. Parachute journalists drop in from out of town, having prepared for a day or two before hitting the ground. They get the story and leave before public interest ebbs or they rack up too large of a tab for the publication. At a local outlet, a story like this might become a reporter's beat, meaning he or she would have first dibs on any news generated and would be assigned to watch it like a hawk.

But once that burst of attention subsides, most crime stories become footnotes. As Hernández suggested, to the world beyond South Texas, a city such as Brownsville is just an imaginary place, a spot on the map that's psychically blank until it's filled with bits of information that appear in national publications or broadcasts or films. These snippets are often limited to local crimes, and their perpetrators begin to populate that blank space, leaving out all of the reg
ular people who make up the majority of the community. While the story may have been resolved from a news perspective, for the people who witness and survive such an event, its trauma has a long life.

Even for a place that's off the collective radar, something good occasionally makes its way into the mix—a championship sports team, the rescue of an endangered plant or animal, a talented artist, the local cuisine. But too much of what people learn about a border city, or small, poor cities generally, relates to spectacularly terrible events covered with shallow impatience. A camera shutter snaps, a neighbor comments on his or her shock. Those reactions remain preserved as the sole—and therefore final—word on what happened. The subtler details fade away, and the community, that network of friends and neighbors and strangers that reach out and help one another in the face of such a loss, isn't represented.

In her book
A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster
, Rebecca Solnit describes the way people band together in the face of tragedy, defaulting to our best, most charitable instincts as if we'd been switched back to a factory setting. “The possibility of paradise hovers on the cusp of coming into being, so much so that it takes powerful forces to keep such a paradise at bay. If paradise now arises in hell, it's because in the suspension of the usual order and the failure of most systems, we are free to live and act another way.”

Solnit's book is concerned with large-scale disasters such as the earthquake that leveled San Francisco in 1906 and the destruction of the World Trade Center, which reconfigured entire cities and tossed their inhabitants into chaos. A heinous crime does not create that kind of absolute disorder, or, therefore, the reordering of the world in its wake. But such events do create confusion and need
and inspire others to respond. Some of that reaction is vitriolic, but much of it is giving. Those bits of kindness doled out in the face of horror are often obscured by fascination with gore or left out of thirty-second sound bites that become the archive. While some generosity may be instantaneous, some takes time. The changes that spring through a community, both broadly and in the lives of individuals such as Officer Cervantes, go unacknowledged.

It took seven weeks before Dr. William Valverde, a psychiatrist, met with John. He said John showed the symptoms of paranoid schizophrenia, a condition he believed may have been exacerbated by the use of spray paint. Notably, the symptoms of schizophrenia typically begin to manifest in early adulthood. At twenty-two, John would have fit the mold. Many of those suffering from the chronic illness experience delusions, believe they're being persecuted, hear voices, and think they're on a special mission. Most are not actively psychotic the majority of the time; rather, the severity of their symptoms can heighten or subside.

John's timeline of the events, as he described them to Dr. Valverde, seemed radically off. He told the psychiatrist that he and his family were inside the apartment for seventy-two hours—a full three days—rather than approximately twenty-four hours that other testimony indicated.

But if John did have schizophrenia and was seeing and hearing things that weren't real, why did Angela blame her actions on the same illusions? Dr. Valverde attributed this to
folie à deux
, or a “folly of two,” a French term for the rare phenomenon in which two people living in proximity sometimes share the same delusion. “There is a dominant individual,” Dr. Valverde testified. “It is their delusion first, and then you have the other person who tends to be somewhat passive and
becomes convinced that the delusion is correct and then supports the dominant person in sharing the delusion, or maintaining it in place.”

Angela's characteristics matched some of those psychiatrists say can be found in the second party—she was mentally challenged, female, and had what some described as a passive personality. John wrote to me that, when he and Angela first got together, he tried to instill in her a sense of agency and convince her they were equals, “but she was so scared, she would just follow what anyone would say. She is sweat, loving, but gulable as well.” Still, Angela's behavior wasn't as thoroughly scrutinized as John's, as she accepted a plea bargain and never went through an extensive trial of her own, and so her part in such a group delusion is not clear.

At the end of his first trial, after John was found guilty, one of his attorneys, Alfredo Padilla, told jurors that he and his cocounsel had intended to present evidence that might have inspired the jurors to have mercy on John, but John had instructed them not to do so.

MR. PADILLA
: Mr. Rubio, it is my understanding, sir, in our discussions previous to this date, and on yesterday afternoon, it is your request that this jury assess death to you, sir?

DEFENDANT RUBIO
: Yes, sir.

MR. PADILLA
: And it is your belief that God has forgiven you for what you have done, sir?

DEFENDANT RUBIO
: Yes, sir.

MR. PADILLA
: And that you want to be with your children in heaven; is that correct?

DEFENDANT RUBIO
: Yes, sir.

MR. PADILLA
: That's all we have, Your Honor.