The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts (15 page)

“The thing is, they should tear it down! That's what I want, but there's no one who will help me.” Minerva was frustrated. The other neighbors weren't doing enough to rally to get the ­building demolished: the venom they had once felt had ­diminished, and she alone held on to it with the same ­intensity of years ago.

Too many people had died at 805 East Tyler Street, and Minerva worried that in its current condition, there would only be more death to come. Some vandals could start a fire. Her house could also go up in flames.

“Go to the church and get the holy water,” Minerva urged. “
Se metió allí. Está malo
,” she said to her cousin—she got in there. It's bad.

At the end of the afternoon, Minerva's voice got quieter and formality wilted away. She was too upset to play the hostess anymore and spoke to me like a confidante.

“You think this neighborhood has something?” she said.

We could hear her cousin on the phone with her daughter, telling her that a reporter had gone into the building where the kids were killed.

“She's going to tell the whole neighborhood,” I said to Minerva, and a laugh came out of her, full and vibrant, like a sigh of relief.

When I left Minerva's house, I thought for a moment about going to the Immaculate Conception Cathedral, five or six blocks away. Minerva was sure the holy water would provide an antidote to my actions. I nearly went, if only to be respectful of her wishes. Instead I drove home and took a shower.

• • •

In the district clerk's office I sorted through a box filled with folders and papers and unearthed a stack of photographs, eight-by-ten, glossy color images that had been printed with an abundance of ink. I paged through them one by one. Here was John, young with a week's worth of facial hair, a plaid shirt with a dark collar, standing against a wood background. He was looking just beyond the camera. He appeared to be around twenty-two, his age when arrested, but it didn't quite look like a mug shot, too informal. Another picture showed a happy Julissa. I recognized the image from the newspaper archive—she was smiling so widely that it almost looked as if she were baring her teeth. But unlike the picture I'd seen at the
Herald
, this photo wasn't cropped. She was sitting on a bare, dirty mattress and seemed to be holding an empty videocassette box, though I couldn't make out the title. In front of her, in the corner of the photo, was a little boy, his face turned away from the camera. John Stephan was in a third photo.
He was sitting in a yellow-and-blue plastic swing, the kind with a secure bar for little children, suspended by ropes. He wore only a diaper. He was pale and his eyes were angled down toward the ground.

The next set of images seemed to rise up suddenly, like an external force, though I was showing them to myself with the flipping motion of my hand. A child's face was on an appendage divorced from its body. Little bodies of children, headless, were covered in puncture wounds from knives. And then, close-ups, in glossy ink that felt almost thick on the paper, of the wounds where heads were torn from bodies. On those wounds, the blood washed away, were flaps of skin I'd never seen on a human body, never imagined. Thinking of them now as I type this makes me tremble. I raced through the stack of photos, trying to see as many as I could as quickly as I could, until I felt that I might black out or throw up or fall to the carpet in tears.

The first time I was told about the murder case, when I came across the documents in the filing cabinet near my desk, the cops reporter told me he'd seen the crime-scene photos. Something in the way he said it indicated a superior level of knowledge. I could read the file all I wanted, he subliminally told me, but until I saw the photos, there was something I just wouldn't understand. Since I'd been researching the case, I'd rationalized many times why I did not, in fact, need to see the photos. The same information could be found in the coroner's report. Maybe I was in denial. I wanted to understand the case, but some part of me was holding back, afraid of what might happen if those images were imprinted on my mind.

Once I saw the autopsy photographs, the equation changed. If before John's letters to me, filled with generosity and childlike curiosity, had weighed on one side of my conscience, the photos fell like an anvil on the other, shaping my understanding of the crime like a putty of flesh and clotted blood into living nightmare.

When I heard what went on inside the apartment, I knew it was a different kind of crime from any a town typically experiences. But the crime itself wasn't unique. It's happened—infrequently—all over the world: parents killing their children. Less than two years before, Andrea Yates had drowned her five children in a bathtub in Houston. In 2009, a San Antonio woman killed her infant son and ate part of his brain. There are too many of these horror stories to enumerate. They happen, and then they happen again. I didn't pick the story of Julissa and John Stephan and Mary Jane because it was necessarily any worse than the rest, but being in my backyard, it exerted an unusual pull, one that didn't seem to let go, more than a decade later.

I eventually took a breath and returned the stack of photographs. One of the members of the office staff pulled down an unassuming cardboard box that contained the bloodstained knives that had been used in the murders and informed me that if I wanted to peruse its contents, I'd need a mask and some gloves. I declined.

Instead I went home and took another shower. I had nightmares that night, and every night for a week. Before I'd go to sleep, I'd start telling myself not to think of the photographs, and soon I could think of nothing else. They'd come at me in fragments and I'd try to blot them out, to invent another image that would collapse them
into nothingness. But no image was powerful enough to supplant them.

Even after the nightmares subsided, I couldn't wear the shoes I'd worn when I walked around the apartment. They stayed in my home for weeks, sitting near the front door. I'd tie the laces, willing myself to leave with them on, then replace them at the last second. Then I gave up putting them on at all. I left home for a few months on a temporary assignment and took all of my clothes with me, except that dark gray pair of tennis shoes. I told my boyfriend I didn't need them anymore. When I returned to the apartment and unpacked my things, I noticed the shoes, waiting for me in the back of the closet, defiant.

“I thought I told you to throw these out,” I said to Chris, though it felt more that the shoes had decided to stay of their own volition.

He looked back at me, confused. They weren't old, nothing was wrong with them.

I put them in the garbage.

The remnants of what had happened were long aged—nearly a decade had passed—but I couldn't wear the shoes that had tread on floors where so much blood was spilled.

When I walk around any big city, I know I'm stepping in the prettied-up path of bloodshed. It might be possible to trace a murder to every block in some neighborhoods. Reflecting on our nation's origins, founded on murderous theft and enslavement, every valley and plain recalls a spilling of blood, a bad history that surrounds us, silently begging to be recognized. Sometimes it seems easier not to know. Easier to forget the murders and the bloody concrete, the remnants of DNA, the graphic histories of
violence, to live in a world where the horrors of the past are invisible, or else you'd have to throw out your shoes every time they touched the street.

Another letter arrived from John. I held it between my fingertips, looking at it the way Minerva regarded me when I'd told her I'd gone inside the apartment—as if something might rub off, something that couldn't be washed away.

Julissa

John Stephan

Mary Jane

(Photos courtesy of John Allen Rubio)

CHAPTER 13

Belief

Can the devil make you do things? I don't know—I thank God for that. I've never been in that predicament, and I hope and pray that I never will be in that predicament.

—LUIS ORTEGA, SWIM TEAM COACH

W
hat was that intangible darkness, the tar that seeped through my skin, when I went inside the building? I didn't sense it the first time I visited, as an uninitiated reporter with no attachment to what had happened there. Minerva said I needed holy water to erase the damage from my trespass. I'd sought none, but had begun to doubt whether I could put what I'd seen behind me.

While I'd noticed the
hierberias
, little storefronts downtown that sold herbs and amulets used in folk healing, I'd never had a reason to spend much time inside one. As a reporter, I'd covered Ash Wednesday, when worshippers spilled out of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral with wavy crosses on their foreheads. I'd gotten dizzy with heat inside a sweat lodge and followed the teenage girl dressed as the Virgen de Guadalupe raised on a float and carried through the streets each year on December 12. In one of my first assignments for the paper, I went to a backyard in the South
most neighborhood to write about an image of the Virgen that had appeared on a woman's tree trunk. My questions had been almost comically superficial: How does it make you feel to have the Virgen here in your backyard? Why do you love her so much? I approached these rituals as an outsider, unsure how to engage in a conversation about convictions to which I couldn't relate.

But as I got deeper into my inquiry, many of those I interviewed described the metaphysical connection to what had happened and its legacy. The attorneys had seriously considered a defense of devil possession. John and Angela had practiced the ritual of the
huevo
, the egg, the night before the murders, to determine if evil was in Julissa. The neighbors had diagnosed the building with a spiritual cancer, which they said continued to run through it, untreated. The role of spirituality was central and yet ethereal, a set of dots I couldn't connect.

One day I went into a
hierberia
on Market Square. I'd passed its hand-painted yellow sign many times before, with the Eye of Providence peeking out from the top, a deck of tarot cards spread along the bottom. Inside were the statues and candles used to create altars, and the herbs that might be prescribed by a folk healer for a cleansing tea or bath. Some of the items were familiar—chamomile or clove—which you could also find in a supermarket, while others were more obscure. Here were statues of Santa Muerte, the death saint, who had become stunningly popular in recent years in Mexico, partly because it was believed that she delivered results expediently and responded to requests purer figures such as the Virgen de Guadalupe would not. These statues are of a cloaked skeletal figure carrying a scythe and sometimes a globe to symbolize world
domination. Many consider her to be a comforting, protective presence, so much so that they tattoo her on their skin. Inside the store, I spoke to a young man named Joe Uvalles, who said his grandmother was a
curandera
and card reader. A TV blasted the sighs and arguments of a
telenovela
as we spoke.

Joe grew up in Southmost and watched his grandmother minister to the people who came to her house. Only in middle school, when his friends began hanging out at one another's homes, did he realize, “This is not something everyone does.”

Joe picked up his grandmother's techniques as he followed her to cleanse homes and treat clients. She had a gift, he said, an ability to intuit what ailed those who sought her counsel. As he grew older, he realized that he had the same ability.

Curanderismo
, he explained, is not about curses or vengeance. “It acknowledges that there are negative things, that bad things exist, bad things happen to you. But at the same time its focus is sort of, the work is to cure, to heal.”

Part of his job at the
hierberia
, when a client came in, was to determine whether the person was suffering from a genuine curse or whether that supposed curse was a scapegoat for the person's misfortune. One man, he said, complained that a curse had caused him to lose his job, but after intuiting he was free from any malediction, Joe concluded that the man's unemployment might more easily be explained by simple incompetence.

“They kind of become upset because you're not telling them what they want to hear.”

Curandero Conversations
, authored by Brownsville anthropologist Dr. Antonio Zavaleta, was recommended to me by Joe and oth
ers. Dr. Zavaleta had been studying folk healing of the border for four decades, and as a native of Brownsville, a scientist, and a spiritual man, he balanced the roles of insider and academic.

Dr. Zavaleta was partially deaf, and his booming voice moved with the rushed cadence of a busy, cluttered mind. Tall, paunchy, and verbose, he dominated whatever space he found himself in. I'd met him many times over my years at
The Brownsville Herald
—he was nearly always suggested by the university as an expert in subjects tied to local culture. But
curanderismo
was his true specialty, and one that he was often interviewed about when it came up in the news. Dr. Zavaleta was intensely open-minded, delighting in analytical discussion as much as anyone else I've met, but he could quickly put up a wall to protect the healers he'd spent his life studying. I didn't blame him: the knowledge they'd shared with him was sacred, and I wasn't committed to understanding these beliefs in the manner of a convert.

Curandero Conversations
was his most open offering on the subject
.
In the book, Dr. Zavaleta shares a written dialogue with
curandero
Alberto Salinas Jr., who had since passed away. In 190 entries, individuals write in with their concerns, and Salinas responds. Dr. Zavaleta then adds commentary and context.

Most of the entries are related to concrete life events. People are reaching out for advice on the dramatic and the mundane, and symbolism is everywhere. A politician is running for office and worries when his opponent hires a
bruja
to ensure victory, but is relieved when a white dove appears in a dream. A person is losing his or her mother to cancer and wants advice on how to deal with such a loss. A parent is concerned about her one-year-old, who has suddenly
gotten irritable, and speculates that the
mal de ojo
has been cast upon the child. Interpreting a strong look or an unusual dream is common in
curanderismo
, and seeing either as a cause of illness or bad luck is not considered paranoid; it's common knowledge that they are often connected.

In some of the entries, the clients openly discuss medical diagnoses of mental illness with the
curandero
. Early in the book, an unidentified follower writes:

I was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia when I was a teenager and for years I was not able to attend school or function normally, to hold a job or to have a lasting relationship.

My mother turned to spirituality in order to help me and eventually we were referred to you for help. Even though I take my prescription medications and see a therapist regularly, it was not until I began coming to you for counseling that I was able to keep my mental illness in check. My illness will never leave me but I know that you are protecting me from the evil spirits which surround me.

The
curandero
responds by thanking the individual for his or her testimonial, adding that the client's stability “should continue as long as you take your medication, see your therapist and place your faith in God.” The
curandero
instructs that a candle should always be burning on the client's home altar and reassures that they have successfully built a protective spiritual wall. It's an ideal manifestation of the way folk healing and mental-health care can work symbiotically to achieve a stable outcome. It also upends a stereo
type about the relationship between religion and mental illness: instead of amplifying this person's paranoia, the spiritual connection actually helps tame it.

But, in many letters, it's impossible to discern the true cause of the client's distress. Dr. Zavaleta volunteered that
curanderos
are in no way equipped to diagnose or cure mental illness.

“The
curanderas
are regular people, often your neighbor living down the block,” Dr. Zavaleta said. “They don't have any special training. For the most part they have no training at all. They have a gift, and through that they're able to practice.”

In the courtroom it became necessary to address the issue of possession and the authenticity of John and Angela's beliefs, to show whether they were invented so as to pretend insanity, or if they had an authentic connection to John's mental state. The prosecuting attorneys also seemed aware that some jurors might believe that a possession was responsible for the couple's actions. In his opening statement during John's first trial, Assistant DA E. Paxton Warner went as far as to tell the jury that the evidence presented would show that “there was no witchcraft that day, that his children were not possessed by the grandmother or any other spirit.” John's grandmother had an altar in her home and he believed her to practice witchcraft, something he spoke about to Gina and his family. His grandmother's voice, he said, came out of Julissa's mouth that day in their apartment.

Dr. Zavaleta was called to testify during the first trial. He hadn't been given much information about the case beforehand, other than John's confession and a tour through the apartment. Depending on which parts you read, the testimony favors either the defense or the
prosecution. When answering questions from the prosecuting attorney, Dr. Zavaleta indicated that, indeed, perfectly sane people can and do have religious beliefs, and that merely hearing God speak to you or seeing a family member in a dream does not indicate you are abnormal. He also said that John and Angela's apartment lacked an altar or complex collection of objects that would indicate a serious practice of witchcraft.

But when defense attorney Alfredo Padilla questioned him, Dr. Zavaleta allowed that possession is ultimately in the eye of the beholder, and that people who are not devoutly religious would be more likely to label such behavior as symptomatic of mental illness:

Q. And there is no guidelines and there is no manual to say, this is a possession, this is not a possession. It all has to do with how the person perceives the occurring act?

A. I think that's exactly correct.

Q. And whether this is a possession or not, there are certain individuals who believe that somebody may be possessed. And, again, there is no established criteria as to what possession entails; isn't that correct?

A. That is exactly correct. In fact, if you believe in possession, then you treat it appropriately. If you don't believe in possession, then you take the person to a mental health practitioner.

Q. And how that person reacts to the belief that a possession exists, a lot of times, is, again, we go back to that person and how that person perceived the concurrent act or the acts that he was able to observe, that's what we are looking at, what that person perceived. Because, I mean, what I may perceive can
certainly be demonic, but may not be what you consider to be demonic. Isn't that correct?

A. That's correct.

Q. If the light burns out here and I may concede, well, you know what? That's a demonic act. Somebody in here produced a spirit, you know, to burn that lightbulb out. Now you may not have the same perception—you may not have the same belief, but I can feel real comfortable. I can sit here and say, “You know what? That light burned out because somebody out here in the audience, you know, put a spell on that light.” And you're not right, and I'm not right. We just have different perceptions about the act, is that correct?

A, That's absolutely correct.

This is a crucial exchange. Padilla explains why it's so tricky to consider the role of religion in this case: a person's behavior, and indeed every act and occurrence in the world, can be the result of spiritual forces, or none whatsoever. It all depends on your perspective. It's impossible to make a judgment as to which perceptions are real, and which are false, without assuming your personal view to be more valid than your neighbor's.

• • •

Most people do not suffer from a “classic” case of mental illnesses like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, but rather have an individual presentation of an illness or mixture of illnesses. Dr. David Novosad, a psychiatrist who often gives forensic testimony, told me that it's difficult to find a criminal with a so-called textbook case of
schizophrenia, but that only such cases would likely cause a jury to find a defendant not guilty by reason of insanity. In a textbook case, a person who has grown up in a stable home has a sudden, clear, and otherwise unexplainable break from his or her former behavior, experiencing the delusions and hearing the voices that are hallmark symptoms. But many schizophrenics, such as John, also use drugs or have had traumatic experiences in childhood, making it challenging to pinpoint the start and cause of specific behaviors.

“We don't really understand a lot about mental illness,” said Dr. Novosad. He works in a state hospital in Oregon with three categories of patients: the involuntarily committed, those charged with a crime but too mentally ill to work with an attorney, and those found not guilty by reason of insanity. Dr. Novosad said that, even for psychiatrists, clear-cut diagnoses are elusive, a reality that's not palatable in the legal arena. That's why reading expert testimony from John's trial is so confusing. Different psychiatrists deliver divergent evaluations of John—that his behavior was the result of schizophrenia or spray use or some combination. That he was not schizophrenic at all, that his behavior in interviews showed he understood his life and was not governed by delusions. The truth is potentially impossible to pin down because drugs can trigger mental illness and can also make people behave as though they were mentally ill. While the high from spray use is short, and John said he'd not huffed in several days, some psychiatrists would argue that brain damage from such chronic use can alter behavior after the initial high is gone, mimicking an illness such as schizophrenia.