The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts (3 page)

Generally, crime coverage didn't fall to me, and I wasn't ­especially attracted to it. I wrote about the university, politics, culture, art, and health. I spent weekends at festivals, concerts, exhibitions. I learned many more good stories than bad. I boarded a tiny plane and braced myself while an elementary-school student trained on a flight-­simulation program took her first try at piloting a real airplane. I ­visited the
colonias
, where residents had waited for decades for paved roads and indoor plumbing, but managed to prepare their children for college, and I saw schools train their chess teams to compete at the national level. During my first month on the job, I boarded an
­eighteen-­wheeler filled with donated supplies after flooding d­evastated the Mexican state of Tabasco and watched the country unfurl for thirty hours through a tiny window before visiting refugee camps and lush countryside. I made true friends, at last, and was welcomed into their families. That's how I discovered that the Rio Grande ­Valley is a lonely place only if you don't have a family of your own.

But murders occupy a specific space in a newsroom, and when a new killing occurred, my colleagues at the
Herald
would often recount stories they deemed more sinister or bizarre from days gone by. I'd sit at my desk in the small, aging building and ask questions. The faces of the other reporters registered emotions from decades past: the shock and wonder, the sadness, the disgust, and the triumph in bringing criminals to justice. Emma, the senior investigative reporter, perpetually wore a black sombrero and a dark poncho.
“
Ay, chinelas!”
she'd say, releasing her raspy smoker's laugh. The expression was her PG version of a common Mexican swear word.

High on the list were the stories of Mark Kilroy and Joey Fischer, both young men full of promise and possibility, killed in 1989 and 1993, in disconnected and startlingly strange circumstances. Joey went to Saint Joseph Academy, the wealthy private school hidden in the historic subdivision near my apartment on Palm Boulevard. Joey was a senior, eleventh in his class, immediately accepted to the ­University of Texas honors program. He was a popular, good-­looking boy who had a facility with language. Getting ready for school one morning, he was gunned down in his driveway. He had briefly dated Cristina Cisneros and, when they broke up, her mother, Dora, visited Maria Mercedes Martinez, a folk healer, who
saw clients at a secondhand clothing store. When Maria told Dora that Joey didn't want to marry her daughter anymore, Dora asked Maria to cast a spell on Joey. She refused. Dora came up with a different plan. She asked Maria to help her assassinate Joey. Maria advised another of her clients that his marital problems would be solved once Joey was dead. The client hired two other men to complete the job, with the agreement that Dora would pay $3,000. The story was chronicled by Marie Brenner, Joey's cousin, in a September 1993 edition of
The New Yorker
.

Hearing this story in its barest essence is like taking a slippery trip down the rabbit hole. It sounds more like the stuff of a soap opera than a real-life transgression. Joey's life was ended with a few abrupt gunshots that morning as he stood cleaning the windshield of his mother's car in his sunny suburban neighborhood.

Another young man, Mark Kilroy, came to Brownsville during spring break of 1989 while he was attending the University of Texas at Austin. College kids commonly walked to Matamoros for a night of partying and easy underage drinking at the clubs and bars near the international bridge. Usually damage to students was limited to hangovers, maybe a risky liaison at a strip club. But Mark, a twenty-one-year-old premed student, disappeared from the street, scooped up as if by the wind, with no news of him for weeks.

Mark's parents came to Brownsville and searched for him doggedly, but information was scarce until a man speeding through a checkpoint caused officers to give chase. They found Rancho Santa Elena, where Mark had been decapitated, dismembered, and used in a ritual cauldron. He was one of more than a dozen killed by the small group of drug traffickers who subscribed to a combination of
Afro-Caribbean Palo Mayombe Santeria and Mexican witchcraft and went out one night in search of an Anglo spring breaker to ­sacrifice.

Pictures of Mark—with a kind, open face reminiscent of a young Matt Damon—show him with a smile so wide as to suggest a belly laugh. They're easy to find online, many posted in 2009 to mark the twentieth anniversary of his death. His parents were astonishingly graceful as the media circus swirled around them, according to a
Texas Monthly
report.

“I don't feel any anger at all, to be honest with you,” James Kilroy, Mark's father, is quoted as saying, adding that he hoped the killers would apologize to his son in heaven.

When the investigation of the murders at Rancho Santa Elena was complete, the shed where the sacrifices occurred was doused in gasoline and set ablaze.

The deaths of these young men still touch a nerve in Brownsville. Some attended the same elite private school as Joey, and remember learning of his death. Others had frequented the cantinas in Matamoros that spring breakers like Mark often visited or had met Mark's grieving parents when they came to Brownsville to search for him. Maybe these deaths stuck out because of the high achievements of both young men, who excelled in academics and were close to showing how their hard work would translate in the world beyond school. Or maybe Mark's story was highlighted because I was a newcomer, and Mark, too, was from out of town.

The stories seemed to be recounted to me in an effort to convey a larger message: In Brownsville, a dissonant note troubled the warmth and community I might otherwise find, and I should be on the lookout. Violence was present, a current flowing through the
city, barely visible until it hit rock and swirled into white water. Only in Brownsville, they might say as they ended such a story.
Qué
crazy.

But the story of what happened to John Allen Rubio, Angela Camacho, and the children on East Tyler Street seemed different
.
For one, it had been only four years since the murders when I arrived at the
Herald.
The crime was more recent, and John was waiting
for his second trial, having won an appeal that showed Angela's confession had been improperly presented to the jury. The narrative had an uneasy open-endedness.

The Rubio story was also especially affecting because it concerned small children. It grabbed hold of the reporters during these newsroom conversations, the revelation of each detail making the case suddenly raw, fresh, intense. A father and a mother killing three young children—three babies!—with the crude weapon of kitchen knives. The bodies in trash bags, the heads in buckets of water, washed clean of blood. For not one but both parents to be involved in such a horror was stunning and inexplicable.

As a young reporter grappling with a place that was new to me, and which I needed to describe in print daily, I paid attention when those around me seemed to care particularly about a certain story or issue. The Rubio case also had an unusual tangibility: the filing cabinet that separated my desk from the
Herald
crime reporters' contained records from the first trial. Present, too, was the building, an ailing marker of the crime, reminding me of what had happened every time I passed by. After hearing the voices of the neighbors a hundred times as I stitched together the audio slide show in the closet-size editing suite, the case began the slow and certain process of taking up residence in my psyche.

Brownsville is not alone in its history of heinous crimes. Cities everywhere witness murders that attract parachute journalists or inspire horror films. But many of the ones that have happened here have a few common ingredients. The local culture of
curanderismo
, folk healing that is most often performed for good, and
brujer
ía
, witchcraft that includes the casting of spells and curses, has sometimes joined the narrative. Some crimes also point to the lack of resources in Brownsville for the treatment of mental illness. Without help, unhealthy obsessions can fester, dangerous belief systems thrive, vendettas brood until such actions become, as John's attorney explained, inevitable. These murders, shocking in their retelling, must have reached that point of apparent inevitability to the killers. In their minds, at that essential moment, these actions had to be taken, whether because of delusion, honor, revenge, desperation, paranoia, or fear of an inner truth.

While I didn't come to the city to report on a murder, I soon realized how central these crimes had become to Brownsville's history, more so in the daily lives of residents than some of its proudest military victories. The restaging of the Battle of Palo Alto, the first major engagement of the Mexican-American War, by volunteers in historical dress, though also a chronicle of death, feels distant from the confrontations and struggles that shape modern lives. Yet while the battlefield has been preserved by the parks department so visitors can stand in the middle of the isolation, see the blooming cacti on the rugged plain where armies clashed, the legends of these local killings of regular people will probably not join a long-term historical narrative. Maybe they'll be used as cautionary tales to scare teenagers or other green reporters. Maybe they'll be forgotten.

On that initial visit, as I walked around the building on East Tyler Street recording audio for the slide show, my interest in the crimes was minimal. What I saw was a cheap place to live, and thus a respite for some of the city's poor. The back of the building was falling apart, an almost random arrangement of wood doors, stairs, and windows. The tenants on the second floor shared a communal bathroom, and in one apartment a woman had constructed a shrine on top of a dresser with a framed picture of the pope, candles, artificial flowers, and an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Brad snapped a few photographs of the doorway to the Rubio apartment, which was locked from the outside, marked with stickers as
EVIDENCE
.

As I put together the photos and the audio, Brad sent me a few digital images from the archives. Some were Polaroids of the children. When I looked at them, I saw happy, innocent young faces, but they remained strangers to me. Today, the images of Julissa, John Stephan, and Mary Jane are imprinted on my brain. I see them when I close my eyes. I see them when I open my eyes.

And I can see the other photograph—the one of an administrator holding up three death certificates. Each is stamped with a single assaulting word:
DECEASED. DECEASED. DECEASED
.

CHAPTER 3

Pilgrim

It's just a building.

—
SUSAN ZAVALA, FORMER NEIGHBOR

T
he district clerk's office in the Cameron County Courthouse is just two blocks from the building on East Tyler and Eighth Streets in Brownsville. There, files documenting both of John's trials are kept in nineteen enormous folders and half a dozen cardboard boxes. I'd moved an hour away along the path of the river, but I'd regularly drive to Brownsville and sit in the district clerk's office in the courthouse where John was first tried, going through page after page of legal filings, with a fistful of paper clips and a peanut-butter sandwich. Sometimes freelance work would intervene and I would skip an entire week or two.

“We didn't know if you were coming back,” one of the clerks would say, eyeing me curiously, before wheeling the stepladder over to the spot where they kept the Rubio files. They'd ask which of the folders I needed, and I'd go back to my usual seat, becoming another fixture in the quiet records room, listening to the pop songs
that streamed through the speakers and going through thousands of pages of bureaucratic court procedures, medical reports, and jury selection.

I didn't know quite what I was looking for at first. My hope was that the court documents would provide a logical entry point. But after a few hours, they would numb me, and I'd gather my things and visit the building before driving home. There, just two blocks away, I'd see the surrogate of my subject. The scene of the crime.

It was like the exoskeleton of a once-living thing. It had the grizzled appearance of a horror house, the kind of place ideal for ghost hunters with dubious equipment and for scaring kids around late October. The structure exuded desolation and a sleeping threat, as if it wore the face of the crime that took place inside, a seemingly perfect scapegoat.

Though 805 East Tyler stood inanimate on the corner of Eighth Street, its mortality, like John's, was at stake. I watched it the way a witness visits the bedside of a dying relative. It was there, so present and concrete. But I knew it could disappear in a moment, the bricks fired for its creation lying in a heap.

I became a pilgrim to the building—not a worshipper, but a witness. I was a disciple of the unknown lesson I believed it would teach me.

In the Library of Congress, I'd found some of the oldest remaining maps of Brownsville. The Sanborn Map Company carefully plotted out cities and towns across America, hoping to sell fire-insurance policies to local property owners. The earliest map shows a box on the street corner, etched with symbols that indicate it was a combination warehouse, grocery store, dwelling, and storage room.
That building was made of wood, one-story high, and haphazardly jumbled together.

On the 1926 map, the space that the jumble had occupied is blank. Maybe a fire had demolished the first structure. But by the 1930 map, the new building appears—a sizable two stories, part brick, part wood, with a filling station and an unusual cutout on the first floor. Here, what would have been the sharp corner of the building was flattened so cars could drive up and fill their gas tanks on the way to and from town. By the time John, Angela, and the three children moved into the apartment that occupied the spot next to that old storefront, that corner was filled in, the filling station eliminated. The family would be the apartment's last tenants.

When the building was erected, Brownsville had grown from a mud-walled army fort on the northern bank of the Rio Grande into a small city. The Fort Brown army barracks flanked the river, and New Orleans–style brick and ironwork stores shared space on the main avenues, next to the large homes of their owners. As one walked away from Mexico toward East Tyler Street, the homes diminished in size until one- and two-room houses speckled street corners near the railroad tracks. Finally, these gave way to ranchland. There, in what is today a sprawling suburban metro area, was the secluded landscape of “Lonesome Dove.”

This was a large building for the neighborhood in the 1930s and was originally on Brownsville's outskirts, beyond the city plan. It occupied two full lots, stretching back from the street toward an alley behind—about 125 feet long and 50 wide. The first floor was a business and the second apartments, a detail that explains in part why the first floor was poorly arranged after it was converted into
housing. Long, hallway-shaped apartments were constructed by the time the Rubio family lived here, a layout that cut the existing floor plan into strips. These apartments had doors on the street and in the back, along the grassy lot.

By 1949 the Sanborn map shows that the building was only half its original size. While it was once primarily brick with a smaller wood section in the back, the wood section was gone and only the brick remained, and it was no longer a filling station. On one of these maps the names of alleys are marked. Today these unofficial streets have no such signs to tell pedestrians or drivers their titles. But at the time the alleyways were probably the site of informal homes for the very poor, hand-me-downs of the Mexican peasants who had erected jacales, or thatched-roof huts, behind the homes of their employers. Near the railroad, it may have been a low-cost place for workers who needed a place to stay as they made their way along the line.

Another killing had taken place at this address, in the mideighties. A man caught stabbing a woman was commanded by Brownsville detective Rey Martinez to stop. When he continued to attack her, Martinez shot him, killing the man. The chief said that the woman, despite her stab wounds, miraculously lived after being rushed to the hospital with the knife still taped to her, preventing her from bleeding out.

By the 2000s, mistreatment was evident along every blemished wall and broken window of the building. Its exterior,
brick long ago painted white, was the nonspecific color of filth. Wood doors with hinged screens stood apart on the first floor with no windows between them, like a prison lineup. Some of those had been boarded over with wood planks, but not the Rubio apartment.

From the front, the two-story building was severe, with a boxlike structure that suggested utility. But viewed from the back it was vulnerable, a feeble hospital patient whose disintegrating body could be undone by a gust of wind. Here, alongside the sturdy bricks, were dilapidated wood doors that no longer fit their frames. Small squares tilted to the angle of diamonds plastered near the roof, looked as if they'd been tacked on like a dutiful nod to the idea of aesthetic beauty.

Posts that once held clotheslines were scattered around the backyard. Now and then the grass was cut, but it usually grew wild and high, hiding discarded items beneath. One day I saw a child's homework, a dirty diaper, a crushed drinking cup, and a small pink plastic star. The sidewalk had split open and a rush of plump red ants poured out of their home beneath the ground. Nearby, a dead lizard was being devoured by another colony of fire ants, each the size of a grain of sand.

One of my first questions to John was whether the apartment had a window. It was hard to tell from the outside, but it appeared that their home was totally dark, with no aperture to let in light or the Gulf breeze. In the South Texas summers with no air-­conditioning, the smells of cooking and children's diapers would have hung in the stagnant air.

He wrote back:

There was a small window almost to the ceiling about 4X4 inches permanently shout. And no it did not seem small or dark because we were happy just to be together and content with the little we had. We had no A/C but we would us a fan to cool us in from
the heat. We didn't have anything to warm us up in the winter seasons except blankets.

One photo of the crime scene showed a fan, next to the naked body of a headless child.

So only the front and back doorways could be opened. From April through October, the temperature hovers between 85 and 110 degrees during the day in South Texas.

On these slow walks around the building, I took notes on a reporter's pad, cataloging every detail, but I looked for something I knew I'd never be able to see with my eyes. It seemed as if the best way to understand the story was to go to it, to show up, to look and listen. Sometimes I'd leave feeling that I'd learned nothing, that indeed not much more was here than a structure and a bit of grass. But when I was lucky, someone would notice the woman standing with the notebook and would stop and talk to me. I'd say what I was writing about and receive instant recognition.
Los niños? Ay
. They'd inevitably have an opinion about why the crime happened.
Las drogas. La locura. La pobreza
. Drugs. Madness. Poverty. It was a brutal triumvirate. While the explanations pushed the crime into the distance and suggested that such an act couldn't happen without one or more of those components, they only drew it closer. Drugs and poverty were everywhere. Madness was another question.