The Red Scream (5 page)

Tiny McFarland, still feeling jet-lagged from her trip, had slept late that morning, according to her daughter, eleven-year-old Alison, who had gotten up to have breakfast with her father and then watched television by herself. Alison’s older brother, fourteen-year-old Stuart, had ridden his bicycle to his cousin Mark Redinger’s house about five miles away, where he was planning to spend the day and sleep overnight.

When Tiny got out of bed at ten o’clock, she dressed in a sleeveless white linen dress with a straight skirt and white Ferragamo shoes with three-inch heels. She wore her usual jewelry—a gold Rolex watch with a diamond bezel and large gold hoop earrings. She was planning on attending a Women’s Symphony League board luncheon meeting and then seeing to some business at a bank downtown.

At about eleven o’clock, Alison, tired from having risen so early, had fallen asleep on the sofa in front of the television. Her mother had gone out to the garden behind the house to cut some flowers from her cutting garden, which she did almost every morning she was in town. Tiny loved having fresh flowers around the house.

David Serrano, the McFarlands’ twenty-one-year-old live-in baby-sitter and handyman, was studying in his quarters above the detached garage, which was about ten yards from the house at the end of a long winding gravel driveway. A part-time student at Austin Community College, David was taking a summer school class in accounting and used all his spare time to do his schoolwork.

The final member of the household, the McFarlands’ ninety-five-pound German shepherd named Mauser, was at the kennel having a flea dip. Charlie McFarland had dropped the dog off on the way to work that morning. Eight years after the murder, an old friend of the McFarland family said with tears in her eyes, “It would never have happened if Mauser had been there; he was the best watchdog, the most protective animal I’ve ever
seen. He would have walked out to the garden with Tiny and he would have set up a racket you wouldn’t believe when that old junker of a car drove in. I don’t believe that man would have even dared get out of his car if Mauser had been there.” It was just one in the series of random misfortunes that contributed to the tragedy that morning.

It had been only five days since Louie Bronk had murdered eighty-year-old Greta Huff in San Marcos, and he was cruising the highways again, driving up from Corpus Christi, where he’d fled right after the Huff murder. As he described it in a prison interview eight years later, “I was just cruising, you know how you do, and the Mustang was running real good, just purring along the Interstate, but in all that distance—Corpus to San Antone, San Antone to Austin—I didn’t see but one opportunity—see I’m always looking for the opportunity—and that was some old bag with gray hair and glasses by the side of the road with a flat. She actually tried to flag me down. Isn’t that something? But she was not up to my standards, definitely not. See, I never had to settle for no dogs.

“I’d been drinking pretty steady for two days and thinking those things which I try not to let take over, but them pictures, the real bad ones, you know, those things I told you about last week, had just got hold of my head and I was seeing those things real clear in my head, just like Technicolor movies over and over again, and by the time I get to Austin I’m in need, just looking for anything at all, not fussy at this point the way I am sometimes, wishing I’d settled back near San Antone for the old bitch. Would serve her right doing such a damn-fool thing like flagging down a stranger.”

Bronk didn’t intend to stop in Austin; he was heading to Fort Worth, but because he got in the wrong lane after he crossed over Town Lake, he was forced to exit off the highway and found himself in Austin, going west on FM 2222. He intended to turn around and get back on the Interstate, but then he decided to wait and see where fate took him. He was low on cash and thought he’d look for someplace easy to rob.

After about fifteen minutes he found himself out west of the city. “See, I always liked to stay close to the Interstate, but this time I thought to try something different. All the times I’ve drove through Austin, I never really seen it and this area was real pretty—these green hills and all. I saw this road, Something Park Road, off to the left and I don’t know why, it just looked pretty, like where you’d take a Sunday drive or something, so I took it and drove about a mile to this driveway going up a hill. Made out of gravel. There was a mailbox with a number on it, I remember that. So I drove in just to see what’s at the end of it and I come to this garage near a big stone house.

“I didn’t see no one around, but it was clear rich people lived there. I knew there’d be stuff to steal. I went to the door and it was unlocked, just
like it was waiting for me, so I walked in and took me a little Sony TV from the kitchen and a silver bowl and the prettiest carving knife with this white handle that looks like it’s made of bone. I was carrying these out to the car when I saw a lady standing in the garage and the door was open. Yup. Mrs. McFarland—she was one of mine, sure was. See, I can have any woman I want. Any woman. She was all dressed in white, not a spot on her anywhere, had a bunch of flowers—these pretty red flowers. Yup. Just as easy to do the rich ones as them you pick up by the side of the road. Ain’t no difference when you get down to the basics.

“Lucky I had this little .22 Saturday Night Special I got me down in San Marcos for twenty-five bucks. I’d it stuck into my pants under my shirt. I dropped the stuff I was carrying and I ran at her. She was real small, I can see why they called her ‘Tiny,’ but she was strong, fought like a wildcat. Pushed me away, and turned to run, so I had to shoot her. I would of preferred to use my knife, or something else, but she didn’t give me no choice, fighting and running like that. She fell and I saw right away she was dead. That easy, it was.”

Then he pulled his old straight razor out of his pocket, the same razor he’d used on Rosa Morales, Lizette Pachullo, and Greta Huff—the razor he’d bought when he got his first job as a barber in Oklahoma after he was released from the state prison, where he was trained as a barber.

“I opened my razor and started on her hair. This Texas Scalper thing—well, I didn’t always do that, just sometimes. When I was done I thought about … well, you know, having sex with her. I took her dress off and looked at her. But this time I know it’s not going to work. I don’t know if it’s all the beer I drunk or it’s so damned hot or a strange place or maybe that she was a blonde and they’ve never appealed to me. They don’t seem … finished somehow. So I took her watch and earrings off of her, ’cause they looked like they’d bring in some cash, and I got in the car and drove off. And that was it, like it was just a detour from the road I was taking. I don’t think the whole thing took more than three, four minutes.”

In one of his confessions Bronk told Sheriff Dwayne Gaskill in Hays County that he sold the pistol and all the stolen items at different flea markets and pawnshops that same day between Austin and Fort Worth. He has also told other versions of what he did with the items. In court, he said he got scared and threw them in a river outside Austin, but he couldn’t remember where. None of the items have ever been recovered.

He said in his confession that he took the dress the victim had been wearing and threw it into the back seat of the Mustang. When he pushed the car off a cliff into Eagle Mountain Lake near Fort Worth, it was still inside. Although the lake has been dragged twice, the Mustang was never recovered.

As for the hair he shaved from Tiny McFarland’s head and from his other victims, Louie Bronk has never been willing to talk about what he did with it.

After he got back onto the Interstate that day, he drove on to Fort Worth where he’d planned to go all along, before he got in the wrong lane that made him take the exit, that led him to FM 2222, that enticed him to the hills, that took him to City Park Road, that lured him to the gravel driveway, that ended at the McFarlands’ garage on that hot July morning.

Molly looked up from the page, remembering that interview with Louie when he’d taken her through the steps of the McFarland murder. As usual, she’d kept her face neutral, her manner encouraging. Of course she already knew the story. She’d read his confession and then heard it all again at the trial where he had unsuccessfully claimed insanity. But hearing it from his own mouth, as they sat inches apart in the visitors’ room in Huntsville, separated only by a few layers of wire mesh, was something else—his cool recital of it, his occasional smiles and head shakes at the ironies of fate. At the time she’d just listened and recorded. But now, reading the words, she wondered how she was able to endure listening to it.

She looked back down at the page:

David Serrano was lying on his bed in his apartment above the garage studying an accounting textbook. He wore only a pair of boxer shorts because his quarters were not air-conditioned like the main house was, and the heat was intense, already ninety-one degrees at quarter past eleven in the morning.

He heard a noise that he recognized immediately as a gunshot, but that didn’t concern him. All four members of the McFarland family often practiced shooting in the field out behind the house where they kept some targets and cans to shoot at. During the summer the kids would often wander out there and do some shooting. Tiny also liked to shoot, was the best shot in the family, better even than Charlie and the kids who had all won trophies over the years In shooting competitions at the Travis County Rifle Club. It could be any of them out practicing.

David went back to his book.

But a few minutes later he put down his book. It occurred to him that there had been just one shot, and he began to worry. He couldn’t remember anyone ever going out to shoot and shooting only once. And as he thought about it, that shot had sounded closer than usual. He decided to
check, and anyway, he knew Mrs. McFarland was planning to leave at about eleven-thirty when he would take over supervising Alison.

He pulled on a pair of jeans and a shirt and stepped into his tennis shoes with no socks and without bothering to tie them. As he was walking down the staircase that led into the garage, he heard a car engine start up, and when he came to the bottom of the stairs he saw through the open garage door a white car, old and beat-up, driving out the driveway. He didn’t recognize the make of the car because he says he’s never been interested in cars, can’t tell a Ford from a Buick. Though he saw only the back of the driver’s head, he thought it was a man with dark hair, though he wasn’t absolutely sure. He was sure about one thing, though: the car was white with one brown door, the one on the driver’s side.

He watched the car drive off, wondering who the McFarlands knew who would drive an old clunker like that. Most of their friends drove late-model cars, new and shiny.

By then he was inside the garage and saw that a woman, naked except for a pair of white panties, lay in the empty space, the space where Charlie’s Cadillac was parked when he was home. David says he knew two things immediately—that it was Mrs. McFarland and that she was past help. Even though she was lying facedown and her hair was gone, he recognized her because her head was turned to the side and he could see her profile. “Also,” he said, “it was the size of her. No one else I knew, no grown woman, I mean, was so small. It had to be her.”

He walked slowly toward her and when he squatted down and saw her glazed, open eyes, he knew instantly that she was dead, even before he saw the blood oozing from under the body, beading up on the grease spot from where the Cadillac had leaked oil.

David Serrano was familiar with the look of death, he says, because his family, including his father, grandfather, and three uncles, was in the funeral business in Brownsville, Texas, where he grew up. For five summers he worked assisting in the embalming and preparing of bodies for burial. He didn’t need to feel for a pulse. He knew death when he saw it.

Only then, he says, did he think to look around the garage. It was a three-car garage, but the McFarlands parked only two of their three vehicles in it because the third space at the north end was taken up with storage of bicycles and lawn mowers and boxes. The big electric door was open and the small side door was shut, he says, though it was never locked. Mrs. McFarland’s white Mercedes occupied the center space and Charlie’s Cadillac, the space on the south end where his wife now lay. Scattered around her body lay a bunch of scarlet gladioli and a pair of garden snippers.

David backed out of the garage and ran to the house to telephone for
the police, suddenly afraid that whoever had killed her might come back. He was shocked to find Alison standing in the doorway looking up the driveway where the car had just been. He took her in the house with him, locked the door, and called the Austin Police.

APD records their response time that day as thirteen minutes. David Serrano says it felt like forever, as he sat with Alison in front of the television worrying about Mrs. McFarland, feeling she shouldn’t be left alone outside. But he felt his first loyalty was to his young charge, so he remained with her. He didn’t call Charlie McFarland at that time. He says he didn’t know what to say and thought he’d let the police handle it.

During that time, Stuart McFarland, who had decided to come home early from his cousin’s house, arrived on his bicycle, went to put it away in the garage, and saw his mother lying there. He knelt down and tried to revive her, thought about doing CPR which he’d just learned, until he saw the blood pooling under her and understood that his mother had been shot.

Molly stopped reading there, though the account went on to detail the arrival of the police and the early stages of the investigation before Louie Bronk confessed eight days later.

Molly stood up, then suddenly dropped the pages to the table. Oh, God. Fingerprints. Here she was a former police reporter, a former wife of a cop, and a present crime writer, and she hadn’t given a thought to fingerprints on the pages. If there had been any, she had certainly messed them up.

Not that it mattered; this was just some kook. There was no reason to worry about prints.