The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts

by Laura Tillman

  At around 7:00 a.m., according to Angela, John killed the family’s pet hamsters with a hammer and some chemicals. John said the rodents were acting possessed, fighting with one another. Killing them, he claimed, would help the children.

  This detail about the hamsters is striking. It’s an almost childlike act of aggression, existing in its own subgenre of violence. This was clearly not a case in which a person with a vendetta set about committing revenge. Instead, someone who had previously sought out these animals and fed them, played with them, maybe used them to entertain his children, had suddenly disposed of them with the unfeeling rancor of a Greek god. John told detectives he flushed the hamsters down the toilet. After that, he nailed the back door shut.

  “My daughter started to talk like my grandmother who had passed away,” John said in his statement. “Julissa started to laugh in an evil way and started making growling sounds at me. The other two babies started to do the same thing.” In his confession, John described it this way:

  A. And I said, “Buela, quien?” And I remembered what my grandmother used to do, little details, so I asked her, “Is it you, Grandma?” She said, “Yes.” “What did you do with my daughter?” She goes, “She’s right there,” like she was inside my other girl, like Mary Jane. I said, “What do you mean? That’s Mary Jane, that’s not you.” “No.” I said to her, like, she was trying to give me—like tell me, but she couldn’t say it, like, “Yo es ella, y ella es yo.” [I am her, and she is me.]

  Q. What she was trying to tell you, was that she was—

  A. She was in her body—

  Q. That your grandmother was in Julissa’s body?

  A. Yes.

  Q. And Julissa’s body was in—

  A. In Mary Jane’s body.

  John said Julissa used scissors to cut the tape he had placed around an electrical socket to protect the children. He thought she was trying to give the scissors to John Stephan to cause him to electrocute himself.

  In his written confession, John placed much of the blame on Angela for what happened next. Angela got the knives, he writes. Angela told John she’d rather kill the children than have them be evil. “I told her no, I did not want to kill them even though my grandmother took over her body.”

  In Angela’s statement to the detectives, she said that John grabbed both Mary Jane and Julissa, then yelled for Angela to help him as he decapitated Mary Jane. She held on to the baby’s legs. When they were finished, Julissa was crying. John grabbed her next, and Angela held her legs as he killed her on the floor. In testimony, Angela described it this way:

  Q. And what was Julissa doing?

  A. Screaming.

  Q. Okay. Was she moving?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. How was she moving?

  A. Her little feets.

  Q. Okay. And what was John Allen Rubio doing?

  A. He was trying to cut her head.

  Q. While she was moving?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. And while she was crying?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. And what did you do?

  A. I was crying and holding her.

  Q. And what happened?

  A. She died.

  Q. Okay. How did she die?

  A. With no head.

  Q. Okay. So he cut her head off while you were holding her feet down?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. And what was your reaction to that?

  A. I was crying. I couldn’t think. I was just crying and crying, looking at them, and I didn’t believe that they were my babies. And I was looking at them, and I couldn’t believe it.

  In John’s version Julissa died first.

  My wife Angela told me to go ahead and kill the children. My wife then went and got two knifes from the kitchen. I then picked up Julissa and she was still talking like my grandmother and growling at me. She was strong and I felt like she could manipulate my mind. I was trying to put spring water on her. She started to shake. Julissa started to yell at me, “You are killing me, you are killing me.” I then placed her on the ground and my wife held her down. I then started to choke her because my wife told me that I rather her die then be evil. My wife then gave me a knife. My wife was holding Julissa with her face to the ground and I started to stab her in the back of the neck and in the chest. I stabbed her a couple of times.

  In John’s version of the events, he decapitated the children because they seemed to rise and revive after being choked and stabbed.

  I thought I had killed her but then she got up and started to growl again was yelling for us to stop. She yelled, “Mom, please tell Dad to stop.” I then grabbed her again and I cut her head off with a machette. The blood started to gush and she stopped moving.

  John said Julissa’s lips continued to move after her head was cut off. “That scared me the most.”

  After Julissa died, John told detectives that Mary Jane was looking at him.

  I grabbed Mary Jane and I was chocking her really hard but she would not die. It was very hard because she was my own blood. I kept trying to choke her but she would not die. I think I then stabbed her in the back of the head. Mary Jane kept moving like she was going to come back to life. I tried to cut her head off with the regular kitchen knife but it was not cutting threw. I was looking for the machette but I think the witches took the machette. I then ripped her head off with my hands it was very hard but I managed to pull her head from her body. My wife started to cry and was telling please not my daughter. I told her that we had to kill them because an evil presence was in them.

  We then both started to cry.

  John told Angela to start cleaning up the apartment. John carried the girls’ bodies to the kitchen sink and poured water through their throats. The couple put the bodies in trash bags and continued cleaning up.

  Q. And this is the dress of—

  A. A little dress for my baby, Julissa.

  Q. So you used Julissa’s dress to clean up her blood?

  A. Yes, sir.

  They cleaned for a while, then took a shower. John told Angela they were probably going to go to jail, and that someone would inevitably find out what had happened. He’d tell detectives that he asked her if he could make love to her one more time, and she vacillated between no and yes, but in the end they had sex. During the second trial, Angela testified that she was forced into having sex with him.

  Q. And what was the reason for having sex?

  A. He told me that he was going to call his friends to rape me and he was going to kill himself.

  In his statement, John first said they had sex before killing John Stephan, then corrected himself and said it was after. He believed the one-year-old was also possessed and needed to be killed. Angela said she fought John this time, but in her statement admitted that she also held John Stephan, or Johnny as she called him, as John killed him the same way he had the other two children. John told psychiatrist ­William Valverde that he saw John Stephan’s head try to suck blood out of his severed neck. Thus John placed the head in a bucket of water.

  At trial, Angela testified that she’d gone into another room and only when she returned did she see her son, decapitated.

  Q. What did you do after you saw this?

  A. I started crying again. And my mind—I don’t know what happened to my mind but I start crying and asked him to kill me, too.

  Q. You asked him to kill you, too?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. And did he try to kill you?

  A. Yes, sir.

  Q. How did he try to kill you?

  A. Choke me, but he couldn’t.

  Neuroscientists tell us that we don’t have a “memory bank,” as we typically understand it—a place where memories are stored and retrieved when needed. Instead we reconstruct events as we try to re-create a memory. John and Angela’s recollections differ, and we could
attribute the discrepancies to many factors—lying, the effects of substance abuse, the passage of time. But in this story, the ending doesn’t change. Whatever details might be altered, the children have died.

  The couple cleaned John Stephan’s body and then left the house and walked to Lopez supermarket, John’s feet bare. They’d planned to buy milk that day, probably for the children. As though nothing had happened, they continued with their predetermined schedule. Angela was questioned about this trip at trial.

  Q. Okay, and why did you go to Lopez?

  A. I don’t even know why, but we went and buy some milk and bring it back to the house and put it in the refrig.

  A moment later, the attorney asked Angela about the walk to the store. Was she crying? Yes, she was scared. And how was John acting? He just seemed normal. They didn’t speak. When they came home, John told Angela that a spirit was communicating with him, letting him know they would be in prison for a long time. Angela said nothing. All she could do was cry.

  They placed the bodies of the children in black trash bags and a cardboard box.

  That same day, Lorena made the ten-minute walk from the Hotel Economico over to the apartment for a change of clothes. John opened the door a little. On the witness stand, Lorena said John’s lips were gold—an indication that he’d been using spray paint, though John’s attorney was flustered by this at trial, saying that in Lorena’s original statement to police, she made no mention of paint on John’s lips.

  “My old lady tried to commit suicide last night,” Lorena said John told her. “But now we’re going to kill ourselves. Fuck ­everyone.”

  Lorena called to Angela, but said John shushed her, telling his wife, “Don’t answer, don’t let him [Lorena] convince you.”

  “You’ll be sorry, John,” Lorena recalled telling him. “You can’t be acting crazy with those children inside.”

  Lorena said she threatened to call the police. After John shut the door, she claimed to hear the sound of a knife being sharpened in the apartment. Lorena returned to the Hotel Economico and never called police. She planned to return to the apartment, hoping John would calm down in the interim.

  During the day, John and Angela washed the bodies of their children and cleaned up the apartment. Angela told detectives that John alternately talked about going to the cemetery to bury them, leaving the state, or simply waiting for the police to arrive.

  Shortly before 7:00 p.m., Beva and Jose Luis, John’s brother, stopped by. Beva testified that when John opened the door, he looked like he was “drugged up,” and both he and Angela seemed serious. Normally, John would greet Jose Luis with a hug and a kiss, but he didn’t reach out for either. John was holding a blown-up white bag, and it looked as if he’d been using it to regulate his breathing.

  Jose Luis asked John where his mother was. John didn’t respond. Jose Luis asked where the kids were. John said nothing.

  Jose Luis walked back toward the bedroom and opened the door. He saw John Stephan’s body on the bed.

  Jose Luis grabbed the body. He realized it was a human child and put him back down.

  “What happened? What happened?” Jose Luis asked John. “Where’s the girls?”

  Beva asked Jose Luis what he’d seen. He said he didn’t know. Beva went to the bedroom to see for herself and returned crying.

  Beva and Jose Luis left to get help. Initially, Beva said, Jose Luis didn’t want to call the police, but John took his hand and told him, “I’ll explain.” Jose Luis stood there, frightened for a moment, before Beva grabbed his hand and they left the apartment.

  As they walked back toward Beva’s, they saw a patrol car in the street and flagged it down. Officer Efrain “Sonny” Cervantes was inside. He’d been sent to a domestic-disturbance call, but had mistakenly driven to East Brownsville instead of West. Realizing his error, he turned the car around and saw Beva and Jose Luis motioning to him.

  Beva spoke through the window, telling him, “El bebé no tiene una cabeza.” The baby has no head.

  “It was like if I were to tell you, ‘Come to my house, we captured an alien and I want you to see it. It’s alive,’ ” Cervantes told me. He recalled that Jose Luis’s eyes were wide-open, and both he and Beva were shaking their heads from side to side, looking as if they were in total shock.

  Jose Luis and Beva climbed into the patrol car. On the drive over, the pair were talking in the backseat, though Cervantes said he could only hear through the thick glass something about heads. At about 7:00 p.m. Cervantes stopped the car at the building on East Tyler Street and the three got out. They approached the door to the apartment.

  Inside, Angela was sitting on the bed, looking at the floor. Her hair was wet and partially obscured her face, but Cervantes recalled he could see her eyes through it. Angela wouldn’t look up.

  “What’s going on?” Cervantes asked, cautiously entering the apartment. Behind him, Cervantes could hear the voice of one of the people who had flagged him down, talking to John.

  “Tell him.”

  “The kids are in the back room,” John said.

  Cervantes walked slowly down the narrow hallway. The smell of bleach hit his nose. Through the open doorway to his right he saw a bare bed and an infant’s crib beside it. All around were piles of clothes, some waist high. But the bed was sheetless.

  Something was on the bed. Cervantes thought it was a headless doll, lying on its back with its arms up above its head, its knees drawn into its chest. Then he noticed the jagged marks around the neck. It was fourteen-month-old John Stephan Rubio. Cervantes touched the corpse to confirm that it was a human being, not the rag doll he’d optimistically seen at first.

  “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 “somet
hings 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

  Macarena 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 The 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.”