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 regular 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.
CHAPTER 11
* * *
Good Guys and Bad Guys
That story could have happened to me.
—EDUARDO RODRIGUEZ, FORMER NEIGHBOR OF ANGELA
Ed Stapleton worked in a sleek office near the strip malls and housing developments that edge Brownsville’s north side, but he lived in a historic house in the heart of the city’s downtown. Like the other attorneys and witnesses in the case, Stapleton was subject to a gag order during the trial, so he was adept at deflecting reporters trying to tack down a comment. After weeks of failed attempts to get him on the phone, I planned a stakeout when one of his friends gave me his cross streets.
The house looked as if it were plucked from New Orleans or Savannah and plopped down among the banana trees on Saint Charles Street, less than a half mile from Mexico. While maybe not the biggest or the grandest home on the street, for my money it would be the loveliest to live in. Knopp led tours of this block to showcase some of the city’s most successful restoration projects.
Like the ragged houses a mile away on East Tyler, Stapleton’s place was guarded by a big dog that waited behind a front-yard fence. I couldn’t get past him to knock on the door, so I waited. A few minutes turned into a quarter hour, then a half. The late afternoon was bleeding into evening. Then Stapleton appeared, walking slightly laboriously toward his front gate, his hair gray, his face soft and tired, his body large and unapologetic. He looked like an attorney from a Southern classic—too big for Atticus Finch, but with that same calm and serious air.
Stapleton opened the gate and led me into a spare, formal living room perfect for uninvited guests. I told him what I was working on, and he agreed to speak with me later.
Stapleton’s insights were sharp—distilled from the many months he’d spent contemplating the case and explaining it to the jury. But when he spoke, he was calm and matter-of-fact, never seeking approval or persuasion. He’d simply answer the question at hand, lay out his thoughts, and there they were.
Stapleton’s reflections related in part to the propensity of some attorneys, law enforcement agents, and, indeed, people, to place convicted criminals into a category of society they deem dispensable. To him, killers act in a moment of inevitability—when the worst possible circumstances collide with a person primed for an act of wild transgression. John fit perfectly into this mold—poverty, abuse, and mental illness had continuously collapsed on him since the moment he was born.
“I certainly do not believe universally that there’s any real volition that goes into acts like that. People do what they do because of forces that make them do it, and they have no choice in the matter,” Stapleton said. “I know that my view of that is not the most common view, but I think it’s supported by more life experience, and also I think it’s supported by the science.
“The main difference between people in jail and those not in jail is not even innocence, in my mind. There’s some correlation with poverty and your ability to buy your way out of problems. It doesn’t have anything to do with being good or bad or moral or immoral.”
It doesn’t have anything to do with being good or bad or moral or immoral. That sentence hung in the air like a bubble waiting to be popped. It’s an almost ridiculous idea—that those in jail are as good as the rest of us. Stapleton’s conviction was stirring. I wanted to believe that he was right. I wanted to believe that he was wrong.
Stapleton was religious, and that was the reason he agreed to work on a death-penalty case. The force of his convictions came partly from the sermons he heard in church during his childhood, and partly from a formative event in his family: his father was tried for homicide after he killed someone in a drunk-driving accident. He defended himself in court, and was acquitted.
Preordination was at the heart of Stapleton’s understanding of this fundamentally unjust world. Preordination, as Stapleton put it, posits that we are all destined to commit the acts and make the decisions that form the content of our lives, and that free will is a delicious illusion that allows us to struggle with morality and try to serve God. Stapleton, unlike many people, believed this even when he stepped outside the doors of his place of worship. When John and Angela were in the apartment that night killing their babies, Stapleton believed they were playing a part in the scripted drama that is humanity.
This view raises so many questions: Am I a helpless participant in my own life, waiting for the moment when something good or bad happens, laboring under the misguided belief that I’m choosing to type this sentence? And if everything is preordained, why not create a world full of beauty and happiness, devoid of pain and suffering? Do we learn nothing from our actions if we are already destined to do the next thing and the next without alteration?
In some respects, preordination is profoundly disturbing: Why try? What will be will be. But it also provides a cause for compassion in even the bleakest situation. John had no choice, it reasons. He acted as he was destined to. And who are we to judge a divine plan in action?
Every time I went to Brownsville, I had to visit the building on East Tyler Street. Was it research or compulsion? What would realistically change from two days ago? Those weeks when I’d gone without seeing the building, I would come back and find it the same. But it felt changed. Or maybe I’d changed. The weather got hotter and the air around the building felt heavier and full of poison.
I looked for patterns in the interviews and noticed a figure mentioned repeatedly: the devil. Was he involved? In John’s letters he said an evil force was responsible for what happened inside the apartment. When I asked the neighbors if they were religious, I heard ambivalence in their voices, the moment they asked themselves, should I say this aloud or should I be silent? Maybe the devil had played a role in the crimes, the leading role. Maybe the devil had possessed the children, or, more convincingly, possessed John.
I put it to Stapleton. What about this belief—some may call it superstition and others religious faith—that John was possessed by an evil force? How did that enter into the trial? I expected him to dismiss the question and move on. Instead, he spoke with his usual calm, serious tone:
“That was an alternate theory—that he was, in fact, posse
ssed by the devil, and we had members of the defense team that believed that, and I had supportive witnesses that believe that. I don’t believe in devils or devil possession, but that doesn’t mean that we weren’t willing to advance the theory. We considered it. Legally it’s not a defense. Possession by devils is not a legal defense. It doesn’t acquit you. If you’re possessed, you don’t have the mental state. I think Mr. Rubio believes and believed he was possessed by devils. I think a lot of well-educated people believe the same thing.”
Much of what Stapleton said conflicted, predictably, with what District Attorney Armando Villalobos told me. Villalobos, a tall man whose dark mane of hair was perpetually slicked back, had a salesman’s smile. To him, John’s case was the sad result of poverty coupled with drugs and desperation. According to the prosecution, John wanted to leave Angela and the kids behind and start a new life. The pressure of the responsibility was weighing hard. The family couldn’t pay the rent and the notification they had received about their food stamps added to the stress. John was unemployed and had a new baby. He wanted to escape. So, he killed them, playing the part of the madman in hopes that if he couldn’t flee, he would be found not guilty by reason of insanity.
Villalobos told me he didn’t agree with glorifying the crime, or even remembering it. I asked him why not remember if something could be learned from it. Villalobos seemed skeptical.
“I mean, if anybody can learn from it, I’m all for that,” he hedged, “but you’re talking about a situation where the lifestyle of both parents was something of their own choice. They decided to get into drugs. She [Angela] decided to stay with John although John was basically prostituting himself homosexually and had a relationship with somebody else. To me it was like, there are stressors that everyone has. It’s just how you put yourself in those situations. These people put themselves in this situation.” This view was meant to be tough but fair: people are accountable for their problems, and John made a series of bad choices.
The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts Page 12
