Villalobos took office just two years after the murders. He was not the DA when John’s initial trial took place, and once an appellate court granted John a new trial, Villalobos knew he was responsible for leading his office to a victorious and final verdict in the case.
“In the city and community there was a sense of wanting to get this over with,” he said. “The longer it dragged on, the more it kept these wounds open.”
Of course Villalobos would scoff at the idea that the devil played a role in the crime. And preordination? No, he held people responsible for their actions. To Stapleton, Rubio was a victim of his own madness, a history mapped out for him before birth. To Villalobos, there was simply no forgiving the unforgivable, especially for a person who did not lead an upstanding lifestyle.
“We as human beings want things to make sense,” Villalobos said. “We expect things to make sense. Most of us follow the rules and have good reason when we choose to not follow a rule. But when you deal with criminals like we do, you learn that there’s a percentage of the population that just does whatever they want with no regard for the rules, no regard for what makes sense.”
He sounded cynical, like a hard-boiled cop, worn-out from too many tough cases.
Stapleton believed that the things we do are inevitabilities before they occur, that imprisonment or freedom are circumstantial, and that no essential difference divides us. To Villalobos, we are a civilized society with a small renegade population of bad eggs. There’s no point in explaining away their actions—justice is exacted through punishment, not empathy.
The law sides with Villalobos: “In our system of justice, in order to not be held responsible for your actions, it’s a very high burden. I’m glad it’s a very high burden. You think these people are crazy because you say, ‘Who would do that? Who would crash into a McDonald’s and open fire? Who would leave their kids in a car and let them die in the heat?’ Everyone has different opinions of what is crazy. Legally, the question is quite simply, do they know right from wrong? No matter how crazy they are, no matter how absurd, if they knew what they were doing was wrong, they’re guilty.”
The prosecution needed to prove that John didn’t have a “severe mental disease or defect” that prevented him from understanding his actions were wrong. A lot of testimony was heard, for example, about John and Angela’s cleaning up the mess after the deaths, as it points to an effort to hide the evidence. Their discussion about sex and the possibility it could be the last time, and John’s alleged statement to Cervantes, “Arrest me,” provided additional evidence that John and Angela were well aware of the nature of their actions, at least after the fact.
Angela would also testify that John had once mentioned the idea of killing the children, several months before it took place. She shrugged off the comment at the time, believing it was just silly talk, the way you might ask your friend, “What would you do if I died?” One of the most damning moments of the second trial occurred when John’s lover, Jose Luis Moreno, testified that John asked him, about two weeks prior to the killings, whether Moreno knew how to commit the perfect murder: “He said that you could get away with it by saying that you were insane.” Moreno also claimed that John wanted to take two of the children with him to Austin, to get away from Angela and Hilda and Hilda’s boyfriend.
These signposts indicated that John knew what he’d done was criminal. But did that mean he did not meet the legal definition of insanity at the time of the murders? Dr. William Valverde, the psychiatrist who first evaluated him, said that while John may have understood society would punish him for what he’d done, it doesn’t mean he appreciated the “wrongness” of the act itself.
“Much like a child, the impulse, the desire, that needs to be met, whatever it is this that pops into your head, overwhelms any sense of morality,” Dr. Valverde testified.
The long-term effect of John’s drug use was also debated at trial. It clouded the ability to discern between symptoms caused by brain damage and those caused by schizophrenia. Dr. Valverde argued the drugs would not cause hallucinations several days after they’d been used (John said it had been three days since the last time he did spray before the murders), but they could contribute to long-term delusions. His argument that there’s a distinction between knowing an action has consequences and knowing that such consequences mean it’s wrong was not persuasive to the jury. When reading about what John did, the visceral reaction may be that only a person out of his or her mind could take a kitchen knife to not one but three children’s throats and force it through their flesh, their muscle, and their spines. Legally, however, that’s not enough to grant a defendant a not-guilty verdict.
The prosecuting attorneys also built their case on the series of economic misfortunes that were piling up on the family, suffocating them and allegedly causing them to decide that the children would be better off dead. They had received a concerning notice about their food stamps, Hilda waffled with her part of the rent, which was due the day of the murders, and they had a third baby in an already-full apartment. Still, I’ve always found this notion—that poverty was the culprit—perplexing. If John wanted a fresh start, he could easily have left Angela and the kids. He had also made adjustments to hold on to them before, participating in parenting classes and drug testing to get the kids back. The couple had contacts with many agencies, including their daily visits to Good Neighbor, and John had even mentioned a plan to go to the Ozanam Center, a homeless shelter, in his statement to police. They’d faced desperate poverty before, and survived. There’s no reason why blood would have had to be shed.
When I spoke to Stapleton and Villalobos, I got swept up in their conflicting perceptions of the moral dimensions that undergird the workings of a courtroom. Then I took a step back: Attorneys are paid to persuade. Best not to take their views too much to heart. Villalobos’s paradigm, a clear division between the criminal and law-abiding segments of society, makes us all feel safer when another of the “bad guys” gets locked up. After all, they’re bad guys. By his logic that’s what they’ll always be.
Then, in May of 2012, just a few months after our conversation, Villalobos was indicted by a grand jury in a widespread corruption case and accused of accepting more than $100,000 in bribes and kickbacks. In one case, his greed helped orchestrate a plan that allowed convicted murderer Amit Livingston to go on the lam. He wasn’t caught for seven years, until he was found in India.
When I talked to Stapleton after the indictment, I recalled Villalobos’s statement to me. That only certain kinds of people commit crimes. That we can’t expect to understand such people because they live outside the rules that govern society.
“His view may be changing now,” Stapleton said generously.
Do you think that people who commit crimes tend to be quicker to condemn others?
“We call it the magic mirror. You hate things about people if you see yourself in them. I think people who feel guilty tend to be more judgmental.” This concept had been part of Stapleton’s closing argument at trial.
After Villalobos was found guilty, I attended one of his hearings in federal court. He looked calm. His eyes were down, that thick crop of dark hair neatly brushed and gelled. He wasn’t frantically flipping through documents or nudging cocounsel to offer an explanation or legal argument. He seemed to understand what awaited him, one way or another: prison.
When Villalobos appeared for his sentencing, that air of tranquility was gone. His voice broke as he cried in the front of the courtroom, pleading with US district judge Andrew Hanen for a lesser sentence. His children, Villalabos said, wouldn’t have him as a father during a crucial period of their lives.
“I’m not the monster they paint me to be,” he said. In a letter the previous year, John told me he was “not the monster I have been made out to be.”
Hanen spoke deliberately. He was aware of the responsibility that came with his position—a cou
nterpoint to the lack of respect that Villalobos had for the public trust as DA. Hanen eventually sentenced Villalobos to thirteen years in federal prison.
Is it easier to believe that John is a “bad guy,” and that what he did was “evil,” or is it easier to blame the circumstances of his life? It’s cognitively overwhelming to combine these factors, to see him both as the catalyst and the entity upon which other catalyzing forces acted.
Psychiatrist Michael Welner, hired by the prosecution, testified during the second trial. He had provided his expertise in a number of other high-profile cases, evaluating Brian David Mitchell, who kidnapped and repeatedly raped Elizabeth Smart, and Pedro Hernandez when he was on trial for the murder of six-year-old Etan Patz. By the time he took the stand, Dr. Welner said he had already spent about 275 hours on the case, at a rate of $400 per hour—a cost of $110,000. It was an extraordinary amount according to other forensic psychiatrists I interviewed. Welner founded the Forensic Panel, a group of experts to create oversight in the field, and developed the Depravity Standard, to compare the relative heinousness of crimes based on various factors. The standard aims to create consensus on terms that are generally held to be abstract and subjective—such as “evil.” It’s a quixotic pursuit that takes for granted that evil is a knowable quantity in our world, capable of comparison. Then again, so, too, is the conceit that a jury, presented with the evidence of a single crime, can understand it relative to a range of cases they have not considered. Dr. Welner believes the standard would ultimately make the court system fairer: when a large sampling of Americans can decide on such a metric, the regional and personal prejudices of individual judges and juries would be set aside, and juries would have a system to make their grave decision. Still, the underlying assumption that “evil” is capable of measurement seemed flawed, and counter to the scientific basis of modern psychiatry.
I asked Stapleton whether he thought Rubio or what occurred in the apartment that night could be termed evil. The question seemed absurd as it left my lips. The word could define the case, but only if you used a particular lens to view the world as a whole. Was Rubio evil? Was what happened evil? Is anything?
Stapleton said he didn’t approve of the way the word “evil” is typically used—to exclude people from society and vilify them. They are damaged people, he said, not evil. “I don’t buy into the idea that there’s good people and bad people and there’s a line that separates us out. I think we’ve got a little of every element in us, and if we don’t recognize it, it’s because we haven’t looked at ourselves closely enough.”
It took me a while before I decided to write to Villalobos in prison. I reminded him of our previous interview, then quickly got to the point.
You told me, when we spoke, that criminals are of a different segment of society, and that it’s no use trying to understand their rationale, because they don’t think the way the rest of us do. I can’t help but wonder if your views have changed or evolved on this issue.
As with my first attempt to contact John, I posted the letter without a sense of expectation. After all, it might not be advisable to write to a reporter when you’re still trying to get your conviction overturned. But, a month later, a response appeared in my mailbox.
Villalobos recalled being under intense pressure to pursue the death penalty in Rubio’s case. His office conducted polling, he wrote, and concluded that the city wanted to see John sentenced to death.
All these factors, plus the unsettling, shocking and unescapable images of the babies that were murdered, led me to conclude that at the very least, a jury should decide his fate.
He went on to say that different people handle prison in different ways. For some, solitary confinement is damaging, he wrote, but others adapt. Then Villalobos came to his final offering of the letter, an “observation,” which came closer to a response to my question than anything that had preceded it.
Once I was sentenced and led away to a holding cell, then off to the federal detention center, where I was held in isolation “for my protection,” it was difficult not to think of all the people who had turned on me. People I had helped prosper, helped their families, helped their friends, and others in which we shared life changing events with. People I considered close friends. As you can imagine, it shakes a person’s resolve and can cause a person to question friendship and trust. It puts you in a position that can definitely change your persona from a personable, friendly, easy going person to a bitter, angry individual, lost in the world. As I sat there in the dark contemplating those feelings, something very unexpected occurred. The other inmates who were in isolation as well—they were not in there for their own protection, but rather for the protection of others. They were guys who were usually imposing, with ink images of various gangs and affiliations all over their bodies and faces. Guys who were hardened by their rough lifestyles and chosen path in life. Definitely the exact opposite of whom you would expect to find any kernel of compassion. But, these men, despite my years of prosecuting them, their friends, and relatives, reached out to me in those dark moments and gave me encouragement, gave me advice, gave me food, and most of all—gave me hope—that not all was lost.
I put down the letter. This was his answer—evasive though it might be—to the question I’d posed. His intended message seemed to be that criminals were indeed not as he had believed them to be, and that they were capable of greater compassion than some of his own close friends, people whom he saw as disloyal. But by couching his answer in this observation, he revealed that his original prejudices persisted: he still separated himself from the criminals—these inked and hardened men, who had “chosen” their “path in life”—as if Villalobos himself had not also made the choices that had led him to his cell.
I thought of Stapleton’s belief that we are composed of a mixture of qualities, good and bad. That being convicted of a crime does not fundamentally make a person any worse than someone who has never spent a night in jail. Temptation would lead me to judge Villalobos, to lick my chops and relish the deliciousness of his conviction. The challenge would be to set aside that impulse.
I was blunt in my next letter: “I wonder, do you still believe that criminals are fundamentally different than other people, now that you have been convicted of several crimes?” He wrote back that he had to resign himself to being “referred to as a criminal.” He defined a true criminal as “a person who has no regard for anything other than themselves and is constantly looking for ways to improve their life at someone else’s expense and someone who has absolutely no remorse of conscious (all in the realm of committing a crime, harm or illegal acts on another).” He also wanted to clarify that his family had been rallying around him and added, “I have had a long history of seeing the good in people (almost to a fault) and most definitely have been compassionate—especially during my time as D.A.” He said that this compassion was a source of aggravation for federal law enforcement officials who saw his approach as too soft. If this was true, the dichotomy between him and Stapleton grew cloudier, as every assumption seemed to upon further inspection.
That was our last correspondence. One passage stuck with me above everything else he wrote. In the ending to his first letter, he summed up the hope that the other men behind bars had given him:
Now granted, I don’t see myself at family pic-nics with most of the guys I have met on this journey, it left me with a feeling that all will be all right in due time—like the image of new growth after a raging forest fire.
CHAPTER 12
* * *
Agua Bendita (Holy Water)
Get some holy water tonight.
—MINERVA PEREZ
I don’t know how many times I went back to the building. I wanted to burn it into my mind, to own the memory, before it was destroyed or changed into something unrecognizable. I had the sensation that I knew it only partially.
The façade looked orderly enough from the street. The doorways va
ried slightly, and the paint seemed to change color inch by inch, but the structure appeared to be something understandable: an old two-story apartment building. On closer inspection, the never-ending details undermined this simple definition. On the front, stenciled lettering was just faint enough to be unintelligible. The sloping sidewalks were another mystery: Were they once indented so cars could drive up to the gasoline pump? They upended my feet, sending me off-balance and close to stepping on the nearby broken glass. Every time I visited, I’d check in on the silent battle of street gangs whose graffiti was periodically whitewashed, wondering who was leaving their mark.
I visited on a sticky day and walked around with a notepad, taking stock of what new things I saw. I’d never noticed the banana tree growing in the neighbor’s yard. The image smacked of fecundity—an abundant crop of small, uniform bananas practically dripping toward the alley. I wondered if a patient person was nearby, the custodian of this particular tree, waiting until they ripened.
Something unexpected occurred that day: A truck parked on the grass and a kind-faced city worker walked toward me. He asked if I wanted to check out the building, and together we traversed the grassy lot. In the past, I’d stayed on the sidewalk and in the alley, never treading in the tall, unkempt grass.
As we walked toward the back side of the building, I noticed a tiny, cartoonish cactus growing at a tilt. A dead papaya tree, perhaps killed by the previous year’s freeze, was disintegrating on the far side of the property. Its pale carcass was as porous and intricate as coral.
The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts Page 13
