Cantu merely shuffled his feet and looked down.
“The answer: we find and determine beyond a reasonable doubt the answer to special issue one is yes.
“Special issue two,” Judge Harmon continued. “Do you find from the evidence beyond a reasonable doubt that Peter Anthony Cantu, the defendant himself, actually caused the death of Jennifer Ertman, the deceased, on the occasion in question, or if he did not actually cause Jennifer Ertman’s death, that he intended to kill Jennifer Ertman or another, or that he anticipated that human life would be taken? Answer is yes.
“Special issue number three: Taking into consideration all of the evidence, including the circumstances of the offense, the defendant’s character and background, and the personal moral culpability of the defendant, do you find that there is a sufficient mitigating circumstance or circumstances to warrant that a sentence of life imprisonment rather than a death sentence be imposed?”
The judge paused. The spectators practically stopped breathing. Peter Cantu grimaced.
“We, the jury,” Judge Harmon continued, “unanimously find and determine that the answer to this special issue is no.
“Verdict: We, the jury, return in open court the above answers to the special issues submitted to us, and the same as our verdict in this case.
“So say you all?” the judge asked the jurors.
“Yes, sir,” they all replied in unison. Not a single jury member was crying.
The tears were flowing in the gallery, though. Young girls were walking up to Sandra Ertman and giving her hugs in her seat. She seemed to be doing more consoling of the kids than anything.
Judge Harmon again looked directly at the defendant. “Mr. Cantu, would you please rise?”
The bored-looking Cantu stood up to face the judge.
“Based upon the answers to the special issues by the jury . . . I’m now going to assess your punishment in accordance with the laws of death.”
For the first time, Peter Cantu showed a look of despair. He grimaced at the pronunciation of the word “death.”
“Do you have any reason to say, Mr. Cantu, why I should not go ahead and pronounce sentence against you today?”
“Nah” was Cantu’s unenthusiastic reply. He then scooted back to his chair and sat down in it.
“Having nothing further to say,” Harmon continued before he noticed Cantu had taken his seat. “Please rise, Mr. Cantu.” Cantu hesitantly stood up. “It is the order of the court that you, Peter Anthony Cantu, adjudged to be guilty of the offense of capital murder, whose punishment has been assessed by the verdict of the jury, the judgment of the court at death.
“That concludes the trial,” Judge Harmon declared. “It is now over.”
But not really.
Judge Bill Harmon allowed Randy Ertman to confront his daughter’s killer in court through a then-little-known law on the Texas books known as the Victim Impact Statement, which is a part of the Crime Victims’ Bill of Rights. At the time, no one in the state of Texas had ever used it before.
There is a first time for everything.
“Mr. Ertman?” Judge Harmon asked as he looked toward Jennifer Ertman’s father.
“Yes, sir, Your Honor?” Randy Ertman said as he raised his six-foot-plus, 245-pound frame toward the wooden railing that separated him from one of the killers of his only daughter. He was nicely dressed in a gray wool jacket.
“You have anything you wish to say to the defendant?” the judge asked.
People in the courtroom were taken aback. Nothing like this had ever occurred in a Harris County courthouse. Even Cantu’s attorneys, Davis and Morrow, were caught off-guard.
“Yes, sir, I do,” Randy clearly replied. He had been quietly sobbing during the reading of Cantu’s sentence. He stopped as soon as the judge spoke to him.
Randy stood behind the wooden railing, placed his hands on it, and began to talk to Peter Cantu.
“I’m not going to put you down and get on your level. I’m not going to call you ‘sir.’ I am not going to call you a thing.”
Cantu, with his hands shoved deep down inside his pockets, kept his back turned to Randy, instead facing toward Judge Harmon.
“You can look at me if you want.” Peter Cantu did not take Randy up on his offer.
“Look at me!” Randy yelled at Cantu.
Still nothing.
“Look!” Randy hollered so loud, two grown women sitting behind him began to cry.
Finally Cantu deigned to turn his head toward the father of the young girl he murdered. He kept the lower portion of his body facing the judge so only his head craned back over his left shoulder to look at Randy Ertman.
Peter Cantu sneered at the father.
“You’re not even an animal.” Randy spit the words out of his mouth. “I have cats that kill animals. They kill an animal, they eat it. You’re worse than that. You’re a piece of shit!” he yelled at Cantu.
The defendant continued to look at the man who stood more than a half-foot taller and weighed nearly a hundred pounds more. He was partially blocked by his attorney Don Davis, who refused to look back at Randy.
“Excuse me,” Randy apologized to the court and to the spectators in the gallery. He returned his attentions to Cantu, who had turned his head back toward the front of the courtroom.
“Look at me!” Randy yelled again. “Look at me!” Cantu looked back again.
“My cats eat something. That’s the way they were brought up, they eat it. You didn’t eat nothing. You destroyed a life. You destroyed my life. You destroyed my wife’s life. You destroyed the Penas’ life.” All of the family members in the crowd were either crying or on the verge.
“I haven’t seen any remorse from you,” Randy chided Cantu.
“You’re worse than anything I’ve seen in my life and I hope that . . .” Randy paused. “I hope that you rot in hell!” At that point, Justice for All founder and crime victims’ advocate Pam Lychner stood up and grasped Randy’s left forearm to provide him some comfort.
“Do you understand that? Just nod your head if you can even think about talking, boy.” Cantu continued to sneer at Randy Ertman. “Can you say ‘boy’?”
Randy was exhausted. He sat down.
That was the end of the first Victim Impact Statement in the state of Texas.
The judge had Peter Cantu removed and asked for the court to be cleared.
Before Randy stood up to confront Cantu, Adolph Pena said, “it felt like everyone in that courtroom was on edge. The tension was almost unbearable.”
Andy Kahan recalled a telling anecdote provided by one of the court’s bailiffs. Apparently, the young man leaned over and said to Kahan, “If he goes over the railing, we’re going to give him a few minutes and then we’re gonna pull him off.”
Afterward, Adolph discussed Randy’s confrontation with Peter Cantu. “He was steaming. But, hell, it made him feel better. It made me feel better. I told him more power to him and give him hell.” Adolph added, “I think everybody in there felt better after he said something to that bastard.”
Some critics, mainly defense lawyers not involved in the case, decried Judge Harmon’s decision to allow Randy Ertman to give a Victim Impact Statement to Peter Cantu. One critic called the entire event “a circus.”
Randy responded by asking, “You ever go to a circus and see two girls get killed like that?”
Adolph Pena said of Peter Cantu, “I look forward to seeing all of them being executed, but he’s the one I am looking forward to the most. I bet there will be two hundred people there in Huntsville outside those walls when they execute that son of a bitch.”
Adolph was constantly appalled by Cantu’s behavior and total lack of remorse. “He acts like, Yeah, so I killed these girls. So what? What’s the big deal?”
Both families of the girls gathered in the hallway of the courthouse. Soon thereafter, the members of the jury spilled out of the courtroom into the hallway. They were standing just feet away from the fam
ilies of the girls when one of the jurors opened up her arms to embrace the families. Several jurors joined in the embrace and the tears finally came for the jurors.
The scene was so moving that local Fox News reporter Andrea Watkins began to tear up as she recalled the events. When told by her in-studio counterpart that it had been a long day, Watkins replied, “Yes, it has” as she practically ripped her earpiece out and tossed down her handheld microphone.
Adding to the emotional day, Bob Carreiro found out the man who had recently been captured in connection with his daughter’s murder, Rex Warren Mays, was being arraigned in the same courthouse.
As a result of the extensive media coverage of Randy Ertman’s confrontation with Peter Cantu, lawyers for Sean O’Brien and Raul Villarreal requested changes of venues. Their motions were denied. Both young men would also be tried in Houston.
Chapter 37
Wednesday, March 30, 1994
Law Office of Connie Williams
Houston, Texas
As Connie Williams, the newly appointed defense attorney for Sean O’Brien, looked over his client’s case files, he shook his head at the enormity of the case. A jury had just been impaneled and he was supposed to begin the trial the following Tuesday. The nearly twenty-year-veteran attorney had plenty of experience handling death penalty cases.
But despite Williams’s experience, it would not prepare him for what was about to happen next. He received a call from a detective in the Houston Police Department Homicide Division in regard to O’Brien. The detective informed Williams that the police would need to pick up his client, bring him down to the police station, and collect fresh new samples of blood and tissue. Apparently, O’Brien, Joe Medellin, and Peter Cantu were considered suspects in an additional murder prior to the deaths of Elizabeth Pena and Jennifer Ertman.
Williams was beside himself.
“Who are they suspected of killing?” the attorney asked.
“Sir, I’m sorry, but I’m not at liberty to discuss that information with you at this time,” the detective replied.
“What can you tell me, Officer?”
“Just that we received another tip from a caller.” It was reminiscent of Joe Cantu’s phone call that led detectives to where the bodies of the girls were located. “The caller wanted to be reasonably certain that those three men were not going to get out anytime soon and come after the caller.”
“I understand,” Williams conceded. “Thanks for the heads-up.”
Williams hung up the phone. Despite having put several dozens of hours into preparing for O’Brien’s trial, he believed this might actually help his cause. If word got out about the suspected murder, then the current jury pool could be considered tainted if they were exposed to any of the media coverage.
“The first thing we are going to do is probably ask this panel to be excused,” Williams confirmed. Frankly, he was surprised the judge moved forward with the jury selection earlier, because of the more than two hundred potential jury members in the pool, the overwhelming majority had heard of the case. Several had stated they had already formed opinions of the guilt or innocence of the defendants—based on what they had heard. Nonetheless, the court was able to whittle the pool down to twelve jurors and one alternate.
Williams was not sure which way was up. “I don’t know where it leaves us.”
On Thursday, the following day, police met with Sean O’Brien, Joe Medellin, and Peter Cantu. They drew the samples they required without incident.
Williams gleaned a bit more information by Friday, April 1, April Fools’ Day, 1994. It turned out the person who telephoned in the tip was none other than Joe Cantu, Peter Cantu’s older brother. He claimed that his younger brother, Peter, bragged in January 1993 about raping and killing a young woman in Melrose Park, at 400 Carby Road, after she had run out of gas. The victim, twenty-seven-year-old Lourdes “Patricia” Lopez, was a mother of a young boy and girl. She also had a drug problem.
According to Cathy Lopez, Patricia’s mother-in-law, Patricia was last seen on New Year’s Eve, December 31, 1992, when she stopped by her mother-in-law’s house on Warwick Road. Patricia wanted to have a word with her soon-to-be ex-husband, Joe Lopez, and to see her two children. Joe Lopez, who lived with his mother, took care of the couple’s two children, Joe Jr., nine, and Tiffany, ten.
According to Alfredo Ballestros, his brother was dating Patricia and they all three lived together at Ballestros’s home. Ballestros claimed the last time he saw Patricia was on Sunday, January 3, 1993. It was an easy day for him to remember because the hometown Houston Oilers professional football team blew a 32-point lead in the playoffs against the Buffalo Bills in what turned out to be the greatest comeback in playoff history.
Ballestros recalled that around 6:00 P.M., his brother and Patricia got into an argument. “She was my friend and he’s my brother, so I didn’t want to get in the middle of that, so I went to shoot some pool.”
Ballestros returned home a couple of hours later. Patricia was not there. Another hour passed, when the phone rang. Ballestros picked it up and heard a weary Patricia Lopez on the other line.
“Alfredo, it’s me,” Patricia informed him.
“Where are you?” the concerned friend asked.
“I’m at a pay phone over at Gulf Bank and Airline.”
“Is everything all right?” he asked.
“Not really. I’m over here at the Smart Stop convenience store. I ran out of gas and I don’t have any money,” she declared, exasperated. “Can you please come get me?”
“Yeah, no problem,” he offered. “What happened between you two?”
“Just come get me,” she pleaded.
Ballestros had been to the Smart Stop numerous times, so he drove there as if on autopilot. It only took him a few minutes to arrive at the store. He parked his car and got out to look around. He did not see Patricia or her car anywhere.
Ballestros’s son was coming in that same night from Denver, Colorado, to visit, and he needed to pick him up at the bus station. He jumped back into his car and picked up his son. The two returned to the Smart Stop, but still, there was no Patricia. He gave up and drove home.
Alfredo Ballestros never heard from Lourdes or saw “Patricia” Lopez again.
At 1:50 A.M. on January 4, 1993, eighteen-year-veteran Houston police officer T. E. Westerman was making his usual rounds on the north side of Houston in his patrol car. His shift was from 10:00 P.M. until 6:00 A.M. His patrol area included Melrose Park, a small community park with benches and large oak trees. It has a tiny triangular-shaped gravel parking lot and a metal fence with a turnstile entrance.
Officer Westerman pulled his cruiser into the parking lot and began to check it out. It was not uncommon for stragglers to be populating the area late at night; usually, teenagers up too late getting into trouble or a homeless person looking for a semiwarm place to curl up in the frigid Houston winter. It was also a haven for gang activity and a drop-off point for stolen cars, according to the officer. He was there to enforce the 11:00 P.M. closing rule.
As the officer cruised around the parking lot, sure enough, he spotted the hand of someone lying down on the grass. He pulled up his vehicle next to the person and shined the lights in his or her general direction. He found the person’s position to be a bit unusual, however, between the chain-link fence that surrounded the park and one of the rounded wooden-log parking obstacles. It appeared as if the person was passed out as well.
Officer Westerman stepped out of his vehicle to get a closer look. He could tell it was a female and she was lying flat on her back. He noticed something on her belly region, but he could not make it out at first. Westerman immediately summoned for backup and an ambulance; he began to search the parking lot for any potential suspects.
It did not look good for the woman on the ground.
Westerman was unable to locate any suspects, so he secured what was an obvious crime scene.
The backup police officers showed up
in just a few minutes, as did the ambulance. The CSU showed up more than an hour later and Westerman was asked to remove his vehicle so they could work the scene collecting any potential evidence that may have been left behind.
CSU detective Keith Webb took over for Westerman. Webb, a twenty-one-year veteran of the HPD, had been involved with CSU for the previous five years. The veteran spoke with the officers at the scene, then began to photograph the area. What he witnessed was not a pretty sight.
A young woman lay on her back without any pants or underwear. Her legs were splayed out and pulled back with her knees up, and her genitalia exposed. She wore a white sock on her left foot and none on her right. The victim’s white button-down blouse was covered in blood and was open so her breasts were exposed. She had been wearing a bra, which had been removed and discarded near the body. It had been severed by a knife or some type of sharp instrument. Just below the victim’s breasts lay her intestines on top of her stomach. The young woman had been sliced open and her insides expelled.
Webb made an interesting discovery. He noticed the victim’s shirt was unbuttoned, not ripped open. The implication being the victim may have willingly disrobed or was forced to do so under duress.
Webb also noted she wore a black leather jacket over her white shirt, which had been unzipped. It, too, had been pulled back.
Once Webb took photographs of the crime scene in the dark environs, he brought out a one-thousand-watt searchlight. With the scene illuminated, he was able to shoot more pictures of any additional evidence he could not spot in the dark. He noticed a pair of black hiking boots on the other side of the fence in the direction of the woman’s body. He also spotted a pair of white panties to the left of her body, as well as a woman’s belt. Interestingly, the belt had been broken on the side with the holes. It appeared to Webb as if the “belt had been broken while it was buckled, with the little buckle pin still inside the hole.”
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