The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts (13 page)

CHAPTER 11

Good Guys and Bad Guys

That story could have happened to me.

—
EDUARDO RODRIGUEZ, FORMER NEIGHBOR OF ANGELA

E
d 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 com
mon 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, possessed 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 par
ents 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.

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.