The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts (14 page)

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 counterpoint 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 varied 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.

Suddenly, an extension curved out of the back, like an unknown limb. I'd noticed this one-story house that shared a wall with the building on East Tyler Street, but I'd always assumed they would stand side by side in back, the small house dwarfed by its big brother. But instead of going proportionally back, the little house narrowed into a series of small, linear rooms. In this way it resembled an arm—conjoined to the building at the pit in front, but then moving back skinny and independent into the lot behind. An alcove formed between the appendage of the little house and
the body of the building, and everywhere along the border were doors; doors to the little rooms of the house, doors into the conjoined armpit between them, and then doors from all the first-floor apartments of the building opening out into the peninsula of grass. There, the white porcelain of a forlorn toilet lay on its side, and a square of carpet marked the entrance to one of the first-floor apartments.

The city workers explained that they were closing off the building, but first they had to go inside to make sure they didn't shut in any squatters. One man had already started sealing up some rooms.

With the doors flung open and the insistent squeal of the drill boring unnaturally through metal, the building seemed like a surgical patient: it lay helplessly as it was unhinged and put back together, with a mix of new and borrowed parts.

The city worker said I could look inside if I wanted to, and I walked in through an open doorway to my right. It didn't take me long to realize where I was. Though the shape and size resembled a hallway, the lumps of clothes on the floor, dirty and shapeless as if they'd been through a flood, told the story. I'd seen it in pictures, though the mess looked fresher nine years ago when it was documented as evidence. I was standing in the crime scene. The doorway I'd stepped through was the same one nailed shut by John.

It was too dark. I couldn't be sure where my feet were taking me. All the court testimony made sense: the apartment was shaped like a hallway, witnesses had said. The rooms ran from one end of the building to the other with a door on either end. I could see
the cracks of sunshine leaching through the doorframe, but not enough light came from any direction for me to know precisely what I was looking at. I feared I'd step on something in advanced decay.

Here was the heart of dread. It was not fearsome. It was fetid, noxious, hopeless. A deep and exhausting misery, a crevasse so bottomless that, in the blackness, all one could make out were the contours of despair.

I took photographs, using the flash to illuminate the room. But the bursts were momentary. I saw only glimpses:

The concrete floor. The kitchen sink filled with plastic bags, dirty bowls. The ladle hanging from a nail, waiting to be used again. A container of lard on the counter, a box of oatmeal. An upended mattress pressed against the wall. Red and purple artificial flowers forever vibrant in a plastic vase.

The contents of the apartment were preserved. Perhaps there had been squatters, vandals, addicts. But because the family had cobbled together the items they could find to make a home, it was hard to tell what was new and what was old. Later I learned that the brown stains on some of the items were dried blood.

When I got outside, I felt like running. The wet air was clean and I gulped it in, realizing I'd been trying to hold my breath, trying not to inhale the smells of the apartment.

They're going to seal up the door, I thought. They're going to close it up with their tools and I never have to go back inside again.

The city worker invited me to look inside the attached house. Not much was left there. Dirt caked the floors, and the long body
of a garden hose was coiled like a snake. Light filtered through the windows in the small rooms, and brilliant green leaves could be seen between the metal bars on the windows. The light and the leaves evoked the peace of one of my favorite paintings,
Shadow Decoration
. The 1887 oil on canvas work by Charles Courtney Curran shows a woman in a simple brown dress and apron hanging laundry from a line. Through the white sheets the viewer can see the dark shadows of exotic leaves, revealed as verdant green in the corner of the painting. She sees the laundry, the pins, and the line, but she's surrounded by the friendly shadow-ghosts of leaves, representing an unseen paradise. In that portrait exists the possibility that you could be going through the mundane actions of your life—doing laundry or the dishes, say—but living in a different landscape.

Inside the apartment the possibility of escape shrank down in the darkness. I had looked at the building from the outside so many times. I'd watched and cataloged it, contemplated its codes and scars and memories. But the essence lay inside, sealed up beyond the doors of people's homes, where families' lives are privately kept. There lay the love that John and Angela showed the children when they were alive, the laughter. There, too, was the hunger and the drugs and the blood.

• • •

I called Brad, the photographer, and he came by to take some pictures before they shuttered the apartment. As soon as he was finished, I thanked the city worker and walked down the block to Minerva Perez's house. Minerva had lived in the neighborhood all
of her sixty-nine years, always in the same house, two doors down from the building.

That day she was inside with her cousin, who had also grown up here. Minerva was warm, her eyes always focused on yours, with a face that invited you to smile whenever she did. She may have been the first advocate of the building's demolition; the children's deaths had never stopped haunting her. The children had been a fixture in the neighborhood, and she'd seen them daily when they passed by her house on the way to their meals at Good Neighbor. But years had passed since the city had started to discuss the demolition of the building, and Minerva was still in its shadow. It could be there for the rest of her life.

I asked Minerva what the neighborhood was like when she was growing up.

“You better believe it—it was real nice here. We didn't have cement. We used to walk. The blocks were dirt. Remember? And we had good neighbors. Los Chapas.”

“All of those houses were neighbors,” her cousin cut in. “The Benevidez,
aqu
í
[here]. Now, no
hay nadie
[there's no one]. Everybody's dead.”

I asked them what they meant by “better.”

“Now,
horita
, you cannot trust anybody, mama!” said the cousin. “It was a beautiful neighborhood, we grew up here!
No había gangas.
”

“There weren't gangs,” Minerva reiterated.

They remembered that the building used to be a gasoline station, something I'd learned from the fire insurance maps from the thirties. Later, they said, it was called the Imperial. After that it was
derisively called El Hotel de los Chiflados, the Hotel of the Stooges, for the elderly people who lived inside. The nickname might have come from a 1939 Mexican comedy. Minerva and her cousin told me that men used to drive up in taxis around the corner and whistle to the prostitutes on the second floor just a few years before the murders.

Minerva and her cousin talked about the old neighborhood with reverence: the families, the neighbors, the nuns at the Catholic school, the dirt roads. In Minerva's memory, all of it was better than what was there now.

“All the houses were beautiful houses,” the cousin said. “But now there's
puro ratones
, there's rats and everything.” The cousin, skeptical of me, told Minerva,
“Es muy grande la history para ella.”
The history is very big for her.

The cousin said she used to live at the Imperial. She remembered the wives of shrimpers who lived there at the time. “They used to help us. The ladies, they were clean people, clean ladies! But ever since they killed these little kiddos there—did you get the story about the kiddos?”

I had.

I asked Minerva and her cousin when the building started to change, transforming from the nice place they lovingly remembered to the one they derided, that they wanted destroyed.

“When people moved, it started changing because people from across started to live there,” Minerva said, referring to Mexico. “It's been more than thirty years.”

“Thirty-five years,” the cousin chimed in.

“They let it go, they let it go down,” Minerva said. “But still peo
ple live there. They don't pay rent, they just go in there. Smoke pot and everything.”

“Right,” I said.

“I've been after the mayor so he can destroy it, do something, but they say they don't have the money. And now the city, the city, now they're saying the city bought it and it's the city's property. You can see I'm not lying, you can see lights at night in those windows, all those windows that are broken, I can see light. Me and Mr. Mendoza, we were outside and we can hear voices from inside.”

“
Como
[like], right here, the Garzas were here,” the cousin said. “They had the kids, the sons, they grow up here. We all grow up here. It's nice.
Ahorita
, now
vive una
Mexican lady she rented, she's not supposed to have ladies from Mexico hiding in there or whatever. It's not the same, mama.”

“What I mean, it's not the same,” Minerva started. “Sometimes I sit down outside and I figure out all the things that were my mom's friends, my neighbors here . . .” She closed her eyes, imagining.

“You close your eyes and you think about how it used to be?” I asked.

She nodded. “It used to be real nice, you know. But when everything happened . . . I'm not saying this whole neighborhood . . . just this side here.”

Minerva said that the vacant lot next door had, at one time, been the site of a beautiful house. The woman who lived there had killed herself. Felix Sauceda had also mentioned this death.

“What happened to the house?” I asked.

“They destroyed it.”

“Who did?”

“The owners,” she said. “Because it was so old and they didn't want to fix it up and they destroyed it,” Minerva said. “After ten, fifteen years.”

“You have a lot of stories here, in this neighborhood,” the cousin said. “I'm telling you the truth. You have a lot of stories. Then right over there in the corner, his name was Tony Rodriguez. Tony.
La pichona
.” The pigeon.

“They killed him right there, too.”

“They killed him over there with a machete. He used to have a store.”

Minerva and her cousin recounted some of this story and some of that about the neighborhood. In their voices I could hear the pangs of nostalgia for a childhood that no longer existed. Even pleasant memories were tinged with violence, with suicides and murders and prostitution. Though Minerva and her cousin spoke a combination of Spanish and English, they both talked of the threat of people from “across,” moving in and destroying the neighborhood.

“I wish you could go inside there and take pictures with somebody, mama,” said the cousin.

“Well, I just did actually.”

“You went by yourself?!”
the cousin yelled, even louder than her normal loudspeaker pitch.

“You went inside?” Minerva asked, shaken.

“Into the apartment where they killed the kids,” I said.

“You went inside? Mama, don't go in there,” Minerva said. “It's bad. I'm gonna tell you why: there's some evil spirits in there. Bet
ter go to a church and get holy water because I'm gonna tell you why. The guy in the back, they went over there to that place at four o'clock in the morning, they saw a lot of things and they came out screaming.”

Minerva looked at me warily, almost as if she were afraid to touch me again, lest she contract whatever I was now carrying. I listened to her admonitions, but I still hadn't processed all I'd seen inside the apartment. Something powerful resided there. Was it a bad spirit, as Minerva said? Is a spirit the same as a memory so visceral it makes a terrestrial home, nesting between the walls of its setting?