The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts (9 page)

In his 1970 book,
The Brownsville Raid
, John D. Weaver advanced the theory that the soldiers could have been framed by racist townspeople. By 1972 Nixon granted a pardon to all the soldiers. The story remains ambiguous, debated by historians. The truth may never be known, except to the dead.

In 1936, the Port of Brownsville opened, the second major business connection the city had established with the world. Two years later, Charro Days began, a festival celebrating the region's culture and its ties to Mexico, intended to boost tourism and draw prospective residents.

At the end of World War II, soldiers departed Fort Brown for the last time. Like so many of our national memories, which boastfully recollect victories in battle while lamenting the dead, Fort
Brown's legacy is a complex history of violence. When that violence is cloaked in love of country, the fort becomes an indispensable part of our collective past. While disease, alcoholism, and racism are mentioned in some accounts, they are mere footnotes. Instead, the fort is remembered for the glory of war, a symbol of Brownsville's eternal significance in shaping the modern boundaries of our nation. Today, the site of the fort can contain, with seeming ease, the gruesome acts of combat and the peaceful, meditative practice of teaching and learning. What was once a hospital has been transformed into the stately office of a university president. What was once a morgue where the bodies of yellow fever victims were dissected became an accountant's office.

It's hard for the building on East Tyler Street to compete. More than a decade after the tragedy, it felt more powerful, with its unpredictable bricks and slanted doorways, than the rise of earth where Fort Brown originated. But history is determined using the power of memory—a power measured in the resources and will of the living. We invest dollars and moments in one place over another. We identify the lessons that might be learned by a new generation, celebrate certain leaders and achievements, and damn others. And as we forget, we destroy. It is a silent violence. We cup our hands over the mouths of the dead, shutting our eyes and choosing to forget them without a conscious thought.

CHAPTER 7

A Corner in the Good Life

No one is going to want to live in those memories
.

—
FELIX SAUCEDA, NEIGHBOR

I
walked around the chain-link fences near the corner of East Tyler and Eighth Street and stood on the sidewalks in front of people's yards. “Hello!
Hola
! Disculpa!
” I'd call out, until someone emerged from a dark doorway, the lights dimmed inside the home to diminish the heat.

Around the corner, an orange tree spilled fruit onto the sidewalk and a man lounged inside a car with the passenger's door open in front of a little house with lattice fencing and a new coat of paint. The grass had been scraped away and a tidy dirt lot remained. From inside the front room of the house, the distinct excitement of a soccer announcer's voice blasted Spanish syllables into the street from a TV set.

“Hello?
Hola!
Disculpa!
” I said from my post on the sidewalk.

A middle-aged man with a graying mullet came outside. He was
wearing black cotton boxers and nothing else. I told him I was writing about the building around the corner.

“I used to live in that building,” the man, named Sixto, said in Spanish. “It's uninhabitable.”

“Did it bother you to live there, knowing what happened?”

“No, that didn't bother me. But I just couldn't live there. I was on the second floor and there's only one bathroom for all the apartments up there,” he said. “The apartments don't have water, ­nothing.”

Like Mr. Mendoza, one of the other neighbors, Sixto looked at the building pragmatically. No water, shared bathrooms—these concerns weighed far more heavily than the lives of strangers.

He seemed anxious to get back to the soccer game, so I tried some more houses. At one, a woman curtly told me the owner wasn't home and shut the door. At a yellow house that had been converted into a legal office, the young secretary said she was afraid to tell her boss, who was from Houston and didn't know the city's history, what had happened down the street. She didn't like working on the same street as the building and suspected that ghosts were haunting the block.

• • •

At the University of Texas at Brownsville, Carlos Gómez, an art professor, painted a portrait of John during his first trial. The local news had been on in his studio, and Gómez glanced at the TV set as John's eyes looked directly into the camera.

“It blew me away,” Gómez said. In John's eyes, Gómez saw rage, evil. The image hit him, he said, like a brick.

He wanted to capture that evil in a painting. The result is a portrait in shades of fiery red and yellow, rendered with long brushstrokes. The piece,
John Allen Rubio Asesino
, was one in a series of five hundred paintings that Gómez called vignettes. He aimed to reach a thousand.

Children, Gómez said, are sacred in South Texas, and John's actions violated a fundamental belief that such things do not happen in a community so oriented around family. At the first opportunity, Gómez got rid of the painting, giving it to the permanent collection at Washington State University. Gómez thought the painting worked technically, but he didn't want the negative energy around him. Still, he felt it should be seen.

“We need to look at these things, because I think if we can recognize them, we can avoid them.” Some atrocities, he said, come out of the void, striking at random. But not this case.

In 2010, after John's direct appeal resulted in a new trial, his attorneys argued for a change of venue, saying that the community's intimate knowledge and emotions about the case would preclude objectivity. In Barrio Buena Vida, it was hard to find anyone unfamiliar with what had happened, as it was whenever I mentioned the case to friends or acquaintances, or anyone I came across in Brownsville.

At the change-of-venue hearing, John's attorneys called witness after witness, trying to prove that all opinions here were biased. Father Ricardo Garcia, the pastor of Mary, Mother of the Church in Brownsville, had visited John in jail and described how easy it had been for him to see extensive information about John's case, including a confession video that was posted online, through a simple
Google search. Father Armand Mathew, a priest for sixty-one years in Brownsville, spoke of the hate the case had generated in the community, a reaction he found unacceptable.

Q. Is there anything about the nearness or the proximity of the apartment where it happened and the people who are involved that aggravate that, in your opinion?

A. Well, yes. I think the memory of the event is still very fresh in many people's minds. How could it not be? And so I think that that is bound to have an effect. I—you know, in my opinion, I don't think that anybody can be aware of this event and not have emotions that linger about it. And so I think even to this day—you know, I believe further, I don't care who we are, myself included, we cannot have that kind of emotional experience and set it completely aside. I don't care how sincere we might be, I just don't think that we can have an experience like that and not have it affect us directly always.

John's attorney Nat Perez Jr. told me that, in arguing for a change of venue, he was trying to protect his client from a bloodthirsty public. “People were saying they need to take him to the nearest mesquite tree and string him up,” Perez recalled.

In the end, John was granted a change of venue to Hidalgo County for his second trial, in a courthouse about an hour from Brownsville. By then, Armando Villalobos had been elected district attorney, and he felt strongly that a death sentence must be secured to achieve a sense of finality. During the second trial, Angela took the witness stand, telling the events from her perspec
tive, but John did not. Again, John's attorneys fought hard, and again he lost.

• • •

Across from the building, on East Tyler Street, I watched a man park and lumber out of his car. He limped toward his house, tilted his head, and drained the dregs of a Diet Coke.

Felix Sauceda, seventy-three, had lived on this street his entire life. He told me in Spanish that he was sure that no one would live in the building, even if it was fixed up.

“Do you believe in spirits, ghosts, things like that?” I asked.

“They say they're there. Personally, I haven't seen them, but they say yes.”

According to Felix, two factors conspired to cause John and Angela to commit the murders: drugs, which make you “do things you will regret your whole life,” and desperation.

“Not because of madness?”

“Yes, well, everything goes together. People, when they don't have something, they go crazy. It's like when you love a woman a lot and she leaves, you want to die alone or the opposite?”

But what if the city wanted to change the building and make it better, what would he think of that?

“They're not going to get anyone [to live there] because no one's going to want to remember what happened. That's what I think.”

Many of the people I'd spoken to wanted the building gone, but when presented with the possibility that the city could make something better of it, they agreed, skeptically, that might be a positive step. Not Felix.

Felix told me about an incident at a clothing store downtown some years ago. The roof flooded and collapsed on the customers inside, and several people were crushed to death. These things happen, he said.

“For a time it stays in your mind, but then you forget it like everything. But at the beginning it makes a big impact. They were children—children! We think more about children because they're innocent, angels. We don't think so much about them [the parents]. Because they're the bad ones, we don't think so much about them.”

Is there a grain of something,
un grano
, that we could learn from all of this?

Felix began to laugh.

Something that perhaps we could use to improve things after such a tragedy?

“No, no, no.”

Why?

“Because he who takes drugs takes them alone, and these are the things that happen! If we told stories of everyone who is in prison, it's infinite. Nothing else like this has happened because things like this happen once in a lifetime, no more. Hopefully we're not going to see something like this again, because it's not pretty.”

But a similar crime had occurred a few hours away in Laredo, just the week before I spoke with Felix. A man took his wife's two children to a hotel, and when the police came knocking on the door, he shot the kids and then himself. Felix told me such things happen when people are desperate. I asked him why desperation would lead people to kill, rather than to look for help.

“They looked, but they didn't give it to them.”

“I think there always are other options.”

“I know there are!” Felix said. “But when a difficult time comes and nobody helps you, no one listens to you, they leave you alone . . . I don't know how to explain it. . . . You go to your neighbor's house and ask if they could lend you three dollars to eat and they say they don't have it. You go to another [neighbor] and they don't have it, no one has it. You're frustrated and you have hungry children. And you kill them. That's how people think.”

You cannot know the power of desperation, Felix was saying, until you experience it in its raw form. Desperation can fuel acts that would otherwise be incomprehensible. And if you've never been filled with that kind of quaking, hysterical desperation, you simply cannot fathom the way it can make you behave.

Felix told me about the woman who lived across the street. She shot herself with a rifle after being duped by a lover. Another neighbor who owned a store was killed with a machete.

Legends were piling up like a stack of bodies.

“I'm going to tell you something. Keep digging and you're going to learn more.”

As I moved to turn off my tape recorder, I noticed a splotch of black ink on the plane of brown skin in the unbuttoned
V
of his shirt. Felix pulled down his collar so I could see. Jesus Christ presided over his chest.

CHAPTER 8

Angela

I don't know what happened to my mind.

—
ANGELA CAMACHO

I
looked for Angela's mother's home on the outskirts of Los Fresnos, Texas, ten miles from Brownsville. Los Fresnos, a sparsely populated ranching town, stretched from Brownsville toward the Gulf, alongside resacas and salt flats and the rodeo fairgrounds, with grapefruit groves and trailer parks, the land as unruly as its residents.

I had a possible address for Angela's mother from an online database and drove off a farm road and into a little neighborhood—two dozen houses on big lots along a road shaped like a figure eight. The neighborhood was a mixture of country and suburb. Some yards were filled with junked cars, others with chickens and turkeys. Idling slowly down the street, I searched in vain for the number. A man was trimming his hedges and I stopped to ask if he knew which house the woman lived in, referencing what had happened. Just ten miles away in Brownsville, everyone I met immediately understood what I meant by the Rubio murders. Here there was no such recognition. “I
think I heard about that, a long time ago” was the closest I could get. I was further impeded by confusion over Angela's mother's name, of which I'd seen multiple versions. No, they didn't know her. They didn't know which house. In this way I continued, around the figure eight, looking for any house where someone was home.

Finally, I walked up to the stoop of a neat home on a smaller lot, and the family inside directed me to the correct one, just two doors down from theirs. The entrance to the porch of the small yellow house was blocked with a piece of plywood. I called out until a woman came to the front door. I told her whom I was looking for. This woman, large and intimidating but not unfriendly, recalled merely hearing something about the crimes.

“She's my mother-in-law,” she said of Angela's mother. “But she's not here. She's away.” I asked her if she knew about the crimes, and she, too, said she'd heard something about them, but didn't have much information. Her statements had a finality, and I left my name and number on a little note, explaining why I wanted to speak to Angela's mother. I got in my car feeling hopeful. Maybe I'd hear from her soon.

A couple of days later I went back. Maybe this time she'd be home. The woman came outside again, and again I told her that I was checking to see if her mother-in-law was home. No, she explained, she's not here. And she's not going to be back for a while. She's up north. I didn't understand what “up north” meant, exactly. Dallas? Canada? Everything was north except Mexico and the rest of Latin America. She said that her mother-in-law didn't have a phone, and they didn't have a phone or electricity at the little house. I wondered how she would contact me when she did get home and got the message.

I waited a week and tried again. This time the woman had a visi
tor and seemed less sympathetic to my mission, or maybe I was just interrupting some important business.

“I don't think she's coming back,” the woman said.

I asked if she'd received this news since the last time we met.

“I just don't think she's coming back.” I stood there for a minute more, hoping for some additional bit of information, but that was it.

I looked again at the house and the goat with icy-blue eyes standing in the neighbor's yard
.
The children lived here for a few months in 2002, after they were examined at the Brownsville Kiddie Health Center and found to show signs of medical neglect. Angela's mother took them in, until John and Angela completed parenting classes and drug testing.

Where does Angela belong in this story? She, too, is in prison for murder, serving three simultaneous life sentences that will leave her eligible for parole in 2045. I wrote to her several times requesting an interview but never got a response. At first I wondered if maybe she couldn't read, but when I called the prison, they told me that another inmate could easily read a letter to her, and I realized that she must be ignoring my request. I could only speculate: Was the subject too painful? Perhaps she didn't have anything more to say. Maybe she was just sick of being asked the same things over and over or was afraid that giving away new information could jeopardize her chances at parole. Maybe she was suspicious of the media, as she had every reason to be. When I found out that she had responded to a television reporter, Mireya Villarreal, and granted an interview, I wondered if my correspondence with John might be the reason—maybe she saw me as an ally to a man who had become her enemy.

Angela has a low IQ, tested at 62 as a fourteen-year-old. The
threshold for mental retardation is 70 or below. In 2004, she tested at 51. According to criminal law, when a defendant is assessed for mental retardation, both aptitude and adaptive behavior are taken into consideration. Angela pled guilty and, in exchange, avoided a possible death sentence.

Her attorney, Ernesto Gamez, has a law office on Eighth Street, one block down from the building. You can see it from his parking lot. I was seated in a conference room with two taxidermied wildcats, both wide-eyed as they identically caught a pheasant with an outstretched paw. Though not large in stature, Gamez was a brooding, intimidating presence. I asked him how he felt when he saw the building, which was incredibly close to his office.

“It has a stigma of an evil presence of what happened. It reminds me of the horror that took place, the carnage, of the kids.” He spoke slowly, looking at some point in space with intensity.

Gamez said Angela was quiet.

“She was easily influenced. She was limited in conversational skills, and she was so docile and passive. And she felt that her kids were not being adequately provided for and that they would be in a better place somewhere else than what she could provide for them. At times she was psychotic and hallucinating of seeing a lady in black who was always around. A lady-shadow was always around.”

Gamez spoke about darkness again and again as he talked about her case. He called the building a “historical remembrance of black death,” said Angela's look had a “blackness,” and, of course, spoke of the image of a lady in black.

I asked Gamez whether he thought Angela believed these hallucinations were real.

“I know there are dark forces, having experienced, not a near-death experience, but a death experience,” Gamez said.

In May of 2008, five years after John and Angela were arrested, Gamez said he saw demons for the first time. “I didn't imagine it.” Gamez had suffered a heart attack that left him legally dead for several minutes, and in a coma for six days after that. “There is no rational, logical medical explanation, other than the grace of coming back and giving me a second chance.” To him, the demons are not a vague vision, but a specific memory.

“They were compelling to take me to hell. They were reaching out. They wanted me but they couldn't get me. The grace of God wouldn't let them get me, but let me know they're there.”

Gamez believed he'd been enlightened to another dimension.

“There is an inner being, soul, within us and wants to live and wants everlasting life. And it fears the abomination of everlasting darkness. I really appreciate, when I crossed over, my ranches meant nothing, my property meant nothing. I'm left with nothing. Nothing was important. You speak, not with your mouth, but your mind. You have no physical form. And I can prove it because I was dead. And all that spirit of yours wants is to reach that light I couldn't reach.”

His voice commanded the empty room, rough and croaking, pushing past my attempts to ask questions during the long pauses between phrases.

“So I cannot say that what she saw wasn't real,” Gamez said. “I don't make that judgment anymore—if she's crazy or sick or mentally retarded—no. I know they're there, and they make people do very bad things. Evil things. Demons' purpose in life is for us—to compel us to do bad things. There is no love with these creatures.”

Gamez now visits churches to speak with their congregations about his experience. He brings his cardiologist to support the scientific aspect of the story.

To Gamez, Angela was like a child—quiet and aloof. She showed little facial expression and didn't have a complex understanding of what was happening around her.

“Other than she'd done something wrong,” he said. “And there was remorse, remorse, remorse.”

Ultimately, he was glad Angela got a plea deal. She would serve three concurrent life sentences and be spared the death penalty. Prosecuting attorneys were aware she could be found incompetent to stand trial and that her Mexican nationality might prompt added attention to her case, since Mexico opposes the death penalty.

The closest I've come to meeting Angela was the hour or so I spent watching a video of her telling two detectives how her children died. The recording was made on her third day in custody. She wore an oversize blue shirt, and she was small and sweet looking, dwarfed by her thick, wavy hair. Her face was absent of guile or virtually any emotion. She'd been through the worst trauma imaginable, and the tape portrays a woman with nothing left inside. With the detectives she was calm and compliant and respectful, in a way that disturbed me: Had she simply been compliant during the murders? Was compliance the essence of her crime?

Angela told the detectives about coming to Harlingen from Matamoros as a child. She didn't detail what this meant exactly—swimming across the river or walking across the bridge and overstaying a visa. She went to Los Fresnos High School until she was a semester shy of graduation, then got pregnant with Julissa and dropped out.
She was living with her boyfriend, she told detectives, until he got arrested for burglary and went to prison for six months. Then she went to live with her mother and then her sister, moving back and forth. I went to Cactus Road in Los Fresnos, which Angela mentioned in her interview with detectives, and found a neighbor who remembered the family. He told me where to locate the plot where their house once stood—a grassy field directly next to the railroad tracks. The house had since burned down, he said, and only a pile of debris beside a stand of trees and the faded path of a dirt driveway remained. This was a parallel in John and Angela's lives: both lived in homes that eventually burned to the ground.

Angela knew her boyfriend, Julissa's father, was cheating on her, and she in turn cheated on him with John. When her boyfriend found out, Angela said he threatened her and her child, but before he could act, he was thrown in jail and she went to live with John.

Angela believed she was pregnant when she and John first got together, but only by about a month. She named her son John Stephan Rubio, and the couple lived with Julissa and the newborn in an apartment on Jackson Street, also in the downtown area. John had a job at McDonald's, and Hilda came to live with them. John said that they were given free rent in exchange for some work he did painting and fixing things around the apartment complex. Soon, Angela would tell detectives, things changed.

A. We stayed there for some months, and then we were on the street—on the street. Yes, on the street.

Q. What do you mean by “on the street”?

A. Because we didn't have any place to stay.

Q. Where did you stay exactly?

A. In parks.

Q. Here by downtown?

A. Wherever we would go, like corners—

Angela said that the children were placed with her mother around the time she became pregnant with Mary Jane, when Julissa was two years old and John Stephan was about four months old. John and Angela took parenting classes for several months to get the children back. By the time they did, they had an apartment in the building on Eighth and East Tyler, though not the same unit where they would commit the murders. John had been working at the Golden Corral, a buffet, and Hilda continued staying with them in their new apartment, though they tried to hide this from CPS. Lorena, a prostitute, also stayed with them for a couple of months, Angela said. She and John had become friends after partying together at the Hotel Economico.

Angela told the detectives that an employee from CPS visited two or three times a week, and admonished her for the dirty state of the apartment, but also brought free diapers. The CPS employees stopped monitoring them several months before the murders, once the family had completed all of the necessary requirements and John was working again at the Golden Corral.

The detectives were big men and asked the questions precisely and patiently, reviewing answers and saying them back to Angela to ensure their veracity. About halfway through the video, the detectives asked Angela to show them the placement of different events on a rudimentary map of the apartment, sketched in chalk on a blackboard. The camera zoomed in on the blackboard as Angela drew a stick figure of
John, showing the spot where Mary Jane's life ended. Throughout the interview, Angela adds the diminutive
ita
to the end of words, as in Julissa's
cabecita
, in place of
cabeza
. Her daughter's “little head.” It's a term of endearment, jarring in the context of the conversation.

In the video, twenty-three-year-old Angela looks calm, much as Gamez described. She's detailing the gruesome deaths of her three children, but she explains the specifics with no agitation. She's so young, petite, and has a kind, cherubic face. In subsequent photographs and on the witness stand, the Angela who has spent time in prison is scowling, and her short frame carries extra weight.

Angela gave three different statements, on three consecutive days—the day the crime occurred, and the two days following. The first two were written, and the third was videotaped. In the first, she said fears of witchcraft accounted for her and John's actions. In the second, financial stress was to blame. In the third, which was videotaped, she fused these two statements, relating that both issues were at play. During the competency trial in 2010, Angela said that she gave the second statement, about financial strain, after a detective told her that was John's story. She seemed most intent on protecting John—matching his story if she thought it would help. When questioned in court, she said that she had lied to do so.