Murdered Innocents (21 page)

 

For Roy Rose, a sickness-free day was a good day. Robert Springsteen’s best friend suffered from a number of maladies, some of which included chronic hepatitis C, fibromyalgia (a syndrome characterized by chronic pain in the muscles and soft tissues surrounding joints, fatigue, and tenderness at specific sites in the body), insomnia, and depression. The thirty-eight-year-old was a veritable walking pharmacy: Prozac, Valium, Elavil, Serzone, Klonopin, Darvocet, Tylox, Soma, Skelaxin, Ambien, and Restoril were some of the drugs he ingested to deal with his various medical problems.

The sickly Rose played an integral part in the Springsteen scenario. Rose was brought in to the Charleston Police Department on September 16, the day after Springsteen confessed to murder. Austin police detective Ron Lara requested Rose’s presence and proceeded to ask him several questions about Springsteen. In the interview, Rose claimed Springsteen bragged to him about the killings. As a result of the interview, Austin officials wanted to fly Rose into Texas so he could testify against Springsteen.

Rose was a reluctant witness, to say the least. Through his attorney, John Hackney Jr., Rose claimed that the Austin police used “heavy-handed” tactics to elicit the statement. He specifically implicated Lara as the main progenitor of the questionable interrogation methods. Rose claimed that they would not let his wife enter the interview room, they turned off the air-conditioning in the room, and he was surrounded by four or five police officers.

When Lara asked Rose if he knew if Springsteen was involved in the killings, he responded that his friend mentioned that someone wanted to speak with him about the crimes. He claimed Lara, who sat in a chair with wheels, rolled up toward him and got right in his face. Lara allegedly refused to believe Rose did not know anything.

Rose became worried. He informed the officers of his various medical problems. One of the officers responded there was no problem—he was not impaired in any way. He just needed to keep talking.

Another officer asked Rose if he had ever been to Texas.

“Yes, I was born there,” he responded.

“Well, you’re about to go back at this time for a jail or prison sentence for withholding information,” the officer threatened.

“Is it possible that Rob committed a robbery?” Lara asked.

“It’s possible,” Rose guessed.

“C’mon, Roy, we know you know that Rob told you he was in a robbery, that he told you all about it.” Lara asked again, “Could he have committed a robbery?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“Was he with anybody?”

“I really don’t know about any of this.”

“Yeah, you do! Yeah, you do!” Lara hollered. “We know he bragged to y’all about it.”

Rose claimed that he became scared. He also claimed that he began to parrot back what the police officers told him. He said they shouted at him until he told them what they wanted to hear.

“Could this robbery have been botched?” Lara asked.

“It could have.”

“It was going wrong,” Lara assumed. “Rob had to do something, didn’t he?”

“I really don’t know anything about that,” Rose pleaded on the verge of tears.

“Your best friend is bragging about this in great detail,” Lara snapped in a harsh tone, according to Rose. “Now tell us what really happened.”

“He shot her in the ear.”

According to Rose, the detectives supposedly laughed.

“That’s not it,” Lara stated. He asked Rose if he knew anything about a rape.

“No, I don’t know anything like that.”

“Rob bragged about this so much we could hardly get him to shut up and leave. So just tell us. You’re only making it harder on yourself.”

“Yes, it could have happened,” replied Rose.

“Did Rob shoot her first or rape her first?”

“After he shot her, he raped her.” Rose claimed his story was eventually changed to anal rape and shooting the girl in the back of the head afterward.

Lara allegedly wanted to know what the other guys were doing at the scene.

“Ransacking the place,” Rose responded.

“Were there any other employees working?”

“A couple of other girls around twenty years old, and maybe a guy.”

“What did the other guys do with the other employees?”

“They were tied up.”

“Were they gagged?”

“With their own clothes.”

“Rob was really excited about telling you everything,” Lara stated. “What did they do before they left?”

“They stole some cigarettes and ran out.”

“Out of an ice-cream shop?”

“A convenience store,” Rose stated. He later said Lara twisted his words until the crime scene became an ice-cream shop.

“What did they do before they left the scene?” Lara allegedly asked again.

“I don’t know.”

“Didn’t Rob say he torched the place?” Lara bellowed in a loud voice.

Rose claimed he “gave in to this idea that yes, Rob said he torched the place.”

“What did Rob tell you he used to do it with?”

“A cigarette lighter.”

“That’s wrong. C’mon, Rob told you this.”

“A bomb,” Rose changed his story. “Gasoline. Lighter fluid. They torched the place [and] they ran out and down the street.”

Rose complained about the commotion inside the interview room. He said detectives kept coming in and out of the room and they received continuous pages on their pagers. They also continually interrupted him.

The commotion led to confusion, Rose claimed. He claimed Lara would yell at him when he did not say something appropriate. Also, he claimed Lara called him a liar and slammed his hands down on the table scaring Rose. He also claimed they threatened to put him in jail if he did not tell them what they wanted to hear.

“At some point in all this, I began saying anything I thought would get me out of the room,” Rose confessed. “The statement given on September 16, 1999, was coerced, is false, and I cannot stand by it.”

Because of the alleged coercion, Rose defiantly declared he would not testify in Texas against Springsteen. His attorney, Hackney, stated, “While Springsteen is his friend and acquaintance, he’s saying Springsteen didn’t tell him anything to lead him to believe he was guilty of this heinous crime.” Hackney added that his client was “not a material witness.” He also relayed information that Rose had been readmitted to the local hospital for heart problems.

Rose’s wife, Charlene, defended her husband by saying that he had taken morphine before he was questioned by Austin officials. “He was taking narcotics—prescription drugs—at the time they questioned him, and he didn’t care.” She was upset at what she believed was a three-hour intense intimidation session. “He did eventually tell them what they wanted to hear and signed a statement. They basically fed information to him.”

The common refrain of coercive police tactics in the yogurt shop case had once again reared its hideous head.

Despite Rose’s protestations that he would not testify against Springsteen, he had no say in the matter. The Travis County District Court had already secured a subpoena to make sure that he would be compelled to testify.

 

In an official press release, Texas governor George W. Bush sent a formal request to Governor Cecil Underwood of West Virginia for the extradition of Robert Springsteen IV.

“I hope the extradition will take place as quickly as possible so Robert Springsteen will be brought to justice for a crime he allegedly committed in Texas,” said Bush.

 

 

Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn appeared before Judge W. Jeanne Meurer. The ever-present Detective Ron Lara was also in attendance.

Lara testified that the Austin Police Department had garnered confessions from Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen. Within those confessions, Lara stated, was information that implicated both Pierce and Welborn in the murders as well.

Lara also testified that the detectives attempted to trip up Welborn during the interview process of Scott. He informed Judge Meurer that a surprise meeting between Scott and Welborn took place outside the former location of the yogurt shop.

“We decided,” Lara testified, “if he was taken over there, he’d remember some events.” Welborn had no idea that Scott would be present at the crime scene location. Lara stated that the meeting did not work, and they gathered no new information from Welborn.

More information was made public in regard to Pierce and Welborn and their potential involvement in the murders:

Prosecutors claimed both young men had troubled pasts. Mention was made that Welborn had made bomb threats at a school and Pierce had been suspected in stealing a car.

Guillermo Gonzalez, the attorney for Pierce, and Robert Icenhauer-Ramirez, the attorney for Welborn, argued that neither man had a serious criminal record. Pierce had a conviction for driving while intoxicated. Welborn had one charge of driving without a driver’s license.

Gonzalez and Icenhauer-Ramirez also requested that Judge Meurer lower the bail for their clients. The attorneys mentioned that neither man fled over the previous eight years, despite the fact that police questioned them intermittently during that period of time. Gonzalez also mentioned that after they were warned they would be arrested, they did not flee. “They weren’t going anywhere. They hadn’t gone anywhere for eight years.”

Judge Meurer agreed with the defense attorneys. As a result, she lowered the bail amount for each man. Bail was reduced for Welborn from $1 million to $375,000. For Pierce, the judge lowered bail from $1.5 million to $750,000.

Neither the Welborn family nor the Pierce family believed they would be able to raise the 10 percent of the total bail amounts to get their boys out of jail.

 

 

Robin Moss was afraid. Robert Springsteen’s forty-six-year-old wife was attempting to cope with the reality that her husband of less than two years would have an extradition hearing in two days. A hearing that could possibly send him to Texas, the state with more executions than any other in the United States.

According to the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), the state of Texas executed thirty-five individuals in 1999. Virginia was the state with the second-highest number of executions at fourteen.

The number of executions in Texas had increased dramatically in the preceding two decades. Texas executed 297 death row inmates from 1930 to 1977. From 1977 to 1999, the total number of executions was 199, well on its way to surpassing the previous forty-seven years.

“We have been picked up out of reality and dropped into a nightmare,” declared Moss.

Not only did she not believe her husband committed the murders, she did not believe he willingly confessed to them either.

“He’d been terrorized,” Moss said when her husband returned home from the interview. “He was crying, pale, absolutely sick. I think they frightened him to death.” She had hope, however, when no arrest was made in the immediate week after the interview. She claimed that her husband did not hit the road because “he didn’t think they’d ever be back.”

Moss was realistic about the possible extradition: “This is my husband’s life. It is fragile and it is out of our hands.”

 

The life seemed drained out of Robert Springsteen as he entered Judge Charles King’s courtroom. He was dressed in a prison-issue orange jumpsuit with a brown corduroy jacket draped over his shoulders. The clinking of shackles could be heard as he slowly shuffled toward the defense table. His ankles were bound together, as were his hands. He was joined by his attorney, David Bungard.

Bungard immediately informed Judge King he intended to file a petition that would challenge evidence used to support an arrest warrant for his client. Specifically, the statement he gave to police wherein he implicated himself in the murders.

“I’m not going to turn this extradition proceeding into a civil trial,” Judge King informed Bungard. “I think this only serves one purpose—delay, delay, delay. This is not a big deal and I’m not going to let it become one.”

Nonetheless, King granted the request and tentatively scheduled a follow-up extradition hearing to take place within a month’s time.

Robin Moss was determined to make a last-ditch effort to keep her husband out of Texas. She wrote an impassioned plea, which was posted on TexasJustice.com, the Web site created by Robert’s stepfather, Andrew “Brett” Thompson, which he designed to point out the flaws in the case against his stepson. Moss’s letter provided an excellent overview of what many believed were the difficult issues in the case.

Moss wrote of the devastation wrought on her family by her husband’s arrest. “We have had to seek help from officials and professionals whom we must entrust with Robert’s life. West Virginia appears to be ready to hand over one of its own to a state wanting to kill him without questioning anything.”

Moss believed her husband was in trouble simply because of “his naive cooperation with the Austin police on September 15, 1999.” She continued by placing the blame on police, the legal system, and the media. “We presumed there were checks and balances in place to protect innocent people and that our patience and trust in the justice system would prevail. We have been amiss in those beliefs and presumptions. Instead, we find Robert is treated as if he had already been convicted by virtue of negative media coverage immediately following his arrest.”

Moss directed her skepticism toward the Austin Police Department. “It is well known that Austin developed a ‘special unit’ in August of this year to ‘solve’ the Yogurt Shop Murders. The unit’s directive was to put the murders to rest by the year 2000. Strangely, they were able to unravel this eight year old murder in weeks without the help of new evidence.” She also referenced the previous confessions in the case. “It is also common knowledge,” she stated, “that the Austin police, in their zeal to satisfy public outcry for not having found the perpetrators of the horrific crime, have previously attempted to coerce statements from innocent individuals through suspicious practices.”

Moss wrote that she used to never pay attention to injustices within the legal system. “Those situations did not directly affect my life, so I, like many of you, had no interest in further investigation in the facts surrounding the allegations. I had been lulled into believing that only guilty people had to worry.”

Moss warned people that they need to be aware that what happened to her husband could happen to any one of them. “You may take for granted that you are not at risk for something like this to occur in your world. Perhaps you feel safe in the normalcy of your life as we once did. Maybe you won’t know the fear of having the one you love snatched ou(t) of your life without warning or justification.”

Moss concluded, “I used to feel safe too. The truth is, my husband is innocent. He is a good person who has been caught in a nightmare. We, his family, are overwhelmed and helpless.”