Murdered Innocents (33 page)

 

There was still one suspect left. Maurice Pierce, the alleged ringleader, had been in jail, unable to make bail, since October 1999.

Pierce’s attorney, Lad Slavik, filed for a change of venue. The hope was to escape the media crush that surrounded the murder case. Judge Mike Lynch stated he would probably make his decision on January 22, 2003, at Pierce’s next court appearance date.

 

 

Nearly one week had passed since Pierce’s scheduled court date.

At the Travis County Courthouse, District Attorney Ronnie Earle stepped up to the podium. He appeared sullen as he leaned into the microphones.

“It is without pleasure that I announce today that the yogurt shop capital-murder cases against Maurice Pierce have been dismissed.”

Earle explained that the primary witnesses against Pierce were Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott. According to the district attorney, “Both have made statements that cannot be used without violating the constitutional right of Maurice Pierce to confront the witnesses against him.” Their statements, therefore, could not be entered against Pierce.

“The state is therefore unable to proceed at this time,” Earle declared.

“The case against Maurice Pierce remains open and the investigation continues. Murder has no statute of limitations.

“We do not have the evidence to convict him right now, but life is long. We believe there are people who know something that would be helpful in this investigation. We urge them to come forward. They will have an attentive audience.”

Earle looked up at his own attentive audience. “The murders of Amy Ayers, Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, and Eliza Thomas left a scar on Austin’s soul. The convictions of Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott have helped to provide a measure of healing to that scar. But we’re not through, and we won’t rest until justice is done in full measure.”

 

 

Maurice Pierce, clad in blue jeans and a white T-shirt, which bulged from too much prison food, stepped outside the Travis County Correctional Complex in Del Valle and into the arms of his cousin Annette Castellaños.

“It is an act of God that he has been released,” claimed Castellaños. “He has a daughter and he has a wife that he lost years with that they’ll never be able to replace.”

When asked how he felt to be released from jail, Pierce simply replied, “Happy.”

Pierce was taken from the jail in an SUV to Lad Slavik’s office in downtown Austin. He was greeted there by two dozen friends and family members. His wife, Kimberli, and their daughter soon reunited with him after they drove down from Dallas.

Jeannine Scott was ecstatic about the news of Pierce’s release. She declared that she was “completely stunned.” She stated she was riding a roller coaster of emotions. She was happy for Pierce but upset that her husband would not be coming home to his daughter that night.

“I don’t believe they actually said they had no case. I never expected them to say that,” she stated with a smile. “I’m glad they did.”

She turned serious and said, “Based on what I’m understanding, it has done nothing but bolstered the appeal for Michael and Robert.” She said of Pierce’s release, “It doesn’t improve my faith in the system. It does show that the innocent can go home. I continue to maintain that all of them are innocent.”

Jeannine Scott also sent a personal message to District Attorney Earle.

“Stop wasting the taxpayers’ time and money and find the actual perpetrators.”

The parents of the girls, of course, had a different reaction to the news of Pierce’s release. Barbara Ayres-Wilson, never at a loss for words when it came to her daughters’ cases, was almost left speechless. She did state she was confident Pierce was guilty.

“I can’t imagine why his friends would include him in that scenario if he was not,” she said, referring to the confessions made by both Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen, which pegged Pierce as the leader.

Bob and Pam Ayers refused to comment on the decision.

 

 

Maurice Pierce, flanked by his wife and daughter, legal team, and additional family members, stepped in front of a passel of microphones. He removed a sheet of paper from his pocket, opened it, and read a prepared statement.

Pierce thanked the media for showing up. He thanked his wife, daughter, and family for sticking behind him. He thanked his lawyers for their tireless efforts. He also thanked God for giving him strength.

“As for my incarceration, it has been a very difficult and painful period of time. For three-and-a-half years, I was separated from my wife and daughter, my family, and my friends, and those years I will never be able to regain. When I was detained and arrested, I proclaimed my innocence of all the charges that were filed against me, and I am standing here today with that same proclamation. I am innocent of any and all charges pertaining to the yogurt shop case.”

Pierce said he needed to move on. He wanted to make a new life with his family. He also declared he would not sue the city of Austin.

He asked the media to give him space.

“I am sure that this has been a very emotional time for my family and I,” Pierce concluded, “and we would like the opportunity to move on with our lives. I thank you very much and Godspeed to you all.”

 

The yogurt shop murders cases were far from over. Patric Davidson, Michael Scott’s “longtime best friend,” stood before United States magistrate judge Andrew Austin. The thirty-seven-year-old man had been arrested as an accessory after the fact.

Additional charges against Davidson included failing to report a felony, making a false statement, and obstruction of justice. Davidson’s statements specifically revolved around the .380 pistol that Scott supposedly hid after the murders. He claimed he gave a bag to Davidson to hide. After he confessed in 1999, Scott allegedly called Davidson and told him to tell the police about the gun.

If they asked.

The gun has never been located.

Davidson faced up to twenty-years in federal prison and as much as $1 million in fines. It only took $5,000, however, to bail him out. Upon his release, he said he was “not surprised” by his arrest.

“They are out to blame somebody,” Davidson claimed, insisting Scott’s conviction was bogus.

Barbara Ayres-Wilson stated, “Anything they can do to put an end to this, to find out who is involved, is wonderful. Until we know the whole truth about how my girls died and those other two died, it’s always going to be unresolved.

“The pain continues.”

 

 

“Guilty, Your Honor,” stated Patric Davidson to United States district judge Sam Sparks. Davidson admitted he told authorities several different stories regarding the whereabouts of the bag Michael Scott had given him, which allegedly contained the .380 semiautomatic pistol used in the yogurt shop killings.

On May 21, 2004, Davidson was sentenced to one year in federal prison, the maximum amount, by Judge Sparks. Chris Davidson, Davidson’s brother, believed there was an ulterior motive behind the sentence.

“It’s someone’s political agenda. Someone wants resolution to this case and a mark in their belt.”

Judge Sparks, on the other hand, claimed the imposition of the sentence was the direct result of Davidson’s actions. Sparks believed Davidson had detectives “trying to shimmy up flagpoles, where there’s no flag.”

 

 

Michael Scott is currently imprisoned in Ramsey Unit II in Rosharon, Texas, located about thirty miles south-west of Houston. Ramsey houses almost twelve hundred male inmates, who range in custody levels from G1 to G4. They are observed by more than 230 security employees. Scott is allowed weekend visitors. He usually spends time with his wife and daughter. According to his mother, Lisa Scott McClain, Michael enjoys playing basketball, exercising, and reading books.

“I can’t even keep up with how many books I send him,” McClain recalled. “He is a voracious reader.”

Scott’s mother also talked about the problems her son encountered at Ramsey. She said Scott was only one test shy from earning his high-school-equivalency diploma, or General Educational Development (GED) test, before his 1999 arrest. She claims prison officials have refused to allow her son to complete the test.

“He still receives death threats,” McClain also claimed.

Michael Scott’s appellate attorney, Ariel Payan, filed an appeal on his behalf that alleged his client’s conviction should be overturned: “Because another man’s confession was used against him illegally.” Payan used the March 2004 Supreme Court decision in
Crawford
v.
Washington
as the backbone of Scott’s argument.

Crawford
v.
Washington
focused on the trial of Michael Crawford, who assaulted and attempted to kill Kenneth Lee on August 5, 1999, in Olympia, Washington. Crawford, at first, denied the attack, but he eventually confessed to stabbing the man. Crawford claimed Lee had attempted to rape Crawford’s wife, Sylvia, at an earlier date. Sylvia also testified her husband intended to kill Lee. At trial, Sylvia did not testify against her husband because of the state of Washington’s marital privilege, which usually prevents one spouse from testifying against another spouse without the other’s consent. Such a privilege, however, “does not extend to a spouse’s out-of-court statements admissible under a hearsay exception.” The prosecution sought to enter the audiotapes wherein Sylvia admitted she led her husband to Lee’s apartment, thus facilitating the assault and disproving Crawford’s self-defense theory. Crawford argued that admitting the evidence would violate his federal constitutional right to be “confronted with the witnesses against him.” The tape was played and Crawford was convicted of assault.

The Washington Court of Appeals overturned Crawford’s conviction. The Washington Supreme Court, however, reversed the court of appeals and claimed that Sylvia’s statement “bore guarantees of trustworthiness.”

The United States Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. It ruled in favor of Crawford by a unanimous vote of 9–0, citing the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to confrontation.

Payan argued Scott’s case before the Texas Third Court of Appeals on June 9, 2004, just four days after one of the toughest presidents on crime, Ronald Reagan, passed away.

 

 

Robert Springsteen currently sits on death row in the Polunsky Unit in Livingston, Texas, waiting to hear the status of his appeal filed by his attorney, Mary Kay Sicola. The appeal was filed on his behalf on October 16, 2002.

Sicola alleged several points of error:

The complex case presented here touches so many facets that almost overwhelmed me during the writing of this book. Many people believe the yogurt shop murders is a case of out-of-control Texas justice. Others believe it is an open-and-shut case.

The reality, however, is so much more.

Those facets are severalfold: senseless murders, innocence lost, police corruption, potential judicial failure, politics and crime, wayward youth gone wrong, and so on. It would be a disservice to the readers, however, for me to tell them how to think in regard to this case.

My goal has been to present a most unique and difficult case in a straightforward fashion and let you, the reader, decide how you feel about the outcome.

I believe I have achieved this goal.

As a result, I hope you come away with a better understanding of this tragic story, but I also hope you have even more questions.

Remember. Don’t ever be afraid to ask questions.

 

 

One of the best discussions I had concerning possible preventative measures in this case took place with Barbara Ayres-Wilson, mother of Jennifer and Sarah Harbison. We spoke for five hours on May 25, 2004, in her SAJE offices, in Austin, Texas.

“Do you want to talk about the boys at all?” I asked.

“What I would like to know,” Ayres-Wilson replied, “is what we could have done different? I don’t mean helping them. Don’t let me miscommunicate what I’m trying to say. I don’t mean helping the little bastards. But, as a society, how, as parents, what did we do wrong raising them that they didn’t have a soul?

“Of course, I have an opinion about it. Bonding comes in the first few weeks and if you are not bonding early on, then you can’t give a damn later. Were they given too much? Were they not given enough? Obviously, as teenagers, they were thrown out in all kinds of ways, emotionally, physically.

“I would like to know what we did wrong raising those boys. Where we made those mistakes.

“Two days after the girls were murdered, I had the basketball team over at my house and I told them, ‘Somebody didn’t love these people (the killers) enough.’ Now, that’s a dumb statement for someone who doesn’t know anything. This is probably way-out for the time. I’m sure those girls were like, ‘What is this woman talking about?’ I said, ‘This is why you need to be so careful and not have any children that you don’t want.’

“I’m talking about safe sex here and my kids are being murdered, but that was my first thought. I mean, I didn’t know they were children, but even adults, whoever it was, they didn’t have any love in them that they could do something like that. And that’s still my premise.

“We have learned so much about the brain and how it works and kids aren’t getting enough attention. We’ve learned that it takes twenty-one hundred words an hour spoken directly to a child to make their brains develop properly. And it’s not yelling at them or putting them in front of the TV; it’s directly speaking to them. You have to bond with your child. You can’t ignore them; you can’t put them off; you can’t neglect them, in all kinds of ways. You can’t give them too much; you can’t dote on them; you have to be present in their life. You have to have them on a good schedule; you have to put them into bed every night; you have to feed them; you have to care. Those are real simple things that I’d like to know: What part of that scenario those four boys didn’t get? When did it start falling apart for them? When their families divorced? When did that happen? Because we have to decide, when is a divorce a good thing for children?

“That’s why we have to say, ‘What happened to Robert Springsteen?’ I met his father. I know what happened. His father’s a loser. He got thrown away. When his parents divorced, he became very unimportant. Now, before then, I don’t know, but after then, he was overstimulated. Too much TV, didn’t bond with anybody, there was . . . I don’t know all the details. I’d like to know all the details from all four of these boys.

“This isn’t about blaming his parents. It’s about understanding what we did wrong as parents. I mean, I know what I did wrong. We have to know what the system did wrong. We have to know that if we own a business, what is our responsibility to keep it safe for the people that work there and the customers that come in. It’s not enough to buy a franchise and invest in it and just want to know what the bottom line is. We ought to know as bankers what we invest in, and if we loan out money to a company that is not taking care of their employees and customers.

“These are common-sense questions that we ought to be gathering from these problems that we go through. ‘Maybe, we shouldn’t let kids work? Maybe we should?’ These are the kinds of questions that need to be talked about. We need to have a dialogue about these issues. ‘When is it a good thing for kids to work alone at night? When is it a good thing for other kids to supervise a younger kid?’ Probably not very often, because there is a lot of abuse that goes on at work, because they don’t know how to deal with the responsibility that they have. They are working with people that they don’t know what their backgrounds are. There are just so many questions that we don’t have the answers to, but we need to be asking the questions.

“You have to ask yourself as a parent, ‘How much of this is my fault?’ ‘How much of this as a parent of two little girls that got murdered, how much could I have prevented?’ And then you have to ask yourself as a business owner, ‘How much of this could I have prevented? ’ As an insurance company that insured that business, you have to ask yourself, ‘How much of this could I have prevented?’ As a community, we have to ask ourselves, ‘How much of this could we have prevented? ’

“I know some people think you shouldn’t connect anything, but you should. It’s not enough to say, ‘Well, you can’t do this.’ Yeah, you can and you should. That’s our responsibility. That’s being a grown-up. You’re a grown-up now and you have the responsibility of connecting all the dots. We have to have enough information. It’s not enough to say, ‘I don’t want to do it.’ Well, I don’t want to do it either. I don’t want to do any of it. But I know I have to keep asking the questions until somebody says, ‘What is it that you want?’

“And then there’s a part of me that’s like, ‘I don’t know why I should care if your children are safe? It doesn’t make any difference to me.’ And then I remind myself that Jennifer and Sarah want me to.”

Tears welled up in her eyes as she tried to smile.

“I miss my girls.”