Murdered Innocents (5 page)

 

Maurice Pierce, who had stolen a Nissan Pathfinder the previous weekend, was in trouble again. This time, it involved something much more serious. The short and stocky teenager with the long dirty blond mullet was arrested for carrying a .22-caliber revolver inside Northcross Mall. The gun was tucked in the waistband of his pants. He was placed under arrest and taken downtown to the APD headquarters on Eighth Street.

According to Mike Huckabay, Hector Polanco and Rodney Bryant, of Youth Services, interviewed Maurice Pierce. Polanco did not know everything about the case and Bryant was a fill-in while Huckabay and Detective Bruce Boardman were called out to a bank robbery and murder-suicide.

Pierce claimed in the interview with Polanco and Bryant that he lent the gun to his good buddy Forrest Welborn. He also made a startling claim—the gun had been used during the yogurt shop murders. Pierce spoke about different aspects of the crime scene that Welborn supposedly relayed to him.

According to Huckabay, Pierce told Polanco and Bryant: “‘I didn’t do it, but I know who did.’ He then starts naming names.” Huckabay added that Pierce checked off a list of crime scene details inside the yogurt shop. “Everything he told them that he was told by this other person,” Huckabay stated, “was factual.”

The police decided to hook Pierce up with a wire and have him speak with Welborn. The intent was to implicate the fifteen-year-old in the murders. Pierce met with Welborn and attempted to steer the conversation in the direction of the yogurt shop case. Welborn, however, did not bite. He seemed befuddled by the questions that Pierce asked him. He had no idea what Pierce was talking about.

The police believed Welborn. They wrote him off as a suspect.

The police did not believe a single word out of Pierce’s mouth. They sensed he was just an obnoxious braggart looking for attention. Pierce was released and marked off the potential suspect list.

It was a list that would continue to grow and grow.

 

 

Maurice Pierce’s two other buddies, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, were called in for questioning. They were also his Pathfinder joyriding pals.

In addition to Welborn, Pierce implicated Springsteen and Scott in the yogurt shop murders. Detective Bruce Boardman decided to bring them in, but only as witnesses.

At approximately 2:00
P.M.
, Boardman interviewed Springsteen. He took notes as he questioned the young man.

According to those notes, Springsteen said he spent most of his day at Northcross Mall. He claimed he left there around 1:30 or 1:45
A.M.
, after the midnight movie ended. He later learned of the murders from someone named “Mace.” He also believed that Scott dated one of the girls who was murdered.

Springsteen claimed that he and Scott went to a party after they left the mall. They returned home at 3:30 in the morning.

Boardman spoke with Springsteen for nearly two hours. He spoke with Scott for almost the same amount of time.

He let both boys go.

 

The bustling two-story home was quiet, but not silent. No longer were there playful squeals of delight for Christmas. No more bouts of laughter ringing through the hallways. Skip and Barbara Suraci, the parents of Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, spent their first Christmas at home without their two precious daughters.

They were, however, surrounded by other people.

A couple stopped by their house to help ease the Suracis’ pain. They had just lost their daughter to murder as well. She was killed by her boyfriend.

“I’m not sure if they came to help us,” Barbara Suraci would later say, “or vice versa, but it didn’t matter. They just came to touch base with us.

“People were coming in checking on us. People were worrying about us, but it was really too soon for anyone to worry about us. I was in so much shock. I was glazed over.”

The girls’ mother spoke about a Christmas tree that the sisters would never see. “I had ordered a live tree to be delivered to the house and it got there the week after they were killed, and I said to Skip, ‘I know this is really weird, but I want you to put that tree up.’” Suraci would not decorate it, but she wanted it up. It was surrounded by dozens of poinsettias sent from well-wishers from around the country. The family received literally thousands of flowers.

“It was so void,” Suraci said of the Christmas tree, “it was almost scary.”

Another void was felt by Eliza Thomas’s grandfather, James Thomas, who wrote an article in that day’s newspaper about the murders. Thomas also wrote about the pain of Pearl Harbor and about learning of the death of a good friend who was killed by enemy tank fire in World War II, just days shy of his twenty-first birthday.

Thomas reiterated Reverend Garner’s sermon that the girls’ lives were short chapters that came to a too abrupt end.

Thomas’s article extended beyond the yogurt shop murders to American society at large. He bemoaned poverty, drug abuse, and violence in culture. He wrote of a need to reject such tenets in American society, to eliminate bad choices from one’s lifestyle.

He wrote of an Austin woman who purchased a bullhorn to use every time a drug dealer drove into her neighborhood. When she yelled, they left. “Austin and all communities all over America need to follow her example and say with a loud voice that we will not stand for drugs and all these shows that teach violence and disrespect for life.” Thomas was determined to “turn around the public slide toward barbarism.”

Barbara and Skip Suraci were doing their part to help stop the violence. Despite their pain and suffering, the couple, who lost all of their children, were determined to get involved. They participated in a group known as Project Help Us, which was formed after the murders to elicit citizen participation in helping to solve the crime. Skip was elected spokesperson. His first duty was to write a letter to the citizens of Austin asking for help. He requested that people turn on their automobile headlights during the day, display white ribbons for the girls, provide help for Child, Inc., and contact local television stations and newspapers and express their grief and anger over the crimes.

While activity helped keep the families’ minds off the constant pain, that first Christmas would be the most painful of their lives. Through tears, however, Skip recalled a humorous story about Jennifer.

Just a few weeks before her murder, Jennifer served yogurt to Governor Ann Richards. “Jennifer came home that night and talked with her mother, as she often did,” Suraci wistfully recalled. “She beamed, she laughed, and her mother asked, ‘Did you charge her?’ And she said, ‘No. But I charged the friend who was with her.’”

Governor Richards later expressed her condolences for the loss of all four girls, including Jennifer. The governor went on television with the girls’ families to make a public plea “to ask everyone in the community to assist our law enforcement officials in solving this crime.”

 

Colleen Reed, a petite, perky twenty-eight-year-old University of Texas graduate, finished soaping up her white convertible Mazda Miata. Simultaneously a large tan Ford Thunderbird pulled into another stall in the car wash. Inside were two men.

One of the men got out of the car to toss some trash into a receptacle. The other man headed in the direction of Colleen Reed. According to author Bob Stewart in his book,
No Remorse
, the man at the trash can heard a woman scream out, “Please! Not me. Not me!” He peeked around to see what the commotion was all about when he saw his buddy grasp Reed with an oversize hand and lift her several inches off the ground. His other hand held the defenseless girl’s hands behind her back.

“Please, God, don’t let this happen to me,” Reed cried. She and her sister had discussed the girls who were killed in the yogurt shop. She prayed that nothing like that would happen to her.

“You’re going with me,” the large man commanded.

According to Stewart, Reed glanced over to the man at the trash can and begged, “Help me!” But the man did not help Reed. Instead, he threw her into the backseat of the Thunderbird. He jumped in the back next to her and pinned her down so she could not move. The large man calmly crawled into the driver’s seat, quietly pulled out of the car wash, and proceeded to head out the wrong way down a one-way street. After nearly hitting several cars, the two men escaped with Colleen Reed.

“Please not me. Not me,” she pleaded with her captors. “Help me.”

 

After being swamped by hundreds of phone calls, tips, and confessions in just a matter of weeks, it was apparent that a larger team was needed.

It was also apparent that the case was too big to be worked out of “Main.” Within weeks, a makeshift command center was set up on Anderson Lane in a rented office space next to Red Lobster, near I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt. The inside was sparsely furnished with brown folding tables, large dry erase boards, and emerald green carpet. Boxes of tip information were stacked floor to ceiling. An open manila folder that contained photos of the four girls layered on top of pink construction paper was taped up on the inside frame of the door.

The task force offices were set up so that police could hopefully decipher the ass end of an armadillo from a hole in the wall—such as the boyfriend and girlfriend who confessed to the murders, yet knew nothing about the crime scene.

They first attracted attention when someone reported a tip to Sergeant Jones, saying a teenage girl gave a cryptic message that she saw “certain things” in the Hillside Center parking lot. Jones brought the girl into the interview room for questioning. The small room contained a round table, two chairs, and a coffeemaker. The door to the room had a misspelled plaque that said,
VIDEO INTERVIEW—QUITE PLEASE
.

At first, Jones’s hopes were raised when the girlfriend hesitated for an extended period of time when asked for the name of her boyfriend. “We thought, ‘Hey, maybe this it.’”

That would not be the case.

The girl spouted out nonsense. None of the information she gave matched the crime scene. She was wasting their time.

“They were telling us stuff that wasn’t true,” Jones stated, exasperated. “They were giving information that they had heard off the street. The killers have to tell us certain things that only the killers would know. That didn’t happen in this case.”

Jones wrote the couple off his growing list of suspects. Less than one month after the killings, Jones had already scratched off more than thirty-five potential suspects.

Jones never understood the bizarre confessions that came down the pike. He could not understand the psychological makeup of a person who clearly had no involvement in one of the state’s most brutal crimes, but who would want to implicate himself with a confession.

“Confessions sound good,” Jones lamented, “but that’s not the standard by which charges are filed. If we have the right person, we will charge them.”

Jones shrugged his shoulders and sighed. “A confession alone isn’t enough to get a conviction.”

One of Sergeant Jones’s first orders of duty was to speak to Agent Ed Richards of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Behavioral Science Unit (BSU). It was the first time in twenty years that anyone from the FBI’s BSU helped in an Austin case. It was a rather fortuitous time to have their involvement. The BSU’s profile had risen dramatically during the past year due to their appearance in the guise of Scott Glenn and Jodie Foster in the soon-to-be Academy Award–winning 1991 Best Picture,
The Silence of the Lambs
. The Jonathan Demme–directed film, based on a novel by Thomas Harris, struck a nerve with the moviegoing public when it was released in February 1991. The story centers on FBI agent Clarice Starling (Foster) and her endeavors to capture a serial killer named Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb (Ted Levine), who skins his female victims. By sitting down with world-famous serial killer, Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), she learns the tricks of the trade so as to get into the mind of Buffalo Bill and capture him. Starling and Jack Crawford (Glenn) are members of BSU, renowned for its so-called science known as “profiling.”

The term profiling describes a variety of methods used, based on an assessment of a crime scene and the patterns that lay therein, that may help investigators to determine the thought processes of a potential killer or killers.

With the success of
The Silence of the Lambs
, BSU’s confidence was at an all-time high, despite the fact that profiling had never once been used to capture a single serial killer. Sergeant Jones also had confidence in Agent Richards. After all, how could he not trust a man who was a grandfather and reminded him of Santa Claus, with his big rosy red cheeks and snow-white hair?

Johnson also happened to be one of the first four men to participate in BSU. He graduated in 1985. In the six years since he graduated, Richards studied more than four hundred violent crimes, including a 1980 unsolved murder in San Marcos, Texas, about thirty miles south of Austin. Richards helped local authorities sift through seventy-five suspects and narrow the field down to the killer, one Doil E. Lane.

San Marcos police captain Lisa Dvorak heaped mounds of praise on Richards: “We could not have found Lane without Richards’s insight. Whenever you have a number of leads, it’s like looking for a pin in a wheat field. Mr. Richards helped us narrow our scope.”

Sergeant Jones met with Agent Richards that January. Based on information relayed to him by Jones, and a perusal of the crime scene photographs, Richards confidently created a profile of the killers in the yogurt shop murders. He informed Jones that he believed more than one person committed the crimes; they were probably white, but other ethnicities could not be ruled out; and they were probably in their late teens or early twenties. One person was the leader of the group.

Richards believed these things about the leader:

After Richards briefed Jones, he took a step back for a breather. “There’s times I go home and cry after hammering and hammering and hammering cases all day long,” Richards intoned. “I feel optimistic about this case, though. It’s just a matter of time.”

Sergeant Jones felt optimistic as well after he spoke with Richards. “We’re real confident that this case will come to an end real soon,” Jones announced beaming. “I don’t think it’s going to drag on very long. We’re not dealing with a hopeless situation by any stretch of the imagination.

“It would be safe to say that apprehension is imminent.”