Authors: Stephen G. Michaud,Roy Hazelwood
Tags: #True Crime, #Murder, #Serial Killers
As Ferguson lay dying, Chavez and Fernandez headed once again for southwest Dallas, where they came upon twenty-five-year-old Kevin Hancock as the security guard sat in his car doing paperwork in the Indian Ridge Apartments parking lot.
Hancock warned them off the property, but Chavez was unfazed.
“Let’s see both hands, don’t fuck with me,” he said as he pointed a gun at Hancock, demanding the security guard’s 9mm handgun. He also demanded his wallet. When Hancock said he didn’t have one, Johnny Chavez shot him twice in the neck.
And still the carnage went on.
At 1:50 a.m., as Francisco Jaimez and his friend, Alberto Guevara, sat together talking in the front yard at 400 East Ninth Street in Oak Cliff, Chavez and Fernandez drove up, produced a gun, and relieved Jaimez of one hundred dollars and Guevara of his wallet. Fernandez shot and wounded them both. Chavez shot and killed a third victim at the scene, twenty-five-year-old Jesus Briseno, who innocently had happened by while the robbery was in progress.
After committing three murders and three other shootings in less than two hours, Chavez and Fernandez next encountered Alfonso Contreras, thirty, and Guadalupe Delgadillo-Pina, twenty-five, who were parked together in a vacant lot at
the intersection of Ormsby and Seale Streets, about two miles from where Jaimez, Guevara, and Briseno were shot.
They robbed Contreras of his billfold and two hundred dollars, then shot him with Hancock’s gun and ran over Contreras with his own truck.
According to Fernandez’s later statements to police, he followed in the Caprice as Chavez drove Delgadillo-Pina in Contreras’s truck to the Trinity River bottoms, the river’s dark and deserted floodplain. Fernandez said Johnny ordered him to shoot Delgadillo-Pina in the head, after which Chavez ran over her, as well, with Contreras’s truck.
That vehicle also was torched.
Two nights later, on the Fourth of July, Johnny and Hector returned to the immediate vicinity of the Indian Ridge Apartments, where they’d shot Kevin Hancock, and committed the double gunshot drive-by murders of thirty-one-year-old Manuel Duran and twenty-seven-year-old Antonio Rios, both tire store employees, as they left work. Chavez also shot and killed fifty-three-year-old Antonio Banda, whose ill fortune it was to be coming around the street corner at just the time of the shootings.
They committed no further crimes in Dallas for eighteen days.
Then at about 1:00 a.m. on July 22, Chavez and Fernandez shot seventeen-year-old Gabriel Yerena in the head, stole his vehicle, and left him lying in the middle of South Randolph Street as they drove away in his car.
Twenty-four hours later, driving a stolen Camaro, Chavez and Fernandez pulled up behind Juan Macias and Manuela Salas on West Canty Street. A shot from the Camaro hit Salas in the arm. After Macias refused to pull over, he took a fatal gunshot to the back of his head. His vehicle careened out of control and struck a house.
Salas jumped out the car, ran to a neighbor’s, and called the Dallas police.
A short while later, as officers were securing the scene,
Chavez and Fernandez returned in their stolen Camaro. They were ordered to stop and get out. Instead, they dropped the Camaro in reverse, gunned the car, and drove straight back into a fence.
The two fled on foot.
Two weeks later, they were finally arrested. In March of 1996, Johnny Chavez was tried and convicted for the Morales murder and sentenced to death. “Crazy” Fernandez, who testified against Chavez, received ten years’ probation.
“Chavez and Fernandez obviously were on a crime spree,” Hazelwood observes. “The victims were randomly chosen.
“They were oblivious to risk.
“Chavez had shot Vicente Mendoza at a residence at seven-forty-five in the evening. He also shot Jose Castillo multiple times in front of several witnesses at the car wash at about eight p.m.
“They were impulsive. They’d see a car they wanted, for example, and would just start following that car.
“They lacked criminal sophistication. They committed crimes in front of witnesses, crimes that involved high risks to themselves. They left evidence, expended rounds and fingerprints.
“They were prepared for, and desirous of, killing. When they drove by the apartment complex where Hancock worked, one of them reportedly said, ‘Let’s get him!’ They wanted to kill. It was a thrill for them.
“A working gate at the apartment complex would not have deterred this crime. Remember, they weren’t stopped by Hancock, who was armed and uniformed. What’s a gate going to do?
“Additional guards also would not have deterred this crime. Cameras would not have deterred this crime. Better lighting would not have deterred this crime.
“Nothing was going to stop those two.”
*
Denotes a pseudonym.
The world of aberrant crime forcefully reclaimed Hazelwood’s attention in 1968, when Roy, by then a Vietnam veteran and a major in the army, accepted a yearlong fellowship at the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, based at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. The AFIP was the best-equipped and most advanced facility of its kind anywhere in the world.
Roy by this time was familiar with the dark side of human nature.
From Fort Rucker he’d been transferred to West Germany, where Hazelwood first served as provost marshal (police chief) of the Fourth Armored Division’s home base at Göppingen. He then was sent to Stuttgart, where he commanded a stockade.
There are very few jobs less attractive than being a jailer. But for Roy Hazelwood, the yearlong responsibility of managing 150 criminals was a welcome chance to interact directly with them—to be educated on criminality by criminals.
“I learned a lot running that stockade,” he says.
He also demonstrated a natural feel for dealing with felons.
One of Roy’s innovations, developed with the help of a psychologist, was to color-code the facility’s interior. Thus, when new arrivals first came to Captain Hazelwood’s prison entrance, they found the walls and floor painted a bleak gray, underscoring the seriousness of their situation.
To emphasize that in this place their lives no longer were their own, Roy directed that black hands and feet be painted onto the walls and floor. These indicated precisely to the newcomers where they were to position their own hands and feet as they were searched, and then marched through the entrance’s outer and inner gates, or sally port.
Inside the lockup, Roy added a Dantean touch. Those in maximum security found their area covered completely with a dark, dull green paint. As the men worked their way up, via good behavior, to the moderate-security wing, they discovered the vile green relieved by a white paint on the upper walls and ceiling. Those well-behaved enough for minimum security enjoyed curtains, rugs, and furniture.
Troublemakers were placed on suicide watch: locked down naked, with no mattress or blanket, under twenty-four-hour guard in a brightly lit cell with only a Bible and their wedding ring to remind them of their higher responsibilities.
After two days of this, Roy would personally visit the inmate, excuse the guard, and speak privately. “I’d tell him that if he’d tell me he was sorry for what he’d done, I’d let him out, and no one would ever know he’d apologized. It worked ninety percent of the time.”
If it didn’t, Hazelwood shipped the miscreant off to a far less congenial environment, the former Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, then being operated as a special lockup for soldier-inmates with behavior problems throughout the European stockade system.
Although Roy couldn’t know it, these one-on-one encounters with the baddest of the bad in his custody were an invaluable prelude to his later confrontations with America’s most deviant offenders.
Mentally sparring with a killer is very different from sharing a lemonade on the veranda with your Aunt Kate. It is very hard work in which a simple slip of the tongue, or even a mistaken gesture, can cancel days, even weeks, of effort.
There’s no cookbook, either.
In Stuttgart, for example, Roy was faced with the problem of a glib and personable inmate whom the prison psychologist had diagnosed as a psychopath.
This prisoner, a persistent reoffender with a long record of incarceration, had voluntarily assisted with overhauling the stockade’s archaic office record-keeping system. But in the weeks he worked around Roy’s staff, Hazelwood realized that though superficially charming, the inmate was a chronic liar who failed to complete most of the tasks he was given.
Besides enjoying the change of scenery, he also took advantage of the circumstance to ingratiate himself with several members of Roy’s staff, while he became intimately familiar with the other inmates’ records, gathering information he no doubt planned to use to his advantage.
Hazelwood knew he would have to make a countermove before the prisoner had consolidated his relationships and established his own power center inside the prison staff, a potentially dangerous challenge to Roy’s authority.
But confrontation, a public showdown, wouldn’t work. This was a model prisoner, and Hazelwood could only undercut his own credibility by treating the popular inmate peremptorily. The answer had to be a response in kind—subterfuge replying to stealth.
Consequently, contraband postage stamps were discovered in the prisoner’s bunk, a rules violation from which there was no appeal. He was summarily issued a one-way ticket to Dachau.
“You know I didn’t steal those stamps,” the inmate said indignantly to Roy on his way out the door. “You set me up, didn’t you?”
Roy nodded and smiled and wished the man a safe journey. The defeated prisoner paused briefly and smiled back, apparently appreciating the craftiness with which he had been finessed.
Hazelwood’s next overseas posting was South Vietnam, where in 1967 he was assigned command of the Fourth MP Company, known at the time as the “Fucked-Up Fourth” for its lack of discipline, low morale, and dismal performance record. At the time Roy took over, seven soldiers in the company were in the stockade for attempting to kill a noncommissioned officer with a hand grenade.
Roy again intuitively recognized that creativity would get him much further than confrontation, an insight also of great value for interviewing violent deviant offenders.
On his first day in charge of his new command, Hazelwood inspected the MPs’ living quarters and equipment. “They were pretty awful,” he says. “I picked up one soldier’s rifle and discovered that it was rusted shut.
“The first sergeant said, ‘Sir, here’s your chance to establish your authority. Court-martial the soldier.’
“I said, ‘No, I think I’ll put him on the lead Jeep on tomorrow’s four a.m. convoy escort—with this weapon.’
“That PFC spent the entire night cleaning his weapon.”
By the time Hazelwood moved on, the Fourth was not only squared away, but had become one of the most decorated MP companies in Vietnam.
His next stop was An Khe, home of the First Cavalry Division, where for four months Roy coordinated convoy security for more than 250 miles of the most dangerous roadway in Vietnam.
His last assignment was as “number one papa san” in charge of cleaning up “Sin City,” the one-square-mile red-light district in An Khe.
Sin City was notorious throughout that part of Vietnam for its overpriced and diluted booze (known as Saigon tea),
diseased hookers, and the frequency of street brawls that broke out among the U.S. Army personnel who were Sin City’s most frequent visitors.
Not unlike some western sheriff determined to tame his town’s outlaw element, Roy instituted reforms that eliminated most of Sin City’s violence, improved the girls’ health and hygiene, and regulated liquor prices.
The fighters tailed off dramatically when he forbade officers and enlisted men to mingle in the same establishments.
“In fact,” Roy recalls, “we had the brothel owners construct, at their own cost, three separate facilities: one for officers, one for noncommissioned officers, and one for the enlisted men.”
He saw to it that price-gouging ricksha operators, who charged exorbitant sums to transport soldiers to and from Sin City, suddenly had an affordable competitor, a regularly scheduled, round-trip minibus service.
Hazelwood also ordered that all prostitutes were to receive weekly physical examinations and be tested for sexually transmitted diseases. Those who were sick were ordered out of their brothels. One violation, and the whorehouse itself was shut down.
Roy further directed that all employers and employees from Sin City’s papa-sans to their bartenders and the bar girls were to rise at 6:00 a.m. each day and thoroughly police the entire district for trash.
“Everyone took part; it was a true democracy,” he says.
In the summer of 1968, his tour complete, Major Hazelwood returned home to confront a major decision. The army offered him a choice: attend Michigan State University to pursue an advanced degree in criminal law enforcement studies, or accept a year’s fellowship in forensic medicine at the AFIP.
Hazelwood decided in characteristic fashion.
“I went to the dictionary and looked up ‘forensic medicine.’
It said, ‘medicine as it applies to courts of law.’ That sounded fascinating, so I accepted the fellowship.”
Roy had seen a tremendous amount of violence in Vietnam, but the AFIP introduced him to a different variety of mayhem—random, pernicious violence and its victims. Assisting in autopsies at the Baltimore medical examiner’s office, retrieving floaters (dead bodies) with the harbor patrol, observing the psychiatric intake ward at Walter Reed, and learning forensic anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution, Hazelwood for the first time began to sketch his own mental frame around the borders of extreme and dangerous behavior.
“My professional interest in death and violence really came together at AFIP,” he explains. “There was
so
much violence, and I was confronted daily with its victims. Some of the victims would be expected to encounter violence in their lives. Prostitutes and drug addicts, for example. But many of the other victims I saw were selected randomly to be killed. That point has stayed with me for my entire career.”