A Legacy of Evil
Once San Diego was home to Texas’ most ruthless dynasty. Now, in the town of the Parrs corrupted, a savage gang rape has resurrected the old ghosts of lawlessness, fear, and betrayal.
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If rape was misunderstood, so too was the difference between it and gang rape. Though women whispered their disgust, few men would admit that gang rape is the result of a world that lets boys be boys to a grotesque extreme. “It got out of hand” was the most frequently offered assessment of the crime. The accused were powerfully bound together, not just through blood, marriage, and time but also by their pride in their role as tough guys. The gang rape was the final, most primitive extension of that bond; to refuse to participate made one less of a man, and also less of a brother. When the time came to choose between the world of men and an insignificant woman, the choice was easy.
If it was more wrenching for the town to choose between the woman and the accused, people slowly found the wherewithal to make the decision. Early on, families and friends and the defendants had begun the paint Linda Gaitan as a tattooed tramp who wore tight clothes and had been previously involved with one of the men she had accused; somehow she deserved what she got or simply invented the story to cover up an indiscretion. As in the New Bedford case, the accused who admit to having sex with Gaitan allege consent. Just after the ten men were indicted last May, Orlando Garza, his face partially obscured but recognizable on camera, told a Houston television reporter, “It wasn’t no rape. Whatever it was, she had fun with it. She enjoyed it.”
This was the approach taken by defense lawyer Nago Alaniz, an ancient attorney who had been a lawyer for George Parr. Implicated in the assassination of the son of a Parr enemy, Alaniz was acquitted in the fifties. Over the years he has shifted his focus from politics to criminal law—Alaniz has represented some of the gang-rape defendants before on drug-related charges and now represents five of the accused—but he remains a powerful reminder of the old ways. Alaniz’s hair is blacker now that it was in photos in the fifties, but that small vanity cannot obscure the weariness in his face and voice. As he speaks, his eyelids droop and his voice drops from a growl to a slow, weary rumble; he seems to be a man whose mission has finally drained him.
After telling me that he had no intention of trying the case in the newspapers or of smearing Linda Gaitan’s reputation, Alaniz offered a preview of coming attractions, as he had done for several other reporters and countless coffee drinkers in town. Deftly, Alaniz told a tale highlighting that crucial element, reasonable doubt. “She knew them all. She knew them better than she should have,” he said. “She’d been keeping company with one of them on the QT. The whole town knows it.” Alaniz further reminded me that Gaitan had withdrawn an accusation against one of Frankie’s cousins, Adolfo Quintanilla (law-enforcement officials say that she had mistaken him for Roberto Perez, whom he resembles.) To hear Alaniz talk, the entire case was concocted by outsiders. “They built this thing up in Corpus. They buy her a car. The Corpus people had money to spend,” he told me. “They made it into a crisis.”
Loyal to their friends, afraid of reprisals (it is somehow revealing that the person most vocal in his support of the Gaitans was Richard Yaegar, a semiretired soldier of fortune with little family left in town), the citizens of San Diego turned inward. A local fund established for Gaitan came up with only $70; a fund administered by Corpus Christi Crisis Services and fueled by the Chorpus Christi Caller-Times’ stories raised almost $10,000. Outsiders donated a Corpus apartment to the couple when it was reported that they were being threatened by the accused. San Diego spoke with silence.
There seemed to be only one person in San Diego who was not afraid of the “boys”—a real boy, aged twelve. Small for his age, he walks with a confident swagger and has a few tattoos, crosses mostly, on his arms and legs. He appeared alone at the DA’s office a few days after the gang rape and told his story. The boy had been spending the night at a friend’s house, when on the way to buy a Coke, they saw his friend’s relative Alex Bear, who from a crowded car invited the boys to the cockfight. Once there, the boy noted the arrival of Garza and the others and saw Linda Gaitan struggling to get away. From then on, his story matched those of Gaitan and Briones. The boy’s mother had not known he had gone to the cockfight, nor did she know he had contacted the district attorney. “They were going to catch me anyway” is the way he explains his confession.
Shortly thereafter, the boy says, he became the subject of threats. The defendants began driving by his house, calling his sisters names like “masota” (“big mama”). His best friend--the fourteen-year-old accused in the gang rape—would have nothing to do with him; the boy caught a glimpse of his former friend near school one day and fainted from fear. Sometimes some of the accused could be seen near the junior high playground. The principal assigned a teacher’s aide to watch over the boy—she turned out to be an aunt of one of the suspects. Eventually the boy’s mother took him out of school, and he was put into a home-tutoring program. He was afraid to go outside. A doctor prescribed medication for his heart. He had bad dreams: once he had a nightmare that the men were at the window. His mother came in, checked the window, and took him into her room to sleep, promising him that they were safe. Just as the two were drifting off, there was a knock on the door. When his mother went to answer, no one was there. “I never gone to one of those rapes before,” he says with a shudder, as if it were something he expected to get used to.
After the Caller-Times wrote a story about the boy, he too became the recipient of donations and letters of support—once more, from out of town. Someone gave him a few weeks at camp, and the family moved away temporarily. At midsummer, the small frame house he shared with his mother and siblings was empty. No laundry hung on the line, and the curtains were knotted behind open windows and rusted screens.
“I don’t talk about it,” Linda Gaitan tells me with a toss of her head, a grimace, and a finality that brooks no argument. We are sitting in the living room of the Gaitans’ donated apartment, a small, dark place in front of a trailer park in Corpus Christi. The children—round-faced, their heads a mass of silky curls—rest placidly in diapers on a pile of blankets in front of a donated color television tuned to a children’s cartoon show. Donated toys are strewn about the floor, and velveteen hangings from Frankie’s mother decorate the walls—one of Christ, the cross inside his heart ablaze, another of bears frolicking in the stream filled with pink fish. In spite of the efforts of family and newfound friends, the place is overwhelmingly grim.
In San Diego, the Gaitans’ lives had been on a fixed, if predictable, course. Both Frankie and Linda had grown up in poverty. Frankie is the only surviving child of a widow who cleaned the church for a living; his father died when he was a boy. Linda, born in Irving, was one of twelve children. Her parents split up after they moved to a ranch near San Diego; her father runs a bar in Benavides. Linda did well in school in Irving but was more distracted in South Texas (“Boys,” she says sourly. “They were always teasing me”). She dropped out her sophomore year and went to work in the fields to help her family.
Their courtship, Frankie says, shaking his head, grinning, and dragging on a cigarette, “wasn’t all champagne and wine.” He met Linda after a basketball game, when he bet a friend his last cigarette that he could get her to tell him where she lived. He walked up to her and asked for a light; Linda reached into her pocket and produced a handful of lighters for him to choose from. They started dating. Frankie would hitch a ride to her ranch every weekend, or he would mail her pictures he had drawn on handkerchiefs—of the Virgin, of two horses rearing, of an eagle flying. They were married by a justice of the peace on Halloween 1985. She was sixteen, he was twenty. The ceremony at his grandmother’s house was interrupted by trick-or-treaters so often that they finally had to send a relative out to the yard to distribute the candy. Later Frankie gave his wife a tattoo on her shoulder, “Soy Gaitan”—“I’m a Gaitan”—it said, over a rose that bloomed.
The tattoo may have been the only thing that flourished. Frankie found work intermittently on construction crews; they supplemented their income by selling homemade tamales or scavenging aluminum cans. Sometimes he made money by doing tattoos, like the penguins he applied to the chest of a wrestler known as the Ice Man. Over the next two years Linda and Frankie had two children, and the days blended together. Sometimes, when he had money, Frankie took his wife to Jerry’s Diner for a night on the town.
Even without the horror of the gang rape, Linda and Frankie’s lives are tinged with bleakness the rest of us would rather not imagine. Frankie, his chest and arms covered with his own tattoos, has a face that is deeply lined for his age, a combination of sun, cigarettes, and hardship. Behind his expansiveness lies a certain freneticism—he downs a beer like a man on a mission. In person Linda is neither the shy saint her in-laws have fashioned for the media nor the sinner the town rumor mills have generated in response. She is simply a sturdy, pigeon-toed girl who wears that air of stolid resignation common to poor women who, raised to expect nothing, get even less. It was she who fought with Frankie’s mother over the distribution of the welfare check in San Diego; it is she who now fixes those rummaging through her neighborhood dumpster with a fierce, competitive stare. Frankie may be the head of the household, but Linda has always been responsible for sustaining it. Long ago she made peace with the conceit that the man of the house was also just another child to be pampered and soothed.
Many who saw Linda after the gang rape noted that she would shrink from contact, as if slapped. At home now, four months later, she speaks in anxious spurts, telling the story of how once on the ranch they nursed an injured seagull until it died or the story of how once she and Frankie were driving up Leopard Street in Corpus Christi and a man exposed himself to her. Unlike her husband, Linda has the curiosity of someone who has not given herself to only one place. She would have liked to have become a cop, she would like to learn to read. Instead, the reality of the gang rape has made her small world even smaller.
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