Selena 
Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
The Sweet Song of Justice
It took the jury less than three hours to find Yolanda Saldivar guilty of murdering Selena. But for two weeks in October, all of Texas followed the most sensational trial in years. A behind-the-scenes look at what happened inside the courtroom.
(Page 2 of 3)
There was also some gripping testimony about Selena and Saldivar’s visit to Doctors Regional Medical Center the morning of the shooting. Saldivar had said that she had been raped earlier that week in Mexico, but after a medical examination proved inconclusive, Selena realized Saldivar was lying, according to two nurses at the hospital. The murder took place less than half an hour after the two left the hospital. Perhaps a fatal mistake was made in dragging out Saldivar’s firing. Having most of the month of March to contemplate that her relationship was over with the person she described as “the only friend I ever had” was too much for Saldivar to take. As she told hostage negotiator Larry Young, “I had a problem with her and I just got to end it.”
The Defense
If Douglas Tinker wasn’t exactly a one-man dream team, the 61-year-old attorney had a long record of impressive acquittals. The criminal justice section of the State Bar of Texas had recognized him as the state’s outstanding criminal defense lawyer for 1995. After Judge Westergren appointed Tinker to defend Yolanda Saldivar, Richard “Racehorse” Haynes said that she had lucked into $50 million worth of representation. At Tinker’s request, Westergren appointed Arnold Garcia to assist him because Garcia spoke Spanish, as did Saldivar, and was a tireless investigator. Before the trial, many Houston lawyers had offered to assist Tinker in the high-profile case. Tinker took on Fred Hagans, a personal-injury attorney and a former partner of superlitigator John O’Quinn. This was Hagans’ first criminal case, and he invested considerable sums of money for the experience. He offered the services of his co-counsel Patricia Saum, hired jury consultant Robert Gordon, and staged a mock trial at an expense of more than $20,000. It was during the mock trial, with cameras filming the reactions of every “juror,” that Tinker first sensed his case might not be as strong as he had thought. Though one third of the “jury” voted to acquit, not one of the test jurors seemed bothered by the actions of Paul Rivera, the officer who took Saldivar’s confession but didn’t include her claim that the shooting was accidental. If the real jury didn’t buy the bad-cop theory, would they buy the accident?
The Prosecution
Carlos Valdez had never tried a felony case before he was elected district attorney for the 105th Judicial District two years ago. His presentations and examinations in court left room for improvement, but the boyish 41-year-old DA had the evidence and he knew how to delegate. Valdez’s chief prosecutor, Mark Skurka, a garrulous 36-year-old, tried the bulk of the case and ably demonstrated why he has prosecuted more murder cases in Nueces County than anyone else. During closing arguments in both the verdict and the sentencing phases, Skurka posted a picture of Selena in the jury box and repeatedly spoke to it, especially when he was referring to the defense’s claim that the shooting was accidental, which he labeled “hogwash.” He called the defense strategy the “squid defense,” attacking Saldivar’s defenders for putting out a black cloud of inky doubt to get away from the essence of the case. Elissa Sterling became part of the team when the case was assigned to Westergren’s 214th District Court, where Sterling prosecutes cases. Between the three of them, the prosecution got the desired verdict by sticking to the indisputable evidence, by calling both friendly and hostile witnesses before the defense could, and by keeping the jurors focused on the victim: Selena’s screams and her last steps and words immediately following the shooting were recounted by five motel employees, one of whom, Norma Martinez, said she had heard Saldivar shout, “Bitch!” at Selena. Their testimony, more than anything else, convicted Saldivar.
The Jury
It took two days to select the twelve-person jury. Judge Westergren had decided that to keep things moving, he wouldn’t seat alternates or sequester the jurors. Throughout the trial, the jury paid close attention, took notes, and showed little emotion, except for one blond Anglo female, who cried at the sight of the autopsy photographs and during the teary testimony of Frank Saldivar, the father of the accused. Up until the verdict, Tinker kept saying how much he liked this jury, in particular the three Anglo men sitting on the back row, one of whom was an ex-Marine. Tinker liked them so much he thought he could make his case without getting into the seamier aspects of the alleged split between Selena and her father. He liked them so much he called only three witnesses for the defense and recalled only two prosecution witnesses before resting, without asking the judge to consider a lesser charge. The guilty verdict was returned in less than three hours. The sentence of life in prison took nine hours. Charles Arnold, who was one of the jurors Tinker liked so much, had held out for a forty-year sentence before giving in.
The Judge
The bow-tied Mike Westergren was the anti-Ito, the kind of judge who would have kept O.J. Simpson’s dream team on a short leash. If nothing else, the unsuccessful candidate for the state Supreme court was going to make the trial run on time and not let it get out of hand. Despite pretrial petitions from the Univision and Court TV networks, the 48-year-old judge ruled that cameras would not be allowed in his court.
He showed a less serious side after the jury began deliberating punishment, when he visited with spectators in the gallery. As everyone began to relax, the din grew so loud that a bailiff had to shout, “Quiet in the courtroom!” Westergren, talking and laughing with two young lawyers, had sheepishly raised his hand and said, “I’m afraid it was me.”
Yolanda
Seeing the accused up close, it was hard to imagine that the tiny four-foot-nine woman could hurt a flea, much less pull the trigger of a murder weapon. Whenever a witness was asked to identify her, she stood up and tossed her head back with an air of pride. But when the five hours of hostage-negotiation tapes were played in the court—a grueling listening experience, the eerie sound of her sobs and hysterical moans filling the room—Saldivar quietly began crying along with the tapes. It was a sad sight, but it humanized the cold-blooded murderer that the prosecution had portrayed. She broke down sobbing after the verdict was read, quietly saying she wanted to kill herself, while defense investigator Tina Valenzuela comforted her.
Where’s Larry?
The most potentially explosive evidence was the recordings of conversations between Saldivar, sitting in the motel parking lot with a gun to her head, and the Corpus Christi Police Department’s hostage negotiation team. Lead investigator Paul Rivera testified that he had been aware of the tapes in April. But they didn’t surface until late August, after Tinker called police chief Henry Garrett and asked for them. Played in their entirety, they depicted Saldivar as distraught and panicky. Between her wails, Saldivar said over and over, “I didn’t mean to do it,” suggesting the shooting was an accident. She also blamed Abraham, saying, “He made me do it. He was out to get me…This man was so evil to me. My father even warned me about him. My father said I should get out before I get trapped.”
The special two-way phone line used by the hostage negotiation team was a flawed piece of technology. A portable phone would have allowed Saldivar a conference call with her mother in San Antonio, which she had asked for from the start. The two-way phone picked up the broadcast signal from the KSIX-AM transmitter, located one hundred yards from the motel parking lot, which is why the voice of Milo Hamilton calling a Rangers-Astros exhibition baseball game and the melody of “The Theme From M*A*S*H (Suicide Is Painless)” could be heard when the tapes were played in court. It was through this interference that Yolanda heard a news report that Selena was dead, at which point she became even more hysterical. The tapes also reveal that hostage negotiators promised Saldivar that her mother and her lawyer, Richard Garza, would be waiting for her when she gave up. She wasn’t and he wasn’t. One thirty-minute tape consisted of little else but Yolanda repeating the mantra “Where’s Larry?”—an appeal to bring negotiator Larry Young back on the line. The mantra was accompanied by a mysterious and extremely irritating electronic buzz. The bizarre audio conflagration inspired “Where’s Larry?” T-shirts, which were hawked on the street the next day.
My Library
