The Public Hell of Bob Carreiro
The Houston trucker turned grief for his murdered daughter into a publicity campaign that led to her killer’s conviction. Now, as a victims’ rights advocate, he’s a star in a world he never wanted to be a part of.
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Not every surviving crime victim becomes a victims’ rights advocate, of course. Those who do usually share certain experiences—a particularly heinous crime and the accompanying media attention it engenders, for instance. Many advocates also possess a powerful personal need for community that sometimes preceded the crime itself. Those who join this world will find that it is not the redemptive one of Sunday newspaper-supplement stories as much as it is a mirror of modern life, where social movements become religions, religions become recovery movements, and grief becomes another form of entertainment. The day that Kynara Carreiro was killed was the day her father’s education in this world began.
SIX WEEKS AFTER THE TRIAL CARREIRO sat in the jury box of a Humble courthouse, fingers to his cheek, studying the crowd. Along with other members of local victims’ rights organizations, he had come to address a group of teenage probationers. Everyday violence was a foregone conclusion here. Carreiro waited his turn while a representative of the Harris County Probation Department presented a “weapons workshop”—a primer on which weapons would land her audience back in trouble with the authorities. “Swords are not to be carried around on an illegal basis,” the compact, no-nonsense woman droned. “A tomahawk is in the category of a club and is illegal to carry.”
Carreiro let his gaze play across the crowd—the worn faces of the parents, the insolent bravado their children, mostly boys, wore as proudly as their fade haircuts, oversized jeans, and Rage Against the Machine T-shirts. Carreiro was searching for the ones he might be able to save, and it looked to him like a friendlier group than the kids he sometimes talked to in juvenile detention, the ones who laughed outright when he told his story. He got tired of telling his story over and over again, but since Kynara’s death, testifying this way seemed, simply, the right thing to do. “I used to wonder why this happened,” he said. “Now I think God has got this other plan for me, and I don’t want to mess it up.”
“This is reality folks, this is not a movie,” Andy Kahan said, pacing in front of the group. The mayor’s crime victims’ director was a tall, balding man with the belligerent air of the parole officer he had been. His was a sensible admonition, given the attention span of those present. Most of the kids had been charged with lesser crimes like car theft and burglary, and it was hoped, perhaps vainly, that a dose of Kahan’s medicine would keep them from graduating to something worse.
It was up to each speaker to make his or her story as dramatic as possible; a generation raised on television required as much. On this night Carreiro followed two women he had appeared with often, Gilda Muskwinsky, the former president of Parents of Murdered Children, and Kathy McCrory, a victims’ rights advocate from Fort Bend County. Muskwinsky’s daughter had been murdered in 1984 by drug dealers in search of her boyfriend; McCrory had been kidnapped, beaten, and raped while on a business trip several years ago. The presentation was something like a television talk show crossed with an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, particularly with respect to the confessional style the speakers used and the way the audience wept at painful moments and applauded at moments of personal triumph. But it was Carreiro who used this style to its most powerful effect; he had a flair for the theatrical that drew people to him.
“I was born and raised in a dysfunctional family,” he began, forming quotation marks in the air around the word “dysfunctional.” “My father was a violent alcoholic—the most time I spent with him was in a beer joint. I grew up hating my father for what he did, but I grew up just like him. That,” he said, letting his eyes pass slowly over the crowd, “was my idea of what it was to be a man.”
He was the son of a Portuguese construction contractor and a German homemaker and grew up in Connecticut watching his father drink himself into oblivion when he wasn’t pummeling Carreiro’s mother. Carreiro grew up to be angry and self-pitying—“it was always me against them”—someone who found himself living in a run-down shack and having to choose between a loaf of bread and a six-pack of beer when he went to the store for food. Carreiro left one bitter marriage and one child behind when he drifted to Texas in 1977 with Diane Kelly, whom he battered and married and who later became Kynara’s mother. Carreiro stopped drinking with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous in 1979, after he blackened both of Diane’s eyes in a fight.
“I feel my daughter was born to teach me how to love,” he said of Kynara. Though he and Diane divorced, they shared custody of Kynara and made peace in the process. With the passion of a changed man, Carreiro took his daughter everywhere, to A.A. meetings, on motorcycle and fishing trips. He built her a playhouse, took her shopping, and found he wanted for nothing. He began to work with drunks at A.A. and discovered he was good at it; he reconciled with his father. And then one phone call proved that a reformed man’s peace is as fragile as anyone else’s.
“That’s the way I’m gonna have to remember her,” Carreiro said to the kids. He had unfurled a poster, a blowup of the familiar snapshot of Kristin and Kynara arm in arm. “No graduations, no first kiss, no grandchildren.” As he recounted the crime, his voice coarsened with anger. “These precious little girls’ lives were lost forever. Forever,” he repeated furiously. When he was done, the crowd rewarded him with thunderous applause.
“Lemme just tell ya,” Kahan said, thanking the audience and opening up the meeting to questions, “this is the best group I’ve seen.” The kids pressed for more dramatic details. One young man asked how Kynara had died. “Did he beat her or shoot her?” To Kathy McCrory: “How did that guy get you?” To Gilda Muskwinsky: “Was this a random killing or did they plan it?”
After the meeting, a small group surrounded Carreiro to thank him for coming. “This is my little girl,” one woman said, stroking the head of her shy, smiling child, who looked to be about seven.
Carreiro bent down toward her and looked urgently into her eyes. “Be careful,” he said. “Be real careful, okay?”
THE SCRAPBOOK IN WHICH KYNARA Carreiro’s father chose to put newspaper clippings about her murder was covered with a Norman Rockwell print of a pretty blonde teenager showing off her corsage to a soda jerk while her date looks on proudly—a mournful symbolism that could be lost on no one. The extensive video library of Kynara consisted of home videos—Kynara on an Easter egg hunt, Kynara on Christmas Day, Kynara hovering near the water at a friend’s beach house—as well as tapes of her father clearing a bayou near the Wiley home, seeking clues to her death. “KC birthday/Cemetery 11/1/93” one tape is labeled; another “Oprah,” another “Jerry Springer.” Because Kynara’s murder went unsolved for so long it happened that Bob Carreiro’s grieving was both public and protracted, which, in turn, led to his rise as a public figure.
Like many high-profile murder cases, this one was played out almost entirely in front of the cameras. The earliest news reports showed Carreiro seated upon several bags of mulch in his ex-wife’s front yard with his head in his hands. He had come upon the scene to find the street blocked by police officers and reporters, and his former wife, now remarried, pacing in front of the Wiley house, carrying her screaming newborn son. “No one would talk to us,” Carreiro said. At first he thought Kynara had been wounded in an accidental shooting; he did not learn that she was dead, and how she had died, for more than four hours. “It looked like a zoo,” he said, and his suspicions about the competence of the sheriff’s department were born at that moment. He was not reassured when a deputy he had known for some time gave him this warning about his colleagues: “Get on ’em and stay on ’em.”
In the first few weeks after Kynara’s murder, he was incapable of doing so. When public interest faded, Carreiro retreated into himself. In those earliest days, his emotional makeup, which tended toward the mystical and the sentimental, saw him through. Searching Kynara’s room, he divined portents in the way she had numbered every day of her July calendar except the one on which she died and in the tombstonelike crosses she had taken to drawing on the inside covers of her coloring books. He formulated a theory in which his daughter was an angel whose time on earth had been brief but purposeful, and then, when he heard his daughter’s voice telling him it was time to rejoin the living, he went back to work at the trucking firm. Passing a tattoo parlor near a sandwich shop he and Kynara had frequented, he had her face, surrounded by roses and a unicorn, tattooed on his upper arm. “What better way to honor my daughter?” Carreiro asked. “She’s in my head, my heart, she’s on my skin too.” He took to caressing his shoulder, as if warding off a chill.
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