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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It also happened that the investigation into the murder of Kristin and Kynara stalled in August, just one month after the crime was committed. What is clear in retrospect was not clear at the time: Rex Mays was one suspect of many, and the sheriff’s department set up a task force to investigate everyone from suspicious drifters to Kristin Wiley’s fourteen-year-old brother. The notion that his daughter was dead and her killer was free ate at Carreiro, and he directed his anger at the authorities. The county sheriff’s homicide division, understaffed and ill equipped compared with its Houston police counterpart, had no use for a father who was hysterical and hostile. “If you don’t find him I will, and I will take him down,” Carreiro told the investigators in one early encounter. “Just get a confession before you do,” they told him.
“I was between a rock and a hard place,” Carreiro explained. “I started doing my own investigation.” He worked with three private detectives, gave up on sleep, ignored his girlfriend, began carrying a gun, and plunged himself into a world of paranoia and panic. The calls were constant: One woman said her boyfriend had washed out his truck on the day of the murder and had bite marks on his chest; another woman said she had found a little girl’s sock with blood on it. Carreiro received word that a psychic in Tomball, near where the girls were buried, wanted to see him. The man, a self-described Indian named White Bear, told Carreiro that Kynara was sending him messages in his sweat lodge. A neighborhood security guard seemed overly brusque, members of the Wiley’s church overly solicitous. When Carreiro sat down with sheriff’s department homicide investigators, he felt no more secure: “There were five different officers in charge of five different suspects, and each one could convince you his guy had done it,” Carreiro said.
He turned more and more to the press, which gladly obliged. Television had found a perfect subject in Bob Carreiro. “I was not gonna let this die down,” Carreiro explained. “Every time it was gonna die down, I’d find something to keep it in the news.” He called the media when the reward for finding Kristin and Kynara’s killer was created. He let a reporter watch him tearfully pack up Kynara’s room. Another filmed him grieving at the sweat lodge. He learned to negotiate: “I’d call up and say I wanted to do a news conference about raising the reward money, and they’d say okay, but we want an exclusive,” he said.
Two months after the girls’ deaths, in September 1992, when media interest had flagged and the investigation remained at a standstill, Carreiro had his grandest idea to date. It hit him when he was driving home from work with the helpless feeling that his daughter’s killer would never be apprehended. “My baby’s gonna be on billboards all over town,” he told himself.
WHO KILLED THESE GIRLS? the enormous letters of the billboard cried. Alongside the question was the picture of Kynara and Kristin arm in arm and an offer of a $40,000 reward donated by family members and businesses. Representatives of the sheriff’s department attended the unveiling of the two hundred billboards only because the Houston newspapers had reported damaging information about the investigation—involving contamination of the crime scene, delays in polygraphing Rex Mays, among other things. Privately, the sheriff’s department saw Carreiro as a bum out for attention.
If the publicity did not serve to flush out a killer, it did have the usual effect: It created more publicity. “Tell us what happened,” Oprah would ask, as would Jerry Springer and many others. Carreiro became a regular on segments devoted to unsolved crimes. “When we come back we’ll meet a sixty-six-year-old woman who survived a hired hit—someone wants her dead,” Jerry Springer chirped after Carreiro had, once again, related that his daughter had drowned in her own blood. Carreiro’s tears made for powerful television, but they also inducted him into the new American pastime of vicarious misery. He didn’t care. He thought only of reaching his daughter’s killer. “I wanted that sumbitch to hate it every time he turned on the TV and saw me there.”
The year ended, and the authorities had nothing to show for their efforts. The sheriff’s department had contacted the FBI for help, and the bureau had produced a profile of a killer who was white and between 25 and 35, the proverbial loner who might have taken an unusual interest in the case. The description fit Rex Mays, the neighbor who had lied to investigators immediately after the murder. Unfortunately, Mays’s ruse had bought him enough time to destroy most of the physical evidence that could have been used against him. The only way to apprehend him was the most difficult of all: Someone would have to get him to confess. That job fell to a two-time cop of the year by the name of Bill Valerio, a heavyset, taciturn man with four daughters of his own. For the next fourteen months, he took Mays drinking and to strip joints, and got nowhere.
Once he learned that Mays had been targeted, Carreiro took to threatening the former neighbor, an activity that ran counter to the FBI’s advice that the killer would confess only if treated kindly. (“There were times when I probably hindered the investigation,” Carreiro would later admit.) He had his biker buddies gun their cycles outside Mays’s home. He had friends send Mays birthday cards—“Roses are red, violets are blue, the girls are dead, wish you were too.” He followed Mays to bars, waiting outside while he drank, and when Mays applied for jobs—particularly those involving children—Carreiro saw to it that he wasn’t hired. When Carreiro heard that Mays was bragging about being the prime suspect in the murder investigation, he thought he would go mad. He imagined hanging him up and peeling his skin off, or simply snapping his neck. Said Carreiro: “I was getting real close to killing him.”
OUTSIDE A HIGH-RISE OFFICE BUILDING on the West Loop South, Bob Carreiro, finishing a cigarette, served as the unofficial greeter for the October meeting of Justice for All. It was a pretty night, the kind that promised the end of another interminable summer, but the people entering were somber. They approached with their heads bowed, not unlike the way people enter church. This was not coincidental: Justice for All served many of the functions most people once found, in a less complicated world, in organized religion. They joined for communion, and they joined to mourn.
In an era in which practically everyone purports to be a victim of one thing or another, these people had a legitimate claim on the word. Dressed in T-shirts and jeans or wrinkled workday clothes, they could be mistaken for guests at a company retreat or a PTA meeting; they were, instead, living memorials to some of Houston’s grisliest crimes. Carreiro accepted an embrace from Jeanne Bayley, a sunny woman whose teenage stepson Robbie was murdered in the woods west of town; his schoolmates had played soccer with his head and taken parts of his body home as souvenirs. Patsy Teer updated Carreiro on the status of the man who had been on death row for twenty years for murdering her son, a state trooper. “This guy is running several businesses from prison,” she told him. Randy Ertman graced his friend with a gruff hello, his wife, Sandra, trailing behind. Jennifer Ertman, along with her best friend, Elizabeth Peña, had been brutally raped and murdered by six gang members just a year or so after Kristin and Kynara had been killed. Greeted with both affection and deference, Carreiro was, in turn, both giving and contained. People were drawn to what they perceived as a calmness within him, though Carreiro defined it differently. “The worst thing that was gonna happen to me has happened,” he said simply.
The topics of tonight’s meeting reflected the group’s need for both solace and social change. Inside the small auditorium containing about a hundred people, Pam Lychner, a movie-star-pretty blonde, opened the meeting by making a plea for financial assistance for a Honduran immigrant who lost both legs after a shotgun attack by her husband. Then she turned the podium over to Andy Kahan, who introduced the widow and teenage daughter of a police officer named Bruno Soboleski, murdered in the line of duty in 1991. “They’ve received the dreaded parole notice,” Kahan said of the family, meaning that they must now perform a new social ritual—that of acquiring signatures on petitions to keep a criminal from being released. “It would mean a lot to us to keep this man where he is,” Sue Soboleski implored, as her daughter studied the floor, as if embarrassed.
The content of the meeting, which would be almost unendurable for people who were not victims of violent crime, was comforting to those who were. There was a mother trying to find her son’s killer and another woman trying to pressure the district attorney into asking for the death penalty for her son’s murderer; while one woman caressed the contents of her dead son’s wallet another railed against medical examiners who removed corneas without the family’s permission. “They’re making a profit off our loved ones,” Carreiro snarled under his breath. In each case, members offered to help or offered a hug, anything so that the person would not feel alone or abandoned. After one woman mentioned that the district attorney had suggested she avoid the arraignment of the boys accused of killing her son, Carreiro was adamant. “You be there,” he said. “You be there.” Later, he made arrangements to meet her at the courthouse.
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