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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Shortly after Kynara was murdered, Carreiro attended a Parents of Murdered Children meeting in the basement of a downtown church. He had gone with Diane and her husband, Patrick Taylor. Diane found that she could not return—the sadness in the room overwhelmed her—but Carreiro was drawn back. Unlike his former wife, who had a new baby to attend to, and unlike the Wileys, who could take solace in their church, Carreiro had no one but the people at the meetings. “It was an avenue, and I didn’t know any way else to go,” Carreiro said.
This association also gave him a framework with which to manage another change in his life. Within a few months of the murder, the media exposure had made Carreiro the man to call whenever a child was missing. His phone rang constantly. One parent wanted to meet White Bear. Another wanted help in dealing with a coroner’s report she suspected was bungled. Another wanted to know how to look up criminal records at the courthouse. Andy Kahan had gone to the unveiling of Kynara’s billboards and at the time had known that Carreiro was too involved with his own case to become an effective advocate; still, he sensed Carreiro’s potential. “Within six months he began making himself available and known, as he began talking about the system and not just his daughter’s case,” Kahan recalled. Carreiro became a regular at rallies in support of victims. By the summer of 1993, he felt the need to supplement the cloistered emotional atmosphere of Parents of Murdered Children with something broader and more political. Following Pam Lychner’s lead, Carreiro and several friends formed Justice for All, which has a tax status that allows the group to lobby. He began working as a public speaker, telling Kynara’s story to everyone from funeral directors to parole officers.
A little more than a year after Kynara’s death, he was at one such event when a large man with long hair and a beard approached him: His daughter had been missing for three days, and the police were ignoring his pleas, assuming she was a runaway. Carreiro gave him the number of a network for missing children. “I hope I never have to see you again,” the man told Carreiro. “I hope I never see you either,” Carreiro replied. The man was Randy Ertman, and the next day, his daughter’s body was found, along with her best friend’s, near some railroad tracks in northwest Houston. Right away Ertman called Carreiro for help. He arrived to see kids in a car passing by slowly, like sightseers. Ertman, enraged, took off after them, cursing and kicking at the car. Watching him, Carreiro was overcome with envy. He longed to lose control.
Instead, he began to believe that Kynara’s death held some meaning for him that he had yet to grasp. He took it as a sign when his company closed and he could spend more time working with crime victims. On a trip to Washington, D.C., he met with senators Phil Gramm and Kay Bailey Hutchison and spoke at a legislative dinner on crime reform. “Maybe we could talk to him about getting a haircut,” Beaumont congressman Jack Brooks muttered, following Carreiro to the podium. Carreiro, impervious, did not change his look; he knew it made him easier to remember.
What he really wanted people to remember was Kynara. When the first of Jennifer Ertman’s murderers came to trial in 1994, Carreiro was there, every day, performing the ritual known among victims’ advocates as court sitting. By then he was on the brink of despair. On the day of sentencing, detectives had picked up Mays for questioning one last time. “Valerio had told me this was the last shot at it. If they didn’t get anything this time, they would have to drop it,” Carreiro said. He sat through the proceedings with his body quaking. As Jennifer’s killer received the death penalty, Carreiro wondered if God would forgive him for killing Rex Mays. And then, just outside of court, Valerio got word to him: Mays had confessed.
The news interrupted regularly scheduled programming in Houston. Two daughterless fathers embraced while the TV cameras rolled, recording what passed for a happy ending. Back in Kynara’s old neighborhood, residents rejoiced. “Was it Rex? I knew it was Rex!” one exulted, as if she had just guessed the end of a made-for-TV movie.
THE HARRIS COUNTY CRIMINAL COURTHOUSE is an ugly building, a slab of muddy pink granite and glass, oafish in comparison with its graceful, cupolaed civil counterpart across the street. But what the building lacks in architecture it makes up for in personality; from the dispossessed on the sidewalk to the cynical lawyers in the basement cafeteria and the teenage mothers weeping on hallway benches, it is perversely vibrant, offering a drama in real life every single day. This was Bob Carreiro’s community now. That he had made the transition from guest star to series regular might be seen as tragic, proof of his addiction to grief, but for this: He seemed happy there. Over the years, some people had come to view Carreiro’s high profile with suspicion, branding him a publicity hound. But the courthouse was more forgiving. People there seemed to understand that he stayed close because the place provided the last link to his daughter.
On one day nearing the end of October, he had in mind to sit in on the preliminary stages of the murder trial of Eric Charles Nenno, who was being tried for a 1995 murder eerily evocative of Kynara’s. Seven-year-old Nicole Benton was playing in a neighbor’s front yard when Nenno, another neighbor, lured the child into his home, where he raped her, killed her, and hid her body. He too confessed to the crime, though in a matter of days, rather than the months it took to extract the truth from Mays. The family had called Carreiro for help soon after Nicole had disappeared.
He had found that such court sitting—a ministry of sorts—had helped him prepare for Mays’s trial, as had his A.A. experience. “The twelve-step program taught me to wait,” he said. “Every day, I’d get up and think, ‘I’ll kill him tomorrow.’” Then Carreiro would head for the courthouse to take a seat behind Mays at the trial. The psyche of Rex Mays remained beyond Carreiro’s comprehension. Detectives had no idea what prompted him to confess—they had merely asked him to come in, saying they had a new lie-detector test that could clear him once and for all, and he had agreed. (He was diffident to the end: “I can’t eat this,” he told them, as he chewed the burger they had bought him for dinner. Detectives believed he had stopped because he was overcome with remorse, or sickened by his actions. Then he explained: “I can’t eat this with mustard on it.”)
Carreiro, who by then had become knowledgeable about the admissibility of certain pieces of evidence and wise to the ways of defense lawyers, anticipated that Mays’s attorney would try to get the confession thrown out, but he could not stop the fear that gnawed at him as he listened to the debate. Likewise, he was in agony when he heard Mays’s attorney establish running objections to certain portions of testimony, building the record for an appeal. When it came time for the coroner’s report, the crime-scene video, and the reading of Mays’s confession, Carreiro fought the impulse to flee and instead sat stoically through Mays’s description of the way he had gouged out the girls’ eyes and used his Marine Corps training to slit the backs of the girls’ necks. Carreiro calmed himself by pretending he was attending someone else’s trial. He knew, then, that his pain would end only with Mays’s execution and tried to reconcile himself to the wait.
And so he had made a home of sorts for himself here, at the courthouse. He felt good: He had a warehouse job starting in a week or so, with a schedule flexible enough to allow him time to continue his work with crime victims; and he imagined that one day he might have a job with the governor’s office, maybe something like Andy Kahan’s.
He went up to the windowless courtroom where the Benton family sat alone behind the prosecution’s table. Pretrial hearings were scheduled for today, so the courtroom was almost empty. Nenno, the defendant, sat against a wall in handcuffs. Aside from the orange hair that matched his jail jumpsuit, his resemblance to Mays was almost uncanny—another pale, bespectacled man wearing a thousand-yard stare. Carreiro regarded him briefly as he entered, then nodded to Nicole’s great-grandfather and gently touched the shoulder of the small, birdlike woman who had been her stepmother.
An FBI agent was called to the stand, the same man, it turned out, who had investigated Kynara’s murder. The questions began: Did you find the body? Yes. How did you find the body? The defendant told me where to look.
When Kynara was small, she had been, like so many children, afraid of the dark. To soothe her, Carreiro would prop her door open with a shoe so a tiny crack of light shone through. Later, it became a kind of joke between them. “Put a shoe in the door, Daddy,” she would say when she felt a little bit scared, and that had always given him the simplest satisfaction, that she knew he would always be there to protect her.
Did you find the body right away? No, the defendant’s first directions were insufficient. I had to return to the attic after he told me to look behind a stack of boxes, where he had hidden her.
Carreiro directed his gaze to the man speaking in the witness stand, but his eyes were vacant and his hands were pressed tightly together in front of his lips, as if he were praying, as alone as one person could possibly be.
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