Thrill Killers
All over urban Texas, young thugs are committing a vicious new kind of crime: Find an unsuspecting victim, rob him, then shoot him just for fun. And most of the time, they’re getting away with it.
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The culprits this time around are not the drug gangs but a new breed of street criminals known as superpredators. They tend to be young, aren’t affiliated with any group, and have little if any organized criminal intent. Their crimes are as savage as they are pointless. The superpredators’ carefree attitude about the consequences of their actions brings to mind plain old juvenile delinquents—but these JDs are armed with Tec 9 semiautomatic pistols, and they prefer slashing throats to slashing tires. Anyone who reads the papers knows there’s ample anecdotal evidence of this trend. If news of gang-related crime has mostly disappeared from the front page, it has been replaced by reports of superpredator crimes: carjackings, driveway stickups, and (in Dallas, at least) stranger-on-stranger rapes. Robbery is the putative objective of much of this type of violence, yet as the Chavez murders indicate, the victims are often lousy marks, and the perpetrator’s plunder from such crimes is rarely equal to the level of risk or violence. (Carjackings are a good example. Automobiles are among the most lucrative items a crook can steal, but why hijack them at gunpoint when they can be easily pilfered from parking lots with no harm to the perpetrator or victim? Because money isn’t really the motive.)
The usual suspects have been blamed for this latest crime wave: poverty, the failure of the education system, the disintegration of the traditional family, the ease with which guns can be acquired on the streets, the drug plague. No doubt all of those well-worn scapegoats have played a part in the rise of the superpredator class. But they don’t really explain the most distinctive aspect of the phenomenon: Why thugs like Juan Chavez commit crimes for which they admittedly have no motive, and why they’re so indifferent to the consequences. I had hoped to hear the answer from Chavez himself, but he never responded to my request for an interview. Of course, that’s typical of the superpredator mentality. The blood he spilled on that July night is long out of sight, out of mind—has been, in fact, since a few seconds after he pulled the trigger.
Princeton University professor John DiIulio has said this chilling lack of conscience is the result of a “moral poverty” that afflicts Chavez’s generation. That may be true, but these new urban marauders are also throwbacks. Three decades ago, we began hearing about sociopathic disorders that could lead people to commit crime. But that explanation went out of fashion during the crack-addled eighties, when so much crime was committed by the people who abused the drug or sold it that law enforcement officials seemed to think drugs were the primary cause of all violence. Police, prosecutors, and judges played down the impact of psychopathic or sociopathic personality disorders and instead waged their war on crime by waging a war on drugs. Today, however, as the superpredators thrive while the crack epidemic tapers off, it’s clear the target of our attack needs to be a criminally antisocial disposition that is not chemically induced.
And the attack couldn’t come a moment too soon, for the superpredator class is growing at an alarming rate. In a recent study he conducted for the United States Department of Justice, Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox noted that over the past ten years, the percentage of murders committed by juveniles has nearly doubled. Indeed, it now may be safely said that the violent crime problem and the juvenile crime problem are one and the same—a frightening thought when you consider that our teenage population is expected to swell by 20 percent in the next decade. “We can expect a crime wave of juvenile violence that will be so bad,” Fox told the ABC newsmagazine 20/20, “that we’ll look back someday at 1996 and say, ‘Those were the good old days.’”
“THE CHAVEZ CASE WAS AS COMPLEX and confusing as any I’ve ever tried to unravel,” says Greg Davis, a square-jawed veteran prosecutor in the Dallas County district attorney’s office. “You had multiple victims, multiple crime scenes, and multiple suspects—all from basically the same place.”
Small wonder that the rise in superpredator crime has coincided with a decline in murder clearance rates. Precisely because random acts of violence are, well, random and involve individuals who don’t know one another, the police are particularly confounded by them. Superpredator crimes tend to be committed by young, underclass males and typically look alike in their messy spontaneity, which is why they can be more difficult to sort out than the most complex murder-for-hire scheme. In the aftermath of last July’s murder spree, the confusion led to the arrest of four suspects within two weeks, two of whom were quickly and, as it turned out, wrongly indicted after lengthy interrogations and dubious confessions.
Fortunately for the police, the fifth suspect hauled in was Hector “Crazy” Fernandez, and if they were to believe his court-appointed attorney, Brook Busbee, he could singlehandedly unravel the entire tangled investigation and also provide information on as many as half a dozen other unsolved gankings in the area. Davis and his investigators immediately met with Fernandez, who was somewhat reticent at first but eventually recounted a tale of senseless savagery far beyond what the prosecutor had suspected. Fernandez was a bit slow, and he hadn’t exactly been a passive bystander on that night, but his recollections were precise. His friend Juan Chavez was not only responsible for an extraordinarily ferocious rampage; if you counted the other murders he had committed, he would earn the ignominious distinction of being the single most productive killer in the history of Dallas County: Twelve people dead and six more wounded over a period of four months. Based on Fernandez’s statement—and his promise to testify in exchange for “use immunity” (freedom from prosecution that would result from self-incriminating statements)—Davis moved quickly to have Chavez indicted on capital murder charges for the brutal slaying of the man using the pay phone at the apartment complex.
Once Chavez was arrested, Davis began delving into his psyche, and what struck him was the fact that his criminal résumé contained little of the “negative sociology” commonly associated with abominable felons. Although Chavez grew up in impoverished West Dallas, he had lived across the tracks from the housing projects in a small, predominantly Mexican American neighborhood where the social atrophy was far less pervasive. There were, predictably, juvenile delinquents in the area who robbed residences and businesses, stole cars, sold dope, and belonged to street gangs, but plenty of hardworking, law-abiding people lived there too.
The Chavez family seemed unremarkable in this environment except for its size: Juan grew up with eighteen brothers and sisters. His father, a construction worker, had stayed married to his mother for 35 years, and most of the children had graduated from high school, entered the work force, gotten married, and had kids of their own. Juan himself seemed similarly unremarkable. Although he dropped out of school after the ninth grade, he had no history of juvenile misbehavior, drug abuse, or formal gang membership.
In 1985, however, all that changed. Overcome, perhaps, by some latent psychopathic urges, seventeen-year-old Chavez and two cohorts pushed their way into the West Dallas home of Raul and Vincente Mendoza, robbed them, and shot the place up, partially blinding Raul and killing Vincente. Chavez was arrested, convicted of murder and aggravated robbery, and sentenced to fifteen years. Any chance he might have had for a normal life was dashed by hard time in the state’s toughest correctional facilities. “I think you had a kid who was only medium-bad to begin with,” says an investigator who worked on the case. “He goes to the joint, he comes out very bad. It’s that simple.”
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