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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Not that Chavez unwillingly degenerated in prison: Indeed, his record indicates he eagerly allied himself with the darkest forces he could find. In mid-1987, only a few months after he was sent to the Pack II Unit at Navasota, Chavez was tapped for membership in the infamous Hispanic prison gang known as the Texas Syndicate (TS). One of the largest, most powerful, and most ruthless prison gangs in the Southwest, TS is a multi-pronged enterprise that stretches from prison unit to prison unit and even outside the walls of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. The gang, which started in the California prison system in the seventies and spread to Texas in the eighties, is selective about its soldiers and demands loyalty from them. “Anyone in TS understands that if he doesn’t carry out the orders of the leadership, he’ll die,” says A. P. Merillat, an investigator with a special statewide prosecution unit for prison crimes. “The Syndicate has long arms too. If you slack on an order to carry out a hit or you turn snitch, they’ll come and get you even after you’re out. Or they’ll come get a family member. You gotta be bad to make it in that gang.”
Make it is precisely what Juan Chavez did, and soon enough he became known as a bad guy within the prison system. “He reminded me of a death row inmate,” a guard would later testify. Beginning in April 1988, Chavez was cited more than forty times for violating prison rules. Sometimes he refused to work at assigned jobs, but usually his offenses were much more serious: In 1989, while at the Ellis II Unit in Huntsville, the maximum security facility that houses death row, Chavez fought so frequently with other inmates that he was placed on cell restriction, meaning he could not leave his cell without an official escort. A year later, he was sent to solitary confinement for the near-fatal beating of a fellow inmate. In November 1992, while at the Beto I Unit near Palestine—“the tightest lockup we have,” according to one guard—Chavez showed his true gang colors by climbing a fence topped with razor wire to get at another inmate in what Davis surmises was a hit ordered by the Texas Syndicate. A guard later testified that he’d never seen anything like Chavez’s single-mindedness and disregard for his own well-being in carrying out his mission.
DESPITE HIS CAPACITY FOR MEANNESS and his propensity for deadly violence, Juan Chavez was inexplicably paroled in April 1994. When he returned to Dallas to live with his sister Isabel, he was, in her words, “a different person”: He cooked and cleaned and baby-sat her two children. He tried to get a few odd jobs, but since he was a high school dropout with a felony record, he had trouble finding steady employment. His parole officer would later testify that he was a model parolee.
But as prosecutor Davis would eventually learn from Hector Fernandez, a different Juan Chavez was wreaking havoc on the streets of West Dallas and Oak Cliff after nightfall. Fernandez said he and Chavez had become running buddies not long after Chavez made parole. He liked hanging with Chavez because he was “cool” and introduced him to the world of illegal firearms. Chavez always had a gun—if not two or three—and Fernandez quickly learned more about Tec 9’s and .38 Specials than any of the subjects he studied in school.
The only trouble was that when you hung with Juan Chavez, you became involved in murder. On March 22, 1995—less than a year after his release from prison—Chavez, Fernandez, and Chavez’s girlfriend at the time, Rachel Blanco, went cruising in north Oak Cliff in Rachel’s father’s Lincoln. According to Fernandez, they were “looking for rims,” the expensive chrome wheel covers especially favored by many Hispanic car owners. Juan spotted a set of rims he liked on a car at a car wash on East Davis, and just like that, they pulled over, hopped out, pulled a gun on the owner, and demanded his car keys. “Juan shot him, and we run off,” Fernandez later testified. The trio took the car keys but not the car. Two months later, Fernandez said, he and Chavez struck again, carjacking and shooting a man in the parking lot of the La Favorita market on West Davis. That time, the two managed to make off with their booty—a Buick Regal with the desired fancy rims—and took it to a chop shop. Fernandez kept the stereo system. Chavez, typically, didn’t keep anything, not even the rims.
Davis was mystified. As bloody and ghoulish as Chavez’s crimes were, they were strangely profitless. Many times he made off with little more than chump change. But Chavez, Fernandez said, liked to pick fights for the hell of it. On July 4, 1995, he accosted two men in the parking lot of a tire shop on West Davis and told them, “If you don’t move that piece-of-shit car, I’m gonna fill your ass full of lead!” When one of the men replied, “Go ahead,” Chavez shot them both dead. And as he sped away with the car in reverse, Fernandez said, Chavez “sport shot” a third man who had made the mistake of standing in his mother’s front yard. Just as mystifying was Chavez’s apparent preference for exterminating other Hispanics, especially immigrants and day laborers. Fernandez, in fact, told Davis that Chavez frequently spoke disdainfully of Mexican immigrants of a lower social station, calling them wetbacks.
As Fernandez continued to talk more about the gankings, Davis knew he had what prosecutors call a “gut cinch” case on Juan Chavez. He knew he could prove that Chavez had committed a dozen murders. What continued to vex him, and anyone else who would peruse the case file, was, Why?
THAT WAS A QUESTION THAT WOULD never be satisfactorily answered. When Chavez went to trial this past March for the murder of the man at the phone booth—the only crime for which the DA’s office had secured testimony from multiple eyewitnesses—there was never any doubt that a Dallas County jury would convict the young thug and sentence him to death. Chavez’s court-appointed attorneys tried gamely to construct a defense of mistaken identity, citing the two suspects initially arrested and indicted. But Hector Fernandez’s gripping account of that July night left only one question about the outcome of the case: how quickly the jury would convict.
Chavez’s demeanor throughout the proceedings was fascinating. As police officers and the medical examiner graphically described the degree of his bloodlust, as relatives and friends of the victims wept on the witness stand, and even as Fernandez detailed his sadism, Chavez remained chillingly dispassionate and expressionless, though occasionally he turned to smile at members of his family seated in the gallery. He just didn’t care—not then, and not at the time he committed the crime. He wasn’t acting out any formless underclass anger when he gunned down all those people last year. Murder was a diversion for him, an activity engaged in as spontaneously as the rest of us might decide to take in a movie on a lazy Saturday afternoon. That is the haunting legacy of Juan Chavez: that he murdered not only without remorse after the fact but without motive before it.
Chavez was convicted, of course, after the jury deliberated for just two and a half hours. Five days later, he returned to court to be formally sentenced to death. Judge Harold Entz asked him whether he wanted to say anything, and he replied firmly, “Yes.” Then, turning to the relatives and friends of some of his many victims, he said, “I still say I’m not guilty.”
As he mouthed the words, his voice seemed to catch a little, but this was not a man stifling fear or ruefulness. Juan Chavez seemed to be swallowing a laugh, and you couldn’t help but think that his coy little smile was the face of the next great crime wave.
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