History Lesson 
Sarita's Secret
Once the seat of a famous ranching empire, this sleepy town has kept hidden for eighty years the answer to one of South Texas's greatest riddles: Is Ray Fernandez, the descendant of a Mexican maid, the heir to the gigantic Kenedy fortune?
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THE OFFICE OF THE NUECES COUNTY MEDICAL examiner is located across the parking lot from the giant Christus Spohn complex, in Corpus Christi. Ray Fernandez, who has held the position since January 2003, grew up in this West Side neighborhood. His father's family came here from Beeville before World War II and opened a grocery nearby. His father, Reynaldo Fernandez, worked in the grocery and later as a fingerprint and identification specialist in the Nueces County sheriff's department. Ray was close to his father's family but knew hardly anything about Ann's. And he knew nothing at all about the Kenedys, although, as he is now discovering, the crosscurrents between the families ran deep. He knows now that the cathedral where he sometimes attended Mass was built on the site where the Kenedy mansion once stood: The Kenedys donated the property to the church in the thirties. Christus Spohn Health System is named for Arthur Spohn, who was married to Mifflin Kenedy's daughter, Sarah Josephine, after whom Sarita was named. Ray's first job was working as a janitor at the hospital, the year after he graduated from high school. After a 22-year odyssey of medical schools and hospitals across America, he returned to take the job as medical examiner. "I've still got my name badge from when I was a janitor," Ray told me, producing from his desk the badge, now brown and faded, issued to him in 1977. Earlier that day he had testified at a murder trial in San Patricio County, one of fourteen South Texas counties that contract for his services, and now had changed into his customary work clothes—baggy green scrubs. In his years as a student and as a medical examiner, he has done roughly 2,500 autopsies and testified in more than one hundred trials. Solving puzzles is what he does for a living, and the puzzle of his heritage is his greatest challenge.
Forty-four years old, Ray is darkly handsome, with shaggy black hair, a broad chest, and—as others have remarked—the trademark Kenedy jowl. He is pragmatic, stubborn, and acutely aware of who he is and where he is going, traits that Johnny Kenedy is said to have possessed. The walls of his small office are covered with certificates and diplomas testifying to how he learned his profession: an associate degree in applied science radiology from Del Mar Community College, in Corpus Christi, where he first heard about forensic science; a bachelor of arts in biology from the University of Texas, where he worked his way through school as an x-ray technician at the student health center; an MD from the UT Health Science Center, in San Antonio, where he trained in the office of Vincent Di Maio, the noted Bexar County medical examiner; a degree in anatomic and clinical pathology from the University of California, Irvine; an internship at Frankford Hospital, in Philadelphia; training in forensic pathology at the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner Department. "I'm just now paying back the last of my student loan," Ray told me. "It totaled about $100,000."
Ann was about eighteen when she met Johnny and Sarita Kenedy. Their mother, Marie Stella Turcotte Kenedy, was dying on the hospital floor where Ann served as a volunteer, and at different times she introduced the young nurse to both of her children. On another occasion, she introduced Ann to Johnny's wife, Elena. At the time, Ann's mother, Maria, lived in a small house near the Kenedy mansion in town. She had married a vaquero named Desiderio Peña two years after Ann was born. One month after the wedding, she gave birth to her second child, Raul, the boy who died of poison. Peña left her and married another woman after Raul was born. When Ann was thirteen or fourteen, she left her aunt in Driscoll and came to live with her mother in the small house in Corpus Christi. Her mother never talked about her past or about working on the Kenedy ranch, and when Ann asked questions, Maria would turn away in anger.
Ray was working as an assistant medical examiner in Miami when the secret began to leak out. He had taken a week off to teach a course in forensics in Latin America and stopped to spend Mother's Day in Corpus Christi on the return trip. The family visited Ray's grandmother Maria, who was in a nursing home. Her remark about him looking like his grandfather Johnny Kenedy didn't start to register until a few days later, when he returned to Miami and found his wife, Marie, distraught and near tears. While searching the Internet, trying to locate the burial place of her father, who had supposedly died years ago, she learned that he had died recently in Oklahoma. Apparently, Marie's mother had lied to conceal the humiliation of a divorce. Marie soon discovered that someone claiming to be her brother had moved into her father's home and stolen his coin and stamp collections. "These few things were her only connection to him," Ray explained. "We hired an attorney and went to court to get my wife title to the house. It was just one house on one lot—it wasn't the Kenedy ranch—but this is what lawyers for the foundation and trust don't understand: It's not the property that's important, it's the link to family."
When Ray saw what his wife was going through, he decided to look at his own family history. He began by gathering baptismal certificates, which provided the first clue that his grandmother might have told him something important. He knew that his mother was born in a home for unwed mothers but had assumed that her father was Desiderio Peña; the certificate issued by St. Francis Church in Waco, however, left the space for "father" blank. Next, he telephoned the Corpus Christi library and asked for information about a John Kenedy Jr. "I didn't know anything about this man, even how to spell his name," Ray recalled, "but the librarian did. She sent me John G. Kenedy Jr.'s obit." When Marie saw the old photograph of Kenedy, she said, "This looks like your mother." It looked like Ray too. Same long face, same hefty build, same prominent jowl.
Old newspaper articles led Ray to the discovery that a man in Raymondville named Max Dreyer was a grand-nephew of Mifflin Kenedy's, which made him a cousin to Johnny Kenedy. Ray telephoned a DNA expert in Miami, who said that a match with a paternal cousin could establish his mother's relationship to the Kenedys. Dreyer agreed to give a DNA sample, and the expert concluded that there was a 25 percent likelihood that Ann and Dreyer were related. In the courthouse at Sarita, Ray's wife discovered a sealed envelope that had been licked by Marie Stella, Johnny's mother. An analysis of this DNA sample revealed a 72 percent likelihood that she was Ann's grandmother.
Finally, Ray tracked down Maria Rowland's brother, Daniel Rowland, who after considerable prompting confessed the family secret: He and Tom Goates—a Corpus Christi detective who was Maria's second husband—both knew that Ann's father was John G. Kenedy Jr. But they never discussed this with other members of the family. In a sworn affidavit, Daniel explained: "We were frightened of what the Kenedy people might do. We wanted to protect [Maria's] reputation. She was only a teenager. . . . South Texas was a much different place in the thirties and forties for working-class Mexican Americans. Those with money and large ranches made the rules." He remembered on one occasion going with Goates to La Parra to ask for money from Johnny Kenedy. Daniel waited in the truck while Goates went into the house. He returned with a stuffed envelope.
Ann viewed a video of her uncle's conversation with Ray over and over, her confusion mounting. In an advanced stage of dementia, she gave her own deposition a short time later, telling conflicting stories. She remembered first meeting Johnny Kenedy at the hospital but later recalled that he had brought her dolls and fruit baskets at Christmas when she was much younger. She also remembered sitting on Marie Stella's lap at the mansion and that Johnny's mother had once talked of sending Ann to a convent to be a nun. Did Ann ever suspect that John G. Kenedy Jr. was her father? Once, when she was fourteen or fifteen, she recalled, her cousins made some vague reference to her real father. But when Ann asked her mother about this, Maria shot her a glare that warned her to ask no more questions.
Ray had an older brother, Joe David, who died in 1997 after an agonizing 48-year struggle with cerebral palsy. Watching Joe David live and die, while his mother tried desperately to find help, was one of the formative factors of Ray's life and a reason he chose medicine as a career. "My mother quit her job as an elevator operator and took care of him full-time," Ray says. Money was a constant problem. Ray's dad worked at the courthouse by day and moonlighted in the evenings, guarding county prisoners at the hospital. Ray learned later that the family had borrowed money and had gotten $100 from the March of Dimes to pay for a bus trip to New York, where there was a hospital that specialized in treating cerebral palsy. The hospital might have been able to treat Joe David, but the cost was far more than the Fernandez family could afford. When Ray talks about lawyers for the defense claiming that Ann has known for years that John G. Kenedy Jr. was her father—a charge that, if proved, would mean that Ray's lawsuit is barred by the statute of limitations—his face twists with anger. "If that was the case," he says, slamming his hand on his desk, "don't you think my mother would have moved heaven and earth to get the Kenedys to help my brother?"
MIFFLIN KENEDY AND HIS LIFELONG friend Richard King made their fortunes during, after—and mainly because of—the Mexican War of 18461848, which changed the face of South Texas. Kenedy and King had a virtual monopoly on the steamship trade on the Rio Grande from the 1840's until after the Civil War, freighting passengers, cargo, and troops up and down the river and running Union blockades with shipments of cotton for the Confederacy. The Mexican War erupted over a border dispute following the annexation of Texas into the United States. The U.S. claimed that the boundary was the Rio Grande. Mexico argued that the true boundary lay 130 miles to the north, along the Nueces River. From 1767 until the Texas Revolution in 1836, Mexican families had received land grants and established ranchos in the region. Known to the Spanish as the Wild Horse Desert and to Mexicans as the Desert of the Dead, this great sea of grass and scrub stretched across the Rio Grande to the present sites of Del Rio and Corpus Christi and everywhere in between. Tejanos ran herds of Longhorns and sheep across their ranches, some of which covered many thousands of acres.
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