Held Hostage: Video 
Letter From Eagle Pass
The Night In Question
Who killed Border Patrol agent Jose Gamez Jr. and dumped his body in an irrigation canal thirty years ago? His partner would still like to know. And so would the people who think his partner could have been involved.
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Meanwhile, as they combed through the thickets, agents detained several undocumented immigrants. Following routine procedure, they returned the immigrants immediately to Mexico. Later, agent Ramon T. Juarez gave a sworn statement in which he declared, “I would sure like to have those ten illegal aliens we found laid up on the river. They were scared, they knew something had happened . . . Lugo talked to them. I saw him talking to them.” A group of five immigrants caught in Brackettville, 46 miles north of Eagle Pass, told authorities they’d crossed the canal at the same spot at around the same time, but they weren’t held for questioning.
Since most of the initial search was limited to areas Lugo had described, he was effectively in control of it, a fact that rankled some. Several days later, Jack L. Richardson, the deputy chief patrol agent of the Del Rio sector, concluded in a memo recapping the night: “There can be no doubt in my mind that Border Patrol agent Frank Lugo lied to me at the scene and concealed material facts from me which would have aided and assisted our officers and the Mexican officers in the conduct of this search operation.”
The FBI assumed command of the investigation. Lugo was stripped of his weapon and remanded to administrative duties in the Eagle Pass office, pending the outcome. When the FBI homed in on him as its prime suspect, the writing was on the wall for many of his peers. They assumed that he’d been AWOL during the murder, frightened and unable to defend his partner, or an eyewitness to the hideous deed, or, perhaps, the murderer himself. Lugo agreed to two polygraph tests, both of which were inconclusive. But later, in a deposition for his federal lawsuit, he said that he had taken an antianxiety drug before one of the tests, which can distort the results. Lugo’s credibility diminished when he told the FBI that on the night of Gamez’s disappearance, he had found a bag of clothing in the brush and thrown it into the canal to avoid paperwork. Finally, he was called to testify at a federal grand jury in Del Rio, where a government prosecutor tore into him. In “The Exoneration,” Lugo recalls the prosecutor accusing him of being a liar and proclaiming that his “hands and feet [were] lethal weapons.”
Lugo blamed the autopsy and the media for his woes. According to his book, he told the grand jury, “I am sick and tired of the way I have been treated. I have been considered guilty until proven innocent. Damn that autopsy. There’s no way Joe could’ve been murdered. I wouldn’t have let it happen to him or anyone . . . Joe Gamez forgot about safety, and now I have to pay the price.”
Lugo remained on administrative duty in the tiny Eagle Pass office, but he resigned after two and a half years due to what he referred to as his “mental and physical condition.” Though the INS investigation had concluded that the evidence didn’t prove Lugo’s actions had resulted in or contributed to Gamez’s death, the other agents were shunning him. He was grinding his teeth down flat. He was hospitalized and medicated for depression.
A few years after leaving the patrol, Lugo found a job with the post office. He spent all his spare time working to clear his name. One of his two daughters recalls that during her childhood, Lugo was always hammering away on his book. His federal lawsuit stalled, but he kept trying to get compensation, sometimes acting as his own attorney. He filed open-records requests with the FBI and the INS and contacted Hollywood screenwriters, book publishers, the Commission on Civil Rights, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, then attorney general Janet Reno, various congressmen, and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Meanwhile, throughout the eighties, FBI investigators continued to work their case. They persuaded Lugo to undergo a marathon hypnotism session. They attempted to contact some of the immigrants who had been caught and released during the search for Gamez. A promising lead came in 1981, when an undocumented Mexican immigrant in the Chicago area told an informant that just a few years earlier, he had killed several people, including “a guard,” while crossing the border near Del Rio. The FBI made several attempts to find him, but it’s not clear if he was ever questioned. Access to many case records was restricted to protect the investigation, making it difficult, even now, to determine what exactly investigators found. The most recent available document, dated 1987, states that agents “will attempt to verify recapture” of an unnamed person of interest in Reynosa, Mexico. In 1988, ten years after Gamez was killed, the case was closed. The FBI had run out of leads.
Retired FBI agent Fritz Bohne was one of several agents assigned to the case. He told me the investigation was especially difficult because there was so little physical evidence. I asked him if his colleagues at the bureau thought Lugo had killed Gamez. “It was on everybody’s mind,” he said. “But if you can’t prove it, you can’t charge him with it.” The agent who ran the INS investigation, James Lucas, of El Paso, is more direct. Today, at 76, he still believes that Gamez was not killed at the check gate and dismisses Lugo’s explanations. “He knows exactly what happened,” Lucas told me. “I strongly believe that, because what he says happened did not happen.”
A persistent theory among those who have followed the case is that while Lugo was not the murderer, he might know who was, that some of his relationships were questionable. Lugo’s closest friends during the years he lived in Eagle Pass were a well-known Piedras Negras attorney, Vicente Lafuente Guereca, and his wife, Eloina. The Guerecas were godparents to Lugo’s youngest daughter. Five years ago, Vicente was gunned down on a Coahuila highway. Mexican police investigated the incident as a killing possibly related to drug trafficking.
Lugo is now 62 years old. In 2005, when I was a reporter for the San Antonio Express-News, he contacted me, asking for an opportunity to tell his side of the tangled story. We spoke on the telephone a few times, and I read a great deal about the case. Looking at the facts, it was hard not to wonder if Lugo might have had something to do with Gamez’s death. But why? And if he was guilty, why had the FBI investigation and the Del Rio grand jury failed to bring him to trial?
One day, I went to see Lugo at his beige-brick McAllen home, in the hopes that a visit might help me understand what had happened that night. Lugo answered the door dressed only in dark blue shorts, his gray hair combed perfectly. He welcomed me into a suburban-style living room with a large television, a prominent photo of a group of soldiers in Vietnam, and a glass frame full of medals and ribbons. His wife, bedridden since 2004 after a stroke, was in a back room.
As we talked, Lugo lounged on a sofa. I quickly realized what investigators meant about his being hard to follow. His thoughts seemed to bounce in every direction. Sometimes he closed his eyes and scanned the inside of his skull while he spoke. One minute he was telling me about how his partner’s death had helped him discover who he really was, the next minute he was rambling on about the definition of “truth” according to Sherlock Holmes. All of a sudden he scampered away like a barefoot child looking for a toy, returning moments later with a tray of pills for sleep, diabetes, depression, anxiety, and his heart. “This is my life,” he said.
His light brown skin was highlighted by the dark mail-carrier tan line around his neck; his bare chest was marked by a six-inch vertical scar from a heart surgery. “I don’t want to make my life complicated,” he told me. “I’ve managed to survive.” He showed me a laundry-basket-size archive of deposition transcripts, sworn statements, and court petitions and a briefcase full of old government memos written by agents and supervisors. It was all very neatly organized. A cardboard box cradled his 156-page manuscript. A red folder was titled “The Manipulation of the Media.” A green folder had a large sticker on it with these typewritten words: “Our generation of Hispanics went through hard times just to merit our piece of a dream. My life has not been easy, but without divine help, I would have not made it this far. The Exoneration is a legacy destined to be billed as: The Greatest Corrido Ever Written. The story just happened, all I did was tell it in words.” Lugo clings to his small archive as if it holds a key to the old case that has somehow been overlooked or ignored. But the bitter reality is that unless someone else comes forward, he will always have to live under the burden of being the only person with a story to tell about what happened on the night in question.
Jesse Bogan is a freelance reporter based in San Antonio whose work has appeared in the Texas Observer and Global Journalist. He formerly covered the border for the San Antonio Express-News.
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