Under the Gun
After a lengthy investigation that was at times scattershot, overly aggressive, and just plain incompetent, Austin police say they’ve caught the three young men who killed four teenage girls in an “I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt!” shop in 1991.
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Their first big break came eight days after the killings. A sixteen-year-old boy named Maurice Pierce was arrested at Northcross Mall with a loaded .22 pistol tucked inside the waistband of his pants and sixteen bullets in his pocket. With him was his friend, fifteen-year-old Forrest Welborn. Pierce was handcuffed, taken to the police station, and questioned by Hector Polanco. In a written statement Pierce said that the .22 was the gun used in the yogurt shop killings. He said that his friend Welborn had borrowed it and that Welborn had told him he had killed the girls. The crime scene slugs were too damaged to be definitively matched with the gun, but Pierce was given a polygraph and he passed. On December 15 officers fitted him with a wire and had him drive around with Welborn, trying to get him to talk about killing the girls. Welborn admitted nothing. He too passed a polygraph test.
The police eventually concluded that neither boy was involved. According to police testimony, they believed that Pierce had a "mental problem" that led him to fabricate the story about the gun and enabled him to pass the polygraph. "It was obvious to everyone," wrote Jones in a report, "that Pierce was trying to force the issue on Welborn, who appeared to have no idea what Pierce was talking about." Still, the police kept the gun. In the course of the investigation, Welborn told detectives about a trip to San Antonio that he and Pierce had taken with two seventeen-year-old friends, Robert Springsteen and Michael Scott, in a stolen Nissan Pathfinder the night after the murders. The police found and questioned the two. All four were let go.
The police were questioning a lot of other people too. "It was bedlam," Jones told me. The highly publicized kidnapping of Colleen Reed stretched the force even thinner. By early January, 25 suspects had been ruled out, including a teenage couple who had confessed to the murders. On Friday, January 3, emboldened by a meeting with an agent from the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit, Detective Jones announced, "It would be safe to say an apprehension is imminent." On Monday, the one-month anniversary of the murders, police chief Jim Everett backtracked from Jones' statement at a press conference, saying there would be no arrests after all. It would not be the last time the police used wishful thinking alongside deductive reasoning.
At the same press conference, the police announced the formation of a task force that included the APD, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Department of Public Safety, the Travis County sheriff's department, the district attorney's office, and the FBI. The FBI had helped come up with a profile of the killers. According to the bureau's analysis, they were probably white and in their late teens to mid-twenties. One had a dominant personality and had led one or more reluctant participants. The leader hung out in the area of the yogurt shop and was familiar with the roads. He was also an emotionally immature underachiever with a criminal record who angered easily. Did the profile—which, in retrospect, looks an awful lot like Maurice Pierce and his three friends—stir any suspicions about the four boys, who had been questioned by the police just two weeks before?
Apparently not. "Everybody in Austin wanted it to be Mexicans or blacks," says former APD officer Jamie Balagia, who, after leaving the force, went to law school and became an attorney who frequently represents police officers. "Nobody wanted it to be white teenagers." Not teenagers who hung out at the mall, at any rate. Teenagers who hung out downtown were another matter. About a week after the killings, police officers began questioning so-called PIBs, or People in Black—primarily high school and college dance-club kids who wore dark clothes and had tattoos. "Because it was a bizarre murder, they started looking for the most bizarre people they could find," one PIB, Cole Ricketson, told the Austin American-Statesman.
Police officers would often show up in the middle of the night and take bewildered PIBs to the station for questioning. The kids claimed that their homes and bodies were searched and that they were given polygraphs. "They questioned me a lot about it," another PIB told a reporter. "They told me I was the one who did it, but they couldn't prove it." Gavin Garcia, a local writer who seemed to the police to be a spokesman for the PIBs, was brought in three times, for six hours each. "I know at least fifty people who were brought in," he says. "Entire rock bands were brought in because their name had something to do with the occult." The first time Garcia was taken downtown, 48 Hours was in the next room, working on a show about the murders. At least one person questioned by police officers said she knew the location of two corpses that had been stolen from Oakwood Cemetery. Other kids were also fingering the grave robber. She was, they said, a witch.
On February 28, with 48 Hours and local news crews in hot pursuit, the APD came crashing through Clair Lavaye's unlocked front door. "The yogurt murder task force is pouncing on a high priestess," said narrator Erin Moriarty on 48 Hours when the show was broadcast a month later. Lavaye, naked, was shown being handcuffed by police officers as the camera bounced around the house, focusing on brooding artwork and a kind of mashed skull. "Dem bones!" said one cop. "I don't think that's a wax copy, guys," said another. In fact, the skull was made of clay. And hundreds of bones seized by the police turned out to be turkey, dog, and rat bones. Instead of being a ringleader of a band of murderous devil worshipers, Lavaye turned out to be a punk rocker with Gothic tastes.
The charges against Lavaye were dropped, and the whole fruitless PIB affair proved to be a fiasco. It also made no sense, because the investigators knew that there was nothing Satanic about the crime scene. And the witch-hunt worked against the police by further fueling the dark rumors about the murders. One story suggested that chickens had been ritualistically placed in the girls' chest cavities; another said that pentagrams had been drawn in blood on the walls. Why else would the cops spend three months chasing through the city's dark side?
Dan Rather's familiar voice was measured with melodrama: "Four all-American teens—executed. A crack police squad desperate to solve the case. And a city on edge frightened by a new reality: It can happen here. Are you safe?" Sleepy Austin was discovering the horrors of big-city crime. 48 Hours cameras followed detectives John Jones and Mike Huckabay as they talked about the 342 suspects, the thousands of phone calls, and the pressure. "There's absolutely no more weight that can be put on my shoulders," said Jones. Patrick Ganne, an Austin criminal defense attorney who has often found himself on the other side of the docket from Austin cops, says about that time: "I can't explain to you the pressure those cops were put under to get results—from the mayor, the DA, the chief: 'Goddammit, get something. Get results.'" They tried. Their net was cast wide and their methods were sometimes unsound. Two days before the 48 Hours episode aired, Hector Polanco was transferred out of the task force to a North Austin substation amid allegations that he had coerced a confession from a suspect on March 15. He wasn't the only cop in trouble. In April APD brass, reacting to the chaos in the homicide department, began replacing investigators. Soon things had gotten so bad that even the district attorney turned against the department. On November 9, 1992, DA Ronnie Earle, with Mayor Bruce Todd and incoming police chief Elizabeth Watson by his side, announced an unprecedented investigation of misconduct in the homicide division. "Unfortunately, this behavior is not the result of the work of just one person or small group of people," said Earle. "Rather, it appears to arise from attitudes among some criminal investigators of 'anything goes' and 'the end justifies the means.'" In other words, it wasn't just Polanco. Earle spoke of "using improper methods to obtain confessions and statements . . . obtaining false and incorrect statements and confessions . . . [and] concealing evidence." Watson scolded her new charges: "It is shocking to me that there could be this breach of ethics that I see."
The Statesman piped in too, noting that the number of criminal investigators had stayed roughly the same since 1977, even though the population had risen by 160,000. As the newspaper pointed out, such a disproportionate number "clearly adds to the pressure to cut legal and ethical corners." The cops were furious at the accusations. "We were treated basically like criminals," says Austin Police Association president Sheffield. "We were interrogated, and that left a very bitter taste in a lot of people's mouths." Five months later, after a review of more than ninety pending homicide cases, Earle announced the results: Questionable interrogation tactics and concealment of information were found in several cases. So was a "serious lack of training for homicide investigators." In response, the APD started a training program for its homicide unit, began taping interrogations, and increased staffing.
In the meantime, the department was mired in a brand new yogurt shop nightmare. Austin detectives, working with the Mexican government, had been trying to question three Mexican nationals indicted in a November 1991 aggravated kidnapping and rape of an Austin woman. On October 22, 1992, the Mexican government announced—without informing the APD—that it had arrested two of the three, including one who fit the description of a man seen outside the yogurt shop on the night of the murder. The trio's leader was Porfirio Villa Saavedra, a.k.a. the Terminator, the head of the Mierdas Punks, a motorcycle gang. Mexican officials said Saavedra had confessed. But two days later he recanted, claiming at a court hearing that he had been tortured by Mexican police officers. The APD felt helpless. "That was Black Thursday for us," sighed Jones. "It was out of our hands." The APD sent officers to Mexico City several times over the next year to question the suspects and eventually concluded that they had nothing to do with the murders.
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