The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts Page 3

  When the investigation of the murders at Rancho Santa Elena was complete, the shed where the sacrifices occurred was doused in gasoline and set ablaze.

  The deaths of these young men still touch a nerve in Brownsville. Some attended the same elite private school as Joey, and remember learning of his death. Others had frequented the cantinas in Matamoros that spring breakers like Mark often visited or had met Mark’s grieving parents when they came to Brownsville to search for him. Maybe these deaths stuck out because of the high achievements of both young men, who excelled in academics and were close to showing how their hard work would translate in the world beyond school. Or maybe Mark’s story was highlighted because I was a newcomer, and Mark, too, was from out of town.

  The stories seemed to be recounted to me in an effort to convey a larger message: In Brownsville, a dissonant note troubled the warmth and community I might otherwise find, and I should be on the lookout. Violence was present, a current flowing through the city, barely visible until it hit rock and swirled into white water. Only in Brownsville, they might say as they ended such a story. Qué crazy.

  But the story of what happened to John Allen Rubio, Angela Camacho, and the children on East Tyler Street seemed different. For one, it had been only four years since the murders when I arrived at the Herald. The crime was more recent, and John was waiting for his second trial, having won an appeal that showed Angela’s confession had been improperly presented to the jury. The narrative had an uneasy open-endedness.

  The Rubio story was also especially affecting because it concerned small children. It grabbed hold of the reporters during these newsroom conversations, the revelation of each detail making the case suddenly raw, fresh, intense. A father and a mother killing three young children—three babies!—with the crude weapon of kitchen knives. The bodies in trash bags, the heads in buckets of water, washed clean of blood. For not one but both parents to be involved in such a horror was stunning and inexplicable.

  As a young reporter grappling with a place that was new to me, and which I needed to describe in print daily, I paid attention when those around me seemed to care particularly about a certain story or issue. The Rubio case also had an unusual tangibility: the filing cabinet that separated my desk from the Herald crime reporters’ contained records from the first trial. Present, too, was the building, an ailing marker of the crime, reminding me of what had happened every time I passed by. After hearing the voices of the neighbors a hundred times as I stitched together the audio slide show in the closet-size editing suite, the case began the slow and certain process of taking up residence in my psyche.

  Brownsville is not alone in its history of heinous crimes. Cities everywhere witness murders that attract parachute journalists or inspire horror films. But many of the ones that have happened here have a few common ingredients. The local culture of curanderismo, folk healing that is most often performed for good, and brujería, witchcraft that includes the casting of spells and curses, has sometimes joined the narrative. Some crimes also point to the lack of resources in Brownsville for the treatment of mental illness. Without help, unhealthy obsessions can fester, dangerous belief systems thrive, vendettas brood until such actions become, as John’s attorney explained, inevitable. These murders, shocking in their retelling, must have reached that point of apparent inevitability to the killers. In their minds, at that essential moment, these actions had to be taken, whether because of delusion, honor, revenge, desperation, paranoia, or fear of an inner truth.

  While I didn’t come to the city to report on a murder, I soon realized how central these crimes had become to Brownsville’s history, more so in the daily lives of residents than some of its proudest military victories. The restaging of the Battle of Palo Alto, the first major engagement of the Mexican-American War, by volunteers in historical dress, though also a chronicle of death, feels distant from the confrontations and struggles that shape modern lives. Yet while the battlefield has been preserved by the parks department so visitors can stand in the middle of the isolation, see the blooming cacti on the rugged plain where armies clashed, the legends of these local killings of regular people will probably not join a long-term historical narrative. Maybe they’ll be used as cautionary tales to scare teenagers or other green reporters. Maybe they’ll be forgotten.

  On that initial visit, as I walked around the building on East Tyler Street recording audio for the slide show, my interest in the crimes was minimal. What I saw was a cheap place to live, and thus a respite for some of the city’s poor. The back of the building was falling apart, an almost random arrangement of wood doors, stairs, and windows. The tenants on the second floor shared a communal bathroom, and in one apartment a woman had constructed a shrine on top of a dresser with a framed picture of the pope, candles, artificial flowers, and an image of the Virgen de Guadalupe. Brad snapped a few photographs of the doorway to the Rubio apartment, which was locked from the outside, marked with stickers as EVIDENCE.

  As I put together the photos and the audio, Brad sent me a few digital images from the archives. Some were Polaroids of the children. When I looked at them, I saw happy, innocent young faces, but they remained strangers to me. Today, the images of Julissa, John Stephan, and Mary Jane are imprinted on my brain. I see them when I close my eyes. I see them when I open my eyes.

  And I can see the other photograph—the one of an administrator holding up three death certificates. Each is stamped with a single assaulting word: DECEASED. DECEASED. DECEASED.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  Pilgrim

  It’s just a building.

  —SUSAN ZAVALA, FORMER NEIGHBOR

  The district clerk’s office in the Cameron County Courthouse is just two blocks from the building on East Tyler and Eighth Streets in Brownsville. There, files documenting both of John’s trials are kept in nineteen enormous folders and half a dozen cardboard boxes. I’d moved an hour away along the path of the river, but I’d regularly drive to Brownsville and sit in the district clerk’s office in the courthouse where John was first tried, going through page after page of legal filings, with a fistful of paper clips and a peanut-butter sandwich. Sometimes freelance work would intervene and I would skip an entire week or two.

  “We didn’t know if you were coming back,” one of the clerks would say, eyeing me curiously, before wheeling the stepladder over to the spot where they kept the Rubio files. They’d ask which of the folders I needed, and I’d go back to my usual seat, becoming another fixture in the quiet records room, listening to the pop songs that streamed through the speakers and going through thousands of pages of bureaucratic court procedures, medical reports, and jury selection.

  I didn’t know quite what I was looking for at first. My hope was that the court documents would provide a logical entry point. But after a few hours, they would numb me, and I’d gather my things and visit the building before driving home. There, just two blocks away, I’d see the surrogate of my subject. The scene of the crime.

  It was like the exoskeleton of a once-living thing. It had the grizzled appearance of a horror house, the kind of place ideal for ghost hunters with dubious equipment and for scaring kids around late October. The structure exuded desolation and a sleeping threat, as if it wore the face of the crime that took place inside, a seemingly perfect scapegoat.

  Though 805 East Tyler stood inanimate on the corner of Eighth Street, its mortality, like John’s, was at stake. I watched it the way a witness visits the bedside of a dying relative. It was there, so present and concrete. But I knew it could disappear in a moment, the bricks fired for its creation lying in a heap.

  I became a pilgrim to the building—not a worshipper, but a witness. I was a disciple of the unknown lesson I believed it would teach me.

  In the Library of Congress, I’d found some of the oldest remaining maps of Brownsville. The Sanborn Map Company carefully plotted out cities and towns across America, hoping to se
ll fire-insurance policies to local property owners. The earliest map shows a box on the street corner, etched with symbols that indicate it was a combination warehouse, grocery store, dwelling, and storage room. That building was made of wood, one-story high, and haphazardly jumbled together.

  On the 1926 map, the space that the jumble had occupied is blank. Maybe a fire had demolished the first structure. But by the 1930 map, the new building appears—a sizable two stories, part brick, part wood, with a filling station and an unusual cutout on the first floor. Here, what would have been the sharp corner of the building was flattened so cars could drive up and fill their gas tanks on the way to and from town. By the time John, Angela, and the three children moved into the apartment that occupied the spot next to that old storefront, that corner was filled in, the filling station eliminated. The family would be the apartment’s last tenants.

  When the building was erected, Brownsville had grown from a mud-walled army fort on the northern bank of the Rio Grande into a small city. The Fort Brown army barracks flanked the river, and New Orleans–style brick and ironwork stores shared space on the main avenues, next to the large homes of their owners. As one walked away from Mexico toward East Tyler Street, the homes diminished in size until one- and two-room houses speckled street corners near the railroad tracks. Finally, these gave way to ranchland. There, in what is today a sprawling suburban metro area, was the secluded landscape of “Lonesome Dove.”

  This was a large building for the neighborhood in the 1930s and was originally on Brownsville’s outskirts, beyond the city plan. It occupied two full lots, stretching back from the street toward an alley behind—about 125 feet long and 50 wide. The first floor was a business and the second apartments, a detail that explains in part why the first floor was poorly arranged after it was converted into housing. Long, hallway-shaped apartments were constructed by the time the Rubio family lived here, a layout that cut the existing floor plan into strips. These apartments had doors on the street and in the back, along the grassy lot.

  By 1949 the Sanborn map shows that the building was only half its original size. While it was once primarily brick with a smaller wood section in the back, the wood section was gone and only the brick remained, and it was no longer a filling station. On one of these maps the names of alleys are marked. Today these unofficial streets have no such signs to tell pedestrians or drivers their titles. But at the time the alleyways were probably the site of informal homes for the very poor, hand-me-downs of the Mexican peasants who had erected jacales, or thatched-roof huts, behind the homes of their employers. Near the railroad, it may have been a low-cost place for workers who needed a place to stay as they made their way along the line.

  Another killing had taken place at this address, in the mideighties. A man caught stabbing a woman was commanded by Brownsville detective Rey Martinez to stop. When he continued to attack her, Martinez shot him, killing the man. The chief said that the woman, despite her stab wounds, miraculously lived after being rushed to the hospital with the knife still taped to her, preventing her from bleeding out.

  By the 2000s, mistreatment was evident along every blemished wall and broken window of the building. Its exterior, brick long ago painted white, was the nonspecific color of filth. Wood doors with hinged screens stood apart on the first floor with no windows between them, like a prison lineup. Some of those had been boarded over with wood planks, but not the Rubio apartment.

  From the front, the two-story building was severe, with a boxlike structure that suggested utility. But viewed from the back it was vulnerable, a feeble hospital patient whose disintegrating body could be undone by a gust of wind. Here, alongside the sturdy bricks, were dilapidated wood doors that no longer fit their frames. Small squares tilted to the angle of diamonds plastered near the roof, looked as if they’d been tacked on like a dutiful nod to the idea of aesthetic beauty.

  Posts that once held clotheslines were scattered around the backyard. Now and then the grass was cut, but it usually grew wild and high, hiding discarded items beneath. One day I saw a child’s homework, a dirty diaper, a crushed drinking cup, and a small pink plastic star. The sidewalk had split open and a rush of plump red ants poured out of their home beneath the ground. Nearby, a dead lizard was being devoured by another colony of fire ants, each the size of a grain of sand.

  One of my first questions to John was whether the apartment had a window. It was hard to tell from the outside, but it appeared that their home was totally dark, with no aperture to let in light or the Gulf breeze. In the South Texas summers with no air-­conditioning, the smells of cooking and children’s diapers would have hung in the stagnant air.

  He wrote back:

  There was a small window almost to the ceiling about 4X4 inches permanently shout. And no it did not seem small or dark because we were happy just to be together and content with the little we had. We had no A/C but we would us a fan to cool us in from the heat. We didn’t have anything to warm us up in the winter seasons except blankets.

  One photo of the crime scene showed a fan, next to the naked body of a headless child.

  So only the front and back doorways could be opened. From April through October, the temperature hovers between 85 and 110 degrees during the day in South Texas.

  On these slow walks around the building, I took notes on a reporter’s pad, cataloging every detail, but I looked for something I knew I’d never be able to see with my eyes. It seemed as if the best way to understand the story was to go to it, to show up, to look and listen. Sometimes I’d leave feeling that I’d learned nothing, that indeed not much more was here than a structure and a bit of grass. But when I was lucky, someone would notice the woman standing with the notebook and would stop and talk to me. I’d say what I was writing about and receive instant recognition. Los niños? Ay. They’d inevitably have an opinion about why the crime happened. Las drogas. La locura. La pobreza. Drugs. Madness. Poverty. It was a brutal triumvirate. While the explanations pushed the crime into the distance and suggested that such an act couldn’t happen without one or more of those components, they only drew it closer. Drugs and poverty were everywhere. Madness was another question.

  John Allen Rubio

  (Photo courtesy of Louie Vera)

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  Letters from the Edge

  I loved to see the stars. Makes me think alot of the amazing univers we live in.

  —JOHN ALLEN RUBIO

  A few months after I started writing to John, he sent me a letter with a list of addresses I’d requested. They were the intersections of his childhood, the places his family lived as he was growing up. I set out on a drive around Brownsville, looking for the landscape of those early years.

  Most of the locations were vague. On this street, near this school. Around this corner. I’d idle in my car and look around. On one street I’d find a white house with a collection of two dozen potted plants in the yard—a small but cheerful little home with a clean paint job and a sign, SE VENDE ÁRBOLITOS DE MANGO, NARANJA, “we sell little mango and orange trees.” Then the list would lead to a run-down cream-colored apartment building with sickly green trim on a stark lot.

  John could only recall leaving Brownsville on a handful of occasions. Sometimes he walked across the bridge to Matamoros, though he said this didn’t really count, since everyone in Brownsville did the same. He took a school trip to San Antonio, where he ate pizza and saw the restaurants and margarita-sipping tourists flanking the city’s famed River Walk. “Everything was so big and amazing to me compaired to Brownsville.” Once, he traveled to Arkansas to apply for a job cleaning chickens at a Tyson factory, but wrote that he failed the drug test even though he hadn’t smoked marijuana in over a month. Mainly, he “stuck to my home town which I loved very much.” John got to know a wide range of neighborhoods in Brownsville due to his parents’ constant fights and financial instability. His family was often forc
ed to go looking for a cheaper place to live, leaving wherever might have started to become home. John altered many details slightly as he recounted them—from statement to statement and letter to letter. I didn’t always notice these variations in the moment, but taken together, they sometimes made it hard to pin down the “correct” version of events. What I have is the product of what John told me, the court record, and the results of my own inquiries.

  John Allen Rubio was born on August 12, 1980, just after Hurricane Allen. His mother, Hilda, gave birth at Valley Regional Medical Center two days after Allen made landfall in Brownsville, a Category 5 storm that had simmered down to a Category 3 by the time it hit Texas. Allen knocked out power along the South Texas coast for several days, destroyed half of the region’s cotton and citrus crops, and left residents without drinking water.

  Hilda was in her early twenties when she gave birth to John and already had another son, Manuel, with a different man. Soon, two more brothers, Rodrigo and Jose Luis, would join the bunch. Hilda came from a large family herself—she was one of twelve children, six boys and six girls. Her own mother, Felicitas, would have forty-one grandchildren by the time she died.

  John lived in several different neighborhoods spread across Brownsville, such as Cameron Park, a colonia that, while technically within the city limits, isn’t part of Brownsville proper. For a time he lived at his grandparents’ house in Barrio Buena Vida. He also lived in Southmost, a neighborhood close to the outer limits of Brownsville and the Rio Grande. There, the orange groves, cornfields, and nature sanctuary shared space along the river’s snaking path. Turning down one street in this neighborhood led to a pocket of houses and parks. Turning down another, the levee appeared, where green Border Patrol trucks kicked up dust along the edge of the United States.