On May 1 a woman who lived a few blocks from White was violently attacked in her home. GOSS, G. W. For Hlavkas family, the news is bittersweet. Hes pondered the many things he didand didnt dobefore he landed behind bars. We have set your language to It never goes away.. McFadden was eventually caught hiding at an abandoned house nearby. An HBO documentary released two months later, The Execution Machine: Texas Death Row, featured Spence in his final week. There was no evidence he was guilty, he would later tell NBCs Dateline. At the time of her death, she was attending Tyler Junior College and dreamed of being a nurse. Okay, now Im finished.. It would mean a cut in pay and status, but Simons didnt care. It was one crisis after another, Schonemann told me. McFadden was arrested and charged in the killing rampage. "We want to compete the investigation," Bluffington said. WILLIAMS, Nanon Mckewn This was a homicidal frenzy. There was one person in particular who Dannen figured might offer insight on the matter: Kenneths father, Richard Franks, whose accounts of that night had troubled a few police officers. In December, however, he discovered that the crime lab that had performed Whites autopsy had saved vaginal and anal swabs. The email does not appear to be a valid email address. "She had already been accepted to A&M," Mrs. Lane said. He could not have known that his promise, and every action he took to fulfill it, would shortly come under intense scrutinyand, in the years to come, set the course for one of the strangest, most serpentine cases of criminal justice in modern Texas history. Investigators learned that the girls had driven from Waxahachie, an hour north of Waco, in Raylenes orange Ford Pinto to pick up Jills last paycheck from Fort Fisher, at the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum, where she had been a tour guide that spring. accessed ), memorial page for Gena Lee Turner (1 Mar 1966-4 May 1986), Find a Grave Memorial ID 6653351, citing County Line Cemetery, Yoakum . There was never any link to him coming up here. This, and only this, would ultimately lead to a hearing where Reaves could question the men who put Melendez and the others in prison and sent Spence to his death, making them answer for their actions a generation ago. She served the seventy-year-old widow his nightly cocktailalong A connection between all four murders has not been determined yet, other than the location of where their remains were found, said League City Police Lt. Michael Bluffington. Man, 2 Teen-age Girls Found Stabbed to Death at Lake Park: Police Say Bodies Bound, Girls Nude, read the front page of the Waco Tribune-Herald. Story of Texas heiress Joan Robinson, who married plastic surgeon John Hill. Two others did match a mark to one of the molds, but it was not Spences. I argued with his lawyer, she told me. She used to find notes and letters from Jills old friends. On May 4, 1986, McFadden kidnapped Bryan Boone, 19, Gena Turner, 20, and Suzanne Harrison, 18, from a local lake where they had gone for a night out. Ive got to go to Texas and find out what the hell happened, he told her. The constitutional violations were egregious.. Unless they get something powerfully exculpatory, Tonys not getting out, he told me. And he didnt eat just anything. She made calls and introduced him to sources who might not otherwise have talked, such as a woman who claimed she had seen Harpers van next to the Pinto that night. For four decades, Portland police were baffled by the brutal crime against the young woman with flowing brown locks and a bright smile. He had never been violent with her or them, she recalled. As the verdict was read, Spence stared solemnly and a collective gasp went up from the courtroom. Low 51F. These days theres increasing credibility given to the idea that innocent people do plead guilty; the National Registry of Exonerations recently found that nearly 1 in 5 of the 87 inmates who were exonerated in 2013 had pleaded guilty to charges against them, often because of the guarantee of a lesser sentence. Other evidence, meanwhile, had never been turned over to defense attorneys, including dozens of police reports that seemed to contradict the murder-for-hire theory. But Scott knew this case had to be solved. Eight informants, two of whom had been in jail with Williams, took the stand. HOUSTON (KTRK) -- The Harris County Sheriff's Office announced a breakthrough in two unrelated cold case murders Thursday morning. ABC News' Stacy Chen contributed to this report. Dannen was something of a curiosity in Wacoa stubborn, garrulous reporter with a New York accent knocking on doors, asking questions about a fifteen-year-old murder case, typing answers feverishly on his laptopbut he had a knack for getting people to open up. On May 4, 1986, McFadden kidnapped Bryan Boone, 19, Gena. Hawkins, Wood County, Texas, USA. He then held the woman hostage in a boxcar outside the rail yards for hours until she managed to flee. Try again later. Schonemann visited Tony and Gilbert again. He sent gifts to Russ Hunt, including an elaborate stagecoach made out of popsicle sticks and a clock made of matchsticks. Congress, no longer willing to pay to defend convicted murderers, had pulled the nonprofits funding. Her sister knew she was living in the Seabrook area and the two had communicated a few times by mail. Feazell, who is back to being a lawyer, in Austin, still considers the lake murder convictions one of his biggest triumphs. State records indicate McFadden was convicted on a burglary charge in 1966 anddestruction of property in 1968. On the morning of April 3, Spence met with his loved ones, including June, one of his sons, and his brother. Simons, an observer in the courtroom, was flabbergasted. I told him, This guy is saying you told him all those storieswhy is everyone talking about it? Suzanne's body was located the following day and by May 6, officers stopped the suspect vehicle near Loop 564 and State Highway 37, north of Mineola. The two became fast allies. His shirt was stained with blood, his chest full of stab wounds. UPDATE:Tony Melendez, the last living Lake Waco murders defendant, died on Friday, January 13, 2017, at 57 at a prison hospice at the Michael Unit in Tennessee Colony, not far from Palestine. There was a problem getting your location. HAWKINS, Anthony Cardell Two people riding horses in the area in September 1991 found the fourth body, which was given the name Janet Doe by the medical examiner, Ratliff said. We were told it was the truth. Simons told him early in their relationship, a few weeks after arriving at the jail. Then, just when it seemed things couldnt get worse, in September 1995 the TRC found itself forced to shut its doors. Kelley, he posited, had been the target of the killers. His life seemed to unravel even before reaching adulthood. Truman thought Deeb would confess, recalled Baier. Dannen told them he did not think Carroll was connected in any way to the Lake Waco killings, though he did consider the burglary at Whites house after her death to be highly suspicious. 'Linda lives in Euless and had come over for Father's Day. Gena is forever missed by her family and many friends. He asked an investigator with the DAs office to accompany him, and the two men wandered through Koehne Park. A middle school dropout with a fondness for beer, marijuana, and amphetamines, he had married at 16, become a father of two by 18, and divorced at 20. Try again later. I killed them. Though he then apologized and said he was joking, Kelley felt certain he was not. Earlier Tuesday, a jury had fond Beasley competent to stand trial on the three murder charges and two counts of injury to a child. Tony said he had learned of the lake murders from other inmates, the media, and interviews with Simons; though he had insisted to his lawyers that he was innocent, hed pleaded guilty because they warned him he would get the death penalty if he went to trial. A story by the Associated Press in June 2013 also found that since 2000, at least 24 men who had been charged or convicted of murder or rape based on bite-mark evidence had been exonerated. I knew they were going to execute him, he later told me. She still had on a Waxahachie High. Two years later, the teenager turned up alive. They interviewed countless suspects. Quickly see who the memorial is for and when they lived and died and where they are buried. The trial lasted just over two weeks. W Bent Bow Ln, Hawkins, TX 75765. If you fill out the first name, last name, or agree to terms fields, you will NOT be added to the newsletter list. You all just fucked up the whole goddamn case, a disgusted Horton told Simons and Baier in front of a crowd of detectives the morning after Deeb was brought in. Despite some qualms about Simonss methods, he included the deputy on his team, along with the two cops most familiar with the case, Salinas and Baier. Just die, he said, glaring at Spence through the glass. In the summer of 1982 the city of Waco was confronted with the most vicious crime it had ever seen: three teenagers were savagely stabbed to death, for no apparent reason, at a park by a lake on the edge of town. Abandoning hope that he would ever print the truth, she destroyed her journals and shredded all the documents shed collected related to the case. I suffered. She regularly communicated with her parents via letters and phone calls and when they hadn't heard from her in a while, they traveled to Houston to search for her, Bluffington said. PORTLAND, Oregon The Portland Police Department in Oregon says a notorious East Texas convicted killer is responsible for the murder of 20-year-old Anna Hlavka, who was found dead on July 24,. In 1979, she was working as a mechanic for a golf cart company in Houston, later getting a job at the Harrison Equipment Corporation, a construction equipment company, Ratliff said. $20,000. For memorials with more than one photo, additional photos will appear here or on the photos tab. Its immoral to go forward with this much doubt.. As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9). Though he was not officially assigned to the investigation, he spent hours at the lake, devoting much of his free time to searching the woods and talking to people. Just ten weeks earlier, a father of five had been beaten to death by a stranger in his front yard because he wouldnt light the guys marijuana cigarette. Though hed ended up retracting all his statements, Gilbert now told Schonemann, he had agreed to testify against Spence at his second trial because it looked like it was just a hopeless cause. Spence had already been found guilty; what would a jury do to a two-time felon who was Mexican American? He thought he could outsmart Simons, she said, and used the jailer to get phone call privileges with Juhl. Simons told Price that, through his informants, he had learned that Washington had had a partner in crime, a nineteen-year-old named Joe Sidney Williams. She knew of the deputys reputation for relying on informants and had heard negative things about him from her fellow officers; as she would later say in a deposition, people arrested by the WPD were getting right back out of jail because they were supplying information to Simons. (Simons has always denied that he made deals with suspects, saying he didnt have the power. He sent them molds and five-by-seven autopsy photos, refusing to enhance the images as Campbell had done because, according to other experts, doing so could produce false or misleading results. Later in the evening, the woman wrote, she saw Kenneth in the front seat of a maroon Lincoln Continental with Robert Frueh, a local reverend with a fondness for teenage boys who often cruised through Wacos parks. Give us all something, she said. It was a match. Spence, who had two new attorneysWalter Reaves, whod represented him on the aggravated sexual abuse case, and Bill Vancegrew increasingly agitated, eventually trying to fire his lawyers. At that time, prisoners were granted excessive time off their sentences for good behavior, essentially opening the spigot for releases. Schonemann and Schwartz had no time to lose. When Im done with the White case, she told him, Im going to look into the lake murders. (Feazell declined to be interviewed for this story, although he did communicate his view that Prices account of these events was untrustworthy. Whoever had assaulted Hlavka had never been entered into the directory. "There wasn't anybody any sweeter than Suzanne, everybody loved her. There was a lot of apprehension. January 2023 Reader Quiz: What Did You Learn? It was all mind-blowing, Schonemann told me. Larry Pack is an active carrier operating under USDOT Number 2158667. There was a much stronger case to be made, he felt, for the involvement of Tab Harper, whom witnesses had seen at the park that night and whose name he had encountered in police reports and interviews several times. He interviewed relatives of the victims, such as Jills aunt Jan Thompson, and won over numerous Waco residents. Murderpedia has thousands of hours of work behind it. Early in the investigation, the prosecutor had written a note on his stationery: G[ilbert] M[elendez] told [fellow inmate] Robert [Garcia] he did not know anything but was going to make up a story to get off of [the] sexual abuse case., Why would Gilbert confess to such a horrible crime if he didnt commit it? His name was David Spence, and he had just been arrested with his friend Gilbert Melendez for cutting a teenage boy on the leg and forcing him to perform oral sex on Melendez. I was absolutely crushed, he told me. In return Melendez got two life sentences. "For five horrible days, we didn't have a clue where to look," Barber said. Wileys willingness to meet with interested parties on matters of criminal justice should never be construed as support for, or against, a person or issue being discussed.) Dannen made a presentation, and UT gave him more funds, which he sent to FSA for another round of testing. Spence, unaware that he might be a suspect, offered to help the officers in their investigation. The Texas Seven was a prison escape which would became a sensation as the seven men from the Texas Department Of Corrections would basically disappeared. Audrey Lee Cook was born on Nov. 25, 1955, in Memphis, Tennessee, and lived in Houston and Channelview, Texas, between 1976 and 1985, Ratliff said. He did it! After Simons calmed her down, she explained how, earlier in the evening, Deeb had taken her and a friend to a gory movie. Use Escape keyboard button or the Close button to close the carousel. Did Spence do it or not, I cant tell you, she said. All rights reserved. The semen found on Whites body had never been tested for DNA, Dannen realized with excitement. The Rev. The Court of Criminal Appeals and all of the federal courts, including the Fifth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court, agreed. As for the journalist who has kept the case alive all these years, Mr. Dannen had paid for all the DNA testing himself; by the time the results came in, hed spent close to $10,000. Speegleville was the largest, a pleasant, wooded wilderness that made for good camping, hiking, and fishing. Dannen bought a Chevy Blazer and took driving lessons, tracking down sources who had never spoken to authorities or who had documents related to the case. When Schonemann arrived for work, in the summer of 1991, he was immediately enthralled by the TRCs pace. The grass around the girls was flattened, as if theyd struggled with whoever killed them, but there was no knife, very little blood on the ground, and no semen anywhereeven though the medical examiner eventually determined that the girls had been sexually assaulted. GUTIERREZ. cemeteries found in Yoakum, DeWitt County, Texas, USA will be saved to your photo volunteer list. The nonprofit didnt get many wins in its fight against the death penalty, but Spences case was looking promising. Schonemann and his team appealed to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in December 1994. Welcome to r/Funny, Reddit's largest humour depository. A 24-year-old who was wanted in Corpus Christi for robbery and rape, Tony had been taken into custody by the WPD for questioning about the lake case and his brothers involvement and then sent to the Nueces County jail. Physically, McFadden cast an imposing shadow. Though Price had been the police departments investigating officer, she wasnt called as a state witness. Suzanne's funeral was conducted three days later. By the time she was a senior, her path in life was paved with optimism and opportunity. A week later, Simons felt like taking another look around the lake. They too were missing. He sat down, typed a letter to district judge George Allen, and faxed it to him the next day. Fourteen years is an eternity in DNA technology., He pinged excitedly from topic to topic, referencing everything from Shakespeare to the TV series Homeland. hawkins texas murders 1986army records office address. Found more than one record for entered Email, You need to confirm this account before you can sign in. The next day, at lunch with his sister, he shared Spences story. This Hawkins County Tennessee Most Wanted List posts the top 50-100 fugitive criminals on the run. Jacque Hilburn-Simmons is an award-winning journalist who has been writing professionally for 30 years. Hawkins was the kind of town where neighbors looked out for one another, and there was an innocence that people seemed to enjoy, but a lot of it was lost that one terrible summer. I was going to get convicted of those murders whether I did it or not. Like Spence, he was given the death penalty. Truman Simons (far right) helping carry the body of the teenagers out from the brush in Speegleville Park on July 14, 1982. Either you believe in the system or you dont, he said. Thousands of people die in Hawkins each year, and most of these people are mentioned in local Texas obituaries. There theyd seen the kids, whom Spence enticed into the car with the promise of beer and weed. Is my mother with you? Sixteen months after White was murdered, Hunt and Fuller filed Spences direct appeal with the CCA. SKILLERN, Derrick J. Gilbert had initially brushed the incident off. And every time, Dr. Moore would tell me nope, thats not the one.. Hopper had never seen McFaddens name in all the voluminous police files. Texas millionaire Steven Beard, Jr. fell hard for Celeste Martinez, a waitress less than half his age. Even Feazell was won over. Carl Lee Winds SE at 5 to 10 mph. The beautiful Gena, voted Miss Hawkins High School, was academically gifted and valedictorian of the 1984 graduating class. Please complete the captcha to let us know you are a real person. On October 16, fourteen hours before Spence was scheduled to die, Owen and Schonemann filed a 164-page writ in each court, in which they stated that in only six weeks of investigating theyd discovered strong indications of astonishing state misconduct in the case against Spence for the Lake Waco murders. Krauss, the odontology expert that Schonemann and Owen hired for their first writs, had suggested back in 1991 that the TRC set up a blind panel of odontologists and do a two-part study: analyze the autopsy photographs for marks, then compare the marks with dental molds from Spence and four other subjects. Al Sharpton led demonstrations after Yusuf Hawkins' murder. The four juries in these trials concluded that Spence and the Melendez brothers were the killers, Simons wrote in his own email. It was only in December 2012 that theyd finally reclaimed the material; now it was at Arkansas Genomics, a lab in Little Rock that does touch DNA testing. The large, elegant slab of Dakota Mahogany granite was decorated by Jills mother with the girls photo, a poem, and the inscription Forever Seventeen. Not only had Simons kept his promise to avenge Jill, he had also made sure she would never be forgotten. He was known to camp not too far from the point, where rolling waves crashed against the rugged shoreline and pretty girls flirted with the guys. (Sarah A. Miller/Tyler Morning Telegraph). Dannen showed the crime-scene photos to a longtime homicide detective he knew in New York, whose reaction supported this idea. Dannen and Blum also drove to Dallas to meet Muneer Deeb, who in his years out of prison had been profiled in Life magazine; filed a $100 million civil suit against Feazell, Simons, and other law enforcement officials (it was thrown out of court); started a limo company; and spoken on Amnesty International panels, including one with the Dalai Lama. Spence was strapped onto the gurney in the execution chamber. He was arrested two days later after the biggest fugitive hunt in Texas state history. Everyone strained to catch a glimpse of the accused killer, who had gotten a haircut and wore a suit and tie. It belonged to another young woman, this one dark-haired. "It seems like yesterday and always will," said Glyndia Lane, Suzanne's aunt. Simons was sure the DA would be interested in his jailhouse findings, but when he approached one of Feazells assistants, he was told that, as hearsay, the inmate testimony was probably inadmissible in court. Editor's Note: This is the first in a five-day series recalling paroled sex offender Jerry Walter McFadden's murderous 1986 crime spree that t, PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) A convicted murderer called the "Animal," who was executed by the state of Texas in 1999 has been identified by DNA as t, Editor's Note:This is the first in a five-day series recalling paroled sex offender Jerry Walter McFadden's murderous 1986 crime spree that t, Editor's Note: This is the third in a five-day series recalling paroled sex offender Jerry Walter McFadden's murderous 1986 crime spree that t, Editor's Note: This is the fourth in a five-day series recalling paroled sex offender Jerry Walter McFadden's murderous 1986 crime spree that , Editor's Note: This is the last of a five-day series recalling paroled sex offender Jerry Walter McFadden's murderous 1986 crime spree that te.