Would I be out of line if I said I miss you?
March 03, 2005:
Twelve Year Anniversary was yesterday.
Rest in Peace,
Albert Joseph Fischer, Jr.
January 16, 1975 - March 03, 1993
Part 2
Alex Perez has been the sheriff of Cameron County, in which Brownsville is situated, for twelve years. Perez, in his fifties, is husky-what Mexicans on the border call poco fuerte-with strong muscles beginning to turn soft. He habitually wears gold aviator glasses, cowboy boots, a gold tie tack in the shape of handcuffs, and a large gold ring with rhinestones in the shape of a pistol.
On March 3rd, the morning that Joey was killed, Perez was eating breakfast at the Toddle Inn, a small restaurant he owns on Central Boulevard, not far from the Sheraton. In the early-morning hours, the Toddle Inn fills with local lawyers and police seeking to hear the morning courthouse chisme-gossip. It was, Perez told me, around seven o’clock, when the call came in: "1900," the code for murder. Immediately, he rushed to his car and, with sirens going full blast, headed for Rancho Viejo. There are twenty or so murders in Brownsville every year, but not many occur in the rich suburbs. When Perez arrived at the house, he saw Buddy Fischer standing in the driveway. Perez knew Buddy from when he was a client of Buddy’s bank. His first thought was that Buddy lived in the area and must have accidentally happened on the crime.
At the house, police found what eventually turned out to be a crucial piece of evidence-a yellow business card lying near Joey’s body. The card was from a bail-bond company in McKinney, Texas, not far from Dallas. The sheriff later theorized that Joey had tried to grab his assailant and the card had fallen from his pocket. On the card, Perez saw, was a handwritten telephone number with a 214 area code, the code for Dallas. "The four was written in a weird handwriting," he told me. "Very distinct. I was asking myself, ‘Why would a young man like this, just starting life, a brilliant student, get shot?’ Usually, it’s either drugs or love." Perez thought it unlikely that Joey had any connection to the local drug trade, he told me, and it also seemed unlikely to him that the murder was a crime of passion. He said that in Brownsville it is unusual for someone so young to get killed over love. But Perez had been on the border long enough to know that anything was possible. He asked the family, "Did Joey ever have any problems with a girlfriend?" They told him about Cristina.
That morning, Marianela Caballero was interviewed at the sheriff’s office. "Did Cristina Cisneros ever say words to you?"
"No," Marianela said. She had no idea why detectives would ask her about Joey’s ex-girlfriend, whom she hardly knew.
Later that day, Cristina appeared at Buddy’s door to make a condolence call. "What happened?" Cristina asked Connie.
Connie was sharp with her. "What do you know about what happened? The sheriff wants to talk to you."
At first, the sheriff and the local district attorney, Luis V. Saenz, did not take the Cisneroses’ connection with Joey any more seriously than their other leads. "The family told me about the crazy calls," Perez said later, "but that didn’t mean murder to me."
The sheriff and the district attorney were also considering the idea that Joey was killed by a drug dealer, who had mistaken him for someone else. Joey’s stepfather, who worked for a Chinese-owned shrimp farm in Arroyo City, about forty miles away, had recently stopped the payment of a check for several hundred thousand dollars to another shrimping company because of a contract dispute. Joey’s stepfather immediately assumed that Joey had been murdered out of revenge. For two days, he was overwrought, weeping uncontrollably, thinking that he was in some way to blame for his stepson’s death. An early investigator on the case pushed the Chinese theory and told Buddy and Corinne that there was the possibility that their other children were in danger. "For two weeks, I would not let my baby out of the house," Connie told me. Buddy and Corinne debated sending Eric and Kathy to San Antonio to stay with their grandparents.
There is no specially trained homicide squad in Brownsville, and the investigation was rigorously pursued by Sheriff Perez’s detectives, Ernesto Flores and Abel Perez. They immediately called McKinney, where the bail-bond company was based, hoping to find a recent application for bail that had been received from South Texas. The bond company gave them a man’s name and a Dallas address and faxed a copy of the man’s bail application. The handwriting had the same florid "4" that appeared on the yellow card. The detectives immediately left for McKinney and got a warrant to rescind the man’s bond. He appeared at the bond company, unsure of what he had done wrong. He identified the yellow card. When they interviewed him, the man said that he had given the card to a friend at a motel in downtown Brownsville; the bail-bond company’s card was a form of insurance if his friend should get arrested.
The detectives knew that this particular motel was a haven for the minor border criminals of the area. Perez’s office began tracking down a few people who had stayed at the motel in the previous months and who they thought might be connected to the man in McKinney. Eventually, they came up with a man named Daniel Garza, a Mexican national who spends a lot of time in Brownsville and San Antonio, and whose nickname is El Güero (the Fair-Haired One). He told them he had a landscape business, but the authorities suspected he might be a small-time drug runner. After being questioned, Garza gave a statement acknowledging that he had arranged Joey Fischer’s killing.
Police describe Garza as a middleman who was having family trouble and had gone to a curandera. Border drug dealers often consult the local curanderas, because they believe that such witchcraft can make them invisible to the federal authorities. "These people in the Mexican culture believe too much in the curanderas," Perez told me. The curandera that Daniel Garza had sought out for his problems, María Mercedes Martínez, had no special reputation. None of the other curanderas of Brownsville had ever heard of her. She was a seventy-two-year-old woman who made a living by charging five dollars to tirar las barajas ("throw the cards"), an unusual practice for a curandera. She did not operate in one of the brightly painted yerberías that advertised special oils and candles; instead, she had a table in a dim back room of a store where secondhand clothes were sold, named La Chuparosa (the Hummingbird), downtown. But, according to the sheriff, Martínez had had a long relationship with Dora Cisneros. Dr. Cisneros’s former office was on a street a few blocks from La Chuparosa and perhaps a ten-minute walk from International Boulevard and the bridge to Mexico.
Although David Cisneros was born in Texas, he had gone to medical school in Mexico. There is a hierarchy among the doctors of the Rio Grande Valley which has to do with whether you attended medical school in the United States or "across." David and Dora Cisneros had lived in Brownsville for many years; they were considered well off but not rich. In 1974, their firstborn son, David, was killed when he was thrown from a vehicle driven by a friend during his senior year at St. Joe. It was said at the time that Dora Cisneros got pregnant again to try to overcome her grief at losing her child. However that may be, when Cristina was born, Dora’s friends called it a miracle.
In recalling Dora Cisneros, the people I talked with in Brownsville tended to describe her as "quiet." She usually wore simple clothes, and she spoke unaccented English; she certainly didn’t seem to be muy Mexicana. She belonged, a friend told me, to a mall-walkers’ club-the members took their exercise by strolling up and down the air-conditioned halls of the Sunrise Mall, across from the Sheraton. She seemed like the picture of middle-class respectability.
According to someone close to the family, Dora was a member of the Garcia family of Los Indios, a ranching community on the American side, close to the Rio Grande, near Brownsville. Los Indios was not a typical middle-class town; someone who grew up in the area told me that the children of the ranching communities close to the river were often strongly influenced by Mexican folktales and superstitions they learned from the braceros who worked on the ranches. In these communities on the border, Mexican traditions are maintained, and the belief in curanderismo is often stronger there than in town. Dora Cisneros spent her childhood in Los Indios but later moved to Brownsville and attended high school. A woman who knew the family remembers that the Garcias owned property and could afford to send Dora and her sister to Villa Maria, a private school, and their sons to St. Joe. In seeking to explain Dora’s personality, this woman said that the family had experienced "much tragedy"; Dora’s uncle is said to have committed suicide, and a brother drowned as a teen-ager. Mrs. Cisneros was ambitious, and was active in a club of local doctors’ wives. She seemed to have become imperious: a former schoolmate told me that she often snubbed her old friends when she ran into them in town. A few people now maintain that in some way she "changed" or "flipped out" after David’s death.
According to someone who knew the Cisneros family, she became more possessive of her other children. Her son Robert became a dentist, and she often called his office. Someone familiar with the office told me that once, when Mrs. Cisneros learned that he was in the middle of performing a root canal, she said, "Well, I don’t care. He knows he needs to be here." When one of Mrs. Cisneros’s sons was having problems in school, she went to talk to his teacher. The teacher told me that Mrs. Cisneros insisted that it was the teacher’s fault, not her son’s, and that her children could do no wrong. The teacher was left with the impression that Dora Cisneros was a woman who should not be crossed.
Mrs. Cisneros also became increasingly religious after David’s death and, some say, began to visit local curanderas. But in the atmosphere of Brownsville seeing curanderas isn’t all that odd-even respected professionals do it. Curanderismo and brujería have always been powerful elements in the cultural history of Mexico. Although Catholicism was well established in Mexico by the end of the eighteenth century, many of the native Mexicans never truly gave up their ancient beliefs, much to the annoyance of the local religious powers. A return to folk-based religious practices occurred during the Mexican Revolution, when the bishops and priests fled northern Mexico for the safety of South Texas. It was the fusion between the pagan beliefs and the theology of the Church that Anita Brenner described in "Idols Behind Altars": the pagan "idols" blended uneasily with the "altars" of Mexican Catholicism, she wrote. Magic continues to pervade daily life in Mexico: the marketplaces are filled with herbs and oils; a popular soap opera in the nineteen-eighties was "El Maleficio" ("The Evil One"), in which a Oaxaca businessman prayed nightly to Satan. Even in the high-tech factories in the Matamoros industrial parks, these superstitions are part of the ordinary routines of the border. Gary Cartwright, writing in Texas Monthly, reported that a maquiladora was spared being shut down because a curandero was able to "de-hex" a piece of machinery with which a worker had been injured. Pregnant women go to work daily at the maquiladoras with ribbons holding amulets and talismans, and milagros, small religious paintings, pinned to their underwear.
One morning, I went to talk with Antonio Zavaleta, the dean of liberal arts at the University of Texas at Brownsville. Zavaleta has a doctorate in anthropology, and his area of expertise is the folk medicine and witchcraft of the Mexican border. He is tall and has a rumpled look; in his office are religious retablos and baskets of the kinds of oil that the curanderas frequently use. During the Matamoros cult-killings case, Zavaleta, as the local expert on palo mayombe, the particular type of black magic employed, received national attention. At the time, he was also on the Brownsville city council, and was thinking about running for mayor. Zavaleta grew up in Brownsville and at his grandparents’ ranch in northern Mexico, and, like many other Mexican-Americans of the border, he considers folk medicine and spells part of his culture. "As I got older," Zavaleta told me, "I became so fascinated by the other side of Brownsville that I have spent my entire adult life studying it."
In rural Mexico, the curandera is the practitioner of health care, a respected healer. There are several types of curanderas, among them those who work "on the material level," giving massage, and those who work "on the mental level," using a form of visualization, like many New Age therapists. A common treatment of these curanderas is to roll an egg over the body, then crack the egg into water for some kind of divination. In Brownsville and Matamoros, there are also curanderas whose specialty is trabajos, works of "white magic and black magic." By Zavaleta’s definition, anyone who is doing trabajos is practicing brujería. Clients seek out these curanderas to affect a relationship-to bring about love, to end a marriage, to attract a husband or a boyfriend, or to harm someone. "There’s a general theme, but individual practitioners develop individual style," Zavaleta said. "If they are trying to harm someone, they use a combination of rituals. Usually, they will use a doll made of wax or rags. They may get hair, an eyelash, or clothing. Then, through a series of incantations, they try to encapsule that, along with a picture of the person, in a clay jar or some other kind of vessel. The concept of a knot is very common. So is the process of tying and enclosing their spells." Zavaleta’s research has taken him to Catemaco, in southeastern Mexico, where the great witches are based, and into the dim yerberías of Matamoros to observe the lesbian channellers of Pancho Villa. Ever since the Matamoros cult killings, Zavaleta told me, he will not cross the border without wearing a cross around his neck.
Police investigating Joey’s death speculate that the curandera, as Martínez is now known in Brownsville, made a deal with Daniel Garza when he came to see her about his family trouble. She said, according to a source close to the D.A.’s office, that she would help him if he took care of someone for her. Garza, according to the subsequent indictment, hired two men named Israel Bazaldua Cepeda and Heriberto Puentes Pizana. The indictment goes on to say that Garza gave Bazaldua Cepeda and Puentes Pizana the prom photograph of Joey so they would make no mistake about their target. There are conflicting reports of how much they were allegedly paid; it could have been as much as four thousand dollars.
On April 5th, a month after Joey was killed, the sheriff’s office arrested Martínez at her house, a small pink building in a barrio near downtown Brownsville. At La Chuparosa, detectives confiscated candles, tarot cards, and oils in the tiny room behind the shop containing racks of used clothes. Reportedly, the sheriff’s office found a piece of paper bearing the name "Cristina Cisneros." Almost immediately, Martínez, who had no prior police record, told the detectives that she had a relationship with Dora Cisneros. At seven-thirty the next morning, according to a source in the D.A.’s office, Martínez, wearing a wire provided by the sheriff’s office, met Dora Cisneros. When Cisneros handed Martínez five hundred dollars in cash, the sheriff of Cameron County moved in and arrested Cisneros for capital murder, a charge that carries the possibility of life imprisonment or death by lethal injection. Martínez was also charged with capital murder.
When news reports about the arrests of Dora Cisneros and María Mercedes Martínez first went out in Brownsville, Buddy was in the warehouse at kemet. A close friend had called Connie, and Connie immediately went out to tell Buddy. Some time before, Buddy had decided that he would not bother the D.A. or the sheriff. He had referred to the process of finding Joey’s killer as a "roller coaster" and had said that it would upset him too much when there were slowdowns in the investigation.
In the weeks before her mother was arrested, friends of Cristina Cisneros said she was having a hard time handling Joey’s death and seemed very distressed. Once, seeing Marianela in a school hallway, she hugged her. Although Cristina had started dating the other boy, a friend of hers later told me that whenever anyone mentioned Joey’s name she "started crying," and often brought out pictures of him.
On the morning Joey was killed, Dora Cisneros had gone to St. Joe to take Cristina home. According to a teacher, the assistant principal said to Mrs. Cisneros, "You, of all people, should know how a mother feels." The assistant principal meant the comment to refer sympathetically to the death of her son David, but Mrs. Cisneros just "stared and stared," the teacher told me. The assistant principal thought Mrs. Cisneros had misunderstood what she’d said, and added, "You lost a son, remember?" After learning about the charges against Mrs. Cisneros, the teacher said, the assistant principal was horrified that she had said that to her.
On the morning that Cristina’s mother was arrested, Dr. Cisneros called the school and asked that Cristina be brought into the guidance office, so that local reporters would not swarm around her. Several of the teachers were concerned about how Cristina would now be treated by the other students. Since Joey’s death, the grief counselling at the school had been intense. Several of Joey’s friends who were in Mrs. Johnson’s English class discussed "Murder in the Cathedral" and Eliot’s observation that death could come in a thousand different ways. It did not surprise Mrs. Johnson that none of the students mentioned García Márquez’s observation on Santiago Nasar’s death-"There had never been a death more foretold"-for the sexual taboos implicit in García Márquez’s chronicle had never seemed to apply to the middle-class teen-age world of St. Joseph Academy.
At St. Joe, there was a great deal of gossip about Mrs. Cisneros. It was quickly recalled that Dora Cisneros’s other daughter had had a boyfriend who had broken up with her. Soon afterward, it was rumored, someone stopped his car and stabbed him repeatedly, but he survived. Although Sheriff Perez traced the boyfriend to a distant city, he could not prove that the rumors were true. Some teachers at St. Joe who had known nothing about brujería accepted as fact the theory that Cristina and Joey had slept together and that the curandera had promised Mrs. Cisneros that if Joey was murdered Cristina would get her virginity back.
On April 6th, the Herald ran the story of the the arrests of Dora Cisneros and María Martínez at the top of the front page. That day, a woman dumped a bulky brown paper shopping bag into a resaca near downtown Brownsville. As luck would have it, park employees were working on the grounds nearby, and noticed the woman dumping the bag and then hurrying away. They went over and took the bag out of the water, moving so quickly that the paper was hardly wet. The bag’s contents frightened them: a full collection of the paraphernalia of brujería required for the most evil of spells, illness and death. There was a garland consisting of three heads of garlic with pins stuck in them and wrapped in yellow cloth; a vial of Embrujo de Sevilla perfume; horseshoes wrapped with red ribbons; an aloe-vera plant, also wrapped in ribbons; two doll-size figures that looked like miniature corpses made of black wax and covered with many pins; and a deck of Mexican tarot cards. The park workers reported the discovery to the Brownsville police, and the police called Antonio Zavaleta. By now, almost everyone in South Texas knows that Zavaleta is the person to call about anything having to do with brujería and the local curanderas. Zavaleta photographed and documented all the items in the bag. Whoever its owner may have been, this was "very secret stuff," Zavaleta told me. "A practitioner would not have kept these sorts of things in her shop. She wouldn’t have it out for people to see. The pins are there, of course, to inflict pain. The aloe-vera plant wrapped with the ribbon would represent the person asking for the trabajo." Although Zavaleta emphasized that, despite the "amazing coincidence," there was no evidence linking the bag to María Mercedes Martínez, the tarot cards made him wonder, since she was one of the few curanderas who used them.
After less than a week in Brownsville, I learned to walk in and out of offices without bothering to make appointments; the telephone and standard office procedures clearly meant little on the border. Sheriff Perez could often be found at the Toddle Inn. District Attorney Saenz was either at his office or in one of the many courtrooms of Brownsville’s modern limestone courthouse; local jurisprudence appeared to depend almost exclusively on his administrative abilities.
Saenz is a former Brownsville school-teacher who decided at the age of twenty-nine to go to law school. He now has the cautious mien of a man who is always thinking about the possibility that his convictions might be reversed by a higher court. Although the sheriff’s office arrested Dora Cisneros on April 6th and it was the middle of June when I arrived in Brownsville, Saenz had yet to present the case to the grand jury of Cameron County. Saenz has been told repeatedly that this case could make his career or ruin it. As reporters have telephoned him from around the state, he has burrowed in, refusing to return most calls. Some local reporters faulted Saenz for his slowness in seeking an indictment, but his seeming inactivity has camouflaged an obsession with the case. He told me, "I’d rather delay the indictment six months than be forced to trial with a sloppy case."
For Saenz to obtain convictions on capital-murder charges, he will have to successfully navigate the state’s accomplice-testimony rule. In Texas, a conviction cannot be sustained with only the testimony of an accomplice. Saenz explained to me, "If A gets on the stand and implicates B, we, the state, must corroborate the evidence." Prosecutors would need to be able to tie the defendant to the crime with other evidence. In the view of Rey Cantu, a former district attorney of Cameron County, prosecuting Dora Cisneros and María Mercedes Martínez will be a challenge for Luis Saenz. Cantu was the prosecutor in a similar case in Brownsville, in which a well-known doctor, Victor Leal, was accused of hiring a killer to murder his brother-in-law, an elderly landowner, with whom he was having a property dispute. Just before they were to go to court to settle the land matters, the brother-in-law was murdered. "So we tracked it down, and it took us two years," Cantu said. "We caught the shooter and we caught the finger man and we caught the driver. The driver flipped, and gave us the shooter and the finger man. Then we went to trial on the shooter. He flipped, and then we went to trial on Leal, who’s a doctor and very generous and a very prominent member of the community. He was convicted, and then the conviction was on appeal for five years. It was affirmed by the Court of Appeals, but the Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court, reversed it, because of the accomplice-testimony rule."
Cantu, however, is optimistic about Saenz’s potential for success with the Fischer case. Besides the testimony of Martínez, Saenz has Daniel Garza’s "possession of knowledge"-the knowledge being that Joey had worn a tuxedo in the photograph. "He knows something, and the only way he would have known that is from the conduit, but it had to have come through one of the Cisneroses," Cantu says. "It is crucial evidence in front of the jury. Who the hell is going to have a picture of this kid in a prom outfit? And, of course, we have the tape. It is enough."
In the pathology of criminal cases, there is often behavior that is inexplicable. Still, several questions occurred to me about the strength of the D.A.’s case as I talked with Luis Saenz. Why would Martínez enter into a conspiracy for murder? And, if she did, what debt was she paying off to Dora Cisneros? Was it a question of money? Will Martínez testify that Dora Cisneros somehow suspected that her daughter was no longer a virgin? Saenz, who is the father of a teen-age son, believes that "if they had sex the fact that they had sex is within the range of normal teen-age behavior." However repressive the culture, nothing justifies a murder-except, possibly, self-defense. "There are shootings in Brownsville every day of the week," Saenz went on. "But this one is so senseless. You go full circle with this thing and you keep coming back to the same fact: This killing is sick. Pointless. Such a waste. I am obsessed with this case. Buddy is my neighbor. You know, I can’t get over how controlled Buddy and Corinne are when they come into this office. If it were my teen-age son, I would be hysterical. I don’t mean to sound racist, but what is it with you gringos? How can you be so calm over the death of a child?"
In late July, a week before Saenz finally obtained the indictments of Dora Cisneros, María Mercedes Martínez ("a/k/a la curandera," the original indictment noted), and Daniel Garza ("el güero"), authorities in Mexico detained one of the alleged hit men, Israel Bazaldua Cepeda, for questioning on a separate homicide charge. Bazaldua Cepeda can’t have been surprised by the appearance of the Mexican police; he was reportedly carrying an amparo, a restraining order signed by a Mexican federal judge. An amparo is a guarantee of protection of civil rights. Although the case has been widely publicized, the Matamoros police released Bazaldua Cepeda before he could be questioned by the sheriff’s office. "It’s Brownsville" was the explanation I was given for how Bazaldua Cepeda could have eluded the D.A.
Extradition of Mexican citizens is a difficult if not virtually impossible process. Mexico operates under a form of Roman law: if a Mexican citizen commits a capital offense in another country he can be tried only in a Mexican court. (Mexico does not allow capital punishment.) I was surprised when Oscar Ponce, the lead prosecutor on the Fischer case, told me that the sealed indictment for the hit men was for capital murder, a fact that made their extradition impossible. "That’s part of our charging strategy," he told me. Even if he had indicted the hit men on a lesser charge, he said, he doubted that the Mexican government would have released them. Additionally, the prosecutor didn’t want to weaken the case against Cisneros and the others. "The extradition process is an incredible scandal," David Berg, a prominent Houston trial lawyer, says. "I don’t know of a single instance in which the Mexican government has extradited a Mexican citizen for a major crime committed in the United States." Despite the growing number of connections between the two countries brought about by the maquiladoras and by nafta, the Mexican government hasn’t changed its practices. On the border, most extradition requests have to do with drug crimes, and the local dealers efficiently pay off the politicians in the neighboring state of Tamaulipas. (In one famous case, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent pulled a suspect through a hole in a fence on the border to prosecute him.) Joey’s murder is an exception for the border: no drugs are involved, and his family has influence in the area. On the face of it, nothing should have prevented the Mexican government from giving up Bazaldua Cepeda and Puentes Pizana, the other hit man, on a lesser charge. "We cannot go over and kidnap them," Alex Perez told me. "But, sooner or later, they will cross the border, and then we’ll get them."
There was some surprise in the area when Dora Cisneros engaged J. A. (Tony) Canales to represent her. Canales, a former United States Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, has made a big reputation in South Texas by representing the area drug dealers. As a trial lawyer, Canales, according to Rey Cantu, "is not your usual flash-bang criminal-defense lawyer." He is the son of a prominent South Texas family of judges and lawyers; his mother is a doctor. He prides himself on his understanding of the arcana of Texas criminal law.
Canales’s strategy will probably be to rely on the potential difficulty of proving capital murder given the state’s accomplice-testimony rule. Several weeks ago, all three defendants pleaded not guilty, but Canales has to be concerned about the amount of evidence that Saenz has: the statements that María Martínez, the curandera, and Daniel Garza, the middleman, have given to the sheriff’s department, including a statement by Garza that he was given Joey’s prom photograph by the curandera; the wire; and statements to the D.A.’s office by Joey’s friends about Joey and Cristina’s putative sexual adventure. Saenz is expected to attempt to prove that Dora Cisneros’s motive for having Joey murdered was that he had told his friends of that adventure. The conflict over the ring may play a role as well.
One afternoon, I drove to the Cisneros home, a brick ranch house. The neighborhood was quiet, middle-class, and respectable, but not quite as affluent as Rancho Viejo. Across the street, some children were playing basketball in a driveway. I walked up the sidewalk and rang the bell. I was surprised to hear laughter inside, as if a family gathering were going on. Dora Cisneros came to the door, smiling. She was shorter than I had expected and rather frail. She had dark hair cut so that thick bangs framed her face. When I told her I was a reporter, she said, "Call my lawyer," and shut the door. There was no particular hostility in her tone; she sounded polite.
There aren’t many people in Brownsville who are willing to discuss the possibility that Dora Cisneros might be innocent-even though she might be.
Canales has declined to comment, but the Cisneros family lawyer and co-counsel, A. C. Nelson, told the Dallas Morning News, "This whole thing is illogical. This is a very traditional woman who built her life around her husband, her kids and her family. This has devastated her. I’ve known Dora Cisneros for more than twenty years, and she would never even dream of doing the things they say she did. . . . There was no animosity toward Joey. It was traumatic for the entire family when Joey died. They grieved for him. Nothing about these charges makes sense." Nelson told the Houston Chronicle, "I can’t help but think it was a case of mistaken identity." He said that Dora Cisneros and Martínez knew each other only because Dora was in the habit of giving used clothes to Martínez. "My client has known this woman for fifteen years. As far as I know, she never read any cards for my client. What the woman had was a business where she sold old and used clothes." Since he gave these interviews, Nelson has stopped talking to the press.
"I think public opinion in Brownsville has crucified her already," a local priest told me. Dora Cisneros has been seen eating with her family at Luby’s cafeteria in the Sunrise Mall. When they appeared, no one greeted them. One woman told me, "There was a conscious effort made not to look in their direction."
Cristina left St. Joe in the late spring. Apparently, she entered another school under an assumed name. "But everyone knew exactly who she was," one student told me. She appears to have become a pariah in Brownsville. It seems clear that both Joey and Cristina are victims.
After I left the Cisneros house, I drove down to Eleventh Street, where the curandera had her store. The scale of Brownsville is such that it is possible to drive from one point to almost any other in ten minutes or so; Cristina’s house is ten minutes from Joey’s house, north of the city; the Mexican part of town, close to the border, is ten minutes farther south of Joey’s house, but it is a part of town where the cultures haven’t melded. On Eleventh Street, the curandera’s tiny shop was now chained shut, but next door was the Yerbería Indio Azteca, a storefront filled with the candles, oils, and herbs used by the curanderas. I bought two candles-Pancho Villa votives, which the text written on the glass promised would bring me "strength and luck." The shop was dusty, and was filled with memorabilia such as a portrait of Robert Kennedy that was at least twenty-five years old, and pictures of many Mexican children-the grandchildren of the woman at the register. At first, she appeared not to understand my Spanish, but after a while she grew more comfortable with me. When I asked her about the curandera, she hugged herself dramatically and said, "It gives me the chills when I read about it." She told me that the curandera "is deeply religious," always asking about the children whose pictures are all over the shop. Then she said, "I don’t really know her." Later, I was told that the curandera had for years bought her supplies from the Yerbería Indio Azteca.
In South Texas, I was haunted by a remark my Aunt Anita once made: "Being an American brought up in Mexico gives one an obsession to try to reconcile two ways of life, two almost opposed points of view, two sets of emotions and interests. . . . It seems to me that if enough Americans know the story, the conflict would resolve on a plane of human friendliness and decency." I wondered how Anita, long dead, would have interpreted Joey’s murder. Although the border towns have several generations of Mexican-Americans that seem assimilated-particularly the children-the contradiction of the society is that vestiges of the traditional shibboleths and the prejudices of both cultures remain. A private-school girl like Cristina may have seemed so assimilated that Joey, a normal American teen-age boy, had no reason to suspect that her family’s values may have differed in any way from his. If Joey had "known the story," as my Aunt Anita put it, would he be alive today?
In brochures distributed to families of murdered children, it is stated that the actual life of the dead child can be lost in the complexities of the legal process. The implication is that a son or a daughter who has been murdered becomes a noun, "the victim," a phantom who begins to exist only as a name in the pages of an indictment or in the memory of family and friends, in black-and-white photographs in high-school yearbooks, in hasty letters written home. New occupations have arisen to protect the rights of murdered children. So many are killed each year that there are now "victimologists," "victim advocates," and "victim support groups" who will appear to "court-watch"; that is, to pack a courtroom, to remind a jury that the victim was once a person, surrounded by friends and family who could not imagine that they would ever have to get through their life without him.
The families of these children do not grieve in the predictable stages outlined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in "On Death and Dying." A homicide leaves too many unanswered questions. Parents will torture themselves: What should we have seen that we didn’t see? For months after Joey was killed, Buddy asked himself, "If I had known that Dora Cisneros was such a possessive mother, would I have stopped Joey from seeing Cristina?" Anne Seymour, a spokeswoman of the National Victim Center, in Arlington, told me, "I don’t use Kübler-Ross’s word ‘acceptance’ when I counsel families of murdered children. There is never ‘acceptance’ when a child is killed." Seymour, whose organization tries to change laws and attitudes about all victims, campaigns against "the societal bias against murder victims." In many violent deaths, people blame the victim. "Friends will think, and may even say out loud, ‘Didn’t you know something like this would happen? Why didn’t you see this?’ The intensity of the sorrow and the frustration over the child’s death is so acute that parents do not get over this kind of grief."
On my last night in Brownsville, Connie, Buddy, and I debated going to see "Like Water for Chocolate," a Mexican movie about thwarted love and magic spells that takes place during the Mexican Revolution. I was curious about it because of our family history. Buddy, understandably, was not interested in our family history. Instead, he wanted to show me a video that Corinne had just been given by a relative, who had discovered footage of Joey at around eight years old playing with his grandfather and then, last spring, reading the Scriptures at his aunt’s wedding. Connie and I sat on the sofa as Buddy calmly inserted the video in the VCR. Suddenly, Joey appeared, smiling and sitting on his grandfather’s lap. His grandfather obviously had a way with children; Joey could hardly stop laughing. "What did the oil say to the vinegar?" Louis Lapeyre asked his grandson. "Close the door, I am dressing!" Then Joey yelled into the camera. Kathy and Eric and Joey sang a song with their grandfather: "If you get to Heaven before I do, just bore a hole and pull me through!" They let out the famous Texas rebel yell-"Yay-hah!" Buddy was stoic watching his child, but Connie cried. The video became scratchy for a moment and filled with static. Buddy got up to fix it. "I want to see Joey at the wedding taken last spring." He played with the tracking on the VCR, and suddenly Joey, a handsome teen-ager, was standing at a podium. The sunlight streamed through the stained-glass windows in the church and made it difficult for me to see Joey clearly. His voice was commanding: "I want to show you the way. . . . Without love it would do me no good. Love is always patient and kind. It is never jealous. Love is never boastful or conceited. It is never rude or selfish." Buddy tried to bring the picture into better focus, but Joey faded in and out.
Twelve Year Anniversary was yesterday.
Rest in Peace,
Albert Joseph Fischer, Jr.
January 16, 1975 - March 03, 1993
Part 2
Alex Perez has been the sheriff of Cameron County, in which Brownsville is situated, for twelve years. Perez, in his fifties, is husky-what Mexicans on the border call poco fuerte-with strong muscles beginning to turn soft. He habitually wears gold aviator glasses, cowboy boots, a gold tie tack in the shape of handcuffs, and a large gold ring with rhinestones in the shape of a pistol.
On March 3rd, the morning that Joey was killed, Perez was eating breakfast at the Toddle Inn, a small restaurant he owns on Central Boulevard, not far from the Sheraton. In the early-morning hours, the Toddle Inn fills with local lawyers and police seeking to hear the morning courthouse chisme-gossip. It was, Perez told me, around seven o’clock, when the call came in: "1900," the code for murder. Immediately, he rushed to his car and, with sirens going full blast, headed for Rancho Viejo. There are twenty or so murders in Brownsville every year, but not many occur in the rich suburbs. When Perez arrived at the house, he saw Buddy Fischer standing in the driveway. Perez knew Buddy from when he was a client of Buddy’s bank. His first thought was that Buddy lived in the area and must have accidentally happened on the crime.
At the house, police found what eventually turned out to be a crucial piece of evidence-a yellow business card lying near Joey’s body. The card was from a bail-bond company in McKinney, Texas, not far from Dallas. The sheriff later theorized that Joey had tried to grab his assailant and the card had fallen from his pocket. On the card, Perez saw, was a handwritten telephone number with a 214 area code, the code for Dallas. "The four was written in a weird handwriting," he told me. "Very distinct. I was asking myself, ‘Why would a young man like this, just starting life, a brilliant student, get shot?’ Usually, it’s either drugs or love." Perez thought it unlikely that Joey had any connection to the local drug trade, he told me, and it also seemed unlikely to him that the murder was a crime of passion. He said that in Brownsville it is unusual for someone so young to get killed over love. But Perez had been on the border long enough to know that anything was possible. He asked the family, "Did Joey ever have any problems with a girlfriend?" They told him about Cristina.
That morning, Marianela Caballero was interviewed at the sheriff’s office. "Did Cristina Cisneros ever say words to you?"
"No," Marianela said. She had no idea why detectives would ask her about Joey’s ex-girlfriend, whom she hardly knew.
Later that day, Cristina appeared at Buddy’s door to make a condolence call. "What happened?" Cristina asked Connie.
Connie was sharp with her. "What do you know about what happened? The sheriff wants to talk to you."
At first, the sheriff and the local district attorney, Luis V. Saenz, did not take the Cisneroses’ connection with Joey any more seriously than their other leads. "The family told me about the crazy calls," Perez said later, "but that didn’t mean murder to me."
The sheriff and the district attorney were also considering the idea that Joey was killed by a drug dealer, who had mistaken him for someone else. Joey’s stepfather, who worked for a Chinese-owned shrimp farm in Arroyo City, about forty miles away, had recently stopped the payment of a check for several hundred thousand dollars to another shrimping company because of a contract dispute. Joey’s stepfather immediately assumed that Joey had been murdered out of revenge. For two days, he was overwrought, weeping uncontrollably, thinking that he was in some way to blame for his stepson’s death. An early investigator on the case pushed the Chinese theory and told Buddy and Corinne that there was the possibility that their other children were in danger. "For two weeks, I would not let my baby out of the house," Connie told me. Buddy and Corinne debated sending Eric and Kathy to San Antonio to stay with their grandparents.
There is no specially trained homicide squad in Brownsville, and the investigation was rigorously pursued by Sheriff Perez’s detectives, Ernesto Flores and Abel Perez. They immediately called McKinney, where the bail-bond company was based, hoping to find a recent application for bail that had been received from South Texas. The bond company gave them a man’s name and a Dallas address and faxed a copy of the man’s bail application. The handwriting had the same florid "4" that appeared on the yellow card. The detectives immediately left for McKinney and got a warrant to rescind the man’s bond. He appeared at the bond company, unsure of what he had done wrong. He identified the yellow card. When they interviewed him, the man said that he had given the card to a friend at a motel in downtown Brownsville; the bail-bond company’s card was a form of insurance if his friend should get arrested.
The detectives knew that this particular motel was a haven for the minor border criminals of the area. Perez’s office began tracking down a few people who had stayed at the motel in the previous months and who they thought might be connected to the man in McKinney. Eventually, they came up with a man named Daniel Garza, a Mexican national who spends a lot of time in Brownsville and San Antonio, and whose nickname is El Güero (the Fair-Haired One). He told them he had a landscape business, but the authorities suspected he might be a small-time drug runner. After being questioned, Garza gave a statement acknowledging that he had arranged Joey Fischer’s killing.
Police describe Garza as a middleman who was having family trouble and had gone to a curandera. Border drug dealers often consult the local curanderas, because they believe that such witchcraft can make them invisible to the federal authorities. "These people in the Mexican culture believe too much in the curanderas," Perez told me. The curandera that Daniel Garza had sought out for his problems, María Mercedes Martínez, had no special reputation. None of the other curanderas of Brownsville had ever heard of her. She was a seventy-two-year-old woman who made a living by charging five dollars to tirar las barajas ("throw the cards"), an unusual practice for a curandera. She did not operate in one of the brightly painted yerberías that advertised special oils and candles; instead, she had a table in a dim back room of a store where secondhand clothes were sold, named La Chuparosa (the Hummingbird), downtown. But, according to the sheriff, Martínez had had a long relationship with Dora Cisneros. Dr. Cisneros’s former office was on a street a few blocks from La Chuparosa and perhaps a ten-minute walk from International Boulevard and the bridge to Mexico.
Although David Cisneros was born in Texas, he had gone to medical school in Mexico. There is a hierarchy among the doctors of the Rio Grande Valley which has to do with whether you attended medical school in the United States or "across." David and Dora Cisneros had lived in Brownsville for many years; they were considered well off but not rich. In 1974, their firstborn son, David, was killed when he was thrown from a vehicle driven by a friend during his senior year at St. Joe. It was said at the time that Dora Cisneros got pregnant again to try to overcome her grief at losing her child. However that may be, when Cristina was born, Dora’s friends called it a miracle.
In recalling Dora Cisneros, the people I talked with in Brownsville tended to describe her as "quiet." She usually wore simple clothes, and she spoke unaccented English; she certainly didn’t seem to be muy Mexicana. She belonged, a friend told me, to a mall-walkers’ club-the members took their exercise by strolling up and down the air-conditioned halls of the Sunrise Mall, across from the Sheraton. She seemed like the picture of middle-class respectability.
According to someone close to the family, Dora was a member of the Garcia family of Los Indios, a ranching community on the American side, close to the Rio Grande, near Brownsville. Los Indios was not a typical middle-class town; someone who grew up in the area told me that the children of the ranching communities close to the river were often strongly influenced by Mexican folktales and superstitions they learned from the braceros who worked on the ranches. In these communities on the border, Mexican traditions are maintained, and the belief in curanderismo is often stronger there than in town. Dora Cisneros spent her childhood in Los Indios but later moved to Brownsville and attended high school. A woman who knew the family remembers that the Garcias owned property and could afford to send Dora and her sister to Villa Maria, a private school, and their sons to St. Joe. In seeking to explain Dora’s personality, this woman said that the family had experienced "much tragedy"; Dora’s uncle is said to have committed suicide, and a brother drowned as a teen-ager. Mrs. Cisneros was ambitious, and was active in a club of local doctors’ wives. She seemed to have become imperious: a former schoolmate told me that she often snubbed her old friends when she ran into them in town. A few people now maintain that in some way she "changed" or "flipped out" after David’s death.
According to someone who knew the Cisneros family, she became more possessive of her other children. Her son Robert became a dentist, and she often called his office. Someone familiar with the office told me that once, when Mrs. Cisneros learned that he was in the middle of performing a root canal, she said, "Well, I don’t care. He knows he needs to be here." When one of Mrs. Cisneros’s sons was having problems in school, she went to talk to his teacher. The teacher told me that Mrs. Cisneros insisted that it was the teacher’s fault, not her son’s, and that her children could do no wrong. The teacher was left with the impression that Dora Cisneros was a woman who should not be crossed.
Mrs. Cisneros also became increasingly religious after David’s death and, some say, began to visit local curanderas. But in the atmosphere of Brownsville seeing curanderas isn’t all that odd-even respected professionals do it. Curanderismo and brujería have always been powerful elements in the cultural history of Mexico. Although Catholicism was well established in Mexico by the end of the eighteenth century, many of the native Mexicans never truly gave up their ancient beliefs, much to the annoyance of the local religious powers. A return to folk-based religious practices occurred during the Mexican Revolution, when the bishops and priests fled northern Mexico for the safety of South Texas. It was the fusion between the pagan beliefs and the theology of the Church that Anita Brenner described in "Idols Behind Altars": the pagan "idols" blended uneasily with the "altars" of Mexican Catholicism, she wrote. Magic continues to pervade daily life in Mexico: the marketplaces are filled with herbs and oils; a popular soap opera in the nineteen-eighties was "El Maleficio" ("The Evil One"), in which a Oaxaca businessman prayed nightly to Satan. Even in the high-tech factories in the Matamoros industrial parks, these superstitions are part of the ordinary routines of the border. Gary Cartwright, writing in Texas Monthly, reported that a maquiladora was spared being shut down because a curandero was able to "de-hex" a piece of machinery with which a worker had been injured. Pregnant women go to work daily at the maquiladoras with ribbons holding amulets and talismans, and milagros, small religious paintings, pinned to their underwear.
One morning, I went to talk with Antonio Zavaleta, the dean of liberal arts at the University of Texas at Brownsville. Zavaleta has a doctorate in anthropology, and his area of expertise is the folk medicine and witchcraft of the Mexican border. He is tall and has a rumpled look; in his office are religious retablos and baskets of the kinds of oil that the curanderas frequently use. During the Matamoros cult-killings case, Zavaleta, as the local expert on palo mayombe, the particular type of black magic employed, received national attention. At the time, he was also on the Brownsville city council, and was thinking about running for mayor. Zavaleta grew up in Brownsville and at his grandparents’ ranch in northern Mexico, and, like many other Mexican-Americans of the border, he considers folk medicine and spells part of his culture. "As I got older," Zavaleta told me, "I became so fascinated by the other side of Brownsville that I have spent my entire adult life studying it."
In rural Mexico, the curandera is the practitioner of health care, a respected healer. There are several types of curanderas, among them those who work "on the material level," giving massage, and those who work "on the mental level," using a form of visualization, like many New Age therapists. A common treatment of these curanderas is to roll an egg over the body, then crack the egg into water for some kind of divination. In Brownsville and Matamoros, there are also curanderas whose specialty is trabajos, works of "white magic and black magic." By Zavaleta’s definition, anyone who is doing trabajos is practicing brujería. Clients seek out these curanderas to affect a relationship-to bring about love, to end a marriage, to attract a husband or a boyfriend, or to harm someone. "There’s a general theme, but individual practitioners develop individual style," Zavaleta said. "If they are trying to harm someone, they use a combination of rituals. Usually, they will use a doll made of wax or rags. They may get hair, an eyelash, or clothing. Then, through a series of incantations, they try to encapsule that, along with a picture of the person, in a clay jar or some other kind of vessel. The concept of a knot is very common. So is the process of tying and enclosing their spells." Zavaleta’s research has taken him to Catemaco, in southeastern Mexico, where the great witches are based, and into the dim yerberías of Matamoros to observe the lesbian channellers of Pancho Villa. Ever since the Matamoros cult killings, Zavaleta told me, he will not cross the border without wearing a cross around his neck.
Police investigating Joey’s death speculate that the curandera, as Martínez is now known in Brownsville, made a deal with Daniel Garza when he came to see her about his family trouble. She said, according to a source close to the D.A.’s office, that she would help him if he took care of someone for her. Garza, according to the subsequent indictment, hired two men named Israel Bazaldua Cepeda and Heriberto Puentes Pizana. The indictment goes on to say that Garza gave Bazaldua Cepeda and Puentes Pizana the prom photograph of Joey so they would make no mistake about their target. There are conflicting reports of how much they were allegedly paid; it could have been as much as four thousand dollars.
On April 5th, a month after Joey was killed, the sheriff’s office arrested Martínez at her house, a small pink building in a barrio near downtown Brownsville. At La Chuparosa, detectives confiscated candles, tarot cards, and oils in the tiny room behind the shop containing racks of used clothes. Reportedly, the sheriff’s office found a piece of paper bearing the name "Cristina Cisneros." Almost immediately, Martínez, who had no prior police record, told the detectives that she had a relationship with Dora Cisneros. At seven-thirty the next morning, according to a source in the D.A.’s office, Martínez, wearing a wire provided by the sheriff’s office, met Dora Cisneros. When Cisneros handed Martínez five hundred dollars in cash, the sheriff of Cameron County moved in and arrested Cisneros for capital murder, a charge that carries the possibility of life imprisonment or death by lethal injection. Martínez was also charged with capital murder.
When news reports about the arrests of Dora Cisneros and María Mercedes Martínez first went out in Brownsville, Buddy was in the warehouse at kemet. A close friend had called Connie, and Connie immediately went out to tell Buddy. Some time before, Buddy had decided that he would not bother the D.A. or the sheriff. He had referred to the process of finding Joey’s killer as a "roller coaster" and had said that it would upset him too much when there were slowdowns in the investigation.
In the weeks before her mother was arrested, friends of Cristina Cisneros said she was having a hard time handling Joey’s death and seemed very distressed. Once, seeing Marianela in a school hallway, she hugged her. Although Cristina had started dating the other boy, a friend of hers later told me that whenever anyone mentioned Joey’s name she "started crying," and often brought out pictures of him.
On the morning Joey was killed, Dora Cisneros had gone to St. Joe to take Cristina home. According to a teacher, the assistant principal said to Mrs. Cisneros, "You, of all people, should know how a mother feels." The assistant principal meant the comment to refer sympathetically to the death of her son David, but Mrs. Cisneros just "stared and stared," the teacher told me. The assistant principal thought Mrs. Cisneros had misunderstood what she’d said, and added, "You lost a son, remember?" After learning about the charges against Mrs. Cisneros, the teacher said, the assistant principal was horrified that she had said that to her.
On the morning that Cristina’s mother was arrested, Dr. Cisneros called the school and asked that Cristina be brought into the guidance office, so that local reporters would not swarm around her. Several of the teachers were concerned about how Cristina would now be treated by the other students. Since Joey’s death, the grief counselling at the school had been intense. Several of Joey’s friends who were in Mrs. Johnson’s English class discussed "Murder in the Cathedral" and Eliot’s observation that death could come in a thousand different ways. It did not surprise Mrs. Johnson that none of the students mentioned García Márquez’s observation on Santiago Nasar’s death-"There had never been a death more foretold"-for the sexual taboos implicit in García Márquez’s chronicle had never seemed to apply to the middle-class teen-age world of St. Joseph Academy.
At St. Joe, there was a great deal of gossip about Mrs. Cisneros. It was quickly recalled that Dora Cisneros’s other daughter had had a boyfriend who had broken up with her. Soon afterward, it was rumored, someone stopped his car and stabbed him repeatedly, but he survived. Although Sheriff Perez traced the boyfriend to a distant city, he could not prove that the rumors were true. Some teachers at St. Joe who had known nothing about brujería accepted as fact the theory that Cristina and Joey had slept together and that the curandera had promised Mrs. Cisneros that if Joey was murdered Cristina would get her virginity back.
On April 6th, the Herald ran the story of the the arrests of Dora Cisneros and María Martínez at the top of the front page. That day, a woman dumped a bulky brown paper shopping bag into a resaca near downtown Brownsville. As luck would have it, park employees were working on the grounds nearby, and noticed the woman dumping the bag and then hurrying away. They went over and took the bag out of the water, moving so quickly that the paper was hardly wet. The bag’s contents frightened them: a full collection of the paraphernalia of brujería required for the most evil of spells, illness and death. There was a garland consisting of three heads of garlic with pins stuck in them and wrapped in yellow cloth; a vial of Embrujo de Sevilla perfume; horseshoes wrapped with red ribbons; an aloe-vera plant, also wrapped in ribbons; two doll-size figures that looked like miniature corpses made of black wax and covered with many pins; and a deck of Mexican tarot cards. The park workers reported the discovery to the Brownsville police, and the police called Antonio Zavaleta. By now, almost everyone in South Texas knows that Zavaleta is the person to call about anything having to do with brujería and the local curanderas. Zavaleta photographed and documented all the items in the bag. Whoever its owner may have been, this was "very secret stuff," Zavaleta told me. "A practitioner would not have kept these sorts of things in her shop. She wouldn’t have it out for people to see. The pins are there, of course, to inflict pain. The aloe-vera plant wrapped with the ribbon would represent the person asking for the trabajo." Although Zavaleta emphasized that, despite the "amazing coincidence," there was no evidence linking the bag to María Mercedes Martínez, the tarot cards made him wonder, since she was one of the few curanderas who used them.
After less than a week in Brownsville, I learned to walk in and out of offices without bothering to make appointments; the telephone and standard office procedures clearly meant little on the border. Sheriff Perez could often be found at the Toddle Inn. District Attorney Saenz was either at his office or in one of the many courtrooms of Brownsville’s modern limestone courthouse; local jurisprudence appeared to depend almost exclusively on his administrative abilities.
Saenz is a former Brownsville school-teacher who decided at the age of twenty-nine to go to law school. He now has the cautious mien of a man who is always thinking about the possibility that his convictions might be reversed by a higher court. Although the sheriff’s office arrested Dora Cisneros on April 6th and it was the middle of June when I arrived in Brownsville, Saenz had yet to present the case to the grand jury of Cameron County. Saenz has been told repeatedly that this case could make his career or ruin it. As reporters have telephoned him from around the state, he has burrowed in, refusing to return most calls. Some local reporters faulted Saenz for his slowness in seeking an indictment, but his seeming inactivity has camouflaged an obsession with the case. He told me, "I’d rather delay the indictment six months than be forced to trial with a sloppy case."
For Saenz to obtain convictions on capital-murder charges, he will have to successfully navigate the state’s accomplice-testimony rule. In Texas, a conviction cannot be sustained with only the testimony of an accomplice. Saenz explained to me, "If A gets on the stand and implicates B, we, the state, must corroborate the evidence." Prosecutors would need to be able to tie the defendant to the crime with other evidence. In the view of Rey Cantu, a former district attorney of Cameron County, prosecuting Dora Cisneros and María Mercedes Martínez will be a challenge for Luis Saenz. Cantu was the prosecutor in a similar case in Brownsville, in which a well-known doctor, Victor Leal, was accused of hiring a killer to murder his brother-in-law, an elderly landowner, with whom he was having a property dispute. Just before they were to go to court to settle the land matters, the brother-in-law was murdered. "So we tracked it down, and it took us two years," Cantu said. "We caught the shooter and we caught the finger man and we caught the driver. The driver flipped, and gave us the shooter and the finger man. Then we went to trial on the shooter. He flipped, and then we went to trial on Leal, who’s a doctor and very generous and a very prominent member of the community. He was convicted, and then the conviction was on appeal for five years. It was affirmed by the Court of Appeals, but the Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest court, reversed it, because of the accomplice-testimony rule."
Cantu, however, is optimistic about Saenz’s potential for success with the Fischer case. Besides the testimony of Martínez, Saenz has Daniel Garza’s "possession of knowledge"-the knowledge being that Joey had worn a tuxedo in the photograph. "He knows something, and the only way he would have known that is from the conduit, but it had to have come through one of the Cisneroses," Cantu says. "It is crucial evidence in front of the jury. Who the hell is going to have a picture of this kid in a prom outfit? And, of course, we have the tape. It is enough."
In the pathology of criminal cases, there is often behavior that is inexplicable. Still, several questions occurred to me about the strength of the D.A.’s case as I talked with Luis Saenz. Why would Martínez enter into a conspiracy for murder? And, if she did, what debt was she paying off to Dora Cisneros? Was it a question of money? Will Martínez testify that Dora Cisneros somehow suspected that her daughter was no longer a virgin? Saenz, who is the father of a teen-age son, believes that "if they had sex the fact that they had sex is within the range of normal teen-age behavior." However repressive the culture, nothing justifies a murder-except, possibly, self-defense. "There are shootings in Brownsville every day of the week," Saenz went on. "But this one is so senseless. You go full circle with this thing and you keep coming back to the same fact: This killing is sick. Pointless. Such a waste. I am obsessed with this case. Buddy is my neighbor. You know, I can’t get over how controlled Buddy and Corinne are when they come into this office. If it were my teen-age son, I would be hysterical. I don’t mean to sound racist, but what is it with you gringos? How can you be so calm over the death of a child?"
In late July, a week before Saenz finally obtained the indictments of Dora Cisneros, María Mercedes Martínez ("a/k/a la curandera," the original indictment noted), and Daniel Garza ("el güero"), authorities in Mexico detained one of the alleged hit men, Israel Bazaldua Cepeda, for questioning on a separate homicide charge. Bazaldua Cepeda can’t have been surprised by the appearance of the Mexican police; he was reportedly carrying an amparo, a restraining order signed by a Mexican federal judge. An amparo is a guarantee of protection of civil rights. Although the case has been widely publicized, the Matamoros police released Bazaldua Cepeda before he could be questioned by the sheriff’s office. "It’s Brownsville" was the explanation I was given for how Bazaldua Cepeda could have eluded the D.A.
Extradition of Mexican citizens is a difficult if not virtually impossible process. Mexico operates under a form of Roman law: if a Mexican citizen commits a capital offense in another country he can be tried only in a Mexican court. (Mexico does not allow capital punishment.) I was surprised when Oscar Ponce, the lead prosecutor on the Fischer case, told me that the sealed indictment for the hit men was for capital murder, a fact that made their extradition impossible. "That’s part of our charging strategy," he told me. Even if he had indicted the hit men on a lesser charge, he said, he doubted that the Mexican government would have released them. Additionally, the prosecutor didn’t want to weaken the case against Cisneros and the others. "The extradition process is an incredible scandal," David Berg, a prominent Houston trial lawyer, says. "I don’t know of a single instance in which the Mexican government has extradited a Mexican citizen for a major crime committed in the United States." Despite the growing number of connections between the two countries brought about by the maquiladoras and by nafta, the Mexican government hasn’t changed its practices. On the border, most extradition requests have to do with drug crimes, and the local dealers efficiently pay off the politicians in the neighboring state of Tamaulipas. (In one famous case, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent pulled a suspect through a hole in a fence on the border to prosecute him.) Joey’s murder is an exception for the border: no drugs are involved, and his family has influence in the area. On the face of it, nothing should have prevented the Mexican government from giving up Bazaldua Cepeda and Puentes Pizana, the other hit man, on a lesser charge. "We cannot go over and kidnap them," Alex Perez told me. "But, sooner or later, they will cross the border, and then we’ll get them."
There was some surprise in the area when Dora Cisneros engaged J. A. (Tony) Canales to represent her. Canales, a former United States Attorney for the Southern District of Texas, has made a big reputation in South Texas by representing the area drug dealers. As a trial lawyer, Canales, according to Rey Cantu, "is not your usual flash-bang criminal-defense lawyer." He is the son of a prominent South Texas family of judges and lawyers; his mother is a doctor. He prides himself on his understanding of the arcana of Texas criminal law.
Canales’s strategy will probably be to rely on the potential difficulty of proving capital murder given the state’s accomplice-testimony rule. Several weeks ago, all three defendants pleaded not guilty, but Canales has to be concerned about the amount of evidence that Saenz has: the statements that María Martínez, the curandera, and Daniel Garza, the middleman, have given to the sheriff’s department, including a statement by Garza that he was given Joey’s prom photograph by the curandera; the wire; and statements to the D.A.’s office by Joey’s friends about Joey and Cristina’s putative sexual adventure. Saenz is expected to attempt to prove that Dora Cisneros’s motive for having Joey murdered was that he had told his friends of that adventure. The conflict over the ring may play a role as well.
One afternoon, I drove to the Cisneros home, a brick ranch house. The neighborhood was quiet, middle-class, and respectable, but not quite as affluent as Rancho Viejo. Across the street, some children were playing basketball in a driveway. I walked up the sidewalk and rang the bell. I was surprised to hear laughter inside, as if a family gathering were going on. Dora Cisneros came to the door, smiling. She was shorter than I had expected and rather frail. She had dark hair cut so that thick bangs framed her face. When I told her I was a reporter, she said, "Call my lawyer," and shut the door. There was no particular hostility in her tone; she sounded polite.
There aren’t many people in Brownsville who are willing to discuss the possibility that Dora Cisneros might be innocent-even though she might be.
Canales has declined to comment, but the Cisneros family lawyer and co-counsel, A. C. Nelson, told the Dallas Morning News, "This whole thing is illogical. This is a very traditional woman who built her life around her husband, her kids and her family. This has devastated her. I’ve known Dora Cisneros for more than twenty years, and she would never even dream of doing the things they say she did. . . . There was no animosity toward Joey. It was traumatic for the entire family when Joey died. They grieved for him. Nothing about these charges makes sense." Nelson told the Houston Chronicle, "I can’t help but think it was a case of mistaken identity." He said that Dora Cisneros and Martínez knew each other only because Dora was in the habit of giving used clothes to Martínez. "My client has known this woman for fifteen years. As far as I know, she never read any cards for my client. What the woman had was a business where she sold old and used clothes." Since he gave these interviews, Nelson has stopped talking to the press.
"I think public opinion in Brownsville has crucified her already," a local priest told me. Dora Cisneros has been seen eating with her family at Luby’s cafeteria in the Sunrise Mall. When they appeared, no one greeted them. One woman told me, "There was a conscious effort made not to look in their direction."
Cristina left St. Joe in the late spring. Apparently, she entered another school under an assumed name. "But everyone knew exactly who she was," one student told me. She appears to have become a pariah in Brownsville. It seems clear that both Joey and Cristina are victims.
After I left the Cisneros house, I drove down to Eleventh Street, where the curandera had her store. The scale of Brownsville is such that it is possible to drive from one point to almost any other in ten minutes or so; Cristina’s house is ten minutes from Joey’s house, north of the city; the Mexican part of town, close to the border, is ten minutes farther south of Joey’s house, but it is a part of town where the cultures haven’t melded. On Eleventh Street, the curandera’s tiny shop was now chained shut, but next door was the Yerbería Indio Azteca, a storefront filled with the candles, oils, and herbs used by the curanderas. I bought two candles-Pancho Villa votives, which the text written on the glass promised would bring me "strength and luck." The shop was dusty, and was filled with memorabilia such as a portrait of Robert Kennedy that was at least twenty-five years old, and pictures of many Mexican children-the grandchildren of the woman at the register. At first, she appeared not to understand my Spanish, but after a while she grew more comfortable with me. When I asked her about the curandera, she hugged herself dramatically and said, "It gives me the chills when I read about it." She told me that the curandera "is deeply religious," always asking about the children whose pictures are all over the shop. Then she said, "I don’t really know her." Later, I was told that the curandera had for years bought her supplies from the Yerbería Indio Azteca.
In South Texas, I was haunted by a remark my Aunt Anita once made: "Being an American brought up in Mexico gives one an obsession to try to reconcile two ways of life, two almost opposed points of view, two sets of emotions and interests. . . . It seems to me that if enough Americans know the story, the conflict would resolve on a plane of human friendliness and decency." I wondered how Anita, long dead, would have interpreted Joey’s murder. Although the border towns have several generations of Mexican-Americans that seem assimilated-particularly the children-the contradiction of the society is that vestiges of the traditional shibboleths and the prejudices of both cultures remain. A private-school girl like Cristina may have seemed so assimilated that Joey, a normal American teen-age boy, had no reason to suspect that her family’s values may have differed in any way from his. If Joey had "known the story," as my Aunt Anita put it, would he be alive today?
In brochures distributed to families of murdered children, it is stated that the actual life of the dead child can be lost in the complexities of the legal process. The implication is that a son or a daughter who has been murdered becomes a noun, "the victim," a phantom who begins to exist only as a name in the pages of an indictment or in the memory of family and friends, in black-and-white photographs in high-school yearbooks, in hasty letters written home. New occupations have arisen to protect the rights of murdered children. So many are killed each year that there are now "victimologists," "victim advocates," and "victim support groups" who will appear to "court-watch"; that is, to pack a courtroom, to remind a jury that the victim was once a person, surrounded by friends and family who could not imagine that they would ever have to get through their life without him.
The families of these children do not grieve in the predictable stages outlined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in "On Death and Dying." A homicide leaves too many unanswered questions. Parents will torture themselves: What should we have seen that we didn’t see? For months after Joey was killed, Buddy asked himself, "If I had known that Dora Cisneros was such a possessive mother, would I have stopped Joey from seeing Cristina?" Anne Seymour, a spokeswoman of the National Victim Center, in Arlington, told me, "I don’t use Kübler-Ross’s word ‘acceptance’ when I counsel families of murdered children. There is never ‘acceptance’ when a child is killed." Seymour, whose organization tries to change laws and attitudes about all victims, campaigns against "the societal bias against murder victims." In many violent deaths, people blame the victim. "Friends will think, and may even say out loud, ‘Didn’t you know something like this would happen? Why didn’t you see this?’ The intensity of the sorrow and the frustration over the child’s death is so acute that parents do not get over this kind of grief."
On my last night in Brownsville, Connie, Buddy, and I debated going to see "Like Water for Chocolate," a Mexican movie about thwarted love and magic spells that takes place during the Mexican Revolution. I was curious about it because of our family history. Buddy, understandably, was not interested in our family history. Instead, he wanted to show me a video that Corinne had just been given by a relative, who had discovered footage of Joey at around eight years old playing with his grandfather and then, last spring, reading the Scriptures at his aunt’s wedding. Connie and I sat on the sofa as Buddy calmly inserted the video in the VCR. Suddenly, Joey appeared, smiling and sitting on his grandfather’s lap. His grandfather obviously had a way with children; Joey could hardly stop laughing. "What did the oil say to the vinegar?" Louis Lapeyre asked his grandson. "Close the door, I am dressing!" Then Joey yelled into the camera. Kathy and Eric and Joey sang a song with their grandfather: "If you get to Heaven before I do, just bore a hole and pull me through!" They let out the famous Texas rebel yell-"Yay-hah!" Buddy was stoic watching his child, but Connie cried. The video became scratchy for a moment and filled with static. Buddy got up to fix it. "I want to see Joey at the wedding taken last spring." He played with the tracking on the VCR, and suddenly Joey, a handsome teen-ager, was standing at a podium. The sunlight streamed through the stained-glass windows in the church and made it difficult for me to see Joey clearly. His voice was commanding: "I want to show you the way. . . . Without love it would do me no good. Love is always patient and kind. It is never jealous. Love is never boastful or conceited. It is never rude or selfish." Buddy tried to bring the picture into better focus, but Joey faded in and out.