Ex-Inmate Now Free as a Bird read the front page of the Waco Tribune-Herald. Owen tracked down one informant, Jesse Ivy, who had testified that Spence had admitted to killing the teenagers; now Ivy told Owen that Spence had said nothing of the sort.

These kids, he felt sure, had been killed somewhere else. Spence was the first of the four defendants to stand trial. Simons hypothesized that Deeb had hired David Wayne Spence to murder her and that Spence and two friends, Anthony and Gilbert Melendez, had seen the victims and mistaken Montgomery for the target. Every murder involves a vast web of people, from the witnesses and the detectives who first come to the scene, to the lawyers and the juries who examine the facts, to the families of the victims, who must make sense of the aftermath. Then, six days before Spences trial, they were dealt an even bigger blow: in an unexpected about-face, Tony pleaded guilty in exchange for a life sentence. He and Reaves went looking for Carroll, but to their dismay, he was dead; after being paroled, he had died of a self-inflected gunshot wound, in 1990. One testified that he had heard Deeb ask Spence if he knew of someone who could get rid of Kelley for a share of insurance money and that Spence had replied he could do it. The deputy had also heardfrom other officers or his informantsthat White had been bitten by her assailant, and so on March 17 he visited Washington in jail and asked for his permission to take a dental mold. It was April 1983; in a few months, the local media would mark the one-year anniversary of the murders, and yet the investigation was still floundering. The semen found on Whites body had never been tested for DNA, Dannen realized with excitement. Feazell, who is back to being a lawyer, in Austin, still considers the lake murder convictions one of his biggest triumphs. Franks had originally told a newspaper reporter that when his son didnt return home, he became anxious that Kenneth might be in trouble and went out looking for him at four-thirty in the morning. I was amazed, he told me. For his detractors in the WPD, Simonss efforts to go after Deeb were evidence of his questionable methods and fixations. Feazell also included Chief Scott, who had publicly accused him of refusing to prosecute valid criminal cases. Simons, meanwhile, began to work on Gilbert Melendez. I dont know whats happened to you, he whispered in her ear, but I promise you one thing. Simons, meanwhile, became one of the most well-respected officers in the state. I dont know why I started writing, Thompson told me, but I felt it was the thing to do. On March 30 Dannen was busy writing in his apartment when the phone rang. The whole community was just in shock. Thats hard to believe, said the deputy to reporters as he walked out. I wouldnt doubt that he started saying the police thought he did it, or he might have said he did it, to make himself look like a badass. Melendez gave it some thought. When Butler first saw the lake murders file, he immediately asked Salinas if theyd checked the bodies for bite marks. She was David Spences mother. White had struggled with her attackerher nose was broken, her ear torn, her body battered. There was no evidence of a boat, and there were no tire tracks around the Speegleville gate, which closed at eleven. The officer was none other than Jan Price. The polygraph, given twelve days after the murders, was ultimately inconclusiveyet decidedly strange. Spence had, however, been informed that he was a suspect by then. To this day, they were the worst photos I have ever seen. Now she hoped she could help free Washington and Williamsand cast some light on the DA and his investigator. I have a witness..

Still, the defense attorneys made a miscalculation in their overall strategy. Franks' body was found propped against a tree, with sunglasses over his eyes. A Baptist preachers son who took to the pulpit himself on occasion, Feazell married and with a son of his ownhad promised that he would be active in the courtroom; his first trial as lead prosecutor, in fact, was to be Spences aggravated sexual abuse case. (The charge was indeed dropped, but Simons has said repeatedly that only the DA had the power to drop charges. Local newscasts repeatedly showed images of ambulance workers and police officers, including Simons, carrying three body bags out from the brush. Jarred Salsa Helps Revive a Nearly 70-Year-Old Tex-Mex Institution, The Top 50 Texas BBQ Joints: 2021 Edition. Not once did I hear Well beat this, youre innocent, he said. All rights reserved. Its to show Im still here, he said. Their parentsits horrible what theyve been through. Price and Turks investigation went through May 1988, when she took their findings to the FBI and the U.S. attorney in Waco. In the Summer of 1982 the town of Waco Texas would forever be haunted by the mysterious deaths of three teenagers. Feazell brought him to the jury room. WebWaco had been having a violent summer; it was July 14, and already a dozen people had been murdered in the city of 100,000. I love you all, he said with tears in his eyes. Dannen, on the ground in Texas, immersed himself in the case. Though there was nothing exculpatory in the odontology testimony, the lawyers decided to address it at the upcoming hearing anyway, just to put it in the record. Unfortunately, however, the odontologists took a long time completing their assessments, and as the October 1993 deadline for the depositions approached, the TRC team realized the full odontology report was going to be late. He also built friendships with more people around Waco, sometimes crashing on their couches when his reporting kept him late. There has never been anything said or written that has ever changed her opinion that her jury made the right decision, Deaconson said. There were so many witnesses they wanted to call that they first persuaded Judge Norman Black to let them collect depositions instead of having everyone testify in court. The testimonyeveryones bite mark is different, like a fingerprintwas very convincing.. The next day, Simons pulled all the police reports that had been filed in the case and, with the help of Baierwhom Scott assigned to assist Simonsbegan looking for any leads that hadnt been exhausted. Dannen had paid for all the DNA testing himself; by the time the results came in, hed spent close to $10,000. Yes, Kelley repliedin fact, people had asked if they were sisters. Dannen himself was beginning to feel drawn into the lake murders for reasons that went beyond his book contract. Simons thought the inconsistencies were likely due to Melendezs drug- and alcohol-addled memory, but the changing statements, plus the fact that Melendez claimed it had been Spence alone who did all the raping and killing, made other investigators suspicious. He sat down, typed a letter to district judge George Allen, and faxed it to him the next day. My responsibility to Calvin Washington took precedence over my interests as a journalist and book writer, Dannen told me. In return Melendez got two life sentences. 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. I kept shaking my head, he told me. When Simons then learned that, two weeks before the murders, Deeb had taken out an accident insurance policy on Kelley that paid $20,000 in the event of her deathand listed himself as Kelleys common-law husbandhe felt his instincts confirmed. Evans had seen plenty of murder and mayhem in her career, but nothing this macabre. She wondered about Tony; if he was indeed innocent, surely Dannens discoveries could help exonerate him somehow. Talk about a commanding presence. In THE MURDERS AT THE LAKE by Michael Hall, in TEXAS MONTHLY 2014, Hall describes Waco cop Simons, who has arrested a suspect named Muneer Mohammed Deeb for the murders of Raylene Rice, Kenneth Franks, and Jill Montgomery. Two fishermen discovered the teens bodies, and the grisly crime scene shook even the most seasoned officers and had Waco residents wondering how something so horrific could happen here. However, his conviction was reversed and he was found not guilty on retrial in Tarrant County in 1993. We had life-size pictures of the marks and a cast of [Spences] teeth brought into the jury room, remembered one juror afterward. Spence raped and stabbed Jill, then Raylene, and finally he killed Kenneth. 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. in 2014, insisting he was painting houses in Bryan, as several alibi witnesses had told police he was. Now she told Price in detail how Simons had visited her after hearing that she had dated Washington; though shed told him she had no information to offer, he kept returning, even bringing crime-scene photos. It began to dawn on both lawyers that the Spence case was going to be different from any they had handled before. Hunt even got an insurance salesman to explain that Deebs insurance policy on Kelley was the kind often used to cover employees in case of accidents.

A book comes out by a New York writer that says Tonys innocent and Texas may have executed an innocent manand Tonys going to get clemency? February 12, 2019 Lanie. Truman Simons, who was with the Waco police department and had been one of the first respondents on the crime scene, also assisted the investigation in an informal capacity. Simons decided to share his findings with Wacos new district attorney, Vic Feazell. WebLake Waco Murders By Allie Roberts On a muggy, Texas summer night in 1982, tragedy struck. The results, as they came in, proved astonishing. (Simons has said that he got involved only after he received calls from a few of his informants. One night, driving home at midnight after a long interview with Dennis Baier, a discombobulated Dannen was pulled over by a cop for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. He had recently received a letter from Dannen saying that a breakthrough with the DNA testing was imminent.

He did it! she screamed. List of people executed in Texas, 19901999, Pain echoes 10 years after grisly deaths (Houston Chronicle, July 26, 1992), "1983 Sees Arrests in Triple Slaying Case", "3 decades after brutal killings, last defendant is no more", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=1982_Lake_Waco_murders&oldid=1119631412, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License 3.0, This page was last edited on 2 November 2022, at 16:00. Yes, admitted Deeb; he often spent time at the Rainbow Drive Inn. The two girls were stabbed repeatedly, their throats cut, and had smaller, shallow cuts on their breasts that pathologists would later identify as torture wounds. Schonemann was not about to give up: after landing a job at the Capital Punishment Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law, he continued to represent Spence pro bono. Hes thought about his brother, Gilbert, whom he never got to see again after their brief reunion in 1992, before Muneer Deebs retrial. Thompson vowed to help Dannen, doing what she could to open doors for him in Waco and Waxahachie as he tried to reconstruct what had happened on July 13, 1982. This didnt surprise his fellow officers; it was this kind of dedication that had helped him solve difficult cases in the past. In advance of their testimony, Tony and Gilbert had been brought to Fort Worth, and the two were allowed to see each other for the first time in ten years. I am perplexed and bewildered, as Im sure a lot of people are, he told the Waxahachie Daily Light. Oh, God, I was with them every minute all night when they were killed, he sobbed. Spence seemed more and more bewildered about what was going on in his mind. But this one, she said, looked shiny and brand-new, not like it had been sitting outside for two years. Kathy Blackwell is an executive editor at Texas Monthly. 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. 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. She was a tomboy who had grown up wanting to be a cop, like her grandfather, and joined the Detroit Police Department in 1977. But the world that she and Turk were investigating was so shadowy that they never got anywhere on the Lake Waco case. Though he wasnt a regular churchgoer, Simons felt Gods hand in his work, and he often quoted from the Book of Matthew: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God.. The police investigation and criminal trials that followed the murders lasted for more than a decade and resulted in the execution of one man, David Wayne Spence, and life prison sentences for two other men allegedly involved in the crime, Anthony and Gilbert Melendez. I dont know who it was or the circumstances, but I never believed we got the complete picture, Goble said. After his direct appeal had been denied, the former shop-keeper, who never wavered in his protestations of innocence, had resolved to free himself: sitting on the floor of his cell at the Ellis Unit, hed studied law books and typed out cases, trying to learn the rhythms of legal writing. Melendez, who was most recently denied parole in May 2016, asserted his innocence until the end, says Jan Thompson, the aunt of one of the victims, who Melendez often called and wrote. Wed paint all day, then throw down our sleeping bags, turn on the radio, cook, and go to sleep. I was like the Anne Frank of Texas, he joked. But Im still here.. He signed the paperwork for disposition of his personal property and recited the 23rd Psalm, saying it gave him peace. Speaking of his decision to move to Mexico, he even referred to the Wizards words to the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz (You are under the unfortunate delusion that simply because you run away from danger you have no courage. His hair is cut close to the scalp, and his close-set eyes are dark with worry. During an interview with investigators, she had fingered a man named Muneer Deeb, who she said didnt like Kenneth and became angry at the mere mention of his name. He is mostly confined to his cell; he gets two hours daily in the dayroom, where he can watch TV, and two hours outside. Harper was no longer alive to talk; he had killed himself with a shotgun in 1994 when police tried to arrest him after hed attacked an elderly couple with a knife. Did Spence do it or not, I cant tell you, she said. Kenneth had last been seen with two girls from Waxahachie, a blond seventeen-year-old named Raylene Rice and a brunette seventeen-year-old named Jill Montgomery. Everyone, it seemed, had forgotten him. The call was urgent: a body had been discovered at Speegleville Park, near Lake Waco. Keeping his whereabouts a secret, Dannen continued his investigation from Mexico, hiring a detective service to pursue leads. The youth and innocence of the victimsall three were high school studentsmade the crime particularly senseless. After Anthony Melendezs death in 2017, Simons said Anthony Melendez initially denied his involvement in the murders but failed polygraph tests. Its hard to think of another crime that has provoked so many long-lingering questions and involved so many people, all of whom have a stake in the DNA tests and many of whom remain haunted by events from three decades ago. But in my mind, this doesn't change anything as far as Mr. Deeb's culpability goes."[11]. He and his fellow officers soon spotted something else: a bent knee, rising above some weeds. A few days later I called Dannen again. Compelled by his vow to avenge the teenagershed whispered the same promise to Raylene and Kenneth as he had to JillSimons kept tabs on investigators progress, even stopping by police headquarters after his shift to read their reports. She recognized the inconsistencies in Gilberts testimony but said his words had been corroborated at Spences second trial by Tonyas well as by the bite-mark evidence. But sometimes you get hold of a case, and sometimes the case gets hold of you.. We held Truman on a pedestal for so long. She uses a cane to walk, and because of failing eyesight, she cant drive. Their decision would prove pivotal: after two weeks of testimony, in a ruling that sent shock waves through Waco, Deeb was found not guilty. 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