Faces of Evil Page 15

  It had bothered the driver enough that she had felt uncomfortable dropping Maria off, even though the man had stayed on the bus for one more block.

  “She saw it as her duty, her responsibility,” Manny told me later, “to take care of the people who rode on her bus. She was worried about the blind woman.”

  Unfortunately, Lt. Zamora could not have chosen a more reluctant witness for me. It’s not that she didn’t want to help, it’s just that she insisted, repeatedly, that she had not seen the man.

  “You spoke to him,” Zamora pointed out. “You had to have seen him.”

  Shaking her head firmly, she said, “Not really. I just got a glimpse of him out of the corner of my eye. That’s all.”

  “That’s enough,” Zamora said.

  Manny knew how powerful the subconscious is, even in witnesses who swear that they didn’t see anything. “They don’t know until they do it,” he pointed out, referring to the composite sketching process. “They really saw more than they think they saw.”

  It was worth a try, Manny figured. “I don’t hesitate to use composites as an investigative tool,” he said later. “I figure, hey, if it doesn’t look like the guy after all, then we haven’t lost anything.”

  But the truth is that, by this point in the investigation, they just didn’t have anything else. On the one hand, they had collected good evidence samples from Maria’s rape kit. A “rape kit” contains evidence collected by physicians during an examination following the assault. It can include blood and semen samples, as well as swabs of saliva taken from bite marks, pubic hairs and other identifying markers left behind by the rapist. However, until they had a suspect in hand, they had no basis for comparison.

  They had to start someplace.

  Over the bus driver’s adamant objections, Manny made an appointment with me. I was still not on staff with the HPD at that time, so I didn’t have an office and had to bring my gear out to the Artesian building, where Sex Crimes was located. When I passed the waiting room on the second floor, I spotted a blind man with a cane chatting with two detectives and it surprised me. For some reason, it hadn’t occurred to me that Maria’s husband might also be blind. How helpless he must have felt at that point, though he did not display the rage that victims’ husbands and boyfriends so often did. I guess he was more used to dealing with the injustices of life than the rest of us.

  As I was setting up my gear, Lt. Zamora came to get me and led me out to meet Maria. Although I would not be working with Maria on the sketch, Manny knew me well. He knew what stoked my fires and gave me my energy and he knew that once I’d met Maria, I wouldn’t stop either, until we had caught the thug who had hurt her.

  She was sitting demurely on the edge of a chair, her big belly sort of resting on her lap, her white cane threaded around her hand with a strap. The orange hair flamed out from her shy, quiet little face like a sign to me that spelled one word: FEAR. Although nobody had told me that her family had cut and dyed her lovely hair in a desperate attempt to foil her attacker should he return, I somehow knew it instinctively, simply because I know only too well what fear can do to a person.

  When Manny introduced us, Maria gave me the sweetest smile and I took her small hand in mine. In soft tones, she thanked me for my help, her sightless eyes staring down and to the right as she spoke. The old rage bubbled up inside—just as Manny had known it would—and I exchanged a glance with him that said all we needed to say between us.

  I returned to my easel and Manny brought in the bus driver, a statuesque, 6′2″ African-American woman with a lean, athletic build and a no-nonsense attitude. To put her at ease, I asked her about her job.

  “I’m the first female ever to win the bus rodeo,” she boasted proudly and went on to describe this annual competition where drivers compete to show their agility in handling a bus through a driver’s obstacle course.

  “Congratulations!” I hoped she knew that I was being sincere. “What a terrific idea, to have a competition like that, because I expect it helps to prevent accidents later, since drivers become more proficient at what they do.”

  She beamed and agreed that yes, it was great.

  When I felt that I had broken the ice sufficiently, I began to work, but before I’d put two pastel strokes on the page, she spoke up and in almost-angry tones, said, “Look, I don’t know why that detective even brought me here. I did not see that guy, I’m telling you. I didn’t see him at all.”

  “It’s all right,” I soothed. “Everybody feels that way when we first get started. You’ll be surprised at what comes to you as we go along.”

  Crossing her arms over her chest, she stuck out her chin and said, “No. I didn’t see him! I can’t tell you anything!”

  By this time, I’d faced all kinds of challenging witnesses in this work, but this woman was openly hostile and I had to take care not to lose my temper too.

  “Sgt. Zamora said you caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of your eye.”

  Her shoulders relented ever so slightly and she said, “Well, yeah—just a side view. “I did not see his face!”

  “That’s great!” I encouraged. “Don’t worry about that at all. I’ve been to the FBI Academy and they taught us how to do a frontal composite of someone’s face based just on side views. Anyway, you don’t have to do well. Even if we come up with a sketch that’s not all that great, it will still be okay. We’ll do whatever we can and then we’ll be out of here. Trust me.”

  I could see that she was impressed by the term FBI Academy—most people are—but she was still defiant. “It was just a quick glance,” she insisted. “I had my hands full opening the door.” She sighed. “Look, I heard what that guy was saying to the blind lady and it bugged me, but I was watching the road and concentrating on opening the bus door. Passengers were getting off and passengers were getting on. I just didn’t get a good look at him. I can’t tell you anything.”

  “Sure you can,” I coaxed. “You can tell me if he was black or white or Latino.”

  “Latino.”

  “There you go. It’s a start!” I smiled, but inside, I was clenching my teeth. It wasn’t the witness’s uncertainty that was so infuriating—I see that all the time. It was that, clearly, this had become a power struggle to her. She seemed to feel that she was being forced to do something she did not want to do and she was determined to give me nothing that she perceived as an advantage.

  Poor little Maria Santos suddenly seemed very far away.

  Still, though, I have to interject here—this woman had been asked to shoulder a very great responsibility. She didn’t want to give a witness description that could get the wrong man arrested. I guess she didn’t realize that Lt. Zamora would employ many investigative tools and put together corroborating evidence before he would ever make an arrest. This was just a beginning, the first few pieces of the puzzle.

  Looking back, I can understand the bus driver’s reluctance and nervousness. Some years after the Maria Santos case, I had the privilege of being interviewed by television journalist Stone Phillips for a piece that appeared on Dateline, NBC. One of the things Mr. Phillips asked me to do was set up my easel on the banks of the River Walk in San Antonio, where I had done so many portraits years before. We did a little exercise: Mr. Phillips took a quick Polaroid snapshot of a random tourist, pocketed it and then sat for me as a “witness,” describing the tourist from memory for me to do a sketch. As I began to draw, the cameras started to roll.

  We hadn’t been working very long when I asked Mr. Phillips to describe the tourist’s eyebrows. Almost immediately, he began to stammer around, struggling to recall, and I could see that he was embarrassed.

  I assured him that he was doing fine and that it was perfectly all right for him to admit that he plain didn’t know.

  “Okay,” he admitted with a charming smile. “I don’t know.” He went on to say, “I’m not even a crime victim and it’s nerve-wracking pressure to sit here and feel like you can’t remember.”


  I try to keep that in mind when I’m working with witnesses—it’s a nerve-wracking process for them—even when they are handsome television personalities just playing a game—so the pressure is all that much more intense for a real crime victim or witness.

  Still, back when I was trying to pry a description out of this unwilling bus driver, I hadn’t yet met Stone Phillips. I do believe that what Lt. Zamora said is true, that the driver did feel a sense of responsibility toward her passengers and especially for Maria Santos. On the other hand, for some reason, once she began to work in a quiet room with me, she became every bit as obstructive as an old buffalo who doesn’t want to be penned up.

  “Here,” I said, handing her an FBI Facial Identification Catalogue. “Just look at this catalogue, okay? Let’s start with the hair. See…on these pages? They’re just pictures of hairlines. Pick out a style that reminds you of the man you saw on the bus. And don’t worry about it. It doesn’t have to be perfect.”

  Impossibly, she shook her head. “I keep telling you people! I did not see him that clearly!” By this time she was nearly shouting.

  To diffuse the situation, I tried to distract her with small talk and in a predicament such as this, I was not adverse to a little flat-out flattery.

  “You’re so tall and beautiful,” I said. “I bet when you put on a pair of hoop earrings and high heels—”

  “—not too high!” she interrupted, laughing.

  “I bet you look just fantastic.”

  She didn’t hesitate to nod her head at that assessment.

  “Do you have a boyfriend tall enough?” I pressed.

  “A couple of them,” she said with a grin.

  “I don’t doubt that…Now, over here. Why don’t you see if you can pick out a pair of eyes that resemble the man on the bus?”

  “I don’t know…”

  And so it went. Back and forth. At one weary point I pictured myself bracing one foot against her chest, reaching both arms down her throat and pulling the information out of her. It would have been easier, I think.

  By the time we made it to the chin in the sketch, I was completely drained—and running very, very late for an appointment to do a composite over in Homicide. Naturally, Homicide was located in another building entirely and I was going to have to pack up my gear and haul it over.

  When we were finally finished with the sketching session, my eyes were burning, my neck was stiff and it was all I could do not to start screaming and make a lunge for this maddening woman. Wearily, I turned the easel around and showed the composite to her.

  With a quick, dismissive shake of her head, she said in no uncertain terms, “No. I can’t really say that’s him. Maybe the hair…I don’t know. I told you. I didn’t see the guy.”

  I was a little distressed that her reaction was so negative and adamant, but over the years, I had learned to trust the process. It would have been nice if at least this witness would trust me, as well.

  But apparently, that was too much to ask. Pursing her lips, the woman said, “No. I don’t want you to show this to the detective. Would you please just throw that sketch in the trash?”

  With a heavy sigh, I did as she demanded. I took the sketch down off the drawing board, walked over and tossed it into the wastepaper basket in the corner of the room. She left with, I must say, almost a triumphant gleam in her eye. She’d won the power struggle, after all.

  And Maria Santos had lost.

  Trying to hurry, I started packing up my gear (Homicide still waited), dreading having to do another sketch after this nightmare session.

  Manny came in. “I’ve finished interviewing Mrs. Santos,” he said. Glancing around, he added, “Where’s the sketch?”

  Without a word, I crossed over to the trash can and pulled out the sketch.

  He took it out of my hand, gave me a funny little grin, shook his head and left. Talk about feeling like a failure—I’d done better work in the fourth grade—and that big tall bus driver had completely worn me out.

  It would take a miracle, I thought, for Maria Santos ever to see justice or to even feel as if she could ever grow out her hair again, letting it fall freely down her back.

  But it didn’t take a miracle, after all. All it took, really, was one dedicated, hardworking detective who really cared, not just about this victim, but about doing his job to the best of his abilities.

  He started by ignoring the bus driver. Not her witness statement, of course, but her insistence that the drawing could not be accurate. By this time, I’d worked with Manny through a number of cases and he trusted me. He trusted my talent and he trusted the process. He also trusted his instincts, which were superb.

  “There are several good reasons to use a composite sketch,” he pointed out. “One is that it helps others help us (the detectives) solve a crime. And two—a good sketch warns others that there’s somebody out there they need to watch out for. It protects others from being victims of this same guy.”

  Armed with my sketch, Manny knew just where he wanted to go.

  “At the time,” he explained, “I had read an article about a study on burglaries done in San Francisco, which concluded that the vast majority of burglaries were committed within two miles from where the criminals lived. I figured that same statistic would most likely apply to this case. So I started right there—in the neighborhood.”

  Taking my composite in hand, he showed it in some key places around the neighborhood that dovetailed with information he’d been gathering on the case. For instance, one witness claimed to have heard the man say that his car had broken down, so Manny checked out nearby parking lots, repair shops and towed vehicle reports. He’d show my sketch to, say, a mechanic in a repair shop and ask if he’d seen someone who looked similar bring in a vehicle recently.

  He showed it to some of the people who’d been waiting at the bus stop and he showed it to the elderly woman who’d been sipping coffee in her front yard the day the suspect, gripping the arm of a blind pregnant woman, had passed by. He showed it around convenience stores and also to a few grocery store managers in the area.

  One manager said that the sketch resembled a couple of brothers by the name of Zayas who worked for him, cleaning the store after-hours. From the manager, Manny got a name.

  Before a week had passed, Manny had put together enough of the case, with help from my sketch, to stage a line-up. Since the victim was blind, Manny asked some of the witnesses to come in and see if one of the men in the line-up looked like the man they’d seen with the pregnant blind woman that day.

  When he’d gotten a positive I.D. from those witnesses, he brought in Maria Santos and he asked each of the men in the line-up to say a few words in Spanish that matched comments Maria had heard from her attacker.

  Without hesitation, Maria said, “It’s number five. That’s him.”

  When David Alberto Zayas was placed under arrest, he was reported by the officers to have said, “What took you so long? I thought you guys would’ve caught me sooner.”

  Interesting comment from a brute who had boasted to his terrified victim that he would never get caught because she’d never be able to identify him.

  But an arrest was just the beginning, as far as Manny Zamora was concerned. The use of DNA evidence at that time to positively identify suspects was still in its infancy. Most police departments were still relying on simple blood typing. But Zamora was determined to keep this guy off the streets. He sent evidence from Maria Santos’s rape kit to the FBI labs at their headquarters in Washington, D.C.

  It took some time—at least two months—to get back the results, but it was well worth it. By the time the case went to court, Manny had done such a thorough job piecing together his puzzle of an investigation that he was not even called upon to testify in court. David Alberto Zayas was convicted of aggravated sexual assault on the evidence and sentenced to spend the rest of his life in prison.

  Through the years, I often think about that stubborn witness wh
o made me throw my sketch in the trash and the dogged investigator who insisted we use it anyway. They say justice can sometimes be blind, but in the case of Maria Santos, justice was as unblinking as a detective, bent over a jigsaw puzzle, snapping each and every zigzagging piece solidly into place, until the whole picture shines out clean, clear and unforgettable.

  Then, a few months later, a gentle, sweet woman, denied the sense of sight, could still gaze into the face of her healthy newborn child, shake her long dark hair loose and smile.

  Chapter Eight:

  Portrait of a Serial Killer: “Ha!—Would a madman have been so wise as this?”

  “True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses—not destroyed—not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?…Now, this is the point. You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me… Ha!—Would a madman have been so wise as this?”

  When Edgar Allan Poe wrote those words in his macabre short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” he might just as well have been writing about Theodore Goynes.

  Throughout Goynes’s miserable life, law enforcement couldn’t seem to make up its mind whether Goynes was just evil or whether he was a psychopath. I know what his victims would say—at least, the ones who survived. And I know what one prosecutor in one of his numerous trials said, that he was, “the poster-boy for the death penalty.”

  I’m not sure what Theodore Goynes himself would have said. He might have had to consult the voices he claimed to hear in his head, the ones who urged him to “do bad things.”