Part 3 (2/2)

One victim, Kevin Hanc.o.c.k, a security guard at the Indian Ridge Apartments on Mount Ranier Street in Dallas, took two bullets to the neck and was paralyzed.

Hanc.o.c.k sued his erstwhile employers, claiming among other things that a broken front gate at the apartments had allowed Chavez and Fernandez access to the property, and thus to him.

In Hazelwood's opinion, however, so ruthless and rabid were the two killers that no practical security measure would have prevented ”Johnny” Chavez and his mentally slow partner, fifteen-year-old Hector ”Crazy” Fernandez, from shooting and paralyzing Hanc.o.c.k.

Johnny Chavez, tenth in a family of eighteen brothers and sisters, was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and brought to Dallas as an infant by his parents, migrant farm workers.

Greg Davis, the Dallas County a.s.sistant district attorney who later prosecuted Chavez, believes ethnic hatred may have underlain the defendant's cold-bloodedness. Although robbery was Chavez's putative reason for many of the a.s.saults, Davis points out that almost all of the victims were other Hispanics, most of them among the least-prosperous-looking residents of Oak Cliff's shabbier neighborhoods.

Chavez's killing career actually began ten years earlier, on December 28, 1985, when Johnny, together with his brother Jesse and a friend, Julian Garcia, decided to rob their Oak Cliff neighbor, Vicente Mendoza. Garcia later testified that he wanted the money to finance a trip to Mexico.

They kicked in Mendoza's front door and robbed him at gunpoint. Then, to eliminate him as a witness, Johnny shot Vicente dead in the top of the head. He also shot Mendoza's cousin in the eye.

Chavez was arrested three weeks later in Houston. In 1987, he was tried and convicted for the Mendoza murder and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He was paroled in 1994.

Back in Dallas, he met Fernandez, who'd recall to jurors that he began hanging out with Johnny ”because he was nice to me. He was cool and stuff.”

Their homicide spree began the following spring.

At about 8:00 p.m. on an evening in late March, Chavez pulled into an Oak Cliff self-service car wash where twenty-three-year-old Jose Castillo was was.h.i.+ng his vehicle in an open-air stall. Then for no reason except, as Davis suggests, ”the thrill of killing,” Chavez shot Castillo several times.

Two months later, just after midnight on May 20, 1995, Chavez and Fernandez used a 20-gauge shotgun to murder eighteen-year-old Juan Hernandez as he sat at the wheel of his 1983 Buick Regal in a food store parking lot.

They stole the Buick, stripped it, and then torched the vehicle. The burned-out hulk was recovered nearby nine days later.

The two then stole a red pickup truck, again in the same general vicinity, sometime between 8:00 p.m. and midnight on June 23.

At 12:15 p.m. on the twenty-fourth, Chavez and Fernandez came upon two women and a man together in the parking lot of a west Dallas restaurant. They leveled a handgun from the stolen pickup's cab and demanded wallets from all three, who readily complied.

A few minutes later, Chavez and Fernandez rolled into a movie theater parking lot in the northwest part of the city and similarly accosted a young couple walking to their car.

”Give me your wallet,” Johnny demanded of twenty-nine-year-old Timothy McKay. Then he gave McKay's companion, Pattie Matherly, to the count of three to surrender her purse.

Forty minutes later, Chavez and Fernandez were back in Oak Cliff, where they discovered Kenneth Shane on the curb outside 610 East Tenth Street. Shane was unloading some possessions from his car. Chavez pointed a handgun at Shane, took his wallet, and shot him once in the chest.

The next spasm of violence began just after midnight on July 2.

The killers approached thirty-nine-year-old Jose Morales as he was placing a call from an outdoor pay phone in a largely Hispanic neighborhood just north of Dallas's Love Field. Chavez shot Morales in the chest and took his wallet, which contained two dollars in cash. Then as Morales lay wounded on the ground, Johnny Chavez shot him a second time in the chest, killing him.

The killers next targeted Susan Ferguson, a uniformed but unarmed forty-one-year-old security guard at a construction site in the area.

Fernandez told investigators Ferguson raised her hands in surrender.

”Do you have any children?” he remembered Johnny asking the woman.

”Yes,” she replied.

Chavez then shot Ferguson in the face, just below her nose, and ran over her in the stolen Chevrolet Caprice they were driving.

As Ferguson lay dying, Chavez and Fernandez headed once again for southwest Dallas, where they came upon twenty-five-year-old Kevin Hanc.o.c.k as the security guard sat in his car doing paperwork in the Indian Ridge Apartments parking lot.

Hanc.o.c.k warned them off the property, but Chavez was unfazed.

”Let's see both hands, don't f.u.c.k with me,” he said as he pointed a gun at Hanc.o.c.k, demanding the security guard's 9mm handgun. He also demanded his wallet. When Hanc.o.c.k said he didn't have one, Johnny Chavez shot him twice in the neck.

And still the carnage went on.

At 1:50 a.m., as Francisco Jaimez and his friend, Alberto Guevara, sat together talking in the front yard at 400 East Ninth Street in Oak Cliff, Chavez and Fernandez drove up, produced a gun, and relieved Jaimez of one hundred dollars and Guevara of his wallet. Fernandez shot and wounded them both. Chavez shot and killed a third victim at the scene, twenty-five-year-old Jesus Briseno, who innocently had happened by while the robbery was in progress.

After committing three murders and three other shootings in less than two hours, Chavez and Fernandez next encountered Alfonso Contreras, thirty, and Guadalupe Delgadillo-Pina, twenty-five, who were parked together in a vacant lot at the intersection of Ormsby and Seale Streets, about two miles from where Jaimez, Guevara, and Briseno were shot.

They robbed Contreras of his billfold and two hundred dollars, then shot him with Hanc.o.c.k's gun and ran over Contreras with his own truck.

According to Fernandez's later statements to police, he followed in the Caprice as Chavez drove Delgadillo-Pina in Contreras's truck to the Trinity River bottoms, the river's dark and deserted floodplain. Fernandez said Johnny ordered him to shoot Delgadillo-Pina in the head, after which Chavez ran over her, as well, with Contreras's truck.

That vehicle also was torched.

Two nights later, on the Fourth of July, Johnny and Hector returned to the immediate vicinity of the Indian Ridge Apartments, where they'd shot Kevin Hanc.o.c.k, and committed the double gunshot drive-by murders of thirty-one-year-old Manuel Duran and twenty-seven-year-old Antonio Rios, both tire store employees, as they left work. Chavez also shot and killed fifty-three-year-old Antonio Banda, whose ill fortune it was to be coming around the street corner at just the time of the shootings.

They committed no further crimes in Dallas for eighteen days.

Then at about 1:00 a.m. on July 22, Chavez and Fernandez shot seventeen-year-old Gabriel Yerena in the head, stole his vehicle, and left him lying in the middle of South Randolph Street as they drove away in his car.

Twenty-four hours later, driving a stolen Camaro, Chavez and Fernandez pulled up behind Juan Macias and Manuela Salas on West Canty Street. A shot from the Camaro hit Salas in the arm. After Macias refused to pull over, he took a fatal gunshot to the back of his head. His vehicle careened out of control and struck a house.

Salas jumped out the car, ran to a neighbor's, and called the Dallas police.

A short while later, as officers were securing the scene, Chavez and Fernandez returned in their stolen Camaro. They were ordered to stop and get out. Instead, they dropped the Camaro in reverse, gunned the car, and drove straight back into a fence.

The two fled on foot.

Two weeks later, they were finally arrested. In March of 1996, Johnny Chavez was tried and convicted for the Morales murder and sentenced to death. ”Crazy” Fernandez, who testified against Chavez, received ten years' probation.

”Chavez and Fernandez obviously were on a crime spree,” Hazelwood observes. ”The victims were randomly chosen.

”They were oblivious to risk.

”Chavez had shot Vicente Mendoza at a residence at seven-forty-five in the evening. He also shot Jose Castillo multiple times in front of several witnesses at the car wash at about eight p.m.

”They were impulsive. They'd see a car they wanted, for example, and would just start following that car.

”They lacked criminal sophistication. They committed crimes in front of witnesses, crimes that involved high risks to themselves. They left evidence, expended rounds and fingerprints.

”They were prepared for, and desirous of, killing. When they drove by the apartment complex where Hanc.o.c.k worked, one of them reportedly said, 'Let's get him!' They wanted to kill. It was a thrill for them.

”A working gate at the apartment complex would not have deterred this crime. Remember, they weren't stopped by Hanc.o.c.k, who was armed and uniformed. What's a gate going to do?

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