Just ten weeks earlier, a father of five had been beaten to death by a stranger in his front yard because he wouldn’t light the guy’s marijuana cigarette.
But others had left even the most hardened officers in the Waco Police Department reeling. Some cases were the kind he’d seen before, like that of a prostitute who’d been stabbed and thrown into the river. Waco had been having a violent summer it was July 14, and already a dozen people had been murdered in the city of 100,000. Simons, a ruggedly handsome man with dark-brown eyes and a brown mustache, took a deep breath. The call was urgent: a body had been discovered at Speegleville Park, near Lake Waco. What follows is a story, built around the question that has haunted so many people for so many years: What really happened at the lake that night? Still, what follows is not a legal document some of the people involved in the case are dead, others don’t remember much, and even others-including the patrol sergeant who investigated the case and the DA who prosecuted it-refused to be interviewed.
This article is the result of a full year of research-dozens of interviews were conducted with the principal and minor players, and thousands of pages of transcripts, depositions, and affidavits, from the case’s six capital murder trials and one aggravated sexual abuse trial, were carefully reviewed. This story examines the case through the viewpoint of five people: a patrol sergeant who investigated the crime a police detective who became skeptical of the investigation an appellate lawyer who tried to stop the execution a journalist whose reporting has raised new doubts about the case and a convict who pleaded guilty but now vehemently proclaims his innocence.Ī word about the reporting. In 1991, though, when one of the convicts got a new trial and was then found not guilty, some people wondered, Were these four actually the killers? Several years after that, one of the men was put to death, and the stakes were raised: Had Texas executed an innocent man? Justice was eventually served when four men were found guilty of the crime, and two were sent to death row. In the summer of 1982 the city of Waco was confronted with the most vicious crime it had ever seen: three teenagers were savagely stabbed to death, for no apparent reason, at a park by a lake on the edge of town. The more traumatic the killing, the more intricate the web. 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.
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