Post by SoulTrainOz on Jul 9, 2006 19:54:07 GMT -5
Judgment errors led to suspensions before, after controversial probe of murder
The sergeant in charge of an investigation that led to the possibly
wrongful execution of a Texas man had arrested innocent people before and was suspended 3 times for errors in judgment over his 31 years at the San Antonio Police Department.
As a supervisor in the homicide unit, Bill Ewell was one of the driving forces behind a controversial 1985 capital murder conviction. Executed for the crime in which one man was shot to death and another critically injured was Ruben Cantu, who went to his death claiming he was not the killer.
Authorities reopened the Cantu case last year after a Houston Chronicle investigation found that the lone eyewitness the man who survived the shooting had recanted, claiming officers pressured him into accusing Cantu. The Bexar County district attorney is exploring the politically charged question of whether Texas took an innocent life with its 1993 execution.
Attorneys on both sides of the case now say Ewell's past mistakes, as well as the possibility that he may have had a personal reason for pursuing Cantu, could have undermined the prosecution.
Ewell denies he was influenced by anything other than the truth.
The eyewitness "had numerous opportunities to qualify or withdraw his identification of Cantu, and he never did," Ewell said. "I believed then, and I believe now, that Cantu was guilty of the murder."
The record shows Ewell has been wrong before.
According to interviews and a review of records by the Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News, Ewell participated in at least 2 well-documented faulty arrests at SAPD. One involved what was then the largest cash robbery in San Antonio history. The other involved two softball players assaulted and arrested without provocation in a public park.
Playing roles in both episodes and in the Cantu case was Ewell's close friend and colleague, officer Joe De La Luz, nicknamed ''Wolfman." De La Luz's behavior repeatedly landed him in trouble, and more than once Ewell stood by his friend.
The question now is whether that friendship colored Ewell's investigation of Cantu.
"The unstated theme of your questions is that because of my friendship with Joe De La Luz, I somehow coerced an identification of Ruben Cantu which led to his conviction and execution," Ewell said via e-mail. " I very strongly resent the implication which I view as an attack on my integrity."
Witness questioned again
Ewell took an active interest in Cantu the day after the teen shot and wounded De La Luz in a pool hall on March 1, 1985, an encounter unrelated to the crime for which Cantu would eventually die. De La Luz was off duty that night. He and Cantu were armed and drinking.
Ewell personally questioned De La Luz in the intensive care unit 2 days later. Ewell knew Cantu, the shooter, had been investigated months earlier in an unsolved homicide case.
But that case, a Nov. 8, 1984, robbery and murder, seemed all but at a dead end; the only surviving eyewitness had rejected Cantu's photo in a lineup in December.
3 months had elapsed. But Ewell resolved to try again, ordering
investigators to question the witness a 2nd and 3rd time. Finally, Juan Moreno, a 19-year-old illegal immigrant, named Cantu as the killer.
Moreno now says he was pressured by police who knew Cantu had shot De La Luz.
Ewell flatly denies that the identification was coerced.
De La Luz, who is retired from SAPD but works as a civilian crime-scene investigator there, refused requests for interviews.
Both Ewell and De La Luz testified at Cantu's trial, but neither jurors nor lawyers heard about their friendship or about the dubious arrests they had made together.
And though some of De La Luz's five suspensions were detailed in court, Ewell's disciplinary history escaped notice.
By the time Ewell retired from the department in 1998, he had been suspended for failing to bring a battered wife to a hospital in 1969, for unjustifiably accosting 2 men in a park in 1976, and for grabbing and swearing at a young African-American who happened to be visiting the homicide squad in 1993.
"If he made a bad judgment call on anything, it was just that, an honest mistake," said Jimmy Holguin, an ex-SAPD detective who worked with Ewell. "I've known him for a long time. He only knows how to work one way that's 150 %."
While at the SAPD, Ewell also earned praise for helping to create a team to investigate police shootings and for being part of a task force that examined police corruption.
He was involved in five shootings during his career and, in one incident, he saved an officer's life.
But Ewells three suspensions at SAPD put him in a small minority of repeat disciplinary offenders. A newspaper analysis of disciplinary actions over the past decade shows that only 1.6 percent of San Antonio Police Department officers have had three or more suspensions and yet kept their jobs.
Ewell, who is retiring from his job as police chief for San Antonio's
North East Independent School District, refused requests for an interview, though he responded to written questions.
Ewell characterized his infractions as ''relatively minor," but he didn't deny that he deserved discipline. ''The suspensions were intended to get my attention and they did," he said.
1 of the 3 suspensions involved unfounded arrests.
Filed a complaint
As Ewell describes it, he was drinking and sharing a picnic with a group of officers, including De La Luz, and their families at Olmos Basin Park the night of June 26, 1976.
About 10 p.m., he and the others saw 2 men who they assumed were breaking into a pickup that belonged to De La Luz. "Words were exchanged and it turned physical," Ewell said.
But the men they tackled and roughed up were a pair of softball players, Joe Blancarte and Albert Lopez. The two ex-Marines and Army base workers were picking up a car, which they had left at the park after a game earlier that night.
Lopez, now deceased, was about to unlock the door in the dark when he was grabbed, punched and kicked, Blancarte said in an interview. Records indicate the assault left ''visible injuries." Eventually, the attackers revealed they were off-duty officers.
Ewell, who had just made sergeant the year before, seemed to be the leader, Blancarte said. When patrolmen arrived later, Ewell, who wore no uniform and carried no identification, began to write a report.
Ewell doesn't remember writing the report but acknowledges he should have identified himself earlier.
Blancarte was charged with disorderly conduct and Lopez with assault, and both were taken to jail.
Blancarte, who feared a misdemeanor conviction could cost him his job at Fort Sam Houston, decided to file a complaint.
After an investigation, then-Police Chief Emil E. Peters, now deceased, determined Ewell had violated several rules, including participating in the incident, failing to report a disturbance to a superior and failure to identify himself as an officer.
''You accosted Lopez. From this point on, the stories of the people
present vary greatly, but Lopez was physically assaulted, as was
Blancarte, and both suffered visible injuries," Peters wrote in the notice that concluded, ''Lopez and Blancarte were in a public park on legitimate business ... This incident reflects poorly on your judgment as a superior officer."
The charges against the 2 men were dropped. Ewell was suspended for 5 days.
Near perfect score
Still, Ewell received a nearly perfect score on his evaluation about a month later. Only in the ''judgment" category did he earn less than the highest rating.
If De La Luz received any discipline for the incident, it doesn't appear in his public file. Instead, an appraisal signed by Ewell says: "De La Luz continues to perform in an exceptional manner."
A few years later, on Dec. 31, 1981, Ewell again was supervising De La Luz, this time in the robbery unit, when the heist of a Loomis armored car in broad daylight made front-page news.
The thieves Maced a messenger who was making a cash delivery to a credit union at Las Palmas Shopping Center. After firing warning shots, they sped away in a stolen car with more than $190,000. It was then the largest bank job in San Antonio history.
Records show Ewell and two of his detectives, De La Luz and Ray
Hildebrand, caught the case. Apparently all three rushed there, though Ewell said he does not remember being there.
"Hijack scores bandits record S.A. cash haul," blared the headline in the next morning's newspaper. The article reported that Ewell "had investigated the scene" and quoted him as saying: ''They were on the guard before he could draw his gun and the driver didn't know what happened until the money was taken and the suspects were fleeing."
What apparently didn't make the papers was this glitch: A deputy chief had smelled liquor on De La Luz and ordered the detective off the crime scene.
Hildebrand, who was then De La Luz's partner and is now retired from SAPD, said the detective was not actually drunk but smelled heavily of alcohol from the night before. Even so, there were consequences.
''It put a cloud over the case," recalled Hildebrand. ''No doubt about that."
A lieutenant took over supervision of the investigation in Ewell's place.
Within weeks De La Luz would be transferred back to patrol. Court records show he was formally reprimanded for being intoxicated on duty.
Ewell also was transferred back to patrol. This, he said, was the result of ''department politics" and the fact that he stood by De La Luz.
Before the transfers went through, Ewell and De La Luz continued to investigate. Within eight days, Ewell personally obtained identifications from 2 eyewitnesses. Both led to bad arrests.
The thieves had made their getaway in a white car, but afterward some boys told an officer that they saw the men stop at a nearby icehouse and switch to a lime-green sedan.
The plate was traced to Daniel Ruiz Salinas, a former Marine and factory worker. Salinas wore a goatee and a camouflage jacket. One of the suspects was bearded and had a green jacket.
Days later, Ewell and an FBI agent visited one of two witnesses who had seen the thieves in the mall parking lot. Rita Huerta picked Salinas out of a photo lineup.
The next day he was jailed. During hours of interrogation, the rattled 21-year-old continuously denied being involved but flunked 1 of 2 polygraph tests.
''They didn't have anything," Salinas said. ''They really didn't."
Ewell disagrees. He still thinks he had more than enough to justify an arrest.
''I cannot think of anything that I would have done differently," he said. The now-deceased FBI agent ''and I both thought it was a good identification at the time. It was also partially corroborated by the connection of Danny Salinas to the lime green Dodge."
The day Salinas went to jail, another bystander who had almost bumped into the robbers' getaway car called authorities with a different tip.
Calling eight days after the heist, Cynthia Guevara, an 18-year-old who worked at Kelly Air Force Base, said a man on the base looked like the getaway driver. Ewell, De La Luz and an FBI agent went to Kelly that day, according to a police report.
With the 18-year-old witness looking on through a window, the suspect, another Kelly employee, was driven past a window for her to view. That's him, Guevara said. ''There is no doubt in my mind," she said, according to the sworn statement Ewell took.
In a recent interview, Guevara said she didn't want to talk about the case but said she was never certain about the identification, though police did not pressure her.
Salvador Aguilar Jr., a 36-year-old civilian employee with no criminal record, was arrested on the spot. Currently recuperating from a stroke, Aguilar, now 61, declined an interview.
Aguilar was jailed for 10 days and temporarily lost his job.
Michael Aguilar was 14 and lived with his stepfather at the time.
"They were trying to coerce a confession," his stepson said. ''But if you haven't done anything, what is there to cough up?"
In the meantime, Hildebrand, still working the case, reported that several confidential informants were providing information. However, none had information about Salinas or Aguilar.
Aguilar and Salinas had spent five days in jail when Hildebrand reported receiving the detailed tip that broke the investigation. In about 2 weeks, he had 3 new suspects in custody, two confessions and part of the loot: $51,508.
Hildebrand suggested in a report that the suspects arrested by Ewell and the others were innocent victims of mistaken identity.
''This by no fault of the witnesses or the officers concerned, but by the fact they are look-alikes for the persons who were involved," he wrote.
One of the prosecutors involved in the case was less charitable.
Then an assistant district attorney, Nelson Atwell said he thought the arrest represented such a classic error, of giving too much weight to one witness, that he used it in training courses.
''You never want to tell a witness that 'you're it' and scare them or put pressure on them," he said. ''I was always under the impression that someone allowed (the Kelly employee) to believe that she was 'the magic witness.' "
Ewell said he didn't recall the details of the arrest but, given what he did remember, it seemed justified.
"The eyewitness personally identified the suspect and swore to a written statement. She made a mistake, but I fail to see how she was mishandled," he said.
Ewell was transferred back to patrol before the armored car case was finished. He had been a patrol supervisor for nearly 3 years when he got a call about a shooting at 605 Briggs Ave.
High school rumor
Ewell arrived with 10 other officers at a house that night. A single lamp inside illuminated the body of Pedro Gomez, face down, blood pooled around his head. Another blood trail led from the living room and out a sliding glass door to a pickup where the surviving witness, teenager Juan Moreno, had taken refuge, barely alive with multiple gunshot wounds.
Moreno told police he was shot and robbed by two Chicano teens who lived "next door." A few weeks later, a teacher told police that a high school rumor linked the crime with Cantu, who lived diagonally across the street from the scene, and 2 other neighborhood youths. One of the youths initially accused Cantu before recanting.
When a homicide detective interviewed Moreno in the hospital in December, Moreno rejected a mug shot of Ruben Cantu in one of several lineups. By the time Ewell was officially reassigned to homicide in January of 1985, leads had grown cold.
Ewell left the case alone until Cantu shot De La Luz in the Skabaroo Lounge pool hall in March 1985. Both Cantu and De La Luz, who did not know each other, appeared to have drawn their weapons: Cantu claimed self-defense, and De La Luz called the shooting unprovoked.
The following day, Ewell spoke with a detective and then began to try to connect Cantu to the unrelated, unsolved murder on Briggs Avenue. Ewell sent a detective to show the witness Cantu's mug shot in a lineup for a 2nd time. Again, Moreno didn't pick out Cantu.
The next day, a Sunday, Ewell visited De La Luz in the hospital. Hours later, Ewell sent another detective to bring Moreno to the police station.
This time, Ewell, who was fluent in Spanish, wanted to talk to the witness himself.
Several detectives thought Moreno was simply too afraid to identify Cantu.
Moreno's brother said the same thing when he accompanied Moreno to the station.
There, Ewell told the illegal immigrant that he thought Moreno knew who the killer was.
For a 3rd time, a detective displayed the mug shots.
Finally, Moreno pointed to Cantu.
In recent interviews, Moreno has said that he felt pressure from police and only did what officers wanted him to do. The police, he said, told him "they were sure because (Cantu) had hurt an officer."
"I had a lot of pressure," he said.
Previous errors
Moreno became the star witness in Cantu's 1985 capital murder trial. Trembling from his injuries, his testimony was all that connected Cantu to the scene.
Cantu's defense attorneys tried to show how aggressively Ewell and his detectives had worked on Moreno. But neither they nor the elected prosecutor knew that the sergeant driving the murder investigation was De La Luz's longtime friend.
Cantu's defense attorney in the 1985 trial, Andrew Carruthers, said in a recent interview that he wished he could have told jurors about Ewell's relationship with De La Luz and about the previous erroneous arrests.
The fact that Ewell and De La Luz's friendship went undisclosed also troubles Sam Millsap, the former Bexar County district attorney who made the decision to seek the death penalty. In an interview, Millsap argued that a close friend of De La Luz should have had nothing to do with investigating Cantu on the shooting or the unrelated capital murder case.
Another lawyer in the current Cantu investigation said the shooting of De La Luz could have given Ewell a strong motive for pursuing Cantu.
''The behavior is more suspect because it came in the aftermath of the shooting of a police officer by Cantu," said Keith Hampton, a lawyer for one of the witnesses in the ongoing investigation. Hampton currently represents Cantu's convicted co-defendant, David Garza.
Garza, 15 at the time of the crime, never previously testified but now has given a sworn statement that also says Cantu was innocent, though he told police years ago he saw Cantu at the scene.
Generally, Ewell said, officers should not investigate shootings involving their close friends. But in this case, Ewell said, he thought it was ''absolutely appropriate" for him to handle both investigations.
''I am convinced the capital murder was not unrelated to the De La Luz shooting," he said. ''The same shooter was involved."
(source: Houston Chronicle & San Antonio Express-News)
The sergeant in charge of an investigation that led to the possibly
wrongful execution of a Texas man had arrested innocent people before and was suspended 3 times for errors in judgment over his 31 years at the San Antonio Police Department.
As a supervisor in the homicide unit, Bill Ewell was one of the driving forces behind a controversial 1985 capital murder conviction. Executed for the crime in which one man was shot to death and another critically injured was Ruben Cantu, who went to his death claiming he was not the killer.
Authorities reopened the Cantu case last year after a Houston Chronicle investigation found that the lone eyewitness the man who survived the shooting had recanted, claiming officers pressured him into accusing Cantu. The Bexar County district attorney is exploring the politically charged question of whether Texas took an innocent life with its 1993 execution.
Attorneys on both sides of the case now say Ewell's past mistakes, as well as the possibility that he may have had a personal reason for pursuing Cantu, could have undermined the prosecution.
Ewell denies he was influenced by anything other than the truth.
The eyewitness "had numerous opportunities to qualify or withdraw his identification of Cantu, and he never did," Ewell said. "I believed then, and I believe now, that Cantu was guilty of the murder."
The record shows Ewell has been wrong before.
According to interviews and a review of records by the Chronicle and the San Antonio Express-News, Ewell participated in at least 2 well-documented faulty arrests at SAPD. One involved what was then the largest cash robbery in San Antonio history. The other involved two softball players assaulted and arrested without provocation in a public park.
Playing roles in both episodes and in the Cantu case was Ewell's close friend and colleague, officer Joe De La Luz, nicknamed ''Wolfman." De La Luz's behavior repeatedly landed him in trouble, and more than once Ewell stood by his friend.
The question now is whether that friendship colored Ewell's investigation of Cantu.
"The unstated theme of your questions is that because of my friendship with Joe De La Luz, I somehow coerced an identification of Ruben Cantu which led to his conviction and execution," Ewell said via e-mail. " I very strongly resent the implication which I view as an attack on my integrity."
Witness questioned again
Ewell took an active interest in Cantu the day after the teen shot and wounded De La Luz in a pool hall on March 1, 1985, an encounter unrelated to the crime for which Cantu would eventually die. De La Luz was off duty that night. He and Cantu were armed and drinking.
Ewell personally questioned De La Luz in the intensive care unit 2 days later. Ewell knew Cantu, the shooter, had been investigated months earlier in an unsolved homicide case.
But that case, a Nov. 8, 1984, robbery and murder, seemed all but at a dead end; the only surviving eyewitness had rejected Cantu's photo in a lineup in December.
3 months had elapsed. But Ewell resolved to try again, ordering
investigators to question the witness a 2nd and 3rd time. Finally, Juan Moreno, a 19-year-old illegal immigrant, named Cantu as the killer.
Moreno now says he was pressured by police who knew Cantu had shot De La Luz.
Ewell flatly denies that the identification was coerced.
De La Luz, who is retired from SAPD but works as a civilian crime-scene investigator there, refused requests for interviews.
Both Ewell and De La Luz testified at Cantu's trial, but neither jurors nor lawyers heard about their friendship or about the dubious arrests they had made together.
And though some of De La Luz's five suspensions were detailed in court, Ewell's disciplinary history escaped notice.
By the time Ewell retired from the department in 1998, he had been suspended for failing to bring a battered wife to a hospital in 1969, for unjustifiably accosting 2 men in a park in 1976, and for grabbing and swearing at a young African-American who happened to be visiting the homicide squad in 1993.
"If he made a bad judgment call on anything, it was just that, an honest mistake," said Jimmy Holguin, an ex-SAPD detective who worked with Ewell. "I've known him for a long time. He only knows how to work one way that's 150 %."
While at the SAPD, Ewell also earned praise for helping to create a team to investigate police shootings and for being part of a task force that examined police corruption.
He was involved in five shootings during his career and, in one incident, he saved an officer's life.
But Ewells three suspensions at SAPD put him in a small minority of repeat disciplinary offenders. A newspaper analysis of disciplinary actions over the past decade shows that only 1.6 percent of San Antonio Police Department officers have had three or more suspensions and yet kept their jobs.
Ewell, who is retiring from his job as police chief for San Antonio's
North East Independent School District, refused requests for an interview, though he responded to written questions.
Ewell characterized his infractions as ''relatively minor," but he didn't deny that he deserved discipline. ''The suspensions were intended to get my attention and they did," he said.
1 of the 3 suspensions involved unfounded arrests.
Filed a complaint
As Ewell describes it, he was drinking and sharing a picnic with a group of officers, including De La Luz, and their families at Olmos Basin Park the night of June 26, 1976.
About 10 p.m., he and the others saw 2 men who they assumed were breaking into a pickup that belonged to De La Luz. "Words were exchanged and it turned physical," Ewell said.
But the men they tackled and roughed up were a pair of softball players, Joe Blancarte and Albert Lopez. The two ex-Marines and Army base workers were picking up a car, which they had left at the park after a game earlier that night.
Lopez, now deceased, was about to unlock the door in the dark when he was grabbed, punched and kicked, Blancarte said in an interview. Records indicate the assault left ''visible injuries." Eventually, the attackers revealed they were off-duty officers.
Ewell, who had just made sergeant the year before, seemed to be the leader, Blancarte said. When patrolmen arrived later, Ewell, who wore no uniform and carried no identification, began to write a report.
Ewell doesn't remember writing the report but acknowledges he should have identified himself earlier.
Blancarte was charged with disorderly conduct and Lopez with assault, and both were taken to jail.
Blancarte, who feared a misdemeanor conviction could cost him his job at Fort Sam Houston, decided to file a complaint.
After an investigation, then-Police Chief Emil E. Peters, now deceased, determined Ewell had violated several rules, including participating in the incident, failing to report a disturbance to a superior and failure to identify himself as an officer.
''You accosted Lopez. From this point on, the stories of the people
present vary greatly, but Lopez was physically assaulted, as was
Blancarte, and both suffered visible injuries," Peters wrote in the notice that concluded, ''Lopez and Blancarte were in a public park on legitimate business ... This incident reflects poorly on your judgment as a superior officer."
The charges against the 2 men were dropped. Ewell was suspended for 5 days.
Near perfect score
Still, Ewell received a nearly perfect score on his evaluation about a month later. Only in the ''judgment" category did he earn less than the highest rating.
If De La Luz received any discipline for the incident, it doesn't appear in his public file. Instead, an appraisal signed by Ewell says: "De La Luz continues to perform in an exceptional manner."
A few years later, on Dec. 31, 1981, Ewell again was supervising De La Luz, this time in the robbery unit, when the heist of a Loomis armored car in broad daylight made front-page news.
The thieves Maced a messenger who was making a cash delivery to a credit union at Las Palmas Shopping Center. After firing warning shots, they sped away in a stolen car with more than $190,000. It was then the largest bank job in San Antonio history.
Records show Ewell and two of his detectives, De La Luz and Ray
Hildebrand, caught the case. Apparently all three rushed there, though Ewell said he does not remember being there.
"Hijack scores bandits record S.A. cash haul," blared the headline in the next morning's newspaper. The article reported that Ewell "had investigated the scene" and quoted him as saying: ''They were on the guard before he could draw his gun and the driver didn't know what happened until the money was taken and the suspects were fleeing."
What apparently didn't make the papers was this glitch: A deputy chief had smelled liquor on De La Luz and ordered the detective off the crime scene.
Hildebrand, who was then De La Luz's partner and is now retired from SAPD, said the detective was not actually drunk but smelled heavily of alcohol from the night before. Even so, there were consequences.
''It put a cloud over the case," recalled Hildebrand. ''No doubt about that."
A lieutenant took over supervision of the investigation in Ewell's place.
Within weeks De La Luz would be transferred back to patrol. Court records show he was formally reprimanded for being intoxicated on duty.
Ewell also was transferred back to patrol. This, he said, was the result of ''department politics" and the fact that he stood by De La Luz.
Before the transfers went through, Ewell and De La Luz continued to investigate. Within eight days, Ewell personally obtained identifications from 2 eyewitnesses. Both led to bad arrests.
The thieves had made their getaway in a white car, but afterward some boys told an officer that they saw the men stop at a nearby icehouse and switch to a lime-green sedan.
The plate was traced to Daniel Ruiz Salinas, a former Marine and factory worker. Salinas wore a goatee and a camouflage jacket. One of the suspects was bearded and had a green jacket.
Days later, Ewell and an FBI agent visited one of two witnesses who had seen the thieves in the mall parking lot. Rita Huerta picked Salinas out of a photo lineup.
The next day he was jailed. During hours of interrogation, the rattled 21-year-old continuously denied being involved but flunked 1 of 2 polygraph tests.
''They didn't have anything," Salinas said. ''They really didn't."
Ewell disagrees. He still thinks he had more than enough to justify an arrest.
''I cannot think of anything that I would have done differently," he said. The now-deceased FBI agent ''and I both thought it was a good identification at the time. It was also partially corroborated by the connection of Danny Salinas to the lime green Dodge."
The day Salinas went to jail, another bystander who had almost bumped into the robbers' getaway car called authorities with a different tip.
Calling eight days after the heist, Cynthia Guevara, an 18-year-old who worked at Kelly Air Force Base, said a man on the base looked like the getaway driver. Ewell, De La Luz and an FBI agent went to Kelly that day, according to a police report.
With the 18-year-old witness looking on through a window, the suspect, another Kelly employee, was driven past a window for her to view. That's him, Guevara said. ''There is no doubt in my mind," she said, according to the sworn statement Ewell took.
In a recent interview, Guevara said she didn't want to talk about the case but said she was never certain about the identification, though police did not pressure her.
Salvador Aguilar Jr., a 36-year-old civilian employee with no criminal record, was arrested on the spot. Currently recuperating from a stroke, Aguilar, now 61, declined an interview.
Aguilar was jailed for 10 days and temporarily lost his job.
Michael Aguilar was 14 and lived with his stepfather at the time.
"They were trying to coerce a confession," his stepson said. ''But if you haven't done anything, what is there to cough up?"
In the meantime, Hildebrand, still working the case, reported that several confidential informants were providing information. However, none had information about Salinas or Aguilar.
Aguilar and Salinas had spent five days in jail when Hildebrand reported receiving the detailed tip that broke the investigation. In about 2 weeks, he had 3 new suspects in custody, two confessions and part of the loot: $51,508.
Hildebrand suggested in a report that the suspects arrested by Ewell and the others were innocent victims of mistaken identity.
''This by no fault of the witnesses or the officers concerned, but by the fact they are look-alikes for the persons who were involved," he wrote.
One of the prosecutors involved in the case was less charitable.
Then an assistant district attorney, Nelson Atwell said he thought the arrest represented such a classic error, of giving too much weight to one witness, that he used it in training courses.
''You never want to tell a witness that 'you're it' and scare them or put pressure on them," he said. ''I was always under the impression that someone allowed (the Kelly employee) to believe that she was 'the magic witness.' "
Ewell said he didn't recall the details of the arrest but, given what he did remember, it seemed justified.
"The eyewitness personally identified the suspect and swore to a written statement. She made a mistake, but I fail to see how she was mishandled," he said.
Ewell was transferred back to patrol before the armored car case was finished. He had been a patrol supervisor for nearly 3 years when he got a call about a shooting at 605 Briggs Ave.
High school rumor
Ewell arrived with 10 other officers at a house that night. A single lamp inside illuminated the body of Pedro Gomez, face down, blood pooled around his head. Another blood trail led from the living room and out a sliding glass door to a pickup where the surviving witness, teenager Juan Moreno, had taken refuge, barely alive with multiple gunshot wounds.
Moreno told police he was shot and robbed by two Chicano teens who lived "next door." A few weeks later, a teacher told police that a high school rumor linked the crime with Cantu, who lived diagonally across the street from the scene, and 2 other neighborhood youths. One of the youths initially accused Cantu before recanting.
When a homicide detective interviewed Moreno in the hospital in December, Moreno rejected a mug shot of Ruben Cantu in one of several lineups. By the time Ewell was officially reassigned to homicide in January of 1985, leads had grown cold.
Ewell left the case alone until Cantu shot De La Luz in the Skabaroo Lounge pool hall in March 1985. Both Cantu and De La Luz, who did not know each other, appeared to have drawn their weapons: Cantu claimed self-defense, and De La Luz called the shooting unprovoked.
The following day, Ewell spoke with a detective and then began to try to connect Cantu to the unrelated, unsolved murder on Briggs Avenue. Ewell sent a detective to show the witness Cantu's mug shot in a lineup for a 2nd time. Again, Moreno didn't pick out Cantu.
The next day, a Sunday, Ewell visited De La Luz in the hospital. Hours later, Ewell sent another detective to bring Moreno to the police station.
This time, Ewell, who was fluent in Spanish, wanted to talk to the witness himself.
Several detectives thought Moreno was simply too afraid to identify Cantu.
Moreno's brother said the same thing when he accompanied Moreno to the station.
There, Ewell told the illegal immigrant that he thought Moreno knew who the killer was.
For a 3rd time, a detective displayed the mug shots.
Finally, Moreno pointed to Cantu.
In recent interviews, Moreno has said that he felt pressure from police and only did what officers wanted him to do. The police, he said, told him "they were sure because (Cantu) had hurt an officer."
"I had a lot of pressure," he said.
Previous errors
Moreno became the star witness in Cantu's 1985 capital murder trial. Trembling from his injuries, his testimony was all that connected Cantu to the scene.
Cantu's defense attorneys tried to show how aggressively Ewell and his detectives had worked on Moreno. But neither they nor the elected prosecutor knew that the sergeant driving the murder investigation was De La Luz's longtime friend.
Cantu's defense attorney in the 1985 trial, Andrew Carruthers, said in a recent interview that he wished he could have told jurors about Ewell's relationship with De La Luz and about the previous erroneous arrests.
The fact that Ewell and De La Luz's friendship went undisclosed also troubles Sam Millsap, the former Bexar County district attorney who made the decision to seek the death penalty. In an interview, Millsap argued that a close friend of De La Luz should have had nothing to do with investigating Cantu on the shooting or the unrelated capital murder case.
Another lawyer in the current Cantu investigation said the shooting of De La Luz could have given Ewell a strong motive for pursuing Cantu.
''The behavior is more suspect because it came in the aftermath of the shooting of a police officer by Cantu," said Keith Hampton, a lawyer for one of the witnesses in the ongoing investigation. Hampton currently represents Cantu's convicted co-defendant, David Garza.
Garza, 15 at the time of the crime, never previously testified but now has given a sworn statement that also says Cantu was innocent, though he told police years ago he saw Cantu at the scene.
Generally, Ewell said, officers should not investigate shootings involving their close friends. But in this case, Ewell said, he thought it was ''absolutely appropriate" for him to handle both investigations.
''I am convinced the capital murder was not unrelated to the De La Luz shooting," he said. ''The same shooter was involved."
(source: Houston Chronicle & San Antonio Express-News)