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Copy. Got an armed robbery going down right now.
10-4.
I came in, and there's an aggravated robbery.
I was taking a break and eating dinner,
and I got up from my dinner and went to go help.
I saw him, and, er, well, fuck, I gotta go towards him.
He said, "Don't fuck with me. I got a gun".
And he took off to the right.
I saw someone running to the back of the field.
Our headlights were right with him as he was running.
And the cops come from all directions.
We didn't know what street he was on.
I was jumping fences, looking for him.
Five-nine, Five-ten...
Got a male, 5'9".
Dark pants and a white unbuttoned shirt that was kind of flapping.
I could see somebody underneath the truck.
And I begin yelling to the person to freeze, don't move, City Police.
We pulled him out right away and handcuffed him to the back.
Then had him in the back seat of the car.
And had a couple witnesses come up, take a look.
So, I looked inside, he looked back at me,
and I said, "Yeah, that's him".
And that was... that was it.
26-year-old Wanda Lopez was working alone behind the counter,
and while on the phone to a police dispatcher, she was stabbed to death.
Wanda was beautiful.
We were young childhood friends in the neighbourhood.
She was a wonderful girl. Very happy, bubbly.
That was Wanda.
That night, I told her as soon as I get off of work,
I was gonna drive over to see her at Diamond Shamrock.
And as I approached the door, it was bloody.
And when I saw that door bloody, I knew...
my childhood friend had passed.
This precious young lady
had so much.
And that was just totally taken away from her.
I recognised him.
It turned out to be a subject that I had dealt with in the past.
Carlos DeLuna.
He looked at me and he said...
"You ain't got nothing on me.
I'm gonna beat this one like I beat the last one".
It wasn't natural the way he was talking.
He kept repeating, "I know who did it, so let me go. I'll tell you who did it".
"Let me go, let me go, let me go".
Again and again. The same thing over and over.
But none of it made sense.
Corpus Christi.
Texas.
It's a lot more civilised now than it ever was before.
This strip in between the Nueces and the Rio Grande was
kind of a legal no-man's land for a long time.
Little skirmishes back and forth for years.
Battles with the Mexican army.
Cattle and horse wrestling.
Texans would go into Mexico and steal cattle.
The Mexicans would come up here and steal cattle.
This is a really, really dangerous place to live.
It was a very violent place.
But eventually, the thin veneer of civilisation...
improved things.
Law and order and, uh, punishment.
Back then, Corpus was kind of a strange town.
In the '70s and the '80s.
All kinds of crazy shit.
God no.
It's the Wild West.
My anger was that...
that it was a very dangerous place to work, and she was by herself.
Then, you still have a lot of old-school, uh, people, you know,
don't give a shit, and they were... Or...
Or if it involves somebody of colour, they don't give a shit.
That's one less Mexican, you know?
That's the way it was back then.
The customer noticed him outside drinking a beer earlier
and noticed that he also had a knife.
He became suspicious and told Wanda to call the police.
She was on the phone to police when the suspect pulled out a knife.
We may never know why Wanda Lopez was stabbed that night...
The first job in television out of college.
First chance to be a reporter, a news reporter on air.
I was as green as could be, and so it was a huge learning experience for me as well
to be part of it and to sit through this
because, again, it was nothing I'd ever done before.
This was my second home away from the newspaper.
This is where I spent all my time unless I was at the office writing the stories.
The Carlos DeLuna trial was a big deal because it was a capital murder case.
This was a bad situation from the word "go".
Carlos DeLuna, he was facing the death penalty.
I mean, you just can't get any worse than that.
At the time, it was pretty wild.
The DA was pretty aggressive and rewarded aggressiveness.
I wanted to try everything in sight.
So I thought, "I'm getting in on this".
Wanda Lopez.
Oh...
Brings back... a lot of mixed feelings.
A lot of mixed feelings.
"Stab wound one penetrates the 5th intercostal space
in the left chest cavity
and goes almost completely through the lower lobe of the left lung".
"Stab wound two is just at the lower level of the breasts".
"As a result of the two stab wounds,
there is approximately two litres of blood in the left chest cavity".
We asked him about the situation, and then, the more we looked into it,
that was not his manner of...
committing crimes.
He just was not the type to go and pull a knife on somebody and
stab 'em to death.
And, of course, he came up with a story.
He told the fella that drove him to the police station
he didn't do it, but he knew who did. That he would help 'em out.
And, uh, when he got to the police station and they tried to question him,
he shut up.
So what's your reaction to that?
That he was having a panic attack and running his mouth.
And how common was that?
Pretty common.
Ever been scared before?
He was apprehensive, he... was concerned.
I would think, deep down inside, he was scared.
Carlos was always running around in the streets.
My brother Carlos DeLuna, he was out there doing spray paint,
drinking.
Started to hang around with the wrong crowd.
I know he got arrested for several things.
Little penny stuff, you know.
Misdemeanours, I guess.
I was young, you know. I was in my 20s.
I was living in Dallas, and I... I got a call from my mum,
and she told me what happened.
And I said it's another joke, you know? He's always getting into something.
And then the next day he's out walking around, you know?
I really didn't wanna have anything to do with him.
He did a lot of bad things to me.
He stole my truck and he wrecked it, and other things that he did.
Taking my mother's money out of the pocket...
and so on.
I mean, I would try to talk to him, get sense to him, but I mean,
you can only say so much.
He would never, never open up.
You know, it's hard for me to say this, but...
I really didn't care at that time.
Every morning, Carlos would come down this tunnel
and they had these little windows for us to video him.
We would just watch him walk, this long perp walk.
Same little swagger down the hall.
It was our ritual before the trial began.
You go to war with the army you got, not the one you'd like to have.
As true for them as it was for me.
From my standpoint, here we have a case
in which the only evidence is eyewitness evidence.
That's the worst evidence in the world.
Would you state your name for the jury, please.
Kevan Baker. I am a witness.
Mr Baker, I want to take you back to the night of February 4.
What kind of vehicle were you driving?
I was driving a '67 Mercury Cougar.
- Was that your car? - Yes, sir.
Can you tell the jury what you did?
I got out, unlocked my gas cap.
Schiwetz wouldn't sit behind his desk asking the questions.
He was up, he was moving and he was passionate.
He captivated this whole courtroom.
What happened then, Mr Baker?
He was just jerking her as hard as he could.
And then he ran to the east.
Right past the Arsuaga couple.
Which is when he turned and looked at us,
seeing him and being able to identify him.
Steve Schiwetz was very effective. Very effective.
Um, but he had a lot to work with.
Were you on duty at approximately 8:00, 8:30 that night?
Yes.
Spotted somebody under a pickup truck.
When they pulled him out from under the truck,
they found a wad of bills in his front pants pocket totalling $149,
which was about the amount of money that was taken from the cash register
in the robbery of the service station.
And what made it even worse, they had the audio.
It was just horrible.
- Where is he at now? - He's right here.
The biggest thing that happened was the playing of the tape,
which was just chilling and so sad and so compelling.
There was not a cough, there was not a rustle of paper.
Everyone was rapt.
The impact was shocking to them.
They're not used to hearing stuff like that.
The 911 call establishes that there's absolutely no reason
for him to kill her.
According to the tape, she was complying. She was handing over the money.
She just says, "You can have it all", and then he kills her.
But there's a lot of questions,
because, you know, if you keep looking at the evidence...
The blood. If he stabbed her and he's right there next to her,
why is there nothing on his clothing?
DeLuna's pulling her head down like that and he's backing out.
He's not gonna get any blood on his shoes, pants or anywhere else.
So, I'd have liked to have had it, but, I mean, kind have been overkill.
Here was contention
that DeLuna would not testify in his own defence
because of his previous criminal record.
Ninety-nine times out of a hundred,
you never put your client on the stand. Never.
The problem was, he wanted to tell the jury he didn't do it.
And my approach was simply see what he's go to say
and then find the holes in it
which was kind of easy.
[Boudrie reporting Once on the stand, DeLuna told the court
that on February 4, the day of the murder,
he was going to meet a girl named Mary Ann Perales.
So I sent a detective out, "Go find Perales".
She did.
His alibi witness, she testified that, well, no, that didn't happen
because at the time, I was seven months pregnant
and I was attending a baby shower held in my honour.
So I wasn't there.
His only explanation for what really happened
was clearly a lie.
You're trying to defend somebody,
and they're giving you this information that's, uh... that doesn't pan out.
Where did this come from?
You want to wring somebody's neck.
That is when he changed tune...
and admitted to being there.
He said that he was across the street,
he could see inside the service station...
and he saw a man attacking the attendant.
And instead of reporting it, he fled.
"I was there. I lied,
but it was only because I saw who did do it, and I was afraid to say".
So he finally tells his lawyers
the name of the guy that he claims did the murder.
He gave us the name Carlos Hernandez.
DeLuna pointed the finger at a friend, Carlos Hernandez.
DeLuna said that he had met this Carlos Hernandez
while they were both incarcerated at the Nueces County Jail.
We got every Carlos Hernandez
that had been arrested in Corpus Christi in the last ten years,
we put every one of 'em in a line-up, and he said, "No, that's not the guy".
And none of those guys were the guy.
And then the prosecution bring detectives on
to say that Carlos Hernandez did not exist.
This guy just does not exist.
"We tried to give you the benefit of the doubt, Carlos.
We tried to find this guy you say was there.
We could not find him".
Yeah. He's making up another lie because he got caught the first time
and he didn't exist.
There's nothing to corroborate what he's saying.
He's just picking this out, a fictitious person.
Carlos Hernandez.
Who the hell is Carlos Hernandez? I'm trying to...
I'm trying to remember.
Corpus Christi's small.
I-I don't know the guy.
It was hard to believe.
Carlos Hernandez was a phantom.
I was just waiting to hear it.
And sure enough, the verdict is "guilty".
He's guilty of murder.
So, in a capital murder case, you're sentenced either to life in prison
or death.
There's a very limited number of crimes for which you can be executed.
Basically, in Texas, it's murdering somebody during a robbery,
or during a rape, during a kidnapping,
and he committed a murder while he was involved in robbing a gas station.
If we feel... or if I feel... that they're gonna find you guilty of this
and sentence you to death,
it's better to go ahead, if they're offering you life, take it.
I offered him life in prison, and with the possibility of parole.
So, our client, steadfast no.
"Why should I go to prison for something I didn't do?
I don't want to plead guilty because I am not guilty."
The same jury must decide...
whether to kill Carlos DeLuna
or whether to let him stay in prison for life.
And once again, the prosecution did a phenomenal job
when they were abe to bring up the past instances
with him having run-ins with women.
Would he be a continuing threat to society?
Would he commit further acts of violence?
"Predator" is all I remember Steve Schiwetz saying.
"He is a predator. He will do this again.
He will harm again. He will kill again."
It's this train that's headed in that direction,
and it's not going anywhere but straight forward towards conviction.
And the jury convicted DeLuna and gave him the death penalty.
It hurts. I hate the death penalty.
It has no place in our society.
He was guilty.
Yeah. You guys did a good job. You convinced me.
You know, we were all kind of caught up in this.
Being very new and naive,
you're not jaded enough to really know
that there's not always two sides to a story.
Sometimes there's three, four or five,
so I didn't know what I was in store for.
And, you know,
there's actually, this story never rests.
I mean, this is too big, you know what I mean?
Every town's got dirty... dirty laundry, you know?
I never did come to the trial.
I just read paper clippings and stuff like that.
I thought it was gonna be... He was gonna get out.
But it didn't work out like that. It really was the real thing.
People came up to me and says, "I can't believe your brother did that."
And I said, "Well, I don't think my brother did that."
You know?
I knew something was not right.
But at the end of the day, you know, he was my brother.
It's not something you just walk away from.
At that point, it was still a story.
He wasn't so much a person to me as he was a story.
And I got the idea that I'd like to talk to Carlos on death row.
I, of course, had never been to, really, a jail, let alone a prison, before
or death row, so, to me, you know, that was like,
"This is a great follow-up to go talk to him and see what he has to say."
In the back of my mind, you know,
part of me was saying, "Maybe I can be the one that he tells the truth to.
He finally admits it."
And I have to speak through security glass,
thinking that this is just bizarre having this conversation with a killer.
And I asked him, you know, how things were going.
Are they trying to find Carlos Hernandez?
I'm thinking he's doing a snow job on me here.
You know, that he's trying to get me, um, to believe him and be sympathetic.
He was just the cold-blooded killer.
He was not a human being to me.
So, I'm kind of guarded, but he started writing to me after that.
And I thought that was weird, and I was kind of creeped out.
"Dear Karen...
I was thinking I could tell you a little bit about me."
I didn't want to get in this letter-writing thing with this killer,
and I thought, "Okay, I'm gonna have a death row pen pal",
and I was very nervous about that.
"We are appealing to the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans,
and of course to the United States Supreme Court.
All day, all I've been doing is calling my lawyers.
Take care, and you be careful, and God bless you and your family.
I hope that all your dreams come true."
An execution date had been set.
The chances of...
delaying the execution were probably pretty good.
I thought I had a reasonable shot.
The paperwork that I would file
would be sufficient to at least halt that process.
In terms of an overall possibility that Mr DeLuna never gets executed,
there is a chance of success.
I have some tools in the tool kit.
They can look at the attorneys' activities.
Did they meet the standards
in a case where the ultimate verdict was being rendered?
You normally have to go outside the record.
You have to take a look at other things.
Something in your back pocket that would really make a judge's head spin
about the uncertainty of it.
I was in the courthouse every day. Every day.
And if you wanted to know anything, you had to talk to the little guy.
I befriended the secretaries, the janitors.
I mean, you... you name it, I was on a first-name basis with them.
And they're the ones that told me,
"I think there's some more photographs that they didn't show."
I issued subpoenas, I got 'em, and I looked at 'em,
and then I saw these other ones.
There was her blood, and the cops were walking all over the evidence.
I mean, they were contaminating the scene.
I was horrified. I mean...
What happened was, when they found Mr Luna under, I think, a car,
they figured they had the guy. It made sense.
You know, we don't have to do shit. This is an easy one.
But there was blood all over the place, so I did ask,
well, why wasn't there any blood on him?
And nobody could answer that question.
I said, "Well, you know, there had to have been something."
I mean, all you have to do is look at these pictures.
There had to have been blood everywhere.
Either on him or on his shoes or something.
Now... she was stabbed twice...
and there was a lot of bleeding with both wounds
'cause they were done consecutively, one, two.
The, uh, knife in the wound,
that's going to allow the blood to flow along the smooth knife edge.
She's moving around, she's slipping around in the blood she's losing.
Well, I would think there would be some blood on him.
He certainly should have had some blood on his shoes.
So I went to the defence attorneys.
I showed it to them, it was kind of like, um...
There was no reaction.
Uh, obviously, there's, uh, more blood.
And nobody wanted to rock the boat.
The case was closed.
It's done, and it's over.
You know, basically.
Hindsight is just great.
We love to just go back and blame everybody that we possibly can.
And in doing so, we are doing the same thing
that every person that goes to... To prison... says the same thing.
"My lawyer was lousy, otherwise I wouldn't be here."
We never look at ourselves, so if they want to say I did a lousy job,
they can say whatever they want.
Well, I mean, if you see something wrong being done to somebody,
you'd better say something, do something,
even if it's not going to help you politically.
But they didn't want to hear it.
I'm gonna have to tell you I have no recollection
these were ever shared with me.
Would've been almost impossible for a perpetrator to walk away from that
without having some residual blood, either on their clothing or on their body.
I don't see how it could be possible otherwise.
I've never seen these before... that I recall.
"Karen, hey, I wish we could have honestly met another way.
Maybe if I had friends like you,
maybe my life would have been a whole lot different.
Who knows?
And when I ended up on death roll"...
- in... - -Death what?
Roll. R-O-L-L.
He didn't even know he was on death row.
You know?
And I think that was the first time, when I got this card from him
and as kind of freaked out as I was about it, I started looking at this guy, going,
"Man, he doesn't even know he's on death row."
He has virtually no education.
He had no real shot at life the way many of us have.
I just, for the first time, began to kind of look at him as a human being.
Not so much doubting the verdict, but wondering...
thinking...
you know, if you weren't born in the barrios...
would this still have happened to you?
Mom had to raise seven.
By herself.
I guess everybody judged us because how we lived, you know?
Didn't have any money and we lived in the projects.
All this wasn't here. It was all fields.
Then they built the new part.
Turn back over here. Used to be a lot of bars and...
nightclubs all around this whole area.
You know? They did a lot of killings here in this...
this area right here.
Lot of killings.
Me and Carlos used to play around this whole area.
It was a bad neighbourhood.
This was a... Back then, this was a good place for the kids to come and fistfight.
I used to stand up here, just watch it.
And there were no places you can run.
Mama and daddy ain't gonna help you.
In my experience as a criminal lawyer and seeing all these guys
who were charged with capital murder offences,
they got court-appointed lawyers, nobody gave a shit.
All these... these poor people, they were all getting found guilty,
they were all going to death row, and nobody represented them.
It's all about money.
Yeah.
This was our football field. Me and Carlos...
I was always the gunslinger.
Quarterback.
You know, I mean, back then you could actually...
Back then you can actually... It was full of kids.
And you could hear all the mothers around 6:00,
"Manuel! Carlos!" Everybody's names, all the kids' names.
I can't believe that I'm back here.
Still looks the same. That was our room right there.
Right there was our room.
And where that air conditioner where's my mom lived at.
Those were our baby brothers and sisters.
And, uh, this one?
We took it at a carnival.
It was Manuel and Carlos when they were small.
We were always taking care of them.
We were like their babysitters all the time because my mom worked,
and we babysat for them and kept them.
'Cause we were older siblings.
And doing things, you know, that normal kids do.
We played and had our twin bicycles and...
Carlos was always a sweet kid.
He was my little brother...
you know?
Carlos fell in this trap...
and I blame...
that we didn't have the education to be able to help him out.
We didn't have the power or...
We didn't understand how to handle it.
It was a stacked deck.
If you're poor and you have no money
and-and can't get yourself a lawyer who really gives a shit about your case,
you know, you're gonna die.
The Supreme Court is saying
that if justice is going to be served, it must be sue and swift.
The justice system always defaults to certainty.
Mr DeLuna had a trial.
Mr DeLuna had lawyers.
Mr DeLuna had a jury of his peers that decided against him.
So when you get that far along,
and a court of criminal appeals has said,
"Hey, this trial is fair",
the default position is they have certainty on this.
The court is ordering lower courts to grant a stay
only if the appeal has "substantial merit".
"Karen, I haven't been a bad person all my life.
How I regret my past lifestyle. I really do.
If only you would have gotten to know me, you would have wondered after a while,
"Is this the same Carlos DeLuna people are talking about?"
I leave you for now. Thinking of you. Carlos DeLuna."
Now I was able to see not just the cold-blooded killer,
but a very lost person...
lonely, and, you know, just a lost soul who still said "I did not do this".
And their desire for just human kindness.
I went back with a successive federal writ of habeas corpus.
It was denied.
I think the certificate of appealability of the Fifth Circuit was denied,
and then the petition for certiorari
of the United States Supreme Court was denied,
and that was the end of the game.
It was over.
And, uh,
Mr DeLuna, uh, had his execution date.
"Karen...
I am scared to die.
I haven't been up to even trying to prepare myself for this.
And if I have to die this way,
I'll never forget you.
I do believe in life after death, and maybe we'll meet up there.
Take care."
Back then, the state of Texas held their executions at midnight.
They usually would transfer the defendant from death row over to the walls unit,
which is where the death chamber is located.
It's just a pale, baby blue room.
Laying on a gurney, the lethal injection part will begin.
I have been in my office at...
11:30 at night with a bottle of scotch waiting for a phone call...
from the Clerk of the Supreme Court,
It is...
the most helpless feeling, 'cause about that time, all of the optimism
is completely sucked out of you.
At about 10:50 p.m., the phone rings,
and it was the Texas Department of Corrections.
And I just kind of froze.
Like, what are they calling me for at 10:50 at night?
And, um, they asked if I would accept a call from Carlos DeLuna,
and I said, "Yes, yes."
His voice came on, and he said, "Karen...
they're gonna execute me, Karen."
I said, "Carlos, is there anything that you really want to tell me?
Is there anything you need to get off your chest?"
He knew what I was getting at, and he said,
"Karen, I didn't do what they said I did.
They're gonna execute an innocent man.
I'm scared, but I know I'm gonna go to heaven."
And...
What do you say to a man that's gonna die in less than two hours?
I got a telephone call from Carlos...
and we talked.
I asked him, "Can I ask you a question?"
And he goes, "Yes." I said, "Did you do it?"
He goes, "No, Manuel, Carlos Hernandez."
And I asked him, "Who is Carlos Hernandez?"
He said, "You know who Carlos Hernandez is."
I said, "I don't know who Carlos Hernandez is."
Somebody came on the phone and said, "Wrap it up."
You know, afterwards, I told Carlos that I loved him...
and that, you know...
I knew he was gonna die at midnight,
and I said, "Man, I'm gonna lose my brother."
But you know...
Him being strapped, injected...
it's... something that I don't think anybody wants to see.
But I just wanted to do it so he could see me and...
knew that I was there for him.
You know, and the helplessness of that...
Knowing that, you know, he really truly may be innocent
and there's absolutely not a damn thing anybody can do to stop this.
You know, Texas was just bound and determined
they were gonna kill this guy.
He needed somebody to believe in him and someone to be kind of a friend to him.
And I think I wasn't a very good friend
because I didn't believe him for the longest time. I didn't believe him.
Even though I saw him change.
There was a caring human being in Carlos DeLuna.
And so it made me question everything.
My whole value system and belief system about the death penalty, but...
A lot of lessons that, um, I've learned through all of this.
About how we treat fellow human beings and how we categorise them
and so easily throw them away.
It forever changed my life having met Carlos DeLuna.
This... the phantom...
it is the truth.
Things that were hidden...
or didn't get discovered before.
So that's what we really mean by "phantom".
In the late '90s, I did a series of studies
of capital cases.
More people are executed in Texas than anywhere else.
A new study by Columbia University
finds rampant problems within the court system.
It is very difficult to overturn a capital judgment on that basis.
You not only have to show that the lawyer behaved incredibly incompetently...
Sleeping, on drugs, drinking, whatever else it is...
You also have to show five, ten years after the fact
that if you'd had a better lawyer,
the outcome would probably have been different.
[reporter Governor Bush maintains
no innocent people have been put to death under his watch.
And I believe every case has been...
we've adequately answered innocence and guilt,
and everybody's had full access to the courts.
That led us to say, "Well, let's go look and see if there's a case
where it looks like there was a miscarriage of justice."
I had a student, and he wrote up a little memo for me
and said, "Hey, I think this is a good case for you to go look at."
And the first thing my colleague said
was that, "This some-other-dude-named-Carlos case?
That's the worst possible case. I wouldn't spend any time on it."
Because he thought that what the defendant was saying was so unlikely
that it had to be made up.
But we found another case in Corpus Christi.
So I did hire an investigator to go to Corpus Christi and look at that case.
But I said, "Look, if you have an hour to yourself
where you don't have something you need to do,
just go look and see if you can find a Carlos Hernandez."
I get a phone call from him, and he says to me,
"Look, I found a record on Carlos Hernandez."
"He looks just like the man they executed here."
My god. This is the real thing.
Carlos DeLuna...
Carlos Hernandez.
We wanted to learn everything we could about this Carlos Hernandez.
Wanda Lopez, Carlos DeLuna...
All of these people lived in close proximity to each other
and an entire story unfolded.
My name is Margie Tapia.
His name was Carlos Hernandez.
I used to sit outside and watch this cute guy go by every day.
And I was like, 'Okay, who is this guy?'
I was a teenager.
I liked good-looking boys.
But come to find out, he wasn't a good-looking boy. He was a man.
He would go, "Why you not in school?"
I'm like, "'Cause I'm pregnant. I can't go to school."
He's like, "Huh." He goes, "What's your mom's name?"
And I said, "Her name is Janie."
He used to do a lot of things
and people wouldn't say nothing because, er, they were afraid to.
You just looked at him wrong, and that's it.
That's it.
We dated for a while, and...
I started living with him.
Like, yeah, but I just look at the house and I get scared.
That house is a nightmare for me.
Everything that went inside that room...
He used to lock me in there.
It was a regular thing.
He would get home...
and then he would start beating me and start raping me.
It didn't take much for him to snap.
It would be him, me, the baby...
and the pillows, of course, then the knife under the pillow.
And he would be talking to it just like if it was a person.
So I finally had a conversation with my, er, sister,
and I told her, you know, he's beating me. I don't... I can't leave.
I need to get out.
She goes, "He was sweet sometimes.
I know that. You've told me that many times."
I said, "But he was a monster too."
My sister helped me grab the baby's things, and I left.
I was like, "I'm never gonna come back again."
And I left the neighbourhood.
So, from there,
the next step was to track Carlos Hernandez's criminal record.
It was a mile long,
a lot of it having to do with both robbery of convenience stores
and violence against women with a knife.
Right here is the knife,
um, that is the murder weapon
and that the perpetrator dropped.
Um, it's a lock-blade Buck knife.
This is exactly the kind of knife that Carlos Hernandez was arrested with
on multiple occasions
down to the colour of the gold trim and the brown handle.
He was arrested 20, 30 times,
and on a majority of those occasions, he had a knife,
and this is what the knife looked like. We've got pictures of it.
He had this total belief that he would not be caught.
He was street smart, and he was feared.
He was able to have this power over people in his neighbourhood.
And I have heard that phrase "snitches get stitches."
Curly hair, scary.
Bloodshot eyes all the time.
Scary angry.
Scary.
I lost my mama when I was 12, and the girlfriend my daddy brought home,
I was jealous, and I thought I'd go and do my own thing.
And it just didn't turn out right.
And so that's what winded me homeless and without a job.
That's when I winded up at Carlos's apartment,
and I stayed with him.
He was having trouble sleeping, and he just had to tell me something,
get it off his chest.
Um...
he said he had done something bad, something wrong.
And, um...
it's just not right.
He said he, uh, picked up this girl in a van...
and once he had sex with her, he...
he strangled her.
That's what he told me. Until her eyes rolled back.
Then he also said that, um...
he flipped her over on her stomach...
and carved an "X" on her back.
From shoulder blade to buttock.
Who? Who can do that? Just a demon would do that.
So it was sort of still an age if you caught a guy
killing children or something like that, they'd,
you know, put a rope around his neck and tie him to a tree
and get the double-barrelled shotgun, and that would end that case.
This is where the van was parked,
and so I just got my camera out and started taking pictures.
The subject was found dead in her van
in a vacant lot in Corpus Christi.
She has a large "X" scratched... More scratched than cut...
On her back.
When you were involved in a case like that,
you can't help but look for a motive.
What kind of a murder was this?
She was named Dahlia Sauceda.
Carlos Hernandez's underwear are found next to the victim.
He was known to have been jealous of this woman and to be angry at her.
He was immediately a suspect in that crime,
but they're also checking out these other young men that she's been with.
And the police charge Jesse Garza.
Wind up in the police station.
I have no idea what's going on.
Until I hear that somebody did lose their life
and I'm being charged for it.
My father inherited this case.
My dad was looking at it
and saw that the physical evidence didn't match what the State's theory was,
and when that happens there's a problem.
So, he's thinking, "I don't think my client did this."
The big piece of physical evidence
that was so important in this case was a beer can,
and once they finally ran fingerprints on it,
the fingerprint came back to Carlos Hernandez, not Jesse Garza.
The police had the wrong guy, and they knew who the right guy is.
It was Carlos Hernandez.
And he is never convicted for this crime.
For some reason, they release him.
In this case, I found that there was no justification.
I found that Carlos did not do this.
In my opinion at the time, he did not do this.
Law enforcement knew that he was already a murderer.
They knew that he had killed Dahlia Sauceda,
and this was four years before Wanda Lopez was killed.
Months later, the very people who were part of the arrest and knew all about him
denied that he even existed.
Accused of the same crime in the same court
in front of the same attorneys using the same weapon.
So, I mean, he had to be on the radar.
There's a fellow named Carlos Hernandez who existed...
and he was a bad guy too.
But...
how am I going to hear about it if nobody tells me?
I didn't even hear about your Carlos Hernandez until ten, 20 years later.
Liebman came up with this stuff about, "Well,
Botary, your other lawyer in the case, he knew about it."
And I'm like, "Really? He never told me anything about it."
And I... That's when I got in touch with Ken Botary a few year...
That was just a few years ago. And...
What did he say?
He didn't remember much of anything about it.
And so when his name comes up in the Wanda Lopez trial,
what do you think?
I... I think it's something that needs to be looked at and, uh,
and questioned.
And I think that... I best recall I told Steve it's not a phantom.
This is a real person. This person came up during a trial of mine,
and I think Steve and I talked about it.
But Steve wasn't too concerned about it
because he was convinced that he had the right person in his trial.
And he said "Hernandez" at the time.
It didn't occur to me that we were talking about the same guy.
Ken Botary allowed the other prosecutor to tell the jury
that Carlos Hernandez was a phantom.
We continued the investigation,
and we found a woman named Dina Ybañez.
He was telling everybody that he did it.
That some other guy was taking the rap for him.
They were friends. Him and that other guy, Carlos DeLuna, they were friends.
So... he said he's taking the fall.
Rumours, family, friends... He killed Wanda Lopez.
When we were investigating this crime, everybody knew.
Carlos Hernandez talked about it...
people in the neighbourhood had seen things.
All I heard was him talking to Javier, and he was bragging,
telling Javier that he had hurt somebody,
and at the same time, he was playing with his knife.
Well, he was bragging to Javier, my uncle, that
that he had hurt somebody.
And, well, Javier didn't believe it, you know.
Somebody that he had hurt?
Yes. A girl by the name of Wanda.
They lie about things they have done,
and they lie about things they haven't done.
He never confessed. He bragged.
Carlos Hernandez created this thing in his mind about
"Oh, I'm such a badass", bragging about this to people.
If you look at that Carlos Hernandez's criminal history,
he has a history of violence too,
but it's against people that he has some kind of vendetta against.
He has a personal animosity or grudge against them.
He didn't know this woman at all.
There was this one time that I can recall and I remember
that me and Priscilla and my sister Cindy were sitting on the porch.
We overheard Carlos Hernandez telling Javier...
that...
that he was gonna go see Wanda at the store.
At Diamond Shamrock.
Carlos Hernandez would always say, "I'm gonna go see my friend Wanda."
We knew that there were police tapes
of everything that happened.
There's a 40, 45-minute manhunt,
all of this with police traffic back and forth on the radio.
And all they presented at trial is Wanda Lopez's call.
All right, we'll get someone over there.
We keep asking, "Where are the other tapes?"
"Oh, we taped over because we didn't want to waste tape,
so we just tape over things."
So, we knew who the dispatcher that night was.
When we tracked him down in Los Angeles,
it turned out that he had pirated a copy of the tape,
and we were able to play the entire 45-minute manhunt...
starting with Wanda Lopez's call.
We can track minute by minute
when the phone calls from the Arsuagas come in,
when men were seen running.
Carlos Hernandez was walking with my brother.
They got to the gas station.
My brother went in there for one reason, and that was to buy something.
Afterwards, go to Stella's.
There was a call that came in about 8:00 in the evening from Wanda.
You've got somebody outside who doesn't look right with a knife.
If I would see something like that, I would get shocked.
I would get scared, I would run. I would say, "What the hell?"
Things look super different right now,
but we were going past the store...
He was running.
Dark pants and a white unbuttoned shirt that was kind of flapping.
And I looked up, and I saw him trying to pull her into the back room,
and I walked towards him.
I heard it on the radio, and I got up from my dinner and went to look.
And he took off to the right.
You've got police officers all around the area.
They're giving descriptions of what they think could be potential suspects.
Hispanic male...
One is talking about a flannel shirt,
the other's talking about a long-sleeve T-shirt untucked.
Maybe wavy or a little bit curly.
I then start to make the judgment
that we may be talking about more than one person here.
I'm watching Jaws, you know, in my living room.
Hear a lot of ruckus outside, trying to figure out what's going on,
and I ran over to the window, and I see one person actually running
and ducking underneath the van.
And then about 30 seconds later,
I seen another person running down the street.
I could tell you maybe they were Hispanic, and that was about it.
We hear one of the officers on foot describe
someone jumping over a fence at a nursing home.
Next thing you know, I see police officers,
so it's kind of freaking me out a little bit.
And the police, who had all been chasing Carlos Hernandez,
all give up on him and come and find Carlos DeLuna.
Yeah, I'm clear.
Okay, we got the guy. This manhunt is now over.
It was night-time, it was dark,
and you've got someone sitting in the back of a police car.
You're only seeing the top half of their body.
I basically said that was him.
And even though when I stood there looking at him,
I tried to visualise his clothes and what he had on,
well, when he was in the cop car, he didn't have a shirt on.
And so... I never said...
I probably should've asked, "Where's his shirt?" or, "What colour was it?"
But I didn't.
I picked the person that I thought that it was.
It was, like, I am not a hundred per cent.
The call is from the police department,
and they're wanting me to come down to the store.
There's been an incident.
I remember seeing Wanda on the stretcher,
and they had a gentleman in the back of the car,
so when I came in the store, the area behind the counter was still in...
still in disarray.
And I'm looking around, and they say it's a robbery, and... and...
And the money's there. There was money on the floor
there was money on the merchandise that was behind the counter.
This doesn't make sense.
They said, "Okay, we got the guy, and that's it. We're done."
They didn't care about anything else.
They just wanted to close the report, wash their hands of it and be done.
They left and said they had the guy, and that was it.
Just like that.
And then the location was turned over to us.
Just doesn't make any sense. I didn't understand it.
They had the guy. It made sense.
The investigation just stopped almost that night, it seemed like.
They didn't do anything else. Why didn't they interview more people?
I wish I could've came forward to do something.
You know, to tell 'em something, but I was too young.
Really, to tell you the truth,
the police officers never even came over to the house.
They figured the case was solved because he was a bad guy
and what was he doing hiding under the car?
Carlos Hernandez,
he got away with it, and they let him go.
And, uh, Carlos Hernandez got away not with one murder but several murders.
I can't understand it.
In between the 1970s and the late 1990s,
he's constantly in trouble, and he's constantly getting let off.
Every murder that this man committed, he got away with it.
Why did he get away with it?
Why was other people getting blamed for stuff that he did
and they knew he did it?
The thought that arose in our head was a thought that was confirmed to us
by criminal defence attorneys in town and police officers whom we talked to
which was that Carlos Hernandez was a small-time police informant.
Absolutely false.
I don't think anybody could rely on Carlos Hernandez's background
or information.
To my knowledge, he never provided one bit of information,
and I don't think he liked the police.
Yeah, he was obviously an outlaw.
He liked to have something on everybody.
He had something on his lawyer. He had something on lots of people.
He was somebody who was known to the police, did favours for the police,
and clearly they did some favours for him.
She was young, and she had, you know,
she had a lot of hope, she had a future, she had a little girl, a baby.
The little girl, I saw her in years later and...
she still had the pain in her face.
That little baby became a woman, so, you know, time came and went.
Carlos is right here.
This is my brother Carlos, right there.
I'm doing my best, brother.
I love you. I know you can hear me.
I love you, and I'm sorry for everything that I did or.
Like I said, I regret not being there for him.
And I'm sorry, you know,
if I ever did anything to hurt him or anything like that.
I pray every day for forgiveness and everything.
Maybe I wasn't, you know, the person that I was supposed to be.
You know, it didn't work out like that.
The proper function of the law is to establish the truth.
And whatever the truth is, that's what we really mean by justice.
In this case, the truth didn't come out.
You know, Mexicans.
Just terrible how they treated them. And they didn't care. They didn't care.
You know, if it was someone with money, they would have done a really good job.
I mean, that's the way it seemed like.
You know, the Hispanics...
they treated them like shit.
It was bad.
Justice has not done as well as it needs to be done in a lot of cases
involving poor criminal defendants,
and also when the victim is somebody who is poor
and of no account to the police and the prosecutors.
That's why I'm against the death penalty now because it's not fair.
If it was fair, then maybe it would be okay, but it's not fair.
It's not a fair system. I wish it were, but it's not.
Nah.
The justice system's about keeping people from killing each other.
Does it work perfectly? Of course not. Nothing does.
We're humans.
The crooked timbre of humanity
out of which nothing straight can be made. Right?
We'll let the world be the judge.
At the end, God's gonna see and judge everyone.
My name is Carroll Pickett.
I was chaplain for the person who was being executed,
and I stayed with him as long as they were there
and walked him into the death house.
Carlos came in at 9:00 in the morning,
and he... I stayed with him all day.
He said, "Well, I'd like to write some letters",
and he said, "How am I gonna mail 'em?"
If he mailed 'em at the prison, they would be censored,
so I told him what we were gonna do
is if he finished with 'em before 11:30 at night,
I'd put 'em in my pocket, and I'll hold 'em in my pocket
until this is over one way or another.
All of a sudden, he said, he said,
"I never had a... a father, you know? My father died."
He said, "I had a step-father who was a drunk and he was horrible to all of us."
And he said, "We're getting along so well. Can I call you Daddy"?'
You know? I said, "Yeah, that's all right."
"Daddy" is so much different from "father".
10:00, the warden will say to me from the death house door,
"It's time", and I will say, "Are you ready to go?"
The executioner was inside this wall,
uh, behind a pane.
And that was the sign to start the first of three injections.
And that first injection was supposed to put him to sleep.
Well, it didn't work.
He raised his head up and looked up at me with those big brown eyes.
I don't know what he tried to say.
He tried to say something, but I don't know what it was.
I wish I knew.
And then he lay down, put his head down,
and then the second injection was started.
And it was supposed to...
paralyse his lungs.
And he raised up again.
I didn't know what was going on. It... It's not working.
And then they gave him the...
The last injection was to paralyse the heart.
It... It finally worked.
And I thought, you know,
here is one of the biggest mistakes Texas has ever made.
He'd done some things before that, he admitted to.
But he didn't do this one, and they killed him anyway.
It's like, you know, Texas likes to kill people
to show people that killing people is wrong.
Well, sometimes they killed innocent people.