Feeling buoyed, Schonemann and Schwartz, now joined by Ken Driggs, decided to again attack the only physical evidence against Spence: the bite marks. 
Dannen found a middle-aged man still mourning his son. Perhaps more significant, however, was the fact that Texas, unlike many states, had no law requiring that a death row inmate be granted legal representation for his writ of habeas corpus. Spence wasnt so lucky. Spence said hed have Juhl ask around on the street about the murders. If this was true, then the confessions of the Melendez brothers were decidedly false. They told me they got enough to get me out, he said. They couldnt all be lying. Truman thought Deeb would confess, recalled Baier. The states case was based on the theory that Deeb had hired Spence and the Melendez brothers to kill Kelley for insurance money, but that Spence and the brothers had mistakenly killed Jill because she looked so much like Kelley. A word about the reporting. He had grown up in Rosenthal, a tiny town just south of the city, and joined the WPD in 1965, a few years after dropping out of high school. These days theres increasing credibility given to the idea that innocent people do plead guilty; the National Registry of Exonerations recently found that nearly 1 in 5 of the 87 inmates who were exonerated in 2013 had pleaded guilty to charges against them, often because of the guarantee of a lesser sentence. Blum felt strongly that it wasnt safe for Dannen to continue his reporting on the lake murders, at least not in Waco, and advised him to stay in New York. Simons had searched Washingtons sisters apartment, where he had been arrested, and found a sweatshirt that appeared to have blood on it, as well as some tennis shoes whose treads Simons thought might match the footprint on Whites door. He had a mold taken of Spences teeth, then personally delivered it and the photos to Homer Campbell, a forensic odontologist in Albuquerque who had helped solve the Amarillo case. WebUPDATE: 10/26/05 Jeremy Jones was found guilty on all 4 counts of capital murder and on 10/27/05 the jury recommended the penalty of death in a 10 - 2 vote. Is my mother with you? Sixteen months after White was murdered, Hunt and Fuller filed Spences direct appeal with the CCA. The call was urgent: a body had been discovered at Speegleville Park, near Lake Waco. The polygraph, given twelve days after the murders, was ultimately inconclusiveyet decidedly strange. It was yet another coup for Simons, who had visited Tony in jail until the inmate finally broke down. Ive got to go to Texas and find out what the hell happened, he told her. Lets go get them and fuck them up. Yet another claimed that Spence told him he had sexually assaulted the girls with a whoopee stick. The inmates denied receiving anything in return for their testimony. I am perplexed and bewildered, as Im sure a lot of people are, he told the Waxahachie Daily Light. It was around six-thirty on a summer evening in 1982, and the 39-year-old officer had just returned to his squad car after visiting his wife, Judy.
Some wouldnt talk, but three of them recanted their testimony, saying theyd agreed to speak on the record for food, cigarettes, and conjugal visits. Price was stunned that Simons had taken his investigation so far without her, but she agreed to accompany him to go speak with Jim Hale, a forensic odontologist in Dallas who was studying the Washington mold. [5] Those who had been involved in the initial prosecution were stunned. However, both men were found to have credible alibis (Harper's was later proven false when Spence's attorneys investigated it). He introduced himself to her after the trial and they were married less than a year later. David Spence was at the county jail awaiting trial for aggravated sexual abuse. But the inmate also had a soft side, composing poetry and writing heartfelt letters to Price, Gilbert Melendez, and Schone-mann himself. Their mother also urged him not to. Hed driven that road many times, and as he crossed the reservoir, he looked out over the water. The state was on track to see the highest annual number of executions in its history: while only a total of three people had been given a lethal injection in 1996, as of April 1997 Spence was already the fourth inmate to have received one that year, and by July the state had dispatched 24 men (the total for the year would be 37). A grateful city breathed a sigh of relief. She didnt make any changes, she didnt say anything was wrong with it, and she signed it.). J.R., who also got the call, was to serve as crime-scene investigator; taking separate cars, Price met him and Ramon Salinas at the address. Standing over her, he felt overwhelmed by the evil that had befallen her. Opening it, he read that there were still no definitive leads. I get people talking, and then I shut up and listen, Simons would later explain. It had been created in 1930, when engineers dammed the Bosque River, and now there were six parks along its edges, with pretty white-sand beaches. Now she hoped she could help free Washington and Williamsand cast some light on the DA and his investigator. Simons, meanwhile, became one of the most well-respected officers in the state. But others had left even the most hardened officers in the Waco Police Department reeling.
He and Spence had been riding around in Spences car, he said, drinking and smoking, when they went to Koehne Park. Later in the evening, the woman wrote, she saw Kenneth in the front seat of a maroon Lincoln Continental with Robert Frueh, a local reverend with a fondness for teenage boys who often cruised through Wacos parks. Spence was executed in 1997, Melendezs brother Gilbert died in prison of complications from HIV in 1998, and Muneer Deebwho won an acquittal in a 1993 retrialdied of. In 2004 Dannen finally finished a draft of his book.
Please let us know how we can help. Schonemann was encouraged. Remains found in May 2022 in the Callville Bay area were identified in August 2022 as those of Thomas Erndt, a 42-year-old Las Vegas father whose family said he drowned during a nighttime family boat outing late Aug. 2, 2002 at the lake.. Other skeletal remains discovered over a three-week span in late July and early August along I do know that just about every one of the witnesses who said that Calvin or Joe murdered Mrs. White would say anything to benefit themselves. (In a deposition Simons gave in 1989, he said, I only talked to Angela Miles one time, and she said that she couldnt write a statement out, and as she quoted it to me, I wrote it out. He insisted that he let her examine it. Leave them blank to get signed up. Nonetheless, Spence was set to be executed in four days. According to testimony at the trial, her parents had asked the His tenacity, in fact, was about to pay off in other ways. It was a match. He gave her a partner, Officer Frank Turk, and took them off all other cases so they could look directly into the DAs and Simonss handling of the White case.
Judge Black didnt address anything we had done..
We were pulling out all the stops, Schonemann explained to me. The police investigation and criminal trials that followed the murders lasted for more than a decade and resulted in the execution of one man, David Wayne Spence, and life prison sentences for two other men allegedly involved in the crime, Anthony and Gilbert Melendez. (Franks was never accused of any wrongdoing.) They also sought out Spences former attorney Walter Reaves, who was now representing another death row inmate with innocence claimsCameron Todd Willinghamand Raoul Schonemann, who was still doing work for the Capital Punishment Clinic in Austin and representing death row inmates. We had life-size pictures of the marks and a cast of [Spences] teeth brought into the jury room, remembered one juror afterward. The testimonyeveryones bite mark is different, like a fingerprintwas very convincing.. An HBO documentary released two months later, The Execution Machine: Texas Death Row, featured Spence in his final week. After her familys long heartache, Thompson felt, Dannen was finally going to bring her niece true justice. My responsibility to Calvin Washington took precedence over my interests as a journalist and book writer, Dannen told me. Bernadette Feazell, who knew Perry, arranged for the two to present Melendezs case to the governors deputy general counsel, Mary Anne Wiley. There they found a footprint on the front door, which had been kicked in, and some smudged fingerprints around the house. WebJill Montgomery, Raylene Rice and Kenneth Franks were tortured and stabbed multiple times at Speegleville Park at Lake Waco on July 13, 1982. (Simons has said that he got involved only after he received calls from a few of his informants. Listen now and subscribe: Everyone strained to catch a glimpse of the accused killer, who had gotten a haircut and wore a suit and tie. White, the investigators learned, had gotten off work the previous night at nine-thirty, after her shift at Uncle Dans Barbecue, where she bused tables and washed dishes. But the CCA denied Schonemanns last-ditch motion, followed by the Supreme Court and the Board of Pardons, which turned down his requests at four oclock that afternoon. The two had engaged in verbal confrontations on multiple occasions. When she didnt show up for church the next morning, her Sunday school teacher stopped by the house and found her. Jill Montgomery, Raylene Rice and Kenneth Franks were tortured and stabbed multiple times at Speegleville Park at Lake Waco on July 13, 1982. 
UPDATE:Tony Melendez, the last living Lake Waco murders defendant, died on Friday, January 13, 2017, at 57 at a prison hospice at the Michael Unit in Tennessee Colony, not far from Palestine. Dannen wasnt fully convinced of Spences innocenceas a veteran journalist, hed made a career out of being skepticalbut hed learned enough to know he had the makings of a great story. If they execute me on April 3, he told the camera, it will be a cold-blooded, calculated murder. Dateline would eventually follow with an hour-long show, in January 1998, that questioned Spences guilt. 
For Simons, this was a promising start, and later that afternoon he and Baier sat down to interview Kelley, who had also been a friend of Jills. Reaves had agreed to represent Melendez pro bono too. Her personal opinion, she continued, was that this Frueh guy had something to do with it. Frueh was no longer alivehe had been stabbed to death by a teenager in 1991but Dannen discovered that he had lived less than a block away from Franks. Witnesses testified to seeing Harper in the park on the night of the murders, and others claimed he had boasted of committing the murders. In February Spence got his new date with death: April 3, 1997. This made for an awkward arrangement, since Simons and the WPD officers had been on cool terms after hed left the force. Feazell also included Chief Scott, who had publicly accused him of refusing to prosecute valid criminal cases. Three Waxahachie teenagersRaylene Rice, Jill Montgomery, and Kenneth But Im still here.. White was poor and had had a hard life; shed been married four times and had lived long enough to see her son vilified as a monster, only to die like this. Spences lawyer in the abuse case, an earnest attorney just three years out of law school named Walter Reaves, had instructed his client not to speak to Simons, but Spence ignored him; when Spences father asked Simons if he should hire a lawyer for his son for the murder case, the deputy said Spence didnt need one because he hadnt been charged with murder. The intruder had not taken anything of valuethe TV was still therebut had ransacked the front bedroom, opening several boxes and scattering papers everywhere. Wed work ten hours a day, and I didnt have a car, so Id stay a week at a time. Retired Waco police Lt. Marvin Horton, now 82, remembers how hard his investigators worked to solve the case and the rift that grew among officers over the direction of the investigation. A second wrote that the marks were more likely than not made by insects or artifacts. If the purpose of the exercise, he continued, was to match these marks to a set of teeth, it borders on the unbelievable. A third thought that some contusions on one body were probable human bite marks, but he couldnt match any of the molds to them. Melendez pleaded guilty to the savage 1982 murder of three teenagers in Waco; he also testified against another man, David Spence in 1985. Schonemann, however, was frantic. Ex-Inmate Now Free as a Bird read the front page of the Waco Tribune-Herald. Now Driggs asked Krauss to set up the study.
She also had marks on her skin that looked as if theyd been made by teeth. I did it, he said. But they were running out of time: Spence had been convicted of murder twice, which meant the lawyers had to file a habeas writ in two trial courts, and it had already taken a month just to read all the documents. In THE MURDERS AT THE LAKE by Michael Hall, in TEXAS MONTHLY 2014, Hall describes Waco cop Simons, who has arrested a suspect named Muneer One night, driving home at midnight after a long interview with Dennis Baier, a discombobulated Dannen was pulled over by a cop for driving the wrong way down a one-way street. There had been no suppression of exculpatory evidence, the brief stated, and the police reports would not have made a difference in Spences verdicts. The twelve jurors found Spence guilty in less than two hours.
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