Copyright © 1994, The Austin American-Statesman

NANCY NUSSER

Yogurt shop mystery endures - 2 suspects still jailed in Mexico

12-06-1994.

 

MEXICO CITY - Porfirio Villa Saavedra, a key suspect in the slayings offour Austin girls in a yogurt shop on Dec. 6, 1991, believes he will be freed from a Mexico City prison in at least six years.

Since his arrest in 1992, Villa, convicted in a rape case, has been incarcerated in a medium-security jail.

But even that punishment - in a relatively lax prison where wives and children visit inmates in an open yard - is too much, Villa said last week.

"I robbed, but I never did those other things. The police tortured me into saying I did," he said.

Three years after the brutal crime in North Austin, the question of whether Villa was tortured to confess or is getting off easy for a heinous act is a mystery that might never be solved. Ever since he and another suspect, Alberto Cortez Jimenez, disappeared into Mexico' s yawning prison system, the yogurt shop investigation has slowed on both sides of the border.

Mexican authorities barely seem to remember the Austin slayings or Villa and Cortez; finding them was like looking for Prisoner X in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago.

Austin officials still say the men are important suspects, though confession by torture is common in Mexico and the suspects have not been interviewed by Austin police since 1992.

Police Lt. David Parkinson, chief of Austin's homicide division, would not say why police have not interviewed the men for so long. He said the men are considered suspects partially because of composite drawings that look like Cortez. "We're kind of stalemated on the guys in Mexico, " Parkinson said.

"The investigation has ground to a halt," said Barbara Suraci, mother of Jennifer, 17, and Sarah Harbison, 15, who were killed in the yogurt shop.

"Unfortunately, the Austin police don't have the clout, the expertise to pursue these men in Mexico because of all the international laws."

The sisters died with two friends, Eliza Thomas, 17, and Amy Ayers, 13. Their bodies were burned in a fire that police believe was set by the killer or killers.

Suspects include three Mexicans living in Austin at the time - Villa, Cortez and their friend Ricardo Sanchez, who is at large. A year after the slayings, police arrested Villa and Cortez in Mexico, and they confessed to the crime soon after.

But when Austin police traveled to Mexico in the fall of 1992, the men said they confessed only because Mexican police beat and tortured them.

Since then, Villa and Cortez have been convicted not of murder but of cocaine possession and the November 1991 rape of an Austin woman who was driven from the Sixth Street entertainment district to San Antonio. Mexico doesn't allow extradition of criminals but permits them to be tried in Mexico for crimes committed elsewhere.

Last December, the men received 15-year sentences, which they said they believe will be shortened to four to six years for good behavior.

Now they spend their days in Santa Marta, a medium-security prison on the edge of Mexico City.

On days when visitors come, inmates wander around an open yard lined with taco stands and foosball tables. Wives and children are allowed to visit three days a week. Other visitors can get in by showing a driver's license. Few armed guards are in sight.

"They have no proof against us," said Villa, 26, who sat with his visiting niece and her baby at a picnic table. "If they had proof, do you think we'd be here on the rape and drug charge?"

He said Mexican police beat his wife and threatened to rape her. " I refused to confess," Villa said, as a few tears wet his cheeks, "until they said they would rape my wife."

He said Austin police gave him a lie-detector test. After the test, according to Villa, Parkinson told him, "I don't think you did it, but I think you know who did."

Villa is so adamant about his innocence that he has sent a letter to the human rights group Amnesty International.

Parkinson would not comment on Villa's statement about the lie-detector test.

"They have the wrong people," said Cortez, 25, also interviewed in prison. "We did bad things, but we didn't kill anyone."

He said that he and Villa stole stereos and appliances in 10 robberies during the 20 months they lived in Austin.

He said he and Villa were in the car when their friend Sanchez raped the Austin woman. "We were wrong in not stopping him, and she was wrong in

getting involved in a game she couldn't stop," Cortez said. ``I think they (Austin police) picked us as suspects because of our history in Austin."

Parkinson said Cortez looks like the man in two composite drawings: One is of a man in a parked car near the yogurt shop before the slayings, and the other is of the three men involved in the rape.

Because the three men appeared to work as a group, suspicion that Cortez took part in the slayings and rape cast suspicion on Villa and Sanchez, Parkinson said.

"We've filled up the better part of five filing cabinets, and unfortunately we haven't come up with the thing or set of things to discover who or what group of people committed the crime," Parkinson said.

He said police are still searching for Sanchez and "several" other suspects.

Meanwhile, Mexican officials appear to have put the case on a back burner. When asked about the Austin slayings, officials in the attorney general's office said they hadn't heard of them.

After a week's badgering of officials, government legal adviser Antonio Villares said he found basic information about the rape case, such as the sentences the men received. But then Hugo Morales, spokesman for the attorney general's office, said the information could not be released.

Even the question of where the suspects were jailed seemed to stymie officials. It took prison spokeswoman Yolo Xochitl 10 days to find that the men had been in the North Prison and were transferred to the Santa Marta jail.

"The government of the U.S. is going to have to find some new evidence, " said a legal adviser at Mexico's office of the attorney general in San Antonio. "It depends on the American government; it doesn't depend on us."

Indeed, Suraci believes the probe is all but over.

"The chances are that this is a forgotten case," she said, "not in the hearts and minds of the people, but we're talking about a system, and systems don't have hearts and minds."

 

Copyright © 1994, The Austin American-Statesman

NANCY NUSSER, Yogurt shop mystery endures - 2 suspects still jailed in Mexico., 12-06-1994.