The Best American Crime Reporting 2010 (13 page)

While the suspects were being questioned in the sheriff’s office in Emory, Erin’s grandparents were driving her to the hospital in Tyler, escorted by Chief Sanders and Deputy Booth. Just a few minutes into the drive, however, Sanders’ cell phone rang. It was Fischer, calling to inform Sanders that Erin had been implicated in the Caffey murders and she needed to be placed under arrest. For a moment, Fischer heard only dead silence on the other end of the line. Sanders passed the phone to Booth. “You want us to do what now?” Booth asked, incredulous.

Sanders pulled her squad car into a parking lot, and the Dailys followed. She informed them that she had been instructed to arrest their granddaughter in connection with the Caffey murders and requested that Erin step out of the car. Virginia Daily became hysterical and grabbed Erin’s face. “Did you have any part in this?” she demanded.

“No, Grandma,” Erin told her, crying.

As a juvenile, Erin could not be taken directly to the sheriff’s office for questioning and so she appeared that afternoon before a justice of the peace. “After everything we had heard, I was picturing a monster, for lack of a better word,” said Sergeant Vance. “Here was someone who had dreamed up a scheme to murder her family and manipulated people into carrying out her plan. And then in walks this tiny, meek, blond-headed girl who couldn’t fight her way out of a wet paper sack.” The judge informed Erin of her rights and asked if she would be willing to speak with investigators. She declined to meet with the Texas Ranger or Detective Almon, electing to make a written statement instead. The brief account, put down in her girlish handwriting, echoed what she had told Chief Sanders: There had been smoke and strangers with swords, and she could not remember much else. She was taken to the juvenile detention center in Greenville, where she was held on charges of capital murder.

Less than 24 hours after the murders, Waid, Johnson, Charlie, and Erin were all in custody.

IV

Terry Caffey was discharged from the hospital several days later and went to stay with his sister in the town of Leonard, about an hour’s drive from Alba. For a man who had been shot five times and climbed out the window of a burning house, he could consider himself lucky; he had a broken nose, two fractured cheekbones, and minor nerve damage in his right arm. “I remember the nurse coming in and saying, ‘Mr. Caffey, you can go home now,’” Terry told me when I visited him this spring. “All I heard was the word ‘home.’ I thought, ‘I don’t have a home. I don’t have a family to go home to.’ And I remember weeping, just weeping uncontrollably.

“I laid on my sister’s couch for a few days, and that’s when the despair hit me. I decided that I was going to go back to my property and end my life. I was going to lay down and shoot myself right there on the spot where I lost my family. I wanted to die where they died. And then I decided, no, there’s been enough bloodshed. I’m going to take all of the pain pills they gave me—all the depression medication, the Xanax, everything—drink me a bottle of Jim Beam, put a hose in the tailpipe of my daughter’s pickup, run it up to the window, and just fall asleep and not wake up again.

“So two or three days I pondered on this. Somebody brought me a Bible and told me to read the book of Job. Well, I’d read the story countless times before, but I read it again and it was almost like I was there with Job. He lost everything, his whole family, all his worldly possessions, but he did not lose his faith, and God blessed him doubly. That turned me around and got me thinking that God might have a plan for me. He didn’t bring me through all that for nothing.

“I went back to our property as soon as I was better. There was nothing left but the subfloor and the metal roof. I spent days out there picking through the ashes. I would get on my hands and knees and just dig. I didn’t find much—a Hot Wheels car; a broken ceramic cup; a horseshoe-shaped belt buckle that the kids gave me for Christmas. I ended up buying me a used RV, and I moved it back up on my land. Everybody said I was crazy for going back, but it brought me healing. I put my RV right on the spot where my house once stood, and I stayed out there about four months. I was so stubborn, I thought, ‘I’ll be darned if somebody is going to run me off of our property. When I leave, it will be when I’m ready and when God’s ready for me to leave.’ Some nights it was pitch-black by the time I got home, and I had to work up the courage to get out of the car. I bought me a nine-millimeter pistol and I slept with it beside me.”

Twice a week, Terry made the trip to Greenville to see his daughter. He could not ask Erin any of the questions he longed to know the answers to; her lawyer had warned him that their conversations were being recorded and anything Erin said could be used against her at trial. And so Terry sat opposite the only other surviving member of his family—the girl who investigators were telling him had wanted him and his wife and sons dead—and conversed with her about subjects as mundane as the weather. Terry found the visits agonizing, but he felt compelled to be in the presence of his only living child. His daughter looked fragile and anxious in her orange prison jumpsuit, and at the end of every visit, he made sure to tell her that he loved her. During the many hours in which they made polite conversation, he ventured only once to ask her a question of substance. It was a question that preoccupied him more than his doubts about her innocence. “Were me and your mom good parents?” he asked her as they sat on opposite sides of the Plexiglas divider. Yes, Erin assured him, blinking back tears. She couldn’t have asked for a better mom or dad.

G
IVEN THE COMPLEXITY
that four capital murder cases posed for a small, rural county, the Texas attorney general’s office was asked to assist the Rains County district attorney in bringing the four defendants to trial. Assistant attorney general Lisa Tanner, a seasoned prosecutor who has sent four men to death row in her eighteen years as a trial lawyer, was assigned to the case. “This was not the most brutal or cold-blooded case I had ever prosecuted,” she told me. “But when you took all the different factors and put them together—how young and seemingly normal the perpetrators were; how ruthless they were; how stupid they were; how cavalier they were; how utterly undeserving this family was—it was, without question, the most disturbing case I’d ever dealt with.”

The crime also defied easy explanation. Though Charlie and Waid had been drinking that night, neither was using drugs. Erin’s desire to have her parents killed did not appear to be motivated by any mistreatment or trauma; her court-mandated psychological evaluation failed to point to any evidence of abuse in the Caffey home. Yet Tanner had no doubt that Erin had masterminded the crime. “The phone records really did it for me,” she said. “When I saw the phone records, I realized that it didn’t matter if a single one of the other defendants testified against her. We were still going to be able to convict her of capital murder.”

The phone records corroborated a pivotal point in Charlie’s account of the murders. “From 11:46 p.m. until 12:48 a.m. that night, Erin called him six times from inside the Caffey house,” Tanner said, reading from the case file. “But the kicker was from 1:22 a.m. to 1:58 a.m., when she called him seven more times. That comported completely with what Charlie told us, which was that she kept calling and saying, ‘Where are y’all? What’s the holdup? Hurry up. Come back, and I’ll keep the dog quiet.’”

Tanner sat down with Terry Caffey and showed him the phone records this past June. She needed to explain to him why prosecutors were asking the court to certify Erin as an adult. (If certified, she would face the same punishment at trial as an adult, including life without parole—with one notable exception: Even when certified, a juvenile cannot receive the death penalty.) Tanner was in the difficult position of briefing the victim of a crime who also happened to be the parent of the perpetrator. “It was an awful thing to have to do, to lay out to a man that his daughter wanted him dead and was responsible for the deaths of the rest of his family,” Tanner said. “I brought all of the relevant documents and pictures, and we went through everything. I showed him photos of the suitcase that Erin had packed and the burned-out lockbox that was open to the combination that she had given Charlie. I showed him the statement that a friend of hers had given to investigators about how Erin had wanted them to be killed. I told him about her and Charlie having sex afterwards, which was by far the hardest thing to have to tell him. Terry cried a lot and kept asking, ‘Why?’ He said, ‘I don’t understand. We didn’t see any of this coming.’”

And yet, after Terry had seen every last piece of evidence, he continued to visit Erin and never wavered in his support, standing beside his daughter at each court appearance holding her hand. For the many people who puzzled over his loyalty, there were many others, in the pews of Miracle Faith and elsewhere, who understood it as the scriptural imperative of unconditional love. Terry drew particular sustenance from a passage in Romans, chapter 12: “Bless them which persecute you,” a principle that, in the end, informed his wish that his family’s killers be spared the death penalty. “My heart tells me there have been enough deaths,” Terry wrote in a letter to the Rains County district attorney, Robert Vititow, this past fall. “I want them, in this lifetime, to have a chance for remorse and to come to a place of repentance for what they have done. Killing them will not bring my family back.” He asked that Charlie Wilkinson and Charles Waid receive sentences of life in prison without parole. After consulting with the attorney general’s office, Vititow honored his wishes and offered them a plea deal. In November they each pleaded guilty to three counts of capital murder.

At their sentencing hearings in January, Terry rose to address each of them in the courtroom. He spoke first to Waid, who remained impassive, and then to Charlie. “In time, God has shown me what it means to forgive,” Terry said as Charlie’s eyes shone with tears. “Charlie Wilkinson, I want to say to you today, I forgive you. Not so much for your sake, but for my own. I refuse to grow into a bitter old man. If I want to heal and move on, I must find some forgiveness in my heart, and that has been the hardest thing I have ever had to do because you took so much from me.”

V

Today Terry lives in a tidy brick house in Wills Point, about thirty miles southwest of Alba, just down the road from the cemetery where Penny and the boys are buried. He became an ordained minister in April, and he gives his testimony most weekends at local churches, using his family’s story as an object lesson in forgiveness. To the astonishment of many of his closest friends, he remarried last year. Terry found a good listener in Sonja Webb, a pretty divorcée he met in the course of his work as a home health aide. Webb was raising two sons on her own. She asked him to lunch last June, and they never ran out of things to talk about.

“Terry missed being a husband and a father,” Tommy Gaston says. “He needed somebody to lay down beside him at night who he could tell his troubles to.” They said their vows in October at Miracle Faith, just a few feet from where Terry’s wife’s and sons’ caskets had rested seven months earlier. Webb’s boys—Blake, who is seventeen, and Tanner, who is nine—bear a passing resemblance to Bubba and Tyler. Terry, who shares a warm relationship with his stepsons, says that, like Job, he has been doubly blessed for never faltering in his faith in God.

Once a month, Terry makes the three-hour trip to Gatesville, where Erin is incarcerated. At his urging, she received a lesser sentence than life without parole; he wanted to make sure that she had something to live for, he said. And so Erin accepted a plea deal—two life sentences to be served concurrently, plus an additional 25 years—which ensures that with good behavior she will be eligible for parole when she is 59 years old. Now that she has pled out and the specter of a capital murder trial is gone, their conversations are no longer restricted, and Terry is free to ask his daughter whatever he wants to know. Yet when I visited him, he seemed hesitant. “I’ve got so many questions, and I don’t want to hit her with them all at once,” he said. He has, thus far, chosen to accept the story line she has provided him: She was planning on running away that night, but then she changed her mind. The phone calls, she told her father, were to dissuade Charlie from coming at all. It was Charlie who had wanted the family dead, and when he came to the house, she had been powerless to stop him.

“I think she thought Charlie was just blowing smoke,” Terry said. “I don’t think she actually thought he would go through with it. I
know
my daughter. She cried one time when we were in my truck and I ran over a squirrel; she’s tenderhearted. No kid’s an angel, but I know what she is capable of, and I know she’s not capable of murder.”

E
RIN TOLD ANOTHER VERSION
of her story to Israel Lewis, the mental health counselor who was hired to evaluate her for the defense. When she spoke to Lewis, Erin insisted that Charlie had a volatile temper; he had killed her family after she had broken up with him and then framed her. “I have worked with some good liars, but Erin was one of the best,” said Lewis, who has nineteen years’ experience counseling juvenile offenders. “She seemed totally sincere and genuine, and I would have put my license on the line to say that she was telling me the truth. She spoke with tears in her eyes—‘God will save me. He knows I’m innocent.’ I cried every time I left her jail cell.”

Only after learning the details of the criminal investigation did Lewis realize that Erin had been manipulating him. He continued to visit her at the county jail, but what disturbed him most, at the end of a year of counseling, was the realization that he could no more explain why she had wanted her family killed than on the day he had first met her. She remained a mystery. “You could not have paid her to say anything negative about her parents,” he said. “I still long for the day when I know what was hurting her bad enough to make such a decision.”

Erin declined my interview requests, but the three other defendants each agreed to sit down with me and revisit the early morning of March 1, 2008. They all gave similar accounts, with Erin serving as the driving force behind the killings. Johnson, who is serving a forty-year sentence, recalled how Charlie had repeatedly asked Erin to consider running away as the group had driven around before the murders. “Charlie kept saying, ‘Are you
sure
you want to do this?’” Johnson recounted. “And she said, ‘Why are you asking me this? If you love me, you’ll do it.’” (Explaining her own inability to put the brakes on the plan, Johnson said, “I just wanted to go home, but Charlie said it was too late, that I was already involved. He said that if anybody said anything to anyone, that person would be taken care of. I was scared shitless.”) Erin had seemed elated after the killings, Johnson explained, and said that she was “free.” In fact, Johnson said, Erin had wanted to get out of the car to make sure that everyone was dead. And it was Erin who had insisted that her brothers be killed, according to both Johnson and Waid. The boys picked on her, Erin had said, and she didn’t want them to be left in foster care. “They were ridiculous reasons—not even reasons—just an excuse,” Waid told me. “When we pulled away from the house, she was happier than a kid on Christmas morning.”