Evil Eyes

COREY MITCHELL

PINNACLE BOOKS

Kensington Publishing Corp.

http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals connected to this story.

PINNACLE BOOKS are published by Kensington Publishing Corp.

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Copyright © 2006 by Corey Mitchell

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Pinnacle and the P logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off. First Printing: April 2006

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

For Carol and Don Mitchell, your example of love and strength goes beyond inspirational.

Justice will only be achieved when those who have not been injured by crime are as indignant as those who have.

—King Solomon

In Memory

Dick Yarbrough Gene Williford Max

Two people in particular helped make this book come to life. Harriett Semander and Andy Kahan provided the heart and grit of this story for me. They are beacons in a dense fog.

I also would like to thank Melinda Aguilar, Jane Mont-gomery, Keri Whitlow, JoAnna Nicolaou, Joseph Foy, Sandra Carlsen, Doug Bostock, Sharon Watts, Mike Cox, Alison Pierce, Paul Bunten, Tom Wine, Don Grove, Denise Domain, Dianne Clements, Scott Durfee, Lynn Erickson, Richard Kuhn, Gavin Routt, Michael Guarino, Virginia Gibbons, Elias Melendrez, and my anonymous sources.

Also Richard Curtis, Michaela Hamilton, He Who Shall Remain Nameless, Stephanie Finnegan, and every-one at Kensington/Pinnacle.

Special thanks to Michelle Hartmann for the use of her photos.

For my friends Ray Seggern and Kelly Nugent, Peter and Kathryn Soria, Lupe Garcia, Mike and Lynette Shep-pard, Knox and Heather Williams, Ricky and Shirin Butler, Kevin and Shana Fowler, Trey and Missy Chase, Clint and Cathy Stephen, Phil and Karen Savoie, Chris and Beverly Goldrup, Kirk and Teresa Morris, Dennis Mc-Dougal, Aphrodite Jones, Poppy Z. Brite, Adam Gross-man, Letty and John Espinosa, Drew and Sarah Stride, Irma Guerrero, Bobbie Stephens, Bertha Gutierrez, Dale Heath, and Ruby Tristan.

For my in-laws Dennis and Margaret Burke, Denise Burke, and my Chi-niece, Leah Burke.

For my family Don and Carol Mitchell, Kyle and Ramona Mitchell, Darrin and DeDe Mitchell, and all of my wonderful nieces, Julie, Kaylee, and Madison, and my awesome nephew, Ronnie. Also to Bill and Renee Runyan, Todd Solomon, and Jeremy Frey. Also, Lucas and Dallas. For my late wife, Lisa. I always miss you and love you.

For my wife Audra. From copyediting to counseling, thank you for always being there for me. Your love and support mean everything to me. You are beyond com-pare. My love, forever.

For Emma, our daughter. Here’s to a safe and happy life. We love you.

May 23, 1982, Hammerly Walk Apartments, Houston, Texas, 6:30
A
.
M
.

The man watched as the young pretty white girl glided out of her car. He thought about the woman he killed earlier that morning.

He didn’t know her name—as usual. The one from the morning, that is. Or this one, for that matter. Or the three women he killed in April.

The man stood quietly in the bushes of the apartment complex. The slim white girl had smooth skin, just the way he liked. She also had pretty hair. He eyed her as she walked toward him. The man slid out from the bushes and directly behind the young woman. He grabbed her just as she began her ascent up the staircase. The strong black man placed his large hands around the woman’s throat and began to squeeze. Caught off guard, the woman’s face was panic-stricken. The man continued the death grip as he dragged her onto her neighbor’s patio.

“Where do you live?” he asked the young woman. She pointed up at the apartment on the second floor.

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Corey Mitchell

“Is there anyone else inside?”

Lying, she shook her head furiously. Her roommate was probably inside.

The man continued to strangle the woman. She began to lose consciousness and sagged to the ground like a rag doll. The man trotted up the stairs to the woman’s apartment. He opened the door, which was not locked, and walked inside. The room was dark. The man felt along the inside of the wall for a light switch. When the room was illuminated, it was time for the man to be surprised. An attractive eighteen-year-old Hispanic woman, Melinda Aguilar, stood directly in front of him.

Melinda had been getting ready for the 10:45
A
.
M
. church service, where she and her roommate, Lori Lister, taught Sunday school. Dressed only in a terry cloth bathrobe, she was terrified. She froze in her tracks and stared at the muscular man. She did not scream; she did not run. She could only stare at the intruder. The man seemed dumbfounded as well.

Aguilar yelled out for her roommate, snapping the intruder out of his reverie. He approached her, grabbed her, and forced her into one of the rooms in the modest-sized apartment. It was the roommates’ bedroom. He began to choke the pretty Hispanic girl.

“If you scream, I’ll kill you,” he threatened in a hushed tone. He forced the girl to her knees next to her own bed. Her head lay on the sheets. She kept her mouth shut, but he continued choking her. Aguilar knew she had to do something to save herself; however, she knew there was no way she could defend herself physically against this man. So she feigned unconsciousness. Apparently, the ruse worked as the man let go of her and let her body slump on the side of the bed. He searched the room for something with which to tie the girl up. There on the bed

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were belts and a wire coat hanger. He used the belts to tie her arms behind her back and her ankles. He then unraveled the hanger and used it to tie her wrists. After he secured Aguilar, he left the bedroom and shut the door halfway closed.

The man went back outside. Aguilar heard a loud
thump-thump-thump-thump-thump
-
thump
. The man was dragging her roommate up the concrete stairs by her hair. The man peeked into the bedroom to check up on Aguilar. She watched her attacker through squinted eyes. She noticed that he seemed extremely pleased with himself. She could not believe when he literally jumped for joy and began clapping his hands like a de-monic mechanical monkey doll. After the man’s macabre dance, he retreated to the front room and grabbed Lister, who was still unconscious. He grabbed some more of Aguilar’s belts and used them as restraints on Lister. He dragged his hapless victim into the bathroom, just like he had done earlier that morning with the pretty brunette whom he killed by drowning her in her own bathtub.

He liked that method. It was a new one for him. One that he had never used before.

He began to fill up Lori Lister’s bathtub with steam-ing hot water. As the water rose in the tub, the man went back to the bedroom to check up on Aguilar. She appeared to be unconscious, so he returned to the bathroom.

When Aguilar heard the running water, she knew that her friend was in trouble. She also knew that they were both going to die unless she did something. Somehow, the five-foot-tall, eighty-six-pound Aguilar, with her ankles bound and her wrists confined behind her back, stood up and backed up to the sliding glass door in her bedroom. She

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Corey Mitchell

managed to lift up the latch to the door and unlock it. In-stead of trying to open it right away, however, she went back to her spot on the floor next to the bed and resumed play-ing possum.

Indeed, the amped-up man returned to the bedroom to check on her. Aguilar could still hear the water cascad-ing from the bathroom. Luckily, the man did not approach her, but returned to Lister. Aguilar heard Lister scream. She realized this was her one and only chance to escape. She stated later that if she was “going to die, [she] would rather kill herself than to have him kill [her].”

The eighteen-year-old stood up and backed toward the bedroom door. She managed to lock the door. She then quietly walked to the sliding glass door. She slowly slid the door open a few inches and squeezed out onto the second-floor balcony. The wooden railing to the balcony stood four feet tall. There was no simple way out for Aguilar, but she had to do something immediately or her friend would die, so she backed up, took two steps, and propelled herself, headfirst, over the railing. Her feet hit the railing and caused her to somersault headfirst. She hit her head on the bottom of the wooden patio balcony and landed hard on her shoulder onto the concrete thirteen feet below. Full of adrenaline, she popped right up, hands still bound, and began to run until she spotted one of her neighbors outside drinking her early-morning coffee. The neighbor lis-tened to her calmly describe what had happened and that her roommate was still inside. The neighbor immediately picked up the phone, clumsily dialed 911, and comforted her calm but frightened neighbor.

Houston police officers Donnie Schmidt and Luther Domain responded to a “family disturbance” call at the apartment complex. The officers knocked on the wrong apartment door. They were greeted by twenty-three-year-

EVIL EY ES 15

old Patricia Kay McDonald, the downstairs neighbor of Lister and Aguilar. Schmidt and Domain began to question McDonald about the commotion. McDonald told them that everything was taking place upstairs. Schmidt and Domain heard what sounded like an explosion upstairs. Apparently, the man had discovered that Aguilar locked herself in the bedroom. He had kicked the door in and discovered that she was missing. The man noticed the open sliding glass door and peered outside. He saw two police cars. He took off running through the front door. Schmidt and Domain stepped off McDonald’s porch only to see a black man “storm” out of the upstairs apartment. The man leaped halfway down the staircase and took off running. Schmidt, the younger of the two officers, took off on foot after the man. Domain, fifty, ran to his police cruiser to request backup. He was afraid that the man would run into the woods surrounding the apartment complex. “We’ve lost four or five prisoners in those woods,” he recalled.

At the same time the chase commenced, Patricia Kay McDonald darted upstairs to check on her neighbors. She looked around the small apartment and even-tually saw Lister submerged in the bathtub. Her neighbor, with whom she had only expressed the oc-casional “Hello, how are you,” was on her back and unconscious. Her hands had also been bound with a wire coat hanger behind her back. The water from the tub’s faucet was still running. McDonald thought she was dead.

As McDonald discovered Lister, Officer Schmidt raced after the man through the apartment courtyard area. The man suddenly turned around and headed for the back side of the apartment complex. He was headed for his car, a brown 1978 Pontiac Grand Prix. It just so happened

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to be parked near the police cruisers. As the man headed for his vehicle, he spotted Domain by his patrol car. Again he hightailed it in another direction and ran into a small area in the apartment complex.

It was a dead end.

Schmidt pulled his service revolver and told him to hit the pavement. The man immediately fell to the ground on his stomach. As Schmidt knelt down to restrain the suspect, one of the apartment residents helped handcuff the man.

Suddenly another neighbor began to scream, “She’s dying! She’s dying!” Schmidt and Domain had no idea what had happened in the apartment. Domain took control of the prisoner while Schmidt returned to the upstairs apartment where the man had just fled. The sub-dued man acted calm as Domain watched over him.

Inside the apartment bathroom, McDonald realized that her neighbor was in serious trouble. She described Lister’s look as “deadly” and that she was turning blue. McDonald grabbed the young woman and pulled her out of the bathtub. She first removed the gag from her mouth, but Lister was not breathing. She wasn’t sure what to do.

“I couldn’t remember any CPR, any lifesaving method,” so she began to pound on Lister’s back. Eventually the crude method of resuscitation worked as Lister began to cough up water and blood. She gasped violently for air as she came to. Officer Schmidt scooted inside and only then realized that something bigger than a domestic disturbance had taken place here.