Albuquerque Journal from Albuquerque, New Mexico • Page 8

A8 ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL Sunday, December 20, 1987 Unsolved Deaths Generate Fears Of Serial Killer Bodies Found Age Date Found Maria Casio 24 Sept. 4, 1987 Karen Baker 20 Desiree Wheatley 1 5 Oct. 20, 1 987 Dawn Smith 1 4 Angelica Frausto 17 Nov. 3,1987 Missing Age Last Seen Marjorie Knox 14 Feb. 14, 1987 Melissa Alaniz 1 3 March 7, 1 987 Cheryl Lynn 1 9 June 28, 1 987 Vasquez-Dismukes Dona Ana Otero I County County anthonyW fEXAS jjl Bodies! NEW und MEXICO I lher I fTEXAS i FORT 1 I BLISS I If xs.

1 NEW MEXICO V. EL I Mexico "WI PASO NM V-JEXAS JOURNAL MAP CAROL COOPERRIDER 11 familiar with the case. Medical examiners established that Casio's killer strangled her, but extensive decomposition masked the causes of death in the others. Marcia Wheatley, Desiree's mother, said she is sure her daughter cried out for her before she died. She added that it has been and still is difficult to cope with her inability to respond to that cry.

"I've always been used to having two kids at Christmas," she said recently in her apartment just off Dyer Street. "I'd have to stop and think whose present I was wrapping. "I still find myself thinking that." Wheatley was an active and vocal critic of the early police investigation when juvenile officers ignored her insistence that her daughter had not run away. Desi, allowed out past her usual 8:30 p.m. curfew on June 2 because it was the last day of school, left a friend's house about 9:30 p.m.

but never reached her grandparents' home a few blocks away. i The girl had never missed a curfew before, had already planned her 16th birthday party and had no reason to run away, Wheat-ley said. The officers sent in response to her call obviously were tired of dealing with parents ex-periencing last-day-of-school problems, she claimed. "I had said she was not a runaway, but (the juvenile officer) just laughed and said parents are the last to know," Wheatley said. "They blew it, they literally blew it, because they were too arrogant to listen to me." The Wheatleys were unaware that Marjorie Knox, 14, an acquaintance from the family's two years in Chaparral, and Melissa Alaniz, 13, a student at Desi's junior high school, had been re- ported missing months earlier.

Marjorie was last seen Valentine's Day; Melissa had an argument with her mother on March 7 and has not been seen since. Had CONTINUED FROM PAGE A1 many as 10 detectives have worked the case at one time. Intense media coverage has added to the pressure on police and fueled fears among the citizenry that a multiple murderer is loose. In addition, three missing teenagers one from nearby Chaparral, N.M., an unincorporated community that is virtually an El Paso suburb are mentioned often in connection with the case. "There's a possibility of a serial killer at work, a good possibility," Lt.

J.R. Grijalva of the El Paso Police Department said. "We can't say for sure, but the bodies were found within a half-mile radius and in shallow graves." Grijalva, the only officer authorized to discuss the case publicly, declined to reveal specifics of the investigation. Grijalva would neither confirm nor deny that David Wood, 30, who is in police custody on other charges, is a suspect in the case. Wood's lawyer, however, said police are treating his client as a suspect to the exclusion of other possible leads.

He said the police focus on his client, coupled with frequent news accounts mentioning Wood, may be giving El Paso a false sense of security. Whoever buried the women chose the open desert that separates the burgeoning residential neighborhoods of northeast El Paso from the New Mexico state line. An estimated 35,000 people live in this section of the city, sandwiched between the Army's Fort Bliss and the Franklin Mountains. Casio came from suburban Dallas to visit a sister in Mexico, but Baker, Wheatley, Smith and Fraus-to lived in or near northeast El Paso, as do the missing teen-agers. Few of the eight knew each other, their families and friends said.

All were about the same height, 5 feet 2 inches, according to those 7 7 Jlte r- Vi' 'l treme pressure, public, personal, professional and judicial, to make some headway in this case," Kohn said in a published interview. "Those pressures become astronomical. "The danger is of a lunatic running around out there while (the police) lull people into a false sense of security by thinking the perpetrator is not still out there." Kohn said his investigator, while working on Wood's rape and kidnap cases, generated several leads on the disappearances that have been turned over to police. He declined to discuss the leads save one involving satanic rituals. "In the course of looking at the reported disappearances of the girls, they have an uncanny relation to the prominent ceremonial dates on the satanic calendar," he said.

"There's all kinds of peripheral stuff." Biker friends told Denise Frausto, Angelica's older sister, that they suspect a man who drove a red Harley-Davidson and was seen for a while in some of their northeast hangouts. "A lot of people tell me they saw him and have been questioned by detectives," she added. The uncertainty about the deaths and disappearances is affecting students and adults on both sides of the state line. "Chaparral is a very tense area right now," said Lt. Ben Archuleta, Anthony substation commander.

"Not knowing can be equally as terrible as knowing there is a serial killer loose in that part of the woods." Junior and senior high school students from Chaparral said they have become more cautious and travel in groups. Some make the longer drive to Las Cruces for nights out, others said they still trek into El Paso and several said their parents have become much more restrictive. "We're scared we might have a flat tire on McCombs or something," said Gloria Ruiz, a senior at Gadsden High School. The killing of Desiree Wheatley, the disappearance of Melissa Alaniz and the death of a popular teacher in a traffic accident reverberated through the H.E. Charles student body, according to Principal Paul Strelzin.

Counseling teams have visited every classroom, and students' requests for someone to talk to have increased, he said. Parents have reacted, too, and began lining up at 9 p.m. to pick up their children from a recent Saturday night dance that ended at 9:30 p.m., he said. Normally students linger after a dance. But on this night, the school was deserted five minutes after the dance had ended.

Wheatley known of those disappearances, she said, Desi would not have been allowed to walk home alone. Nearly five months later, in late October, homicide investigators would take Wheatley to an evidence room where she identified the tattered remnants of the T-shirt Desi's friends had covered with autographs that last day at H.E. Charles Junior High School. In response to Wheatley's criticism, El Paso police have said they followed normal procedures given the information available and their staff size. The department takes more than 2,000 runaway reports a year.

"We followed it up as well as we could," Grijalva said. On June 5, three days after Desiree Wheatley disappeared, Karen Baker failed to return to her Dyer Street motel room and her three children. Three weeks later, on June 28, Cheryl Lynn Vasquez-Dismukes, 19, married only a week, disappeared after going to a convenience store on McCombs Street. A woman told police she saw Vasquez-Dismukes talking to a man who earlier had asked the DICK KETTLEWELL JOURNAL PHOTO deaths pose the spectre that a hand may have been at work. fi -rv rit wtr the cases.

With the discovery of the bodies, the investigation passed to the police Crimes Against Persons division. Wheatley praises the work and compassion of homicide detectives. But she said she fears the trail may have grown cold before police realized they had a problem in northeast El Paso. Detectives on foot, in the air and accompanied by trained dogs have conducted periodic searches of 10 square miles of desert around the gravesites without finding additional victims. The missing New Mexico girl, Marjorie Knox, is believed to have been in El Paso when she disappeared on Feb.

14, FBI Agent Gary Webb said. "She told my mom she was going to a party and would be home by 10," said Cheryl Knox, 18. A student at Gadsden Junior High School in Anthony, Marjorie did not say specifically where she was going that night, her sister said. Although no one stands accused in the deaths and disappearances, it was homicide detectives working those cases who arrested Wood Oct. 23 on charges of aggravated kidnapping and sexual assault.

According to court records, one woman said she jumped from Wood's moving pickup truck in west El Paso as he held her at knifepoint in September. Another woman identified Wood as the man who allegedly gave her a ride in a beige pickup truck in August, took her to the same desert area where the bodies were later found, and raped her. Wood pleaded innocent to both charges on Dec. 10 and remains in jail while the Texas Department of Corrections considers revoking the parole from prison he received in January. Wood, who lived within blocks of Desiree Wheatley and Melissa Alaniz, had pleaded guilty in 1980 to charges of rape and rape of a child.

At the parole-revocation hearing Dec. 7, lawyer Roy Kohn III accused police of using questionable tactics and of targeting Wood to the exclusion of other possible suspects who drive similar pickup trucks. Wood's truck had been disabled by an accident before the alleged kidnapping took place, he said. Wood had met Vasquez-Dismukes, one of the missing, once at the convenience store where she was last seen, which helped make him a suspect, Kohn said. "My client actually participated in the search for the Dismukes girl, putting up posters," Kohn said.

"There is nothing to say she's not still alive. "I fully understand the El Paso Police Department is under ex Linda Schukei said. "If they don't do something that the board requires of them, all they have to do is shrug their shoulders and say, There's no accountability." The Schukeis maintain that their board which represents about 300 licensed veterinarians, one of the smallest constituencies of the boards could operate more efficiently without the state looking over its shoulder. They said the nagging administrative problems lost mail, wrong applications mailed, incorrect answers given out to those asking questions would diminish, if not disappear. However, Carruthers said that even if he granted requests to some of the boards for independence, he would still want the Regulation and Licensing Department to continue to provide some services, including computer support and secretarial services.

"We can't go back to the old days," Carruthers said. "The governor needs to feel that he can be accountable" for the boards, Carruthers said. For his part, Baca acknowledged that in a department the size of Regulation and Licensing, some "glitches" are inevitable. The Boards and Commissions Division, one of seven divisions within the department, has 60 employees and an annual budget of about $2.6 woman if she'd be interested in a ride, a marijuana cigarette and some cocaine, according to the police report. A witness described the man as a rugged-looking Anglo driving a beige pickup truck.

Vasquez-Dismukes officially remains among the missing. Angelica Frausto was last seen alive early in July. Her family and police say the teen-ager frequented biker bars and Denise Frausto, an older sister, said Angelica may have worked one night at a topless bar. She had quit school after the seventh grade and was not living at home, said Hope Frausto, her grandmother and adoptive mother. "She ran away (before), but she never stopped coming home," Hope Frausto said.

"She said she was thinking about going to Albuquerque or California, and that's why I wasn't worried at first. "Then they started finding the girls, and I began to worry." Frausto, who adopted Angelica about 10 years ago, described her granddaughter as a friendly and independent person who often brought stray animals home. "She was a fighter," Frausto said. "If she got into trouble, she put up a big fight." Shortly after Frausto disappeared, the seeming lack of interest of the police prompted Wheat-ley and Karen Baker's mother to organize a demonstration at a downtown border crossing, Wheat-ley said. At that time they thought their daughters had been spirited into white slavery in Mexico, she said.

"The police were denying they (the disappearances) were related, denying the girls were missing," Wheatley said. "It was like they didn't want to believe it, but hell, I didn't want to believe it either." On Aug. 12 Maria Casio of Addi-sion, Texas, told her sister in Juarez she was going to El Paso to mail letters and make telephone calls. Police later found her car abandoned in east-central El Paso. Dawn Smith's mother last heard from her daughter on Aug.

28. The girl, a chronic runaway, called to say she was not coming home. About this time, Wheatley said, she saw a definite increase in police interest and activity as officers began compiling reports on functions. Baca said the opinion has helped clear the way to define the functions of the state agency and individual boards. He has talked with several of the boards to spell out which functions are administered by the boards, which are administered by the department and which are jointly administered.

However, Linda Schukei and her husband, Terry, a member of the state Veterinary Medical Association, said the attorney general's opinion doesn't help correct past wrongs. As one example, Linda Schukei said her board's budget before Anaya's decision was about $34,000. Of that figure, $22,000 was earmarked for an executive secretary. The board's budget for the current fiscal year is about $54,000 and doesn't include $20,000 in salary for an executive secretary, which the board hasn't hired yet. "If we get an executive secretary, we'll have doubled our budget to perform the same functions we had been performing before this happened," Terry Schukei said.

"That money could be spent on fixing potholes or attracting industry to the state." Another problem, the Schukeis and others said, is that the boards have no authority over the department liaisons assigned to work with each of the boards. "They're hired and fired by RLD," One of five graves shrouds answers to the deaths of young women in the El Paso area. Professionals Join in Chorus of licensing Complaints 7 The unsolved serial killer's ment was created in 1983 by then-Gov. Toney Anaya. Department Superintendent Tom Baca said he believes many of the boards' complaints stem from confusion about the functions of each board confusion he has been laboring to correct.

While he acknowledged there have been problems in working with the boards, Baca said the boards' frustrations may have arisen from a resentment of having to work hand in hand with the department. "I don't think there's a management arrangement quite like this in the world," Baca said. "It's a real test of diplomacy and management ability. If you succeed, you've done what some say is impossible." The arrangement was created to centralize all of the state's previously autonomous licensing boards under one umbrella. At the time, Anaya hoped the department could save the state money by streamlining and centralizing paperwork processing.

By centralizing record-keeping, data processing, license-fee collections and other administrative duties, it was expected that the boards could devote more time to making decisions over granting licenses and disciplining members, among other things. The problem with Anaya's plan, Baca said, was that it left unresolved just what powers belonged to A 1 1 However, Baca defended his department's record, saying he believes some of the problems that sparked the boards' complaints either occurred before he took over in January or are unfounded. "I will stand up to anyone who questions the competency of anyone in the Regulation and Licensing Department," he said. "The inefficiencies that have occurred have occurred not because of incompetence but because of a lack of knowledge about the role that Regulation and Licensing is supposed to play." Among the improvements that have been made in recent months that Baca points to is the installation of data processing equipment that can give comprehensive cash reports for each board, a move he hopes can end complaints about accounting procedures. Baca said he sympathizes with some board members' desires for autonomy.

"I can really understand their frustration," he said. "There is an air of discomfort simply because the boards were autonomous at one time. But regardless of what I think of changing that policy, that policy' is in place and I have to work with; it "We are currently developing a working relationship with th boards. But the boards have to want to do it. We have to work Right now, there's no other option." CONTINUED FROM PAGE A1 ulation and Licensing Department is OK, but in practice it's been a nightmare," said Albuquerque veterinarian Dr.

Linda Schukei, a member of the state Veterinary Medical Examiners Board. The veterinary board's chairman, Dr. Bill Heite of Silver City, complained, "We have to deal with their computers that don't work, their secretaries that don't find things, their mistakes that are made and on and on and on." At the same time, the chairman of the Dental Board, Dr. Albert Mul-liken of Roswell, said his group is also upset with the department: "They are inefficient, and they can't get the job done." Albuquerque engineer Ted Asbury, vice chairman of the state Engineers and Land Surveyors Board, summed up the situation as "an absolute mess. "Just imagine, if you will, a lot of people stumbling around in long johns, with one foot in and one foot out, saying, 'We'll get it fixed, we'll get it fixed, Asbury said.

"We've given them 2Vj years; how much more time do they need?" The veterinary board, engineers board and several of the other 27 boards the department works with have taken their frustrations to Gov. Garrey Carruthers, imploring him to grant their groups the autonomy they had before the 'depart Tom Baca Blames boards' confusion the boards and what belonged to the state, such as who could hire and fire personnel. Upset over a personnel decision, the veterinary board asked the state Attorney General's Office this fall for its interpretation. The attorney general's opinion, issued in September, said the law creating the Regulation and Licensing Department did not supersede an earlier law that created the veterinary board and other boards. The boards, it said, have the authority to make policy and hire their own employees, while the department should administer licensing.