Man set to be executed for cocaine-fueled 1993 triple slaying
Cocaine orgy preceded slayings of senior citizens
By Michelle CasadyJanuary 17, 2015
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They started snorting cocaine early that day, Arnold Prieto would later tell police after he was arrested on a charge of capital murder for his role in a triple slaying.
By the evening, according to Prieto, he and brothers Jesse and Guadalupe Hernandez hopped in his 1993 blue Ford Escort and drove from the Dallas suburb of Carrollton to San Antonio — intending to rob the great-aunt and -uncle of the Hernandez brothers.
When they arrived at the home in the middle of the night, Virginia Rodriguez, wearing a nightgown, ushered them inside, sat them at the kitchen table and went to work preparing a breakfast of eggs, tortillas and orange juice, Prieto said.
“I remember this lady being very nice,” Prieto wrote in a five-page statement to police in which he described in detail the brutal stabbings of married couple Virginia, 62, and Rodolfo Rodriguez, 72, and family friend Paula Moran, 90, that commenced after he placed his plate and juice glass in the sink.
Police identified the murder weapons as a screwdriver, a knife and another sharp object, possibly an ice pick.
On Wednesday, Prieto is scheduled to be executed in Huntsville for the September 1993 killings. He’s the only one of the three originally charged with the crime who received the death penalty.
Jesse Hernandez is serving a life sentence. One day shy of his 17th birthday when the murders were committed, he wasn’t eligible for the death penalty. And Guadalupe Hernandez, now 42, remains free. Initially pointed to by police as the mastermind of the robbery scheme, he later had all charges against him dropped.
Prosecutors had initially announced they planned to seek the death penalty for the older Hernandez brother.
“We didn’t have a statement or anything from Guadalupe Hernandez that he gave to police or anybody else in the case, and that leads to problems in terms of prosecution,” Assistant District Attorney Chris DeMartino told reporters in 1995 when the case was dismissed, calling his release unfortunate.
Jesse Hernandez will be eligible to apply for parole in the summer of 2035. He’ll be 58.
Prieto denied a request by the San Antonio Express-News for an interview. Messages left at a number listed for Guadalupe Hernandez were not returned.
Carrollton to San Antonio
It was May or June of 1993 when Prieto, then 20, met the Hernandez brothers.
Prieto’s 16-year-old sister, Lydia, had been dating Jesse Hernandez and the couple was expecting a child.
Prieto and the brothers, he told police, became close that summer, hanging out together most nights, watching movies and doing cocaine.
“A lot of cocaine,” he acknowledged to police. “It was starting to get out of hand.”
He lost his job at a warehouse in August and had trouble paying his car loan, utilities and rent on the apartment he shared with his wife, Frances.
“Lupe” and Jesse spoke often of a rich great-uncle in San Antonio, about a closet full of cash and jewelry the man kept inside the home where he ran a check-cashing business.
“About two weeks before the murders Lupe had said that he would like to get the money,” Prieto wrote, adding that he brushed the comments off until one night in the second week of September — after a daylong bender. “Lupe kept saying let’s go to his uncle’s. Later on that night, I don’t recall the time but it was beginning to get dark, we all decided to go to San Antonio.”
More drugs were consumed on the trip there, he said. Conversation was scant.
Four and a half hours later, Prieto said, they parked the car against the curb outside the house.
“It was not my idea to go steal from these people, even though I was going through some tough times,” Prieto wrote. “I thought I would just sit in the car, but it didn’t work out that way.”
The crime scene
In a statement Jesse Hernandez gave police, he said he did not participate in the killings. Prieto did all the stabbings, he claimed.
According to Prieto’s version, Lupe Hernandez struck first, stabbing his aunt in the kitchen. Jesse Hernandez handed him a screwdriver, he recounted to police, and he stabbed Rodolfo Rodriguez.
Prieto said Jesse Hernandez stabbed Moran when she came out of her bedroom.
A medical examiner later testified Virginia Rodriguez was stabbed 31 times, Rodolfo Rodriguez 17 times, and Moran had eight wounds.
“I don’t remember where I stabbed him but I do remember one time I stabbed him in the back of the head,” Prieto confessed. “I grabbed onto the door frame by the refrigerator because I felt faint.”
According to Prieto’s story, the trio left the house with gold chains, rings, earrings and a purse that contained about $300, which they split evenly.
Guadalupe Hernandez drove first, he said. Prieto, with bloodied hands and clothes, recalled vomiting.
“I was shaking and continued to do some more cocaine,” he told police. “Somewhere, out of town, we stopped and I began to drive. All I could think of was the old lady and began to cry.”
It would be six months before an anonymous Crime Stoppers tip led police to arrest Prieto and the brothers.
The prosecution
Messages left with Mary Ellen Smyth, who was the lead prosecutor in Prieto’s case, were not returned. M’Liss Christian, who was second-chair prosecutor to Smyth in the case against Jesse Hernandez, characterized the murders as senseless.
“There were half-full glasses of orange juice and a few eggs still on the plate,” she recalled of crime scene photos. “She cooked them breakfast, and they proceeded to slaughter the household.”
Christian said the Hernandez brothers had visited the Rodriguez home the weekend before the killings for a large family gathering. Rodolfo Rodriguez had shown his great-nephews a collection of gold jewelery and coins.
“And after they left he just sort of had a bad feeling and he moved the jewelry from where he had it hidden so that no one would be able to find it,” she said. “He had some kind of premonition that they might come back.”
Julie Pollock, who was Prieto’s second-chair defense counsel at trial, testified at a habeas corpus hearing in 2000 that she and co-counsel Michael Bernard urged Prieto to take a plea deal that would have given him two 30-year sentences in exchange for his testimony against Guadalupe Hernandez.
“Arnold was saying he was afraid for his life and his family’s safety,” she recalled this week. “And he rejected the offer.”
Bernard said he remembers even bringing in outside lawyers to advise Prieto to take the deal.
Prieto was tried first. After five days of testimony, it took jurors two hours to convict him of capital murder.
The evidence in the punishment phase took half as long to present but jurors deliberated Prieto’s fate — life in prison with the eventual possibility of parole or death — for 13 hours, not reaching consensus until 15 minutes after midnight that he should be executed for his crimes.
“The person they’re going to execute next week is 40 years old, and that is a different person than the 20-year-old at trial,” Bernard said, elaborating on Prieto’s choice not to take the plea and not to testify against Guadalupe Hernandez. “Mentally, he’s not the same. Emotionally, maturity-wise, he’s not the same individual.”
Newspaper accounts of Prieto’s and Jesse Hernandez’s trials mention the victims’ family was present in large numbers — as many as 18 — throughout the proceedings.
When Prieto’s verdict was announced in state District Judge Mary Roman’s courtroom, son Guillermo Rodriguez said he was “satisfied justice had been done.”
“It’s not over, we have to go through this two more times and in those cases we do expect justice to prevail,” he said.
Attempts to contact two of Virginia and Rodolfo Rodriguez’s sons as well as the mother and sister of Prieto were unsuccessful.
The home in the 1100 block of West Mistletoe Avenue that Rodolfo and Virginia Rodriguez shared with Moran, who was a nanny to their children, has since been torn down. The vacant, grassy lot dotted by two trees sits between two homes, an unused driveway still intact.
“They slaughtered these relatives for nothing — for absolutely nothing,” said Christian, the former prosecutor. “They were the type of people that, if (Jesse Hernandez and Prieto) had asked for $300, they would have given it to them. And here we are, with many lives ruined, many years later.”
News Researcher Mike Knoop contributed to this report.
mcasady@express-news.net
Twitter: @michellecasady
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