Category: Unsolved Mysteries

My blog last week presented the case of Gerald Robinson, a Catholic priest and sexual predator who murdered a nun in 1980. This week’s blog deals with a 1990 mass murder at a Las Cruces, New Mexico bowling alley. Despite the passage of more than three decades, the murders remain unsolved.

The Bowling Alley

It was Saturday morning, February 10, 1990. Stephanie C. Senac, 34, the manager of Las Cruces Bowl at 1201 East Amador Avenue, went about the routine tasks of opening the business. Stephanie had her twelve-year-old daughter, Melissa Repass, with her. Melissa and her friend, Amy Houser, 13, planned to supervise the bowling alley’s daycare.

In the kitchen, cook Ida Holguin, 33, prepared to start her day. As she did, a man who had entered through the unlocked front door pointed a .22 caliber pistol at her and ordered her into the office. There, she saw another man holding Senac and the two girls at gunpoint. The gunmen ordered the women and girls to lie down while they removed between $4,000 and $5,000 (approximately $9,400 and $11,800 in 2023) from the bowling alley’s safe.

Murder in the Bowling Alley

While the intruders plundered the safe, Steve Teran, the bowling alley’s mechanic, arrived for work. Unable to find a babysitter, he brought his two daughters, Valerie Teran, 2, and Paula Holguin (no relation to Ida), 6, with him. He intended to drop them off at the alley’s daycare. Since they didn’t see anyone in the main part of the building, Teran and his two girls went to the office. There, they stumbled onto the robbery in progress.

Most likely panicking, the two robbers shot all seven people multiple times. Attempting to cover their crime, they set fire to some papers on Senac’s desk.

The report of the robbery and shootings came in at 8:33 a.m. Despite being shot five times, Melissa Repass used the office phone to call 9‑1‑1. Responding officers discovered Amy Houser, Paula Holguin, and Steven Teran dead at the scene. Valerie Teran was rushed to a hospital but was dead on arrival.

Melissa’s call and fast response by emergency personnel likely saved her life and those of her mother and Ida Holguin. However, Stephanie Senac died in 1999 from complications from her wounds.

Investigating the Bowling Alley Murders

Police set up ten roadblocks surrounding Las Cruces within an hour of the shooting and carefully screened anyone leaving the city. The U.S. Customs Service, the Army, and Border Patrol searched the area with planes and helicopters. No suspects were found, and no arrests were made.

Shortly after the murders, rumors began circulating that Ronald Senac, the owner of Las Cruces Bowl (and father of Stephanie), was involved in shady business dealings. Police investigation of Senac led to nothing but dead ends. According to Detective Mark Meyers, “We put Ronald Senac under a microscope, and we couldn’t find anything.”

Like the Austin, Texas, yogurt shop murders I profiled recently, the fire and efforts to extinguish it destroyed much evidence. As forensic technology improves, detectives hope that some of the evidence recovered from the scene at the time will lead them to the killers.

Epilogue

At one point, Las Cruces Bowl underwent a name change and became 10 Pin Alley. Today, the building sits abandoned.

No one has ever been charged in the Las Cruces bowling alley murders. Thirty-three years later, Las Cruces police still receive tips about the case. So far, none of them have led to a suspect or an arrest.

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This summer has challenged my ability to produce a blog each week. But even though I missed last week, I have not abandoned my readers. My previous blog explored the case of Lindsay Buziak, a young real estate agent murdered in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2008. Her killer has never been identified. Neither have police solved this week’s case, the murder of four teenage girls in an Austin, Texas, yogurt shop in 1991.

The Yogurt Shop Girls

It was December 6, 1991, not quite three weeks before Christmas. Jennifer Harbison and Eliza Thomas, both 17, worked their shifts at the I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt! store located at 2945 West Anderson Lane in Austin, Texas. As the 11:00 p.m. closing time approached, Jennifer’s sister, Sarah, 15, and her friend Amy Ayers, 13, joined Jennifer and Eliza. The two younger girls planned to get a ride home with Jennifer after the store closed.

Minutes before midnight, a police officer on patrol reported a fire in the shop. Responding firefighters put out the fire but found a grisly scene inside. The nude bodies of all four girls lay on the floor, each shot in the back of the head by a .22-caliber firearm. A pair of panties bound Sarah’s hands behind her. She had also been gagged and sexually assaulted. Eliza had also been gagged and had her hands tied behind her back. Amy’s body, found in a different part of the store, had a “sock-like cloth” around her neck. She had suffered two gunshot wounds.

The Yogurt Shop Investigation

From the start, the effects of the fire hampered investigators. Jennifer’s, Eliza’s, and Sarah’s bodies suffered severe burns. Amy’s body, found in another part of the yogurt shop, suffered less severe burns, but damage to the shop itself from the fire and efforts to extinguish it compromised the crime scene.

One early person of interest was a 15-year-old caught with a .22 weapon inside an area mall just days after the killings. He seemed like a promising suspect. But his gun could not be identified as the weapon used in the killings, and detectives decided he was trying to wrangle his way out of a gun charge. They eliminated him and three friends he implicated. All four boys were younger than eighteen at the time.

Eight years later, in 1999, a new detective assigned to the case decided that the four were, in fact, viable suspects. Now in their twenties, several detectives sat the four down for relentless interrogations. Two of the four, Michael Scott and Robert Springsteen, confessed to participating in the yogurt shop murders. Both later recanted, saying detectives coerced the confessions.

The Yogurt Shop Murder Trials

In 2001, Robert Springsteen went on trial for capital murder. Although the trial lasted three weeks, Scott’s confession was the only substantial evidence against him. Scott refused to testify in court, so the prosecutor read parts of his (Scott’s) confession to the jury. After thirteen hours of deliberation, they returned a guilty verdict, and Springsteen went to death row.

Prosecutors used the same playbook when it came time for Scott’s trial a year later in 2002. They used Springsteen’s confession as evidence against Scott. Springsteen himself did not testify. This jury also returned a guilty verdict, although Scott was spared the death sentence because he was a minor at the time of the crime.

In 2006, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned Springsteen’s conviction, ruling that the prosecution had improperly used Scott’s confession against him, violating his Sixth Amendment rights. A year later, in 2007, the same court overturned Scott’s conviction on identical grounds.

DNA Testing Provides No Answers

Texas prosecutors vowed to retry the cases. As they prepared for the new trials, defense lawyers requested that the state resubmit evidence for DNA testing. Prosecutors agreed since the capabilities of DNA testing had grown significantly in the seventeen years since the murders.

The tests revealed the DNA profile of a man on biological evidence taken from two of the victims, Amy Ayers and Jennifer Harbison. The DNA of another man was found on clothing used to bind the wrists of a third victim, Eliza Thomas. A partial DNA profile of a third person was also found on Jennifer Harbison. None of these profiles matched Scott or Springsteen. Nor did they match the other two original suspects, Maurice Pierce and Forrest Welborn.

Authorities released Scott and Springsteen on bond on June 24, 2009, finally dismissing the charges against them on October 28.

Epilogue

Almost thirty-two years have passed since Jennifer and Sarah Harbison, Eliza Thomas, and Amy Ayers died that horrible December evening. No credible suspects have emerged after the appeals court overturned Scott’s and Springsteen’s convictions.

In February 2022, it was announced that advanced DNA technology was bringing investigators closer than ever to solving the case. However, the announcement provided no details. No suspect has been identified or arrested since.

On December 23, 2010, Austin police officers Frank Wilson and Bradley Smith made a routine traffic stop on a car driven by former suspect Maurice Pierce. Pierce fled, and a foot chase ensued. When Pierce pulled a knife and stabbed Wilson in the neck, Wilson shot Pierce dead (Officer Wilson survived).

You can read more about the yogurt shop murders in Beverly Lowery’s Who Killed These Girls? and Corey Mitchell’s Murdered Innocents.

Today, the site of the former yogurt shop is home to an oriental rug gallery. A memorial plaque to the four slain girls is across the street.

The case is still open. If you have any information about the yogurt shop murders, call 512-472-TIPS [8477].

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Last week’s case was an unsolved murder over a century old, the 1911 death of Dr. Helene Knabe. This week we look at a case “solved” by sending the wrong man to prison. James Richardson served 21 years in a Florida prison for murdering his children, but he didn’t do it.

James Richardson and the Deaths of His Children

Annie Mae and James Richardson were African American migrant farm workers. In October 1967, the Richardsons and their seven children, all under ten, lived in Arcadia, Florida. Two of the children were from Annie Mae’s previous marriage. James was the father of the other five.

On October 24, Annie Mae prepared a meal of beans, rice, and grits for the children’s lunch the next day. The following morning, James and Annie Mae left to pick oranges in groves sixteen miles away. They entrusted the care of their younger children (the oldest four were in school) to a neighbor, Bessie Reece.

At lunchtime, the four oldest Richardson children returned home for lunch. They and their younger siblings ate the meal Annie Mae had prepared. Back at school, their teachers noticed all four exhibiting strange symptoms. The school’s principal immediately took them to a hospital. One of the teachers checked on the remaining three children, discovered they were sick, too, and rushed them to a hospital. It was no use. Six of the children died before authorities could summon the Richardsons from the orange groves. Three-year-old Dianne succumbed the next day.

James Richardson, Murderer?

Investigators soon discovered the pesticide parathion in the food Annie Mae prepared for the children’s lunch. Sure enough, they found a two-pound sack of parathion in a shed behind the apartment building where the Richardsons lived. It surprised no one when a grand jury indicted James Richardson for murder on November 2.

During Richardson’s trial, the state contended that Richardson killed his children for insurance money. Prosecutor John Treadwell introduced evidence that Richardson met with insurance salesman George Purvis to discuss life insurance for the children before the murders. That much was true. What Treadwell didn’t say, though, was that Purvis initiated the meeting. Nor did he say that Richardson hadn’t bought any insurance because he couldn’t afford the premiums.

Other testimony from former cellmates claimed Richardson had confessed the murders to them. DeSoto County Sheriff Frank Cline provided additional sensational testimony when he claimed Richardson had poisoned six other children in another county. Although unsubstantiated, the defense apparently let this accusation pass unchallenged.

The outcome of the trial was never in doubt. On May 31, 1968, jurors took only thirty minutes to return with a guilty verdict and a recommended sentence of death in Florida’s electric chair.

James Richardson Exonerated

For nearly five years, James Richardson sat on Florida’s Death Row. Then, in 1972, the United States Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty, as it was then implemented, was unconstitutional. Like other death row inmates, the State of Florida resentenced him to life in prison. In Richardson’s case, he had an opportunity for parole starting in 1993.

Over time, the case against James Richardson began to unravel. Investigators overlooked possible clues in their zeal to convict him. For example, at the time of the murders, Bessie Reece was on parole for the poisoning death of her ex-husband. Prosecutors went to great lengths to keep this fact away from the jury.

Another hole in the case against Richardson appeared when the last surviving jailhouse snitch who testified at the trial recanted. He revealed he’d been offered a lighter sentence for his testimony.

Lawyers for Richardson continued to uncover additional evidence of prosecutorial misconduct. On April 25, 1989, their efforts paid off when DeSoto County Circuit Court Judge Clifton Kelly dismissed Richardson’s conviction and released him to the custody of his attorneys.

Who Killed the Richardson Children?

Authorities never charged anyone else with the deaths of Betty, Alice, Susie, Dorreen, Vanessa, James Jr., and Dianne Richardson. The question remains, who killed them?

The most likely suspect is the woman who fed the children the poisoned lunch, Bessie Reece. As noted above, Reece was convicted of murdering her second ex-husband with poison. She was also a suspect in the death of her first ex-husband. Furthermore, In 1988 and living in a nursing home, Reece allegedly confessed to the murders multiple times. At the time, though, she suffered from the effects of Alzheimer’s, and no one took her confessions seriously.

Epilogue

Richardson’s life after prison held many challenges. He suffered from numerous heart ailments, for which he blamed poor-quality prison food and stress. He and Annie Mae had remained married all the while he was incarcerated but eventually divorced.

In 2014, Florida Governor Rick Scott signed a bill into law that bypassed the roadblock that had denied Richardson compensation up to then. In 2016, he began receiving payments totaling $50,000 for each year he was wrongfully imprisoned.

Bessie Reece died from Alzheimer’s in a Florida nursing home in 1992. She never faced charges in the deaths of the Richardson children.

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