THE CANNADY-ALVARADO TRAGEDY OVER 1990 MURDERS

"Anonymous said...
Does anyone remember Sgt. Joe Alvarado? He worked for DA (Luis) Saenz during his first DA term. Joe was a good guy, who took his own life. Go back and read about it! "SEPTEMBER 3, 2015 AT 6:28 PM 

By Juan Montoya
We were intrigued by the comment above made in relation to one of our posts and decided to have a look-see at the Jose Alvarado case. Alvarado had worked as a county employee since the late 1960s, according to news accounts.
He was a sheriff's dispatcher until 1970, when he was promoted to sheriff's deputy. In 1973, he was promoted to patrol sergeant and in 1979 he transferred to the district attorney's office. When Luis V. Saenz was appointed District Attorney by the Cameron County Commissioners' Court in 1990, Alvarado served under him as one of his top investigators.
Saenz went on to win election to DA in 1992, and then served until 1996.
But it was in June 1990, after  Rogelio Cannady and four other La Feria teenagers took part in the murders of Ricardo Garcia, 16, of Freer, and Ana Robles, 13, of Brownsville that Alvarado's world began to fall apart in a funk of despair and depression, reportedly over that case.
On June 26, Ana Robles, 13, Rick Garcia, 16, and Luis Acosta, 16, ran away from the Esperanza Home for Boys in Brownsville. They stayed at the home of 19-year-old Elizabeth Ordonez in Adams Gardens, La Feria.
Just three days later, a group of teenagers – including Rogelio Cannady, 18, Danny Kuhlke, 18, Francisco Solis, 18, John Ray Garza, 17, with Robles, Garcia and Acosta – had a party at Garza’s grandmother’s mobile home in Adams Gardens. 
The next day – June 30 – the bodies of Robles and Garcia were found in an irrigation canal behind Adams Gardens. Police reported that Robles had been raped and strangled while Garcia had been stabbed 13 times. 
(In the photo at right, Rogelio Cannady speaks from a death row visiting cage at the Polunsky Unit outside Livingston.)
After investigating the murders, Cameron County sheriff’s deputies arrested Cannady, Kuhlke, Solis, Garza and Acosta July 18 in connection with the murders. 
Three days later – on July 21 – Cannady and Solis pleaded guilty to murder, avoiding the death penalty, and under the impression – witnesses there at the time recall – that they would be tried as juveniles.
But, according to witnesses present at the time, all that went out the window when the DA Saenz – contrary to the promises made for them to confess – went to court and tried them as adults. State District Judge Darrell Hester told them upon conviction, that they would be old men when they get out of prison.
On February, 1991 Kuhlke and Garza are convicted of crimes in connection with the June 29 murders.
Cannady got a life term and the others received lesser sentences, the lowest one of 10 years at the Texas Dept. of Corrections. 
The sentences given to the defendants, including Cannady, seemed to have sent Alvarado into the depths of despair. He agonized over the fact that the confessions may have been coerced and threatened more than once to take his life.
No one knew how much the case affected Alvarado until two years later, when, on May 19, 1993, he holed up in a trailer home outside Lozano and shot himself with a .38-caliber revolver on the porch of his trailer home at 12:57 a.m.,
Saenz and other DA and sheriff deputies were on the scene at Lozano when Alvardao pulled the trigger.
At the time, very few people knew that Alvarado had been so deeply affected by the legal process that was followed in the case.
A law enforcement officer who was present at the suicide scene said Alvarado called out to Saenz that he had an extra bullet for him, too.
It wasn't until years later, in 2012 that affidavits filed with Cannady’s final appeal to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans supported the contention that the confessions of Cannady, Solis and Garza were coerced by DA and sheriff's investigators.
Solis wrote a letter dated April 28, 2010, to one of Cannady’s lawyers denouncing the 1990 confession. That letter stated that he and Cannady were not present at the time of the murders. Several of the affidavits filed with Cannady’s appeal refer to an allegation that there was an audio recording between two investigators with the District Attorney’s Office talking about how they coerced the confessions.
And in May 1993, a few days before Alvarado committed suicide, Susie Mowbray, convicted of the murder of her car-dealer husband Bill, is said to have sent transcripts to county officials of an audio recording between Alvarado, Saenz and District Judge Benjamin Euresti .
On a transcript of the alleged conversation between Alvarado, Saenz  Euresti Jr., the distraught investigator expresses fears that he had perjured himself in testimony involving four youths arrested
on murder charges in 1990 resulting in their being sent to the penitentiary and accused Saenz of going back on his word.
Mowbray was said to have threatened them that she would release the tapes if they did not support her peas for clemency to then Texas Gov. Ann Richards. Richards had turned down Mowbray's plea earlier in April.
Alvarado fatally shot himself May 19, two days after discussing the transcripts with attorneys representing two of the four teenagers. Saenz refused to explain how the audio tape of his conversation with his distraught chief investigator could have come into Mowbray's hands. Mowbray was eventually freed on appeal of her sentence.
Then the tragedy took an even more somber turn.
Two of the boys' defense lawyers, Noe D. Garza Jr. of Brownsville and Ernesto Gonzales of Harlingen, told the Associated Press that Saenz tape-recorded Alvarado's call because Alvarado had been missing for a few days and Saenz feared he had been kidnapped. Saenz put the tape in his desk and didn't give it another thought until the transcripts arrived via a mail service, Gonzales told the Associated Press.
On September 1993, while Cannady was serving his life sentence a Texas Penal Code amendment went into effect, requiring a capital murder charge for any person who while “serving a sentence of life imprisonment...murders another.”

Just  a month later, on October 1993, Cannady killed his cellmate, 55-year-old Leovigildo Bonal, with a belt and a padlock. Cannady claimed Bonal had attempted to sodomize him and had made at least two sexual advances before. He claimed he killed the victim in self-defense. Bonal had been serving a 15-year sentence for murder. 
However, on June 2, 1994, a Bee County grand jury indicted Cannady on a capital murder charge, based on the 1993 state law.  A state jury found Cannady guilty of capital murder on Dec. 3, 1997. Cannady’s defense had argued that because the first murders occurred prior to the 1993 law, Cannady should not be charged under it.
The day before he was scheduled to be executed, a state district judge withdrew the death warrant. The execution was stayed until further order of the court. On May 19, 2010 – exactly 22 years later to the day Alvardao committed suicide – Cannady was executed by lethal injection. 
What really happened that drove Alvarado over the edge? And could the audio recording cited by Mowbray, Cannady's co-defendants and defense attorneys shed any light on the inner workings of the DA's office and investigators at the time? Twenty-five years after the mirders, the mystery remains unanswered.