Read Murdered Innocents for Free Online Page A

commemorated in music in a corrido known as “Tragedy in Matamoros,” by the group Suspiros de Salamanca.
    Another tragedy occurred two years later, almost seventy miles north of Austin. On October 16, 1991, Belton, Texas resident-cum-musician-with-a-messianic-complex George Hennard rammed his Ford Ranger pickup truck through a large glass window of a Luby’s Cafeteria, jumped out of the vehicle armed with two semiautomatic weapons, and began firing indiscriminately at the diners. After he killed twenty-two patrons, in the process becoming the most prolific mass murderer in the history of the United States, Hennard hid in the bathroom alcove and turned the gun on himself. A twenty-third victim died later in the hospital.
    The Luby’s massacre occurred seven weeks before the yogurt shop murders.
    Something about the yogurt shop murders, however, touched Austinites more so than all of the other previous crimes. People were already on edge because of the Luby’s tragedy, but it was something more. Most pointed to the youth and innocence of the girls. Others cited the fact that the killer or killers had not been discovered immediately.
    The only certainty was that the city of Austin changed forever.

CHAPTER 7
    In the beginning, the “Yogurt Shop Murders” task force worked out of the main APD headquarters located at Interstate 35 and Eighth Street in downtown Austin. Senior sergeant Hector Polanco was named the supervisor over the case, Sergeant John Jones was the case agent, and Detective Mike Huckabay was lead investigator. Jones was responsible for keeping the case in order and directing the flow of the case. Huckabay did all of the interviewing of the major suspects and handled all of the leads.
    Fifteen-year veteran Detective Mike Huckabay was Jones’s right-hand man in the task force. Huckabay grew up in Odessa, Texas, with three brothers and a sister. He claimed to have experienced a rough childhood due to a father who drank too much and bounced around from job to job. According to Huckabay, there was a lot of “fussing, fighting, and feuding going on.”
    To deal with the stress of home, Huckabay developed a love for work. His first job at the young age of eleven was selling peaches for his grandmother. He also had his own paper route and later worked in a grocery store.
    Huckabay attended Odessa Permian High School and played football for the Panthers, the team featured in H. G. Bissinger’s book, Friday Night Lights , about the legendary high-school football team. “Our mascot’s name was ‘Mojo,’ which is a mystique,” claimed Huckabay. “I can’t tell you what it means because it is a secret. Only the football players on the team knew what it meant.”
    After Huckabay graduated from high school, he joined the U.S. Army, fought in Vietnam, and came home because of a war injury. He received two Purple Hearts and a Bronze Medal for Valor for his efforts.
    After the war, Huckabay answered an advertisement in the paper for a position with the Austin Police Department. He got married, worked full-time for the police, and attended college at night at St. Edward’s University, where he received a degree in criminal justice.
    Huckabay was the father of two sons, but he was also recently divorced. Despite the stress of a failed marriage, he was known throughout the police department for his genial sense of humor.
    Huckabay was not, however, in a laughing mood. He was peeved at how much “holdback” information had leaked out in the yogurt shop case.
    Holdback information is information that police officers choose not to leak to the press or public. They hold it back in an effort to discern which confessions are false and which ring true. Only the killer or killers would know this holdback information.
    Usually it is something key or unusual.
    Like the stacking of bodies in a pile or an ice scoop inserted into a victim’s orifice. Huckabay noticed a recurring theme with several of the tipsters that called