Rivera v. State

• Decision Date: 20 February 1991
• Docket Number: No. 69640,69640
• Citation: 808 S.W.2d 80
• Parties: Angel RIVERA, Appellant, v. The STATE of Texas, Appellee.
• Court: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

Page 80

808 S.W.2d 80

Angel RIVERA, Appellant, v. The STATE of Texas, Appellee.

No. 69640.

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas,

En Banc.

Feb. 20, 1991.

Luis E. Islas, El Paso, for appellant.

Steve W. Simmons, Dist. Atty., Robert Dinsmoor, Asst. Dist. Atty., El Paso, and Robert Huttash, State's Atty., Austin, for the State.

Before the court en banc.

OPINION

WHITE, Judge.

Appeal is taken from a capital murder conviction; the penalty assessed was death. Appellant challenges the sufficiency of the evidence supporting his conviction, as well as the sufficiency of the evidence supporting the jury's affirmative answers to the two special issues submitted during punishment. He also brings fourteen other points of error. After due consideration of appellant's contentions, we will affirm his conviction.

Jewell Haygood was an 88-year old widow who lived alone in her trailer home at Duchay's Trailer Court on Alameda St. in El Paso. She was in the habit of going to her stepson's house each day to help assemble church catechism books. Late in the afternoon of Friday, October 26, 1984, her neighbor Patricia Chavez noticed Jewell working in the yard around her trailer and concluded that Jewell had returned from her daily duties. There was nothing out of the ordinary in this observation. But about 4:00 a.m. on Saturday morning, Chavez heard the extraordinarily unusual sound of her neighbor's Fury II charging off into the night. She knew it was Jewell's car because of the characteristic engine noise she heard. The next day, she noticed that Jewell's car was gone, and that a blue jacket was lying beneath Jewell's open water heater door, which was situated beneath Jewell's bathroom window.

Meanwhile, Jewell's 76-year old stepson Herman Haygood had become concerned when Jewell had not arrived at his house as usual on Saturday morning. He and his brother David went to Jewell's trailer at 9:00 a.m., but decided that she was probably out at breakfast when they saw that her car was gone. When they still had not heard from her by 11:00 a.m., however, they returned to the trailer to see if anything was wrong. They noticed the blue jacket underneath the bathroom window and moved it to the landing by the front door. Herman later testified that the front door was open a crack and that he saw blood on the screen. The men pushed the door open and split up to search the trailer. They found the interior of the trailer in great disarray; at least one of Jewell's two televisions was gone, purses were on the floor, and the contents of drawers had been strewn about. Herman soon found his stepmother's body on the floor next to the bathtub, which was full of bloody water, feces, and several pairs of socks.

When the police arrived in response to the brothers' call, they secured the scene and began searching for physical evidence. Detectives Raul Acosta and Luis Ortega of the Identification and Records Bureau of the El Paso Police Department observed the blue jacket by the trailer's front door and seized it. Acosta noticed the bloodstains on the front door frame, and concluded that the perpetrator must have left through the front door. At trial, Ortega's testimony concerning the living room matched Herman's: the room appeared to have been ransacked, and purses were lying about on the floor. In the bedroom next to the bathroom, the bed was undone, drawers were open, and there were blood stains on the bed, ceiling, walls, closet, and drapes. A wet substance which Acosta believed to be urine was still on the bedsheets. On top of the bed, the officers found a piece of torn towel tied in a knot as well as a neck massager. A similar knotted towel, bearing bloodstains, was found in the bathroom.

The victim was found face-up on the bathroom floor, with her legs spread and her nightgown pushed up to her chest. Socks were on her feet, but she was wet from head to toe, apparently from having been in the filthy bathtub next to her. Her face and body were covered with bruises, her eyes were swollen, her hands were lacerated, and a trail of dried blood was visible coming from her mouth. Her genitals were particularly bloody, indicating that she had suffered some kind of a sexual attack as well.

Acosta noticed that the bathroom window had been disturbed, and that parts of the window frame were lying on the bathroom floor. Detective Alfonso Marquez later testified during the State's rebuttal portion of the trial that the police concluded that the bathroom window had been the intruder's point of entry into the trailer.

Acosta found that the ransacking observed in the living room and bedroom had occurred throughout the trailer. On top of the stereo, a square space without dust indicated a location where a television might have stood. Although Herman Haygood testified that his stepmother had kept two television sets in the trailer, no televisions were found in the trailer that Saturday. No money was found in any of the purses (except for one Canadian dollar), nor were the keys to the victim's missing car anywhere on the premises.

Sierra Medical Center Pathologist Jody Lawrence testified concerning his autopsy performed on the deceased's body. He found multiple lacerations of the face; a broken nose that had been mashed to the left; abrasions of the face, neck, chest, and back; multiple bruises all over the body; two black eyes; a semi-circular abrasion on the neck which made it appear that a ligature had been placed around the victim's neck, and multiple bruises on both forearms just above the wrists. His examination of the body's internal injuries revealed multiple broken ribs, hemorrhaging in the neck area, extensive damage to the bones and cartilage in the neck, and a one-inch tear in the rear wall of the vagina. Dr. Lawrence stated that all the bruises had to have occurred before death. In response to questions asking how the victim's injuries could have occurred, the doctor said that the arm bruises and tears were probably caused by grabbing the victim's forearms and dragging, propelling, or slinging the deceased around. The victim's facial condition was the result of a bad beating probably an encounter with a solid object like a floor or table. He believed that the victim had died from strangulation with some type of ligature--perhaps, but not necessarily, one of the knotted towels found at the scene. Because of the vaginal tear, the Doctor believed that the attack may have been sexually motivated, but he could say nothing more definite about the cause of tear than that it had been caused by a blunt object. Although the tear could have been caused by a penis, the doctor thought it more likely that the victim had been "manipulated."

Javier Flores and Juan Rojas, two DPS employees who analyze physical evidence, testified concerning the comparisons between hair samples taken from the trailer and samples from various suspects. Flores testified that there were four hairs recovered from the bedroom pillows that did not match the victim's hair. Of these four, one was consistent with appellant's hair samples, although Flores stressed that hair comparison was not as exact a science as fingerprint analysis. Three hairs matched neither appellant nor the victim. Rojas enumerated and detailed five specific similarities between appellant's hair and the one matching hair from the pillow, but he admitted on cross-examination that there were dissimilarities as well and that the hair "could have" come from another person. He testified that a hair sample from James Powers, whom the appellant tried to paint as the perpetrator at trial, matched none of the hairs found in the trailer, because it was noticeably lighter than any of them.

No physical evidence besides the one hair was found to link appellant to the crime scene.

Another group of State's witnesses consisted of people who testified to encounters with appellant between the time of the murder and the discovery of the victim's stolen car late on Sunday afternoon. Sylvia Guerra told the jury about a run-in she had with a man she identified as appellant who was driving a white car late on Saturday afternoon, October 27. Accompanied by her six year old daughter, she had just returned from town on a bus that had let her off at the corner of Alameda and Seville. From there, she began to walk the few blocks to her home. When she was about two houses away from her home, a white car with three occupants approached her. (She later identified the driver of the car as appellant, and identified the car as the one which ultimately turned out to have belonged to the victim). The car slowed by the side of the road, the driver said something to her, and the men all laughed. This scared Guerra, who then tried to hide in a neighbor's house until the car full of men disappeared. On Sunday afternoon, she saw the same three men in a blue car. Because of her scare on Saturday, she reported all this to the police.

Myra Deucher, a widow whose children were 19, 16, and 7 years of age, testified as to her acquaintance with Jewell Haygood: Herman Haygood's deceased wife Mildred had been the godmother of Myra's daughter Debra. Myra had also been acquainted with appellant; a mutual friend introduced him to her around June, 1984. Appellant eventually began asking Myra out on dates, but she always refused him because she was much older than he was. At trial, Myra described the relationship she and appellant had as more of a mother-son relationship than anything else. Over the summer and early fall months of 1984, appellant often frequented Myra's house, ate meals, played with her children, washed his clothes, washed up in her yard with the garden hose, watched television, and generally helped out with household chores. Sometime during this period, appellant asked if he could sleep in his blue car in front of the Deucher house, since he had no other home; Myra gave him permission, as long as he "stayed off" her house.

On Friday...