While writing this memoir piece about reporting on fires, the memories came back on this case.
She almost got away with it. And my newspaper came close to acting as
an accomplice of sorts, potentially leading to a libel trial.
It was one of the three darkest cases I ever covered, up there with the serial killer and the meth lab mom.
What made this one different was love, children and relationships,
specifically how relationships gone bad can make people do things beyond
understanding. The stereotypes of men being more violent than men also
played a role.
It all began when a woman rushed into a small town (San Jacinto, CA.)
police department office to announce that she feared her ex-husband was
going to hurt her children. We'll come in a minute, they told her. No,
you need to come right now, she insisted. They came and discovered two
children dead, stabbed with a knife.
On Oct. 25, 1994 the woman, Dora Buenrostro, told the police she had
feared the kids father had done something wrong because he was mad at
her and she was right. A double murder is huge news in this region –
almost unheard of. But there were more questions than answers: Where was
the father? Where was her other child? Where was she when her kids were
being killed?
The reporter on the story started writing a story with what we knew
at the time, two kids dead and the father, ex-husband, Alex Buenrostro.
appeared to be the killer. Nervous, an editor handed the story to me to
cover (me having a few more years) experience. While I re-wrote the
story to make it much more cautious and more clear that the father's
exact involvement remained unknown the police dispatcher went crazy:
They'd found the other child!
The child, dead from knife wounds, still strapped in a car safety
seat, was found in an abandoned post office on a road connecting San
Jacinto with Riverside. I drove to the scene to gather the scant
information I could get. In the neck of Deidra, 4, they found a broken
knife blade. She had also been stabbed with a pen.
I would never pass that post office again without thinking of that grisly scene and I passed by it daily for more than one year.
The location of the body raised questions. She suggested it was
because her husband was headed back to his home in the Los Angeles area.
But police realized it could also go the other way – it could also be
her headed toward Los Angeles.
I forget some of the details and I don't want to guess at them so
let's just say the next day's articles just stuck to the facts we knew –
three children dead and the assailant unknown – and it's a damn good
thing we did that. Because soon suspicion shifted from him to her.
Police, trailed by the media, found and questioned the children's
father. But not only did he deny any crime, or being at the crime scene,
he had an alibi.
She was soon charged with killing her kids, first the one in the car
seat then the other two at home. There was a two day gap between the
killings away from her house and the two at her home. I found that
detail, that two days between killing her 4-year-old and then stabbing
in the throat her sleeping children, Susana, 9, and Vicente, 8, more
disturbing in a way than if she did all her killing at once.
Her mental competency was questioned, which seemed to be a pre-trial
move made by all the murder suspects I'd covered. Soon came the
inevitable battle of experts on whether she was sane.
I covered the preliminary hearings. I'll never forget one where she
not only ignored the public defender's attempts to keep her silent but
yelled at a judge to have the guards stop putting snakes and poisons in
her cell and I had to wonder myself about her sanity. If she was putting
on a show that woman deserved an Oscar.
I moved on to other stories and other cases.
In July 1998 she was found guilty of first degree murder.
In October 1998 Buenrostro, then 38, was sentenced to death and she remains on death row.
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