McKinney quadruple murder

Last updated
McKinney quadruple murder
Location McKinney, Texas
DateMarch 12, 2004
Attack type
Home invasion, mass murder, attempted robbery, mass shooting
WeaponsFirearms
Deaths4
PerpetratorsEddie Williams
Javier Cortez
Raul Cortez
MotiveRobbery

The McKinney quadruple murder, also called the Truett Street massacre, was when four people were gunned down in a house in McKinney, Texas on March 12, 2004. The incident received notable national coverage on the July 22, 2006, episode of America's Most Wanted , leading to the capture of a suspect.

Contents

Incident

On March 12, 2004, Eddie Williams, Javier Cortez, and Raul Cortez entered the home of Rosa Barbosa (46), a clerk at a local McKinney check-cashing business. Javier Cortez allegedly had been watching Barbosa and believed she took cash home from the business daily. [1] When the men couldn't find any money in the home, they forced Barbosa to give them the key and alarm code to the check cashing business. One of the men then shot and killed Barbosa. [2]

Before the shooters had left, Barbosa's nephew Mark Barbosa (25) entered the home with friends Matt Self (17) and Austin York (18). [3] The three burglars forced Mark Barbosa, Self, and York into a bedroom and shot them before fleeing the scene. [4] Shortly following the botched robbery, Robert Barbosa - Mark Barbosa's brother and a resident in the house - entered the residence to find the four victims. [5] Self was still alive and was rushed to the hospital. He died the following day.

Police response

One month after the killings, police believed they had solved the case but soon realized that those suspects were not guilty due to a lack of evidence and were released. It wasn't until several years after the case that the authorities were led to Eddie Williams and the Cortez brothers. The case had not been progressing steadily until Talisha Haithcox, 37, called the police and told them that her boyfriend, Eddie Williams, was involved with the murders of the four victims in McKinney, Texas. McKinney Police Detective Joe Arp eventually gathered DNA evidence that linked Raul Cortez to the crime scene on Truett Street in McKinney, Texas. Investigators collected a cigarette butt from the place where Cortez worked in Florida to use as DNA evidence against the suspect. Also, investigators retrieved DNA evidence from the latex glove pieces and duct tape the suspects left behind in the house on the day of the murders. Arp used the cigarette butt and the latex pieces to cross-reference and was found to have matched once tested.

Williams and Haithcox went to the police station on June 14, 2007. They cooperated with the police. [ citation needed ] Williams told police officials that before the shooting, he had been at Raul Cortez’s house in McKinney planning to rob Cliff's Checking Cashing business, where Rosa Barbosa was the manager. Williams also stated that while they were planning the robbery, Raul Cortez fired his .25-caliber pistol into the ceiling of his house at 312 South Kentucky Street in McKinney while his brother stood outside to listen and see if he could hear the shot being fired. Police officials recovered fragments of the bullet in the South Kentucky residence and matched those fragments to those removed from victims Mark Barbosa, 25, and Austin York. Williams admitted to shooting Austin York and explained that his main reasoning was that the Cortez brothers would have killed him if he hadn't shot Austin. Haithcox's 18-year-old son, Cody, reasoned with the police officials about why Williams might have shot Austin. "I heard Shorty (Eddie Williams’ street name) talk about Javier. He was his friend," (Dallas News[ clarification needed ]) Cody said. "If anything, I think they made him do it. He's not that type of guy."

Javier Cortez, 31; Raul Cortez, 26; and Eddie Williams were all arrested and charged. Williams pled guilty to three counts of murder in 2010 and was sentenced to 20 years. [6] Raul Cortez was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. [7] Williams's relatively lighter sentence compared to that received by Raul Cortez was justified by his co-operation with police and his history of mental disabilities. [8] Javier Cortez pled guilty to federal weapons charges and was sentenced to four years in prison. He is currently confining his sentence at the Clements Unit in Amarillo. [9]

Legacy

Raul Cortez appealed his death sentence to the Texas Supreme Court, but his appeal was rejected in 2011. [10] He subsequently appealed his sentence all the way to the US Supreme Court, but his appeal was rejected in 2017. As of 2023 a date is still yet to be set for his execution. [11] A scholarship fund was raised in the names of the victims of the killings. [12] The killings were also the subject of an episode of the Investigation Discovery channel documentary Nightmare Next Door . [13] The episode first aired in January 2011. [14]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">West Memphis Three</span> Three men convicted of the 1993 murders of three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, United States

The West Memphis Three are three men convicted as teenagers in 1994 of the 1993 murders of three boys in West Memphis, Arkansas, United States. Damien Echols was sentenced to death, Jessie Misskelley Jr. to life imprisonment plus two 20-year sentences, and Jason Baldwin to life imprisonment. During the trial, the prosecution asserted that the juveniles killed the children as part of a Satanic ritual.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Henry Wade</span> American lawyer (1914–2001)

Henry Menasco Wade was an American lawyer who served as district attorney of Dallas County from 1951 to 1987. He participated in two notable U.S. court cases of the 20th century: the prosecution of Jack Ruby for killing Lee Harvey Oswald, and the U.S. Supreme Court case that held abortion was a constitutional right, Roe v. Wade. In addition, Wade was district attorney when Randall Dale Adams, the subject of the 1988 documentary film The Thin Blue Line, was wrongfully convicted in the murder of Robert Wood, a Dallas police officer.

The 1991 Austin yogurt shop killings are an unsolved quadruple homicide which took place at an I Can't Believe It's Yogurt! shop in Austin, Texas, United States on Friday, December 6, 1991. The victims were four teenage girls: 13-year-old Amy Ayers, 17-year-old Eliza Thomas, 17-year-old Jennifer Harbison and Jennifer's 15-year-old sister Sarah. Jennifer and Eliza were employees of the shop, while Sarah and her friend Amy were in the shop to get a ride home with Jennifer after it closed at 11:00 pm. Approximately one hour before closing time, a man who had tried to hustle customers in his queue was permitted to use the toilet in back, took a very long time and may have jammed a rear door open. A couple who left the shop just before 11:00 pm, when Jennifer locked the front door to prevent more customers entering, reported seeing two men at a table acting furtively.

This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.

The Norfolk Four are four former United States Navy sailors: Joseph J. Dick Jr., Derek Tice, Danial Williams, and Eric C. Wilson, who were wrongfully convicted of the 1997 rape and murder of Michelle Moore-Bosko while they were stationed at Naval Station Norfolk. They each declared that they had made false confessions, and their convictions are considered highly controversial. A fifth man, Omar Ballard, confessed and pleaded guilty to the crime in 2000, insisting that he had acted alone. He had been in prison since 1998 because of violent attacks on two other women in 1997. He was the only one of the suspects whose DNA matched that collected at the crime scene, and whose confession was consistent with other forensic evidence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Dallas Police Department</span> Dallas, Texas law enforcement agency

The Dallas Police Department, established in 1881, is the principal law enforcement agency serving the city of Dallas, Texas.

In the United States, misdemeanor murder is a term used to describe a situation in which a person is suspected of murder, but there is not enough evidence to convict the suspect of murder in court. The suspect is then either released without charges or the suspect receives a sentence that is similar to a sentence given to a person charged with a misdemeanor. It is not an official term and it is not an offense defined by the criminal code of the United States or any state thereof.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kimberly McCarthy</span> American murderer (1961–2013)

Kimberly LaGayle McCarthy was an American death row inmate and suspected serial killer who was convicted and sentenced to death for the 1997 murder of her neighbor, 71-year-old retired college professor Dorothy Booth, in her Lancaster, Texas home during a robbery. She was a suspect in the murders of two other elderly Texas women, for which she was never tried.

In 2013, two prosecutors and a prosecutor's wife were murdered in Kaufman County, Texas. The case gained national attention in the United States due to speculation that the Aryan Brotherhood prison gang was responsible, but this was later found to be untrue. Eric Lyle Williams, a former lawyer and justice of the peace whose theft case was prosecuted by two of the victims, was tried, found guilty, and sentenced to death for two of the murders. He was also charged with the murder of prosecutor Mark Hasse, but a decision was made not to prosecute him as he had already received a death sentence for the other murders. His wife, Kimberly Irene "Kim" Williams, was tried separately, and sentenced to 40 years in prison.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Yaser Abdel Said</span> Egyptian-American murderer and former fugitive

Yaser Abdel Said is an Egyptian-American convicted murderer. For 12 years, Said evaded arrest for the January 1, 2008, fatal shootings of his two daughters, Amina (18) and Sarah (17). Their bodies were found in his abandoned taxi cab in Irving, Texas, on the property of the Omni Mandalay Hotel.

On May 14, 2015, three members of the Savopoulos family—Savvas, Amy, and their son Philip—as well as their housekeeper, Veralicia Figueroa, were killed at the Savopoulos home in Washington, D.C. The victims were held hostage for 19 hours, starting on May 13. Ten-year-old Philip was tortured in order to coerce $40,000 in cash from the family. The perpetrator(s) restrained them with duct tape before killing them, then set the house on fire. They all sustained blunt force trauma, and Philip was also stabbed.

William Hawthorne Wirskye is a prominent Texas prosecutor who is currently the First Assistant District Attorney in the Collin County District Attorney's Office in Collin County, Texas. Wirskye is best known for being the lead prosecutor who tried the Kaufman County DA murders, which ultimately resulted in the death penalty for the defendant, former Justice of the Peace of Kaufman County, Eric Williams. Before that, he was a Dallas County prosecutor for 12 years.

Felicia Gayle Picus was a former St. Louis Post-Dispatch reporter who was found stabbed to death in her St. Louis, Missouri home during the day on August 11, 1998.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Tommy Zeigler case</span> American murderer on death row

The Tommy Zeigler case refers to the murders of four people in Winter Garden, Florida on December 24, 1975. Thirty-year-old Tommy Zeigler was charged for the quadruple murder of his wife, her parents, and another man at his family-owned furniture store. He was tried and convicted on July 2, 1976. Zeigler was sentenced to death on July 16, 1976, for two of the murders, in addition to life imprisonment.

Juan Ramon Segundo Meza is an American serial killer and rapist convicted of the 1986 murder of Vanessa Villa, 11, in Fort Worth, Texas. Segundo was arrested in 2005 after his DNA profile was found to match semen collected from Villa's crime scene. He received the death penalty in 2006. Between 2005 and 2010, Segundo was also linked by DNA to three unsolved murders that occurred in the Fort Worth area in the mid-1990s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Angela Samota</span> 1984 murder in Texas, US

The murder of Angela Samota occurred on October 13, 1984, when she was attacked while in her apartment, raped and killed. The case remained unsolved until DNA evidence surfaced in the 2000s, following which charges were brought against a convicted rapist, Donald Andrew Bess Jr., who was subsequently tried and received a death sentence. He died of natural causes while awaiting execution in October 2022.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Murder of Botham Jean</span> 2018 murder case in Texas

On the night of September 6, 2018, 26-year-old accountant Botham Jean was murdered in Dallas, Texas by off-duty Dallas Police Department patrol officer Amber Guyger, who entered Jean's apartment and fatally shot him. Guyger, who said that she had entered Jean's apartment believing it was her own and believed Jean to be a burglar, was initially charged with manslaughter. The absence of a murder charge led to protests and accusations of racial bias because Jean—an unarmed black man—was killed in his own home by a white off-duty officer who had apparently disregarded police protocols. On November 30, 2018, Guyger was indicted on a charge of murder. On October 1, 2019, she was found guilty of murder, and was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment the following day. The ruling was upheld on appeal in 2021.

Rodney Rodell Reed is an American death row inmate who was convicted on May 18, 1998, by a Bastrop County District Court jury for the April 1996 abduction, rape, and murder of Stacey Stites, a 19-year-old resident of Giddings, Texas.

McKinney v. Arizona, 589 U.S. ___ (2020), is a Supreme Court of the United States decision concerning how an appellate court handles sentencing after an Edding's error is identified – an error in which a person deciding a sentence in a capital punishment does not consider all mitigating evidence. It ruled that the state appellate court, rather than a jury, should reweigh the mitigating and aggravating factors in a habeas corpus review.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Koh Tao murders</span> 2014 murders in Koh Tao, Thailand

The Koh Tao murders involved the deaths of two British tourists in Thailand in 2014. On 15 September, the bodies of Hannah Witheridge and David Miller were found on Sairee Beach on the island of Koh Tao, between 4 and 5 am, a few hours after their deaths. Both victims had been hit several times on the head; Witheridge had been raped, and Miller had been drowned.

References

  1. ↑ WFAA Staff. (2009, October 16). Suspect describes the scene of McKinney murders in '04. WFAA.
  2. ↑ WFAA Staff. (2009, October 16). Suspect describes scene of McKinney murders in '04. WFAA.
  3. ↑ Wigglesworth, V. (2017, October 30). Man sentenced to die in McKinney quadruple murder loses U.S. Supreme Court appeal. The Dallas Morning News.
  4. ↑ Gallagher, D. (2007, July 20). Warrants detail Truett Street evidence. McKinney Courier-Gazette.
  5. ↑ Solis, S. (2009, January 12). Quadruple murder trial underway in McKinney. NBC DFW.
  6. ↑ Wigglesworth, V. (2017, October 30). Man sentenced to die in McKinney quadruple murder loses U.S. Supreme Court appeal. The Dallas Morning News.
  7. ↑ "Man sentenced to death for killing 4". NBC. AP. 3 February 2009. Retrieved 3 November 2021.
  8. ↑ "Plea deal reached in 2004 Texas quadruple murders". The Eagle. AP. 18 February 2010. Archived from the original on 2021-11-03. Retrieved 4 November 2021.
  9. ↑ Wigglesworth, V. (2017, October 30). Man sentenced to die in McKinney quadruple murder loses U.S. Supreme Court appeal. The Dallas Morning News.
  10. ↑ "Man Condemned For McKinney Murders Loses Appeal". CBS-DFW. AP. 16 September 2011. Archived from the original on November 3, 2021. Retrieved 3 November 2021.
  11. ↑ Wigglesworth, Valerie (30 October 2017). "Man sentenced to die in McKinney quadruple murder loses US Supreme Court Appeal". Dallas Morning News. Retrieved 3 November 2021.
  12. ↑ Blakeley, Katy (9 March 2020). "Family Works to Celebrate the Lives of Those Killed in 2004 Robbery". NBC-DFW. Retrieved 3 November 2021.
  13. ↑ "Nightmare Next Door episode list". Apple TV. Apple. 13 January 2011. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
  14. ↑ Gallagher, Danny (12 January 2011). "Discovery Channel's ID airing piece on Truett Street murders". McKinney Courier-Gazette. Archived from the original on 2021-11-15. Retrieved 15 November 2021.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.