Trial To Begin In Deaths Of 3 Brownsville Children

[TexasStooge]

BROWNSVILLE, Texas -- Prosecutors plan to use videotaped and handwritten confessions in the capital murder trial that opens Monday for a 23-year-old man accused of decapitating three children with the help of his common-law wife.

Two of the young children found dead in March in John Allen Rubio and Angela Camacho's rundown Brownsville apartment were Rubio's.

Camacho, the 23-year-old mother of all three children, faces capital murder charges but a trial date has not been set because of questions about her mental competency. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty in both cases.

Police said the couple told them they killed the children because the couple was destitute and because Camacho thought the children were possessed.

Sealed evidence in the case includes hundreds of pages of school records intended to document Rubio's history of emotional problems.

Rubio's brother summoned police to the apartment on March 11 after seeing the children's body parts stuffed into plastic bags.

In the confessions, the couple told police they repeatedly stabbed and then smothered 3-year-old Julissa Quezada, 1-year-old John Esthefan Rubio and 2-month-old Mary Jane Rubio. The children's heads were then severed.

In the video, Rubio re-enacts the deaths and makes a sawing motion on the neck of a doll to illustrate the decapitations.

Autopsy reports showed the children were stabbed and suffocated, with one child having more than 20 stab wounds and another having broken ribs and vertebrae.

Defense attorneys in August failed to prove to state District Judge Robert Garza that the confessions were coerced and should be thrown out.

The attorneys also failed to get the judge to throw out evidence from the crime scene, including the children's bodies, on their argument police entered the couple's apartment without probable cause.

In an Aug. 29 hearing, Brownsville police Officer Efrain Cervantes recounted how Rubio's brother Jose Luis Lopez and a woman flagged him down to enter the crime scene.

"I asked, 'What happened?' and (Rubio) just said, 'The kids -- the kids are in the back room,"' Cervantes said during the hearing.

Cervantes then found the children's bodies.

"I just saw the jagged marks around the neck and then I realized that that couldn't be a doll or anything," he said, recalling when he spotted the first victim.

The state's child protection agency said it had counseled the couple before concluding three months before the deaths that the couple was making progress in providing a home.

[opera ghost]

I don't know what to say.... that has to be one of the most horrifying things I can possibly think of.