The Evil That Men Do: FBI Profiler Roy Hazelwood's Journey Into the Minds of Sexual Predators by Stephen G. Michaud, Roy Hazelwood

Over the spring and summer of 1995 in Dallas, a paroled killer named Juan Chavez, twenty-seven, paired up with a young accomplice to wantonly and brutally murder twelve people, injure five more, and rob six other victims, principally in and around the Oak Cliff district, south of the Trinity River.
    A Dallas police spokesman told the
Dallas Morning News
that Chavez is “the most prolific killer in Dallas County history.”
    One victim, Kevin Hancock, a security guard at the Indian Ridge Apartments on Mount Ranier Street in Dallas, took two bullets to the neck and was paralyzed.
    Hancock sued his erstwhile employers, claiming among other things that a broken front gate at the apartments had allowed Chavez and Fernandez access to the property, and thus to him.
    In Hazelwood’s opinion, however, so ruthless and rabid were the two killers that no practical security measure would have prevented “Johnny” Chavez and his mentally slow partner, fifteen-year-old Hector “Crazy” Fernandez, from shooting and paralyzing Hancock.
    Johnny Chavez, tenth in a family of eighteen brothers and sisters, was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and brought to Dallas as an infant by his parents, migrant farm workers.
    Greg Davis, the Dallas County assistant district attorney who later prosecuted Chavez, believes ethnic hatred may have underlain the defendant’s cold-bloodedness. Although robbery was Chavez’s putative reason for many of the assaults, Davis points out that almost all of the victims were other Hispanics, most of them among the least-prosperous-looking residents of Oak Cliff’s shabbier neighborhoods.
    Chavez’s killing career actually began ten years earlier, on December 28, 1985, when Johnny, together with his brother Jesse and a friend, Julian Garcia, decided to rob their Oak Cliff neighbor, Vicente Mendoza. Garcia later testified that he wanted the money to finance a trip to Mexico.
    They kicked in Mendoza’s front door and robbed him at gunpoint. Then, to eliminate him as a witness, Johnny shot Vicente dead in the top of the head. He also shot Mendoza’s cousin in the eye.
    Chavez was arrested three weeks later in Houston. In 1987, he was tried and convicted for the Mendoza murder and sentenced to fifteen years in prison. He was paroled in 1994.
    Back in Dallas, he met Fernandez, who’d recall to jurors that he began hanging out with Johnny “because he was nice to me. He was cool and stuff.”
    Their homicide spree began the following spring.
    At about 8:00 p.m. on an evening in late March, Chavez pulled into an Oak Cliff self-service car wash where twenty-three-year-old Jose Castillo was washing his vehicle in an open-air stall. Then for no reason except, as Davis suggests, “the thrill of killing,” Chavez shot Castillo several times.
    Two months later, just after midnight on May 20, 1995, Chavez and Fernandez used a 20-gauge shotgun to murder eighteen-year-old Juan Hernandez as he sat at the wheel of his 1983 Buick Regal in a food store parking lot.
    They stole the Buick, stripped it, and then torched the vehicle. The burned-out hulk was recovered nearby nine days later.
    The two then stole a red pickup truck, again in the same general vicinity, sometime between 8:00 p.m. and midnight on June 23.
    At 12:15 p.m. on the twenty-fourth, Chavez and Fernandez came upon two women and a man together in the parking lot of a west Dallas restaurant. They leveled a handgun from the stolen pickup’s cab and demanded wallets from all three, who readily complied.
    A few minutes later, Chavez and Fernandez rolled into a movie theater parking lot in the northwest part of the city and similarly accosted a young couple walking to their car.
    “Give me your wallet,” Johnny demanded of twenty-nine-year-old Timothy McKay. Then he gave McKay’s companion, Pattie Matherly, to the count of three to surrender her purse.
    Forty minutes later, Chavez and Fernandez were back in Oak Cliff, where they discovered Kenneth Shane on the curb