In 1993, Christina's ex-boyfriend was gunned down outside his home. A clue at the scene led police to a fortuneteller and Mexican faith healer named Maria Martinez. She had hired the gunmen, at the request of her longtime client, Dora Cisneros. The city of Brownsville was shocked to see what the obsessed mother was willing to do to avenge her daughter.

Dora was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. A successful appeal set her free, but persistent prosecutors won a second conviction in federal court. Dora Cisneros is currently serving a life sentence in federal penitentiary.

South Texas woman who had daughter’s ex-boyfriend slain loses appeal

By Matt Peterson - DallasNews.com

November 10, 2008

The U.S. Supreme Court has refused to hear the appeal of a South Texas woman who is serving a life term for arranging the murder of a teenage boy who spurned her daughter, The Associated Press reports.

Dora Cisneros, the wife of a prominent Brownsville surgeon, originally asked her fortuneteller to put a curse on Joey Fischer but, when she refused, then asked for the woman’s help in having him killed, prosecutors say.

Mr. Fischer, 18, a high school senior, was gunned down in 1993 outside his home as he was washing his car. His mother found her son in a pool of blood, shot once in the head and once in the chest. The water hose was still in his hand.

Ms. Cisneros, 70, had her state murder conviction overturned because of an error by the prosecutor but was then tried and convicted in federal court because prosecutors said the hit men she hired came from Mexico. Her appeal took issue with that.

Maria Mercedes Martinez, the fortuneteller, is serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role.

Valley woman convicted in murder-for-hire trial

By Mark Babineck - TexNews.com

May 13, 1998

HOUSTON (AP) -- A federal jury on Tuesday convicted a Brownsville woman in the murder-for-hire plot that resulted in the death of her daughter's ex-boyfriend.

Dora Cisneros, who was accused of hatching a plot in which telephone calls and travel from Mexico were involved in the 1993 death of 18-year-old Joey Fischer, had no visible reaction to the verdict. The victim's mother and stepmother sobbed at the decision, which came after about three hours of deliberations.

"We're relieved," said Vernon "Beau" Nelson, Fischer's stepfather. "This woman is a murderer of children. She needs to be put away. Joey finally got some justice today."

Joey Fischer broke off his relationship with Mrs. Cisneros' youngest daughter in the summer of 1992. On March 3, 1993, he was shot to death in the driveway of his home as he washed off his car before school.

Mrs. Cisneros was sentenced to life in prison in 1994 following a murder conviction in state court. However, an error in jury instructions won her an acquittal from an appeals court in 1996.

To make a federal case, prosecutors this time had to prove Mrs. Cisneros was involved in a plot that included travel and phone calls from nearby Mexico. She didn't need to know about the "foreign commerce" under the statute.

She could face up to life in prison when she is sentenced July 27 in Houston. Until then, she'll remain at the nearby Montgomery County Jail without bond.

"My son's murderer is going where she belongs," said A.J. Fischer, the boy's father. "We've been here before. Hopefully what was done today, will stand."

Mrs. Cisneros' family and defense attorneys declined to comment on the verdict. Prosecutor Assistant U.S. Attorney Mervyn Mosbacker said he was pleased with the quick decision.

In both trials, prosecutors presented witnesses who testified that Mrs. Cisneros first asked a folk healer to cast a fatal spell on Fischer for breaking up with her daughter. The fortuneteller, Maria Mercedes Martinez, says she declined, prompting Mrs. Cisneros to inquire if Ms. Martinez knew anyone who could kill Fischer.

That's when Ms. Martinez set the wheels in motion through Daniel Garza, a lovelorn San Antonio housepainter who had sought Ms. Martinez' help for marital troubles.

Ms. Martinez, 77, is serving a 20-year prison term for her role.

Garza, serving a life sentence for finding the two gunmen who shot Fischer, testified he discussed the plot with the folk healer during four phone calls he made from Mexico. However, there is no documentation the calls were made.

Also, prosecutors said testimony by U.S. Customs officials, a motel manager and witnesses at the crime scene pinpointed a white car driven by the suspected gunmen as having come over from Mexico the day before the shooting.

"All we have to prove is somebody came from Mexico to the United States to commit this murder. And we did that," Assistant U.S. Attorney Mervyn Mosbacker told jurors in his final arguments Tuesday.

Despite 5-1/2 days of testimony and piles of circumstantial evidence, lead defense attorney Tony Canales told jurors they hadn't seen enough proof to meet federal standards.

"I submit to you that a clear conscience dictates that proof beyond a reasonable doubt was not met," he told the jury. "Whether you like it or not ... you've got to do the right thing."

The suspected killers are jailed in Mexico and did not appear in the courtroom in Houston, where the case was moved by U.S. District Judge Filemon Vela because of intense publicity in the Rio Grande Valley.

Mrs. Cisneros did not testify in her own defense.

After Prosecutor's Error, Woman Convicted of Murder Is Freed

The New York Times

March 3, 1996

Two years ago, a jury in this border town sentenced the wife of a prominent doctor to life in prison after convicting her on murder charges. Prosecutors said she had given a fortune teller $3,000 to arrange the murder of a high school honor student she blamed for jilting her youngest daughter.

Now, as the third anniversary of Albert Joseph Fischer Jr.'s killing approaches, the woman, Dora Garcia Cisneros, walks free, the result of a prosecutor's error and a Texas appeals court that ordered her acquittal.

On Feb. 22, Mrs. Cisneros, 58, was released from a Texas women's prison after appellate judges ruled that prosecutors here in Cameron County had presented evidence of a murder conspiracy, and then effectively asked the jury to convict her of direct participation in the crime.

"I'm just absolutely livid that they're going to allow this lady to move back to town and take up life like nothing ever happened," said Buddy Fischer, the victim's father.

His 18-year-old son, known as Joey, was a popular student at his high school when he was shot on March 3, 1993, in the driveway of the family's suburban home.

Testimony in the 1994 trial painted Mrs. Cisneros as a mother obsessed because Joey Fischer had ended a relationship with her daughter; she was said to have offered him $500 to get back together with her daughter Cristina. Evidence pointed to a conspiracy that led from the mother, through a fortune teller, Maria Mercedes Martinez, and another of her clients, to two men the Texas authorities say were the gunmen. The men, Mexican nationals, are being held in Mexico on other charges.

Mrs. Martinez pleaded guilty to murder conspiracy and is serving a 20-year sentence. She was an important witness in the prosecution's case against Mrs. Cisneros.

In its January ruling, the appeals court ordered Mrs. Cisneros acquitted, so she cannot be retried for the killing on state charges. Although the court agreed she participated by giving money, a photograph and instructions to the fortune teller, it said there was no evidence that she had contacted the killers herself, and insufficient evidence that they were the ones who had carried out the crime.

The Cameron County District Attorney, Luis Saenz, who declined to be interviewed about the case, has appealed the latest ruling to the state's highest appeals court.

Two lawyers who are advising the Fischer family said that the prosecutors had made a "rookie error."

"Do not hold the law responsible," said one of the advisers, David Berg, a Houston trial lawyer. "This is not a technicality or a fluke in the Texas law. This was negligence."

Cathy Herasimchuk, a Houston lawyer who specializes in appeals and is an adviser to the Fischer family, is more charitable.

The Texas statute on murder-for-hire, Ms. Herasimchuk said, "is really very difficult to use when the paymaster, the mastermind, insulates herself from the triggerman."

Mr. Fischer, however, holds the appeals process responsible. "What the court of appeals has done is overturn what the jury decided," he said. "The appeals court didn't hear the case; the jury did."

Mrs. Cisneros's husband still practices medicine in Brownsville, and declined to be interviewed. The family's eldest daughter continues in her job as assistant principal of a Brownsville school. Cristina Cisneros attends college out of town.

In instances when family members have spoken publicly, they have said that Mrs. Cisneros is innocent.

Mr. Fischer said: "How do you tell your children that we live in a society where murderers go free?"

Mother Gets Life Sentence

April 20, 1994

A Brownsville woman has been sentenced to life in prison for paying two men $3,000 to kill the teen-ager who had spurned her daughter.

Under the terms of Monday's sentence, the defendant, Dora Garcia Cisneros, 56, must serve at least 30 years before she is eligible for parole. Daniel Garza, who admitted passing $3,000 from Mrs. Cisneros to the killers, received the same sentence.

Prosecutors said Mrs. Cisneros became so upset about 18-year-old Joey Fischer's breakup with her daughter that she plotted for months to find someone to kill him.

A 73-year-old fortuneteller, Maria Mercedes Martinez, testified that she had delivered the money to Mr. Garza from Mrs. Cisneros. Mr. Garza, 43, said that he gave the money to the hit men but that he thought they would only beat Mr. Fischer, who was instead shot to death.

MURDER ON THE BORDER

Last fall, my eighteen-year-old cousin Joey Fischer was assigned to read Gabriel García Márquez’s "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." Joey’s English teacher, Janice Johnson, believed that her honors students at St. Joseph Academy, a private school in Brownsville, Texas, on the Mexican border, needed to stretch themselves by taking on serious themes, such as the notion of mortality. In the book, Santiago Nasar, an amicable and rather feckless twenty-one-year-old, is murdered because he has possibly violated a daughter of the local town. Mrs. Johnson didn’t care that her students might not appreciate Márquez’s literary style of magic realism–his baroque chronicle of this particular killing which gradually reveals more and more details–but she was hoping that they would understand, and even be intrigued by, the subtext: that of a Latin culture in which a murder might be considered morally justifiable when it is motivated by the loss of a young woman’s honor. "This couldn’t happen," Mrs. Johnson later recalled Joey and his friends saying of the García Márquez novel. "This kind of thing only happens on soap operas."

Joey, whose full name was Albert Joseph Fischer, Jr., was slim and had neatly trimmed brown hair, a narrow face, and a wry smile; he was one of Mrs. Johnson’s most challenging students. At times, he could be as heedless as any other teen-ager, but she was impressed by his conversation, which was often serious. Joey had a deep voice and loved to bounce big words like "plethora," "lugubrious," and "pusillanimous" around with Mrs. Johnson. People who knew him often talked about him first in terms of his accomplishments: he had a 98.5 grade-point average for his senior year; he was eleventh in his class; and he had been immediately accepted into the honors program at the University of Texas at Austin. It could be argued that Joey’s confidence in his academic abilities gave him a certain margin to try to push his teachers to their limits. Joey always had a remark to make, on any subject. "One of these days, your mouth is going to get you in trouble," Mrs. Johnson often teased him.

However much Mrs. Johnson tried last year, she had a hard time getting Joey’s class to appreciate the rich ironies of "Chronicle of a Death Foretold." Joey told a friend of his that he thought all the omens were "ridiculous." He gave the friend the impression that he regarded the García Márquez novel as an anachronism, a throwback to the repressive sexual mores of Catholic mothers who chanted endless Rosaries to purify their daughters who had been degradadas. Joey said to Mrs. Johnson, "All the books you seem to pick for us are so morbid."

Mrs. Johnson was not originally from the border. As an outsider, she had a sharp sense of all the many contradictory aspects of the culture. St. Joseph Academy–and, for that matter, Brownsville–was at least eighty-five per cent Mexican-American. It was frequently said that the school, like the city, was "a mix of cultures," but it was impossible to think of either St. Joe, as the school is known, or Brownsville as an Anglo-versus-Hispanic world. Outside South Texas, it is often presumed that there is a continuing culture clash between the local Anglos and the Mexican-Americans. In fact, the closer you are to the border, the more the worlds meld together; ethnic and racial considerations are secondary to how rich a family is or how long it has lived in the area. On the border, the assumptions that outsiders make about the area often seem patronizing, because the Mexican-Americans define the culture and are its political power structure. It is common for the Mexican-Americans to tease their Anglo friends affectionately by calling them gringos, or even bolillos, meaning "white bread."

As an Anglo, Joey was most friendly with the Mexican-Americans in the school who were "second or third generation from across"–middle-class children whose last names were Ayala or Gonzalez, the kind of kids who wore boat shoes and polo shirts, sometimes applied to the Wharton School or Brown, and, at home, spoke Spanish mostly with their grandparents. This Brownsville world of established families does not show up in movies like "The Border" or "El Norte," for it is a society of subtle distinctions, in which Mexican-Americans and Anglos live in the same neighborhoods and go to the same schools and dances.

Joey and his friends could speak a perfect border Spanish, trilling their "r"s like natives, but for all their fluency in the language Mrs. Johnson remained convinced that they were unaware of the oddity of their environment. Brownsville is at the southern tip of Texas, across the Rio Grande from the Mexican city of Matamoros, and twenty-five miles from the Gulf of Mexico and the beaches of South Padre Island. It is a community of Bonanza restaurants, cineplexes, department stores, yogurt shops, and malls, where a small but significant number of the population truly believe that they have seen the Miracle Virgin of Guadalupe appearing in the clouds, on their tortillas, or, just recently, in the knot of a tree. It is a city where there are curanderos and curanderas–Mexican medicine men and women, sometimes benign but sometimes somewhat sinister, who practice brujería, or witchcraft. For a fee, the local curanderas will prescribe herbs for indigestion or employ spells, oils, and incantations–and, on occasion, tarot cards–to put the mal ojo, or evil eye, on straying boyfriends or unfaithful wives. A few miles from St. Joe, there are several storefronts advertising velas mágicas, aceite de suerte, sahumerio–magic candles, lucky oil, specially prepared incense–and other tools of curanderismo. Neither Joey nor his private-school friends appear to have ever shown the slightest interest in these things.

On Wednesday, March 3rd, in the sweet, nervous time of his last months of high school, Joey was up early, as usual. He put on one of the St. Joe uniforms–navy trousers and blue-and-white button-down–and then tried to get his younger brother, Eric, out the door; Joey always drove Eric to school. Just before seven o’clock, Joey went into the garage and backed his mother’s car into the circular driveway. The traffic was light on Highway 77/ 83, visible just beyond an allée of palm trees in front of his house, on Cortez Avenue, in Rancho Viejo, an upper-middle-class community to the north of Brownsville. By Brownsville standards, Joey’s neighborhood was rich. A number of doctors and lawyers lived there, and so did executives of the local maquiladoras, the factories of vast American and Taiwanese companies, such as A.T. & T. and Zenith, in Matamoros. Rancho Viejo was the kind of place where people describe the houses by their measurements, as in "Look at the Hernándezes’–they have fourteen thousand square feet." One next-door neighbor, a Mexican national, had in his front yard a dozen plaster statues of ancient Greek goddesses holding urns. Compared with some of its neighbors, Joey’s house, a stucco ranch, was modest; it had a swimming pool, but a relatively small one.

I grew up with Buddy, in San Antonio. My father owned a small chain of discount department stores which had been started by my grandfather, Buddy’s great-uncle. Buddy’s father, Albert Fischer, was a surgeon, the chief of surgery of a local hospital. Buddy’s mother, Ella Zuschlag, was a highly respected pediatrician. His father and my father, both of whom still live in San Antonio, are first cousins, and so close that they are more like brothers; their connection is powerful, rooted in the nineteenth century in central Mexico, where their fathers, best friends from a small town in the duchy of Kurland, on the Baltic Sea, married two sisters and settled in Aguascalientes, hoping to strike it rich. By 1911, during the revolution, four Brenner children and two Fischer children were living in Aguascalientes. Pancho Villa’s troops massed in front of their ranch. Our grandmothers were often frightened by the local superstitions and folkways. From time to time, my grandmother told me years later, they found on their porches dead chickens or bananas wrapped in red cloths. They had no idea what the chickens and bananas meant. In the years when the revolution was brewing, a comet streaked across the sky, and my aunt Anita Brenner’s nurse, Serapia, held her up to look and said, "It means war, death, misery, hunger, and disease." Soon after, it rained ashes for a night and a day from a distant erupting volcano. Nearly two decades later, Anita wrote of these events in "Idols Behind Altars," a study of Mexican art and anthropology, published in 1929. The Brenners and the Fischers stayed in Mexico for only eleven years (they left during the revolution), but for eighty years most of my family has been unable to move any farther away from Mexico than South Texas. With time, the closeness of the clan weakened, but many of us have been drawn to the totems of the culture that drew our grandparents; our houses are full of Mexican paintings and religious kitsch. "For the dust of Mexico on a human heart corrodes, precipitates. But with the dust of Mexico upon it, that heart can find no rest in any other land," Anita wrote in "Idols Behind Altars."

Buddy and I had known each other well as children, but I hadn’t seen him in nearly twenty years. On my first morning in Brownsville, I waited in the lobby of the Sheraton for my cousin and his wife to pick me up. Buddy and Connie work at a local maquiladora, kemet de Mexico, a South Carolina electronics company that manufactures millions of electrical capacitors a day in Mexico. Buddy, a former banker, is a buyer and is implementing a new automated purchasing system for the factories in Mexico; Connie is an executive in charge of maintaining the quality of the product for all the Mexican factories. She worked her way through college and then took an M.B.A. in South Carolina. Connie’s intelligence and direct manner are not unlike those of Buddy’s mother, the only woman interne in her year at Robert B. Greene Hospital, in San Antonio.

At eighteen, Joey’s personalitywas still in formation, but he loved basketball and computers, and often talked about his desire to become an engineer. At school, his class voted him, along with two others, "most sarcastic," and they posed for their picture carrying a sign that read "What Us Sarcastic?" He had a fine sense of the absurdity of high school. Once, a teacher took two balloons away from Joey and put them in a closet. A few days later, Joey asked for his balloons back. The teacher opened the closet and a bunch of balloons floated out. Joey waited a full beat. "That’s what happens when you leave two balloons alone," he said.

For an adolescent, Joey sometimes showed a surprising concern for his parents. In the spring of 1992, when his stepmother, Connie, was six months pregnant, she received a note from him. "So the baby is due in late September. I wonder if he’ll look like Mikey from ‘Look Who’s Talking’ or like Wally from ‘The Beaver.’ Either way, he should look pretty funny. But don’t you worry, I’ll take good care of him." Joey was twelve when his parents divorced, and he had had a hard time, but he and his father maintained their close relationship. There was never a Lakers game that Joey did not try to watch with Buddy.

Joey and his friends often complained that there was almost nothing to do in Brownsville. The parents of the girls they dated did not want them to drive to the beaches of South Padre Island except on special occasions. Across the Rio Grande was Matamoros, long the equivalent of a theme park for Texas teen-agers, with its easy liquor and, before the age of aids, quick and memorable sex in the red-light section. Soon after Joey and many of his friends got their driver’s licenses, at age sixteen, they visited the bars in "Mata" from time to time–places like Blanca White’s and Hobie.

By the end of their junior year, the raffish atmosphere of Matamoros had become less appealing to them. Joey and his friends knew that their parents worried about occasional shootings in the bars and about people being kidnapped off the streets. Matamoros had had a lot of bad publicity in 1989, when Mark Kilroy, a University of Texas student, on the border for spring break, disappeared from a bar in Matamoros. His body and at least a dozen others were found buried on a desolate ranch nearby, apparently the victims of a cult involved in the drug trade whose members believed that sacrifice would make them invincible. The appearance of a satanic cult a few miles from their quiet neighborhoods had terrified many of the St. Joe parents whose children were old enough to get their driver’s licenses.

People in Brownsville sometimes say that the parents who send their children to St. Joseph Academy want them to be "part of the St. Joe mafia" and "meet the right kind of people." St. Joe is one of the few private schools in Brownsville; the tuition is three thousand dollars a year, and ninety-eight per cent of the students go on to college. The school occupies a red brick building in Rio Viejo, one of the most elegant of the Brownsville neighborhoods.

The building, which has open-air corridors and patios, to take advantage of the mild Brownsville winters, stands near a resaca, one of many charming old cutoff river channels to be found all over Brownsville, and is surrounded with flowering cenizo shrubs, which are indigenous. Most of the children at St. Joe are wealthy: the sons and daughters of the rich families of the Rio Grande Valley; the children of Taiwanese entrepreneurs who came to the border to run the maquiladoras; and even the children of several rumored drug and arms dealers in the area. In the morning, the St. Joe parking lot fills with expensive cars, some of them, it has been thought, surely belonging to drug dealers’ children.

The counselling problems at the school are idiosyncratic in the extreme; guidance counsellors had to use special expressions like being "in the paper a lot" when one of the fathers–allegedly a member of a Matamoros-based drug ring linked to a Colombian drug cartel–was indicted last year. On the surface, all the different Hispanics, Taiwanese, and Anglos at St. Joe seem to get along with one another, but, as in every high school, there are cliques. Some of the more assimilated Mexican-American students have little to do with the Mexican-Americans from el otro lado.

In the view of one person who knows the school and its students well, the lack of much to do in Brownsville for the middle-class teen-agers leads to a great deal of early sex. "It is surprising that, with the Catholic doctrine and the Mexican-American doctrine, there is so much sex going on, but the parents and the school refuse to talk about the problems," this person told me. "They say, ‘That doesn’t happen here, and neither does anorexia, or drug or alcohol abuse.’ " Some of the Anglo boys at St. Joe who get involved with the girls from the old-fashioned families have no idea of the expectations and pressures that are put on the Mexican-American daughters. In Brownsville, Mexican-American girls are often pushed to marry as soon as possible after high school.

Joey was often attracted to the more Latina girls of the school. During his junior year, he asked out Cristina Cisneros, a sophomore. The other boys were surprised. "I didn’t really know that much about her," a close friend of Joey’s told me. Cristina, the youngest of five children, had long curly dark hair and a pretty face with small features. Although she once tried out for cheerleader, for the most part she seemed to keep to herself. "In the cafeteria at lunch," one of her friends told me, "when all of us would be laughing, Cristina would be very quiet." Another friend saw her differently: "Cristina could be quiet when you didn’t know her, but when you know her she’s bouncy, happy, and friendly."

Joey may have appeared to Cristina’s mother, Dora Cisneros, to be a catch: he was an ambitious student from a good family, and he wasn’t wild, like many of the St. Joe boys. Cristina and Joey often played tennis together or swam in his pool. His stepmother, Connie, thought they were "just friends." Some weekends when Cristina was at Joey’s house, she would sit by herself playing video games while Joey did his homework in the dining room. "It was strange," Connie told me. "I never saw anything remotely intimate between them. They didn’t even hold hands."

One day, Joey told one of his closest friends that he and Cristina had gone alone to South Padre Island, to a condo her parents had there. It is impossible to know exactly what went on there between Cristina and Joey, but Joey later told his friends that they had slept together. He didn’t brag about it, his friends told me, and one friend said that he even seemed to regret it. His friends think that Joey and Cristina slept together only once or twice, but they have no doubt that Joey was telling them the truth. Cristina later denied that anything had happened between them, according to a friend of hers. In any case, later that spring Joey took Cristina to the junior prom; a photograph of Joey in his tuxedo was taken.

That June, Joey broke up with Cristina. One of his closest friends told me that he thought Joey had decided that it had been just a physical attraction, and that there weren’t many emotional ties between them. He wanted to get out honorably, without "hurting her feelings," he told his father. He had given Cristina his ring, and when he broke up with her he asked for it back, but she refused.

During the first few weeks of the summer, Buddy told me, Dora Cisneros began to call Joey. She was very polite on the telephone. "Why have you broken up with Cristina?" she would ask. Joey, uncomfortable at hearing from Cristina’s mother, was apparently almost excessively polite, using his Catholic-school manners. "Well, Ma’am, I think she is very nice," he would say, "but I just want to see other girls." According to Buddy, Mrs. Cisneros called him and asked him why Joey had broken up with her daughter. At first, Buddy remembers, he thought Mrs. Cisneros was just being "a concerned parent," but when he realized that she was truly concerned about a high-school romance that had fizzled he could not understand how a mother could risk humiliating her daughter by calling her boyfriend’s parents.

Joey was angry that Cristina had not returned his ring, and he decided he would write her a polite but firm letter asking for it back. To his teen-age mind, the letter had a menacing legal tone. Buddy, who had seen the letter, recalled that it said, in effect, "You have ten days to return my ring or I am taking action."

After Joey sent the letter, according to Buddy, Dora Cisneros called Buddy at home and said, "I want to meet you and talk to you about Joey’s ring and other things." Buddy agreed to meet her at a Burger King. When he got to the table, he saw Cristina sitting there with her mother. An outsider might have thought they had come to negotiate a marriage, an old-fashioned Mexican custom. Dora Cisneros again asked, "Why did Joey break up with Cristina?" Buddy answered, "This is really between Joey and Cristina. It has nothing to do with us." Buddy expressed the opinion that Joey was old enough to conduct his own personal affairs, and that, as the father, he had to stay out of it. Inexplicably to Buddy, as Mrs. Cisneros talked about her daughter’s private life Cristina did not protest but remained silent for most of the meeting.

Then Dora Cisneros said to Buddy, "Are you aware that your son drinks?"

Buddy wasn’t particularly upset. He remembered his own teen-age years in South Texas. "What eighteen-year-old doesn’t?" he answered.

"I’ve seen him drunk once," Cristina said.

"Well," Buddy said, "if Joey has been drunk, he has never been drunk in front of me."

The meeting, however bizarre, was perfectly friendly, Buddy recalls. The subject of sex never came up. Buddy told Mrs. Cisneros that he would talk to Joey about being "a gentleman." Mrs. Cisneros told Buddy that Joey would get his ring back. "I just want him to sweat a little bit," she said. When Buddy got home, he told Joey, "If you are breaking up with Cristina, please be a gentleman about it. If you have done anything to offend her, please write her a note or call her to apologize. Tell her you want to be just friends." No one knows whether Joey took his father’s advice. But, according to Joey’s friends, Mrs. Cisneros continued to call him. Joey told a friend that she had offered him five hundred dollars a month to take Cristina out. Eventually, the situation reached a point where he later confided to another friend, "I have never told an adult off before, but, yeah, I told her off."

At the beginning of his senior year, Joey met Marianela Caballero, a new girl in school. Marianela had long, dark hair and an infectious laugh. Her mother, who was originally from San Luis Potosí, spoke Spanish with her daughter, and Marianela had a Mexican lilt to her voice. Joey invited Marianela to homecoming, but the relationship did not take off. "I didn’t want a commitment then," Marianela told me. But during February their flirtation intensified.

The Saturday before Joey was killed, he attended a friend’s quinceañera, the traditional coming-out party given for a Mexican-American girl’s fifteenth birthday, and became confused that Marianela paid more attention to another boy than to him. Marianela might have been unsure that Joey really cared for her. Like many of the more traditional Mexican-American girls, she did not want the sort of casual romance favored by the Anglo boys. Her mother had talked to her at great length about "reputation."

On the Monday after the quinceañera, Joey wrote her a long letter explaining his intentions: "I know how I feel, and it’s all up to you. You need to let me know. You wanted sincere, this is how I feel. I like you alot, but it’s all up to you. . . . Please let me know how you feel. I sincerely care for you."

On Tuesday–the night before he was murdered–Joey and Marianela were on the telephone for more than three hours. His friends Patrick Aziz and Erika Borrego were over at his house, as they often were, ostensibly to study calculus but really just to hang out. Before Patrick and Erika left, the three friends started kidding around with Joey’s electric razor. They held Joey down and tried to shave his legs. At one point during the evening, Joey said that he had heard that another boy was now taking Cristina Cisneros out. "Good luck," Joey said.

On another occasion, he told that boy’s cousin, "Tell him not to worry. If he wants to take Cristina out, that’s fine." He also startled Patrick and Erika. "Did you know that Mrs. Cisneros offered me money to take Cristina out?" he asked. "God. Really, God, what a nut!" Patrick recalled telling him.

Joey was serious. He told them she’d offered him five hundred dollars a month. All three were casual about this information; their minds were on other things.

Alex Perez has been the sheriff of Cameron County, in which Brownsville is situated, for twelve years. Perez, in his fifties, is husky–what Mexicans on the border call poco fuerte–with strong muscles beginning to turn soft. He habitually wears gold aviator glasses, cowboy boots, a gold tie tack in the shape of handcuffs, and a large gold ring with rhinestones in the shape of a pistol.

On March 3rd, the morning that Joey was killed, Perez was eating breakfast at the Toddle Inn, a small restaurant he owns on Central Boulevard, not far from the Sheraton. In the early-morning hours, the Toddle Inn fills with local lawyers and police seeking to hear the morning courthouse chisme–gossip. It was, Perez told me, around seven o’clock, when the call came in: "1900," the code for murder.

Immediately, he rushed to his car and, with sirens going full blast, headed for Rancho Viejo. There are twenty or so murders in Brownsville every year, but not many occur in the rich suburbs. When Perez arrived at the house, he saw Buddy Fischer standing in the driveway. Perez knew Buddy from when he was a client of Buddy’s bank. His first thought was that Buddy lived in the area and must have accidentally happened on the crime.

At the house, police found what eventually turned out to be a crucial piece of evidence–a yellow business card lying near Joey’s body. The card was from a bail-bond company in McKinney, Texas, not far from Dallas. The sheriff later theorized that Joey had tried to grab his assailant and the card had fallen from his pocket. On the card, Perez saw, was a handwritten telephone number with a 214 area code, the code for Dallas. "The four was written in a weird handwriting," he told me. "Very distinct. I was asking myself, ‘Why would a young man like this, just starting life, a brilliant student, get shot?’ Usually, it’s either drugs or love."

Perez thought it unlikely that Joey had any connection to the local drug trade, he told me, and it also seemed unlikely to him that the murder was a crime of passion. He said that in Brownsville it is unusual for someone so young to get killed over love. But Perez had been on the border long enough to know that anything was possible. He asked the family, "Did Joey ever have any problems with a girlfriend?" They told him about Cristina.

When news reports about the arrests of Dora Cisneros and María Mercedes Martínez first went out in Brownsville, Buddy was in the warehouse at kemet. A close friend had called Connie, and Connie immediately went out to tell Buddy. Some time before, Buddy had decided that he would not bother the D.A. or the sheriff. He had referred to the process of finding Joey’s killer as a "roller coaster" and had said that it would upset him too much when there were slowdowns in the investigation.

In the weeks before her mother was arrested, friends of Cristina Cisneros said she was having a hard time handling Joey’s death and seemed very distressed. Once, seeing Marianela in a school hallway, she hugged her. Although Cristina had started dating the other boy, a friend of hers later told me that whenever anyone mentioned Joey’s name she "started crying," and often brought out pictures of him.

On the morning Joey was killed, Dora Cisneros had gone to St. Joe to take Cristina home. According to a teacher, the assistant principal said to Mrs. Cisneros, "You, of all people, should know how a mother feels." The assistant principal meant the comment to refer sympathetically to the death of her son David, but Mrs. Cisneros just "stared and stared," the teacher told me. The assistant principal thought Mrs. Cisneros had misunderstood what she’d said, and added, "You lost a son, remember?" After learning about the charges against Mrs. Cisneros, the teacher said, the assistant principal was horrified that she had said that to her.

On the morning that Cristina’s mother was arrested, Dr. Cisneros called the school and asked that Cristina be brought into the guidance office, so that local reporters would not swarm around her. Several of the teachers were concerned about how Cristina would now be treated by the other students. Since Joey’s death, the grief counselling at the school had been intense. Several of Joey’s friends who were in Mrs. Johnson’s English class discussed "Murder in the Cathedral" and Eliot’s observation that death could come in a thousand different ways. It did not surprise Mrs. Johnson that none of the students mentioned García Márquez’s observation on Santiago Nasar’s death–"There had never been a death more foretold"–for the sexual taboos implicit in García Márquez’s chronicle had never seemed to apply to the middle-class teen-age world of St. Joseph Academy.

At St. Joe, there was a great deal of gossip about Mrs. Cisneros. It was quickly recalled that Dora Cisneros’s other daughter had had a boyfriend who had broken up with her. Soon afterward, it was rumored, someone stopped his car and stabbed him repeatedly, but he survived. Although Sheriff Perez traced the boyfriend to a distant city, he could not prove that the rumors were true. Some teachers at St. Joe who had known nothing about brujería accepted as fact the theory that Cristina and Joey had slept together and that the curandera had promised Mrs. Cisneros that if Joey was murdered Cristina would get her virginity back.

On April 6th, the Herald ran the story of the the arrests of Dora Cisneros and María Martínez at the top of the front page. That day, a woman dumped a bulky brown paper shopping bag into a resaca near downtown Brownsville. As luck would have it, park employees were working on the grounds nearby, and noticed the woman dumping the bag and then hurrying away. They went over and took the bag out of the water, moving so quickly that the paper was hardly wet.

The bag’s contents frightened them: a full collection of the paraphernalia of brujería required for the most evil of spells, illness and death. There was a garland consisting of three heads of garlic with pins stuck in them and wrapped in yellow cloth; a vial of Embrujo de Sevilla perfume; horseshoes wrapped with red ribbons; an aloe-vera plant, also wrapped in ribbons; two doll-size figures that looked like miniature corpses made of black wax and covered with many pins; and a deck of Mexican tarot cards. The park workers reported the discovery to the Brownsville police, and the police called Antonio Zavaleta.

By now, almost everyone in South Texas knows that Zavaleta is the person to call about anything having to do with brujería and the local curanderas. Zavaleta photographed and documented all the items in the bag. Whoever its owner may have been, this was "very secret stuff," Zavaleta told me. "A practitioner would not have kept these sorts of things in her shop. She wouldn’t have it out for people to see. The pins are there, of course, to inflict pain. The aloe-vera plant wrapped with the ribbon would represent the person asking for the trabajo." Although Zavaleta emphasized that, despite the "amazing coincidence," there was no evidence linking the bag to María Mercedes Martínez, the tarot cards made him wonder, since she was one of the few curanderas who used them.

After less than a week in Brownsville, I learned to walk in and out of offices without bothering to make appointments; the telephone and standard office procedures clearly meant little on the border. Sheriff Perez could often be found at the Toddle Inn. District Attorney Saenz was either at his office or in one of the many courtrooms of Brownsville’s modern limestone courthouse; local jurisprudence appeared to depend almost exclusively on his administrative abilities.

One afternoon, I drove to the Cisneros home, a brick ranch house. The neighborhood was quiet, middle-class, and respectable, but not quite as affluent as Rancho Viejo. Across the street, some children were playing basketball in a driveway. I walked up the sidewalk and rang the bell. I was surprised to hear laughter inside, as if a family gathering were going on. Dora Cisneros came to the door, smiling. She was shorter than I had expected and rather frail. She had dark hair cut so that thick bangs framed her face. When I told her I was a reporter, she said, "Call my lawyer," and shut the door. There was no particular hostility in her tone; she sounded polite.

There aren’t many people in Brownsville who are willing to discuss the possibility that Dora Cisneros might be innocent–even though she might be.

Canales has declined to comment, but the Cisneros family lawyer and co-counsel, A. C. Nelson, told the Dallas Morning News, "This whole thing is illogical. This is a very traditional woman who built her life around her husband, her kids and her family. This has devastated her. I’ve known Dora Cisneros for more than twenty years, and she would never even dream of doing the things they say she did. . . . There was no animosity toward Joey. It was traumatic for the entire family when Joey died. They grieved for him. Nothing about these charges makes sense." Nelson told the Houston Chronicle, "I can’t help but think it was a case of mistaken identity." He said that Dora Cisneros and Martínez knew each other only because Dora was in the habit of giving used clothes to Martínez. "My client has known this woman for fifteen years. As far as I know, she never read any cards for my client. What the woman had was a business where she sold old and used clothes." Since he gave these interviews, Nelson has stopped talking to the press.

"I think public opinion in Brownsville has crucified her already," a local priest told me. Dora Cisneros has been seen eating with her family at Luby’s cafeteria in the Sunrise Mall. When they appeared, no one greeted them. One woman told me, "There was a conscious effort made not to look in their direction."

Cristina left St. Joe in the late spring. Apparently, she entered another school under an assumed name. "But everyone knew exactly who she was," one student told me. She appears to have become a pariah in Brownsville. It seems clear that both Joey and Cristina are victims.

After I left the Cisneros house, I drove down to Eleventh Street, where the curandera had her store. The scale of Brownsville is such that it is possible to drive from one point to almost any other in ten minutes or so; Cristina’s house is ten minutes from Joey’s house, north of the city; the Mexican part of town, close to the border, is ten minutes farther south of Joey’s house, but it is a part of town where the cultures haven’t melded. On Eleventh Street, the curandera’s tiny shop was now chained shut, but next door was the Yerbería Indio Azteca, a storefront filled with the candles, oils, and herbs used by the curanderas. I bought two candles–Pancho Villa votives, which the text written on the glass promised would bring me "strength and luck."

The shop was dusty, and was filled with memorabilia such as a portrait of Robert Kennedy that was at least twenty-five years old, and pictures of many Mexican children–the grandchildren of the woman at the register. At first, she appeared not to understand my Spanish, but after a while she grew more comfortable with me. When I asked her about the curandera, she hugged herself dramatically and said, "It gives me the chills when I read about it." She told me that the curandera "is deeply religious," always asking about the children whose pictures are all over the shop. Then she said, "I don’t really know her." Later, I was told that the curandera had for years bought her supplies from the Yerbería Indio Azteca.

In South Texas, I was haunted by a remark my Aunt Anita once made: "Being an American brought up in Mexico gives one an obsession to try to reconcile two ways of life, two almost opposed points of view, two sets of emotions and interests. . . . It seems to me that if enough Americans know the story, the conflict would resolve on a plane of human friendliness and decency." I wondered how Anita, long dead, would have interpreted Joey’s murder. Although the border towns have several generations of Mexican-Americans that seem assimilated–particularly the children–the contradiction of the society is that vestiges of the traditional shibboleths and the prejudices of both cultures remain. A private-school girl like Cristina may have seemed so assimilated that Joey, a normal American teen-age boy, had no reason to suspect that her family’s values may have differed in any way from his. If Joey had "known the story," as my Aunt Anita put it, would he be alive today?

In brochures distributed to families of murdered children, it is stated that the actual life of the dead child can be lost in the complexities of the legal process. The implication is that a son or a daughter who has been murdered becomes a noun, "the victim," a phantom who begins to exist only as a name in the pages of an indictment or in the memory of family and friends, in black-and-white photographs in high-school yearbooks, in hasty letters written home. New occupations have arisen to protect the rights of murdered children. So many are killed each year that there are now "victimologists," "victim advocates," and "victim support groups" who will appear to "court-watch"; that is, to pack a courtroom, to remind a jury that the victim was once a person, surrounded by friends and family who could not imagine that they would ever have to get through their life without him.

The families of these children do not grieve in the predictable stages outlined by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in "On Death and Dying." A homicide leaves too many unanswered questions. Parents will torture themselves: What should we have seen that we didn’t see? For months after Joey was killed, Buddy asked himself, "If I had known that Dora Cisneros was such a possessive mother, would I have stopped Joey from seeing Cristina?" Anne Seymour, a spokeswoman of the National Victim Center, in Arlington, told me, "I don’t use Kübler-Ross’s word ‘acceptance’ when I counsel families of murdered children. There is never ‘acceptance’ when a child is killed." Seymour, whose organization tries to change laws and attitudes about all victims, campaigns against "the societal bias against murder victims." In many violent deaths, people blame the victim. "Friends will think, and may even say out loud, ‘Didn’t you know something like this would happen? Why didn’t you see this?’ The intensity of the sorrow and the frustration over the child’s death is so acute that parents do not get over this kind of grief."

On my last night in Brownsville, Connie, Buddy, and I debated going to see "Like Water for Chocolate," a Mexican movie about thwarted love and magic spells that takes place during the Mexican Revolution. I was curious about it because of our family history. Buddy, understandably, was not interested in our family history.

Instead, he wanted to show me a video that Corinne had just been given by a relative, who had discovered footage of Joey at around eight years old playing with his grandfather and then, last spring, reading the Scriptures at his aunt’s wedding. Connie and I sat on the sofa as Buddy calmly inserted the video in the VCR. Suddenly, Joey appeared, smiling and sitting on his grandfather’s lap. His grandfather obviously had a way with children; Joey could hardly stop laughing. "What did the oil say to the vinegar?" Louis Lapeyre asked his grandson. "Close the door, I am dressing!" Then Joey yelled into the camera. Kathy and Eric and Joey sang a song with their grandfather: "If you get to Heaven before I do, just bore a hole and pull me through!" They let out the famous Texas rebel yell–"Yay-hah!" Buddy was stoic watching his child, but Connie cried. The video became scratchy for a moment and filled with static. Buddy got up to fix it. "I want to see Joey at the wedding taken last spring."

He played with the tracking on the VCR, and suddenly Joey, a handsome teen-ager, was standing at a podium. The sunlight streamed through the stained-glass windows in the church and made it difficult for me to see Joey clearly. His voice was commanding: "I want to show you the way. . . . Without love it would do me no good. Love is always patient and kind. It is never jealous. Love is never boastful or conceited. It is never rude or selfish." Buddy tried to bring the picture into better focus, but Joey faded in and out.