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She Said She Didn't Kill Her Child - Texas Almost Executed Her · Scary Paranormal Stories

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  Speaker 1: There is a version of this story where a mother
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: is guilty. There is another version where the state of
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: Texas came within hours of executing an innocent woman. Fourteen
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  Speaker 1: years passed between those two possibilities, and during all fourteen
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: of them, Melissa Lucio sat on death row and said
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  Speaker 1: the same thing she said on the night they arrested her.
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  Speaker 1: She did not kill her daughter. The execution was scheduled
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  Speaker 1: for April twenty seventh, two thousand twenty two, two days
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  Speaker 1: before the needle. A judge suspended it, not because Melissa
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  Speaker 1: was declared innocent, because five of the twelve jurors who
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  Speaker 1: convicted her said they would have voted differently if they
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  Speaker 1: had known what the defense teen knows now, and what
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  Speaker 1: they know now changes the shape of everything. There is
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  Speaker 1: something about this case that stayed with me long after
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  Speaker 1: I finished reading through it, the moment I realized the
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  Speaker 1: confession every one pointed to was made at three in
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  Speaker 1: the morning, after five hours, by a woman who had
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  Speaker 1: just watched her two year old daughter be taken away
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  Speaker 1: in an ambulance. She never came back from. Her name
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  Speaker 1: was Mariah Elizabeth Alvarez. She was born on September twenty ninth,
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  Speaker 1: two thousand four, and she was the youngest of twelve children.
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  Speaker 1: She had a congenital deformity in both feet that required
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  Speaker 1: special orthopedic shoes and made walking difficult. She had just
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  Speaker 1: turned two years old. She never turned three. The call
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  Speaker 1: to emergency services came at seven in the evening on
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  Speaker 1: February seventeenth, two thousand seven. It came from the Condado
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  Speaker 1: de Cameron, a stretch of South Texas that runs right
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  Speaker 1: up against the border with Tamalipas, Mexico. The family had
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  Speaker 1: been in the middle of moving boxes, half packed furniture
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  Speaker 1: split between two apartments, a life distributed across two addresses.
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  Speaker 1: On the same day, a child stopped breathing. To understand
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  Speaker 1: what happened to Maria, you have to understand the world
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  Speaker 1: Melissa Lucio had built and what had been built around
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  Speaker 1: her before she was old enough to choose. Melissa was
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  Speaker 1: born on July eighteenth, nineteen sixty eight, in Lubbock, Texas.
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  Speaker 1: Her father died when she was an infant. By the
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  Speaker 1: time she was six years old, she was experiencing abuse
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  Speaker 1: at the hands of her mother's boyfriend. She has spoken
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  Speaker 1: about this in the years since her mother Esperanza Trevino
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  Speaker 1: was present in the home. The abuse continued. At sixteen,
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  Speaker 1: Melissa married a man named Guadalupe Lucio, who was twenty.
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  Speaker 1: He was an alcoholic, He trafficked drugs. He was physically abusive.
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  Speaker 1: His sister introduced Melissa to cocaine. By the time Melissa
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  Speaker 1: was twenty three, Guadalupe had abandoned her with five children.
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  Speaker 1: She kept his last name. Her second partner was Robert
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  Speaker 1: Antonio Alvarez. Relatives described him as violent and abusive. Between
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  Speaker 1: nineteen ninety four and two thousand seven, Melissa's firmly moved
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  Speaker 1: twenty six times, twenty six different addresses in thirteen years.
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  Speaker 1: There were periods when the household had no running water.
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  Speaker 1: Neighbors let them use a garden hose. A local church
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  Speaker 1: did the same. Specialists who reviewed the case later used
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  Speaker 1: a specific phrase to describe the conditions extreme poverty, not
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  Speaker 1: financial hardship, extreme poverty. When Maria was born in two
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  Speaker 1: thousand four, Melissa was thirty five years old and tested
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  Speaker 1: positive for drugs at the hospital. She was working part
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  Speaker 1: time as a home health aid, caring for other people's
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  Speaker 1: family members during hours when she was not caring for
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  Speaker 1: her own twelve children. This is the life that was
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  Speaker 1: already in motion before February fifteenth, two thousand seven. That
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  Speaker 1: was the date, Melissa said, Maria fell down the stairs.
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  Speaker 1: The apartment they were leaving had a second floor unit.
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  Speaker 1: Social services reports had noted the condition of the staircase
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  Speaker 1: deteriorated unstable. Melissa said she was there when it happened.
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  Speaker 1: She said she found Mariah at the bottom of the steps,
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  Speaker 1: a split lip, visible bruise in, but nothing that looked
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  Speaker 1: life threatening. No trip to the hospital. She brought her inside,
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  Speaker 1: cleaned her up, and watched her. In the two days
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  Speaker 1: that followed, Mariah was quiet. She vomited a tamal, then
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  Speaker 1: some cereal. Melissa told her other children not to disturb her.
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  Speaker 1: She put her to bed. On the evening of February seventeenth,
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  Speaker 1: Robert came home from work. He went to the bedroom.
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  Speaker 1: He found Maria not breathing. Robert not Melissa made the
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  Speaker 1: call to emergency services. When paramedics arrived, they found Maria
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  Speaker 1: on her back. Melissa was sitting near her daughter's head.
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  Speaker 1: She was not performing CPR, She was not attempting anything.
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  Speaker 1: When the paramedics cut away Maria's clothing, they found bruising
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  Speaker 1: across a significant portion of her body, the detail that
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  Speaker 1: will matter later. The emergency call was made from the
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  Speaker 1: new apartment. That unit had no second floor staircase. It
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  Speaker 1: had three steps at the entrance. Melissa had said the
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  Speaker 1: fall happened at the old apartment, but no one had
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  Speaker 1: gone back to examine those stairs. The family had been
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  Speaker 1: moving for days, two dresses, two sets of stairs, one
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  Speaker 1: version of events, and no one asked Melissa about it
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  Speaker 1: until ten o'clock that night, when five investigators sat her
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  Speaker 1: down in a room and the recording began. The interrogation
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  Speaker 1: began at ten o'clock at night on February seventeenth, two
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  Speaker 1: thousand seven, five investigators, one woman, more than five hours
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  Speaker 1: in a room in the condo. To Cameron, Melissa denied
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  Speaker 1: striking Maria approximately one hundred times. Her attorneys counted one
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  Speaker 1: hundred times. She said no. Then the camera went off.
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  Speaker 1: No one has fully explained why. When the recording resumed,
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  Speaker 1: something had shifted in the room and in Melissa. She
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  Speaker 1: acknowledged disciplining Maria with, as she put it, some spanks.
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  Speaker 1: She said she did not know what had caused her
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  Speaker 1: daughter's death, and then near three in the morning, she
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  Speaker 1: said she supposed she was responsible out of frustration. Those
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  Speaker 1: words supposed frustration travel from that room in Cameron County
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  Speaker 1: all the way to a death chamber in Huntsville. She
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  Speaker 1: was arrested at three in the morning on February eighteenth.
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  Speaker 1: Biale was set at two million dollars. What the prosecution
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  Speaker 1: built from that night looked air tight. A mother who
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  Speaker 1: could not explain the injuries on her daughter's body, a
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  Speaker 1: mother who did not call for help when the child
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  Speaker 1: stopped breathing. Robert made that call, not her, A room
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  Speaker 1: full of investigators who heard her say she supposed she
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  Speaker 1: was responsible, and a forensic report describing what the pathologist
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  Speaker 1: called the worst case of child abuse in more than
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  Speaker 1: thirty years of practice. Everything pointed in one direction, but
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  Speaker 1: the direction everything pointed depended entirely on what you believed
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  Speaker 1: about a staircase. The emergency call on February seventeenth was
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  Speaker 1: made from the new apartment. That building had three steps
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  Speaker 1: three a dangerous staircase her short landing. No one went
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  Speaker 1: back to examine the old staircase before trial. No second
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  Speaker 1: structural assessment was ever entered into evidence. The geography of
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  Speaker 1: this case had a gap in it large enough to
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  Speaker 1: change everything, and the jury never saw it closed. Maria
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  Speaker 1: also had something else. Her medical records had not flagged,
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  Speaker 1: a rare clotting disorder. Forensic pathologist Tomma John reviewed the
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  Speaker 1: case years later and concluded that her condition would have
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  Speaker 1: caused extensive bruising from impacts that in a healthy child
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  Speaker 1: might leave almost no mark at all. A fall, a stumble,
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  Speaker 1: the act of a two year old with a congenital
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  Speaker 1: foot deformity losing her footing on deteriorated stairs. Any of these,
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  Speaker 1: John argued could have produced the constellation of bruising. The
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  Speaker 1: original autopsy presented as evidence of sustained the broken arm,
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  Speaker 1: a fracture estimated at between two and seven weeks old,
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  Speaker 1: had not been treated medically. The prosecution used this as
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  Speaker 1: proof of neglect of a child whose injuries went unacknowledged,
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  Speaker 1: But a child with an undiagnosed clotting disorder in a
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  Speaker 1: family that had moved twenty six times in thirteen years,
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  Speaker 1: an access to water through a neighbour's garden hose might
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  Speaker 1: sustain an injury that her mother did not recognize as
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  Speaker 1: a fracture. The absence of a doctor's visit is a fact.
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  Speaker 1: What that fact means depends on what else you know.
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  Speaker 1: The jury did not know about the clotting disorder, that
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  Speaker 1: evidence did not exist at the time of trial, and
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  Speaker 1: the confession the moment that sealed it. For most people
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  Speaker 1: in that courtrum carried its own buried question. Clinical psychologist
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  Speaker 1: Jumping Kerman reviewed the full five hours of interrogation footage
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  Speaker 1: and reached a conclusion that reframes everything that came before.
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  Speaker 1: Melissa's psychological profile, kerman found made her specifically susceptible to
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  Speaker 1: assuming blame under sustained pressure. Her history, the abuse, the abandonment,
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  Speaker 1: the years of living inside other people's definitions of her
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  Speaker 1: had shaped a person who, when confronted by five investigators
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  Speaker 1: in the early hours of the morning, would absorb responsibility
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  Speaker 1: as a reflex, not as an admission, not as a confession,
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  Speaker 1: as a conditioned response to authority that had always told
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  Speaker 1: her she was at fault. The words supposed and frustration
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  Speaker 1: were not a description of violence. They were the sound
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  Speaker 1: of a woman collapsing under the weight of being questioned.
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  Speaker 1: Kermann's analysis was not available to the original jury either.
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  Speaker 1: That disparity was never adequately explained in open court. Five
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  Speaker 1: of the twelve original jurors gave statements after the new
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  Speaker 1: evidence surfaced. Five people who sat in that room in
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  Speaker 1: the summer of two thousand eight, who heard everything the
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  Speaker 1: prosecution offered, who looked at Melissa Luscio and voted guilty.
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  Speaker 1: Five of them said the same thing. If they had
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  Speaker 1: known about the clotting disorder, they would have had reasonable doubt.
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  Speaker 1: If they had heard Kerman's analysis of the interrogation, they
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  Speaker 1: would have had reasonable doubt. Reasonable doubt had existed, the
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  Speaker 1: jury simply hadn't been given the tools to find it.
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  Speaker 1: The Fifth Circuit Court overturned the conviction in two thousand nineteen.
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  Speaker 1: Then the prosecution appealed. In two thousand twenty one, the
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  Speaker 1: conviction was reinstated. Melissa's execution was scheduled for April twenty seventh,
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  Speaker 1: two thousand twenty two. The date was on the calendar.
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  Speaker 1: The state of Texas had a warrant. On April twenty fifth,
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  Speaker 1: two days before the scheduled execution, a judicial review was
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  Speaker 1: ordered and the execution was suspended. Fourteen years after her conviction,
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  Speaker 1: Melissa Lucio remained alive inside a Texas prison, her case unresolved.
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  Speaker 1: Her daughter's death still officially attributed to her hands. The
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  Speaker 1: prosecutor who won that conviction, Armando Villa Lopos, was later
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  Speaker 1: sentenced to thirteen years in federal prison for running a
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  Speaker 1: bribery and extortion scheme inside the Texas judicial system. That scheme,
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  Speaker 1: the record shows, was unrelated to the Lucio case, but
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  Speaker 1: Villelobos built his re election campaign on this conviction. He
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  Speaker 1: won in November of two thousand eight, three months after
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  Speaker 1: Melissa was sentenced to die. The man who sent her
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  Speaker 1: to death row was himself corrupt. Whether that corruption touched
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  Speaker 1: this case is a question the courts have not answered.
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  Speaker 1: Sandra Babcock, founder of the Ornell Center on the Death Penalty,
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  Speaker 1: joined the defense team. Eighty plus Republican and Democratic legislatures
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  Speaker 1: called for clemency. The Mexican ambassador to the United States
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  Speaker 1: formally advocated on Melissa's behalf. Kim Kardashian directed her audience
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  Speaker 1: to a clemency petition. In April of twenty twenty two,
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  Speaker 1: the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles declined to issue
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  Speaker 1: a recommendation. The board declined Mariah's father served four years,
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  Speaker 1: Melissa has served more than fourteen and counting. The staircase
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  Speaker 1: at the old apartment was never formally examined. The clotting
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  Speaker 1: disorder was never placed before the original jury. The interrogation
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  Speaker 1: ran for five hours with the camera off for a
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  Speaker 1: portion that no one has accounted for. There is no
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  Speaker 1: version of this story where everything makes sense. The conviction
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  Speaker 1: was never quietly undone. It was dismantled peace by peace,
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  Speaker 1: by people who looked at the same evidence a Texas
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  Speaker 1: jury saw in two thousand and eight and arrived at
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  Speaker 1: a different conclusion. A judicial review conducted years after the
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  Speaker 1: verdict identified three separate failures in the original prosecution. The
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  Speaker 1: state had used false testimony, the scientific evidence had not
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  Speaker 1: been presented accurately to the jury, and new evidence evidence
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  Speaker 1: that simply did not exist a trial could have changed
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  Speaker 1: the outcome. That last finding carries a weight that cannot
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  Speaker 1: be overstated. Five of the twelve original jurors who convicted
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  Speaker 1: Melissa came forward and said the same thing. They had
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  Speaker 1: not known about the clutting disorder. They had not seen
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  Speaker 1: the psychological analysis of the interrogation. Given that information, they
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  Speaker 1: would have had reasonable doubt. Five jurors. That is not
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  Speaker 1: a fringe position. That is almost half the room that
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  Speaker 1: sent her to death row. Meanwhile, Robert Antonio Alvarez, who
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  Speaker 1: was present in the u apartment, who made the emergency corps,
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  Speaker 1: who shared the household where a two year old died
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  Speaker 1: with a broken arm that had never been treated, was
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  Speaker 1: convicted of negligence. He served four years. He walked out.
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  Speaker 1: Melissa had been on death row for fourteen years by
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  Speaker 1: the time her execution was suspended on the twenty fifth
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  Speaker 1: of April twenty twenty two, two days before the scheduled date.
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  Speaker 1: There is something specific about those two days that stays
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  Speaker 1: difficult to absorb. The machinery had been set in motion,
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  Speaker 1: the date was on a calendar, and then forty eight
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  Speaker 1: hours before it was supposed to happen, it stopped not
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  Speaker 1: because the state concluded she was innocent, not because a
• 15:42
  Speaker 1: court declared a miscarriage of justice, because a review determined
• 15:47
  Speaker 1: there were questions that had not been answered. She remained
• 15:50
  Speaker 1: in prison while those questions waited for a forum. The
• 15:54
  Speaker 1: prosecutor who won the conviction, Armando Villa Lobos, had placed
• 15:59
  Speaker 1: it at the center of his re election campaign in
• 16:03
  Speaker 1: two thousand eight. He one years later, he was sentenced
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  Speaker 1: to thirteen years in federal prison for bribery and extortion,
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  Speaker 1: conduct done unrelated to the Lucio case, but conduct that
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  Speaker 1: speaks to the environment in which that conviction was obtained.
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  Speaker 1: No court has formerly connected his later crimes to what
• 16:24
  Speaker 1: happened at Melissa's trial. The record simply holds both facts
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  Speaker 1: in proximity, and the proximity is uncomfortable. Sandra Babcock, founder
• 16:34
  Speaker 1: of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty, joined Melissa's
• 16:39
  Speaker 1: defense team. Her presence transformed the case from a state
• 16:43
  Speaker 1: appeal into something with international reach. The Mexican ambassador to
• 16:47
  Speaker 1: the United States advocated publicly for clemency. More than eighty legislators,
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  Speaker 1: Democrats and Republicans added their names. Kim Kardashian directed her
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  Speaker 1: audience to a clemency petition in April of two thousand two.
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  Speaker 1: These are not the ordinary instruments of a death row case.
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  Speaker 1: Something about Melissa's story had broken out of the legal
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: system and entered public consciousness in a way that is
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  Speaker 1: rare and difficult to manufacture. The Texas Board of Pardons
• 17:22
  Speaker 1: and Paroles still declined to issue a clemency recommendation. That
• 17:27
  Speaker 1: detail sits beside everything else without resolution. The international advocacy,
• 17:33
  Speaker 1: the bipartisan support, the five jurors, the forensic reinterpretation, the
• 17:39
  Speaker 1: psychological analysis of the confession, and the board declined what
• 17:43
  Speaker 1: that body weighed and against what is not part of
• 17:48
  Speaker 1: the public record. Mariah Elizabeth Alvariz was born on the
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  Speaker 1: twenty ninth of September two thousand four. She died on
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  Speaker 1: the seventeenth of February two thousand seven. She was two
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: years old. She had a congenital deformity in her feet
• 18:06
  Speaker 1: that required special shoes and made walking difficult. She was
• 18:11
  Speaker 1: the youngest of twelve children. She had a name. She
• 18:15
  Speaker 1: existed specifically in a way that a verdict cannot fully contain.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: What the legal proceedings never settled is whether Maria's death
• 18:24
  Speaker 1: was the end of a pattern of harm or the
• 18:26
  Speaker 1: result of a fall on a broken staircase that no
• 18:30
  Speaker 1: investigator ever examined. The staircase in the old apartment, the
• 18:35
  Speaker 1: one Melissa described, the one with the bad steps mentioned
• 18:38
  Speaker 1: in social services reports, was never inspected. That staircase may
• 18:43
  Speaker 1: have answered something it was not asked. I have spent
• 18:47
  Speaker 1: time with this case in a way that a single
• 18:50
  Speaker 1: episode cannot fully account for. What I keep returning to
• 18:55
  Speaker 1: is not the legal argument on either side. It is
• 18:59
  Speaker 1: the five hours in that interrogation room, the camera that
• 19:03
  Speaker 1: went dark, and a woman who had spent her entire
• 19:06
  Speaker 1: life learning that the correct response to authority was compliance
• 19:13
  Speaker 1: life wearing whatever she said in that room, and however
• 19:17
  Speaker 1: a jury heard it, the psychological architecture that produced those
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: words was itself a kind of evidence. It just was
• 19:25
  Speaker 1: not treated as one. As of twenty twenty two, Melissa
• 19:30
  Speaker 1: Luscio remains in a Texas prison. There is no verdict
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  Speaker 1: that satisfies. There is no clean line where justice completed
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  Speaker 1: its work and stopped. The judicial review is ongoing. The
• 19:45
  Speaker 1: Cornell Center on the Death Penalty continues active litigation on
• 19:50
  Speaker 1: her behalf. The question of whether she will face a
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: new trial or whether the charges will ultimately be dismissed
• 19:57
  Speaker 1: had not been resolved at the time this story was reported.
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  Speaker 1: There is not a procedural footnote that is a woman
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  Speaker 1: now in her mid fifties waiting in a cell for
• 20:07
  Speaker 1: a system to decide whether what happened to her was legal.
• 20:11
  Speaker 1: Her son, John was seventeen when Maria died. He spent
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: years in prison himself on unrelated charges, and was released
• 20:20
  Speaker 1: at thirty one, he has spoken publicly about his mother.
• 20:24
  Speaker 1: The younger children were placed with a relative and grew
• 20:27
  Speaker 1: up without her. Twelve children, the family that the state
• 20:31
  Speaker 1: argued she endangered, is now scattered across the years that followed,
• 20:36
  Speaker 1: shaped by an absence the legal system created and has
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: not corrected. The documentary about her case, directed by Sabrina Bandazel,
• 20:47
  Speaker 1: screened at Tribeca, awarded at rain Dance, introduced her story
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: to audiences who had no prior knowledge of the Cameron
• 20:55
  Speaker 1: County court House or what happened inside it in two
• 20:58
  Speaker 1: thousand eight. Whether that visibility translates into legal relief is
• 21:04
  Speaker 1: a different question. Courts do not respond to film festivals,
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: but visibility changes the political cost of inaction, and that
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: cost is not nothing. Mariah had shoes made for feet
• 21:17
  Speaker 1: that did not work the way other children's feet did.
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: She needed them to walk. She was two years old
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: and she needed special shoes to walk. And she is
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: the reason all of this exists. The trial, the appeals,
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: the death warrant, the suspension, the fourteen years, the five
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  Speaker 1: jurors who changed their minds too late to matter, whatever
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: happened in that apartment, whatever the full truth is, She
• 21:47
  Speaker 1: was two years old. That is the fact that does
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  Speaker 1: not move. This show is made by ober Media