Back in 1953, Southwest Texas was rocked by the brutal murder of a Mexican-American teenager. 15 years later, a Mexican American family was also killed.
Both crimes, linked by geography, have remained unsolved for decades.
The atrocities were committed at the intersection of race and class and entitlement. Meanwhile, the memories of the victims and the identities of the perpetrators have been confined to whispers.
E.R. Bills’ new investigative book, “Devil of Devils: Unspeakable Crimes in Southwest Texas,” details these crimes and attempts a long overdue reckoning.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: How long have these particular stories been on your radar?
E.R. Bills: I’ve spent some time over the last really 10 or 15 years goofing around finding excuses to go down to the Devils River State Natural Area [or Devil’s Sinkhole]. There was a roadside memorial, it’s really on, I guess that’s US 277, heading south, and there was memorial for the Arellanos, and I saw it, and… I don’t think I stopped in… I just saw it.
And then on the way back up to Sonora, I stopped and I looked at it and I thought, I’ve never heard of this. So it got me to looking into it and, you know, obviously you can get on the internet machine and all this stuff popped up and I was like, “this is a crazy story.”
Well, you mentioned a name there. What do we know about the victims from that memorial you saw?
Well, Juan Arellano, his wife, his sister, he had a daughter and two sons. They were headed up to San Angelo to visit his sister who was in the hospital. He was an American citizen, Mexican-American.
They went up to visit her and along the way, I guess in the Loma Alta area, hey had a flat tire and they managed to fix it. And then a little farther up, they had another flat tire and several people drove by them and waved or stopped and talked to them, but nobody had what they needed.
And eventually, the proverbial “good Samaritan” comes by — big, white guy in a cowboy hat and stops and offers, at least pretends to offer, to help them and takes them all to Sonora to get the tires fixed. And then when they head back out there, apparently, well, they don’t make it back to their car, and their bodies are found strung along a two-mile stretch of US 277. And so it’s all very shocking.
And then when I started asking questions around Sonora, nobody really wanted to talk about it or said it’s something they didn’t talk about at the time. And I thought… That’s really weird.
I mean, I even went back to the old Sonora Bronco yearbook, people who graduated in 1968 when the Arellanos were murdered. And I was like, well, do you remember this or hearing about this? And nobody, nobody that I talked to and only a few returned my calls and they said they hadn’t heard of it.
And then, you know, one lady I talked to said, well, yeah, I remember it, but we just didn’t talk about it. I’m digging through the newspapers and I see a sheriff from Edwards County — which is a county where the bodies were found, just south of Sonora — and he says, you know, we need to find this guy, he’s crazy, and if we don’t find him, he’s gonna do it again.
So of course I pursued that line of inquiry, couldn’t find where anything like that happened again. I thought, what if they got it the wrong way around? What if this wasn’t the beginning, but what if this was maybe an escalation? What if something had happened before?
So that had me looking backwards and that’s how I stumbled on to the murder of the 17-year-old boy in Sonora, Raul Arevalo. Everything seemed to be going on — if not around, then involving somewhere down the line — a member of one of the local white ranching families. It’s just really horrifying stuff.
And, you know, we see all this… Everybody’s obsessed or was obsessed for a while with “Yellowstone,” for example. You know, for me, that’s a really rosy picture probably of how those things really are, these ranching fiefdoms. Out there in that part of the world, there are four or five families that carried a lot of water and at least one and maybe two were involved in these murders.
70 years after these crimes, is accountability, is justice still possible you think?
You know, I really don’t know about that. And when I was writing, I didn’t think about it.
I think setting the record straight is important. And I think the murders being solved is wildly important. Now the people who perpetrated the murder, you know, Raul Arevalo in 1953, are they even still alive? I doubt it. ’68, maybe, but I doubt it.
Can you get justice? I don’t now. But can you hold, you know sort of the legal system or the folks?… Can you call the folks into account or demand some kind of acknowledgement from the parties involved?
I mean, systemically, you know, local law enforcement, the Texas Rangers, do they have something to answer for? Yeah, I really think they do, personally. I think it’s shameful.
I don’t make a lot of friends in this book because the white ranching families — the “Yellowstone” crowd, the Dutton-esque crowd — I’m very critical of their obvious involvement or their obvious disinterest in seeing these cases solved.
I basically uncovered where the sheriff at the time Raul Arevalo was killed… He was related to the main suspects and the people today that everyone says committed the murder. That’s shocking.
A few years before all this happened, especially in the case of the Arellanos, the Clutters were killed there in Missouri — I think Missouri or Kansas — and Truman Capote writes, “In Cold Blood.” It captivates the nation.
If the Arellanos would have been white, this would have captivated the nation, and it probably would have been solved.
Yeah, let me ask you about that. Is that the point, I mean, to set the record straight or attempt to bring attention to something that people just haven’t talked about as much as you think they should have?
Well, you know, you’re a journalist. I’m a journalist, and I forget who the more famous forebear was who said the role of journalism is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” Doesn’t that say it all? Is there any other reason for it? The Fourth Estate?
So, yeah, I mean, it was one of those stories, kind of like the Slocum Massacre. It needed to be told. The people in the area, especially the people with control, weren’t going to care to tell it and didn’t want to see it told and there’s been too much of that in Texas for too long.
Some of those blank spaces need to be filled in and it will give us a better idea of who we are and I think it’s wildly important because I think one of the strengths of the state is its diversity, and if one group is treated far better than another, hey, that’s not how we see ourselves.
We’re Texans. We’re native Texans, or I’m a native Texan. It’s like we like to think pretty well of ourselves. We’re good folks, we’re fair, we’ll give you a fair shake. Well that’s not what’s happened, and that’s not what’s happening now really.
So this is nothing new and it’s gone on for a while and I think if we all knew more about what went on, maybe we would look at each other differently or see the broader picture differently. So I think it’s important. I think its imperative.