Texas Executed Carlos DeLuna for Murder in 1989. A New Documentary Says He Was Innocent.
All try to get at the truth in their own fashions.
In telling the story of Carlos DeLuna, a young Corpus Christi man executed in 1989 for murder, that means ultimately trying to figure out:
Did DeLuna really stab Wanda Lopez to death in 1983?
Another way of putting it: Did Texas really execute an innocent man?
DeLuna’s story has been told numerous times, by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times back in 1983, by the Chicago Tribune in 2006, by a team from the Columbia University Law School in 2012 and again in 2014.
The latest telling is The Phantom, a brooding documentary by British filmmaker Patrick Forbes that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June and opens in theaters July 2.
The film takes viewers to places that readers of a newspaper story or a law-school journal might only imagine.
For example, The Phantom opens with the literal sounds of murder.
It’s the actual tape of Lopez, 24, a clerk at a Sigmor Shamrock station, calling the Corpus police on the night of February 4, 1983, and, as you watch a reenactment onscreen, you hear her go from quiet fear—“I have suspect with a knife,” she says calmly—to frantic terror a few seconds later as she begs, “You want it? I’ll give it to you!” Finally, you hear her screams as the killer stabs her in the chest.
Forbes first learned of the infamous DeLuna case in 2012, when he was in Austin because his documentary Wikileaks: Secrets and Lies was showing at South by Southwest.
“I thought, ‘This is an incredible story—a guy who says he’s innocent and is executed anyway.
It’s all about the truth—and your notion of the truth.’ I thought, ‘I’m in.’”
Forbes was lucky to ever hear DeLuna’s story in the first place. Back in 1983, the murder of Lopez seemed to be an open-and-shut case.
An eyewitness at the Sigmor named Kevan Baker locked eyes with the killer and gave the police a description: a Hispanic man wearing a gray sweatshirt or flannel shirt.
Police fanned out, using Baker’s words, but also those from a couple who had seen a Hispanic man in a white shirt running nearby.
About 45 minutes later they found Carlos DeLuna, age twenty, hiding under a truck. DeLuna was a troubled young man—a seventh-grade dropout who had an IQ of 72.
He had more than twenty crimes on his record, mostly minor offenses like public drunkenness, though he had once pled no-contest to attempted aggravated rape and driving a stolen vehicle and spent a couple of years in prison.
The police put him in a cruiser, brought him back to the crime scene, shone a light in his face, and asked Baker if this was the guy.
Baker wasn’t positive—he was nervous and remembered a mustache on the killer—but he said yes.
The crime scene was a bloody mess, and though DeLuna had no blood on him, he was arrested.
Police found a lock-blade knife, but they weren’t able to lift any prints from it. DeLuna was given a couple of public defenders and offered a deal—plead guilty and get a life sentence.
He refused, saying he wouldn’t confess to something he didn’t do.
DeLuna said he knew who had killed Lopez, but he wouldn’t tell anyone because he was scared the man would somehow exact revenge.
By the time DeLuna finally told his lawyers the man’s name—Carlos Hernandez—it was too close to trial to do much of an investigation.
When DeLuna claimed on the stand that he had been with Hernandez that night at the gas station but his friend was the actual killer, one of the prosecutors mocked him by calling Hernandez a “phantom.”
DeLuna was found guilty, sent to death row and, six years later, executed by lethal injection. He proclaimed his innocence to the very end.
In 2003, Columbia Law School professor James Liebman came upon DeLuna’s name while studying Texas death sentences founded on eyewitness testimony.
Wanting to know more about the case, he sent an investigator to Corpus, who quickly found a couple of interesting—and disturbing—things.
First, Carlos Hernandez (who had died in prison in 1999) was no phantom; he had a long criminal record. Second, back in 1983, DeLuna and Hernandez had remarkably similar faces and bodies.
Liebman and his students investigated further and found that Hernandez had a reputation for being a mean-spirited, violent man with an affinity for cutting women with a lock-blade knife.
He had once been arrested for killing a young mother and carving an X on her back (the case was later thrown out).
The team even found a woman who said Hernandez had confessed the Lopez murder to her.
To Liebman, it was clear that Hernandez was the killer but police had been so focused on DeLuna that they had never properly investigated.
For example, once the cops arrested DeLuna, they had shut down the crime scene; they didn’t even collect any blood from the floor and they never analyzed.
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