ALYSSA MARIE VASQUEZ - 7 yo (1999) - San Antonio TX

Maybe the little girl had wet her pants and was hiding, a babysitter thought.

The sitter's mind raced as she searched for the 7-year-old after
finding her tiny green shorts on the floor of a West Side apartment. She
checked the girl's usual hiding spots — inside closets, behind trash
bins in the parking lot.

Half an hour after Alyssa Maria Vasquez was reported missing, police
found her body in tall grass behind a meat market next door. Naked from
the waist down, her legs were splayed and her face was swollen,
scratched and bruised. She'd been raped and strangled.

On Wednesday, 12 years later, Guadalupe Esparza is set to be executed
for the crimes, pending a clemency petition before the Texas Board of
Pardons and Paroles.

At the time of Alyssa's slaying, he was 34, a sex offender romantically interested in Alyssa's mother.

Robin Wellbrock, the babysitter, knew she'd left the TV on and had
closed the door of the apartment in the 2400 block of Pinn Road when she
left Alyssa and her two older brothers home alone.

Returning from a neighbor's house less than an hour later, Wellbrock
saw the door was open. The green shorts were on the floor. The TV
was off.

As she searched for the outgoing, gap-toothed girl, Wellbrock heard
the lid of a trash bin close and thought she recognized a man walking
down the street. She called out "Lupe," Esparza's nickname, according to
trial testimony.

"I don't know why," said Wellbrock, who died of a heart attack in 2004, "but I just did, because I thought it was him."

No strings attached

In April 1999, Esparza and Alyssa's mother, Diana Berlanga, were at the same bar and began to talk.

"I met the devil," Berlanga said, but at the time she thought they could get along.

Esparza, who worked as a bricklayer and in a pizza restaurant,
already was in a relationship but thought Berlanga was nice and played
pool with her.

"She asked me if I was married, and I said no," Esparza said in an
interview at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Polunsky Unit.
"It was nothing serious. There were no strings attached."

Berlanga took Esparza's calls for a few weeks, until a woman who had
known Esparza as a teenager asked her sister, a friend of Berlanga's, to
pass along a warning: "Stay away from him."

The woman, Connie Perez, later testified that when she was 12 or 13
and Esparza a year or two older, he had tried to rape her on her way
home from a friend's house. They struggled, and Esparza put his hands on
her neck before she escaped, she said.

"I told her, 'You need to tell Diana to stay away from him,'." Perez said in court. "And so she did."

Berlanga heeded her warning and declined Esparza's persistent calls
from then on. The night Alyssa was killed, she told Wellbrock, who
Berlanga had recently taken in, to tell Esparza she wasn't there.

About 11 p.m., a friend Melinda Arce picked Berlanga up for a night
out. "I love you, mommy," Alyssa said as she left. It would be the last
time Berlanga heard her voice.

"I didn't want to go," Berlanga said. "I just didn't feel right."

Esparza showed up at the apartment moments after she left.

He'd been fighting with his girlfriend and had brought three 32-ounce
cans of Budweiser to share with the two women, he said. He kept one
beer and gave the others to Wellbrock, who put them in the freezer and
told Esparza to leave.

"Diana wasn't there, and Robin told me she didn't want me there,"
Esparza recalled. "So I went to a bar like a mile away,
Barton's Boozery."

Esparza said he arrived at the bar about 12:15 a.m., got into a fight
and cut his hand on a bottle. He left at 2 a.m., he said, for a
15-minute walk home. He threw away his clothes, bloodied from the cut,
and crawled in bed with his girlfriend, Diana Rodriguez, around 2:30
a.m., he said. About then, Wellbrock was finding Alyssa's shorts.


Wellbrock was
"hysterical, crying, obviously distraught, and just wanted our help,"
said Police Officer Carlos Ortiz, who responded to her 911 call. By the
time Berlanga got home around 3 a.m., police had found her
youngest child.

Berlanga punched the sides of police cruisers and screamed in anger.

Esparza still maintains he is innocent.

"I wasn't there when she died, ma'am," Esparza said. "I have a
daughter. I always wanted to be a father. I'm not capable of doing
anything like this."

DNA results said otherwise: sperm swabbed from Alyssa's mouth matched
his, and material found under Esparza's fingernails matched hers, a
Bexar County Forensic Science Center report states. A post-conviction
DNA test completed Thursday confirmed the 1999 results.

Esparza was questioned hours after officers found Alyssa's 53-pound
body, wearing only a sleeveless flower-print top. A search warrant was
executed to draw his blood. Released, he was arrested and charged with
capital murder several days later.

Against the advice of his defense attorneys, William Berchelmann and Terry McDonald, he testified at his own trial.

Two childhoods

Esparza was a middle child with one brother and six sisters. His
father drove 18-wheelers and his mother, now 74, has been hospitalized
frequently for depression.

Before his dad died of lung cancer when Esparza was 11, the family
caravanned to Michigan and Ohio seasonally to pick tomatoes. His mother
remarried. Esparza said his stepfather beat him.

"I was drinking beer by age 12, running around," he said. "Mom — she let me do whatever I want."

At 14, Esparza tried to kill himself, twice, by taking his mother's
pills. That December, he and another kid threw a Molotov cocktail at a
house and were charged with attempted arson. The next year, he and a
male acquaintance tried to steal a boy's mini-bike at knife point.Esparza
had a knife, the victim said, but let him go after slashing the tires.

At Holmes High School, he went through ninth grade three times before
getting expelled. A charge at age 16 for criminal mischief was dropped.
Another charge at age 19 stuck: He used a gun to commit rape.

Esparza pleaded guilty and got 12 years in prison, but served less
than half the sentence, getting parole in 1990. He now says the victim
was a prostitute with whom he'd had sex before without paying, but this
time she'd demanded $50.

"The only thing I'm guilty of is not paying for sex," he said.

The victim, then 25, said she played along until she could flee to a
gas station with the gun Esparza had hit her with, telling the clerk to
call the cops.

"I have never forgot it," she said. "I wanted him to go to jail for
what he did to me. He got out of that, and he (killed) a child."

Two years after his release, Esparza was caught possessing cocaine and sentenced to eight years.

"Since he turned 18, except a couple of years, he's been in jail,"
said Esparza's older sister, Esther Moncada, 51, who helped raise him.
"As a kid, he was very hyper; he couldn't stay in one place. Persons
like that, they can't stay out of trouble."

Alyssa was smart and friendly, excelled in math and reading and
played hide-and-seek with her brothers, Joel and Aaron, who were asleep
when she was snatched from the apartment.

She loved Barney, the Teletubbies and the Rugrats, and danced to
Selena's "Bidi Bidi Bom Bom" and the '90s rap song "Tootsie Roll." The
songs still remind Berlanga of her pigtailed daughter.

"She would be 20 now, probably in college," Berlanga said, gazing at a
living room altar filled with Alyssa's pictures and memorabilia. "I
always wonder what she would be like."

A dozen years

Esparza's sister said she doubts he's mentally retarded. It's a claim
made by Esparza's attorney Michael Gross in state and federal appeals.
And she isn't sure her brother is innocent.


"I can't say I know
that he didn't do it," Moncada said. "Maybe he was on some kind of
drugs. He's my brother, but I can't say, because of what happened to
that little girl. I told him if he did it, then he has to pay for it."

The trial lasted about two weeks and still haunts participants.

"I can still see the picture of that little girl in the field," said
Catherine Babbitt, chief of the Bexar County district attorney's family
justice division, who helped prosecute the case. "Murder is horrible
anytime. Not only did we have a murder of a child, but a murder and a
rape of a child. It was particularly horrific."

Babbitt and prosecutor Robert McClure, argued that Esparza, a member
of the Mexican Mafia prison gang since 2001, confessed to two inmates in
Bexar County Jail while awaiting trial. Both men testified in Esparza's
trial and were given plea deals for their cooperation.

Esparza denies ever being in the Mexican Mafia but said he knew
people, including at least one cellmate, who were. He denied a rumor
that Alyssa's father was a member of the same gang. He also denies ever
making any jailhouse confessions, saying he wasn't friends with the men
who testified.

His only mistake, he said, was cheating on Diana Rodriguez.

Fingering a silver cross on his neck, a gift from a friend, Esparza
said he's not afraid to die but regrets he never was around for a
daughter, now 15. He hasn't invited his family to watch.

"Would you want to see your brother tied up?" he asked, tears rolling
down his face. "I pray and hope, but I know it's an ugly charge. I
leave it up to God. ..... My sympathy goes out to (Berlanga). Somebody
killed her daughter."

Now a grandmother, Berlanga still visits Alyssa's grave on holidays
and special occasions. For several years, she lit candles at the scene
where Alyssa's body was found, but the meat market management eventually
discouraged it.

Berlanga had signs and a banner printed with the words "Justice has
been served! Rest in peace Alyssa," to take with her to Esparza's
execution. She's nervous about it, has had headaches and can't stop
biting her fingernails. Relatives and friends will join her on a
chartered bus to Huntsville, she said.

"He never gave my daughter a right to live," Berlanga said. "So why should he have any rights? I lost my child."

Berlanga said she is staying strong and thinking positively, hoping Esparza doesn't get a last-minute stay of execution.

"Alyssa was always afraid of monsters, and I'm pretty sure she was
afraid when she passed," she added. "He needs to repent for what
he did."





Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/article/Horror-story-nears-a-grim-conclusion-2266618.php#ixzz1dsv1EbyP

HUNTSVILLE —
Convicted child killer Guadalupe Esparza offered his condolences to the
family of Alyssa Vazquez, the 7-year-old San Antonio girl he raped and
murdered more than a decade ago, before he was put to death Wednesday
night.

“To the family of Alyssa Vasquez, I hope you will find peace in your
heart,” he said. “My sympathy goes out to you. I hope you find it in
your heart to forgive me. I don’t know why all of this happened.”

Before Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials injected the
lethal dose, Vasquez’s mother, Diane Berlanga, let her feelings be known
about what was about to happen.

“He is going to get what he deserved,” she said.

At 6:21 p.m. on Wednesday, 11 minutes after the lethal dose began,
Esparza was pronounced dead, becoming the 13th and last scheduled inmate
to be executed in Texas this year. Appeals were exhausted and no late
legal maneuvers were made leading up to the execution.

Esparza, 46, was a convicted sex offender when he kidnapped Vasquez
from her apartment and sexually assaulted the young girl on June 6,
1999. The former cook and bricklayer then strangled the girl to death
and left her body in a nearby field.

According to a baby sitter who discovered Vasquez was missing, Esparza
telephoned and came by the apartment looking for the girl’s mother on
the night of the murder.

Law enforcement located Esparza at his residence, close to two miles
away from Vasquez’s apartment, around 4 a.m. and found the suspect’s
bloody shirt and boxer shorts in a trash can outside of his house. Semen
found on the girl’s body was linked to Esparza through DNA testing and
he was charged with capital murder.

“He tried to blame it on somebody else,” Terry McDonald, one of his
trial lawyers, said. “He was not a very repentant individual ... just a
constant denial that it wasn’t him, the facts to the contrary.”

From death row, Esparza continued to insist he was innocent leading up
to his execution. Wednesday, even though he asked the family for
forgiveness, he did not confess his innocence or his guilty.

“I don’t know why all of this happened,” Esparza said after saying good-bye to his family. “I don’t know why.”

A judge who authorized a review of DNA in the case was told last week
the findings were consistent with the evidence during Esparza’s 2001
trial, where his attorneys had challenged the validity of the results.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to review claims he
was mentally impaired and ineligible for execution. Last month, the
Texas Court of Criminal Appeals rejected an attempt to renew that claim
and others questioning whether he had effective legal help at his trial.

Esparza had a long criminal history before he was convicted of
Vasquez’s murder. He was arrested as a teenager for attempted arson and
received juvenile probation, was arrested again for trying to steal a
bicycle from a child at knife point, had school suspensions and was
remembered as a school bully. A woman testified he tried to rape and
strangle her when she was 13.

In 1984, he was convicted of assault for beating a man with a metal pipe and baseball bat.

Esparza was convicted of aggravated sexual assault in 1985, although he
contended the sex was consensual. He was sentenced to 12 years in
prison, was paroled in 1990, and was locked up again in 1993 with an
eight-year sentence after pleading guilty to cocaine possession. He was
released on mandatory supervision three years later.
http://itemonline.com/local/x1265048545/Convicted-murderer-asks-forgiveness-before-execution