Read Online The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts by Laura Tillman - Free Book Online Page B

comes with uncertainty? The love that Angela and John showed the children was important, but the idea that Mary Jane, John Stephan, and Julissa were happily gliding through the chaos that surrounded them was suspect. John blamed his problems on his dysfunctional childhood, then insisted that his own kids were perfectly happy even when they were sometimes homeless, and their father was doing drugs, working as a prostitute, and suffering from mental-health issues that likely extended to schizophrenia.
    There was no evidence that John or Angela abused the children before the crimes, but scenes such as one in neighbor Nydia Hernandez’s statement to police about an incident two weeks prior to the murders added to a concerning portrait:
    â€œI saw the male subject and the female subject together and they had one of the children in the stroller. The male subject allowed the stroller (with the child in it) to go and it rolled down the sidewalk and it slammed into my truck. The child who was in the stroller started to cry. Neither one of the subjects did anything. All that the male subject did was pull the stroller back.”
    I found a few images of the children online and in the court record. A Polaroid shows John Stephan sitting on the floor in diapers, with aviator sunglasses and an oversize cross around his neck, a sly smile on his face like a baby Hells Angel. In a photo of John Stephan and another little boy, John Stephan is wearing a blue-and-yellow-striped polo shirt, a tiny pair of jeans, and sneakers, and he gazes up at the camera with a tuft of dark hair swept across his forehead. In the several photos of Julissa at various ages of toddlerhood, she has curly jet-black hair, sometimes pulled into pigtails. In one, she is smiling fiercely, all her teeth bared. In another, she is snuggled with John and John Stephan on a bed, with a soft, close-lipped grin. In the only image of Mary Jane, a healthy and happy-looking John is holding her up for the camera, bursting with paternal pride. She’s tiny and wears a red-and-blue onesie and looks up and to the left, her soft, toothless mouth open and her tongue sitting near her lips.
    One day, when I was trying to find neighbors willing to be interviewed, a young woman with bright-pink lipstick wearing a pink silk blouse and daisy dukes approached me. She looked as if she’d stepped out of a photo shoot. Her car was idling by the curb while she glanced anxiously at the house I was approaching. She was waiting for her boyfriend, she said, and he was at his grandmother’s house. She wanted to know if I would knock on the door because his grandmother intimidated her. Dogs were in the yard and I paused. Maybe we could call him? She asked if she could borrow my phone. A couple minutes later Miguel Angel Ramos, tall and lanky, walked out of his grandmother’s house and onto the curb.
    â€œShe’s writing about that family in that building,” the girlfriend told him. Then to me: “He knew them, he used to tell me about it. He used to play with the kids.”
    Miguel Angel’s eyes grazed the building, as if he could see thefamily walking around the corner. “I used to play with them on the basketball court when they were little. The mom and dad were always at the crack houses.”
    Miguel Angel told me that John and Angela would often leave Julissa and John Stephan at the Boys and Girls Club, catty-corner to the apartment building. The children, just toddlers, would play for a while with the other neighborhood kids, their unchanged diapers weighed down, and then, as if an inaudible whistle had blown, they’d return home.
    Miguel Angel was young when the murders happened—around eleven years old. It’s easy to imagine him wading deeper and deeper into the mythology of the murders like a character in The Goonies . Across the street, there was a family with fourteen children. Miguel Angel said he and his friends called them Los Hernandez,