Father Quiróz didn’t know the taxi driver’s name, nor did he recall ever having seen the man before. Maybe the taxi driver hadn’t given his name, or the priest, startled and himself frightened by the visit, hadn’t registered it. The taxi driver was light-skinned, with a mustache, a bit overweight, said the priest, and he apologized, because that was all he could remember. But he had the slip of paper on which the taxi driver had written the number of the license plate, and he handed it to Melgar, who unfolded it and read the hurried scrawl: P-3201. The priest told Mynor Melgar that when he walked the taxi driver to the door, he saw a white taxi waiting outside, with at least one other man inside it.
Melgar passed the piece of paper to Ronalth Ochaeta, who gave the number to the interior minister the next day, asking that it be checked out.
“Why does a person passing in a taxi memorize a license-plate number?” Fernando Penados asked, rhetorically, one day in early September, after I’d been in Guatemala for two weeks. “First, the hour. And second, because this person is no tame dove. The taxi driver notices these things because he has his past.” Fernando said that the taxi driver told the priest that he had once been arrested on a drug charge. Someone with that kind of experience tends to notice the same things that a good policeman does. If that sort of person sees a group of men and another man wearing no shirt standing by a car—indeed, the kind of car undercover policemen frequently use—on a dark street late at night, that person will memorize a license-plate number.
Four months after first learning of license-plate number P-3201, ODHA was still hunting for the taxi driver, hoping that he was not already dead. The taxi driver was the mystery witness Andy Kaufman’s friend had mentioned.
OTTO ARDÓN was appointed special prosecutor in the case. ODHA was granted co-plaintiff status, as legal representatives of Bishop Gerardi’s family and the Church. Thus ODHA was, theoretically, a partner of the prosecution. But what ODHA soon discovered about Ardón’s past did not inspire confidence. Until recently he had been a lawyer for the Guatemalan Air Force, and he was related to military officers. In 1996, when he was on a team prosecuting soldiers accused of massacring over 300 civilians, he was removed from the case after relatives of the victims complained that he blatantly favored the defense. (Mynor Melgar had eventually taken over as prosecutor of that case.) Indeed, many people began to suspect that Bishop Gerardi’s murder had occurred on the date it did because those who planned the crime knew that the investigation would fall to Ardón. He had only two assistant prosecutors working under him on the Gerardi case, including Gustavo Soria. By contrast, a case involving corruption and contraband rackets had twenty investigators assigned to it.
Rubén Chanax and El Chino Iván, the two indigents who were taken into custody the night of the murder, had given conflicting descriptions of the shirtless man, which resulted in quite different composite sketches of the “suspect.” Nevertheless, the sketches had been widely published in the Guatemalan press as the face of Bishop Gerardi’s murderer. Chanax’s and El Chino Iván’s perusal of mug shots led to the arrest, three days after the murder, of Carlos Vielman, a young, alcoholic, sometime indigent. At the police lineup in which Vielman was presented to the witnesses, hidden in a row of other young men, Chanax said that the man without a shirt was not among them, but El Chino Iván positively identified Vielman as the man he had sold cigarettes to that night. Vielman was much shorter than the man both witnesses had earlier described, and he had tousled curly hair. One side of his face was grotesquely swollen from a dental infection. He seemed nearly retarded and had been imprisoned in the past, most recently for public drunkenness, though for only about five days. He had been released from jail less than a week earlier, and had celebrated by embarking on a drinking binge that lasted up to the moment of his arrest.
During the initial interrogation of Vielman, Otto Ardón had bellowed at him: “Confess that in the moment in which Monseñor Juan José Gerardi Conedera was entering the parish house … at about ten at night, you attacked him with a piece of concrete with which you gave him several blows until you caused his death!” Vielman, apparently utterly bewildered, responded with the same words throughout the interrogation: “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
It was almost inconceivable that Vielman, who was lame in one arm, could have wielded the heavy chunk of concrete. The church of San Sebastián was far from his usual stomping grounds by the bus terminal. And what reason could he have had for murdering Bishop Gerardi? Robbery didn’t seem a plausible motive. The bishop’s gold ring and his wallet with fifty dollars inside it had been left on his person. The only things that were missing were the keys to the parish house and to the bishop’s car, the chain from around his neck, and his cheap plastic Casio watch.
ODHA checked out Vielman’s alibi, which seemed solid. After sweeping up, as he often did, in La Huehueteca, a little cantina near the bus terminal, he’d been paid with a bottle of cheap cane liquor, which he shared with other indigent friends, and then he had slept there. Nevertheless, Otto Ardón continued to insist that Vielman was the perpetrator. Ardón may simply have been eager to arrest anyone and perhaps hoped that Carlos Vielman would provide an adequate scapegoat. Or perhaps he really was as incompetent as Edgar Gutiérrez said he was. Gutiérrez had been educated in Mexico as an economist and was responsible for much of the REMHI report’s shape and content. His gentle, soft-spoken demeanor belied an intensely cerebral and complex personality. Gutiérrez’s public calls for Ardón’s removal poisoned relations between ODHA and the prosecutors, although it is hard to imagine that a spirit of collaboration could ever have flowered between them.
The lethargic, seemingly diffident Ardón—the prosecutor bore a remarkable resemblance to an unsmiling Alfred E. Neuman, the cartoon character who is the face of Mad magazine—had been bemoaning to everyone his unlucky fate in drawing such a high-profile, implicitly dangerous case. He let it be known that he had nothing to gain from prosecuting it, that it would be bad for his career. Sometimes, in a tone of weary bravado, he said the pressures and complications of the case didn’t allow him to sleep at night.
VERY QUIETLY, HARDLY NOTICED, FBI agents had slipped into the country a few days after the murder and were aiding Ardón and the prosecutors. Rubén Chanax had passed a polygraph test the FBI administered in which the only question he was asked was if he had seen a shirtless man step out of the garage. El Chino Iván refused to take the test.
In late May, Ardón sent pieces of evidence to the FBI laboratories in Washington, D.C., to find out if the blood or hairs found in the blue sweatshirt corresponded to Vielman’s, or if any traces of Vielman’s body fluids or DNA were on the bishop’s clothes. The results of all those tests would be negative. It was to be an ongoing routine in the investigation. Guatemalan prosecutors would send evidence and samples to Washington and then wait with bated breath for the results, which on every occasion disappointed them. One reason was that the prosecutors were often requesting the wrong kind of information. There was a great deal of Bishop Gerardi’s blood in the garage, tracked all over the house, and left in traces on the walls, but there was not much in the way of incriminating evidence waiting to be discovered in it. And a great deal of potentially crucial evidence had been lost. The single, rather small, bloody footprint found by the bishop’s body, the first and seemingly most promising piece of evidence, was never matched, at least not publicly or officially, to the footwear of any named suspect or witness.
President Arzú responded to the crime by appointing a High Commission of notables, including Rodolfo Mendoza, the minister of the interior, to whom Ronalth Ochaeta had passed the license-plate number. The Church declined to participate, arguing that the work of investigating the crime should be left to those who were presumably better qualified: the police and prosecutors. The Church feared being trapped into sanctioning an official whitewash. It did not go unnoticed that military regimes of the past had typically responded to crises by appointing a political commission.
President Arzú, who was notoriously thin-skinned to begin with, was on the defensive. In his first public interview about the case, published in Prensa Libre, the country’s largest newspaper, Arzú pointed out that just days before in New York City a priest who had done