Whisper
#byefelicia
Composite drawing in 1990 of younger of two suspects wanted in bowling alley shootings.
Composite drawing in 1990 of the older of two suspects in the Las Cruces Bowl massacre.
Remembering the vistims
Site of Las Cruces Bowl, 1201 E. Amador Ave., on Saturday morning, Feb. 10, 1990, where seven people, including four children, were shot multiple times at close range. Four died and the case remains unsolved.
Paula Holguin, 6, and Valerie Teran2http://www.elpasotimes.com/newmexico/ci_14354909LAS CRUCES -- An unlocked door. A morning robbery. Two suspects, one young, one old. An execution-style shooting. A young father and three girls, killed. The fire. A 12-year-old, shot in the head, called 911.
Many Las Crucens knows what happened that morning 20 years ago at the bowling alley.
And somewhere, someone knows why.
It was 40 minutes before Las Cruces Bowl was to open for the day. Manager Stephanie Senac, 34, was working in the office of what's now Ten Pin Alley with her daughter, Melissia Repass, 12. Ida Holguin, 30, a cook, thought the two men who came through the unlocked door were there to clean up that Saturday morning, Feb. 10, 1990. One of them produced a .22-caliber pistol and took her into the office, where Senac, Repass and 13-year-old Amy Houser were being held by the other gunman.
They were told to put their heads down.
As the first of what would be 25 shots began to be fired, Steve Teran, 26, a New Mexico State University student, walked into the attack with his daughters. He couldn't find a baby-sitter that day, so he'd taken 6-year-old Paula Holguin (no relation to Ida) and 2-year-old Valerie Teran with him
All seven were shot multiple times at close range. The robbers took between $4,000 and $5,000 from the bowling alley safe, leaving some money behind and setting a fire in the office. It seemed to Holguin, who had been shot three times, once in the head, that the shooters were unnerved
by the number of people who were there that day and that they frantically searched the cabinets for something they couldn't find.
Incredibly, Senac, Repass and Ida Holguin survived being shot in the head. Repass, who had just the week before learned the procedure for calling 911 at Lynn Middle School, called the police and stayed on the line for four minutes. Roadblocks were set up around the perimeter of Las Cruces, as police looked for a younger man -- described as Hispanic, 29 or 30 years old, 5-feet 10-inches tall, weighing 170 pounds, with dark wavy hair and light-colored eyes and no accent when he spoke -- and an older man -- described as 45 or 50 years old, 5-feet 7-inches tall, weighing about 140 pounds, with thinning salt and pepper hair, a dark complexion and a slight Spanish accent when he spoke.
It shook up everybody
Tasked with videotaping the crime scene with partner Joe Bob Sellers was Chuck Franco, a Las Cruces police detective with a young family in 1990, now Do-a Ana County undersheriff.
"What made it bad was the children," Franco said. "The impact of that, as you walked into that crime scene, was horrific. There's something about the innocence of children who haven't even had a chance to enjoy life, and you see them on the floor like that. It tears you apart for a long time."
While 6-year-old Paula survived just long enough to be taken to the hospital, capturing the image of 2-year-old Valerie was the hardest part, Franco said.
He had a 2-year-old child at the time. Teran was still, curled up on the floor, he said, exactly like his child slept at night.
"It shook up everybody," Franco said. "No one could imagine that anyone could do that -- to children and that many people at the time. That was something that was never thought possible."
The whole city was shell-shocked. At Lynn Middle School, where Melissia Repass and Amy Houser were students, hundreds of children overwhelmed four counselors called into service, remembers Dorris Hamilton, then principal.
"They lined up in the hall and cried and wiped their eyes," she said. "They were busy for a full week ... Everybody came together and helped us with the fact that we lost this kid and nobody knew why -- everyone kept asking, 'Why?
Melissia was released from the hospital after two weeks, she said.
"Melissia was scared to death the rest of the school year," Hamilton said. "I had to hug her a lot. We'd eat lunch together."
Hamilton is still amazed the crime has never been solved.
Tips and clues
In the aftermath of the massacre, more than 100 tips an hour were being called in to police. Police considered three possible motives: Revenge against then-owner Ronald C. Senac, a retired military pilot who was in Arizona at the time of the killings; revenge against one of the adult victims, possibly related to debt or out-of-state organized crime; or a simple robbery preceded by the two men casing the bowling alley before the day of the killings, Franco said.
All those were aggressively investigated, police say.
"What led us to think the crime was related to (Senac), his lack of cooperation made it seem like, 'Ah, there's more to it than that,'" Franco said. "The shooters were initially thought to be from Las Cruces, but information later led us to believe they were from out of state and sent here to do a job."
An uneventful civil suit was brought against Ronald Senac in 1995 before District Court Judge Jerald A. Valentine. Houser's mother, Gloria Woods, said during the trial that Senac should have accepted responsibility for the bowling alley's unlocked doors. Instead, she said his lawyers followed her outside one day during a smoking break and offered her $30,000.
"I got so mad," Woods said. "I said, 'Why don't you slap me in the face? Not only no, but hell no. I'd rather have nothing than take that.' And I'm not sorry I said that. It's about what's right, and, 'OK, we accept the responsibility, we left the doors unlocked.' That's how those men got in. That doesn't mean (bowling alley management) wanted my daughter killed, but that's how they looked at it and that upsets me because they were negligent and those men did go in through unlocked doors. And maybe they would have broken and window and still got in, but that would have made it a process where (employees) were alerted some way. And it wasn't that way."
After the trial, Senac left Las Cruces and returned to his family home in Louisiana. His daughter, Stephanie Senac, who survived the attack, died in 1999. By 2000, the calls to police were coming once every two months, or once a year. The $30,000 reward for information leading to the shooters' arrest was never claimed. Senac's granddaughter, Melissia Repass, returned to Louisiana. She has since married and become a mother.
No one left to arrest
It is probable that there is no one left alive to arrest, Franco said, that the killers "overdid it" and were killed, themselves, for committing such a visible crime.
"Chances are, by the time we solve this, it's going to be (with) third-hand (information)," Franco said. "If they talked about it, maybe to family, maybe they talked to friends ... The families of the deceased would be so grateful for anything that might identify the shooters."
As much as no one likes reliving the events of 20 years ago, no one wants to think the worst mass murder in the history of Las Cruces could never be solved.
"It may, on someone's deathbed," Franco said. "That would be a wonderful thing for those families, to have some closure."
LCPD's lead detective on the case since 2002, Mark Myers, maintains that the next phone call could break open what he said is "absolutely" the worst, most ruthless, most heinous crime in the city's history.
"We've had some promising stuff come up since 2002," Myers said. "We still have reason to believe that the (sketched) composites are what they look like and there's still some forensic hopes that, if we do get onto the right people, forensically we'll still be able to link them to the bowling alley."
Myers said it's entirely possible the suspects are local.
"That's why it's important for the public to think back to their associations back when it happened and think if anyone was acting differently or living a little above their means for a while," Myers said. "It's hard to find a single person, much less two people that aren't going to have some kind of change after shooting multiple people, including kids."
Residents might not even realize they have relevant information about the men, he said.
"Generally, you'd see behavior changes consistent with some guilt or remorse, a little more withdrawn, a little more quiet, not wanting to be in public, wanting to get out of town real fast," Myers said.
Do you have information on this case?
Call the Las Cruces Police Department at (575) 528-4222
Call Las Cruces Crime Stoppers at (575) 526-8000 or, from outside the Las Cruces area, (800) 897-2746
New documentary
Since the release of Charlie Minn's documentary "A Nightmare in Las Cruces," premiering Wednesday, was announced, the tips have started to flow again to police and the media. The young suspect had green eyes and was the best friend of a Tortugas man, one lady said. The killers hid out at a house on Poplar, one man said, emerging at night and ducking if someone looked their way, but when the police were called out, all they found was a renter who stole stereos. One film crew member was stopped at the mall by someone who said the older suspect was dead, but that the younger suspect was in jail. Another citizen came into the police station certain she'd be able to identify the two men.
Whether those leads pan out, or the movie prompts someone to speak up, remains to be seen.
"It breaks your heart," Myers said of the movie. "And you're hoping that the right person listens to those people and says, 'You know, enough's enough. I'm going to get this off my chest,' and calls in and hopefully leads to some information that breaks the case ... It's a burden to carry that kind of information around and even more of a burden if you've done something heinous to somebody."
Some people have been unburdened by coming forward with ideas and suspicions that turns out to be innocent, Myers said, but one never knows what that information could lead to.
"When they finally come in, they say, 'I've thought about this since Feb. 10, 1990, but I thought it was silly or didn't want to cause any trouble,'" Myers said. "That's who we want to hear from. That's exactly who we want to hear from."
Minn, a former KRQE sportscaster who moved to the state in 1993, hopes the two men are alive and will turn themselves in -- or that a member of the public will have the courage to come forward with information about their identities.
"I understand the trepidation factor, but you don't have to give your name," he said. "Just supply the information so that this case can be solved. The victims have suffered enough, their families, friends."
Even compared with the slaying of five people in 1996 in a Hollywood Video in Albuquerque, for which two people were convicted, the Las Cruces case is more heinous, Minn said, because it involved children and remains unsolved.
"It's the worst thing that ever happened in the state of New Mexico, the worst crime, that is," he said. "It's been 20 years. Enough is enough."
Though police have never publicly announced a motive for the crime, Minn believes the two murderers were hired "to deliver a horrific message" to Ronald Senac.
"I believe it was financially related to drugs and these two hit men were hired and I don't believe it was two men from Las Cruces who randomly chose this bowling alley to do something terrible," Minn said, citing an interview with a woman, now deceased, who was believed to have sheltered the two men two blocks away on Kansas Street. "After 20 years, people are dying, disappearing and forgetting. The whole point of this documentary is to resuscitate a story that's become dormant and gone into oblivion. I think if people start talking about it, it's going to get to someone who will say something that will crack the case, because if nobody's talking about it, no one's probing, no one's thinking about it, there's no way to be solved. What's the alternative, just to let it die and do nothing?"
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Ida Holguin was a survivor of the Las Cruces Bowl
Amy Houser
Paula Holguin, 6, and Valerie Teran 2 Steve Teran
http://www.elpasotimes.com/newmexico/ci_14354909Gloria Woods, Amy Houser's mother, now 54 and still living in Las Cruces, says that just can't happen.
"You want them to get caught and you always have hope for that," she said. "The first five to seven years were really, really tough. It was constantly on your mind, constantly. And as a healing process, I think the Lord just teaches you to deal with it, but not a day goes by I don't think about her, don't miss her, don't wonder what she would have been or if I would have had grandchildren."
Instead, she tries to remember all the happiness that came before that Saturday two decades ago -- how Amy started reading at 2 years old, how her grandmother would stand her on the table to sing into a rolling pin, how she sold a whole 24-bar box of fundraiser chocolate in a single day for her school, how she shooed everyone out of her 10th birthday party when her mother went into labor with her brother, how she begged for a super-cool black Swatch watch and Liz Claiborne perfume for her last Christmas, and how she wanted to go to Stanford and be a lawyer.
"She'd say, 'I'll be a big somebody someday, you'll see,'" her mother remembers. "And I'd say, 'Yeah.' And she is. In a different way. In a very different way."
It's moments like the family's last night together that Woods has been holding on to especially hard these last 20 years. Woods' husband had just gotten back from working out of town. After dinner, Amy turned on World Class Track Meet and challenged her mom to a game. The Nintendo track and field game came with a vinyl pad on which two players could compete, side by side, in sprinting, long-jump and hurdles.
"I wanted to beat her so bad," Woods said. "I was holding on to the TV, trying to stay on my squares, and (Amy's sister and brother) were laughing so hard. I looked so stupid! But I didn't care. I was out of breath. And they were going slower than me because they were laughing at me."
Woods laughs just remembering it.
"I had to be at work at 4 in the morning, so I said, 'Everybody's got to go to bed.' I remember her sister saying, 'But we still have to play this game one more time!' I said, 'No, my legs are like rubber!' And they all started laughing so hard," Woods said. "My husband was sitting on the couch, thinking, 'You guys are crazy!'"
The next morning, she shook Amy awake.
" 'Come on, honey, you have a commitment, you need to get up,'" Woods told her daughter. "She said, 'Five more minutes.' I said, 'I'm setting the alarm. You need to get up.' I left for work."
Woods' husband, on his way to work early as well, took Amy to the bowling alley.
"He dropped her off and went around the back of the building, on Solano, so he wouldn't have to go on Lohman," Woods said. "He stayed there and watched her walk in and as he left he told her how beautiful she was and said she was growing up to be such a pretty, good girl. And that was basically the last thing we did."
After the killings, Woods woke up and ran to get the newspaper, expecting to see an arrest in the case, for years. These days, she's an outspoken defender of the documentary, which some Las Crucens have criticized for its potential open wounds. Even if justice is never served on the murderers, she wants the case to be solved.
"I live with it every day and I want to know, every day, and if this is a way, then that's fine with me because I want to know," Woods said. "I don't particularly care about seeing dead bodies and blood, even though that was the reality. I don't particularly care to see any of that, but it did happen. It did happen. And people need to be aware of what all those people went through. They went through a horrific ordeal and no one's paid the price but the victims. And if they're caught and they get an electric chair, if they tear them limb from limb, they'll never pay the price we do. Never."
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