Gilberta Estrada was twenty-five and had come to Texas from Tamaulipas, in Mexico, a few years earlier. She had four daughters. According to court documents she said her common-law husband, Gregorio Frayre Rodriguez, had been abusive since they began living together in 2003: pulling her hair, slapping her, trying to strangle her, and on one occasion forcing her to have sex. In June 2006 he raised his hand to the eldest child. She obtained a protective order in August, on a judge's finding that she had been a victim of domestic violence, and the couple separated in February 2007.
What she had done in the months before her death is part of the record and belongs in it. Pregnant with her fourth daughter, she moved into a women's shelter, SafeHaven of Tarrant County, and learned to take the bus to her medical appointments. She got a work permit and a job at a fast food restaurant. A few weeks after the baby was born she moved into her own mobile home in the Oak Hills park, off Interstate 20 about twenty-five miles west of Fort Worth. She named the baby Evelyn, after her caseworker at the shelter. The caseworker, Evelyn Haro, said she remembered Estrada telling her that she was worth something, that she was doing this for herself and for her girls, and that she was going to be all right.
She was last seen alive on the Monday afternoon, playing with the baby outside the trailer.
On the morning of Tuesday May 29, 2007 the restaurant where she worked rang to say she had not arrived. Her sister Alejandra, who lived nearby, forced her way past a makeshift lock made from a rope tied to the doorknob, and at about half past six found the bodies in a ten-foot closet in the middle of the trailer, which had been covered over with a bedspread. Estrada and three of the girls were hanging there: Maria Teresa Estrada, five, Yaneth Frayre, three, and Magaly Frayre, twenty-one months. They had been hanged with strips of clothing and sashes.
The fourth child was hanging in the same closet with a sweater sleeve wrapped around her neck. Her aunt heard a noise from behind the bedspread, realised she was alive and got her down, and called for help. Evelyn Frayre was eight months old.
She was taken to Cook Children's Medical Center in Fort Worth, where the medical director of emergency services called her a miracle and put her survival down to her weight and to the fatty tissue that had protected her neck from breaking while she was suspended. There was no brain damage and no long-term harm was expected. She was discharged the following day into the care of Child Protective Services and placed temporarily with a foster family.
The sheriff, Larry Fowler, said the doors had been locked from the inside, that there were no signs of a struggle, and that there were no marks on any of the victims except those made by the cloth used to hang them. There were no stools or chairs beneath the bodies. He said Estrada appeared to have tied cloth round her neck and a wooden clothes rail, then leaned into it and let her knees buckle, and that the children were arranged next to her.
One question the investigators raised was never answered in the accessible reporting. At least one of the children was tall enough to have put her feet on a lower rail in the closet and possibly saved herself, so they wanted to know whether the children had been drugged or sedated. The sheriff said there was no evidence of drugs or alcohol in the home.
Nothing had been reported to the authorities about the household. The call on the Tuesday was the first emergency call to the address, and police said there was no evidence that Frayre Rodriguez had abused the girls. He came to the hospital and was not allowed to see the baby because of the protective order.
The shelter staff who had worked with her said the news stunned them. Her caseworker said that every client at a shelter has a difficult time and that Estrada was sad at times, but that there had been nothing to raise a red flag, that she always had a smile, and that she loved those little girls.
Hudson Oaks is a town of sixteen hundred people. Five years earlier, about a mile from this house, Dee Etta Perez had shot her three children as they slept and then killed herself.
This is a single act rather than a series, and it is in the archive under that classification.