At about half past six on the morning of Tuesday, May 29, 2007, the fast-food restaurant where Gilberta Estrada worked called to say she had not come in. Her sister Alejandra, who lived across the street in the Oak Hills mobile home park at Hudson Oaks, in Parker County, Texas, about twenty-five miles west of Fort Worth, forced her way past a makeshift lock made from a rope tied to the doorknob. In a ten-foot closet in the middle of the trailer, covered over with a bedspread, she found her sister and her sister's four daughters hanging. Gilberta Estrada, twenty-five, was dead, and so were Maria Teresa Estrada, five; Yaneth Frayre, known as Janet, three; and Magaly Frayre, twenty-one months. They had been hanged with strips of clothing and sashes tied to a wooden board that served as the clothes rod.
The fourth child was hanging in the same closet with a sweater sleeve around her neck. Alejandra heard a sound from behind the bedspread, realized the baby was alive, pulled her from the noose and called 911. Evelyn Frayre was eight months old.
She was taken to Cook Children's Medical Center in Fort Worth. "The staff here was ready for the worst when they heard what was bringing her here," a hospital spokeswoman, Winifred King, said. "Instead, they actually got a child who was in very good condition, considering." The medical director of emergency services called her survival a miracle and put it down to her size; she weighed about twenty pounds, and fatty tissue had protected her neck from breaking or losing its air supply while she was suspended. There was no brain damage, and no lasting harm was expected. She was released the next afternoon to Child Protective Services; one account says she went to a foster home, another to an aunt.
Estrada had come to Texas from Tamaulipas, in Mexico, a few years earlier, and had entered the country illegally. According to court papers, she said her common-law husband, Gregorio Frayre Rodriguez, thirty-eight, had been abusive since they began living together in 2003: pulling her hair, slapping her, trying to strangle her, and once forcing her to have sex. In June 2006, when Maria and her sister were fighting over a toy, he raised his hand to Maria, then kicked Estrada and pulled the phone from her hand when she tried to call 911. She said she had stayed because she was afraid that calling the police would get her deported. In August 2006 she won a protective order on a judge's finding that she had been a victim of domestic violence, and the couple separated in February 2007. He was the father of at least two of the girls.
In the months before her death she had rebuilt her life. 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. She named the baby Evelyn, after her caseworker at the shelter, Evelyn Haro. "I remember her telling me, 'I am worth something. I am doing this for me, and I am doing this for my girls,'" Haro said. "She said, 'I'm going to be OK.' Her self-esteem was building up."
She was last seen alive on the Monday afternoon, playing with the baby outside the trailer, and things had seemed normal. The sheriff, Larry Fowler, said the doors had been locked from the inside, there were no signs of a struggle, and there were no marks on any of them beyond those made by the cloth. There were no stools or chairs beneath the bodies. He said Estrada appeared to have tied cloth around her neck and the clothes rod, leaned into it and let her knees buckle, with the children arranged beside her. "It's horrendous," he said. "My mind cannot get around how all this can happen." A relative told investigators she had been depressed.
At least one of the children was tall enough to have put her feet on a lower rail and perhaps saved herself, so investigators asked whether the girls had been drugged. The sheriff said there was no evidence of drugs or alcohol in the home. The Tarrant County medical examiner's office ruled Estrada's death a suicide and the deaths of the three girls homicides. It found indications of depression but no documented history of suicide attempts, no antidepressants in the home and no note.
The Tuesday call was the first emergency call ever made to the address, and police said there was no evidence Frayre Rodriguez had abused the girls. He came to the hospital and was not allowed to see the baby because of the protective order. At the shelter, Haro said Estrada had been sad at times, as every client is, but that nothing had raised a red flag. She always had a smile, Haro said, and she loved those little girls.
Yaneth and Magaly were buried at East Greenwood Cemetery in Weatherford on the Saturday, after a private service at their father's request. Gilberta Estrada and her eldest, Maria Teresa, were buried in the same cemetery on the Monday. Hudson Oaks is a town of about sixteen hundred people, and it was the second triple killing of children there in five years. About a mile from the trailer, Dee Etta Perez had shot her three children as they slept and then killed herself.