Thursday, October 20, 2011

Houston, TX: After 40 years, wife arrested in man's hot-grease death

More than 40 years ago, an angry wife who allegedly killed her husband with a pot of hot grease was able to slip away from authorities.

The 76-year-old woman with an oxygen tank would go undetected for decades before being arrested last week in a small community in south Georgia, near Valdosta.

Mary Ann Rivera had been living with one of her children in Lake Park, five miles north of the Florida state line. She was wanted in connection with the 1970 slaying of Cruz Rivera, the oldest unsolved case of the 637 being revisited by the Harris County District Attorney's fugitive unit, investigator Chuck Lowery said.

Exactly how she was able to evade detection for 41 years came down to two major factors: A missing date of birth for Mary Ann Rivera, even though she was arrested in 1970 as a suspect in the death of Cruz Rivera, and a lack of resources to mount an intensive search for her in the years after she apparently bailed out of jail and disappeared, Lowery said.

After her arrest last week, she was driven back to Houston because her dependence on the oxygen tank made her unable to fly. She was booked into Harris County jail on Wednesday on murder charges. No bail had been set Thursday.

Lowery would not disclose details of the original incident that led to Cruz Rivera's death, but did say that his wife was angry with him on Oct. 14, 1970. She boiled a pot of grease, then threw it on him. Cruz Rivera died of his injuries three days later.

When Lowery began work on the case in 2009, he found little information about Mary Ann Rivera. Her date of birth, a key identifier in modern law enforcement databases, was missing. And files did not specify what happened after she was arrested as a suspect in Cruz Rivera's death, leaving Lowery to surmise that she bailed out and disappeared.

"Things were done a little bit different back then, I guess," Lowery said.

Lowery was able to determine the names and birth dates of the couple's children, then found an address for one of them in Georgia in late 2009.

After locating Mary Ann Rivera, he kept track of her while he worked to piece together evidence from the case, searching for witnesses and learning that many of them had died.

"It wasn't just locating her," Lowery said. "It was trying to make sure that it was still a case."

It was two years before he had enough for an arrest. He wouldn't comment on the evidence.

Meanwhile, authorities in Georgia had kept track of Mary Ann Rivera, and Lowery had asked them to contact her and question her about the case.

The arrest was one of two made in Georgia related to cold cases this month. On Wednesday, authorities in Gwinnett County, Ga., arrested Epifaneo Jaimes Arroyo, 55, suspected of beating and stabbing a man to death outside the La Chancla Club in north Houston on July 12, 1980. Lowery was the investigator on that case as well.

"We're starting to find them here and there now, so it's a sense of accomplishment," he said.

As for the Rivera case, Lowery said, "being the oldest, it was kind of unique, but they're all gratifying when I find them."

That isn't always easy, he said, noting that cases can go unsolved for years because of the sheer number of crimes committed.

With more than 10,000 outstanding felony arrest warrants out, and more than 30,000 arrest warrants overall, the detective said, it can be hard to stay focused on a case in which little progress has been made for years.

"It's just a numbers thing," Lowery said. And for Rivera, "I think that kind of combined to make it somewhat easy for her to remain under the radar."

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