Anita Byington’s Murder and the Travis County DA’s Pursuit to Pervert Justice
Part 1: The Crime and Punishment
It’s something you see on the news every day, but it always happens to other people, other families. You see the stories and you feel bad for them, and imagine their horror and pain. You see them on shows like Dateline and 20/20, but you never imagine that your life will become much like one of those Dateline stories.
On August 11, 1991, I no longer had to imagine that horror and pain — my first cousin, Anita Byington, was beaten to death — the horrific thing on the news had happened to our family. From one moment to the next, we had become those people you read about and see on the news. Since the moment I heard the horrible news, my life has never been the same. To say that it was and continues to be a nightmare is an understatement.
Anita Byington was brutally murdered on August 11, 1991, in Austin, Texas. She was beaten to death and left in a grassy area next to an apartment complex on the East side of town. One of her killers, Allen Andre Causey, was convicted of her murder and sentenced to 50 years in prison. There wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute the other suspect, Causey’s friend, Bobby Harrell. In Causey’s case, he confessed to the murder — open and shut, right? Wrong. That confession was the point of contention at Causey’s 1992 trial and is the basis for his recent quest for exoneration.
I could write a thousand pages on how Anita’s brutal death affected me and all of her loved ones, but this story isn’t about that. That’s a story that I may write someday, because Anita was a real person, not just a case, or a story for strangers to gawk at, or to use for headlines or political purposes. But this story is about the pursuit of justice, and also about seeing your loved one, the one person in the world whom you viewed as a little sister, written about by strangers, and talked about by lawyers and people who never even met her. This is about coming face to face with one of her killers, and about so many things that happen when you become one of those families impacted by murder. This is also the story of how, 31 years after our family’s nightmare began, a political figure, Travis County District Attorney Jose P. Garza, began to use Anita’s murder case as a means of political gain, with no regard to Anita herself or her loved ones, who still struggle to cope with her horrific death and her loss, even after all these years.
Anita, a 21 year old student at Southwest Texas State University in San Marcos, was visiting friends in Austin on the weekend of August 11, 1991. She and two friends, along with 3 acquaintances who worked at the State Capitol, spent the evening of August 10 at a bar on 6th Street. When the night came to an end, Anita and one of the acquaintances, Kevin Harris, were to follow the others home in Anita’s car. But Anita never showed. The next thing anyone knew, her badly beaten body was found in a wooded area near the Spring Creek Apartments in East Austin at 6:30 am. She was left there like an animal. When Harris was questioned by police, he claimed that Anita dropped him off at his truck at 3:00 am. and that he never saw her again. Nobody believed his story then, and nobody believes it now.
The next morning, August 11, bystanders at the crime scene where police were processing the scene noticed a car circling the area several times. According to them, the driver of the car eventually stopped and entered the crowd of onlookers, acting nervously. At one point he blurted out, without prompting, “I didn’t kill her.” He then said that he found her body and called the police. The man was acting so suspiciously that two witnesses separately called the police and gave them his license plate number. That man was Allen Andre Causey.
By that evening, police officers had tracked Causey down and asked him to accompany them to the police station for questioning, which he did voluntarily. According to court testimony, Causey wasn’t yet a suspect in the murder. However, early into questioning, Causey gave 8–9 different stories of his whereabouts the night of the murder, which is when the officers began viewing him as a suspect and read him his rights.
The other suspect, Bobby Harrell, was brought in for questioning later that same night. According to the officers present, Harrell began to violently throw up when questioned about the murder. Meanwhile, Causey was informed that Harrell was questioned and had implicated him (which was a bluff by the police officers). According to the officers, Causey began crying and confessed to the murder, claiming that Harrell was the main participant in the crime, and that Causey had helped him. As testified to in court by several witnesses, Causey then verbally gave his detailed confession to two separate officers (neither being Hector Polanco) and willingly signed the confession after it was read back to him. Harrell, on the other hand, never confessed, nor did he implicate Causey.
During questioning and his confession, Causey described purchasing and doing crack cocaine all night with Bobby Harrell. He described in detail every time either of them went to purchase the drugs. In fact, his entire confession was very detailed. He claimed that at around 5:30 am he saw Harrell arguing with Anita in the parking lot, that Anita tried to run away but he caught her and knocked her to the ground as Harrell began hitting her with a belt buckle. (Anita’s body had marks consistent with being struck with a belt buckle, but this was unknown to the police at the time. This was confirmed by the medical examiner in the following days). Causey admitted to hitting her, choking her, and holding her down, as Harrell kicked her, struck her with a belt buckle, and finally, smashed her in the head several times with a large cement brick. Causey’s confession correlates with the time of death determined by the medical examiner, and corresponds with all of the injuries sustained to Anita’s body.
In December 1991, a pretrial hearing was held, as Allen Andre Causey was charged in the murder of Anita Byington. Causey himself testified at that hearing. He was asked if he was threatened during his questioning by police, Causey unequivocally replied “no.” Causey’s defense at this time was that he was a poor reader and he didn’t know what he was signing. This was the basis for his recanting of his confession, at least at this point. His reasoning would conveniently change later. There was no mention of Sgt. Hector Polanco whatsoever.
In between that pretrial hearing in December, 1991 and the trial in July, 1992, Sgt. Hector Polanco received widespread media coverage regarding his interrogation tactics and the possibility of false confessions being obtained by him. Unsurprisingly, by the time the trial rolled along, Causey’s defense had changed completely. Whereas before, Polanco wasn’t even mentioned, now Causey’s defense was that he had been coerced and threatened by Polanco, therefore he confessed. It should be noted that three other police officers testified on the stand that Polanco was never alone with Causey, and that he had merely played an auxiliary role in the questioning. Polanco himself testified and, apparently, was found by the jury to be credible, as Allen Andre Causey was found guilty and sentenced to 50 years in prison. (It should be noted that, on the stand, Causey read a portion of his confession aloud, thereby negating his original claim of not being able to read his confession).
There was never enough evidence to charge Bobby Harrell for the murder, although it was believed then and it is believed now, that he, along with Causey, did murder Anita. It has always been believed that Kevin Harris, the last person known to have been with Anita, took her to that apartment complex, tried to make some sort of drug deal (unbeknownst to Anita), and fled when things went bad. No trace of drugs was found in Anita’s body upon autopsy.
Cut to October 2022 — after serving 31 years for the murder of Anita Byington, Allen Andre Causey was finally released on parole. None of Anita’s loved ones were happy about this, in fact, we were sickened, but there was nothing we could do about it. We just had to accept it and try to live with it. Little did we know what was in store in the coming months.
In December, 2022, I was notified by a witness in the case that several witnesses were being contacted by an investigator with the Travis County DA’s office and a lawyer for The Innocence Project of Texas, regarding Anita’s murder case. No other information was given and, although Anita’s parents are deceased, no member of the Byington family was notified of anything. Scrolling through the social media of The Innocence Project, there I saw a picture of Causey, being celebrated as a hero and being used in a fundraising campaign. No mention of the girl whom he beat to death, nor of the fact that he was paroled, and not exonerated. I was horrified and disgusted. And this was just the beginning. The nightmare which assaulted our family 31 years prior was about to be reignited in a way nobody ever could have imagined.
Part 2: The Ugly Aftermath
After Allen Andre Causey had served 31 years in prison for the murder of Anita Byington, Anita’s loved ones felt like we had gotten a measure of justice. It wasn’t perfect, but it was something. But we were not prepared to be slapped in the face as we learned that Causey was seeking to be exonerated and was being represented by attorneys from The Innocence Project of Texas. That wasn’t the worst part — the worst part was that the Travis County DA’s Office was fully on board and involved in the quest for Causey’s exoneration. Of course, they lied to us about that, for a long time, after they finally stopped ignoring us.
Anita Byington was an only child, and her parents are deceased, therefore, she had no surviving “immediate family.” She did, however, have a lot of very close family members, whom the DA’s Office made no attempt to notify about the new legal proceedings in this case, despite us being registered with the State precisely for this purpose. Once we became aware of the situation and asked to be updated as things progressed, we were ignored for close to a year, while secret proceedings and hearings were occurring. The DA’s office had an agenda — they wanted to quietly go ahead with Causey’s exoneration without any word or input from the family, and without any care or consideration as to how the family might feel about it.
You may be asking yourself, why would they want to do this, what is their motive? That was my question, initially. I have since discovered at least a couple of motives, the first one being political. Upon a quick Google search, one finds that Travis County DA Jose P. Garza is referred to as a “rogue district attorney” elected with over half a million dollars from George Soros. He’s quite a controversial figure. He appears to be an extremist, with an anti-police agenda, who has a record of being extraordinarily easy on criminals. And we are feeling that in this case personally. We have been ignored, dismissed, and lied to by his office, while the convicted murderer seems to have been treated quite the opposite.
Another motive is financially based. In 2023, $599,504 was awarded to create a “Confession Review Team: A Joint Venture between the Travis County District Attorney’s Office and the Innocence Project of Texas.” So, as much as the DA’s Office assured me that they were doing their own separate investigation and hadn’t made any determination on Causey’s guilt or innocence, they were clearly working together the entire time. Representatives from both offices attempted to question at least one witness together. That sounds like a joint investigation. And the goal had always been to present Allen Andre Causey as an innocent victim, all wrapped up in a bow, as a shiny trophy for their mantelpiece and for headlines. After all, they are in a position now where they need to prove that their huge grant is being well spent. I guess they thought that they could go through with this; after all, Anita had no surviving immediate family, and the case was 32 years old. I’m sure they weren’t expecting the full force of Anita’s loved ones after all this time.
Once I found out about this reinvestigation, I was ignored by the DA’s office for close to a year. It was not until the Byington family retained an attorney, Terry Keel, that they began to pay any attention to us. Mr. Keel was the original prosecutor in the 1992 case, and when he learned of what was happening, he was as passionate about it as the family. Terry Keel treated us the way the DA’s office should’ve treated us, the victim’s family, but didn’t. It was Mr. Keel who provided us with the trial transcript and other documents that the DA’s Office refused to provide. It was Mr. Keel who clearly explained the upcoming court proceedings to us and told us what to expect. It was Mr. Keel who treated us as if we mattered, and that what we had to say mattered. It was Mr. Keel who showed us the empathy and compassion which seemed to be sorely lacking in our dealings with the DA’s Office. And it was Mr. Keel who went through all of the evidence with us, and not just the bits and pieces which might favor Causey, if presented in a misleading manner.
After going over all of the evidence again with Mr. Keel, not just the cherry-picked pieces that the Innocence Project and DA’s Office were focusing on, we became even more steadfast in our belief in Causey’s guilt. His changing stories (his complete turnaround in his defense, inserting Sgt. Polanco for the first time), his behavior at the crime scene all pointed towards his guilt. For Causey’s confession to have been fabricated, there would have had to have been this huge conspiracy, with four police officers lying under oath, not to mention the two other unbiased witnesses to the confession. And yet, shockingly, none of these officers were interviewed, nor even contacted for this reinvestigation. It seems that the DA’s Office would prefer to take only the word of a crack cocaine using convicted murderer, without even speaking to one other person who was present that night. It boggles the mind.
And now Causey’s defense attorneys and the DA’s Office are trying to use Kevin Harris as a scapegoat, claiming that he is the true murderer of Anita. His DNA was found on Anita’s clothing, and his fingerprints were found in her car. Yet, this is not the “slam-dunk” evidence that the defense tries to paint it to be — Harris was always known to have been with Anita the night she was killed, it is only logical that his DNA and fingerprints would be present. Furthermore, in a document filed on Nov. 22, 2023, the DA’s Office claimed that Harris has been a suspect in the murder since the year 2000. This was addressed by 331st District Court Judge Chantel Eldridge at the Nov. 27 hearing. She questioned if the State thought Harris was the suspect in 2000, why didn’t they start the investigation into him then? The attorneys for the DA’s Office said that they couldn’t explain that. Yet, there’s a simple explanation. It’s obvious that this new investigation into this case has nothing to do with the murder of Anita Byington or with justice. If it did, why would the DA’s Office leave a man whom they are claiming is innocent in prison for another 22 years? They had their suspect, the true murderer, 23 years ago and did absolutely nothing to achieve justice and free an “innocent” man? Ludicrous. The motive here isn’t justice — this is a political sideshow, and DA Jose P. Garza and his office are playing a starring role, alongside The Innocence Project of Texas and Allen Andre Causey, a brutal murderer.
Furthermore, Causey’s defense and the DA’s Office are claiming that Causey was coerced and that his confession was fabricated, therefore, he was framed by the police. But one must ask — if those police officers were only trying to frame someone, why wouldn’t they have framed Kevin Harris initially, right from the start? After all, he was right there for them on a silver platter: he was the last person known to have been with Anita, and his DNA and fingerprints were present. Seems like that would’ve been a slam-dunk case, if that’s what the police were after. But they didn’t do this, and there’s a simple reason as to why — Allen Andre Causey confessed to the murder, plain and simple, just as the four officers have always maintained. Any other explanation strains simple logic.
As of now, this case remains ongoing. On November 27, 2023, the very first public hearing was held on Causey’s post-conviction writ of habeas corpus. This hearing was over a year after the DA’s Office had teamed with the Innocence Project to conduct secret hearings. The victim’s family was never given the courtesy of any notice about the secret hearings, or even a schedule for the public hearing, but we found out about it on our own. During the hearing, the Innocence Project and the DA’s Office fought to keep the victim’s family from reading an allocution statement. Fortunately, the judge overruled their objections. I was allowed to sit merely feet away from Anita’s killer and describe to him, the judge, and the spectators, at length, everything and everyone that he destroyed. My statement didn’t accomplish anything real, yet it felt immensely important to me that I had a voice and that Anita was not forgotten in all of this.
It should be noted that the Innocence Project attorneys Mike Ware and Jessi S. Freud scowled and smirked at Anita’s supporters throughout the hearing. We were treated like the enemy, as if we were the ones who had killed someone. Our attorney, Terry Keel, was also treated as an enemy. He was added to the witness list to prohibit him from being in the courtroom, thereby leaving us without representation that day. This was an obvious ploy by the attorneys from The Innocence Project and the DA’s Office . He has yet to be called as an actual witness and it is highly unlikely that he ever will be. To add insult to injury, The Innocence Project of Texas has blocked me, a murder victim’s closest relative, on Facebook. I used to naively believe that The Innocence Project was a beacon of justice, but I have since learned differently.
There is another hearing on Jan 5, 2024, and likely another one after that. Despite being made to feel extremely unwelcome and unwanted, Anita’s loved ones will attend every hearing. Anita may have been silenced when she was murdered over 32 years ago, but she still matters, and I will always be her voice. It’s all I can do for her now. Eventually, this case will go before The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, where a final decision will be made.
The DA’s office has remained in contact with us now, notifying us of upcoming hearings, trying to appear helpful, but it’s way too little, and way too late. They have apologized to me for how this case was handled regarding the victim’s family, and I appreciate that, but I feel that the apology should come from DA Jose P. Garza himself. I am waiting for that apology. The apology should not only include shutting the victim’s family out of the process, but also the sham investigation that has been conducted in the pursuit to exonerate Allen Andre Causey, a man who beat a 21 year old girl to death. A real investigation would’ve included all of the evidence, incorporating that which bolsters Causey’s guilt. But that’s not what happened here. There was a predetermined agenda to exonerate this killer, for political and financial reasons, and for headlines. And that is beyond despicable.
This may be just another case to the DA’s Office, but they need to remember something — Anita was a real person, she lost everything. And we lost her forever. Justice was served 32 years ago, and an unbiased and just DA would continue to seek justice all these years later, and not act as an active participant in this travesty occurring now. It seems impossible to traumatize a murder victim’s family as brutally as the murder itself did, yet Travis County District Attorney Jose P. Garza and his office have come close.
I will close this story with some of the words I used in my allocution statement to the Court on Nov. 27:
“It wasn’t enough for this animal to kill her and destroy so many lives. After lie upon lie upon lie, here he is again, wreaking havoc on our lives. And the truly disgusting part is that he’s somehow gotten The Innocence Project and the Travis County District Attorney’s Office to participate in this travesty, this sham. I feel personally victimized all over again by all of them.”
