NEW MEXICO — ARIZONA — CALIFORNIA
The Barracuda Fastback
Did a fast-driving honors student murder his parents?
Dave Serna was on edge. He had two murder victims and no suspect. Or did he?
Serna, the district attorney for Silver City, New Mexico, was built like a snowman. His circular face sat atop a round body. He’d descended from Mexican-Americans who’d lived in the area since the 1600s, before there was a Mexico or a United States. He earned his law degree at Tulane and represented striking miners. After becoming D.A., he built a reputation for rolling around in his desk chair, pulling at his shirt collar, and spewing irreverent jokes and English and Spanish profanity.
The murder victims were a husband and wife in their late 40s. Both worked in the circulation department at the local newspaper and were well-regarded in the community. Their three grown children had married and moved away in the last few years.
Their 19-year-old son, Joe Sneed, had discovered the bodies that morning, August 18, 1964, when he arrived for a visit. Neighbors then reported hearing what might have been gunfire around eleven the previous night. Each victim had been shot three times with a .22-caliber weapon. There was no gun nearby, so it wasn’t a murder-suicide. Nothing indicated a robbery.
Sneed, a slender young man with a triangular face, large ears, and deep-set brown eyes, had graduated near the top of his class a year earlier at Silver City High School. He’d played football, participated in many clubs, and served as president of the National Honor Society. In the school’s yearbook, Sneed listed his ambitions as “college education, good job, marriage, and a family.” He wed immediately after graduation and moved to Las Cruces, where he entered college. But the marriage didn’t stick, and his wife took off for California.
Sneed had never been in any trouble, and his sisters were sure he had nothing to do with the murders. Serna was less sure. He had officers check Sneed for gunshot residue, and he drove the teen to El Paso himself for a lie detector test. Sneed came back clean on both.
Silver City was, as you’d expect, a mining town. What was surprising was that its main output was copper. Apaches had been extracting copper there long before Spanish explorers “discovered” the deposit in 1799. Except during the late 1800s silver boom that gave the town its name, copper drove the area’s economy.
In the 1960s, the mining industry was growing, but atomic energy and the dawn of the space age were drawing young people like Joe Sneed away from Silver City and toward nearby Las Cruces. The first atomic bomb had exploded 80 miles north of Las Cruces in 1945. The Army’s White Sands Missile Range and NASA’s White Sands Test Facility were now the area’s largest employers.
Sneed purchased a gold 1964 Plymouth Barracuda, a muscle car produced for the first time that year. The nation’s new interstate highways offered him mobility and the chance to punch the fastback’s accelerator along desert highways. Frustrated by his failed marriage, Sneed drove a thousand miles to Seaside, California — near the Central Coast city of Monterey — to patch things up with his estranged wife. Thirty-six hours of driving over five days accomplished nothing. She had no interest in a reconciliation.
Sneed arrived back in Las Cruces at night and found his parents’ bodies the following morning. He spent that day with the police and the night at his grandparents’ home. The next day, Silver City authorities asked him to return to the police station. Sneed obliged. Miranda rights had not yet been established, but the officers told him he didn’t have to answer any questions. He said he wanted to cooperate fully and find the perpetrator.
Sneed talked freely; having grown up in Silver City, he knew most of its police officers. He worried aloud about his Barracuda. It was still sitting at his parents’ house. A sergeant he knew offered to fetch the car, and Joe handed him the keys.
When the sergeant retrieved the car, he poked around. In the glove compartment, he found a receipt from a Holiday Inn in Yuma, Arizona. The guest’s name was listed as Robert Crosset. Another receipt, also in Crosset’s name, was for a 55-cent purchase at a Las Cruces discount store, Surplus City. When asked, Sneed said he’d never heard of anyone named Robert Crosset.
Serna had no murder weapon and no motive. Since Sneed was registered under his own name at a Las Cruces motel at the time of the killing, he’d had no opportunity to commit it. Serna released him.
Following up on the Surplus City receipt, Silver City detectives drove two hours to Las Cruces. The proprietor said he offered only two items for 55 cents. One was shaving cream. The other was .22-caliber ammunition.
The detectives then scoured the area for stores that sold guns. At Moore’s Pawnshop, a man who matched Sneed’s description had purchased a .22-caliber revolver for $9.95 on August 17, the day of the murder. The woman who owned the store remembered telling the customer he could buy ammunition at Surplus City. The name she recorded for the sale was Robert Crosset, and the address was a nonexistent post office box in Deming, a city halfway between Silver City and Las Cruces.
At Pic-Quick, another discount store, police discovered that Sneed had purchased gloves and a flashlight on August 17. There was no doubt the buyer was Sneed; he had once worked there, and his coworkers remembered him.
D.A. Dave Serna now had a murder case against Robert Crosset, who had purchased a weapon and ammunition that matched those used in the killing. His case against Sneed was less certain. Nevertheless, immediately following the double funeral, Serna charged Sneed with murder.
After his sisters arranged for an attorney, Sneed pleaded not guilty. The lawyer tried to suppress the Crosset receipts, arguing that the search of the Barracuda was illegal, but the judge (and later an appeals court) concluded that Sneed had willingly handed over the keys.
To obtain a guilty verdict at the 1965 trial, Serna had to prove that Crosset was Sneed. He started by demonstrating that Sneed had used the Crosset name during his trip to California.
The front-desk agent from the Hacienda Motel in Seaside said a man who looked like Sneed had registered there as Robert Crosset. He’d provided the same Deming post office box number given at the pawnshop.
A clerk from the Holiday Inn in Yuma testified that the man who registered there as Robert Crosset was the defendant sitting in the courtroom. Witnesses from the shops where the gun and ammunition were purchased testified that the buyer resembled Sneed, but they could not be certain about their identifications. Both men were about 5’9” with brown hair and eyes — too average to be distinctive.
As Serna contemplated Sneed’s likely defense, his own case felt shaky. He had not proved that Crosset was Sneed. Crosset could have been a hitchhiker Sneed picked up. Or, Sneed may have accidentally picked up receipts belonging to a stranger named Crosset. Perhaps someone had framed Sneed.
To ensure the jury made the necessary connection, Serna took a gamble that only made sense in the context of the times. In the early 1960s, the space program transfixed America and promised a transcendent future. People believed in the objectivity and infallibility of mathematics and science.
Serna had read about a trial in Los Angeles that involved probability. A statistician determined the odds that the defendants had committed the crime, given the prevalence of their identifying characteristics in the broader population. His testimony won the prosecutors a guilty verdict.
Serna arranged for Dr. Edward O. Thorp, a New Mexico State University mathematics professor, to analyze the Sneed evidence. Thorp determined that twelve of the 35 purchasers in the pawnshop register were between 5’8” and 5’10” and had brown hair and eyes. After reviewing 1,290,000 names in various phone directories, Thorp calculated that 1 in 30 men had the first name Robert. He found no Crossets and decided that the frequency of the name Crosset in the population was about 1 in a million. He assessed the probability of two random people choosing the same three-digit post office box number as one in one thousand.
Thorp then applied the “product rule,” a principle in statistics that says if two events are independent, the probability of them both happening is obtained by multiplying together the probabilities of each happening. So if the chance of picking a club from a deck of cards is 1/4 and the chance of choosing an ace is 1/13, then the likelihood of selecting an ace of clubs is 1/52.
Thorp multiplied his probabilities and calculated that the chance another person matched Sneed’s description and used the name Robert Crosset with the Las Cruces post office box number was one in 240 billion. Robert Crosset, he said, had to be Joseph Sneed. The testimony was unconventional, but the judge allowed it.
When the defense presented its case, Sneed’s attorney called his sisters, aunt, uncle, and grandmother. All testified that Sneed was incapable of killing his parents. The lawyer reminded the jury that Serna had not provided any testimony putting Sneed in Silver City the night of the murders.
In instructing the jury, the judge explained his willingness to allow Thorp’s statistical testimony. He stated, “Mathematics is an exact physical science, and I believe this is a sound principle.”
The jury then convicted Sneed of first-degree murder. Asked if he had anything to say, Sneed replied, “I am not guilty.”
Sneed appealed, and the New Mexico Court of Appeals overturned the verdict. The court exposed fallacies in Dr. Thorp’s reasoning and ruled that speculation and guesswork are inadmissible. The trial judge should not have allowed his testimony.
The sample size of 35 gun buyers, the panel said, was too small to allow for extrapolation. In any case, height, hair color, and eye color are not independent. For instance, people with blue eyes are likelier to have blond hair than people with brown eyes. Even the chances of someone having the given name Robert and the surname Crosset are not independent since, in many families, names are repeated across generations. Despite being a mathematician, Thorp had made the common error of applying the product rule to conditions that were not independent. The court also pointed out that since the name Robert Crosset never appeared in the phone books, the value assigned to the likelihood of that name should have been zero. The verdict in Los Angeles that had inspired Serna’s approach was also overturned on appeal.
On the morning of Sneed’s retrial in 1966, D.A. Dave Serna slipped as he stepped out of the shower. Arm in a sling, he grimaced with pain throughout the trial. This time around, Serna presented additional evidence to prove his case.
A forensic document expert testified that Robert Crosset’s Holiday Inn registration matched Sneed’s handwriting. For ballistics expertise, Serna called upon a Maryland investigator who’d testified before the Warren Commission investigating President Kennedy’s death. He said the bullets in the bodies of the Sneed parents matched the type purchased in Las Cruces the day before the murders.
From the beginning, Sneed had said he’d stayed in Las Cruces at the Penguin Motor Hotel the night the murders were committed. He claimed to have remained in his room all night except for a walk to get magazines and a soft drink. Two firemen who’d stayed at the hotel to attend a convention that night testified for the prosecution at the second trial. They had been impressed by Sneed’s gold Barracuda early in the evening and noted that it was not there when they returned late that night. That testimony suggested that Sneed could have driven to and from Silver City the night of the murders.
An even bigger revelation was the testimony of Sneed’s ex-wife, even though it occurred outside the jury’s presence. The marital privilege in criminal law blocked Kathleen Sneed Storey, now remarried, from speaking to the jury of events while she was married to Sneed. In a hearing to determine what she could testify to, Storey said that Sneed had physically abused her during their marriage. Once, he’d hit her with a book. Another time, he threw a fountain pen at her with such force it lodged in her leg. Still another time, he bit her on her face. She also described how Sneed had thrown the couple’s dog into a wall. The judge ruled that Storey could testify before the jury only as a rebuttal if the defense again put on witnesses to support Sneed’s character. To avoid such testimony, the defense did not call upon Sneed’s family this time.
Sneed himself did testify, narrowly. Asked if he killed his parents, Sneed replied, “No, I did not.” He denied using the name Robert Crosset.
The jury again found Sneed guilty of first-degree murder. The weight of the evidence indicated that Sneed, as Crosset, had purchased the gun and ammunition and slipped away from the motel in the middle of the night to commit the murder.
Serna thought Sneed killed his parents because he resented their interference in his relationship and blamed them for the dissolution of his marriage. Perhaps the parents didn’t like his wife. Maybe Sneed irrationally blamed his parents for the violence he inflicted on his wife, which led to their split. I think it’s more likely that the parents unreasonably insisted that the marriage could be saved, and — after the fateful trip to California — Sneed knew he couldn’t meet their expectations. It’s also possible money was an issue. I can’t figure out how a college student from a middle-income family could afford a brand-new sports car. Barracudas were selling for $2500, about forty percent of an average American family’s earnings in 1964. The financial element of this story remains a mystery to me. As far as I can determine, it never came up in the investigation or trial.
Following the jury’s recommendation, the judge sentenced Sneed to life imprisonment, sparing him the death penalty. While incarcerated, he earned an associate degree summa cum laude from the College of New Mexico. Once again, he was the honor student. Chosen to speak at the prison graduation ceremony, Sneed concluded, “To serve time is perhaps the most serious adversity a human being can undergo. But every adversity carries a seed of greater benefit.” He characterized his defeat as a blessing and said his experience had fully rehabilitated him. But did it? Life has a way of shattering expectations, whether optimistic or cynical.
After eight and a half years in prison, Sneed earned parole. He found work in the state’s personnel office. In 1977, he began adding fake names to the state payroll. He deposited the paychecks into bank accounts he opened. He netted only $1200 before he was caught. This time, he didn’t fight the charges. He pleaded guilty to embezzlement and larceny, paid back what he’d stolen, and served more time in prison.
That same year, DA Dave Serna died at 54 when he lost control of his car after swerving to avoid a log in the road between Las Cruces and Silver City. Once the youngest DA in the state, he’d become its longest-serving prosecutor, holding his position for 21 years. Had it not been for Serna’s tenaciousness, Sneed would likely have gotten away with murder.
Copyright © 2024 Lou Schachter • All rights reserved
