Editor’s Note: The following is a preview of a new podcast released by the Texas Observer and Free Range Productions. Look for The Unforgotten—season five: “Riding Shotgun”—wherever you get your podcasts.
Jill Barganier, a petite blond mother of three from the Dallas suburb of Farmers Branch, has been asked many times over the past three decades to recall what she saw from her window on January 29, 1998.
That morning, Barganier peered through her blinds and watched an odd car pull up in front of her neighbors’ house. It was a pink-and-purple Volkswagen Beetle, with a psychedelic paint job and bumper stickers advocating for peace, love, and the Grateful Dead. It seemed unusual for her neighbors, the Blacks, a couple in their 60s whose kids had long since left the house, to get an early-morning visit from hippies. The situation turned more bizarre when two men got out of the car.
The driver, a man who looked about 30 years old, with long, dirty hair and blue eyes, took a swig from a glass beer bottle. It was so early—Barganier hadn’t even woken her husband up for work yet. Who started drinking before the sun was even up? She caught sight of the passenger, too. For a moment, he looked in her direction. His hair was also long, down to his shoulders, and his hair and eyes were both darker than his friend’s. That’s all she really processed before closing the blinds.
A few hours later, she’d find out she was perhaps the most critical witness in a murder investigation.
The two men had broken into her neighbors’ house through the garage and shot and killed Betty Black, who was an unofficial grandma to the kids of the modest neighborhood. They ransacked the house and left, seemingly without taking anything. Black’s husband, Bill, discovered her body when he got home from an early trip to work.
It didn’t take long for Barganier to identify the driver of the VW in a photo lineup. She had gotten a good look at him, and that beer bottle stuck in her mind. She picked out a photo of Richard Childs, known to most as Ric, and told police he was the one she’d seen.
For weeks, then months, she wasn’t able to identify the passenger, though. She was shown photo lineups and helped create composite sketches—which showed a man who bore a resemblance to Childs—and she even requested that the police hypnotize her to see if she could remember any more relevant details. A young officer who’d taken a class on investigative hypnosis two years prior conducted the interview. It was his first and last hypnosis interview, and it didn’t yield anything new or explosive. It seemed to police as if they’d gotten all the useful information they were going to get out of Barganier.
Meanwhile, investigators, through other leads, had zeroed in on local drug dealer Charles Flores as the man they believed had been riding shotgun that morning. He was a friend of Childs’, a heavy-set Hispanic man who wore his hair shaved or close-cropped. Officers showed his picture to Barganier in one of the lineups, but she shook her head.
Even so, investigators pursued the case against Flores, fueled largely by intel from the Dallas-area drug scene. They built a capital murder case against him, and in 1999, over a year after the murder, they called Barganier to the stand. There, she dropped a bomb that obliterated the defense’s case.
Before the judge and jury, she declared Flores was, in fact, the man she saw in front of her neighbors’ house that morning. It was a stunning turn of events, after so many months of her being unable to ID anyone and describing a passenger who looked entirely different from the large man on trial.
The turn also came after she’d seen Flores’ face in news reports about the murder for over a year—and after that seemingly unhelpful hypnosis session. Suddenly, she was positive Flores was the guy. With the help of her testimony, the state secured a death sentence.
Flores has now sat on Texas’ death row for nearly half his life, with appeal after appeal shot down by the courts. But he remains adamant that he was not the passenger in the car that January morning.
Barganier’s hypnosis and her stunning about-face on the witness stand have been central to Flores’ appeals efforts. But her testimony was just one part of the state’s case against Flores—who had a criminal history and a known temper. The Dallas County District Attorney’s office hasn’t shown any support for Flores’ appeals, even though it has disavowed its own prosecutions in other cases. It seems that, for the office’s current leadership, the Flores conviction was just.
But since 2016, Flores has had the help of tenacious appeals attorney Gretchen Sween, who recently helped Robert Roberson avoid execution in one of the state’s most high-profile death penalty cases in years. For a decade, Sween has picked apart the threads of the state’s case—from Barganier’s legitimacy as a witness to the crucial statements from co-defendants who later got sweet deals—and she’s convinced that the conviction was a house of cards.
“They have no DNA. They have no fingerprints. They have no ballistics. They have no fibers—they have nothing that you would think of as objective evidence connecting Charles to this crime scene,” Sween said in an interview last year.
For the past several months, I’ve been looking into the investigation of the murder of Betty Black and the prosecution of Charles Flores. This March, the Texas Observer and Free Range Productions launched a six-part podcast series about the case. The series is the fifth season of the true-crime podcast The Unforgotten, which is available on all major platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen.
To hear the rest of the story I’ve uncovered, just search “The Unforgotten” in your preferred podcast app, and look for season five, “Riding Shotgun.”
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