Sitting in the prison where she’s spent nearly half of her life, Elizabeth Ramirez is stunned by the words that could help exonerate her and three friends of the sexual assault of her two nieces, a crime she said she couldn’t fathom let alone commit.
It never happened, one niece now says of the debauched, orgy-like nightmare that she and her older sister described to San Antonio police in 1994 when they were 7 and 9.
“I want my aunt and her friends out of prison,” Stephanie, 25, said by phone last week. “Whatever it takes to get them out I’m going to do. I can’t live my life knowing that four women are sleeping in a cage because of me.”
On and off the witness stand, the sisters changed their accounts of the timing, the use of weapons, the perpetrators and other basic details of the assault every time they told it to authorities, records show.
It was one of several red flags raised in the Express-News investigation published in December 2010 that also delved into concerns about the scientific legitimacy of medical evidence used against the women, whether anyone looked into a previous rape allegation made by the girls and if anti-gay views prejudiced Ramirez’s jury.
