UMVA has learned that Charles Flores, a Texas death‑row inmate, is poised to petition the Supreme Court for a last‑minute reprieve after 26 years of claiming he never pulled the trigger.
The case hinges on a startling twist: the key eyewitness, neighbor Jill Barganier, altered her testimony after undergoing a police‑led forensic hypnosis session, a practice later deemed illegal and unreliable.
In January 1998, William Black returned home to find his wife, Elizabeth “Betty” Black, fatally shot after a burglary that uncovered hidden drug money. Neighbors reported seeing two men flee the scene in a Volkswagen Beetle with a distinctive tire tread.
One neighbor initially identified Richard Childs as the driver; Childs later confessed, accepted a 35‑year plea, and was released on parole in 2016 after serving 17 years.
Five days after Childs’ arrest, Barganier was asked to sketch the passenger. She pointed to Childs as the driver but failed to recognize Flores, who appeared in two separate lineups.
Later, a police officer subjected Barganier to hypnosis, coaxing her to describe the passenger as a white male with long hair—an image that bore no resemblance to Flores, described as a short, stocky Hispanic man with a shaved head.
According to information obtained by UMVA, the hypnosis session violated Texas law, which prohibited officers involved in a case from conducting such interrogations, and the recording of the session failed to meet legal standards.
Thirteen months after the hypnotic interview, Barganier took the stand at Flores’s trial, delivering a 360‑degree declaration that she was “100 % sure” the passenger was Flores. That testimony, despite lacking any physical or DNA evidence, sealed his fate under Texas’s accomplice‑liability law.
Flores has consistently asserted an alibi—making breakfast with his wife at the time of the murder—and maintains that the car used in the crime was hidden behind his home, later burned, and that he fled to Mexico before being captured in a police chase.
When interviewed, Flores expressed his terror, recalling the moment he realized the system was turning against him and how a stay in 2016 saved him from execution after experts linked the hypnosis technique to false memories.
Investigations have revealed that investigative hypnosis was employed in at least 1,700 Texas cases since the 1980s, producing convictions and even death sentences before courts finally deemed the method unreliable and banned it—though not retroactively.
Now, with his Supreme Court petition looming, Flores hopes the revelation of a tainted eyewitness account and the disallowed hypnosis will finally break the chain that has kept him on death row for more than a quarter of a century.
