murky tale cont...

The refugees say they were forced to listen impotently as Sanchez-Core begged to be let back on the drifting boat, his cries for mercy gradually fading with distance in the turbulent nighttime seas that eventually claimed him.

"He yelled not to do this to him and that he was going to die and that he had a daughter," one of the survivors, Aldo Mesa, told FBI interviewers. "He was yelling out for God to save him."

Authorities have one of the Cubans, Orlando Requejo-Pupo, behind bars in an immigration detention center in Central Texas. Agents picked him up 18 months ago at his sister's Dallas apartment on immigration law violations, but, according to investigative documents, suspect he perpetrated the mutiny and slaying.

Requejo-Pupo steadfastly denies the assertions.

But while investigators may believe they have all but solved one of the state's more unusual murder mysteries, another tenacious mystery so far has prevented the filing of criminal charges against anyone.

Try as they might, federal authorities have been unable to charge Requejo-Pupo or anyone else for one simple reason: They can't say for sure where the killing occurred. If Sanchez-Core went overboard anywhere within 12 miles of the Texas coast, charges could be filed and U.S. courts would have jurisdiction, officials say.

Some government officials involved in the criminal investigation now are openly discussing their frustration at failing to discover whether the crime occurred in U.S. jurisdiction.

"This is the first type of case we've encountered in this area," said Joe Gonzales, the resident agent in charge of the U.S. Coast Guard's Investigative Service in Corpus Christi, which initially pressed for the murder-on-the-high-seas investigation, which was joined by the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents.

"We looked at this and said, 'We've got to go forward. We've got to go forward,"' Gonzales said. "We didn't want a murderer running around the U.S."

The desire to file charges has led agents to order extraordinary steps for a murder investigation. At one point last year, Coast Guard analysts in Corpus Christi noted the approximate date of Sanchez-Core death and the location of an abandoned oil platform the Cubans said they'd passed just off the Texas coast, within U.S. jurisdiction.

Gonzales said Coast Guard analysts conducted lengthy examinations of wind, sea, drift and tidal patterns in an attempt to estimate when Sanchez-Core went overboard. In the end, he and other officials said, the effort proved inconclusive.

The U.S. attorneys office in South Texas and in Dallas turned the investigators away. At one point, the FBI dropped out of the case entirely.

"There have been many instances in my career when the system just precludes you from taking action that was in the best interest of the country," said Ken Cates, who recently retired as head of the Dallas ICE office.

"The interesting thing about this case is that this crime has occurred somewhere out on the ocean, and the entire matter is strung out from the ocean to Dallas and there's just no venue."

Frustrated, immigration authorities in Dallas say they have switched legal strategies to keep Requejo-Pupo behind bars awhile longer while fishing for a way to keep him there permanently.

Requejo-Pupo, insisting the American investigators have the story of Sanchez-Core's death all wrong, has applied for political asylum, a status that would grant the detainee freedom and an unobstructed path to citizenship. The government is opposing the application and wants him deported instead.

U.S. Immigration Judge J. Anthony Rogers has wide discretion to grant or deny the asylum request, based in part on whether he considers Requejo-Pupo morally fit to stay.

So government attorneys in Dallas plan to argue that Requejo-Pupo is not morally fit for political asylum by having four of Requejo-Pupo's fellow survivors prepared to testify against him at a hearing Thursday in federal immigration court.

The Express-News first reported last year on the government's developing case against Requejo-Pupo, citing confidential investigative records of preliminary interviews the six refugees provided shortly after their landing.

At the time, the refugees offered inconsistent or contradictory accounts of where, why and how Sanchez-Core died less than a week before they made their Texas landfall.

Requejo-Pupo has always maintained that a despairing Sanchez-Core threw himself overboard in a fit of delusion brought on by malnutrition and dehydration.

The FBI was asked to re-interview them all in various states, and that's where the story left off.

The new records obtained by the Express-News detail the results of those interviews, and they offer far more unanimity about the circumstances of Sanchez-Core's death. Requejo-Pupo threatened everyone with death if they ever told what they knew, the refugees said.

The incident, they say, occurred after prolonged bouts of argument between Requejo-Pupo and Sanchez-Core over various survival chores and strategies.

The tension finally led to an armed mutiny during which Requejo-Pupo and another Cuban man, Zeidel Rivero Perez, took control of the boat by slashing and stabbing the others with a screwdriver and a knife, the refugees said.

Then one night a week or two later, after more tension and argument, according to several of these new accounts, Requejo-Pupo and Perez picked up the struggling captain and threw him overboard to drown alone.

"He was yelling out to save him for his daughter, and we could not do anything for him," Rolando Perez, one of the survivors, said in a sworn statement. "Well, I was so nervous. He (Requejo-Pupo) threw him overboard with a tank and a rope.

"I was left intimidated, thinking that they would throw me over, too. I tried to intervene. I told them to leave it, but I then became fearful that I would end up with the same destiny as the poor young man."

Another survivor, Aldo Mesa, told investigators he'd been stabbed six times with a screwdriver and threatened with death, a knife at his throat, during the boat takeover two weeks earlier. When Requejo-Pupo and Perezthrew Sanchez-Core into the water, Mesa testified, he felt helpless to assist.

"I would tell Requejo-Pupo and Perez not to do that, and they would tell me to be quiet because if not, they would throw me in the same way," Mesa told investigators.

Another survivor said that some three days after Sanchez-Core's death, the group spotted land and began to paddle for it.

On the final approach to the beach at Mustang Island, Miguel Diaz-Cangas later told investigators in Junction City, N.J., that Requejo-Pupo "told everyone in the boat not to say anything regarding (Sanchez-Core). Otherwise he would hunt them down and kill them."

Others on the boat support the threat claims, among them the only woman aboard, a 55-year-old librarian named Atiliana Araujo-Cruz, who is expected to testify Thursday.

In her first interviews with authorities, she stated that Sanchez-Core had thrown himself overboard in despair but later told a good Samaritan she met in Corpus Christi that Requejo-Pupo and Perez had killed the boat's captain.

She reversed course in the second interview with FBI agents in Miami. She said she lied the first time because Requejo-Pupo had threatened to kill everyone otherwise.

Araujo-Cruz said Perez had been a neighbor in Cuba and that they'd known each other as friends. She said Perez had participated in the mutiny and later helped Requejo-Pupo keep Sanchez-Core from getting back on the boat.

From that night forward, Araujo-Cruz said, Perez "could not look her in the eyes."

No statement is available from Perez, who is living in Florida and has never been detained. It remains unclear whether investigators ever interviewed him. He has declined interview requests.

Without a murder charge to keep Requejo-Pupo behind bars, authorities now rest their hopes on persuading Judge Rogers to turn down Requejo-Pupo's asylum application.

Requejo-Pupo's prospects for winning asylum seem less than certain, given that Rogers last August denied him bond after government prosecutors presented evidence, including taped jailhouse conversations, that Requejo-Pupo allegedly sought to threaten a witness.

"I do not intend to put you on the streets of this nation," the judge testily told Requejo-Pupo at the time.

The judge also cited a significant "likelihood" that Requejo-Pupo "committed some form of violence at sea."

Government prosecutors at the time expressed concern that the other survivors might come to harm if Requejo-Pupo were ever released.

The other shipmates are so concerned that none would agree to testify if they had to face Requejo-Pupo in the courtroom, so all are expected to testify by teleconference. If their fears are grounded, the survivors may not be free from it even after the judge rules.

Requejo-Pupo still can walk if his asylum bid fails and he is ordered deported because of a curious twist in the law and international diplomacy that favors his release: Cuba likely would not take the deportee, and the U.S. can't legally keep him locked up more than six months.

Requejo-Pupo, even with deportation orders, would be set free indefinitely on the streets of America essentially because of bad relations between the U.S. and Cuba.

Cuba has almost never accepted Cuban deportees from the U.S., especially those suspected of committing crimes. In fact, Cuba's president, Fidel Castro, likes to see Cuban criminals in the U.S. In the 1980s, Castro emptied that nation's jails and helped thousands set sail for Florida as a way to aggravate American authorities.

Requejo-Pupo's former attorney, Joel Vera, said Requejo-Pupo would be out on the streets indefinitely right now with a deportation order had he not applied for political asylum.

"The only thing they can do," Vera said, referring to the government, "is make his life miserable while they have him. He could be out on the streets right now."