CANYON LAKE, TEXAS -- On the night of November 3, 2006, sheriff’s deputies in Comal County, found the barefoot, mangled body of eighty-three-year-old Shirley Lindenbaum near 500 White Oak Drive in the Oaks subdivision of Startzville on the south side of Canyon Lake, about thirty miles north of San Antonio. A resident of the other side of the lake, forty-six-year-old Janice Marie Vickers, claimed to have run over her and then subsequently called 911 around 9:30 p.m.
The Comal County Sherriff’s Office, in conjunction with the Texas Department of Public Safety and the Texas Attorney General’s office, proceeded to conduct a two-year investigation of the incident. That led to the arrest of Vickers in December 2008 and a grand jury in early 2009 that determined she should be charged with intentionally striking Lindenbaum with the intent of killing her. Vickers pleaded not guilty to the charges.
After various delays, Vickers’ murder trial began November 2, 2009, one day short of the three-year anniversary of the killing, in the 207th Judicial District court in New Braunfels, Judge Jack Robison presiding. The entirety of the first day of the trial was devoted to selection of the four-man, eight-woman jury.
Much of the initial proceedings on Tuesday, November 3, 2009, involved personal testimony from witnesses intended to establish the respective characters of both the defendant and the victim. The prosecution also presented crime-scene photos that many of the people present found to be horrific and disturbing. The entire top of Lindenbaum’s head was removed when Vickers ran over it multiple times with her Chevrolet Tahoe, and the victim’s body was so badly contorted that, witnesses testified, her breasts and buttocks were both facing in the same direction.
“I’ll have nightmares for a long time,” Mary Lindenbaum, daughter-in-law of the victim, told me when I spoke with her. Other family members and friends of the slain woman seemed equally shaken by the circumstances of her death.
