A Dallas police officer was arrested on Thursday and charged with two counts of capital murder after a witness said that the officer had hired him to kidnap and kill two people and then dump their bodies in a river, the authorities said.
The Dallas police said that the officer, Bryan Riser, who joined the department in August 2008, had been charged in connection with the murders of Albert Douglas, 61, and Liza Saenz, 31, both in 2017.
The city’s police chief, Edgardo Garcia, declined to describe the relationship between the officer and the victims, but said the killings were connected to Officer Riser’s “off-duty conduct,” not his police work.
Nevertheless, Chief Garcia said, the Dallas Police Department will move to fire Officer Riser and will examine his conduct on the force and the arrests he made.
“We hire individuals from the human race and, when we find individuals such as this, it’s the actions that we take afterward that we should be judged by,” Chief Garcia said. “We will hold ourselves accountable to the highest levels.”
It was not immediately clear if Officer Riser had a lawyer. The Dallas Police Association, which represents the city’s officers, declined to comment.
Ms. Saenz’s body was found in the Trinity River in Dallas on March 10, 2017. She had been shot several times, the police said. In September 2017, three men — Kevin Kidd, 28; Emmanuel Kilpatrick, 31, and Jermon Simmons, 35 — were arrested and charged with killing Ms. Saenz, the police said.
On Aug. 12, 2019, a prosecutor told the Dallas Police that one of the men — who was identified only as a “witness” in court papers — wanted to come forward with information about Officer Riser’s involvement in Ms. Saenz’s murder, the authorities said.
Two days later, during an interview at the Dallas Police Headquarters, the witness implicated Officer Riser in the murders of both Ms. Saenz and Mr. Douglas, whose family had reported him missing in February 2017, according to the authorities. His body has not been found, although the witness told the police that Mr. Douglas had been shot and killed then dumped in the Trinity River.
The witness said he and Officer Riser had known each other for years and had reconnected in 2013 when Officer Riser contacted him and asked him if he was “still doing the things they were doing when they were young,” like committing burglaries, the witness told the police.
The witness said that Officer Riser initially promised to provide him with information about drug houses if the witness and his crew would rob the houses and then keep the drugs and give any stolen money or guns to Officer Riser, the police said.
The plan, however, never materialized, the witness said, because Officer Riser then came up with a plan to have Mr. Douglas kidnapped and killed for $3,500, the police said.
After discussing the plan at a doughnut shop and in a park, the witness said, Officer Riser drove him to a place where he identified Mr. Douglas as his target, the police said.
Several days later, the witness said, he and an associate stopped and handcuffed Mr. Douglas, put him in a car and drove him to a spot near the Trinity River, the police said. Mr. Douglas was shot and killed and his body was dumped in the river, the witness told the police.
About two weeks later, Officer Riser contacted the witness again and told him he would pay him $6,000 to kidnap and kill Ms. Saenz, the police said. Officer Riser told the witness that she was “an informant,” the police said.
Ms. Saenz was shot and killed and her body was dumped in the river, the police said. But the witness never collected the $6,000 because he and his associates were arrested in unrelated killings, the police said.
The chief acknowledged that the department had allowed Officer Riser to remain on patrol after the witness implicated him in the killings, in 2019. But he said that “terminology is important.” The chief said that a person does not become a “murder suspect” until there is enough information to find probable cause that he committed a murder.
“I think the community should know that this Police Department wants to be as thorough as possible, because we certainly don’t want someone slipping through the cracks that has no business wearing this uniform,” Chief Garcia said. “And so he’s a person of interest until he becomes a suspect. And that’s what the diligent work of our homicide detectives and the F.B.I. were trying to do.”
