Texas Monthly On . . .: Texas True Crime 9780292795532

Citation preview

on . . . Texas True Crime

T4096.indb i

1/18/07 7:18:37 AM

on . . .

T4096.indb ii

1/18/07 7:18:39 AM

Texas True 6 Crime From the editors of texas monthly introduction by evan smith Editor, Texas Monthly

University of Texas Press

T4096.indb iii

Austin

1/18/07 7:18:39 AM

Copyright © 2007 by Emmis Publishing LP d/b/a/ Texas Monthly All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2007 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ∞ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Texas Monthly on — Texas true crime / from the editors of Texas Monthly ; introduction by Evan Smith, editor. — 1st ed. p. cm. isbn-13: 978-0-292-71675-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-292-71675-3 1. Crime—Texas—Case studies. 2. Criminals—Texas—Case studies. I. Smith, Evan, 1966— II. Texas monthly (Austin, Tex.) hv6793.t4t56 2007 364.1092′2764—dc22

T4096.indb iv

2006038717

1/18/07 7:18:40 AM

contents

Introduction evan smith

vii

Suburban Madness skip hollandsworth The Outsiders pamela colloff

1

19

Borderline Insanity cecilia ballí

39

A Kiss Before Dying pamela colloff

59

Midnight in the Garden of East Texas 79 skip hollandsworth Girls Gone Wild katy vine

95

The Man Who Loved Cat Burgling skip hollandsworth

111

Two Barmaids, Five Alligators, and the Butcher of 133 Elmendorf michael hall The Day Treva Throneberry Disappeared 147 skip hollandsworth A Bend in the River pamela colloff The Last Ride of Cowboy Bob skip hollandsworth

173 193

The Family Man skip hollandsworth

T4096.indb v

215

1/18/07 7:18:40 AM

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

introduction

6

W

hen they say everything’s bigger in Texas, they mean nice things: hair, smiles, steaks, sky. Crime is too depressing to make the cut, but like it or not, our crime is not just big but bigger than anyone else’s, so we may as well brag about it. Our iconic criminals are larger than life, their names so well ingrained in our culture that they trip off the tongue without so much as a raised eyebrow: Bonnie and Clyde. Charles Whitman. Lee Harvey Oswald. Andrea Yates. Even if their acts were ghastly, they are or have been fixtures in our lives, the stuff of everyday headlines, for as long as we can remember. There’s no point in ignoring them or wishing they’d go away. From a journalistic standpoint, we couldn’t, and we haven’t. Since its inception, Texas Monthly has made hay of true crime, in the great tradition of our literary forebears. A previous anthology of terrific crime stories culled from our pages covered the celebrated likes of the folks mentioned above. In your hand is, to my mind, a more interesting collection. The crimes chronicled are not as widely known, nor are the perpetrators. (With the possible exception of that nice lady from Houston who ran over her adulterous husband with her Mercedes and then did it again and again, just to make sure she got him. Maybe you saw the TV movie? This stuff is entertainment gold.) But start reading about them—and then try to stop.

T4096.indb vii

1/18/07 7:18:40 AM

6 These twelve gems have in common what you’d want from Evan Smith any good read: memorable characters, a compelling plot, and rich scenes. And, of course, great writing. The authors are some of the finest, not just in Texas but anywhere. Perhaps the finest among them—at least when a dead body is at the center of the action—is Skip Hollandsworth, one of the magazine’s longtime executive editors. It’s no surprise that Skip wrote half the stories in this collection. A master spinner of yarns, he mixes deep-dive reporting with stylish storytelling in a way that gets his stories consistently talked about at dinner tables and around watercoolers. He’s such a favorite of our readers, and of mine, for one simple reason: He treats true crime not as pulp or pap but as serious journalism—every bit as worthy as any other genre, which it is. And also every bit as big. viii

6 Evan Smith, Editor texas monthly August 2006

T4096.indb viii

1/18/07 7:18:41 AM

on . . . Texas True Crime

T4096.indb ix

1/18/07 7:18:41 AM

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

suburban madness

6

sk ip holl andsworth

W

hy would a devoted wife deliberately run over her beloved husband three times? It’s quite simple, really. He was having an affair with a woman accused by her allegedly pill-popping ex-husband of carrying on a lesbian relationship with her best friend, whose exhusband has been indicted for an illegal wiretapping scheme designed to catch the two in the act and cover up his own infidelities with her former Lamaze-class buddy. Any questions?

late in the afternoon of july 24 , Clara Harris, a pretty and personable 44-year-old dentist from the Houston suburbs, put on a silky blue blouse and cream-colored slacks. She brushed her hair and tied it in place with a little bow. She then took Lindsey, her husband’s sixteen-year-old daughter from a brief first marriage, for a drive in her silver S-Class 430 Mercedes-Benz. Clara loved her Mercedes-Benz. She had once told her husband, David Harris, a spectacularly successful orthodontist who had as many as 120 crooked-teethed adolescents a day coming through his office, that the only extravagance in life she cared about was owning a Mercedes. For her, the car was a shining symbol of all that she had been able to accomplish. She had been born in Bogotá, Colombia, and raised by her widowed mother. Determined to make a living for herself, she had studied dentistry there before coming to the United States for more training in the

T4096.indb 1

1/18/07 7:18:41 AM

6 Skip late eighties. With her thick red hair and perfect smile and little Hollandsworth mole on her left cheek, she looked like a beauty queen. In fact, she had been. She was crowned Miss Colombia Houston in a local contest soon after completing her residency at the University of Texas–Houston Dental Branch. “I remember David calling soon after he had met Clara and telling me he was completely smitten,” his father, Gerald, would later tell me. Clara felt no differently about David. They had met in 1991, when they were both in their early thirties and working at the Castle Dental Center in Houston. David was not only brilliant when it came to teeth—he had graduated second in his class (also from the Houston Dental Branch) —but he had a charming, folksy nature, his favorite word being “golly.” They married on Valentine’s Day, 1992, less than a year after their first date, and held the reception at the Nassau Bay Hilton hotel, about thirty miles south of downtown Houston, across the highway from the looming Johnson Space Center and not far from where David would eventually open his first practice, Space Center Orthodontics. “I found the best,” Clara once told a reporter from a Brazoria County newspaper serving Lake Jackson, a nearby community where she had opened her own dental practice in 1993. “I found the one God had reserved for me.” She put photographs of the two of them in her office, replacing them with new ones every few months, and she talked to David two or three times a day on the phone, never hanging up before saying, “I love you.” In 1998 she gave birth to healthy twin sons, and she enjoyed a splendid relationship with David’s daughter, Lindsey, a talented violinist who lived with them in the summers after spending the school year with her mother, who had moved to Ohio. No matter how many patients Clara had to see, she always got home in time to cook dinner for her family in their palatial white-brick home, worth more than half a million dollars, in the cheerily named suburb of Friendswood. She had the perfect life, she often told her patients. “For Clara, it was always ‘David, David, David, ’” one of her co-workers said. “I used to tell people that I wished I could be able to love my husband in the same way that Clara loved David.” But on that July evening, David Harris had decided not to be with his wife. He was meeting a receptionist who worked at his office, a petite, stylish 39-year-old mother of three named 2

T4096.indb 2

1/18/07 7:18:42 AM

6 3 Gail Bridges. Less than two years earlier, Gail had divorced Steven suburban Bridges, a popular State Farm agent who had clients all over the madness suburbs south of Houston. They too seemingly had the perfect life. They had lived in an exclusive gated subdivision called South Shore Harbor, in League City, a suburb just across Interstate 45 from Friendswood. After carpooling her kids to school, Gail, a former high school cheerleader, could be found at a La Madeleine, sipping coffee and chatting with other beautiful mothers. She had flawless alabaster skin, eyes as brown as almonds, and a pixieish Dorothy Hamill–like hair cut. Compared with other neighborhood wives, her breast implants were not overly large. But after her divorce in November 2000, she moved to a smaller home in an ungated neighborhood, and she eventually started looking for work. When she was hired by Space Center Orthodontics in August 2001, she was making only about $1,800 a month—hardly the kind of money she was used to. But she did like the job, in part because she got along famously with the orthodontist. Dr. Harris started lingering at the front desk to talk to her. In late February 2002 he quietly asked her if she would like to have lunch at Perry’s Restaurant. By April or May, they were intimate. They began meeting at the Nassau Bay Hilton, the site of his wedding reception, where the rooms had views overlooking the water. That’s where David had asked Gail to meet him on July 24. He used cash to purchase a room under an assumed name, and together they walked into an elevator and headed upstairs. When they came back down, about an hour and a half later, Clara and Lindsey were standing in the lobby. It is not known if David got a chance to say something to his daughter or to Clara. What witnesses remember is Clara lunging at Gail and screaming, “You bitch, he’s my husband!” Then she slapped at Gail, grabbed her shirt, and tore it off. She also shouted, “This is Dr. David Harris and he’s f—-ing this woman right here!” At the same time, Lindsey began hitting her father with her purse, screaming, “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!” Hotel employees tried to intervene, but Clara, her rage building, kept grabbing at Gail. At one point, she and Gail were pulling on opposite ends of Gail’s shirt as if they were in a tug-of-war contest. Finally, according to one witness, David put his hand on

T4096.indb 3

1/18/07 7:18:42 AM

6 Skip his wife’s head, pushed her to the floor, and along with a hotel Hollandsworth employee, quickly escorted Gail out the lobby doors to her car, a Lincoln Navigator, in one of the hotel’s parking lots. The confrontation seemed to have ended. Hotel employees walked Clara and Lindsey back to the Mercedes in another parking lot and asked them to leave. Clara started the car. Suddenly, she gunned the engine and raced toward the parking area where her husband was standing with Gail. The Mercedes glanced off the Navigator and then hit David before he could get out of the way, propelling him 25 feet across the lot. Witnesses heard Lindsey screaming. They saw her open the door and stick her feet on the ground, attempting either to escape or stop the car. But Clara again aimed her car at her husband’s crumpled body and pressed the accelerator. The Mercedes bounced twice as the front tires and then the back tires rolled over him. She whipped the car around, hit the accelerator again, and drove over her husband a second time. Then she did another one-eighty and ran over him a third time before coming to a stop. According to witnesses, Lindsey then got out of the car, rushed around to the driver’s side, and punched Clara in the face. Then she collapsed on the ground and sobbed. When Clara got out of the car, she didn’t seem to know what to do, the witnesses said. She finally walked over to her husband. She stared at him. And then, she too began to sob. Before the police arrived to arrest her for murder, the witnesses added, she cradled him in her arms, and begged him to breathe. “I’m so sorry,” she was heard saying over and over. “David, I’m so sorry. I love you.” 4

the murder made headlines all over the world. One of the English tabloids nicknamed Clara the Driller Killer. The New York Post’s headline tagged her “Mad Wife at Wheel.” On network television, the morning talk shows interviewed just about anyone they could find who knew something about her, and even the late-night comedians used her as fodder for jokes in their opening monologues. When Clara emerged from seclusion for her court appearance after her release from jail on $30,000 bail, nearly a dozen photographers were there to capture her every move. Perhaps because she didn’t want to be recognized in public,

T4096.indb 4

1/18/07 7:18:42 AM

6 5 she had changed the color of her hair from reddish blond to dark suburban brown. She sat in the courtroom between two friends, wearing an madness elegant teal pantsuit, staring straight ahead, blinking back tears. Her wedding ring was still on her left hand. It was rare to find Clara not weeping, said her lawyer, George Parnham, who gained national attention last year for his sympathetic defense of Andrea Yates, the Houston mother who drowned her five children. Parnham told reporters that Clara was still having difficulty believing that David would never again walk through the front door of their home. A couple of her close friends told me they had spent nights at her home because they were afraid she would become suicidal if she was left alone for too long. The only thing that kept Clara going, they said, was her love for her sons, who were just about to reach their fourth birthdays. For weeks, people could not stop talking about her. The scene of a vengeful suburban wife tearing off the blouse of her husband’s mistress, then furiously mowing down her husband, then having an abrupt change of heart and crying out for him to live, was so horrific, and so outlandishly dramatic, that it could have been lifted straight out of a classic film noir. Local radio talk shows were jammed with callers saying that Clara should not be severely punished for what she had done. More than one caller suggested that David had signed his own death warrant the moment he left the Hilton with Gail instead of with his wife and daughter. In the letters to the editor section of the Houston Chronicle, one writer blamed the entire fiasco on the other woman, Gail Bridges, for wanting to carry on an extramarital affair with David. Another blamed David for choosing to stray. Clara Harris, one woman wrote, had simply “acted out” the fantasy of every woman who learns her husband is having an affair. Gail Bridges, like Clara, had also gone into seclusion for weeks after David Harris’ death, in part because of the public speculation about who she was and why she had become romantically involved with the orthodontist. Reporters quickly found out that this was not the first time she had been accused of having an affair. During Gail’s divorce proceedings, which began in 1999, Steve Bridges claimed that she had been carrying on a lesbian relationship with her best friend, Julie Knight, who was married to Charles “Chuck” Knight, a software specialist for an aerospace company. Chuck

T4096.indb 5

1/18/07 7:18:42 AM

6 Skip made the same allegations about his wife during their divorce. NeiHollandsworth ther husband ever presented any definitive evidence in court that proved a lesbian relationship, and Julie and Gail’s lawyer, Valerie Davenport, of Houston, later stated in a court filing that the tale had been invented by their husbands merely as a way to divert attention from their own “improper misconduct,” including, she alleged, the abuse of alcohol and prescription pills by Steve and an extramarital affair carried on by Chuck with one of Gail and Julie’s close friends (charges both Steve and Chuck deny). Still, for the media, the lesbian allegations gave the Harris saga an irresistibly salacious new twist. And the story only snowballed when it was learned that Gail and Julie had appeared on a segment of the Sally Jesse Raphael show in 2001, wearing wigs and dark glasses, to talk about their former husbands’ attempts to portray them as lesbians. Soon, videocassette tapes of the episode, which had been titled “My Husband Spies on Me,” were in the hands of most Houston media outlets, and soundbites were being played on the local news shows. A photo of Gail in her wig was run in the Houston Chronicle. “Bisexual Triangle Led to Car Slay of Hubby,” the always-hyperbolic New York Post proclaimed. Gail Bridges had become the Hester Prynne of the Houston suburbs. Only she wasn’t wearing one scarlet letter. She was wearing two: an A and an L. How had so many likable, normal people—known around their neighborhoods for their decency—found themselves entangled in such a saga? How had they ended up doing things to one another, and to themselves, that simply defied explanation? In many ways, what happened on July 24, and everything that led up to it, was the real-life version of one of those novels that are periodically published exploring that well-worn topic of American fiction: madness in the suburbs. “It is madness. There’s no other way to describe it,” Julie Knight told me one day, shaking her head slowly as we sat at a Joe’s Crab Shack in a sunbaked strip mall next to Interstate 45. “You really do think you have your life worked out. You really do think nothing can go too wrong. And now here we all are on the front pages of newspapers.” 6

one would be hard-pressed to find a more pristine suburban world than the bedroom communities south of Houston.

T4096.indb 6

1/18/07 7:18:43 AM

6 7 Almost everywhere you go there are new developments under con- suburban struction, all of them made up of custom-built, split-level homes madness with “great rooms” that lead off the kitchen. In these neighborhoods, the small front yards are neatly landscaped and the sidewalks have no cracks. There are community swimming pools, soccer fields, and stop signs at every intersection. Residents go to churches where the sanctuaries look like civic center auditoriums, and there they give thanks for their good jobs, for their healthy children, and for their pretty homes with the pretty picture windows that look out on other pretty homes across the street. Probably none of them can imagine that someday they will need to visit Blue Moon Investigations, the suburbs’ most prominent private investigative agency, located on the second floor of the Morgan Stanley office building along Webster’s Bay Area Boulevard. Blue Moon is owned by a chatty Rubenesque woman named Bobbi Bacha who wears long black or purplish dresses with granny boots and talks in such a cheerful, singsong voice that people who call her for the first time often mistake her for a teenager. The 43year-old is not exactly a portrait of the hard-boiled detective: She always keeps a stack of decorating magazines in her car in case she needs something to read during stakeouts. Because she wants her clients to feel at home when they visit, she has given her offices a distinctly feminine touch, lining the walls with serene photographs of the moon, placing long-vined potted plants and small, gurgling fountains next to the windows, and burning cinnamon candles on her and her employees’ desks. To soothe her clients’ nerves, she serves them Constant Comment hot tea, never coffee. Bobbi understands that marriage is an often flawed and disastrous institution. The daughter of a Galveston police officer, she began working as a secretary at a private investigative firm in the early eighties after her husband, her high school sweetheart, left her for another woman. After a second failed marriage, she began working nights for another private investigator to keep food on the table for her three children. Occasionally, when no babysitters were available, her children sat in the back seat of the car doing their homework or leafing through comic books while Bobbi tailed cheating spouses. She was good. After word got around about her lying under a dining room table with a tape recorder

T4096.indb 7

1/18/07 7:18:43 AM

6 Skip to catch a wealthy married man with another woman, she had Hollandsworth full-time job offers from many of the dozen or so private-detective agencies in the Houston area. But sensing an opportunity to make her own mark in the mushrooming southern suburbs, she opened Blue Moon Investigations in 1995, taking out large ads in the area Yellow Pages with the headline “Need a Clue? Call Blue.” Today, her business is thriving. On the various days that I visited with her, she was involved in the case of a wife wanting to know if the “thera-stress consultant” that her buttoned-down insurance executive husband was visiting was actually a massageparlor prostitute, a husband wondering if his wife was having sex inside the family Suburban with cowboys she was meeting at a country-western bar, and an astronaut’s wife who thought her husband was making out with a secretary on his lunch break at the NASA complex. She has 38 assistant investigators, most of whom are younger women who work part-time, doing surveillance jobs at night after spending their day taking college classes or toiling away as schoolteachers, executive assistants, or salesclerks. Bobbi admits she prefers female investigators—“I think we are so much more naturally observant,” she says—but she does want people to know she’s an equal opportunity employer. Her chief investigator, Jeff Moore, is a former male stripper. And when Bobbi is overbooked, she gets her third husband, Lucas, a brainy Boeing engineer, to do surveillance work for her, despite the fact that he’s a bit of a Mr. Magoo who at restaurants will often circle the dining room a couple of times on his way back from the restroom because he’s forgotten where his table is located. On the afternoon of January 27, 1999, Bobbi was about to leave the office when the phone rang. A man named Chuck Knight told her that he needed someone that evening to watch his wife, Julie, and her best friend, Gail Bridges. Chuck and his wife lived one neighborhood away from Gail and her husband, Steve, and the two couples were good friends. They went to the same church, Bay Harbor United Methodist. Their boys played on the same soccer team. They drank champagne together every New Year’s Eve at the Knights’ house. But for the past year, Chuck said, neighbors had started coming to him and Steve, asking why Gail and Julie spent so much time together—going to lunch, taking tennis 8

T4096.indb 8

1/18/07 7:18:43 AM

6 9 lessons, sitting around at one or the other’s homes—while the suburban husbands were away at work. Chuck said he began to have suspi- madness cions himself after watching Julie and Gail hugging and, he says, fondling each other when the two couples went out to dinner. The more time passed, and the more their marriages soured, the more Chuck and Steve thought they realized what was going on: Their wives must be lesbians. Chuck told Bobbi that he and Steve would be watching the children that evening so their wives could go shopping at the Baybrook Mall for a couple of hours and that he wanted the two of them followed. According to Bobbi’s notes, Chuck said to her, “But I bet they will go to a hotel. Or they might just pull over on the side of a highway to do their business. Gail has a boob job, and my wife will not be able to wait to touch those puppies.” Bobbi sighed. She had promised her husband and children that she would get home early to fix dinner, and all of her investigators were already booked. But she did not want the male-ownedand-operated Turman and Associates, her chief competitor in the suburbs, to get Chuck’s business if she turned it down. She took his credit card number over the phone—Blue Moon charges $55 an hour, with a four-hour minimum, for a surveillance job—and she drove over to the Knight house in the Harbor Park subdivision of League City, where she waited for Gail and Julie to drive off in Gail’s Navigator. Out came Julie, a curvy blonde with startlingly blue eyes, wearing blue jeans and a red Tommy Hilfiger top. Out came Gail in blue jeans and a pink top. The two women drove to the mall and visited a few stores, with Bobbi following at a safe distance. When they lingered at a Nine West shoe store, Bobbi walked in and sat near them, trying on shoes, including a pair of stiletto heels. Meanwhile, the two women swapped stories, laughing loudly, before finally heading back out of the mall, driving through a McDonald’s for soft drinks, and going home. The next day, Bobbi told Julie’s husband, Chuck, that they had acted like Wilma and Betty from the Flintstones and that there was nothing at all lesbianlike about their behavior. The only time they got physically close, she said, was when their heads briefly moved toward each other in the car.

T4096.indb 9

1/18/07 7:18:43 AM

6 According to Bobbi, Chuck asked her to “inflame” that part Skip Hollandsworth of the report and make it seem worse than it was. (Chuck says he never asked Bobbi to inflame anything, nor did he refer to Gail’s breasts as “puppies.”) “Mr. Knight, you do know that women are different than men?” asked Bobbi in response. (Besides her ability to hide in closets and sneak onto hotel room balconies, Bobbi also likes to think of herself as a kind of therapist who can help her clients better understand human behavior.) “Even if two women kiss or hug, it doesn’t mean they are sexually active with one another. Not at all.” Chuck hung up, and so Bobbi filed the case away and turned to her next piece of business. Then, in mid-July 1999, Julie and Gail showed up at her office. As they sipped hot tea, they told Bobbi that they had both filed for divorces from their husbands within a week of one another, and they went into all the standard horror stories about bad husbands that Bobbi had heard thousands of times. Among their complaints was that their husbands had been threatening to expose them in court as lesbians, which they said was preposterous. They thought their spouses might be using the lesbian tactic to force them into agreeing to out-of-court settlements that would leave them with less than their fair share of the community property. Julie said she wanted her husband tracked to see what he might be hiding. (Gail backed out of hiring Bobbi at the last minute, saying she wanted to try to keep the peace between her and Steve during their divorce.) Bobbi had one of her investigators tail Chuck, who began noticing that he was visiting the house of a friend down the street and that another woman was showing up at that house about the same time. Then Bobbi’s investigator caught Chuck and this other woman flying off to Tampa, Florida, for a weekend trip. The woman was Laurie Wells, a part-time batontwirling instructor and the wife of Steve Wells, a respected suburban remodeling contractor. When Bobbi brought in Julie and Gail to deliver her report, the two women’s mouths dropped open. The three women and their husbands had once been good friends. Gail had met Laurie at a Lamaze class and then invited her to Bay Harbor Methodist. Before too long, all three couples—the Knights, the Bridgeses, and the Wellses—were finalizing their divorces, and it was not 10

T4096.indb 10

1/18/07 7:18:44 AM

6 11 pretty. The spouses kept trooping off to court with accusations of suburban all sorts of misbehavior, sexual and otherwise. They got into shout- madness ing matches at the mall and left threatening messages on each other’s voice mail. Julie found her house vandalized, which she blamed on Chuck and Laurie and Steve Bridges. Chuck occasionally followed Julie in his car. During one episode, Julie claims he stuck his middle finger out of his driver’s side window while she stuck a camera out of her sunroof, snapping photos of him to show to a divorce judge. And in one of the more heated court skirmishes, Gail and Julie accused Chuck and Steve of taping their phone calls and then splicing the conversations together so that the two wives would appear to be swapping sexually suggestive comments about such activities as eating ice cream. After Julie and Gail paid a visit to the district attorney’s office, both men were indicted on felony charges of illegal wiretapping. (Charges against Steve were later dropped, but charges against Chuck are still pending.) By late last year, everyone was officially divorced. Chuck and his new girlfriend, Laurie Wells, both of whom had gotten little property in their divorces, moved into a small apartment together. Steve Wells had full custody of the Wellses’ two girls, in part because Laurie had called him and said she was going to teach the children to hate him, a phone call that he taped and later played before a judge. In her divorce settlement, Julie got full custody of her and Chuck’s two children, but she was continually returning to court to ask for protective orders against Chuck, who she claimed was stalking and harassing her and the children. As for Gail, she got custody of the two youngest children while Steve got custody of the eldest. She and the two kids moved into a smaller house nearby, and then Gail got a job at Space Center Orthodontics. if there was one man who did not seem likely to get involved in an affair, it was David Harris. “I’m not exaggerating this. He just didn’t look twice at another woman,” one of his coworkers told me. He was a little vain—he wore a toupee to keep up his looks—but he was never the kind of guy who wanted to go out drinking with his buddies or flick the channel over to HBO to watch Real Sex when his wife wasn’t in the bedroom. He and Clara were devoted members of Shadycrest Baptist Church,

T4096.indb 11

1/18/07 7:18:44 AM

6 Skip where David played the drums in a contemporary Christian softHollandsworth rock group, the Colemans, providing the backbeat on such songs as “Sing Hallelujah” and “You Make Me Complete.” David had been divorced before, though infidelity reportedly had not been the cause of the breakup. His wife claims that she left him because he had been too focused on his career. After his marriage to Clara, his career had indeed taken off. Besides building his own practice, in which he was putting braces on hundreds of kids and some adults, including Bobbi Bacha’s husband, Lucas, he had purchased seven other dental practices in the area and put together a management team to staff and supervise them. By 2001 his income was skyrocketing. He was clearing as much as $35,000 a month from Space Center Orthodontics alone, and he bought a piece of land in a more upscale shopping area so that he could build an enormous, six-thousand-square-foot new office. Once the building was finished, Clara was going to move her practice there so they could be closer. When his daughter, Lindsey, who worked at Space Center Orthodontics in the summer, told him that her goal in life was to become an orthodontist too, he told her that there would always be an office available for her to come work with him. Why, then, after having built such a life for himself, did he want to put it into play? Some of David’s friends wonder if he felt a typical middle-aged need to shake up his daily routine. They think he was at that place in life where the attention of a new woman was suddenly tantalizing. He had, after all, been telling his friends that he sometimes felt unappreciated by Clara, who was consumed with the children and with her own business. On the other hand, some of the women in his office believe he simply fell under the sexual spell of a woman they think was clearly out to snag him. “I remember watching Gail bend down in front of David to get some papers out of a filing cabinet,” one woman told me. “But instead of bending at the knees, like everyone else, she bent at the waist so that her butt would stick up. And I thought, ‘Uh-oh.’” Around Space Center Orthodontics, it is hard to find someone who does not think that Gail saw David as her ticket back to the lifestyle to which she was once accustomed. But Gail’s closest friends said that for the first several months she worked there, she never said a word to them about feelings she might have had for 12

T4096.indb 12

1/18/07 7:18:44 AM

6 13 the orthodontist. Obviously, they said, attention from any man suburban must have felt good to Gail, who had been embroiled for so long madness in a vicious divorce and who couldn’t go to church or her children’s school without people whispering that she was a lesbian. And, they admitted, Gail could be cute around a guy, turning on her highschool-cheerleader personality. But none of them really believed that she would get into an affair, until Gail began to mention that David was taking her to lunch. She told them that he had confided to her that he was staying in his marriage only for his business and the children. Then she told them that David had said he loved her. No one from David’s circle believes that the orthodontist was really in love with her. “If anything, he was infatuated with her for a while, nothing more,” said a close friend who asked not to be identified. “He was never going to leave his wife.” Nevertheless, by early this summer, the employees were getting worried. Everyone was whispering about David and Gail’s lunches at Perry’s. And when someone saw the two of them apparently fondle each other in the office when they thought no one was looking, “the cat got out of the bag and started running all over the floor,” said one worker. About that time, David’s brother, Gerald, Jr., a psychologist who teaches at the University of Houston, had installed a video camera in the office to identify ways to improve patient-staff interactions. One worker kept turning off the camera because she didn’t want Gerald to see scenes of David coming up to flirt with Gail. Over the July 4 weekend, roughly four months into the affair, the Harris family took a vacation to Jamaica. A few of his closest co-workers were hoping that David would come back determined to save his marriage. When David returned, they decided to confront him. He was open with them, but when someone suggested that Gail be fired, he paused. He said he still loved Clara and did not want to end the marriage, but he had gotten emotionally involved with Gail. Clara still knew nothing and presumably had no suspicions of what David was doing. No one from his office had said anything to her. But perhaps worried that the word would leak out anyway, David sat down with his wife on Wednesday morning, July 17, and confessed. He told her about the lunches at Perry’s and the nights

T4096.indb 13

1/18/07 7:18:45 AM

6 Skip at the same Hilton hotel where they had held their wedding recepHollandsworth tion. Clara became hysterical. The two went to the office, where Clara confronted Gail, telling her that she was fired and that she could never come back. Two days later, on Friday, she allegedly called Gail so many times, ranting about what kind of woman she was, that Julie Knight reported to the police that Clara was making “terroristic threats” on Gail’s life. One of Clara’s friends, however, says she had only called Gail to thank her for opening her eyes. Those who saw Clara said she looked ravaged in the days after learning about the affair. She quit eating and lost ten pounds. She walked into the office of the plastic surgeon who was next door to Space Center Orthodontics and made a $5,000 down payment on a liposuction procedure and breast implants. She hired a personal trainer and started going to a tanning salon. And she told people in a fervent voice that she was going to win David back. One day, the two returned to Space Center Orthodontics holding hands after having had lunch. “We’re going to make it,” David said to a friend. In fact, by the start of that next week, David and Clara had sat down with his parents and his teenage daughter, Lindsey, and told them about the affair. David asked for their forgiveness. “It really was a time when healing had begun,” David’s father told me. As part of that healing, David told Clara, he wanted to sit down with Gail at a restaurant and tell her that he was sorry. What happened wasn’t her fault, he said. He couldn’t just break off all communication with her. Clara reluctantly agreed. In fact, according to a close friend, she told David that if he stuck by their marriage, he could continue some sort of friendship with Gail. But as the day when David was scheduled to have dinner with Gail came closer, Clara began to worry. She flipped through the Yellow Pages and saw an ad with the headline “Need a Clue? Call Blue.” Bobbi Bacha was about to get another case. 14

bobbi was meeting with someone else when Clara came in on Tuesday, July 23. Clara told the woman at the front desk that she needed someone to follow her husband the next night. She explained that he was going to meet his mistress at Perry’s Restaurant and that she wanted the investigator to get close enough

T4096.indb 14

1/18/07 7:18:45 AM

6 15 to overhear what he said. As she began to feel more comfortable suburban in the Blue Moon offices, she started chatting about the other madness woman. She described her as “evil.” She said she had been hearing in town that this woman had a lesbian lover and that the two lesbians might have come up with a plot for one of them to seduce David to get at his money. On a form she filled out for Blue Moon, Clara wrote down the woman’s full name: Belinda Gail Thompson Bridges. When Bobbi briefly glanced at the form, she didn’t make the connection. She assigned the case to one of her part-time investigators, Lindsey Dubec, a blond, pigtailed 25-year-old criminal justice major at the University of Houston–Clear Lake. Dubec jumped into her gray Toyota Camry and drove over to Space Center Orthodontics to tail David. But David didn’t go to Perry’s. He drove to the Hilton, where he met Gail inside at a restaurant. Dubec couldn’t get close enough to hear what they were saying, but according to Gail’s friends, David became distraught and told her that he wasn’t ready for it to end, that he still loved her, and that he could arrange for them to still see each other. Gail then told him that she wanted no part of the relationship while David was still married. Then she got up and walked out to her car. David followed her. They talked for a few more minutes outside. Obviously, something between them changed, because they then headed upstairs to a room. Dubec returned to her car and positioned herself so that she could watch the front of the hotel and David’s car in the parking lot, then pulled out a video camera to capture the couple on tape when they next appeared. Bobbi always instructed her girls to capture their “subjects” on videotape whenever possible. Then, assuming she was in for a long night, Dubec called a girlfriend, who drove over to the Hilton with some soft drinks and fast food to keep her company. While Dubec and her friend were chatting away about the pros and cons of an elopement versus a big church wedding, Clara Harris and her stepdaughter, Lindsey, were pulling up to the Hilton. Wondering what David might be doing, Clara had been unable to sit at home. She had asked Lindsey to go along with her to search for him. They drove to Perry’s, walked inside, and couldn’t find him. They went to another restaurant where David

T4096.indb 15

1/18/07 7:18:45 AM

6 Skip said he had sometimes taken Gail and then went to Gail’s house. Hollandsworth Finally, Clara called Blue Moon and got through to Bobbi’s husband, Lucas, who was taking the nighttime emergency calls. She demanded to know where her husband was. Lucas called Dubec, then he called Clara back and said her husband was with the other woman at a hotel. Clara knew exactly what hotel that would be. When Clara and Lindsey arrived at the Hilton, they spotted Gail’s Navigator in the lot. Clara drove up to the car, got out, and busted the Navigator’s taillights and scratched it with her keys (Dubec, who was staring at David’s car several parking spaces away, never saw Clara). Clara and Lindsey then parked in another area of the lot before walking to the front desk of the Hilton and asking for the room of David Harris. An employee said that no Harris was listed. Clara came up with an idea: Both she and Lindsey called David from their cell phones and told him that one of the twins was sick and begged him to come home. David told both that he and Gail were at Pappadeaux (a restaurant Clara and Lindsey hadn’t visited) and that he was on his way home. A few minutes later, the elevator doors opened and out walked David and Gail. And just a few minutes after that, Lindsey Dubec of Blue Moon, sitting out in the parking lot, saw a frantic David and Gail rushing out the doors. “So anyway,” said her friend, “ just think of all the money you would save if you just went to a justice of the peace.” “Hold on,” said Dubec, turning on her video camera. Moments later she heard the loud roar of an engine. Through her viewfinder, she saw a flash of a Mercedes. Then David Harris was flying in the air. “Oh, my God! Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” the two women screamed. 16

considering that a jury is no doubt going to watch David Harris’ death replayed many times on a television screen in the courtroom (the tape has not yet been made available to the public), George Parnham might have only one defense to make for his client at her trial, which is scheduled to take place in January: that she had gone insane in the heat of the moment. He hinted at such a defense during an interview with CNN’s Paula Zahn back in July, when he somberly said, “Who knows what happens to a loving wife, obviously a loving mother, a person who wanted to

T4096.indb 16

1/18/07 7:18:45 AM

6 17 maintain the sanctity of the union with her husband, when, unex- suburban pectedly, she is confronted with the picture and the reality of the madness very fine man that she loves in an embrace with another female? ” It certainly didn’t hurt Clara’s chances of staying out of prison when David’s parents said that they had forgiven her for what she had done to their son. “What David did outside his marriage was a tragic mistake, and what Clara did was a tragic mistake,” Gerald Harris, a retired public school administrator, told me. “But these were mistakes made by two of the finest people I know. And if God can forgive us of our sins and our mistakes, then why should we not be able to forgive the sins and mistakes of others? Clara has been a good mother and a good wife and a good person. We hope she’ll be able to raise her twin boys in honor of our son, and we will do everything we can to help her.” On the other hand, it’s hard to imagine jurors acquitting a woman who kept turning her car around in a parking lot so that she could run over her husband again and again. If she was in such an uncontrollably insane rage, why didn’t she keep driving around the parking lot until she found her rival, who was on the other side of the Lincoln Navigator, and plow into her too? If Parnham could not persuade a Houston jury to believe that Andrea Yates was insane, it’s doubtful he’s going to find a way to persuade a jury that Clara was. What’s more, no matter how badly David Harris acted that night, no juror is going to be able to get out of his or her mind the fact that Clara murdered him in front of his own teenage daughter. According to people who have talked to Lindsey since her return to Ohio after her father’s funeral, she’s still utterly traumatized by that night, haunted by the fact that the last words she said to her father, as he stood with his mistress, were “I hate you”—and haunted too by the thud of the Mercedes slamming into her father’s body and knocking him backward while she watched through the windshield. What she says in her testimony could very well decide what kind of prison term her stepmother serves. As for Gail Bridges, she has tried to get back to a normal life, becoming a room mother at her children’s school, but she has trouble looking other mothers in the eye. “People forget that she too is grieving over the death of a man she loved,” her attorney told me.

T4096.indb 17

1/18/07 7:18:45 AM

6 To add to her problems, her still bitter ex-husband, Steve, Skip Hollandsworth showed up at a civil court asking that his and Gail’s divorce decree be changed to allow him to have full custody of all three of their children. He claimed that as long as Clara Harris was free on bond, she might want to harm Gail and maybe even the children. He then resurrected the lesbian claim, and for good measure, he added that Gail “may not be mentally stable at this time.” Chuck Knight quickly followed his friend’s lead and filed his own claim trying to get full custody of his and Julie’s two children. He theorized that as long as Julie and the children remained close friends with Gail and her children, then they would be in danger if Clara Harris came around. When Gail and Julie were forced to make a court appearance regarding the matter, the media crush was so intense that both of them were nearly knocked to the ground. Steve’s motion is still pending; Chuck dropped his but plans to refile. More than two years after their divorces became final, it is hard to believe that these fights are still going on. Love and destruction: two sides of the same coin. One day I went by Bobbi Bacha’s office to find out what she thought about the way all these events had turned out. She was busy as always, with a stack of “domestic investigation” files on her desk. But she stopped what she was doing for a few minutes to philosophize. “Well, the moral to this story is very simple,” she said. “If you are going to have an extramarital affair, then you ought to wait until after you are divorced to have one. Does that make sense to you?” It did, but before I could answer, her intercom buzzed. It was the woman at the front desk: “Bobbi, there’s a new client here to see you.” 18

6 November 2002

T4096.indb 18

1/18/07 7:18:46 AM

the outsiders

6

pamel a colloff

T

he unofficial leader of Amarillo’s punk scene looked and dressed and acted different. His nonconformity made him an easy target— and it may have kept the football player who killed him from going to jail.

on friday nights in amarillo , after the high school football season and its hopes have faded, there is a restless energy on Western Street, where students from Amarillo High and its crosstown rival, Tascosa, idle in empty parking lots, leaning out the windows of their pickups to discuss the night’s possibilities. The uneasy tensions of adolescence reverberate along this broad boulevard lined with fast-food joints, convenience stores, and allnight drive-throughs, where the jocks and the punks and the kickers and the stoners while away their weekend evenings. Here, the jocks—sometimes called the White Hats for the ball caps they regularly wear—reign supreme: With a sense of certainty and the self-assurance of those who know their worth, they drive along Western Street, surveying the landscape as if it were their own. The objects of their scorn are the misfits who stand at its fringes: punks in patched-up pants and black leather jackets and the occasional blue mohawk. Over the years, the punks say, the White Hats have mocked and bullied them without mercy, spitting on them as they walk down the hall at school, roughing them up in

T4096.indb 19

1/18/07 7:18:46 AM

6 Pamela Colloff the restroom, and swinging at them, on occasion, from the back of pickup trucks with bats. “Hey, freak,” the jocks would yell from their cars at the punks passing by on foot, scattering broken glass along the pavement as hurled beer bottles missed their mark. Amarillo turned a blind eye to these cruelties until a brawl of such extraordinary violence erupted one night on Western Street that a Tascosa High football player would later say it “seemed like a dream.” It happened on a Friday night much like any other, a few weeks before Christmas in 1997. Rumors had been circulating at Tascosa all week that the football players—the Rebels— were going to fight the punks. The previous weekend there had been a scuffle between the two groups outside a coffee shop on Western Street at which seventeen-year-old Dustin Camp, the ruddy-cheeked center for the junior varsity team, had gotten into an argument with several punks. It had quickly escalated: Dustin’s windshield had been smashed, and though he denies it, the punks say he had taken swipes at them with his car before peeling off down the boulevard. Now he had returned to the coffee shop to see how the rematch would unfold. Beside him in his prized 1983 Cadillac sat varsity tight end Rob Mansfield and in the back was Rob’s friend Elise Thompson, a poised, serious-minded girl who would graduate as the valedictorian of the class of 1999. Elise had heard the rumors, but she didn’t believe they were anything more than the usual bluster. There was often such talk, but rarely did the boys do anything more than throw a few punches before hightailing it out of there. As Dustin turned his Cadillac onto Western Street, the coffee shop came into view: A large group of boys in varsity jackets stood outside, along with dozens of students who had gathered to watch. Several punks, armed with bats and chains, soon approached, challenging the jocks to fight; the melee began in the parking lot across the way with a ferocity that sent a chill through Elise. Alarmed, she assumed that Dustin would take her and Rob home, but he steered his Cadillac toward the action, weaving through the boys, who wrangled with one another under the streetlights. To his left, he caught a glimpse of one of his good friends, Andrew McCullough, being beaten by several punks. It was then, Elise later recalled, that Dustin “snapped.” Veering toward the crowd, 20

T4096.indb 20

1/18/07 7:18:46 AM

6 21 he knocked one of the punks off his feet and onto the hood of the the Cadillac; the boy stared in startled amazement before falling off outsiders to the side. “Let’s go,” cried Rob as the punks pummeled the car with bats and fists, making a thunderous racket. “Let’s get out of here!” Dustin drove hurriedly toward the exit, then changed his mind; circling back around, he jumped a median as he picked up speed. Spotting a punk, nineteen-year-old Brian Deneke, striking someone, he drove steadily toward him. Brian turned for an instant as the headlights drew nearer and struck the Cadillac with a chain when it came too close. Then there was a thud. Brian rolled up onto the hood before sliding beneath the car. Elise closed her eyes and prayed that it was only the median she had felt underneath the wheels. “I’m a ninja in my Caddy,” Elise heard Dustin boast. “I bet he liked that one.” Elise looked over her shoulder, out the back window, and saw Brian crumpled on the pavement in a pool of blood. “I might have screamed,” she later testified. “I was having trouble forming words. . . . The emotions were so intense—we were overwhelmed. It was insane.” The Cadillac lurched out of the parking lot and sped toward the highway, leaving Brian dying on the pavement. In its wake, over the course of the many months that followed, the city’s sympathies would be divided as it waited for the football player behind the wheel to be tried for murder. But in those first searing moments, as the Cadillac fled the scene, all of that was unforeseeable to the three teenagers inside. After what seemed an interminable amount of time, Elise leaned forward, trembling, and asked the question that was no doubt on their minds: “What if he’s dead?” amarillo straddles the flat, empty prairie that stretches north across the Panhandle toward Oklahoma—a stark landscape of wide-open sky and grassy plains unexpectedly broken just west of town by the upturned tailfins of Cadillac Ranch. It is arguably Texas’ last great Western outpost, a city of 169,000 bordered to the east by the ragged barbed wire of the stockyards and vast ranchland that extends to the horizon. Named “Amarillo” (Spanish for “yellow”) after the yellow wildflowers that bloom in its pastures

T4096.indb 21

1/18/07 7:18:47 AM

6 Pamela Colloff each spring and the yellow soil that lines its creek banks, it is a place of contrary impulses: with rutted cowpaths and an interstate highway, honky-tonks and old-money enclaves, roughnecks and debutantes who fly to Dallas to shop at Neiman’s. Founded a little more than a century ago by bullheaded men who disregarded its wild and inhospitable weather and embraced the solitary freedom of the range, Amarillo has long been home to independent thinkers and contrarians. “In the fifties it was the cowboys versus the city slickers,” resident eccentric Stanley Marsh 3 recalled as he sat in his downtown office in a white brimmed cowboy hat and a fake sheriff ’s star that read “Boss.” “And before that, at the turn of the century, it was the merchants versus the ranchers. I’ve been told they had a gold rope up at the cemetery so that merchants and ranchers—who smelled worse and who were considered speculators because they could lose everything on a herd of cattle—wouldn’t have to mix.” Isolated by its geography and steeped in a stubborn frontier tradition, Amarillo has seen a good number of colorful squabbles in its history, including several in recent years: During the eighties, there was Boone Pickens’ vendetta against the Amarillo GlobeNews for its scathing criticism of a university president whom he steadfastly supported; in the nineties there was the feud between Marsh and the wealthy Whittenburg clan that boiled over into a bitter civil lawsuit. For younger residents, whose rivalries play out on a smaller scale—typically in the form of high school football, a sport with an almost religious significance in this northern corner of the state—the city’s insularity gives rise to a heightened sense of antagonism, one that permeates teenage culture to its core. During Hell Week, the seven days of pranks and vandalism that precede each year’s big game between the Tascosa Rebels and the Amarillo High Sandies, students give in to a feverish aggression: They paintball their opponents’ trucks and set off firecrackers on their lawns, egg houses and string trees with toilet paper, and most notably, get into fistfights around town. Throughout the season, Tascosa students are riled up at pep rallies by their pep squad, the Fanatics, cheering while football players pretend to beat and stomp on dummies dressed as their opponents’ mascots. Such rowdiness is winked at, its excesses as much a part of the 22

T4096.indb 22

1/18/07 7:18:47 AM

6 23 culture as the machismo that informs the landscape: In the com- the mons area of Tascosa High stands a statue of the Rebel, a cowboy outsiders with one hand resting firmly on his holstered gun. Indeed, for Amarillo’s other rebels, the “freaks” who sit disinterestedly at the very top of the bleachers during pep rallies, the rah-rah atmosphere has an ugly side: It leaves little room for those without athletic ability or school spirit or, by extension, those who deviate from the norm. “Teenagers here pay a lot of attention to what your parents do, where you live, what name-brand clothing you wear, what church you go to, what kind of car you drive,” one mother lamented. “If you can’t compete, you’re an outcast.” If conformity has become a virtue at schools here as elsewhere, it is only reinforced by the fact that Amarillo itself is a stronghold of both cultural and religious traditionalism: Bordered by some of Texas’ few remaining dry counties, its FM dial carries an abundance of evangelical radio stations, and its newspaper regularly runs letters to the editor advocating the return of school prayer and creationism in the curriculum. “It’s like we’re stuck in the fifties here,” sighed more than one teenager. Even if the city has provoked a wholly original flamboyance in a few individuals, its conservative bent can be stifling for those who do not adhere to its expectations. “I believe it’s natural for a certain number of young people to do outrageous things like swallow goldfish or dress like Elvis or tuck their jeans into their boots to shock their elders,” Marsh observed. “When I was growing up in Amarillo, it was considered radical to turn your jeans up only once at the cuff, instead of twice like everybody else.” No less radical by today’s standards, the punk scene—a loosely defined subculture populated by disaffected kids who range in style from skateboarders to skinheads—arrived in Amarillo by way of Interstate 40, a major thoroughfare for touring bands traveling west to Los Angeles. When punk rock exploded onto the East Coast in the late seventies, soon spreading to the Midwest and West Coast as well, seminal bands like the Clash passed through town not long afterward, bringing a whole new sound and sensibility with them. “When punk came here in the early eighties, it was exhilarating—the energy was tremendous,” recalled David Poindexter, a tattooed plumber who, at 45, is the old man of the

T4096.indb 23

1/18/07 7:18:47 AM

6 Pamela Colloff Amarillo punk scene. “You danced until the sweat poured off you, until you were too exhausted to stand. It felt like something was finally happening here.” Punk’s defiant lyrics and its rejection of mainstream conventions—with its outrageous attire, anti-authoritarian attitude, and disdain for middle-class materialism—appealed to some young Amarilloans in the throes of adolescent rebellio n. Though it was first and foremost about the music, which was fast and loud and often lacked any semblance of melody or virtuosity, punk also provided a ready-made aesthetic and an all-encompassing lifestyle for those who had never found their place in the world. They were not, for the most part, teenagers who excelled at school or went out for any team: They were kids who had never quite fit in, calling themselves nerds, loners, rejects, and geeks. Most were raised outside the privileged milieu of Wolflin—the older neighborhood of stately homes, well-tended lawns, and brick-paved streets where ranching families have lived for generations—and lacked the privileges others took for granted, having neither their own car nor the requisite expensive clothing. In the punk scene, they found a haven from sometimes chaotic homes and a hostile atmosphere at school. Their decision to become punks represented a shift in thinking: They were no longer outsiders by circumstance but by choice. Flaunting their differentness, they styled their hair into mohawks, covered themselves with tattoos and piercings, and wore secondhand clothes on which they scrawled slogans like “No Future.” The most extreme-looking of the bunch are the gutter punks, a subculture within a subculture consisting of a handful of local runaways who scavenge food from dumpsters and squat in abandoned homes. Other punks view their slovenly habits and excessive drinking with contempt, arguing that they give the scene a bad name. Among their most outspoken critics in Amarillo are the Bomb City Skins, a group whose name refers to the nearby Pantex plant that once manufactured, and now disassembles, nuclear weapons. The Skins have adopted the look of traditional skinheads—pegged pants, suspenders, and work boots—but not their racist ideology; they are apolitical punks who shaved off their mohawks to be employable, and they hold down minimum-wage jobs around town. The rest of Amarillo’s punks are not as tribalized; 24

T4096.indb 24

1/18/07 7:18:47 AM

6 25 some dress unremarkably, while others wear studded dog collars the and thick black eyeliner—their entire presentation, from their outsiders green hair down to their steel-toed boots, an affront to prevailing notions of good taste. Until recently, punks gathered at the Eighth Street House, a run-down crash pad in an overgrown, weedy lot near the center of town. It was an uninspiring place, with cheap wood paneling that was covered with graffiti and posters advertising old punk shows and a few dim fluorescent bulbs illuminating an ungodly layer of grime. Gutter punks lived there when they needed a place to stay, pooling money for rent and food; their furniture was picked from castoffs on the street, and their electricity was illegally wired into the house with jumper cables. The mood at the Eighth Street House on my first visit last summer was oppressive: A limping dog meandered along the stoop, where a boy with blue hair sipped a Schlitz and ate spaghetti out of a can, talking at length about his luckless attempts to find a job. Music blared in the background, and another boy lay disinterestedly on a beaten-up couch behind him, watching his cigarette smoke drift through the air. Among the residents there was a dead-end sort of feeling. But the place came alive at night, when a Dallas punk band played to an appreciative crowd of sixty or so teenagers, who rushed into the cavernous rec room when the thrashing cacophony of sound began to ricochet off the concrete floors. Grabbing each other by the hand, they ran toward the makeshift stage and danced in a circle to the frenetic beat—a reeling sea of boots and fists and spikes from which a few fell to the ground laughing before returning to the fray. This was where Brian Deneke, the punk who died on Western Street, had briefly lived with his girlfriend, Jennifer Hix, a short, stocky girl with bleached-blond hair shaved on the sides and tinted pink at the edges. When I first met her at the Eighth Street House, she sat in her bedroom on a patchwork velvet bedspread, chainsmoking and absently examining her chipped blue nail polish; she wore a spiked dog collar and a faded black T-shirt that read “Conflict,” and behind her on the wall, next to an upside-down flag, rested a small sign that said, “Be Warned! The Nature of Your Oppression Is the Aesthetic of Our Anger.” Despite her forbidding,

T4096.indb 25

1/18/07 7:18:48 AM

6 Pamela Colloff tough-girl attitude—her mouth, pierced multiple times, was often pursed determinedly into a pout—Jennifer seemed vulnerable and shy, a fragile girl behind extravagant posturing. She had first met Brian when they were kids living in the same neighborhood; when they were younger, she recalled, they used to throw eggs at each other. She had become a habitual runaway, spending time in a detention center and a work camp, but Brian later became a central figure in her turbulent life, traveling the country with her and caring for her when she had no money. The room still held remnants of his presence; in addition to the tattoo on her forearm bearing his name, his black leather jacket was hung reverently on the door—the same leather jacket that he had worn on the night he was killed. Jennifer had been there, in the empty parking lot off of Western Street, when Brian died. The moment was still fresh in her mind, as it was for everyone who passed through the Eighth Street House. “Brian was the candle burning the fastest and brightest—people gravitated toward him,” said Dan Kelso, an older punk who once worked with him. “He was the face of the scene here. He was visible, smiling, standing tall. When he was killed, part of these kids died too.” 26

brian grew up on the southwestern side of Amarillo in a working-class neighborhood of tan-colored tract homes and sun-bleached lawns—a colorless grid dotted with the occasional basketball hoop and American flag, each block one of uninspiring similarity. His parents are ordinary, hardworking people, both Kansas natives who moved to the city nearly twenty years ago when his father was transferred there by his employer. Mike Deneke is a stainless-steel-cookware salesman, a genial, heavyset man who favors plaid shirts and suspenders; his wife, Betty, a reserved woman with dark eyes, manages a photo-processing lab. It is clear upon first meeting the Denekes that they lead lives of quiet devastation; their grief, apparent in their slow gestures and downcast gazes, permeates their home with an acute sense of mourning. Their house is one of suburban propriety, with a bed of gardenias out front and, in the backyard, a mulberry tree that cradles the treehouse in which Brian and his brother, Jason,

T4096.indb 26

1/18/07 7:18:48 AM

6 27 once played. In their den, an otherwise unremarkable room with the an easy chair and an assortment of painted enamel butterflies and outsiders china bells in glass cases, is a black and white photo of Brian with a mohawk. “We thought that if we didn’t accept him, we would lose him,” his father said. “You get to the point where you can keep battling with your children, but you realize you’re not going to change them.” While Jason, two years his senior, was bookish and introverted, Brian was gregarious and outspoken—a strong-willed, restless boy who rarely sat still. “He never took much of an interest in school, and he wasn’t an athletic star,” Jason recalled. “If you’re not an athlete, if you’re not a part of the culture, you’re nothing. It was difficult for Brian to fit in.” When he was thirteen, he started using a skateboard to maneuver his way around the neighborhood. He met other skaters who introduced him to punk rock, and he was soon attending local punk shows with his brother, who would become a Bomb City Skin. The hard-edged music and rebellious attitude appealed to Brian, and during his years at Crockett Middle School, he began his transformation from a Boy Scout to a skateboarder with a streak of green hair to a full-fledged punk whose hair was fashioned into a mohawk with a handful of Knox gelatin. His parents were mortified; there was constant arguing at home, and during one particularly heated confrontation, they attempted to cut Brian’s mohawk off. “He had a real strong opinion that it shouldn’t matter how he had his hair, how he dressed,” his father explained. “Even though he was right in a theoretical sense, it didn’t matter. We knew that society would judge him, and that there would be consequences.” Brian would become one of the most controversial-looking punks in town, covering his arms with tattoos and dyeing his hair blue, piercing his nose and wearing a studded dog collar and T-shirts with slogans like “Destroy Everything.” It was not a look that went unnoticed in Amarillo. “Brian had a sense of theater about him,” recalled Marsh. “He was a smartass, and that’s why I liked him. He walked around asking for it and grinned all the way through it.” Lacking a car, Brian was a conspicuous target as he walked to and from school; after several beatings—including one that required stitches in his head—his friends nicknamed him Fist

T4096.indb 27

1/18/07 7:18:48 AM

6 Pamela Colloff Magnet. “People tried to start fights with him wherever he went,” Jennifer said. “When people drove past him, they flipped him off or ran their mouth, calling him a freak or a faggot or a worthless piece of trash. He’d smile and say things like, ‘Oh, you’re such a big man.’ He’d point out how ignorant they were, try to broaden their horizons, and sometimes they’d listen.” For protection, he began wearing a “smiley”: a chain fastened to his belt loop with a lock on the end. In the tenth grade he responded to taunts with violence: Finally fed up with students yelling insults at him and splashing puddles on him as he walked to an Arby’s near school for lunch, he lost his temper and threw a rock at another student’s pickup. He was put on juvenile probation and promptly dropped out of Amarillo High. Not long after, at the age of seventeen, he moved out of his parents’ house and took up residence in an apartment above a nowdefunct punk club, the Egg, making ends meet by washing dishes at the Catfish Shack. Once he had scraped together a few hundred dollars, he decided to see what lay beyond Amarillo. With a stray dog in tow, he and Jennifer hitched rides up and down the East Coast and lived by their wits, collecting cans and polishing rigs at truck stops for spare change and occasionally dumpster diving for dinner. After four months on the road, Brian and Jennifer returned to Amarillo. Brian began working for Marsh in 1997, putting fake road signs—some with curious paintings on them, others with absurd sayings such as “Road Does Not End” and “Lubbock Sucks Eggs”—around town as part of a project dubbed the Dynamite Museum. Brian thrived in its carnival-like atmosphere; the sign crew rode around town in a surrealist caravan, blasting bull-fighting music out of a pink 1959 Cadillac and a Yellow Submarine-themed hearse, accompanied by a pig named Cinderella and Marsh in a top hat reading poetry. Brian worked door-to-door, trying to persuade Amarilloans to place Dynamite Museum signs in their front yard, and his brash charm worked on even the most resistant of adults. “He looked bizarre, but he could walk toward people with his hand out, grinning, and they would like him before he got to their front door,” Marsh explained. “I called him Sunshine. He was boisterous, optimistic, fun—so Sunshine just stuck.” 28

T4096.indb 28

1/18/07 7:18:48 AM

6 29 Brian assumed a larger-than-life stature among the punks, the bringing traveling bands to town with the money he earned outsiders through the Dynamite Museum and making the Eighth Street House a refuge for kids who had nowhere else to go, providing them with food and a place to sleep. “Brian’s main goal, and he had saved a whole lot of money for it, was to start an all-ages place for bands, poetry, art, theater,” said Brady Clark, a former Bomb City Skin. “He wanted to have a place where kids could hang out, be in their own element, and not get harassed by a bunch of drunk rednecks. He wanted to give everyone something constructive to do with their free time.” Brian could have used something constructive himself. In his own free time, he drank heavily; his blood alcohol level on the night he died was .18 percent, nearly twice the legal limit at the time. That night, he had spent the previous few hours at his brother Jason’s house, listening to records and drinking beer, before deciding to drive up to Western Street. Whatever Brian’s motivations were when he joined the fighting—whether it was out of loyalty, vengeance, or drunken bravado—Jennifer is sure that he didn’t expect to die. “I remember after he was hit, there was a cheer,” she said flatly, steeling herself against the heartache of the memory. “We ran to him as soon as he went down. He was trying to talk, but there was too much blood coming out of his mouth. Jason put his arms around him and held him while he died.” as the cadillac sped away from Western Street, Elise Thompson sat in the back seat in stunned silence, her panic slowly giving way to a profound sense of dread. Her mind reeled; the enormity of what had happened seemed impossible to grasp, but she knew, as the car headed down the freeway toward home, that the boy on the pavement was dead. Dustin Camp raced toward Wolflin, turning down one of its wide streets before breaking the silence. “Y’all don’t have to go down with me,” he offered, his voice filled with alarm. “I’ll tell them you weren’t in the car.” Rob Mansfield nodded solemnly from the front seat, agreeing that perhaps that would be best. “But we were in the car,” Elise said firmly. “Nancy,” Rob urged her, calling her by her first name, “I don’t think you understand how serious this is.” Upon hearing

T4096.indb 29

1/18/07 7:18:49 AM

6 Pamela Colloff his friend’s assessment of the situation, Dustin lost his composure and broke into choking sobs, banging his head repeatedly against the steering wheel. It was not the face he usually presented to the world. Relentlessly upbeat, he often wore a confident grin, his close-cropped blond hair framing a boyish face. “Dustin has a million-dollar smile and a sense of humor that’s contagious,” said a family friend. “He laughs with his whole body. When he enters a room, the mood lightens, people smile.” In the locker room at Tascosa High he regularly ribbed other players as they suited up, keeping them in stitches before the game and at halftime. “He used to joke around in class a lot and make everybody crack up,” remembered his friend Jesse Sierra. “At dances, he danced real wild. He’s laid-back, never serious.” When football season was over, he spent his afternoons lifting weights and his weekends mountain biking in nearby Palo Duro Canyon; during the summers, he worked at the auto repair shop that his parents owned, fixing cars with his father. Football was an all-consuming passion for Dustin (who declined to be interviewed for this story, as did his parents), though he was not blessed with the physique for stardom. He was slightly built—a shortcoming he worked hard to overcome, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches between meals to bulk up and lifting weights with a determined intensity. “He wasn’t anyone we noticed initially,” recalled Tascosa High JV football coach Alan Hunnicutt, “but his desire to play was 110 percent.” The Camps were enthusiastic supporters, attending every game of the season and sounding an air horn whenever the team scored a touchdown. But by his junior year, Dustin was still playing JV football while many of his friends—including Rob—played varsity and excelled at the game. If he felt any frustration, he deflected it with jibes and jokes, sitting with the varsity team at lunch and trading wisecracks with them in the weight room. Dustin knew well what it meant to be on the outside looking in: Though he was well regarded by the teenagers in Tascosa High’s ruling elite, he was not one of them. He was from a family of average means, an inescapable fact that set him apart from the old-money crowd. His Cadillac was nearly fifteen years old, and his 30

T4096.indb 30

1/18/07 7:18:49 AM

6 31 parents’ house, though in Wolflin, sat on its edge, one block from the a lower-income part of town. Yet rather than rejecting a world to outsiders which he could never fully belong—as had the punks, whom he and his friends scorned—he embraced it. Standing at the fringes of the in crowd, he perhaps longed for a sense of identity; by distancing himself from the “freaks,” he and his friends could delineate their own social standing within Tascosa’s stratified society, a place where each clique eyed the others with equal suspicion. Such antagonisms were often fueled as much by drinking as by any real aversion to one another; in the hours before Brian’s death, Dustin drank a few beers with a friend, and in his Cadillac was a partially empty eighteen pack of beer and a nearly empty bottle of whiskey left over from the week before. Of course, the night that Brian died was unlike any other. “It was pandemonium,” said one parent. “One of Dustin’s friends had a concussion; another had his head laid open with a chain. A few boys went to the hospital, and the rest came home screaming.” Dustin had returned home that evening for a restless night’s sleep, but Elise and Rob—after a tearful discussion—decided to wake their parents and drive down to the police station. Their accounts of what had happened made for damning evidence against their friend: At dawn, police officers arrived at Dustin’s house and arrested him on a charge of murder. He would first claim that he had been alone in his car; he would also say that he had been trying to help a friend who was being beaten by Brian and that Brian had fallen under the wheels of his Cadillac after slipping on ice. “Dustin’s fault that night lay in intimidation and fear, not hatred, but what he did was still wrong,” Elise observed. “A lot of people tried to defend him, but you cannot defend what he did.” The event devastated Elise, who went into a severe depression, unable to get out of bed during the weeks that followed. “I didn’t feel like I should be alive,” she said. “I felt so guilty. I ran those few moments over and over again in my mind, trying to figure out what I could have done different. People tried to comfort me, but they didn’t understand.” This May, during Tascosa High’s graduation ceremonies, Elise startled her fellow students by delivering an emotional valedictorian speech about the night of December 12, 1997. “On that evening,

T4096.indb 31

1/18/07 7:18:49 AM

6 Pamela Colloff a boy lost his life and with him a part of many people died,” she announced to the assembled crowd of five thousand, while some students shifted uncomfortably in their chairs. “Nothing else I have experienced has so greatly molded who I am and what I think. I hope its message can penetrate your heart.” Describing how the fatal fight was waged between “two groups of people who wore different types of clothes,” she urged her classmates to rethink their own prejudices toward one another. “So I challenge you and me, all of us, to break through the stereotypes with which you may have been raised. I challenge each one of us to see the art, the beauty of humanity, in others.” 32

the trial began on an uncommonly hot, windless morning during the last week in August this year at the Potter County Courts Building, a monolithic building of concrete and granite that seems out of place amid the classic limestone facades of downtown Amarillo. On the left side of the aisle that divided Judge Abe Lopez’s courtroom lay a familiar tableau of suburban life: Broadshouldered boys in khakis and button-down dress shirts, accompanied by their girlfriends; Mike Camp and his wife, Debbie, who greeted their son’s friends warmly; a pastor from the First Presbyterian Church; and several older, smartly dressed relatives whose pleasantries and courteous manners were reminiscent of a Sunday afternoon church function. Across the aisle sat Mike and Betty Deneke, holding hands in silence, and behind them were three rows of punks: a ragtag bunch that, despite having removed their piercings and wallet chains and dog collars for the benefit of a metal detector, looked distinctly out of place in the formality of a courtroom. Dustin sat at the defense table with his back to them all, his hands folded neatly. He would register little emotion for the duration of the seven-day trial, though he occasionally flushed with embarrassment when his friends took the stand. “We believe that the evidence will convince you beyond a reasonable doubt,” assistant district attorney John Coyle announced to the jury, his arm outstretched as he pointed accusingly at the defendant, “that this was not an accident, that this was not justified, and that the defendant intentionally and knowingly murdered Brian Deneke.” The prosecution would present compelling

T4096.indb 32

1/18/07 7:18:49 AM

6 33 evidence against Dustin: He had never applied his brakes or the turned his steering wheel as his Cadillac had approached Brian, outsiders he had fled the scene of the crime, and he had lied to the police. But it was defense attorney Warren Clark who set the tone for the proceedings when he put the punks—and Brian’s character—on trial, transforming the murder case into a wholesale condemnation of the punk scene. “Ladies and gentlemen,” began Clark, a persuasive orator who favors dark suits and theatrical flourishes, “this is not a case of diversity, or tolerance, or judging people by the way they dress. This case is about a gang of young men who choose a lifestyle designed to intimidate those around them, to challenge authority, and to provoke a reaction from others.” Clark contended that when the punks brought bats and chains with them to Western Street, “a conspiracy was put into play . . . to kill and maim these high school students.” His client, he argued, had no other option but to protect the life of his friend, whom he suggested Brian was beating. “[Dustin] had no time to think or ponder. He had to take immediate action and he took it. And if he had to live it over again,” said Clark meaningfully, fixing his gaze on the jury, “he would do it again.” The prosecution would spend much of its time chipping away at Clark’s assertions: For instance, testimony suggested that it was another boy, John King, not Brian Deneke, who had struck Dustin’s friend in the parking lot. Additionally, Dustin’s cavalier comment—“I’m a ninja in my Caddy”—hardly reflected the state of mind of a panicked teenager trying to save a friend’s life. The jury was riveted by certain moments in the state’s case, as when Jason Deneke described in a low, halting voice how his brother had died in his arms, while those on the punk side of the courtroom openly wept. The trial, however, ultimately belonged to the defense, which sought to establish that Brian was a belligerent teenager prone to violence who was therefore an imminent threat to Dustin and his friends. “I had never seen eyes so cold and dark,” testified Brian’s former Boy Scout troop leader, Tom Scherlen, about an argument they had over a skateboard when Brian was thirteen years old. “He told me that I was a son of a bitch and that he didn’t need to be in my troop anyway.” Police officer Jeff Stephenson, who had arrested Brian for disorderly conduct when

T4096.indb 33

1/18/07 7:18:50 AM

6 Pamela Colloff he was sixteen, recounted how the teenager had shouted obscenities when police officers tried to clear the street outside a busy punk club. Another officer, at the request of the defense, held up for the jury each item of clothing that Brian had worn on the night of the fight—camouflage pants, combat boots, chains, and a ratty shirt—as well as a photograph of him with a mohawk. Though such evidence had little to do with the case against Dustin, it served as a powerful reminder to the jury that Brian was a very different sort of teenager than the blond, all-American eighteen-year-old who sat politely before them at the defense table. Dustin had shed the bulky muscularity of his football days, and his sober countenance suggested that he was no longer the class cutup but a responsible teenager on the verge of adulthood. He would not take the stand in his own defense, but his very presence in the courtroom—with his family and friends assembled behind him, evoking a reassuring portrait of middle-class values—spoke louder than any words he could have delivered on his own behalf. It was a point Clark sought to drive home in his vitriolic closing argument, in which he alluded to the “goons” and “thugs” sitting on the opposite side of the courtroom. “What Dustin Camp faced out there,” he thundered, “was a mean drunk with a weapon. . . . Somewhere in the infinite processes that make a boy into a man, something happened to Brian Deneke. . . . His manner of death was unfortunately the end result of his choices over the last six years prior to his death. You could even argue that he was destined to die the way he did. He was a violent individual. And it took violence on Dustin’s part, Dustin Camp’s part, to put an end to further violence and to save an innocent life.” Clark paused, then pointed toward his client as his voice reached a feverish pitch. “Let this boy go home, and restore him to his family,” he implored, “because he did the right thing.” After several hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Dustin not of murder, as the prosecution had hoped, but of manslaughter—deciding, in effect, that he had acted recklessly rather than with intent. Both sides seemed equally astonished by the verdict, but they reserved their opinions until the conclusion of the sentencing phase. Manslaughter carries a two- to twenty-year prison sentence, although the jury was also given the option of awarding 34

T4096.indb 34

1/18/07 7:18:50 AM

6 35 Dustin probation since he had no criminal record. The defense the presented a series of character witnesses who supported leniency: outsiders Dustin’s former football coach, who praised him; teachers who described his diligence in the classroom; a friend of his parents’ who declared that “he would make his family, his church, and his community proud”; and the pastor, who described how the Camps had “modeled the godly life before their son.” As witness after witness took the stand to extol his virtues, it was easy to lose sight of the fact that the clean-cut boy behind the defense table had, by taking a life, trespassed the most basic of moral codes. But the image of a now repentant teenager who had fallen from grace was a resonant one, and the jury listened intently when Dustin took the stand to apologize to the Denekes. “It’s a tragic deal that happened, and it shouldn’t have happened,” he declared from the witness box. “After all the pain and agony my friends and family have been through, the Deneke family have been through, I would have gotten out of that car. If I had gotten beaten down with a bat, it would have been better than all this.” Coyle rose from his chair at the conclusion of the defense’s closing argument and launched into a passionate plea for punishment. At 31, he was an exceptionally young prosecutor, with a round, earnest face that had registered both shock and outrage during the course of the trial; when the medical examiner had described Brian’s injuries—he had been conscious when he was dragged under the wheels of the Cadillac, its impact so severe that his collarbone had been torn free from his shoulder— Coyle had looked visibly shaken. Now he stood before the jury, beseeching them to see the grander purpose behind their decision. “Our young people, on both sides of this aisle in our community . . . need to be told by the twelve of you that what you do carries consequences . . . whoever you are, no matter what you look like, no matter how you dress,” he said in a solemn, deliberate voice. “I don’t expect you to enjoy sending this young man to prison, however long you send him for. I expect you to do it with a tear in your eye and your heart in your throat. . . . President John Kennedy said we do things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. I ask you to do the hard thing. I ask you to send a message to this community that all young people, all of them, will

T4096.indb 35

1/18/07 7:18:50 AM

6 Pamela Colloff suffer the consequences of their actions, and that you are holding Dustin Camp unconditionally responsible for the death of Brian Deneke.” The twelve jurors, however, were not swayed; after deliberating for nearly three hours, they sentenced Dustin to ten years’ probation and a $10,000 fine he will not have to pay if he stays on his best behavior. The anguish of those on the right side of the courtroom was tangible; Mike Deneke’s shoulders sank in resigned defeat, his face ashen. Behind him, three rows of teenagers gripped one another’s hands tightly, choking back tears. Coyle stared miserably at the jurors before him, as Dustin turned from the defense table, nodding courteously at his attorney and his parents, before walking out of the courtroom and through the courthouse doors into the bright afternoon sunshine. 36

news of the sentence, which was broadcast live from the courthouse late that afternoon, stunned many residents of Amarillo, spurring a deluge of phone calls to local TV stations and stirring debate across the city. Parents took to the airwaves to voice their outrage about the message that such a verdict sent to teenagers in the community, while others simply shook their heads in dismay, expressing astonishment that someone convicted of manslaughter would never spend a night in jail. At one hastily organized community meeting at a Unitarian church, several attendees openly wept, and by the time the ten o’clock news aired that evening, anger had reached a fever pitch. “If all you get for murdering someone with your car is ten years’ probation with a felony-free record,” wrote one incensed television viewer in an e-mail that was read on the air, “then I can only ask Mister Camp not to let me see him walking around.” Such bitterness did not wane as the days passed: An Amarillo Globe-News poll revealed that 74 percent of respondents believed that the punishment did not fit the crime, and emotions ran so high that Judge Lopez sealed the list of the jurors’ names out of concern for their safety. There was little doubt about the message sent by the twelve men and women who sat in judgment that day. It was what the punks felt they knew all along: Teenagers deemed “good kids” could enjoy a sanctioned sort of rambunctiousness in Amarillo

T4096.indb 36

1/18/07 7:18:50 AM

6 37 without fear of punishment, since a boys-will-be-boys attitude the would pardon even their most egregious behavior. Such indul- outsiders gences, however, did not apply to those who stood on the margins. Had the roles been reversed—if a football player had lost his life that night at the hands of a punk—did anyone believe that a jury would have rendered the same verdict? For punks, teenagers who had never had faith in the system, the outcome of the trial reaffirmed their worst fears, and revealed the true costs of a social order in which some boys are valued more than others. Many punks, frustrated by the harassment they had received even in the months after the killing, had drifted away from the scene, shaving off their mohawks and dressing in darker, muted clothes. There was, among these teenagers, a deep sense of loss: The Eighth Street House is now uninhabited, a remnant of another time, and punk shows are sparsely attended. Many spoke of moving on—to Austin, Dallas, maybe west to California. Anywhere, they said, where they might feel more at ease. Though they were comforted by the community’s support after the trial, many punks felt that the outrage of adults had arrived too late: Where, they wondered, had the concern of teachers, parents, and even the police been before the verdict became front-page news? Their questions would go unanswered. Despite a trial that had rocked this city to its core, little had changed: On my last night in Amarillo, I spotted two punks loping along Western Street toward an empty parking lot, their skateboards tucked under their arms. A black pickup stopped at a red light; both its teenage driver and passenger, straining for a better view, rolled down their windows and stared intently at the punks who made their way up the boulevard. As the boys drove off, you could hear—just barely— gales of laughter and a string of obscenities over the squeal of car wheels.

6 November 1999

T4096.indb 37

1/18/07 7:18:51 AM

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

borderline insanity

6

cecilia ballí

I

n what is shaping up to be the deadliest year in Nuevo Laredo’s history, 77 people have died in Mexico’s drug cartel turf war. Now the violence is seeping into Texas.

it was dusk one evening in february when Alejandro Domínguez Coello lit a series of cigarettes and philosophized about Nuevo Laredo’s crime problems in his raspy smoker’s voice. Except for a phone book, a coffee mug, a bottle of Tylenol, a calculator, and a cigarette lighter that lay on his desk, the office of the 55-year-old chamber of commerce president was barren. The freight-forwarding company he operated, part of his printing business, and his customs brokerage firm were all situated across the border in Laredo, as was his home. Like dozens of other chamber members, Domínguez had shifted some of his life to the American side to escape the drug gang turf war and the ensuing wave of violence that had gripped Nuevo Laredo since the summer of 2003. “We’re the number one commercial port in all of Mexico,” he said, blowing out a lungful of smoke. He had silver hair, thick eyebrows, and a prickly mustache, and he wore gold chains around his neck and wrist. “We’re a magnet that attracts all of the importers and exporters, obviously legal commerce. But we can’t prevent the fact that this magnet also attracts bands of narcotraffickers and people who smuggle undocumented migrants.”

T4096.indb 39

1/18/07 7:18:51 AM

6 Domínguez was hopeful about the city’s odds of overcoming Cecilia Ballí the drug lords. It all still seemed to him like a bad dream that would eventually end, nothing more than an unusually violent episode in the latest struggle for power and territory. As he spoke, he contemplated the problem of police corruption and the barriers that had been created by jurisdictional boundaries between Mexican law enforcement groups. He described how the mayor had been working to clean up the police force and how every neighborhood needed to be patrolled by a local cop to deter crime. But, he assured me, “The problem is no more serious than in New York or Chicago. I go and come all the time to Laredo, Texas, and to this day, I personally haven’t been stopped, kidnapped, bothered, or caught up in gunfire.” Four months later, on June 8, Domínguez surprised the Nuevo Laredo business community when he stepped down as chamber president after the mayor named him chief of police, a job nobody had been willing to accept for more than a month. That same evening, he left the downtown office where we had last talked and got behind the wheel of his Ford F-150 pickup. A vehicle pulled up next to him, and the crack of an AR-15 assault rifle ripped through the air. Domínguez was shot more than thirty times. The new police chief died in the driver’s seat, his white shirt shredded by bullets, his chest and chin bathed in blood. His murder is only the latest example of the escalating violence that has taken place in 2005, which promises to be the deadliest year in Nuevo Laredo’s history. Seventy-seven people, including six other cops, have been murdered in the Mexican border city, many of them gang-style like Domínguez. The U.S. State Department has issued two warnings to American travelers venturing across the Texas border, and Mexican President Vicente Fox has sent in the army four times in six months. The violence has continued unabated now for two years, yet since last fall, there has been a palpable increase in its reach. More and more American citizens, some with no apparent ties to the drug world, are being caught up in the horror, proving how deeply entrenched the drug trade has become on both sides of the border. Of the 173 people who have disappeared in the state of Tamaulipas, 42 have been from Laredo. Many border residents are now asking themselves: Just 40

T4096.indb 40

1/18/07 7:18:51 AM

6 41 how many degrees of separation does anyone here really have from borderline the underworld? insanity lydia was sitting before an ornate glass dining table in her condominium on the north side of Laredo when I met her, her shapely legs crossed, her foot swaying in a hot-pink slipper. She is a striking woman with heavy cheekbones, deep eyes, and a thick mane of black hair that grazes her shoulders. She wore short jean shorts and a bright-colored tank top. When she spoke, she sometimes rapped the table with her long fingernails for emphasis. Lydia (for safety reasons, some names in this story have been changed) had recently survived a terrifying experience in Nuevo Laredo. “I’ll give you my story,” she had told me in her low, unselfconsciously seductive voice when we spoke over the phone, “but only if you write that my insurance has put me through hell.” A no-nonsense woman who speaks her mind, Lydia is a schoolteacher in one of Laredo’s rougher neighborhoods. “I work at a tough school, so I know the walk, the talk, and the whole shebang,” she told me with a laugh that filled the room. A divorcée and a disciplined nickel-squeezer, every birthday she rewards herself with a big present. Last May, in honor of her thirty-sixth year, she bought a brand-new, diamond-black Mercedes C230 Kompressor sedan. “I bought the loaded version, honey. I didn’t skip out on anything,” she said. One Saturday night, just after New Year’s, Lydia was out with her friend Claudia and her nephew Hector at a Laredo club called 57th Street. They had been there about an hour when Claudia announced that she wanted to join one of her friends from the club who had an unopened bottle of expensive scotch and was heading to another club in Nuevo Laredo. Lydia was hesitant about going with them. She hardly crossed the border anymore. In the previous six months, she’d gone into Nuevo Laredo just four or five times, to buy things she couldn’t get in Laredo, like cheap medicines and good avocados. “I don’t want to go in my car,” Lydia told her niece Christina, a slim 21-year-old who had joined the group. “I’ve heard over there they’re killing for free.” But Claudia was persistent. “He who owes nothing has nothing to fear,” she said snidely. Christina, meanwhile, refused to drive her

T4096.indb 41

1/18/07 7:18:52 AM

6 Cecilia Ballí own sports car into Mexico, and Hector had a pickup, which was not big enough to fit the group. After reviewing her options and remembering the promise of free scotch, Lydia finally relented. The four of them loaded into her Mercedes and rolled down the highway to the international bridge. When they arrived in Nuevo Laredo, Hector struck a deal with a parking lot attendant. “Here’s five extra dollars if you guard it with your life,” he said, motioning to the Mercedes. Inside Señor Frog’s, a neon-splashed bar with oversized drinks whose names read like alcoholic snow cones, the music was pounding. It was close to three o’clock in the morning when they arrived. Lydia immediately spotted some men Claudia had been talking to at 57th Street. Drug dealers, she thought. It was a distinction she’d learned to make automatically from years of living on the border. Who else wears gold chains that could pull trucks? Lydia recognized one of the men as Miguel, a friend of Claudia’s who lived in a neighborhood near Lydia’s. Rumor had it that Miguel and his friends were runners for a notoriously violent arm of the Gulf Cartel. Claudia had brought him over once, and when he’d seen Lydia’s new Mercedes, he’d sneered and said, “I’ll give you five hundred dollars for your car. All you have to do is claim the insurance.” Claudia joined Miguel and the rest of his group on the other side of the bar. A few minutes later, a strapping young man in his early twenties named Robert walked up to Christina with tears in his eyes. He said one of the men with Claudia had elbowed his face because he was talking with one of Claudia’s girlfriends. Christina was livid. She bounded over to the offender and elbowed him. “What’s wrong with you? ” she snapped. Lydia was relieved when Claudia came up and suggested that they drive about four blocks to a different bar, called Luxor. But when they arrived, Lydia spotted the same bunch of men and realized that this was a group trip. Luxor seemed even shadier to her than the previous two clubs. “Oh, my God,” she said to Christina. “Drug dealer galore.” Lydia had just made herself comfortable when Claudia approached her. “I need your car key,” she said. “I’m leaving with Miguel, and I need to get my keys out of your car.” Lydia replied, “I don’t have it. Go ask Hector.” Hector arrived a few minutes later. “Claudia wants to get her keys out of your car,” he said. “Should I go with her? ” Lydia shrugged. “Let her get her own keys.” 42

T4096.indb 42

1/18/07 7:18:52 AM

6 43 “You don’t want me to go with her? ” Hector asked. borderline “No. Just give it to her.” insanity Fifteen minutes later, Lydia glimpsed Claudia, who had supposedly left the club. She panicked, sensing immediately that something had gone wrong. “What happened?!” she barked at Claudia, but her friend’s face was blank. “Where is the key to my car? ” “Miguel has it,” Claudia said. Lydia shouted a string of curse words and derogatory names. She followed Miguel, who began to head out of the club when he saw her face. Lydia stepped outside and noticed that her car was gone. Her heart stopped. She spotted a pickup parked nearby with at least eight policemen with assault rifles in the cab and in the bed. “Hey, I need your help!” she shouted desperately. But none of them moved; it was as though she had never opened her mouth. “What’s going on here?!” Lydia yelled as she pursued Miguel, who was now striding across the street. “Please, give me my car. Look, you’re a drug dealer. You have tons of money. I’m an educator.” Miguel smirked. “The police put a gun to my head and took your car,” he said. Hector had followed Lydia out of the club and was now surrounded by Miguel’s friends. They were standing at the rear of the club’s parking lot, near a dark alleyway. Lydia heard the ring of cell phones all around her, as about ten men began to emerge from the shadows, as if they had been summoned. “I’m an American citizen!” Lydia said. “You’re violating my rights!” The men laughed. Her blood was boiling, and she was trying to think of the worst words she could use for self-defense. “You’re all pieces of shit!” she shouted at them, using the loaded Spanish word mierda. “I’m somebody in the United States!” She remembered how close she was to the border. She turned to her nephew and said in the most threatening tone she could muster: “F—all this shit! Dial 9-1-1 and see if these f—ers won’t listen to me.” One of them pulled out a gun. the citizens of nuevo laredo have witnessed the violent effects of organized crime for more than twenty years. In the eighties, a group called Los Texas ruled much of the territory in

T4096.indb 43

1/18/07 7:18:52 AM

6 Cecilia Ballí the city, but they were more interested in smuggling immigrants than drugs. At the time, the violence they caused was mostly smallscale, and there were implicit agreements between local gangs that women and children were not to be hurt. That began to change in the mid-nineties, when the well-organized Mexican drug cartels, armed with assault rifles and heavier weapons, began reaching their tentacles into the city. One of the most powerful was the Gulf Cartel, headquartered only two hundred miles down the Rio Grande in Matamoros. When its new leader, Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, stepped into power in 1996, the style of the cartel shifted dramatically. Victims were no longer shot and abandoned on the street; now they were often tortured gruesomely and sometimes incinerated. Cárdenas had a wide jaw, protruding ears, a receding hairline, and a menacing stare. He was a former federal police officer and a native of Matamoros. Unlike his predecessors, he was known for his abnormally defiant and vicious streak; according to federal authorities, he ordered his own boss shot so that he could take over the cartel’s operations. From his new perch, he came to understand the importance of Nuevo Laredo. U.S.-Mexico trade was increasing, and more and more eighteen-wheelers were rumbling across the international land port. The financial stakes within the drug business had grown too. Cárdenas inherited a $2 billion cocaine business with ties to the Cali Cartel in Colombia, and he continued to expand it. He co-opted fourteen federal special-forces agents who’d been sent by the Mexican government to the border to fight organized crime. They were part of a larger group—the equivalent of the U.S. Navy Seals—that had received training in small-group tactics, mission planning, aerial assaults, and sophisticated communications methods at army bases throughout the world, including the United States. The men became Cárdenas’s enforcers and dubbed themselves Los Zetas, after their radio code name. With time, their ranks would multiply, and they’d become the most mythologized gang on the border. Cárdenas extended the reaches of the Gulf Cartel in unprecedented ways. His operation evolved into an elaborate nexus of criminals, cops, politicians, and businessmen who controlled every form of contraband, from drugs to weapons to migrants to cars to 44

T4096.indb 44

1/18/07 7:18:52 AM

6 45 fine jewelry—even used clothing. Anybody who wanted to dabble borderline in these enterprises had to pay the organization. The money was insanity funneled to Matamoros, where the group’s leaders took care of sending some of the cash to high-ranking government officials for protection. At a minimum, dozens of local and state police officers were put directly on the cartel’s payroll, with payments determined by their rank and their usefulness to the group. The Zetas also controlled their physical territory. They carved up cities into sectors and placed lookouts on main roads and at airports, police and bus stations, and government offices. They purchased sophisticated wiretapping devices and bought off their prey’s cell phone codes from phone companies and service providers. Information became a priceless source of power. Cárdenas also understood the importance of the media, and his men began monitoring and kidnapping journalists. In 2000, when President Fox’s administration came to power, the Gulf Cartel faced its first serious law enforcement threat. Fox announced that he was unleashing “the mother of all battles” against Mexico’s drug traffickers. His team shared intelligence with the DEA and began arresting high-profile leaders from at least four major drug groups. Mexican federal agents raided one of the Zetas’ properties in Nuevo Laredo and discovered a twelvepage list of payees who were receiving anywhere from $300 to $1,500 a week, including two commanders and a supervisor from the Nuevo Laredo police department. Cárdenas became ever more insolent. He directly threatened U.S. drug agents, Mexican army leaders, and the federal attorney general, and he instituted a style reminiscent of Colombia, where the drug trade had flowered in opposition to the government—not, as in Mexico, in collusion with it. But on March 14, 2003, a shoot-out erupted in downtown Matamoros, and the unthinkable happened. Cárdenas finally became a hostage of the government. Drug agents and border residents cheered the president. But in retrospect, Fox’s seemingly heroic action produced a power vacuum, one that some have dubbed the “gelatin effect”: The once highly organized Gulf Cartel was left leaderless and in disarray. The Zetas shifted from enforcing for Cárdenas to moving their own drugs. Confusion ruled the streets, especially in Nuevo

T4096.indb 45

1/18/07 7:18:53 AM

6 Cecilia Ballí Laredo, where most of the men left to run the cartel’s operations were young, irreverent, and inexperienced. Ranging from their mid-twenties to early thirties, they were criminals whose résumés consisted mainly of using drugs and stealing cars. Overnight, they became bosses. They began taxing, kidnapping, and extorting whom they could, and any remaining boundaries of respect toward certain citizens of the border were quickly forgotten. 46

when she saw the gun, Lydia’s body froze, but the words that tumbled out of her mouth would later make her roar with laughter. “I’m sorry! I didn’t know you had guns!” she blurted. “Please, please, please. If you want the car, it’s yours.” She saw the man point the gun at her, and she saw her nephew grab the man’s arm and the gun. She remembers thinking: “One of them is going to die.” It occurred to her to change her strategy, and she considered trying to negotiate with the criminals. But her voice was still pleading. “I’ll give you whatever you want!” “Shut your mouth, you whore.” Another man leaped forward with a gun in his hand and smacked Hector across the brow. He stumbled forward, and Lydia caught him to keep him from falling. His blood spattered her white blouse. In the dizzying blur of events, she had a gruesome vision. She pictured herself on the ground, dead. Then she pictured something different. She saw the face of Priscilla Cisneros’s daughter. At the time, Lydia knew Priscilla simply as Ms. Cisneros, a colleague she’d met at a school in her district. For the past three months, a chilling story had circulated quietly among Laredo teachers that in September, Priscilla’s daughter, Brenda, had been kidnapped with her friend Yvette Martinez across the border. The disappearance of the two American women in Nuevo Laredo would eventually make headlines all over the U.S. and be a featured story on CNN, America’s Most Wanted, and Geraldo. But that fall, the incident was still only local news, and Lydia had not talked to Priscilla about it. After Brenda’s disappearance, Priscilla spent most of her time at work inside her small, spare office. When she walked out, she smiled at her co-workers meekly. Every morning, she woke up with the agonizing question of whether Brenda might return that day.

T4096.indb 46

1/18/07 7:18:53 AM

6 47 Brenda was a business accounting student at Laredo Com- borderline munity College. The last night her family spent with her, they insanity were celebrating her twenty-third birthday at Logan’s Roadhouse in Laredo. Afterward, her friend Yvette, an attractive 27-year-old mother of two, had said she wanted to take her out. In the Logan’s parking lot, Brenda fished for her driver’s license and some cash, then handed her purse to her mother. She told her they were going to a club called Graham Central Station and waved good-bye with a smile. But Brenda and Yvette did not visit the club that night. Instead, they crossed the border and attended a concert in Nuevo Laredo featuring Mexican singer Pepe Aguilar, whom Brenda admired. Yvette had apparently surprised her friend with the tickets. After the show, the women were supposed to have met up with a male friend of Yvette’s at a makeshift nightclub on the fairgrounds where the concert took place, but he never showed. The same young man—to date, his identity remains unknown—reached Yvette on her cell phone as she and Brenda drove back home at roughly four-fifteen in the morning on September 18. They were about five blocks from crossing the international bridge when her phone rang. That’s the last anyone heard of them. After weeks of searching for clues, Yvette’s stepfather, William Slemaker, found her pearl-white Mitsubishi Galant in a towing yard in Nuevo Laredo. The towing company’s workers said that they’d picked up the car from the local police station under orders from the cops themselves. But when Slemaker spoke to the police, they denied having any record of the vehicle. There were no clues inside the car that would point to the women’s fate, but there were two fresh dents on its rear bumper that suggested someone may have bumped them from behind until they stopped the car. Their families concluded that this must have transpired shortly after Yvette received the mystery phone call from her friend. But to this day, no other clues have been uncovered. After the women’s disappearance, Yvette’s and Brenda’s parents searched out other kidnapping victims’ families and organized a group called Laredo’s Missing. They presented their cases to law enforcement authorities and created a Web site and billboards asking the public for tips. When I spoke with Priscilla in

T4096.indb 47

1/18/07 7:18:53 AM

6 Cecilia Ballí March, she was tired of the press. Still, she continued to hope that the next journalist might be the angel who would somehow deliver her message to her daughter’s captors. “I don’t want to know who you are or why you did it,” she said, as though she were speaking to them directly. “Simply put her on the phone.” She finished our interview with a weary plea. “If I could talk to President Fox or President George Bush, I would tell them, ‘Please. Do something on our borders. Because they are no longer secure.’” 48

five months after Osiel Cárdenas Guillén’s arrest, downtown Nuevo Laredo was momentarily paralyzed by what seemed like a war scene. It was a little past two in the morning on August 1, 2003, when a group of agents from the Agencia Federal de Investigaciones, the Mexican counterpart to the FBI, came across a convoy of late-model sport utility vehicles and tried to stop them for interrogation. The passengers, dressed head-to-toe in black, fired at the federal cops with assault rifles. The agents radioed desperately for help, and local police and the army came to their aid. The police returned fire at the men in the SUVs. Two of the cars’ gas tanks exploded with the hits, killing the drivers. The shoot-out, which occurred in the heart of downtown, lasted nearly an hour and was carried over to at least one other street intersection. Three men were killed, six were injured, and seven were detained. An investigation concluded that the armed convoy had belonged to a group allied with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, a notorious and dangerous drug lord from Sinaloa, the birthplace of the Mexican drug mafia. It was the beginning of the turf war between El Chapo’s men and the Zetas for control of Nuevo Laredo. “That was the day we lost our peace,” said Raymundo Ramos, a freelance journalist and human rights worker, recalling the shootout as he pulled out the day’s newspaper. We were sitting in a small office with peach-colored walls and maroon lace curtains that houses his human rights organization, Comité de Derechos Humanos Grupo 5 de Febrero. Its domesticity contrasted sharply with the ghastly photos of bloodied bodies that appeared on Ramos’s computer screen. “You tell me if you wouldn’t need psychological help to overcome this,” he said as he ran his mouse

T4096.indb 48

1/18/07 7:18:53 AM

6 49 over the pictures. The images showed all the signatures of the borderline business: the plastic bag, the silver duct tape. But instead of faces, insanity there were red masses of flesh and brains. Ramos explained each photo as he clicked through them: This one was buried alive. This one had his head busted with an iron bar. This one had his mouth and nose taped up. Before he founded his organization, Ramos had worked for El Mañana, Nuevo Laredo’s largest newspaper, for more than a decade. During that time, the most shocking image he’d ever come across was a stabbing victim. “We’d never experienced the bazooka; now we have,” he said. “We’d never experienced shoot-outs in restaurants; now we have. What message do you send a society when you find a group of victims murdered in such a violent way? What is this group of people trying to sell? Terror, terror, terror.” The spread of fear has been a potent method of social control. Locals say that some federal agents assigned to Nuevo Laredo have opted to resign from their jobs rather than move to this part of the border. From the infamous La Palma maximum-security prison near Mexico City, Cárdenas continues to manage his empire. He employs prison guards and attorneys, uses cell phones to communicate with his people, and negotiates with leaders of other cartels who are being held in the same prison, sometimes in adjoining cells. Fox’s plan of taking out the cartels’ heads has accomplished little on the streets or among local and state police, where corruption and secret alliances still flourish. Although he sent federal troops to the border several times in the first months of 2005, the rampant corruption among local law enforcement and state authorities made cooperation impossible. And perhaps the most disconcerting fact about the recent deluge of violence is its unabashedly democratic nature; even the cops are dying, including four police commanders by mid-June. FBI agents say those policemen had most likely aligned themselves with one of the battling groups and paid the price. On the U.S. side of the border, an entire infrastructure of financial and human capital supports the trade. In Laredo, there is a surplus of young males looking for work. With few traditional job or educational prospects, they are no less easily lured by the promise of riches than those wealthy businessmen whose banking

T4096.indb 49

1/18/07 7:18:54 AM

6 Cecilia Ballí and trade businesses are tainted by drug money. The Zetas have formed alliances with major prison gangs in South Texas, including the Mexican Mafia, the Hermandad de Pistoleros Latinos, and the Texas Syndicate. In turn, these groups hire juvenile gangs from Laredo and other border cities to move drugs, pose as lookouts, execute drive-by shootings, and steal. In this way, the narcotics trade has become a very American, very local crime problem that lately has emulated the style of the Mexicans’. Laredo police have raided homes where they’ve confiscated high-caliber weapons, as well as assault rifles, and have rescued kidnapping victims. Already in 2005, the city has witnessed at least nine drug-related murders, some of them resembling the gang-style executions of Nuevo Laredo. And although the United States has a vastly more effective law enforcement system and a rule of law, impunity related to drug crimes is a problem here too. Most of the homicides in Laredo that appear to be drug-related remain unsolved. “These people are hiring hit men from somewhere else,” Laredo police lieutenant Jesus Torres, who is in charge of investigating kidnappings and homicides, told me. “They’re complete strangers. They move on to another city. They just completely disappear off the face of Laredo.” “If before we were only twenty, now I’ve lost count./Disposed to die, they know us as Zetas./We’ve earned our position, that’s why we’re respected.” This ballad, sung in a nasal voice to the raw riffs of an accordion, is recorded on a CD that sells in the street markets of the border. It contains nineteen swaggering songs that describe the history and workings of the Zetas. They document perhaps most faithfully the vast cultural transformation that is unfolding in tandem with the crime on the South TexasMexico border. An army of young men nicknamed the Zetitas, or Zetillas, has coalesced in Matamoros, Reynosa, and Nuevo Laredo, where members do odd jobs for the cartel in hopes of climbing up the ranks and tasting power and money in a way that never seemed possible in their low-end, dead-end lives. The struggle to control the trade is also a class war, a hybrid of American economic promise and Mexican-style justice. It is the poor imitating the lifestyle and business strategies of the rich. They have bought homes in the most expensive neighborhoods in Nuevo 50

T4096.indb 50

1/18/07 7:18:54 AM

6 51 Laredo, which they use as stash houses or meeting places, sending borderline the original residents scurrying quietly across the border. They are insanity stealing and driving the upper crust’s cars. These new gang leaders have little tolerance for rich kids or for anyone who they think might be encroaching on their turf. priscilla cisneros wasn’t the only person Lydia knew who had been caught up in the random violence. One afternoon I visited Sylvia, who manages the building where Lydia lives. Like other women of her class in Laredo, she was very put together, with curls folded into her golden-brown hair and blue eyeshadow brushed over her eyelids. She recounted the December day, just a few weeks before Lydia was held at gunpoint, when her 22-yearold nephew lived the most frightening day of his life. As she told the story, her voice ran a range of volumes, at times reaching an extremely high, barely audible pitch. “My nephew’s got a home in Sabinas Hidalgo, which is a town near Monterrey, but he also owns property here in Laredo. His family owns a forwarding agency—you know, the trailers, the import and export. He had been taking courses at TAMIU [Texas A&M International University], and he finished a course, his English course. So he says, you know what, I’m going to start doing the business here in Laredo—all the business that goes into Mexico. And the family in Mexico ship the merchandise over to the U.S. “It was mid-December when he was coming to Laredo from Sabinas. He was driving a Grand Marquis. I guess it was probably a 2002. He was coming on Degollado Avenue, and a cop just puts on the lights and stops him. This was daylight. It was probably about three-thirty, four o’clock. And he’s freaking out: Why are they stopping me? [The policeman] radioes in some other officers—well, my nephew’s thinking they’re officers. All of a sudden, an unmarked car gets behind him so he couldn’t move backward, and a guy gets out and opens his door with a machine gun. You see how the police are involved in this? “The guy comes over with an AK-47 and sits right next to [my nephew] and says, ‘Let’s go.’ In my nephew’s car. ‘Let’s go, let’s go.’ My nephew says, ‘What’s going on? What have I done? ’ He

T4096.indb 51

1/18/07 7:18:54 AM

6 Cecilia Ballí says: ‘Let’s go.’ He had him driving for two hours around Nuevo Laredo. Right around five-thirty, when it started getting dark, he says, ‘Turn here. Go here. Go there. Go there.’ And he took him into the ranches. My nephew didn’t know where he was going. He doesn’t know Nuevo Laredo. “It was pitch-black, and they drove him into, like, a warehouse. They asked him to get down, and they asked for his little credential for voting—your picture identification in Mexico. And so they start interrogating him and all this go-around. There was a bunch of men, older men around him at this warehouse out in the boonies. They start asking him all these questions, and it was the same questions: Who’s your father? Who’s your mother? What do you do? Where do you live? The same questions, over and over. Kind of like what cops do to try to get the truth out of you, and if you mess up, they know that you’re lying. He says all these were cops that had gone bad. None of them were dressed in uniform, only the one that stopped him. He kept thinking, ‘I can’t mess up.’ He started crying. He said, ‘God, help me. I can’t mess up.’ “Finally, they grabbed his cell and they started going down his directory. And he thinks that the one that saved him was his grandmother. Because he had Tío I-Don’t-Know-What and Tía I-Don’t-Know-What and just different names of uncles and aunts and nieces and whatever. And then finally, it said, ‘Abuelita.’ ‘Grandmother’? They said, ‘You know what? This is a momma’s boy.’ But, of course, they used the word cabrón. ‘This guy is nothing but a joto, a faggot.’ Like he doesn’t amount to anything. By that time, they had already hit him here in the back with a gun— oh, they had guns, machine guns all around him. And they kept on asking him who he worked for. He said, ‘All I do—I have a forwarding agency.’ He told them, ‘That’s all I do, and it’s my parents’, and I’m on dispatch, trying to get customers. I’m the one who connects the U.S. to the Mexican side.’ “They hit him in the back, and he made sure he wouldn’t fall because he kept on thinking, ‘If I fall, they’re going to get me on the ground.’ So he never fell, but they kept on kicking him. Finally, they threw the cell on the floor, together with the ID. They told him, ‘Hurry up and leave, before we kill you.’ So right away he fell to the ground and grabbed his stuff. And they’re going, ‘Go, 52

T4096.indb 52

1/18/07 7:18:54 AM

6 53 go, go!’ Like, ‘Hurry, hurry!’ He was all nervous. He grabbed his borderline things, and then he went into his car and turned it on. This was insanity late. Six-thirty or seven o’clock. By the time he reached the road, he didn’t know where he was at. He was freaking out, crying and crying. Finally, he saw some lights far away. So he started heading towards those lights, and he was able to get to Nuevo Laredo. “The next day, his mother came into my office, crying. It was as if they had just murdered her son. She was so scared of how she was seeing him. He couldn’t go in the car. He was 21 at the time. He’s young, but it just hit him real bad. “What I found out—or what I think, from talking to people—I heard that in the Zetas, there’s a lot of young kids involved in their twenties, and very good-looking. Like, there’s ‘La Barbie,’ and they call him La Barbie because he’s so good-looking. He’s murdered many, many other ones. His name has come up a lot. My nephew is also very handsome. And they said that at that time, [the police and rival gangs] were checking any young, goodlooking kids with nice vehicles, just stopping them at random to say, ‘Hey, what the heck?’ ” the business owners i spoke with in Nuevo Laredo were deeply frustrated over their city’s deteriorating image. While they agreed that the drug war violence had wreaked havoc on their lives, they argued that it had not affected any tourists. They blamed the U.S. government and the media for scaring away visitors and demanded nuanced news coverage, reports that would help outsiders understand the issue of security on the border in all of its complexity. “We’re not saying, ‘Don’t say what’s happening,’ ” said Jack Suneson, a perfectly bilingual Mexico native who sells highend handcrafted furniture, clothes, jewelry, and pottery out of a 24,000-square-foot downtown store called Marti’s. “It’s how you say what’s happening that really makes a big difference.” Suneson pulled out an advertisement that he had clipped from the San Antonio Express-News, which touted a news report on Nuevo Laredo done by one of San Antonio’s television stations. The teaser declared the border city a “Kidnapper’s Hunting Ground.” Suneson became irate as he recalled how he’d sent copies of the paper all the way to the Tamaulipas governor’s office. “The way the news is

T4096.indb 53

1/18/07 7:18:55 AM

6 Cecilia Ballí being sensationalized is really having an effect on the livelihood of many people,” he said. “This is not open season down here on Americans, where they’re being kidnapped right and left. It’s curious that the people missing are all from the border area. They’re all local people.” On that point, Suneson is right. But there are still serious problems that the drug enterprise has created for the entire border region that remain unresolved. The most glaring of these is the freedom with which the criminals prowl through their communities, even when many people know who they are. Ironically, the many jurisdictional boundaries that have been constructed on either side of the border create a porosity that enables crime. Even if Laredo residents suspect a neighbor—someone like Miguel— of being involved in the drug trade over the border, neither the DEA nor the Laredo police can pursue him until they can implicate him directly in a drug deal or some other crime carried out on American soil. And the DEA, the agency whose mission is to fight drugs, is tied up targeting higher-level traffickers and processing confiscations in the region’s various checkpoints. “They’re not going to take one of their high-paid DEA agents and go work this guy, this little insignificant guy,” said James Kuykendall, a retired DEA agent who appraises real estate in Laredo. Once in a while, when the crime spreads to American soil, U.S. authorities get a glimpse of how bad the situation is on the other side of the border. Last November, four young men found themselves in a stare-down at an intersection in Laredo during the early hours of the morning. Their Lincoln Navigator was shot twice by men in another vehicle. After giving up on trying to track down their assailants, the young men taped up the bullet holes and drove across the bridge, venturing into Boystown. But once they were there, a security guard saw the tape and stopped them. Unconvinced by their answers to his questions about what had happened to their car, he called his boss. Soon, two Suburbans arrived, delivering a squad of men dressed in black. The Laredoans disappeared. Their relatives publicly denounced their kidnappings. Four days later, the four men were released, and they returned home wide-eyed, with stories to tell the Laredo police. “All that is very 54

T4096.indb 54

1/18/07 7:18:55 AM

6 55 confidential, because they gave us a window into what’s going on in borderline Nuevo Laredo,” a Laredo police detective said. “All the way from insanity the corruption of the police department, working with the drug cartels, to what their activities are with kidnapping victims. I can’t tell you more than that. If I ever tell you more, you can’t print it. Because all that we learned out of that is, like, man. If somebody makes a movie of this—man, it’s incredible to see what’s going on over there.” In May a group of fed-up Nuevo Laredoans initiated a peace campaign, walking the streets with white balloons and holding forums trying to find local solutions to the continuing violence. Some remained hopeful that this wave, like those of the past, would turn out to be episodic. But the death toll continued to rise. Domínguez’s murder in June shook the nation, raising the difficult question of whether the government had any authority left over the traffickers. President Fox responded directly to his death, launching a program called Safe Mexico that put more than a thousand federal soldiers, special agents, and police officers in the drug-infested states of Tamaulipas, Baja California, and Sinaloa. The program, Fox promised, would specifically seek better cooperation in resolving organized crime among all three levels of government. Nuevo Laredo mayor Daniel Peña Treviño reacted too. He pulled all 760 of the city’s municipal police officers off the streets to screen them for drugs and look into pending criminal records. Ten days later, after the first stage of screening, only 319 cops were left on the force. Forty-one had been sent to Mexico City to be investigated for shooting a convoy of arriving federal agents. Eighty-nine had failed the drug tests. The rest— 311 police officers—had simply quit. Meanwhile, the city was left without anyone to answer emergency calls, and the criminals, again, seemed unfazed by the presence of the army. Domínguez had been victim 61 in 2005; three weeks after his death, the toll was at 77. A business friend of Domínguez’s in San Antonio, who sends bulletproof vehicles to Iraq, Nigeria, and Mexico, later told the Mexican press that the chamber president had called him six days before his execution asking for a bulletproof vest. His friend tried to persuade him not to take the police job, but Domínguez assured

T4096.indb 55

1/18/07 7:18:55 AM

6 Cecilia Ballí him that his duties would be entirely administrative. “What you need is a bulletproof truck,” the associate said. Domínguez had bought dozens of these from him through his import-export business. He replied, nonchalantly, “We’ll see. Maybe later on.” 56

lydia and hector stood in silence as the man continued to point his gun at them. “I’m sorry, Hector,” she whispered to her nephew, blinking back tears. Then Hector clutched her hand and said, “Vámonos, Tía.” They ran “like crazy people,” Lydia recalled. She was wearing twoand-a-half-inch heels, but she doesn’t remember feeling anything on her feet. They heard shots, several of them, as one of their assailants emptied his semiautomatic pistol into the night. They ran in the only direction they knew: toward the international bridge to Laredo. Lydia’s white blouse was soaked with blood. “Check me!” she yelled at Hector, so full of adrenaline that she thought she’d been hit. She screamed as she approached three policemen on the Mexican side of the bridge. She grabbed the back of her head with her hand, which was trembling. The men looked at her curiously. Lydia explained the sequence of events to the three policemen, who stood facing her with their hands on their hips. “You have to come with us to file a police report,” they told her. But there was no way she was turning back. She grabbed Hector’s hand and they ran again, across the bridge, over the river, to the customs agent who stood on the other side. She smiled when she recounted that. “I don’t even remember if we said we were American citizens or not.” The law enforcement authorities on the American side of the bridge had been as useless and indifferent to her pleading as those on the Mexican side. “They just looked at us like we were weirdos,” she said. They told her that they couldn’t help her because the crime had occurred in Mexico; she’d have to go back to Nuevo Laredo and file a report. In Laredo, only the FBI would listen to her story, and an agent informed her that their biggest priority was to investigate kidnappings. For three days Lydia remained in her bedroom, unable to eat, certain in her nervousness that the

T4096.indb 56

1/18/07 7:18:55 AM

6 57 assailants, some of whom knew where she lived, were going to re- borderline turn to finish the job. She popped pills to sleep and lodged a chair insanity under the knob of the back door. It was still there when I visited her nearly three months later. One day, Lydia was crawling through bumper-to-bumper traffic in front of a Laredo middle school when she spotted Miguel, who was driving in the opposite direction. “I noticed him right away because he’s got big ears and a big nose, and he’s mother-ugly,” she said. She did her best to act defiant. She rolled down her window and motioned for him to do the same. When he could hear her, she declared: “You stole my car. Why did you do this to me? ” “The police put a gun to my head,” said Miguel. “Follow me to the police department,” Lydia replied, “and tell that to them.” Miguel sped away. She never saw him again. In March, Lydia was still borrowing a car from a family member. Her insurance company argued that there was nothing she could do to recover the $10,000 that made up the difference between what she had paid for her car and what she would be receiving from the bank for her loss. She was debating what kind of car to get next. “Not another Mercedes,” she shuddered. “It would be too traumatizing.” She had not returned to Nuevo Laredo since her incident, nor did she plan to. “Believe me,” she said, and I believed her. “I’ll never go to Mexico again, not even to the beaches. You think I’m going back into Mexico? Hell, no! And when I say I’m not going back into Mexico, I’m not going back into Mexico. Why are they not putting in the news that you can’t go into Nuevo Laredo? You need to put that: Do not go to Nuevo Laredo, period. Do not go unless you want to die.”

6 August 2005

T4096.indb 57

1/18/07 7:18:56 AM

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

a kiss before dying

6

pamel a colloff

B

etty Williams was a fast girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Mack Herring was a handsome football player with all the right friends. When he broke up with her during her senior year at Odessa High School, her world fell apart. But she asked him for one last favor: to kill her.

when football season ended and there was nothing much to do on Friday nights except drink beer and stare up at the wide-open sky, teenagers used to park their pickups across the street from Odessa High School and wait to see the ghost they called Betty. According to legend, she would appear at the windows of the school auditorium at midnight—provided that students flashed their headlights three times or honked their horn and called out her name. The real Betty, it was said, had attended Odessa High decades before and had acted in a number of plays on the auditorium’s stage. But the facts of her death had been muddled with time, and each story was as apocryphal as the last: She had fallen off a ladder in the auditorium and broken her neck, students said. She had hanged herself in the theater. Her boyfriend, who was a varsity football player, had shot her onstage during a play. So many teenagers made the late-night pilgrimage to see Betty that the high school deemed it prudent to paint over the windows

T4096.indb 59

1/18/07 7:18:56 AM

6 Pamela Colloff of the school auditorium. During a later renovation, its facade was covered with bricks. But the stories about Betty never went away. Students still talk of “a presence” in the auditorium, one that is to blame for a long list of strange occurrences, from flickering lights and noises that cannot be explained to objects that appear to move on their own. Some claim to have seen her pacing the balcony or heard her footsteps behind them, only to find no one there. Rumors have flourished that a coach who knew the real Betty is visited by her, on occasion, in the field house and that a former vice principal who once caught a glimpse of her after hours was so spooked by the encounter that he refused to be in the school again by himself. “I hear her name on a daily basis,” says theater arts teacher Carl Moore, who has taught at Odessa High for four years. “Whenever something unexplained happens—a book falls on the floor in my classroom or the light board goes out during a technical rehearsal—someone always jokes, ‘It’s Betty.’” What may be nothing more than just a ghost story can also be seen as something more complicated—as a metaphor, perhaps, for the way that one crime has lodged, uneasily, in Odessa’s collective memory. The teenagers who pass down stories about Betty are too young to remember the Kiss and Kill Murder, as it was christened by the press in 1961, but it was the most sensational crime in West Texas in its day. The notoriety of the case has long since faded, yet 45 years later, something lingers. When Ronnie White, who graduated from Odessa High the year that the murder took place, returned to his alma mater to teach history, in 1978, he was astonished to hear students talking about the former drama student named Betty whose spirit supposedly haunted the auditorium and the popular football player who had had a hand in her killing. “I couldn’t believe what I was hearing,” he says. “I thought, ‘Good Lord, they must be talking about Betty Williams.’” 60

September 23 [1960] Study Hall . . . Well, I’ve finally made the rank of Senior and I can hardly believe it! I really don’t feel much different. We get our Senior rings Wednesday. I’ll be glad.

T4096.indb 60

1/18/07 7:18:56 AM

6 61 It sure does feel funny to be on the top of every thing looking down. Seems strange to think that this is really all of high school. Next year??? We had our pictures made last week. If they turn out half-way decent, I’ll send you one. Send me another picture if you have it. Well, the bell is about to ring so I’ll write more later. Love, Betty

a kiss before dying

what most people remember about Betty Williams is that they hardly noticed her at all. She lived in a small, well-worn frame house on an unpaved street not far from the oil fields west of town, where gas flares burned and drilling-rig lights illuminated the desert at night. Her father, John, was a carpenter who had difficulty finding steady work, and her mother, Mary, had taken a job at J.C. Penney to help make ends meet. A strict Baptist, her father often preached to Betty about sin and eternal damnation, and on more than one Sunday morning, he prayed that she might learn to be a more obedient daughter. At seventeen, Betty was pretty in an unremarkable way, with sandy-blond hair that brushed her shoulders and big, expressive blue eyes that could feign sincerity when talking to authority figures but were alive with irreverence. Betty disdained conformity and reserved particular contempt for the girls with matching sweater sets and saddle shoes who seemed to look right through her. She fancied herself an intellectual and put down her opinions on everything from boys to religion in dozens of letters and notes that she passed in study hall. She read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, and she listened to records of Lenny Bruce’s stand-up routines, in which he railed against racism and skewered middle-class hypocrisy. She too liked to get a rise out of people, and she thrived on attention, whether she got it by arriving at Tommy’s Drive-In dressed entirely in black but wearing white lipstick or in jeans and a T-shirt, under which she didn’t bother to put on a bra. She freely expressed opinions that went against the grain, like her belief that segregation was unjust and that blacks should not have to attend a separate high school across the railroad tracks. In bedrockconservative, blue-collar Odessa—where the John Birch Society’s

T4096.indb 61

1/18/07 7:18:56 AM

6 Pamela Colloff crusade against communism and other “un-American influences” had struck a chord—she was seen as an oddball. “Most people do not understand me,” Betty wrote to a friend her senior year. “There are people willing to be my friends, but mostly they [are] either too ignorant to understand why I’m like I am, and consequently offer my mind no challenge; or they haven’t the wits to match mine.” At the top of Odessa High School’s rigid social hierarchy were the “cashmere girls,” as one alumna called them—the girls with perfect complexions from West Odessa’s better neighborhoods who were perennially voted most popular, best personality, and class favorite. At football games, they sat in the stands wearing the ultimate status symbol: their boyfriends’ letter jackets. They belonged to the informal sororities called Tri-Hi-Y clubs— Capri, Sorella, and Amicae—which cherry-picked the most popular high school girls. Betty was hardly Tri-Hi-Y material; in the high school pecking order, her classmates remember her as “a nobody,” “a nonentity,” and “someone on the outside looking in.” But while she struck an antiestablishment pose, the rejection she felt from the other girls still stung. “Betty wanted to be liked,” says her first cousin Shelton Williams, whose memoir, Washed in the Blood, chronicles his coming-of-age in Odessa through the prism of Betty’s murder. “She wanted what we all want—to be totally unique while being completely accepted.” In a place where fun on a Saturday night might mean deciding to take only right turns while cruising around town, Betty dreamed of her escape. She hoped to one day become an actress, and in her bedroom, where movie posters and playbills covered the walls, she devoured magazines like the Hollywood scandal sheet Confidential. She loved the thrill of the spotlight and was gifted enough that she landed parts in three school plays when she was just a sophomore. During her junior year, when the speech team performed the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet at the University Interscholastic League competition, Betty played the doomed, lovesick heroine. But as desperately as she wanted to propel herself out of Odessa, she was fatalistic about the future. The oldest of four children, she knew that her parents could not afford to send her away to college, and her part-time job at Woolworth’s barely paid enough 62

T4096.indb 62

1/18/07 7:18:57 AM

6 63 to finance any kind of getaway. While she aspired to one day appear a kiss on the Broadway stage, in the meantime she planned to live at home before after graduation and attend Odessa College, just up the street. dying Some nights, Betty would slip out the back door after her parents had gone to bed and walk the four blocks to Tommy’s Drive-In, where there were always boys to talk to. Plenty of girls were flirts, but few of them were as assertive as Betty. She made no secret of the fact that she was not a prude and that she was willing to prove it. At the end of an evening at Tommy’s, it was not unusual for her to end up parked in a secluded spot somewhere with a football player—after, of course, he had taken his girlfriend home to meet her curfew. While boys were free to do as they pleased, “good” girls were expected to obey an unspoken code of conduct. “If a girl had a steady boyfriend, then she could have sex, as long as she didn’t advertise it,” says Jean Smith Kiker, a Capri who was a year below Betty. “But if she did it with someone who wasn’t her boyfriend, then she was a pariah.” Betty chose to disregard the rules, and if she had earned herself a reputation, she hardly seemed to care. “Eisenhower had been president during most of our years of growing up, and kids were kept on a very short leash,” remembers classmate Dixon Bowles. “You got the feeling with Betty that she was always straining against that leash, even when it choked her. Maybe especially when it choked her.” Mack, Well, I guess you accomplished what you set out to do. You hurt me, more than you’ll ever know. When you handed me that note this morning, you virtually changed the course of my life. I don’t [know] what I expected the note to say, but not that. I’ll not waste time saying that I didn’t deserve it because I guess I did. I’ve never been so hurt in my life and I guess your note was the jolt I needed to get me back on the straight and narrow. I’ve done a lot of things, I know, that were bad and cheap, but I swear before God that I didn’t mean them to be like that. I was just showing off. I know it’s much too late with you, Mack, but I swear that another boy won’t get the chance to say what you said to me. You’ve made me realize that instead of being smart and sophisticated like I thought, I was only being cheap and ugly and whorish.

T4096.indb 63

1/18/07 7:18:57 AM

6 Forgive me for writing this last note and thank you for reading it. I’ll not trouble you again, and Mack, I haven’t forgotten the good times we had. I really have enjoyed knowing you and I’m awfully sorry that it had to end this way. . . . Best of luck with your steady girlfriend. I hope she’s the best. Betty P.S. When you think of me try to think of the good times we had and not of this. 64

Pamela Colloff

mack herring was not one of the elite football players at Odessa High School on whose shoulders rested the hopes for the 1960 season; as a back for the Bronchos, and one of average abilities, he was just another guy on the team. Tall and goodlooking, with jet-black hair that framed a long, contemplative face, Mack was “a guy’s guy,” his classmates remember, who was quiet and self-contained. The oldest son of a homemaker and a World War II veteran who owned an electrical-contracting business, Mack grew up in the solidly middle-class neighborhood that was home to many of his teammates and the Tri-Hi-Y girls they dated. An avid hunter, he was happiest when he could spend a few days bagging dove or quail on his father’s hunting lease north of town or ramble around the oil fields with his .22, plinking jackrabbits. “If Mack wounded an animal when we went hunting, he would pursue it and dispatch it,” says Larry Francell, who grew up across the alley from him. “A lot of kids were cruel—they would shoot something and watch it hobble off—but Mack was different. He didn’t like to see things suffer. If he was going out there to hunt, he was going to kill.” Although Mack was near the top of the high school caste system and Betty was at the bottom, they managed to strike up a friendship when she was a junior and he was a sophomore. Betty thought she sensed in him a kindred spirit; he seemed more sensitive than the other boys she knew, and she thought there was something lonely and romantic about him. In the summer of 1960, they started dating, and Betty wondered if she might be falling in love; Mack, she told friends, really listened to her. But Mack was careful to be discreet about the time they spent together. He never took Betty to his neighbor Carol McCutchan’s house, where the

T4096.indb 64

1/18/07 7:18:57 AM

6 65 in crowd gathered for dance parties and rounds of spin the bottle. a kiss He never gave her his letter jacket or brought her home to meet before his parents. dying Perhaps because he had wounded her pride, or maybe just to make him jealous, Betty tried to even the score one night when she parked with one of his best friends, a popular football player who had been voted the most handsome in his class. The stunt soured Mack on the relationship, and by the fall, he had broken things off and started going steady with a pretty redhead in Amicae. “I’ve never been so humiliated and torn to pieces as I am now,” Betty wrote to a friend. “I feel so lonely and deserted I don’t care what happens now or ever. . . . This is pure hell!” Betty was crushed to discover that fall that Odessa High’s new drama teacher did not see much promise in her and had relegated her to the role of stage manager for the spring production of Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, a gloomy 1935 play based loosely on the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Worse, she learned that Mack would be playing one of Winterset’s lead roles, a remorseless killer named Trock Estrella. Still reeling from their breakup and depressed at the prospect of not being cast in a single play her senior year, Betty began to feel hopeless. Mack was “the one,” and without him, life wasn’t worth living. “She said she wanted to die if she couldn’t be with Mack,” remembers her cousin Shelton, who was a year her junior at Odessa’s Permian High School. “She told me, ‘I have to get him back.’ ” Her mood turned darker after her father rummaged through her dresser drawers, looking for evidence of her disobedience. Distraught, Betty confided in a friend that he had found her diary, in which she had detailed her experiences with boys. Though she had pleaded with her father to believe her when she swore to him that she had changed, he could not be convinced. “Betty said that the situation at home was bad,” says the friend, who asked not to be named. “I wanted to help, but I didn’t know what to do. I was sixteen years old.” By the winter, Betty had started telling friends that she would be better off dead. “Heaven must be a nice place,” she told junior Howard Sellers. She claimed to have halfheartedly tried to kill herself by taking four aspirin. She boasted of climbing up to the auditorium rafters, intending to throw herself onto the stage

T4096.indb 65

1/18/07 7:18:57 AM

6 Pamela Colloff below, only to find that she lacked the courage. Betty, who had always enjoyed being outrageous, talked about wanting to die to whoever would listen. But the only reaction she was able to provoke was a few eye rolls. The response was always the same: There goes Betty again, trying to be the center of attention. Even when she began acting more erratically during rehearsals for Winterset, her peers wrote off her overwrought confessions about wanting to die as nothing more than a theater girl’s high school histrionics. She informed at least five students working on the play that she wanted to kill herself but didn’t have the nerve. Would they be willing to do it for her, she asked? “No, I don’t think I will,” senior Mike Ware said, passing it off as a joke. A sophomore, Jim Mercer, also deflected the invitation. “I charge for my services,” he kidded, quoting her an impossibly high price. At a time when Betty felt marginalized by those around her and forsaken by the one boy she loved, death seemed to hold its own allure. Or was she just acting, pushing the boundaries in another bid to catch Mack’s attention? One night he gave her and Howard a ride home from rehearsal, and she made the request of him: Would he be willing to kill her? She would hold the gun to her head, she said, while he pulled the trigger. Mack laughed at the absurdity of the idea, and Betty laughed with him. She even went so far as to write out a wildly melodramatic note clearing him of culpability were he to be apprehended for her murder, a note that Howard would later say had seemed like a joke. But the next afternoon during rehearsal, Betty pulled Mack into the prop room backstage. She was miserable, she told him, and she wanted to die. It was the week before Winterset was scheduled to premiere, and students were busy running their lines and painting the set as they readied for the final dress rehearsal. In the middle of the chaos, Betty spotted Mike. “It’s been nice knowing you,” she said. “What do you mean? ” he asked. “I finally talked Mack into killing me,” she said. Mike shrugged. “I’ll send roses.” 66

I am consumed with this burning emptiness and loneliness that has taken charge of me, body and soul. I have to fight it! If I am to live

T4096.indb 66

1/18/07 7:18:58 AM

6 67 I have to fight [or] else it will pull me down, down, down into that thankless pit of fear, pain, and agonized loneliness.

a kiss before dying

two days later, on March 22, 1961, the Odessa Police Department received a frantic phone call from Mary Williams, who reported that her daughter was missing. One by one, Betty’s friends were called into the principal’s office, where they were asked to tell what they knew. Ike Nail, a popular junior who had taken Betty home from rehearsal the previous evening, recounted a story that interested investigators. When he had dropped Betty off at ten o’clock, he said, she had suggested that he return in half an hour and meet her in the alley behind her house. As promised, at tenthirty Betty had snuck out the back door and slipped into his car. The two teenagers had parked in the alley for a while, but they had been startled to see headlights coming toward them. Betty immediately recognized the approaching car as Mack’s. “Oh, my God, I didn’t think he’d come,” she had exclaimed. Ike had been certain Betty was only joking when she had remarked earlier in the evening that Mack had promised to kill her—so certain that he did not try to stop her when she climbed into Mack’s Jeep. As she turned to go, she said to Ike, “I’ve got to call his bluff, even if he kills me.” Odessa police youth officer Bobby McAlpine sat Mack down to answer a few questions. The football player told a plausibleenough story: He had dropped Betty off outside her parents’ house at midnight and had not seen her since. But inconsistencies in his account led McAlpine to believe that the seventeen-year-old knew more than he was letting on. Had he left Betty at the front door or the back, McAlpine inquired? The front door, Mack answered. And no, he hadn’t waited to see that she’d gotten inside safely. His answer struck McAlpine as peculiar; the officer knew that Betty had been dressed for bed when she had slipped out of the house that night. According to Ike, she had been wearing only pale-pink shorty pajamas and a blue-and-white-striped duster—not the kind of clothes a boy would leave a girl standing in on her front porch at midnight. McAlpine also felt sure that Betty would not have wanted to sneak back into the house through the front door. Mack was brought down to the police station for further questioning, and 45 minutes later, he broke down. Betty had begged him

T4096.indb 67

1/18/07 7:18:58 AM

6 Pamela Colloff to kill her, he told McAlpine; all he had done was carry out her wishes. He claimed to have committed the crime with a twelvegauge shotgun that Betty herself had picked out. Mack led officers to his father’s hunting lease, 26 miles northwest of town, on a lonely piece of scrubland studded with pump jacks. They turned off the highway onto a winding dirt road and continued on until Mack directed them to stop. He showed them where his and Betty’s footprints—his large, hers small—led down a steep incline to a stock tank. Beside the water, the ground was spattered with blood. In a flat monotone, Mack told investigators that he had shot Betty next to the stock tank, weighted her down, and submerged her body. Unsure of the exact location of the body in the tank, officers asked Mack if he would retrieve it. He stripped off his red-and-white varsity letter jacket, sport shirt, loafers, blue jeans, and socks and waded into the water until it came to his chest. The assembled group of lawmen fell silent. When he reached the center, Mack oriented himself by looking at the mesquite trees on either side; then he dove under the water and came back up. He began wading back toward land, dragging an object that appeared to be very heavy; when he was near the water’s edge, Odessa police detective Fred Johnson could see that he was holding a pair of human feet. Johnson advised him to leave the body, which was still clad in pale-pink pajamas, in the water. Around Betty’s waist were tied two lead weights. She had been partially decapitated by a single shotgun blast to the head. “It didn’t move him when he pulled her body out of the water or when he said that he’d put a shotgun to her head,” remembers retired highway patrolman E. C. Locklear. “It was as cold-blooded and premeditated as it could be. What pushed him to do it, none of us knew. Later on, when I put him in the squad car to take him to jail, I said, ‘Mack, didn’t you expect to get caught? ’ And he said, ‘Not this quick.’ He showed no emotion or regret or fear. It was like he was talking about shooting a dog.” Investigators called for an ambulance to be sent to the scene without sounding its siren, but reporters were not far behind. Before Mack was taken to jail, he recounted what had taken place the night before while newsmen from the Odessa American and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram took down his story and six photographers 68

T4096.indb 68

1/18/07 7:18:58 AM

6 69 jockeyed for the best angle. On the drive out to the hunting lease, a kiss “she was cheerful and chatted about how happy she was going to before be when she was dead,” Mack explained. He had parked his Jeep dying a short distance from the stock tank, and he and Betty had sat there for a while and talked. “She was happy,” he recalled. “She kept saying what it was going to be like in heaven.” Then they had walked down to the pond together. Shivering, Betty had hurried back to the Jeep to retrieve her duster. When she returned to the spot where Mack was waiting for her by the water, she took off her shoes. “I just stood there with the gun,” Mack told reporters. “I said, ‘Give me a kiss to remember you by.’ She gave me a kiss and then said, ‘Thank you, Mack. I will always remember you for that.’ Then she said, ‘Now.’ I raised the gun barrel up, and she took ahold of it with the back of her hand and held it up [to her temple]. And then I pulled the trigger. She was dead—like that.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis. As word spread around Odessa that afternoon that Mack had been arrested for Betty’s murder, the news was greeted with incredulity. “I just can’t believe it! Not Mack!” a sixteen-year-old girl shrieked as she collapsed in tears against a wall in the police station. “We were shocked that one of our own—a popular football player who had been to our parties and had dated our friends— had committed a heinous crime,” says Jean Smith Kiker. “And as more information came out, we were shocked to learn that Mack, and a lot of the other boys we knew, had been spending time with Betty after they had taken their girlfriends home.” But despite the gruesomeness of the crime and the first-degree murder charges that were filed against him, Mack was not ostracized by his peers. He was still invited to parties at Carol McCutchan’s house and was welcome at Tommy’s Drive-In. Girls visited him at home and boasted of knowing him. Rather than seeing Mack as a killer, many classmates acted as if something tragic that was beyond his control had befallen him. “We were all supportive, because we couldn’t believe it,” says a former Tri-Hi-Y girl who asked not to be identified. “We figured that if Mack did it, then there had to be a good reason.” After the arrest, the gossip centered less on Mack than it did on Betty. “She was seen as a slut and a diabolical manipulator,”

T4096.indb 69

1/18/07 7:18:58 AM

6 Pamela Colloff says Shelton Williams. “My father overheard a customer at his car wash say, ‘Everyone knew that girl was no good. She tricked that boy into killing her.’” Betty’s classmates in Winterset, which was canceled after the news of Mack’s arrest, puzzled over her intentions on the last night of her life. Had she really wanted to die, or was she still hoping, somehow, to win Mack back? “I think Betty trapped herself in a real-life drama of her own making,” says Dixon Bowles. “She was ad-libbing all the way, and it spun out of her control. I remember a teacher taking me aside afterward and asking me, ‘Was Betty pregnant? ’ And I said, ‘No. I wish it were that simple.’ It was a game of chicken, and she never backed out.” 70

March 20, 1961 I want everyone to know that what I’m about to do in no way implicates anyone else. I say this to make sure that no blame falls on anyone other than myself. I have depressing problems that concern, for the most part, myself. I’m waging a war within myself, a war to find the true me and I fear that I am losing the battle. So rather than admit defeat I’m going to beat a quick retreat into the no man’s land of death. As I have only the will and not the fortitude necessary, a friend of mine, seeing how great is my torment, has graciously consented to look after the details. His name is Mack Herring and I pray that he will not have to suffer for what he is doing for my sake. I take upon myself all blame, for there it lies, on me alone! Betty Williams

when the state of texas v. john mack herring got under way on February 20, 1962, a guilty verdict seemed to be an all but foregone conclusion. Mack’s own confession painted a picture of a methodically planned murder; before driving Betty half an hour out of town and shooting her, point-blank, in the head, he had, by his own admission, procured lead weights, rope, shotgun shells, and even a miner’s helmet to light his way so he could submerge her body in the stock tank. In the presence of lawmen, he had shown little emotion for his victim. (While in custody, Mack reportedly told a deputy sheriff, “I feel toward her like a cat lying in

T4096.indb 70

1/18/07 7:18:59 AM

6 71 a muddy street in the rain.”) “It looked, to most people, like a case a kiss that was impossible for the defendant to win,” says writer Larry before L. King, who had left Midland a decade earlier but still followed dying the case. “I mean, the defendant had admitted he kissed the girl, then blew her away, weighted her body, and buried it in the pond: What else did the state need? ” So King was confounded when his good friend Warren Burnett, an Odessa defense attorney, decided to take the case. “I asked Burnett why and he said, ‘Church ain’t over till they sing.’” At 34, Burnett was already considered one of the finest trial lawyers around, having earned the sobriquet “the boy wonder of the West.” An ex-Marine who, at the age of 25, had been the youngest prosecutor in Texas, Burnett always brought a sense of theater to the courtroom. In his melodious baritone, he peppered his arguments with Shakespeare and Scripture and won over jurors with his down-home charisma, so much so that no jury had ever sent a client of his to prison. In the Kiss and Kill case, he hatched a plan that he hoped would prevent Mack from ever standing trial for murder, using a defense strategy that had never, to anyone’s recollection, been used before. Under Texas law, if jurors found a defendant temporarily insane—that is, insane only when he committed the crime—he would walk free. Citing this statute, Burnett argued before district court judge G. C. Olsen that before any trial was to take place, jurors should first have to evaluate Mack’s sanity at the time he pulled the trigger. If they determined that he had been temporarily insane, he should not have to stand trial for murder. Burnett’s line of reasoning flouted legal precedent; sanity hearings are supposed to take up only the narrow question of whether a defendant is competent to stand trial. But to the astonishment of courthouse observers and over the strenuous objections of the prosecution, Judge Olsen granted Burnett’s motion for the pretrial hearing. Jurors would not determine Mack’s guilt or innocence; they would only render a decision as to whether he had been insane at the time of the crime. Mack, in effect, would have a chance at acquittal before his murder trial had even begun. When flummoxed prosecutors requested a 24-hour delay to prepare their case, Burnett expressed his surprise, “since insanity is the only possible explanation for this tragedy.”

T4096.indb 71

1/18/07 7:18:59 AM

6 Because the murder had occurred just across the Ector County Pamela Colloff line, the hearing took place in Kermit, an oil-patch town 45 miles west of Odessa, where the smell of petroleum hung in the air. The jury pool was the largest that had ever been called in Winkler County; the last murder to get much attention—a stabbing at a hotel in Wink—had happened in 1947. Teenagers filled many of the 160 seats in Judge Olsen’s courtroom, at times spilling over into the aisle and out the door. “It was a carnival,” says former Winkler County clerk Virginia Healy. “The defendant was a good-looking boy, and all these clean-cut girls came out from Odessa to ooh and aah over him.” Nicknamed “Mack’s girls,” they made up only a fraction of the spectators whose sympathies were with the defendant. Betty’s parents, lost in their grief, were her only visible supporters; her father occasionally leaned forward so as not to miss a word of testimony, dabbing at his eyes with a white handkerchief. Mack sat behind the defense table in a dark suit, his head often bowed. The strain of the proceedings sometimes showed, as when he laid his head in his hands during jury selection; otherwise, he was impassive. Arguing for the state was 32-year-old district attorney Dan Sullivan, an earnest, if not particularly seasoned, lawyer who was out of his depth; in his sixteen months in office, he had prosecuted mostly oil-field theft cases and DWIs. It was Burnett, with the sleeves of his suit jacket pushed up to his elbows, who commanded the courtroom. Because the burden of proof fell on Burnett to prove that Mack was insane when he pulled the trigger, the hearing began not with witnesses for the state but for the defense. The first person Burnett called to the stand was Mack’s father, O. H. Herring, who told the jury that on the day of his son’s arrest, Mack had handed him a letter Betty had written. The letter, which the Texas Department of Public Safety had authenticated and which Mr. Herring read to the jury, held that Betty alone was to blame for her death. “You might say she has become a witness for the defense,” Burnett quipped. Nine character witnesses—including Odessa High’s head football coach, Lacy Turner—spoke on Mack’s behalf; many of them concurred that Mack must have been temporarily insane at the time of the crime. Three classmates testified that Betty had also asked them to kill her. But the 72

T4096.indb 72

1/18/07 7:18:59 AM

6 73 most compelling testimony came from Marvin Grice, an Odessa a kiss psychiatrist who had examined Mack three days after the murder. before The former football player had been “dethroned of his reasoning” dying by Betty’s pleadings, Grice said, and, in his estimation, had been temporarily insane when he put the shotgun to her head. “He became so mixed up and so sick that he felt pulling the trigger was what he should do for her,” Grice testified. “He was deprived of the power of applying logic.” However, the effects of this “gross stress reaction” were temporary. “He can be trusted to lead a normal life,” Grice assured the jury. Sullivan put on the best case he could given the extraordinary limitations he was working with. Judge Olsen had denied his motion to have Mack evaluated by a psychiatrist for the state, having agreed with Burnett that the defendant’s current state of mind was irrelevant. Sullivan tried to establish jealousy as a motive by calling to the stand Bill Rose, the popular football player whom Betty had parked with when she was dating Mack. But Bill testified that he had spurned Betty’s advances when they had parked in a secluded spot. Besides, Bill maintained, the incident had not had much of an effect on Mack. “We talked a while and agreed our friendship was more valuable than an argument about her,” Bill testified. “We shook hands and forgot the whole thing.” Sullivan pushed on, focusing on classmate Howard Sellers’s comment that Betty’s dramatic note attempting to exonerate Mack had been “conceived in a joking atmosphere.” But the district attorney could not establish a motive. “The entire proceeding was a perversion of the law,” says Sullivan, who is still a practicing lawyer in the nearby town of Andrews. “The jury never heard the indictment read or learned how the crime was committed. None of the facts of the case came out.” Moments after Sullivan rested his case, Burnett rose from his seat and thundered across the crowded courtroom, “Stand up, Mack Herring! Go around and take the witness chair.” It appeared that Burnett was calling his client to the stand for rebuttal, but no sooner had Mack been sworn in than Burnett, for further dramatic effect, roared, “Pass the witness! Answer the questions they have for you, lad.” If he had hoped to throw the prosecution off balance, he had succeeded, though Sullivan tried to make the

T4096.indb 73

1/18/07 7:19:00 AM

6 Pamela Colloff most of the opportunity. In his cross-examination, the district attorney pressed Mack to explain at what moment, exactly, he had decided to kill Betty. “I don’t know,” Mack stammered. “I can’t remember . . . I can’t explain.” He had difficulty understanding it all himself, he told the jury in a halting voice. “I have stayed awake at night trying to think so I could explain it to other people,” he said. “Sometimes now I think it was a dream. Sometimes I think it was real. Sometimes I think I am watching someone else.” As he sat in the witness chair, he appeared solemn and contrite. Though other classmates had believed that Betty was joking when she had asked them to kill her, Mack maintained that her pleas had had a profound effect on him. Betty had “talked about heaven a lot,” he said, and had made it appear “like a place you could reach out and touch.” He explained that on the night he killed her, he had believed he was doing the right thing. In retrospect, he told the jury, “I know that everything about it was wrong.” After eleven hours of deliberation, during which jurors asked that Grice’s expert testimony be read back to them, they determined that Mack had, in fact, been temporarily insane on the night of the murder. Upon hearing the verdict, Mack slumped in his chair and wept, while friends and classmates rushed to his side to embrace him. Betty’s parents slipped through the exuberant crowd and out of the courtroom before reporters could reach them for comment. While Burnett had been careful not to malign Betty’s character during the hearing, some details of the case, like her sneaking out of her house in her nightclothes to meet Ike Nail, had tarred her as a loose, immoral girl. “I overheard a juror talking about Betty,” says Hazel Locklear, the wife of the highway patrolman who had been struck by Mack’s aloofness at the crime scene. “I remember her saying, in a very ugly way, ‘That girl was nothing.’” To some observers, it seemed as if Betty’s transgressions had eclipsed those of the teenager who’d killed her. “Nobody talked about how Mack could have said no,” observes Sandra Scofield, who graduated from Odessa High a year before the murder. “Betty had enlisted him—this worthy young man—to do what she didn’t have the courage to do herself. She had ‘roped’ him into doing it. So she became not the victim but the villain.” 74

T4096.indb 74

1/18/07 7:19:00 AM

6 75 Sullivan appealed the verdict to the Texas Supreme Court, on a kiss the grounds that Judge Olsen did not have the authority to grant a before hearing that only evaluated Mack’s sanity at the time of the crime. dying On June 27, 1962, the court sided with Sullivan, vacating the judgment and ordering a new trial. But what advantage he gained in being allowed to present his evidence was negated by Burnett’s skill and showmanship. Because of the intense publicity, the second trial was moved nearly six hundred miles away, to Beaumont. Burnett relied on his old playbook. He put Grice back on the stand and packed the courtroom with teammates, teachers, parents, and community leaders who took the stand to extol his client’s virtues. Mack had been a stellar student, one of his teachers told the jury, and added, “I’ve never known a more brilliant mind.” His football coach testified that Mack had never used profanity. Howard Sellers said that Mack was his “idol” and “personified everything that was good.” In an impassioned closing argument that Burnett delivered before a standing-room-only crowd, he hammered home the fact that nearly two years after Betty’s murder, the prosecution had still not established a motive. “Does the evidence show you any possible explanation? ” he challenged the jury. “Until some evidence is brought to show the psychiatrists were wrong, I’d be inclined to believe them.” Jurors agreed, and twelve days before Christmas, they found Mack not guilty by reason of insanity. A smattering of applause broke out in the courtroom when the verdict was announced, and once again, Mack was mobbed by jubilant supporters. A few glad observers, including the wife of a Baptist minister who sat on the jury, looked on with tears in their eyes. Mack, who had once worried aloud to a reporter that he would be sent to the electric chair, was a free man. To whom it may concern, The time has come to leave, and as I prepare to go, I find it difficult to write the words that will explain . . . I love you Dick, for all that you have meant to me. You’ve been the greatest friend I could ever ask for. Here’s to all the stories we never wrote. Maybe it’s better that way—they’ll never be exposed to the critics or the public. I hope our story about Jerry makes it. Think of me once in a while and know that I’m glad we met.

T4096.indb 75

1/18/07 7:19:00 AM

6 Gayle . . . I’m sorry about Indiana, but I hope you’ll understand. Here’s hoping you’ll always have the best because you’re one of the best! I find the tears clouding my eyes as I say goodbye to those I love. May they forgive me . . . Mr. Herring, you’re a wonderful man. So many times I’ve wanted to tell you how much I appreciate you. I’m sorry I have to tell you like this. . . . Memories, so many memories to come back and cloud my mind, memories that I’ll carry through all eternity. 76

Pamela Colloff

anyone who had suffered the unrelenting scrutiny that Mack had—the Odessa American alone ran nearly two dozen front-page stories on the case—might have pulled up stakes and started a new life somewhere else. But Mack chose to stay. After attending Texas Tech University, where he was once introduced to a class as “the famous Mack Herring,” he returned home to the town that never turned its back on him. He made a quiet life for himself, and he steered clear of trouble with the law. He married and divorced, twice. He worked as a dock foreman at a chemical company, a carpenter, a welder, and, for at least the past 25 years, as an electrician. Few of his former classmates still see him; most have moved away or fallen out of touch. As the booms and busts of the oil patch have brought new people to Odessa and taken others away, Mack has faded into the background. I caught sight of him one afternoon in November as he pulled up to his house, a mint-green frame house not far from where he grew up. His own neighborhood lacks the gracious lawns and spreading trees of his childhood; the house, which is a bit down at the heels, looks like the province of a man who lives alone. A meager yard of packed dirt and weeds led to the street, and an old rusted pickup sat in the driveway. Mack, who declined to be interviewed for this article, looked indistinguishable from any other working man in Odessa, right down to his beat-up truck with the toolbox in the bed. Nothing suggested that he had once been sharply handsome or held a great deal of promise. At 62, he was utterly unremarkable.

T4096.indb 76

1/18/07 7:19:00 AM

6 77 “This has not been a free ride for Mack,” says his childhood a kiss friend Larry Francell. “It’s ruined two lives. One’s dead, one’s still before alive.” And because many people in town would prefer never to dying hear the words “kiss and kill” again, the case still touches a nerve. “I suspect most of us would rather let the thing stay in the past,” one Odessa High School alumna wrote me in an e-mail. “There was already enough pain in ’61. Why dredge it up again? ” But others refuse to forget. “I don’t take well to the fact that people don’t think this is an important story,” says Shelton Williams, who carried a photograph of his cousin in his wallet for 35 years after her murder. “I don’t believe that Betty ever wanted to die.” In the Williams family, grandiose threats and melodramatic bids for attention had not been unique to Betty. “When her father lived with my parents, he used to threaten to kill himself in the middle of the night,” says Shelton. “My mother would sit up with him and try to talk him out of it, until he did it one too many times. Then she told him to just go ahead and do it, which he didn’t. When Betty said that life wasn’t worth living without Mack, I understood it within the context of our family.” Her murder and the verdicts that followed had stripped away any of his preconceptions about fairness and justice. “No other event in my life impacted me the way this did,” he says. “Everything looked different to me afterward. Betty had been murdered, and everyone wanted to sweep it under the rug and make it go away.” And still, after nearly half a century’s worth of other tragedies, the stories at Odessa High School live on. In October an Odessa College student named Sammi Sanchez, who was researching a paper she had to present to her speech class on the best place to spend Halloween, received permission to spend the night in the high school’s auditorium. When I met Sanchez and three of her girlfriends a few weeks later, they told me, in great detail, about all the strange and unexplained things they had heard and seen: the door that had mysteriously slammed closed behind them, the eerie footsteps, the stage lights that had moved when they had called out Betty’s name. After two hours in the auditorium, Sanchez and her friends were so unnerved, and so certain that they had felt Betty’s presence, that they decided to leave. But first they did what

T4096.indb 77

1/18/07 7:19:01 AM

6 Pamela Colloff they assumed any drama girl—spectral or not—would have wanted. “We let Betty know she was the star,” Sanchez says. “We sat there in the theater seats, in the dark, and we applauded for her.” 78

6 February 2006

T4096.indb 78

1/18/07 7:19:01 AM

midnight in the garden of east texas

6

sk ip holl andsworth

M

arjorie Nugent was the richest widow in an eccentric town full of rich widows. Bernie Tiede was an assistant funeral home director who became her companion. When she disappeared, nobody seemed alarmed. When he confessed to killing her, nobody seemed outraged.

sitting at his regular table at Daddy Sam’s BBQ and Catfish (“You Kill It, I’ll Cook It”) in the East Texas town of Carthage, district attorney Danny Buck Davidson began to realize that he might have some problems prosecuting Bernie Tiede for murder. “Bernie’s a sweet man, Danny Buck,” a waitress said. “He’s done a lot of good things for this town. He’s given poor kids money to go to college and everything.” “You got to admit nobody could sing ‘Amazing Grace’ like Bernie could,” someone else said. The bulldog-faced Danny Buck took a bite of slaw and sipped his iced tea. “Now y’all know that Bernie confessed, don’t you? ” he said, trying to keep his voice calm. “He came right out and told a Texas Ranger that he shot Mrs. Nugent four times in the back and then stuffed her in her own deep freeze in her kitchen.” There was a long silence. “Danny Buck,” one man finally said, “it’s just hard for me to believe that old Bernie could fire a gun

T4096.indb 79

1/18/07 7:19:01 AM

6 Skip straight. He acts . . . well, you know . . . effeminate! You can tell Hollandsworth he’s never been deer hunting in his entire life.” “And you know what? ” a woman told Danny Buck later at a convenience store. “I don’t care if Mrs. Nugent was the richest lady in town. She was so mean that even if Bernie did kill her, you won’t be able to find anyone in town who’s going to convict him for murder.” Danny Buck Davidson had spent almost all of his fifty years in Carthage, the past three as district attorney, and neither he nor the town of 6,500 was accustomed to high-profile killings. Every couple of years or so a murder case would come across the DA’s desk, usually involving a resident from one of the poorer neighborhoods. But nobody from the respectable side of town ever seemed to get in trouble, as long as you didn’t count the recent conviction of Carthage state senator Drew Nixon, who was caught soliciting an undercover cop posing as a prostitute in Austin. Even then, Carthage’s civic leaders were able to put a good spin on Nixon’s arrest, saying that Nixon never would have had any problems if he had just stayed in Carthage. Carthage has no prostitutes. This past August, however, Carthage captured the attention of the entire country when the news broke that the town’s richest and snootiest widow, 81-year-old Mrs. Marjorie Nugent, had been found in the bottom of a large freezer in her home. What made the story peculiar was that Mrs. Nugent had been dead for almost nine months before people began searching for her. What made the story truly bizarre was the way many of the townspeople rallied around the 39-year-old man who had admitted to killing her and stealing her money—the soft-spoken, chubby-cheeked Bernie Tiede, the former assistant funeral director at Hawthorn Funeral Home who had gotten close to Mrs. Nugent when he supervised her husband’s funeral. For out-of-town reporters, the story of Bernie Tiede and Mrs. Nugent was like an East Texas version of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, featuring a down-home gallery of characters entangled in an off beat, tragic mystery. Wearing his flaming red chamber of commerce blazer, the town’s mayor, Carson Joines, posed for a People magazine photograph and then announced that Bernie might be acquitted. When Hard Copy arrived, Bernie’s 80

T4096.indb 80

1/18/07 7:19:01 AM

6 81 former funeral home boss agreed to be interviewed sitting out by his backyard pool. Carthage’s congenial Methodist minister, the Reverend E. B. Beasley, gave reporters copies of a sermon he had preached the Sunday after Bernie’s arrest titled “When Life Doesn’t Make Sense.” “No matter what the truth is,” Beasley proclaimed, “Bernie will need our prayers. He needs to be with God, and he needs to know that we are with him.” The town refused to abandon Bernie even after Sheriff Jack Ellett announced during his Friday morning talk show on the local radio station, KGAS (“The Heartbeat of East Texas”), that deputies had confiscated nearly fifty videotapes from Bernie’s house, some showing men involved in illicit acts. “From the day that deep freeze was opened, you haven’t been able to find anyone in town saying, ‘Poor Mrs. Nugent,’ ” said city councilman Olin Joffrion, a respected Carthage insurance agent. “People here are saying, ‘Poor Bernie.’ ” In fact, throughout last fall, a stream of mostly female wellwishers visited Bernie in jail, bringing him cakes and pies. “If I made a list of people I knew were going to heaven,” one woman told the Houston Chronicle, “Bernie would be the first on that list.” At the grocery store and at Daddy Sam’s, other women came up to the district attorney and said they were praying for him to do the right thing. A disgusted Danny Buck told me, “It’s almost as if everyone has already forgotten that an elderly lady was shot to death.”

midnight in the garden of east texas

tucked away in east texas’ piney Woods, about twenty miles from the Louisiana border, Carthage sits on what used to be one of the largest natural-gas fields in the world. In the forties and fifties the town was known as the gas capital of the U.S., and its citizens believe it is so rich in history that they’ve built dueling historical museums on opposite sides of the town square: the Panola County Historical Jail Museum and the Panola County Heritage Museum and Texas Tea Room. These days chamber of commerce representatives are promoting Carthage as Texas’ country music capital, the birthplace of such sensations as Tex Ritter, Jim Reeves, and budding solo star Linda Davis, a backup singer for Reba McEntire and a former Miss Panola County, who, according to one of her high school classmates, “would surely have won Miss Texas if she had gotten a boob job before the state

T4096.indb 81

1/18/07 7:19:01 AM

6 Skip pageant.” To improve tourist traffic, the chamber is planning to Hollandsworth open a new museum this year devoted solely to Texas-born country music stars—the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame. All in all, Carthage, which made it into the 1995 edition of The Best 100 Small Towns in America, is an immensely likable place—“The kind of town,” says KGAS owner Jerry Hanszen, “where people get out of their cars to see which neighbors they can help whenever there’s a traffic jam around the town square.” Carthaginians are also conservative, politically and socially, which makes it hard to imagine that Bernhardt Tiede II, who moved here in 1985, would end up becoming one of the most popular people in town. Compared with the men who passed their afternoons at Leon Choate’s barbershop just off the square, the portly, mustachioed Bernie was, in the words of one person who knew him, “peachy and sweet.” When he wasn’t in his dark funeral suit, he wore colorful Tommy Hilfiger clothes and drove around town in his Lincoln Continental, smiling broadly at whomever he saw. “He wasn’t bad-looking, and there were numerous girls in the community who would have dated him,” says Don Lipsey, the former owner of Hawthorn, who had hired Bernie. “But he showed no romantic interest in women his age at all. I think some of the men during their coffee shop talks would insinuate that Bernie was a little light in the loafers.” Despite the questions about Bernie’s personal life, Carthage’s citizens couldn’t help but take a shine to him. Bernie clearly loved the small-town life of East Texas. At First United Methodist he was the tenor soloist in the choir, he taught Sunday school, and sometimes, when the minister was sick or on vacation, he gave the sermon. (“Let me tell you, he was doggone better than the paid preacher,” one elderly member says.) Bernie got involved with the drama and music departments at Panola College, and he became so renowned for his knowledge of Broadway musicals that he was asked to conduct the drama department’s performances of Showboat and Guys and Dolls. He sang with the Shreveport Chamber Singers, a professional singing group just across the state line, and he served on the chamber of commerce’s Christmas decorating committee, giving advice about where the lights and wreaths should be placed around the town square. 82

T4096.indb 82

1/18/07 7:19:02 AM

6 83 “He brought a lot of compassion to Carthage,” says Paula Carter, a fellow church member and a counselor at the high school. “He was very quick to shake your hand and ask how you were doing, and if you told him you weren’t doing too well, he would drop everything to talk to you and see what he could do.” He sewed curtains for people who needed them, he helped others with their tax returns, and he began buying so many gifts for his new Carthage friends that, according to Lipsey, “the UPS truck started arriving in Carthage every day with something that Bernie had ordered from a catalog.” Born in Tyler, Bernie spent his earliest years in Kilgore, a 45minute drive from Carthage, where his father was the chairman of the fine arts department at Kilgore Junior College. His mother died in a car wreck when he was only three, and his father, after remarrying and moving Bernie and his younger sister to Abilene, died after a long illness when Bernie was fifteen. To help support himself and his sister, Bernie took an after-school job at an Abilene funeral home, first doing yard work and then helping out at the funerals. “I really think that because of the loneliness he went through in his childhood, Bernie made it his calling to serve people in times of their own need,” says his sister, a Central Texas social worker who asked not to be identified. “He wasn’t a dour boy. He was popular at high school, and for kicks he’d sneak the hearse on Fridays out of the funeral home and drive a bunch of us around Abilene. But he said a long time ago that he was meant to take care of others—and I think that’s why the funeral business appealed to him.” He received an associate’s degree in mortuary science from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, worked at a funeral home in town, and in 1985 came to work in Carthage, living in a small apartment just behind the Hawthorn Funeral Home. “He was probably the most qualified young man I have ever seen,” says Lipsey. “He waited well on the families, he would sing solos behind the screen during the funeral, and he was a darned good embalmer. He had a talent of making the hair of the deceased look really natural.” He was especially empathetic with older ladies who had just lost their husbands. He led them weeping to a sofa in the parlor,

T4096.indb 83

midnight in the garden of east texas

1/18/07 7:19:02 AM

6 Skip handed them handkerchiefs, quoted comforting Scripture, and Hollandsworth stood close to them at the interment, always prepared to catch them in case they fainted as their husbands’ caskets were lowered into the earth. In the weeks after the funeral, he would call the widows, offering to pick up their medicines at the drugstore. Some of them loved him so much that they told their children that Bernie had to sing at their funeral when they passed on. “With that nice tenor voice of his, I just knew Bernie could sing me right into heaven,” one Carthage widow says. Carthage is full of well-to-do widows who have inherited small fortunes from their rich husbands. Some of them can be seen driving their huge Cadillacs up and down the town’s streets, occasionally bumping into trees or stop signs when their tiny feet miss the brake pedal. They are a spirited bunch, even if they are somewhat behind the times. Speaking to me on the phone, one widow said that a man who had just delivered lunch to her house knew Bernie. “Chris,” she said to him, “why don’t you tell this reporter what you know. Shall I introduce you as Negro, black, or colored? ” Bernie was not partial outright to the wealthier widows. One of the first women he took a special interest in was Gracie Duke, the widow of a mechanic. When she complained about an ache in her bones, Bernie felt so sorry for her that he took her to Hot Springs, Arkansas, so she could sit in the baths. But he would eventually give the most attention to the richest widow in Carthage— Mrs. Marjorie Nugent, who arrived at Hawthorn in March 1990 for the funeral of her husband, who was worth between $5 million and $10 million. Born in 1915 just outside Carthage—her father ran a grocery— Marjorie Midyette attended Louisiana Tech, where she met R. L. “Rod” Nugent, who had recently graduated from the school with an electrical engineering degree. After their marriage, Nugent took a job with Magnolia Oil (which later became Mobil), and the two of them lived throughout Louisiana, New Mexico, and Texas, spending more than a dozen years in Midland, where their only child, Rod Junior, was raised. In 1989, at the end of his career, the eldest Nugent decided to bring his wife back to her hometown. He bought controlling interest in the First National Bank of Carthage, and the couple 84

T4096.indb 84

1/18/07 7:19:02 AM

6 85 built a sprawling, six-thousand-square-foot stone home at the edge of town, surrounded by a stone wall and electronic gates. Although Mrs. Nugent rarely left the estate, it wasn’t long before she became the talk of the town. Curious neighbors learned that she refused to speak to her own sister, who was also a Carthage resident (another sister lived in Ohio), because of an argument the two had back in the eighties over their dead mother’s estate. Mrs. Nugent had so many disagreements with her son, who had become a prominent Amarillo pathologist, that she would only occasionally speak to him. According to most locals, she acted as if she was too good for Carthage. “If she had held her nose any higher,” one man once said of her, “she would have drowned in a rainstorm.” It was said that when she made an appearance at the bank, she sat in a chair in the lobby and barely nodded to people. She didn’t participate in any civic activities or contribute to worthy Carthage causes, and she seemed to hate spending money around town. When a local veterinarian told her that he would charge $45 for treating her dog, she argued with him until he lowered his price. Even those close to her admit that she was imperious and critical, lashing out at whoever disappointed her. “If she liked you, she sent lovely birthday cards and thank-you notes,” says Lloyd Tiller, one of her stockbrokers. “But you had to cater to Margie and constantly flatter her. She could throw a temper tantrum if everything didn’t go her way.” A close relative, who wishes to remain anonymous, says that there were times when Mrs. Nugent seemed to lapse into a low-level clinical depression: “It was like these blue periods came on, and when they did, she could be very biting in her comments to people. Margie was a very difficult woman to love.” Much of the gossip about Mrs. Nugent was, no doubt, exaggerated. “She wasn’t all that unfriendly, but she didn’t go out of her way to be friendly, which can mean a lot in a small town,” says a teacher at the high school. Nevertheless, when Mr. Nugent died unexpectedly of heart failure, only a handful of people came to the funeral to offer her their condolences. Bernie Tiede would later tell others that he could see the loneliness etched in Mrs. Nugent’s stern face as she stood by the casket. When Mrs. Nugent started shivering, Bernie gave her his coat. At the funeral service, held in

T4096.indb 85

midnight in the garden of east texas

1/18/07 7:19:03 AM

6 Skip the chapel, he sang a hymn, then he helped Mrs. Nugent to her Hollandsworth car for the trip to the cemetery. 86

in the months after the funeral, the only person who took an active interest in Mrs. Nugent’s well-being was Bernie Tiede. “I don’t know if Mrs. Nugent had a single friend in town other than him,” admits Danny Buck. Bernie would arrive at her estate for lunch, leave little notes of endearment for her around the house, and take her to see theatricals at the local college. Says Tiller: “Bernie made her smile, he gave her plenty of attention, he was an excellent conversationalist. It was like he made her feel young again.” And Mrs. Nugent was apparently willing to do what it took to keep him around. Soon after the funeral, she gave Bernie Mr. Nugent’s Rolex watch, worth $12,000—a startling act of generosity from a woman known as the town Grinch. In 1991 she ordered officials at First National Bank to accept checks from her account signed by Bernie so that he could handle some of her bills. When Tiller asked if she was certain she could trust Bernie, Mrs. Nugent grew livid and threatened to move all her stocks out of Tiller’s brokerage. Bernie began spending his days off with Mrs. Nugent, which reportedly upset some of the town’s other widows, with whom he’d spent so much time over the years. One afternoon Don Lipsey called Mrs. Nugent looking for Bernie. She told him that Bernie was in one of her bedrooms taking a nap. Then word spread that Mrs. Nugent had gone on a cruise—something her husband had never wanted to do—and that she had paid Bernie to go with her. The two even slept in the same cabin. Rumors flew through Carthage. Was the cherubic Bernhardt Tiede II trying to seduce the haughty Marjorie Nugent? Or was it the other way around? Some people were shocked when Bernie was seen holding Mrs. Nugent’s hand in town, but Bernie was quick to explain that Mrs. Nugent wobbled when she walked. “I think Margie truly enjoyed the companionship with Bernie, and I think Bernie truly enjoyed Margie’s money,” says a close relative of hers. For Bernie, who was making a reported annual salary of about $18,000 at the funeral home, Mrs. Nugent’s money

T4096.indb 86

1/18/07 7:19:03 AM

6 87 must have been tempting. She was making between $200,000 and $300,000 a year in oil and gas royalty payments alone. He was constantly behind in his American Express payments, and he owed the IRS $4,000 in back taxes. “Bernie was a buyaholic,” says his sister. “He not only wanted to experience the finer things in life, he loved buying as much as he could for others. He’d order the same items over and over—like three of the same chairs or boxes of Cross pens—just so he could give them away.” In late 1993 Bernie told Don Lipsey that Mrs. Nugent had asked him to work for her—at a much higher salary—as her business manager and escort on trips around the world. A barrelchested, plain-talking East Texan, Lipsey had grown fond of Bernie, despite his discomfort with what he described as Bernie’s “tutti-frutti speaking voice.” “Bernie,” he warned, “you know what kind of woman Mrs. Nugent is. Whatever you think you’re going to get out of her, you’re going to have to earn every penny of it.” “Mrs. Nugent is already so possessive of you,” added Sally, Don’s wife. “She’s already making you drive out there every morning just to fix her coffee! Is that really what you want for yourself?” “Now, Don and Sally,” Bernie replied, “Deep down inside she’s a sweet woman. We will get along just fine.” What few in town knew—and what Bernie was not saying— was that Mrs. Nugent had already changed her will, making Bernie the sole heir to her multimillion- dollar estate. (Mrs. Nugent later told a cousin that she didn’t want to leave a cent to her son or her immediate family because they didn’t “appreciate” her.) How could Bernie risk Mrs. Nugent’s wrath, and thus risk losing her money, by turning down her job offer?

midnight in the garden of east texas

with money mrs. nugent advanced him, Bernie bought a two-bedroom home about a mile from the Nugent estate. He set out his collection of black-and-white plastic penguins in the front yard. (He liked penguins, he told others, because they looked so well-dressed.) He hung white curtains on the living room window and displayed his collection of more than seventy wristwatches in the hallway. He threw a Christmas open house, inviting members of the chamber of commerce, professors at the college, and other Carthage VIPs. One widow who was there took a look at the

T4096.indb 87

1/18/07 7:19:03 AM

6 Skip polished furniture and the porcelain penguins on the side tables Hollandsworth and said, “Bernie, you’ve created a doll house!” “Bernie found himself living a dream,” says his sister. “For the first time in his life, he got to be somebody.” Bernie earned his pilot’s license and bought a couple of small airplanes. He took Mrs. Nugent’s seat on the board of the First National Bank, and he regularly placed calls to Lloyd Tiller, irritating the stockbroker to no end with recommendations of stocks that he thought should be bought for Mrs. Nugent. “What do you know about the stock market? ” Tiller once shouted at Bernie. “You’re nothing but an undertaker!” A few minutes later Mrs. Nugent called Tiller and told him in an icy voice that if he spoke that way to Bernie again, she would be changing stockbrokers. On their vacations together, Bernie and Mrs. Nugent traveled all over the world, visiting the Orient, Egypt, and Russia. They flew to New York to see new Broadway musicals, and they sailed on the Queen Mary for Europe, returning on the Concorde. It was a glamorous life, but as Lipsey warned, Bernie paid a price. According to Bernie’s friends, he had to have Mrs. Nugent’s medicines laid out every day. If he wasn’t at her house by eleven forty-five for lunch, she would become extremely frustrated— “Almost panicky,” says one man—and call his pager incessantly until he arrived. When visiting someone else, Bernie would have to interrupt the conversation at regular intervals and use the phone to check in with Mrs. Nugent. “If I don’t call her, she will give me living hell,” Bernie would say. Perhaps Bernie decided he deserved extra pay for his service to Mrs. Nugent. Or perhaps he thought he could do whatever he wanted with her money since he knew it would be coming to him anyway after her death. Or, as his sister suggests, maybe Bernie genuinely believed in the good of giving. For whatever reason, Bernie became the town’s Robin Hood. Unbeknownst to Mrs. Nugent, he started slipping money out of her hefty bank accounts and giving it to anyone he thought could use help. He bought at least ten cars for people who couldn’t afford one, telling them to pay him back when they could. He bought a home for a struggling young couple. He provided scholarships to students at Panola College, he pledged $100,000 to the new building campaign 88

T4096.indb 88

1/18/07 7:19:03 AM

6 89 at First United Methodist, and he led the fundraising drive for the Boy Scouts. When a woman who owned a local trophy shop told him that her business was failing, Bernie stepped in and bought it so that Carthage High School and youth sports teams could get their trophies for another year. Bernie was on a oneman campaign to improve culture in Carthage, giving away tickets to the college theater productions and paying for the expenses of choir concerts. When a man who once worked with him at the funeral home told him that he wanted to open a clothing store, Bernie agreed to fund it, saying that Carthage needed its own Neiman Marcus. The man’s idea of what Carthage needed was a little different. He proudly opened Boot Scootin’ Western Wear. Some townspeople thought Bernie’s presence did have a positive effect on Mrs. Nugent. At his urging she joined the Methodist church, and she once had the women’s Sunday school class over to her house for brunch. But sometime in 1995, Bernie told his sister that he thought Mrs. Nugent was developing a mild dementia. Mrs. Nugent had fired the gardeners, he said, because the flowers hadn’t bloomed on time. She also made Bernie buy a .22 rifle to shoot the armadillos that were rooting up her front yard. Bernie found himself stalking the armored pests while Mrs. Nugent supervised from the front porch. “Bernie said to me, ‘She’s so controlling, it just wears me down,’ ” his sister recalls. “I asked him why he didn’t quit, and he gave me this tortured look and said, ‘Because I’m her only friend. I have to stay because I’m the only one she has.’”

midnight in the garden of east texas

at thanksgiving, 1996, Bernie went alone to see his sister, telling her that Mrs. Nugent had decided to spend the holiday in Ohio with the one sister she was still talking to. At Christmas, Bernie decorated Mrs. Nugent’s home, but he again told those who asked that Mrs. Nugent was in Ohio. Early that spring, he began telling people that Mrs. Nugent was in bed because of an illness and not accepting visitors. By late spring, he said she was in a nursing home outside Carthage, recuperating from a stroke. He told Lloyd Tiller, who was concerned that Mrs. Nugent had not answered any of the messages he had left on her home phone, that she was losing her mind and perhaps had Alzheimer’s.

T4096.indb 89

1/18/07 7:19:04 AM

6 Tiller says he didn’t entirely believe Bernie’s explanations, but Skip Hollandsworth it never occurred to him that Bernie might have harmed her. Ruth Cockrell, a Carthage widow who was Mrs. Nugent’s first cousin, was also dubious: “I was worried something had happened to her, but I didn’t know who to talk to about it. Bernie was so beloved in Carthage that if I suggested he had done anything wrong, I would have been laughed out of town.” Meanwhile, the maid continued coming to the empty estate to clean the house, and the yardmen kept cutting the yard. And Bernie kept giving: money for jet skis and pickup trucks, and to every student who performed in Panola College’s production of Guys and Dolls a $200 gift certificate to Boot Scootin’ Western Wear. In April Bernie performed with the Shreveport Chamber Singers. His solo rendition of Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer” was so heartfelt the audience gave him a prolonged ovation. In June he went on a Carthage Chamber of Commerce trip to Nashville to view a new Opryland exhibit honoring Tex Ritter. When he made sure to pay extra attention to one of the Carthage widows who had come along on the trip, pushing her through Opryland in her wheelchair, people patted him on the back and said, “Good old Bernie.” Then, in early July 1997, an unidentified Carthage woman called the sheriff ’s department and said she was worried about Mrs. Nugent—had anyone there seen her lately? Because of more pressing matters around town, sheriff ’s deputies didn’t look into the matter for nearly a month. Bernie, whom they found in Las Vegas singing at a Panola College student’s wedding, explained that Mrs. Nugent was staying in a hospital in Temple under an assumed name and did not wish to be contacted. But deputies couldn’t find anyone at the hospital who matched her description. They called Mrs. Nugent’s son in Amarillo, and he came to Carthage with his eldest daughter to search the house. When she told a deputy how odd it was that the deep freeze had been taped shut, he took a look inside. At the bottom, wrapped in a white sheet underneath some frozen food, was Mrs. Nugent. Not wanting to destroy evidence, the sheriff ordered his deputies to lift the entire deep freeze, with Mrs. Nugent still inside, onto a pickup truck and drive it to Dallas for an autopsy. (The deputies connected a gasoline-powered generator to the freezer to 90

T4096.indb 90

1/18/07 7:19:04 AM

6 91 keep it working.) Other deputies spread through town looking for Bernie. They found him preparing to take a team of Little League baseball players and their parents to dinner. He seemed surprised that deputies wanted to ask him some questions. With officers looming over him in a small room at the sheriff ’s department, Bernie tried to keep his composure. But he grew increasingly nervous, and he finally, calmly admitted to shooting Mrs. Nugent the previous November 19. He said he had used the same gun she made him buy to shoot armadillos. When asked why he killed her, Bernie looked at the officers in bewilderment, as if the answer were obvious. At last, he said that Mrs. Nugent had become “very hateful and very possessive.” The uproar in Carthage over Bernie’s arrest was, in the words of Danny Buck, “like a bunch of fireworks going off.” After a group of women tried to raise the money to meet Bernie’s $1.5 million bond, the DA went to the justice of the peace and filed additional theft charges against him (for stealing money from Mrs. Nugent’s account after she was dead) and got the bond raised to $2.7 million. He got so mad at the Reverend E. B. Beasley for publicly praying every Sunday for Bernie that, for a time, he stopped going to church. “Bernie is a con man and an accomplished actor,” Danny Buck kept telling anyone who would listen. “He duped a really nice, trusting town. He’s evil.” IRS agents arrived in Carthage to charge Bernie with money laundering—it is estimated that he took more than $1 million from Mrs. Nugent—and Sheriff Ellett set off another round of fireworks when he said that certain Carthage men were seen on the videotapes confiscated from Bernie’s house. Soon there were rumors that everyone from elected city leaders to a DPS trooper to a sheriff ’s deputy was seen on the tapes, engaged in what the local newspaper, the Panola Watchman, described as “misconduct.” One man showed up at a Carthage High School football game wearing a T-shirt that read “I’m the only one in Carthage NOT on the videotapes.” Some of Bernie’s friends hired famous East Texas criminal defense attorney Clifton “Scrappy” Holmes to defend him. “Let’s face it, Bernie’s ox is in a ditch,” Holmes told me. He is reportedly trying to discuss a plea bargain for Bernie, which would be just fine

T4096.indb 91

midnight in the garden of east texas

1/18/07 7:19:04 AM

6 Skip with Danny Buck, who’s worried about finding an impartial jury Hollandsworth in Panola County. “A couple of people have said to me that Bernie deserves to fry for what he’s done,” he says, “but I know there are a lot more who just want the whole thing to go away. They keep asking me if there aren’t some extenuating circumstances that would help his defense. And I think, ‘Good God-almighty, do people really think Mrs. Nugent was so mean to him that he had to shoot her in the back in self-defense?’ ” 92

what drove bernie tiede, the gentlest and most compassionate man in Panola County, to kill Mrs. Nugent? Many townspeople wonder if Bernie suddenly snapped and had a psychotic breakdown. They think he should plead temporary insanity. Danny Buck assumes that Mrs. Nugent finally discovered Bernie was looting her bank account and that Bernie panicked and shot her when she said she was going to expose him. But Bernie’s sister says that when she phoned him at the jail, he told her that there had been no particular problems that November day between him and Mrs. Nugent. They were about to go to Longview to run errands and have lunch when suddenly Bernie picked up the .22 rifle in the garage and started firing. He dragged Mrs. Nugent into the kitchen, put her in the freezer, and washed the blood off the garage floor with a garden hose. “He said, ‘I started thinking about having to live with her for the rest of her life, and I just couldn’t take it,’” recalls the sister. “He said, ‘I realized I couldn’t stand it another day.’” But why on earth did Bernie leave Mrs. Nugent in the freezer for nine months? Sure, Bernie was used to being around dead bodies from his funeral home days. But Danny Buck admits that he probably never would have been able to file murder charges against Bernie if he had simply dumped her somewhere where she would never be found. “I don’t understand why Bernie didn’t put her in one of his little airplanes and fly her over the Gulf of Mexico and kick her out,” one of the town’s widows told me matter-of-factly. According to Bernie’s sister, Bernie said that he couldn’t be so cruel as to abandon Mrs. Nugent. “You couldn’t be so cruel? ” the astonished sister asked. “Bernie, what were you going to do? ”

T4096.indb 92

1/18/07 7:19:04 AM

6 93 In a very soft voice, Bernie said, “I wanted to give Mrs. Nugent midnight a proper burial. You know, everyone needs a proper burial.” in the mrs. nugent did get her proper burial, in a small rural cemetery outside Carthage. Some of her relatives, who hadn’t spoken to her in years (including her sister in Carthage) came for the service, hoping in some way to say good-bye to a woman they never really understood. A granddaughter stood and sang “Amazing Grace.” One Carthage widow, who didn’t make it to the funeral, later asked if Mrs. Nugent’s granddaughter had sung well. She said she was looking for a soloist for her own funeral now that she knew Bernie was going to be unavailable.

garden of east texas

6 January 1998

T4096.indb 93

1/18/07 7:19:05 AM

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

girls gone wild

6

k at y v ine

W

hen Bobbi Jo Smith and Jennifer Jones left Mineral Wells, they were young and in love. They had a full tank of gas, a case of beer, and the open road ahead. There was only one problem: They’d left their roommate—a 49-year-old amateur pornographer—lying in bed with three bullets in his head.

after three days of traveling, Jennifer Jones was exhausted as she drove across the state line from Arizona into California. The baby-faced eighteen-year-old’s legs and arms were sunburned from the beams that shone down hard through the windshield, warming the cloth seats and intensifying the musty smell of cigarette smoke and marijuana. She was driving a 1989 blue-and-tan GMC pickup with a busted radiator that she and her new girlfriend, Bobbi Jo Smith, had stolen back in Texas. “We can’t run forever,” Jennifer told Bobbi Jo; she’d seen too many episodes of America’s Most Wanted to think otherwise. Still, she felt glamorous being on the run, and she was a tiny bit disappointed that there wasn’t a blockade of state troopers ready to gun them down as they drove past the “Welcome to California” sign. The two had been combing the headlines of newspapers at gas stations all along Interstate 10, but not once had they seen any mention of Bob Dow, their former housemate, whom they had left

T4096.indb 95

1/18/07 7:19:05 AM

6 Katy Vine back in Mineral Wells in his bed, his face covered with a pillow and pierced with three bullets. If they were captured alive, they’d have a heck of a story to tell. Even if they were having a hard time remembering which version of the tale was true: Had Bobbi Jo pulled the trigger? Had Jennifer killed him? Or was it that Jennifer shot him in the arm and then Bobbi Jo finished him off? Their stories had begun to morph even before they’d left town. (The account that appears in this article is drawn from interviews with Jennifer Jones, her family and friends, police records, witness statements, and trial transcripts. Bobbi Jo Smith, whose trial is pending, was not interviewed on the advice of her attorney.) On May 5, 2004, Bobbi Jo Smith, a nineteen-year-old with short-cropped bleach-blond hair and a petite boy’s frame, had sauntered into Jennifer’s father’s apartment. “We killed Bob,” she announced as Jennifer trailed in behind her. At the apartment that day were Jennifer’s half sister Audrey; Audrey’s girlfriend, Krystal; and Jennifer’s mom, Kathy Jones, who had recently been paroled from prison on a robbery charge. “Is it true? ” one of them asked, giggling nervously. Jennifer’s mother thought the two kids were just joking around. Then she saw her trembling daughter nodding yes. “Bob was raping Jennifer,” Bobbi Jo explained. “So she shot him.” “If that’s true,” said Kathy, “you need to call the cops and tell them what happened.” Everyone glanced at one another, waiting for someone to call Bobbi Jo’s bluff, but she wasn’t kidding. And she had no intention of going to the police. “Come on,” she said. “We need to get out of here fast.” And before anyone could stop to think about it, all five of them jumped into Bob Dow’s truck. Bobbi Jo took the wheel as they sped out of town, telling the others, “I did this. I’ll drive.” A couple days later and halfway across Arizona, the group started to splinter, and Jennifer and Bobbi Jo decided to head out on their own. Alone now, the two continued on into California. Jennifer watched Bobbi Jo nod off in the passenger’s seat as the sun set. She imagined their life together on the run. Maybe she 96

T4096.indb 96

1/18/07 7:19:05 AM

6 97 could get a job as a waitress up in Washington State, a heaven she girls gone had seen on the pages of Better Homes and Gardens. wild That night they pulled up behind an abandoned pool hall in the tiny town of Blythe, about ten minutes past the state line. They set a blanket and pillow down on the ground so they could look up at the stars while they listened to the truck’s radio. When George Strait’s “I Cross My Heart” came on, Bobbi Jo and Jennifer wrapped their arms around each other and slow-danced. As soon as the temperature dropped, they climbed back in the truck and drifted off to sleep. They were living the outlaw dream: Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde. Jennifer had always believed that she was a distant relative of Clyde Barrow’s, and she knew the tragic ending to that story. But that didn’t matter. She was content for the first time in her life. Right up to the moment she heard a police radio outside the truck door. jennifer jones had been looking for logic and patterns in her surroundings in a diary she’d started at age fifteen, three years before she was accused of shooting Bob Dow in the head with a .22. 12-28-00 Dear Journal, These dreams are coming to me for a reason, showing me some kind of sign. Which path to take, I guess.

She’d had a lousy upbringing, even by the standards of Mineral Wells, a meth-scourged town whose population had declined and whose economy had crashed when Fort Wolters was closed, in 1975. The rough life was certainly familiar to Jennifer’s mother, whose childhood was marked by abuse. As a teenager, Kathy had rebelled against authority by sneaking out of the house and stirring up trouble. When she was fifteen, she’d stolen a horse and sold it for a couple hundred dollars. She’d tried to steal her grandma’s car when the old woman was taking a bath. Kathy told her mother that if she wasn’t going to live the right way, she was going to live the wrong way. Kathy was 22 years old when she married Jennifer’s father, Jerry Jones, in 1985. By then she had already given birth to two girls, Audrey and Emily. A year later she was pregnant with Jennifer. A year

T4096.indb 97

1/18/07 7:19:05 AM

6 Katy Vine and a half after that, she and Jerry had another girl, Stephanie. Four girls in six years. Kathy began partying, getting into drugs. She turned to theft and prostitution to keep up with her crack cocaine habit. When Jennifer was three years old, Kathy moved out of the house. Jennifer would hear stories about how her mom was cleaning other people’s homes and working as a prostitute for money. 98

January 22, 2001 Dear Journal, I spent the night with [Lawrence], but we didn’t do anything because . . . I didn’t want to. I woke up around 9 . . . then Lawrence took me home. My sister said that I was turning out to be like my mom. I go somewhere and don’t tell no one. She is in prison. I’m not going to turn out like her.

Jerry struggled to persuade Kathy to come back. “The kids need you,” he’d say. But Kathy was in and out of jail on prostitution and drug charges. The family’s Sunday outings consisted of visits to see her. Jerry had quit his job at the local oil company, but he made his way by picking up odd jobs like fixing fences and clearing rocks out of fields. For food, he often shot deer and gathered vegetables from his mother’s garden so he’d have enough cash left over to pay the electricity bills. He was trying to create some stability. But by the time Jennifer was a teenager, the phrase “You’re going to end up just like your mother” was already following her around. Aunts and uncles often made the comparison. Physically, it was certainly true. Like Kathy, Jennifer was a pretty girl who threw herself into her laughs; she was big-boned and broad across the chest. Her behavior began to mimic Kathy’s as well. February 5, 2001 Dear Journal, I had a blast last night. I tried weed for the first time. I got high. It felt okay. I couldn’t stand, then I couldn’t hold my eyelids up. . . . I’m disappointed in myself, but as long as I feel good, I don’t care. My dad isn’t even talking to me for staying out. . . . He said something. “I’m about to not care if you come back anymore.”

Jennifer began to take pride in the comparison to her mother. The way she saw it, Kathy was tough and a survivor. People spoke of the time she’d barely dodged a bullet—literally—and the time

T4096.indb 98

1/18/07 7:19:06 AM

6 99 she’d almost died in a bar fight. Jennifer hoped people would talk girls gone about her that way someday. And so she started to explore what she wild called the two paths. On days when she’d be at her Aunt Anita’s house, making sweets with Ritz crackers and marshmallows and peanut butter, she was as delightful as any niece. But whenever someone would test her delinquent side, she couldn’t help herself. Once, when her sister Stephanie’s friends dared Jennifer to burn herself with a cigarette lighter, she pressed the hot metal tip onto her arm and left it there until her skin melted like a piece of caramel. February 18, 2001 Dear Journal, Hey, what’s up! So much has happened. . . . Went to Bluffdale to make a promise to stay sexually pure till you’re married. I already broke it. I’m not proud about it . . . March 15, 2001 Dear Journal, My wish came true. I walked outside and got to the drag and Jesse and me went parking . . . He is so sweet and talkative. He can sing, play the piano . . . He is only 18, but he would be too smart and sexy for me. He is an honor student from Strawn and now goes to Texas Tech, I think. . . . He is so cautious about sex. . . . I’m going on about him like he is my dream man. We talk about everything except drugs and drinking. I think I know that he doesn’t do anything like that. He said that he would rather have a boy first, then a girl. He said that girls are hard to raise. And he is right.

Ever since Jennifer was ten years old, her well-heeled aunt and uncle in Granbury, Melanie and Robert Brownrigg, had taken an interest in her and Stephanie, presenting the girls with Christmas gifts and bicycles. But as soon as the Brownriggs found out that Jennifer had been having sex with boys and taking drugs, they stepped up their involvement. They paid for the girls’ braces and shuttled them back and forth to their appointments in Arlington. Jennifer tried to be good. She clung to Melanie, even tried calling her “Mom.” She passed her classes and quit smoking and drinking. She tried to attend school regularly. When the girls got good grades, they were rewarded with vacation trips and cruises to the Caribbean.

T4096.indb 99

1/18/07 7:19:06 AM

6 Shortly before her sixteenth birthday, however, Jennifer got Katy Vine busted for breaking into a convenience store to steal cigarettes. Two months later she was caught cashing a fraudulent check. The drug use continued, and by the next summer, the offenses had become more serious. Robert recalls watching his niece assist a magician on a cruise ship around that time: “I remember thinking, ‘That’s a beautiful woman up there. She looks so grown-up!’ And two days later she’s out stealing a car!” 100

January 4, 2003 12:55 a.m. Journal, I am going to see momma today. I have to wake up in 4–21 hours. . . . I have been awake for 36 hours. I feel ditzy! . . . I’m going to write Audrey. Then paint my nails RED. January 5, 2003 1:17 a.m. Journal, . . . I am such a bad person and do the stupidest things. Well, I am going to try and get some sleep . . . Bye. Please pray for me tonight!

In October 2003 Jerry and his girls were evicted from their apartment for being late with the rent. Thinking that a fresh start might keep Jennifer and Stephanie out of trouble, the Brownriggs invited them to come live with them. Melanie and Robert were building their dream home, and the blueprints for the mammoth house included plans for high-ceilinged bedrooms for the two girls. They even bought a Honda Civic for Jennifer to drive. But just a few months into the arrangement, Melanie discovered drug paraphernalia under Jennifer’s bed. That night she was shown the door. Jennifer moved back in with her dad, who was then living in a motel in Mineral Wells. Six months later they moved into a latesixties-era two-story apartment complex near the edge of town. She quit school. She got a job at the Chicken Express but quit that too, after a month. She was eighteen years old and bored out of her mind. She wrote her last entry in her diary at three o’clock in the morning on March 24, 2004. Dear Journal, Hey, long time no hear. You have been too busy for me or what? Well . . . I have f—-ed up again, like always. I had everything going good, really good for me, and I started on that shit again. This is where I always f—-up. I am going to make everything

T4096.indb 100

1/18/07 7:19:06 AM

6 101 sweet and simple for you. I . . . moved in with Mel and Rob. . . . I girls gone got a car, cell, everything my heart desired. I had a boyfriend named wild Billy. Life was great. Well, now I’m in Mineral Wells with my dad and Audrey in the Spanish Trace Apartments. Billy broke up with me, and now I am not in school and haven’t been since Feb. 12th. I am going to Fort Worth in the morning and maybe Audrey will be back without her dyke girlfriend. I’ll write you later, Buh-bye, Jennifer Jones. the next day, Jennifer was standing at her dad’s apartment door, on the back side of the run-down complex, where the asphalt had buckled and cracked. She was dressed in her pajamas, smoking a cigarette and looking at the field behind the parking lot when Audrey drove up with her girlfriend, Bobbi Jo Smith, in the front seat. Jennifer had heard about this girl. Bobbi Jo was a notorious charmer, a party girl into every kind of trouble. Maybe because she was the only girl in a family full of brothers, many people mistook her for a young man, though she was a mother, having dropped out of school in the tenth grade to give birth to a son. But she wasn’t much the nurturing type. She’d recently moved out of the house where her grandparents had raised her and left her two-year-old son with relatives. She lived by her wits. On the day Jennifer met her, Bobbi Jo was living with a 49-year-old man named Bob Dow. Audrey walked into the apartment while Bobbi Jo stayed in the car, her tattooed arm hanging out the window as she eyed Jennifer. “You ever kiss a girl? ” Bobbi Jo asked. “No,” Jennifer said. “You want to? ” Jennifer smiled. “No.” “I could change your mind,” Bobbi Jo said with a laugh as Audrey walked outside and hopped back in the car. She was persistent. The next day Bobbi Jo told Audrey she needed to go to the grocery store, but instead she called Jennifer and asked if she’d meet her at the library. Jennifer was intrigued. She knew she had always liked boys; she’d run through one after another since she was fourteen. But none of them had ever stuck around very long. That day, under a tree in the park beside the library, Bobbi Jo kissed her. And all of a

T4096.indb 101

1/18/07 7:19:06 AM

6 Katy Vine sudden Jennifer didn’t care that Bobbi Jo was a lesbian or even that kissing her meant she was one too. In that instant, she’d decided she was in love. “Come on with me,” Bobbi Jo told her, and like a pied piper, she led Jennifer to Bob’s house. A tall, clean-shaven guy with hazel eyes and short, graying hair, Bob had inherited the house after his younger brother died in the fall of 2003 and left him caretaker to his mother. He didn’t consider this responsibility too much of an inconvenience, though his mother was almost completely incapacitated. Bob received her Social Security checks in exchange for bathing her and feeding her the occasional hamburger from McDonald’s. When he had guests, he simply locked the door to her room while she slept. He and Bobbi Jo had an informal agreement. Bob supplied Bobbi Jo with drugs, a roof over her head, a foam mattress in the living room, and a part-time job at his apartment-repair service. In return, Bobbi Jo went out and solicited young women, telling them she knew a great place to party. New girls were the key to Bob’s happiness. “You’re my chick magnet,” he liked to say. That afternoon, Bobbi Jo and Jennifer arrived on Bob’s doorstep. The house still showed his mother’s touch, and the decor hadn’t changed in years. The windows were mostly obscured by curtains from the fifties, and old green paint on the walls deadened the light in the room. Bobbi Jo and Jennifer inhaled the pot-scented air as they walked past the stacks of boxes containing Bob’s brother’s collections of Hot Wheels cars, Beanie Babies, paper plates, and Franklin Mint collectibles. “Wow, she’s pretty!” Bob said as Jennifer walked in. “She could be a movie star!” He wasn’t necessarily referring to Hollywood. In his spare time, Bob made amateur pornographic videos with the girls Bobbi Jo brought home to him, some of whom the authorities now believe were as young as fifteen. That night, Bob pulled Bobbi Jo aside. “Ask her if she’ll sleep with me,” he told her. When the question was relayed, Jennifer was disgusted. “No way!” she told Bobbi Jo. “He’s too gross.” And for a while, Bob was content to bide his time. 102

from the day of their first kiss, Jennifer and Bobbi Jo were inseparable, leaving Audrey furious for a time. Jennifer immediately

T4096.indb 102

1/18/07 7:19:07 AM

6 103 moved her clothes out of her father’s apartment and into Bob’s girls gone living room. Being with Bobbi Jo made her feel as if she had fi- wild nally found solid footing, a partner to spend her life with. Bobbi Jo, meanwhile, was mesmerized by the attention from this girl who would do almost anything she asked. If Bobbi Jo needed to run some errand, Jennifer went with her. If Bobbi Jo needed to help Bob with his repair service, Jennifer lent a hand. And if Bobbi Jo wanted to do some drugs, Jennifer was ready to partake. Drugs became their whole existence. They’d get drunk and high for 48 hours straight. One week of partying led to two weeks, then three weeks. There was Xanax, methamphetamines, marijuana, shots of vodka. They got little sleep and hardly ever ate. And they were never apart. They’d be up all night, coming down after days of partying and constantly telling each other how in love they were. Before long, they were also strung out and paranoid. Like the night of Bobbi Jo’s nineteenth birthday. They started the partying early in the afternoon at Bobbi Jo’s grandmother’s house with another friend, Darcie (not her real name), smoking meth and taking pills. As Jennifer watched cartoons and Bobbi Jo took a shower, Jennifer began to feel that she could read Darcie’s mind. “I want you to leave Bobbi Jo alone and never come back,” Jennifer heard. Bobbi Jo thought she heard the voice as well and stormed out of the bathroom. “What the hell are you talking about? ” she demanded. Darcie denied saying anything, but Bobbi Jo wasn’t having any of it. “I heard the whole thing!” In a rage now, she hunted around the house for a notebook Darcie had been writing poems in, sure that she’d discover some hint of magic spells. When she found it, she saw that the pages had all been ripped out. Panicked, Bobbi Jo scoured the house and found that the missing pages had been torn into tiny pieces and stuffed in the kitchen drawers and under the cushions of the couch. Now she was sure that Darcie had put a hex on them. “You’re not coming between me and my girlfriend,” she screamed. “Get out of here!” Darcie took off. Bobbi Jo ran out and fetched her two-year-old son from a babysitter. She brought him back to the house, where the two of them jumped into bed with Jennifer. Bobbi Jo held Jennifer down. “Don’t

T4096.indb 103

1/18/07 7:19:07 AM

6 Katy Vine move,” she said. “Darcie’s under the bed.” They tried to relax and watch Ren and Stimpy on TV, but they couldn’t concentrate. They sat still on the bed for hours imagining that the doors in the house were opening and closing. They even thought they heard Bobbi Jo’s son’s voice instructing them in baby talk. “We’ve got to burn the whole place down,” Bobbi Jo said. “You can’t do that,” Jennifer said. So they compromised. They gathered everything Darcie had touched—makeup, perfume, pot—and torched it. 104

bob knew something was going to happen to him. He couldn’t explain it, but after he saw how close the two girls were becoming, the feeling was strong enough that he stood on the porch one morning with his first ex-wife and told her calmly and deliberately that he wanted his funeral to be a party, just like the kind he’d have if he were alive. He didn’t want anyone to be sorry he was gone. For weeks, Bob had partied with the girls and the stream of young women they’d brought by the house. He’d slept with most of them, even Jennifer’s own mother, who was visiting in town and ready to party. Jennifer had refused his constant advances and Bobbi Jo had made it clear that he wasn’t to go near her, but he couldn’t help himself. On the afternoon of May 4, just a few days after they’d had their bonfire, the two girls were hauled down to jail for swiping a $64 watch from J.C. Penney. Bob bailed them out. After he drove them to Bobbi Jo’s mother’s house, he waited with Jennifer in the truck when Bobbi Jo went inside. He was quiet for a minute, staring out the window. “Jennifer,” he finally said, “you know you’re costing me a lot of money.” “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m not going to steal again. We’ll get jobs and pay you back.” “No, you don’t have to do that,” he said, continuing to look away. “I want you to sleep with me instead.” Jennifer grabbed her purse and jumped out of the truck, then stomped into the house. A few seconds later, Bobbi Jo ran outside screaming. “This is the one girl you can’t have!” she yelled as Bob peeled out. The next day, she and Jennifer were driving down the road going about 70 miles an hour in Bobbi Jo’s grandma’s truck. Their

T4096.indb 104

1/18/07 7:19:07 AM

6 105 meth binge had been relentless. They hadn’t slept or eaten now in girls gone three days. All of a sudden, the whole world seemed determined to wild tear them apart. Bobbi Jo had stolen one of Bob’s guns and loaded it with bullets, and now Jennifer listened as Bobbi Jo talked about the need to get rid of him. “I’m never going to be my own person with him around,” Bobbi Jo said. “He’s trying to split us up.” That idea was too much for Jennifer to handle. Bobbi Jo was the only certain thing she had left. Without her, she’d be right back at her father’s place, with no life. They parked the truck in the driveway, and while they walked up the path to the house, Bobbi Jo gave her the loaded .22. Jennifer tucked the gun in the back of her pants, covering it with her black T-shirt. When they entered Bob’s living room, Jennifer saw Bob lying on the mattress on the floor. She could tell from the look on Bob’s face that he knew trouble was coming, but he didn’t seem ready to fight. “I’m sorry for what I said before,” he said. “It’s okay,” Jennifer said. “I’m ready to pay you back.” “No, you don’t have to do it,” Bob said, pouting. “No, I insist.” Jennifer took him into the bedroom, and as they undressed, she placed the gun between the nightstand and a pillow that was lying next to the bed on the floor. Bobbi Jo waited in the living room, listening to the radio, and turned up the volume on an Eagles song. Jennifer’s heart was racing, but she acted methodically. After Bob was relaxed, she reached down to the floor and picked up the gun. Then she hid it under the floral-printed covers as she tossed her leg over Bob’s waist. “I want to pretend you’re somebody else,” she told him. Bob paused for a few seconds, then, with a shrug, he pulled a black-and-white-striped pillow over his face. anyone who saw Bob Dow’s stolen truck speeding west on I-20 probably imagined that the five women inside were on the great American road trip. They certainly acted the part. They had all the windows rolled down, the stereo blasting country songs. And they were running quickly through a case of beer. “We’re just like Thelma and Louise,” Bobbi Jo said, driving somewhere west of Odessa.

T4096.indb 105

1/18/07 7:19:07 AM

6 Audrey, Krystal, Kathy, Bobbi Jo, and Jennifer decided early Katy Vine on that they didn’t need any maps. They had destiny. Maybe they’d end up in Mexico! Or Canada! Or, if Jennifer got her way, Washington State! Wherever they went, it would be slowly: Every hundred miles or so they had to pull over to cool the truck’s fickle radiator. Curious state troopers would slow down to survey the truck full of women parked in the emergency lane, but the girls just smiled and waved them ahead, signaling that they had the situation under control. They hobbled along this way for two days, eventually merging with I-10 out in West Texas, then leaving the state behind and crossing into New Mexico. All the while, they took detours whenever the spirit moved them. On one afternoon, after a hot day of driving, someone in the group spotted a decorative pond in front of a large subdivision. They pulled over, stripped down to their skivvies, and took a dip. Just being in the truck meant that Jennifer’s mother was violating her parole and ensuring herself several months of hard time. But perhaps Kathy had rediscovered her nurturing side. Understanding the trouble her daughter was in, she started to take action to protect her. When the group ran out of money on day two, Kathy told Bobbi Jo to give her a Luger she’d taken from Bob. Then she pawned it at a shop in New Mexico, propelling the group into Arizona with another $70. When Krystal wanted out, she made sure to leave her behind at a phone booth in Chandler, where she could call her anxious mother. That day, on May 7, they hit Buckeye, Arizona, and they pulled over at a Days Inn where Kathy had arranged for Jerry to wire them some more cash. She even hatched a plan to trip up the prosecutors if they ever got caught. “You girls should get married,” she announced to Bobbi Jo and Jennifer. “That way you won’t have to testify against each other.” The group set up a little ceremony next to the motel, under a giant cottonwood tree. They didn’t have much in the way of formal wear. Bobbi Jo wore jeans and a T-shirt. Jennifer wore the same and held some wildflowers in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Kathy, meanwhile, read 1 Corinthians 13 from the motel’s Gideon Bible and helped the girls exchange ad hoc vows as Audrey stood witness behind the couple. Bobbi Jo gave Jennifer a ring with a blue stone in it to seal the deal. Afterward, she led her 106

T4096.indb 106

1/18/07 7:19:08 AM

6 107 bride through the parking lot back to the motel, where Jennifer girls gone told her, “I’ll always be with you, no matter what.” wild That night, the couple was sitting in the motel pool waiting for Audrey and Kathy to return from a nearby truck stop, where they’d gone to pick up some food. It had been more than an hour since they’d left, and Bobbi Jo started to get nervous. Maybe one of their companions was planning to rat them out. She was especially anxious about Kathy. “Let’s go check on them,” Jennifer said, trying to convince her that her own mother would never turn them in. But as they drove the couple blocks to the truck stop, Jennifer spotted her mother and Audrey talking to some men in the parking lot and grew certain that the men were police officers. A few moments later, Bobbi Jo and Jennifer were back on the highway, alone. And the next night they were asleep in the truck, just inside California. when the police finally caught up to them in the predawn hours, Bobbi Jo and Jennifer didn’t run or put up a fight. They weren’t surrounded by squad cars and brought down in a gunfight, as they had sometimes fantasized. Tips from family members led the police to Blythe, where officers placed the girls under arrest without incident and hauled them down to the Riverside, California, jail. There, they sat in a small cell together. “I’m going to spend the rest of my life in prison,” said Bobbi Jo, crouched on the floor with her back against the wall. But Jennifer had another idea. No one really knew what had happened in Bob’s bedroom. She thought about Bobbi Jo’s son, who would be left without a mother. “I’m going to take the blame for you,” she said. “No matter what.” “Would you really? ” Bobbi Jo asked. “Yes.” “You know I’m going to be with you forever if you do that.” That was all Jennifer needed to hear. They spent the next year sitting in separate cells on opposite ends of the small jail in Palo Pinto, near Mineral Wells. Though they weren’t allowed to visit with each other, they soon found ways to communicate. During the day they yelled through the bars, holding conversations from one end of the wing to the other.

T4096.indb 107

1/18/07 7:19:08 AM

6 Katy Vine At night, they discovered that they could correspond through the air ducts that linked their two cells. While the other inmates tried to sleep, the two would cozy up to the ducts and continue to hone their strategy. Bobbi Jo updated Jennifer on her son. Jennifer reassured her she’d take full responsibility. “Don’t worry, honey,” Jennifer said at one point. “Bob was fixin’ to get busted. We’re not going to get caught. They’re going to thank us. I love you.” And Bobbi Jo said, “I love you too. We’re going to get through this.” “I’m your backbone and you’re mine,” Jennifer said. To the Palo Pinto County jury that assembled for Jennifer’s sentencing hearing in April, it must have been hard to imagine that the sweet-looking girl before them would be pleading guilty to such a heinous crime. Jennifer wore a black dress decorated with red rosebuds, and she’d employed toilet paper from her cell to spin tight curls into her long brown hair. She teased the bailiff, a longtime family friend, rubbing his bald head and joking with him, and she hugged her dad, gently pulling a piece of fuzz from his ear as he tried to tell her everything was going to be all right. Had the jury seen Bobbi Jo Smith, maybe they would have had the same reaction as the authorities in California. According to Jennifer, they’d said, “We know you didn’t do it. That tattooed girl did it. Don’t you dare take the rap for her.” By the time she took the stand, she had already changed her story once. In her first account, Jennifer had told the authorities that Bob was forcing himself on her when Bobbi Jo walked in and wrestled him to the bed, giving Jennifer just enough time to shoot Bob. In her second statement, given four days later, she’d said that Bobbi Jo had left in Bob’s truck to make a grocery run and returned to find that Jennifer had shot him. On the witness stand, she told yet another version. She was in the bedroom with Bob, she said, her voice shaking a little as the prosecutor drew the story out of her. She’d shot him twice but didn’t kill him. Then Bobbi Jo had walked in and told Jennifer that she needed to finish him off. “Bobbi Jo didn’t have the guts to do it or what? ” the prosecutor asked. “No, sir. She did not.” 108

T4096.indb 108

1/18/07 7:19:08 AM

6 109 “She didn’t? ” girls gone Jennifer shook her head no. wild “But you did? ” he asked. “Yes, I did,” she said. “She was all talk, wasn’t she? ” “Yes, sir,” Jennifer replied. “She was.” After just a few hours, the jury came back with a sentence of 48 years in prison. A few days later, Jennifer was awake at night waiting for her transfer to the state penitentiary in Gatesville. Bobbi Jo, who was still awaiting trial, yelled to Jennifer through the air ducts one last time. “I’m getting out,” she said. “You can’t be there for me no more. You’re going to be locked up. I’ve found somebody new.” this may, jennifer jones sat at a table behind the security glass in the visitors’ room of the Gatesville Prison, one month into her 48-year sentence. She was dressed in white prisoner’s garb, and she had gained about thirty pounds since she’d been caught. There was no trace of the smile she’d shown at her sentencing. She perked up when she described how she had gotten a lot of time to visit with her mother. Kathy’s role in the road trip had earned her another few months in Gatesville as well. There, the two of them spent hours together, catching up, sharing stories, and talking about old times. Kathy had even apologized for not having been a better role model. But she had also denied that she had turned the girls in. Jennifer said she wasn’t sure what to believe anymore. Her own story had changed again. She had fired only two shots at Bob, she told me; Bobbi Jo unloaded the final two. She swore she wasn’t trying to get out of something but that Bobbi Jo had manipulated her. “She’s in my head all the time,” she told me. “She has this book of spells, and she’d burn candles all the time and make people fall in love with her. She knew how to make people do things for her.” But now she’d show Bobbi Jo: She said she was planning to testify against her and would set the record straight when Bobbi Jo finally went to trial. “For all I know, I might have shot the wall first. I dropped the gun on the floor and Bob was shaking and Bobbi Jo picked up the gun and unloaded it.”

T4096.indb 109

1/18/07 7:19:08 AM

6 She told me she remembered what she’d written in her journal Katy Vine five years ago, about how she had been looking for a sign, trying to figure out which path to take. Only now, Jennifer was beginning to think her path had chosen her. “I always heard that Clyde Barrow was a relative, so I guess it’s in my genes,” she said. “To tell the truth, I thought they’d understand and let me go.” 110

6 September 2005

T4096.indb 110

1/18/07 7:19:09 AM

the man who loved cat burgling

6

sk ip holl andsworth

B

y day, Mitch Shaw was a colorless computer nerd. By night, he teamed up with his sweetheart, Jennifer Dolan, to rob Dallas’ rich and famous of their jewelry. The police say they pulled off impossibly daring heists for nearly a decade—until she made one little mistake.

to the cops who patrolled Dallas’ richest and most exclusive neighborhoods throughout the 1990’s, Mitch Shaw and his cute girlfriend, Jennifer Dolan, must have looked like a couple of rubes. For one thing, they cruised through the neighborhoods in a turquoise Toyota Tercel. Turquoise! Jennifer always drove, usually with her window down, her magnificently teased hair and dangling costume earrings fluttering in the wind. Although no one would have called Jennifer a knockout, she had a big, inviting smile, and she clearly knew how to handle herself around men. When a Dallas police officer stopped Jennifer and Mitch a couple of years ago to ask why she kept tooling up and down one particular mansion-lined lane, Jennifer gave the officer a little wink and said in a voice as sweet as syrup, “Officer, we live in a little apartment, and sometimes we like to look at big, pretty homes. Is there anything wrong with that?” Then she pursed her lipstick-red lips around a straw and took a drink from a big cup of Diet Coke that she had wedged between her thighs.

T4096.indb 111

1/18/07 7:19:09 AM

6 If the officer was able to take his eyes off Jennifer—and, in Skip Hollandsworth all honesty, it was an effort to not look at her, especially when she wore one of those bras that pushed her breasts together—then he would have glanced over and seen a slightly pudgy, unmuscular young man with soft brown eyes, long eyelashes, thinning dark hair, and a gentle, almost perplexed expression on his face. Mitch Shaw was not exactly a threatening figure. His friends said he was a computer geek who spent most of his time creating Web sites on the computer that sat on the kitchen table of the one-bedroom apartment in far north Dallas that he shared with Jennifer. For relaxation, he watched Jeopardy, dabbled in abstract painting, played with his tabby cat, Sweet Pea, and took Jennifer to the Galleria, where they wandered through the stores and ate fast food down by the skating rink. They looked like so many other young couples you see at the mall, couples still trying to find their footing in life, the type who often drive through rich neighborhoods at the end of the day so that they can dream about what their lives might be like someday. As the wide-eyed Jennifer exclaimed to the police officer that day, “Just look at these homes with all these big columns. They’re bigger than Ramada Inns.” Actually, Mitch and Jennifer were not that interested in the way those homes looked—not from the outside, anyway. According to statements that Jennifer would later give to Dallas police detectives and subsequently confirmed to me, she would often park the Tercel on a side street with little traffic and watch as Mitch, who usually wore a rumpled T-shirt, baggy shorts, and tennis shoes for their evening drives, put a black baseball cap backward on his head, pulled on a pair of gloves, and then snapped a fanny pack around his waist that was filled with just three items: a flashlight, a screwdriver, and a pack of cigarettes. “Be careful, honey,” Jennifer would always say, leaning across the seat and giving him a kiss. “Don’t you worry,” he would reply. And then Mitch would jog toward one of the mansions, scale the outside wall or gate, slip unnoticed through the back yard, expertly knock a hole in the window of the master bathroom, hoist himself through, and meticulously begin hunting for jewelry. He’d pick the locks of cabinets, rifle through closets, pull up carpets, and then make 112

T4096.indb 112

1/18/07 7:19:09 AM

6 113 spectacular last-second getaways, racing back out the window just as police helicopters and squad cars were closing in. Professional jewel thieves aren’t supposed to exist anymore. Confronted with a state-of-the-art combination of electronic locks, infrared motion detectors, and hardwired detectors on doors and windows, most criminals are lucky to get inside a wealthy person’s house, let alone have the time to figure out where the jewels are. But the police are convinced that Mitch Shaw, who’s now 31, was one of the shrewdest and most daring jewel thieves of our time and that Jennifer Dolan, who’s now 26, acted as his “wheelman,” dropping him off and then picking him up at prearranged locations near the targeted homes, so confident a driver that she’d wave flirtatiously at the cops as she drove away with Mitch crouched on the floorboard. Mitch is the lead suspect in the break-ins of some of Dallas’ best-guarded homes over the past decade. Police detectives believe that he snatched jewels from the lavish residences of such society-column notables as Nancy Brinker, the wife of restaurateur Norman Brinker and the founder of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation; Clarice Tinsley, a popular Dallas television anchor; and the flashy charity ball hostess Sharon McCutchin. His crowning achievement came on a rainy night in January 1998, when Jennifer dropped him off just down the street from the Preston Hollow-area estate of Dallas billionaire Harold Simmons, whose wife, Annette, is renowned for her magnificent collection of jewelry. The 12,000-square-foot Simmons home seemed impenetrable. It was guarded 24 hours a day by an off-duty trooper from the Department of Public Safety, who walked the grounds twice an hour. In the back yard was a German shepherd guard dog. Wired to the windows and doors was an alarm system that was designed to go off even if the window panes rattled too loudly. But Mitch made friends with the dog, avoided the DPS officer, deftly popped out two window panes in the master bedroom, found a key in the powder table that fit a locked closet, and then used his screwdriver to pry open five locked drawers, each one containing jewelry. He dumped the jewelry into a pillowcase and raced back to the Tercel, where Jennifer was sitting patiently, slurping on a Diet Coke. Back at their apartment, they dumped Mrs. Simmons’ jewels on their bed—nearly two hundred pieces,

T4096.indb 113

the man who loved cat burgling

1/18/07 7:19:09 AM

6 Skip worth at least $1 million. Mitch and Jennifer had just pulled off Hollandsworth the biggest jewelry heist of a residence in Dallas history. Until now, the story of the duo’s improbable crime spree has never been told—and even those who know the story still have trouble believing it could be true. How could two young people, dreamy-eyed with love but amateurs in crime, execute the kind of heists that would daunt even the most highly skilled European cat burglars? How did they elude the cops for so long? Were they just lucky, able to evade police officers because they looked like two bumbling characters out of a lowbrow comedy? Or was there something far more ingenious about their methods and manners? “It’s like a dream, thinking about what we did,” Jennifer told me not long ago, speaking publicly for the first time about her life with Mitch. “Here we were, living in a little $525-a-month apartment—it was all we needed, really—and then we’d go out at night and live this other life. It was sort of romantic, you know? Someone told me it’s like we were Bonnie and Clyde.” 114

mitch shaw is not one of those thieves who grew up on the wrong side of the tracks. He is a descendant of a family that once was as well known in Dallas as the families whose jewelry he is now accused of stealing. His great-grandfather was a respected Dallas judge named C. V. Compton who owned a grand three-story mansion on Lakeside Drive, the most elegant street in Dallas’ Highland Park area, where most of the well-to-do families lived. The judge’s three daughters were presented as debutantes to Dallas society. One daughter, Clairine, married a successful young lawyer named Thomas Mitchell Shaw, and their second son, Thomas Mitchell Shaw, Jr., was still a teenager when he met Melanie Trauman, a striking young woman who had moved to the Highland Park area with her mother. She became pregnant, a marriage was quickly arranged, and in 1968 she gave birth to Thomas Mitchell Shaw III. Many of Mitch’s family members—including Melanie’s own mother, Nancy Wiener, who now lives in California—told me that Melanie, who had ferocious social ambitions, went for Shaw because she thought there was money in his family. But Mitch’s father received little inheritance. After graduating from Southern

T4096.indb 114

1/18/07 7:19:09 AM

6 115 Methodist University with a degree in accounting, he went to work for the state comptroller’s office, and when Mitch was still a toddler, Melanie asked for a divorce and eventually moved to Houston, where she married a successful real estate developer and had her photo taken for a 1974 Town and Country magazine story about the boom times. (She posed in an off-white Geoffrey Beene coat and beret in front of the Houston skyline.) Mitch remained in Dallas with his father and barely saw his mother. Mitch’s father married again—his new wife, Nancy, was a former high school classmate—and they moved to a pleasant but not ostentatious neighborhood in northwest Dallas. According to Nancy, who gave birth to two daughters after marrying Mitch’s father, Mitch was a shy child who played the piano and the guitar and took art lessons at school. He did have mild dyslexia and briefly took Ritalin for a minor attention-deficit disorder, “but he was really no problem,” she told me. “He was this physically gorgeous boy who liked going on weekend camp-outs with his father, loved the Dallas Cowboys, and loved to swim laps in our backyard pool. We called him a little dolphin.” Throughout most of his teenage years, Mitch stayed mostly to himself, quiet and introspective, the kind of kid who rarely had photos taken of him for the high school annual. Eventually he quit school and received his GED. Because he loved abstract painting and could knock off remarkable imitations of Picasso masterpieces, some of his friends thought he might grow up to become an artist. His biggest love, however, was the computer. Long before the Internet became popular, he worked on his computer into the late hours, teaching himself to create graphic designs and to write HTML code, the computer programming language used to build Web sites. Then, in 1987, Mitch’s father began to get horrendous headaches and was diagnosed with an incurable brain tumor. For the first time, Mitch, who was then nineteen, got into some trouble. He was arrested and given a year’s probation for breaking into an automobile and stealing a camera. Mitch was hardly a competent criminal: When he hocked the camera at a pawnshop, he wrote down his correct name and address on the pawn slip, which led to his easy arrest once the camera was reported stolen. “We wondered

T4096.indb 115

the man who loved cat burgling

1/18/07 7:19:10 AM

6 Skip if Mitch was just so angry at not having his mother around and Hollandsworth seeing what was happening to his father that he decided to lash out at something,” said his stepmother, Nancy. “We didn’t know what made him do it, and we couldn’t imagine that this was something he planned to do again.” Indeed, one act of teenage rebellion does not a professional jewel thief make. But in 1990, a year after his father died, a friend introduced 21-year-old Mitch to a cute, sassy teenager with big brown eyes and soft pouty lips. Her name was Jennifer Dolan. And Mitch fell so crazy in love that he found himself willing to do just about anything. 116

as the guys from mitch’s neighborhood liked to say, Jennifer Dolan was the kind of girl who gave you an instant buzz in the gonads. She was a 16-year-old who acted 26. She smoked, she drank, and she liked to stay out late. “I thought she was going through a stage and that she would grow out of it,” her mother told me. “Well, I figured wrong.” It was hard to believe that the two would ever get along. Compared to Mitch and his blueblood background, Jennifer was middle-class: Her widowed mother supported the family by operating a couple of low-income apartment complexes. Mitch liked spending his evenings reading computer books; the gregarious Jennifer prided herself on getting into bars with her fake ID. Many of Mitch’s family members have not forgotten their first sight of Jennifer, at a Christmas luncheon thrown by one of Mitch’s austere great-aunts. Jennifer sat at the end of the table, her body curvy and a little plump, her hair wild and wavy, her eyes rimmed with thick black eyeliner. The bracelets on her arm rattled each time she lifted her fork. Mitch was infatuated with her. “I think, considering the lonely times he had been through, he liked having a young, frolicsome, pretty little thing who was impressed by him, who let him take care of her,” said Nancy Wiener, Mitch’s grandmother. Every afternoon, Mitch picked up Jennifer at Lake Highlands High School in northeast Dallas, where she was a freshman, and took her shopping at the Galleria. Dipping generously into his inheritance money—he reportedly had received $60,000 after his father’s death—he bought what she asked for, usually colorful

T4096.indb 116

1/18/07 7:19:10 AM

6 117 Fila sweatsuits and more costume jewelry than she could possibly wear. “I loved big fake earrings, the bigger the better,” Jennifer matter-of-factly told me, nibbling on a club sandwich and drinking a Diet Coke at a Bennigan’s restaurant. “That’s what people don’t understand about me. I didn’t want to wear big old socialite jewelry. One day Mitch gave me a fifteen-hundred-dollar Rolex watch, but I liked my fake thirty-dollar Rolex better because it was flashy and had all these fake diamonds embedded in it. So I took the plain Rolex back to the store.” When she was seventeen, Jennifer dropped out of high school and moved into Mitch’s apartment. “There was nothing I could do to stop her,” said her mother. “And in a way, I couldn’t blame her. Mitch treated her like a queen. He gave her money, which she’d never had before. If she got mad at him and moved back home, he’d come over and stand out in our yard all through the night, tapping on her bedroom window, begging her to come back.” Jennifer told me that she and Mitch would argue over her desire to go out with her girlfriends and “um, get in a little trouble”— her code phrase for meeting another guy. “Mitch would ask me why couldn’t I just be with him all the time, and I’d tell him I didn’t want to sit around at nights watching him work on his computer.” After one argument, she dramatically pulled off some diamond jewelry Mitch had given her, tossed it down the garbage disposal, flicked on the garbage disposal switch, and squealed away from the apartment complex in her car. When Mitch began paging her over and over to persuade her to come back, Jennifer stopped the car, threw the pager out in the street, and then ran over it. Yet she always returned. “I put him through some hell, but he cared what happened to me,” she told me. “There was no one sweeter than Mitch.” Still, like so many other lovelorn young men wanting to win over a girl, Mitch clearly felt the need to do something—something that would add a dramatic new dimension to his personality, something that would make Jennifer’s eyes shine with admiration. But was it really possible that Mitch Shaw the computer nerd thought he could turn himself into the dashing Cary Grant character from To Catch a Thief? His grandmother told me he didn’t even dance well. “The one physical talent he had was his ability to

T4096.indb 117

the man who loved cat burgling

1/18/07 7:19:10 AM

6 Skip type very quickly on his computer keyboard,” added a close famHollandsworth ily friend. “This was not someone you could ever envision climbing trees and jumping over walls and entering houses that had armed guards. I promise you, the Mitch I knew was scared of my medium-sized dog.” In truth, the possibility of becoming a jewel thief might have been nothing more for Mitch than a Walter Mitty-esque dream had it not been for a middle-aged man who lived in Mitch’s old neighborhood and who from time to time had stopped by the neighborhood park where teenagers congregated. The man was distinguished-looking, easygoing, and always interested in the kids’ lives. He also possessed one other trait, according to Dallas Police detectives who spoke to me: He had a rather extensive knowledge of Dallas’ criminal underworld. The man’s own father had been a mobster during the fifties gangland wars over the Dallas gambling rackets. The man himself had been sentenced to the penitentiary for five years in 1977 after fatally shooting another man who, depending on whose version of the shooting you want to believe, was either a renegade heroin dealer or a police informant. Although by all accounts the man’s violent days were behind him, he remained a subject of great curiosity to the kids at the neighborhood park. Many of them had heard that he had married into a Mafia family. Others had heard that he was a fence who would purchase stolen jewelry and then have it cut up and resold to dealers he knew on the East Coast and perhaps as far away as Europe, people who didn’t particularly care where the jewelry came from. It is no secret that every good jewel thief needs a fence; otherwise, the thief might end up unloading his merchandise at pawnshops for pennies. What’s often forgotten is that every good fence needs a thief; otherwise, he won’t have any jewels to sell. Was it possible that the man in the neighborhood came to the park to recruit a thief? Had he heard about Mitch’s earlier run-in with authorities over the stolen camera and decided this was a kid he could groom? Did Mitch, in turn, see in this man his lucky opportunity to create a new life for himself? 118

T4096.indb 118

1/18/07 7:19:10 AM

6 119 When I spoke to the man—who is now 48 and has not been charged with any crime related to the jewel heists—he stated that he was working in “private business” and that he didn’t go to the neighborhood basketball court and that he had never fenced jewelry. “What in the hell would I do with all that jewelry? I have trouble enough keeping up with my Seiko watch,” he said with a good-natured chuckle. He said he did become friends with Mitch but not for nefarious reasons. “I felt sort of sorry for the kid, with him losing his dad and his mom being gone,” the man said. “I talked mostly to him about his computer work, which is about the only thing he liked talking about.” But detectives believe that the man from the neighborhood taught Mitch how to break into homes and then offered to buy whatever jewelry Mitch brought him. If so, the man saw a talent in Mitch that no one else did. Indeed, Mitch turned out to be a precocious burglar. The police believe he first broke into smaller homes around his old neighborhood—“training homes,” he called them. His modus operandi was to enter a home through a bathroom window, in part because he had learned—or had been taught— that motion detectors are rarely installed in bathrooms. With his screwdriver, he learned to crack the window panes almost as noiselessly as a chef cracks an egg, then he carefully would pull out the shattered pieces until he had a hole big enough to crawl through. Sometimes, he’d remove the weather stripping and take out the entire bathroom window to get in. And more often than not, he’d get lucky and discover that the homeowners had simply neglected to turn on their alarms. The only problem for Mitch was that he couldn’t find a good wheelman he could trust. Initially, he used a couple of buddies from the neighborhood, but they tended to panic and flee if they saw police officers, forcing Mitch to make his getaways on foot through back yards and alleys. Mitch knew that if he was ever going to move up to the elite Dallas neighborhoods, where he would face private security guards and regular police patrols, then he was going to need a wheelman who not only was composed enough to wait for him as long as was necessary at the pickup locations but also could handle any questions from the cops and, if Mitch

T4096.indb 119

the man who loved cat burgling

1/18/07 7:19:11 AM

6 Skip was being pursued, would be willing to floor the accelerator once Hollandsworth Mitch was in the car and make a run for it. But instead of finding a professional, Mitch made a decision that must have made the man in the neighborhood shake his head in disbelief. He asked Jennifer to join him. 120

perhaps he thought it was such a romantic notion: the two of them embarking on a great adventure, stealing jewels from rich people who probably had the insurance to cover their losses. Or maybe he thought that if he and Jennifer created a life together as criminals, she’d be less likely to go out with her friends to meet other guys. Whatever the reason, he had made a far more brilliant choice than maybe even he realized. With her big hair, her always-skillful makeup job, and her manicured nails tapping the steering wheel as she listened to rap music, Jennifer would drive around a neighborhood after dropping Mitch off, oohing and aahing at the mansions, and always circling back to the pickup spot right on time. In our conversations Jennifer remained coy about many aspects of her relationship with Mitch, but when I asked her if she had been scared about becoming Mitch’s wheelman, she gave me an almost nostalgic smile. “Oh, no, it was so exciting. And Mitch always told me it would be so easy.” I realized later that what Mitch had said to Jennifer was almost exactly what Clyde had said to Bonnie in the 1967 movie version of their lives. “Don’t worry about nothing,” Clyde proclaimed about the bank robbery he was planning. “This is going to be the easiest thing in the world.” Compared to his more infamous predecessor, however, Mitch was very, very cautious. Because he hated violence, he refused to carry a gun—he used to tell Jennifer that he wished there were laws banning guns—and he refused to burglarize a home unless the occupants were gone, so there would be no possibility of his getting shot. He and Jennifer would drive through a neighborhood night after night, studying a house, looking to see if certain lights always remained on (a giveaway that the homeowners were out of town). He’d get out of the car and circle the house on foot, peering through windows to see if the beds were made; he’d even peek through mail slots to see if mail was scattered on the floor.

T4096.indb 120

1/18/07 7:19:11 AM

6 121 Occasionally, he’d knock a hole in the window and then retreat, sitting in a dark corner of the yard to see if police officers would come or if a light would turn on inside the house. If he heard a phone inside the house ringing soon after making his opening in the window, he’d leave, his assumption being that he unknowingly had tripped an alarm and that the security company was calling the homeowners. And once inside, he never ventured past the bathroom or closets if he thought a motion detector was on in the hallway. Yet for all his caution, Mitch could be almost incomprehensibly gutsy. Police officers almost never encounter professional jewel thieves anymore, because stealing jewels takes time and time increases the burglar’s risk exponentially. The typical burglar today smashes through a door or window, grabs whatever portable merchandise he can carry, and then lumbers away. In dollars, the average value of the haul in a residential burglary in Dallas totals no more than $3,000. But Mitch was unique. He went after only good jewelry (he usually left the costume jewelry behind), and he loved going after well-known Dallas residents. Based on conversations with Jennifer, the police believe that he burglarized the mansion of restaurant entrepreneur Norman Brinker and his wife, Nancy, twice in one month in 1992 while they were away at their Florida home, and he broke into the home of local television anchor Clarice Tinsley in 1993 when she was out of town. On that occasion he not only took her jewels but also grabbed as a special present for Jennifer a glittery sequin-encrusted denim jacket that Tinsley had purchased at a Dallas AIDS benefit. The police also believe that in 1996, after Dallas socialite Sharon McCutchin had been photographed for the High Profile section of the Dallas Morning News wearing a gigantic diamond ring and gold earrings the size of miniature football helmets, Mitch broke into her and her husband’s Mediterranean-style villa in the Preston Hollow estates area, getting away with some of her best pieces. In 1993 the Dallas police department set up a task force to investigate the North Dallas jewelry heists and added extra patrols in the neighborhoods where the burglaries were taking place. They got close to Mitch a couple of times, but they never knew it. Once, just as Mitch found two $100,000 diamond-studded

T4096.indb 121

the man who loved cat burgling

1/18/07 7:19:11 AM

6 Skip Rolexes and $10,000 in cash during one burglary, he heard a siren Hollandsworth coming down a street at the back of the house. Sensing his escape route was cut off, he quickly changed into an all-white tennis outfit he had found in the closet, stuffed the watches and cash down the front of his underwear, dashed around to the front of the house, and then trotted right down the middle of the street, as if he were one of the neighbors out for an early-evening jog. No one looked twice at him: Who would have expected a burglar to be dressed in tennis whites? On another occasion he was inside a North Dallas home when he heard the sound of an approaching police helicopter along with the sirens of squad cars. With the jewels in hand, he headed out of the house, raced to the next-door neighbor’s yard, threw off his clothes except for his boxer shorts, and jumped into the swimming pool. As the police helicopter flew over him, Mitch swam back and forth, back and forth—still, to use the words of his stepmother, the little dolphin. The cops in the helicopter mistook him for the homeowner out for an evening swim—and flew off to look elsewhere. As more cops converged on the neighborhood, a smiling Jennifer maneuvered her way past them in the Tercel, parked at the pickup spot, and waited until a wet-haired Mitch leaped into the car. If the police are to be believed, Mitch was doing at least a dozen scores a year by the mid-nineties. In some instances, of course, he found little jewelry. Most wealthy people in Dallas keep their best jewels in safe-deposit boxes at banks or in safes hidden away in their homes. In one burglary, however, when Mitch did find a small safe that he couldn’t open, he lugged it out of the bathroom window and then carried it as far as he could down the street and into some bushes before tiring, returning later that night with Jennifer to pick it up. Still, even when he did find a stash, his fence would pay him only a fraction of what the jewelry was worth, claiming he had his own exorbitant costs to have the jewels cut up to be resold. Mitch reportedly received $5,000 to $20,000 for a heist, a few of which brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gold and diamonds. Yet Mitch didn’t seem to care about becoming rich. “He never spent a dime on himself,” said one of his half sisters. “He never 122

T4096.indb 122

1/18/07 7:19:11 AM

6 123 bought clothes, and I think he had just one coat. At the apartment, the closet was full of Jennifer’s clothes, and I think Mitch had one drawer full of stuff, mostly T-shirts.” Jennifer did tell me that if Mitch suddenly showed up with a large wad of cash, he’d spend it mostly on her, taking her to get her nails and hair done, buying her new outfits, and then ending the day with dinner at Bennigan’s or, for a real treat, at the revolving restaurant inside the gigantic lighted ball at the top of Reunion Tower, which looms over downtown Dallas. Sometimes she’d wear some of the better pieces of jewelry that Mitch had acquired. Mitch was so in love with Jennifer that he once let her help him paint one of his Picasso imitations; when they were finished, he signed the painting “Dolan Shaw” and put it on a wall in their living room, right next to the bookshelf filled with a fish-shaped onyx sculpture that Jennifer’s mother had given them. Mitch had plans to go legitimate someday—he did start a company called WebCanDo to create Web sites for small businesses—yet he never could shake the thrill of the heist. “I think he realized he had a gift for this kind of work,” a police detective told me. “He found a real joy in being able to do something few other people could do.” On Sunday afternoons, he and Jennifer would walk hand-in-hand through open houses for newly built mansions, in part to see how they were built and where the new homeowners would keep their jewelry. And inevitably, he began having Jennifer drive him past the Simmons mansion, with its offduty DPS officer in the driveway and a trained German shepherd guard dog named Titus in the back yard. No one in Dallas loved jewelry more than the glamorous Annette Simmons, the welder’s daughter from Tyler who met Harold in 1975 in a luxury box at a Dallas Cowboys game just as his fortune was starting to explode from his corporate investments and hostile takeovers. Annette adored fine jewelry the way Jennifer adored costume jewelry. She had jewelers from New York, Beverly Hills, and Dallas who called her regularly. She perused Christie’s and Sotheby’s catalogs for estate jewelry on the auction block. She was so well known for her interest in jewelry that husbands from Dallas’ mega-rich circles often asked her to buy jewelry for them to give to their wives.

T4096.indb 123

the man who loved cat burgling

1/18/07 7:19:12 AM

6 Although Annette kept her most expensive jewels locked in Skip Hollandsworth safes and safe-deposit boxes away from the home, she still had a whopping two hundred pieces in four drawers in a closet of her large dressing room. “Some of those items meant the most to me,” she told me one afternoon, sitting in her living room, which is filled with the kind of French furniture tourists see at the Palace of Versailles. Her eyes reddened with tears. “There was a little diamond watch that my daddy gave me when I graduated from high school, the first piece of jewelry Harold ever gave me [a bracelet containing thirty small heart-shaped diamonds], and my first wedding rings from Harold [which she later replaced with bigger rings].” But there were also some monster rocks, including a fortycarat pink sapphire ring circled with diamonds that was worth at least $150,000—a jewel thief ’s dream. The January 1998 burglary, done while Harold and Annette were at their second home, in Santa Barbara, California, was Mitch’s masterpiece. He timed the entry to avoid the officer making one of his twice-hourly tours around the grounds and persuaded the dog not to bark (perhaps by feeding him cookies). Then he approached Annette’s dressing room window, cracked two panes with the sharp edge of his screwdriver, and removed the glass and part of the window frame so delicately that he didn’t trigger an alarm. He was in and out so quickly that Jennifer, who had driven over to a McDonald’s half a mile away to get a Diet Coke, had barely made it back to the pickup spot when he came flying out of the bushes with a pillowcase bulging with jewelry. Although many wealthy victims of jewelry heists swallow their losses and ask the police to keep their names out of the newspapers, Annette was too distressed to do nothing. She hired an FBI agent turned private investigator, Michael Miles of Dallas, to make inquiries throughout Europe and Asia, send photos of Annette’s most valuable pieces to diamond merchants in Paris, Hong Kong, and New York City, and take out advertisements in jewelry magazines and the Dallas Morning News announcing a reward for information leading to the return of the jewelry. Meanwhile, the chairman of the Department of Public Safety, perhaps embarrassed that the robbery had happened on one of his men’s watch, okayed a team of DPS divers to search the pond behind 124

T4096.indb 124

1/18/07 7:19:12 AM

6 125 the Simmonses’ house for jewels or any other evidence and assigned a DPS officer to assist with the Dallas Police Department’s investigation. The lead investigator in the case, Joe Philpott, was a softspoken but relentless burglary detective who had been with the DPD for thirty years. Philpott ran all the usual traps: He had some of the employees at the house—from the housekeeper to the gardener to the gardener’s assistant—take polygraphs. He also took a look at two of Harold’s daughters from his previous marriages who despised him and Annette. A year and a half earlier, they had sued their father over the way he ran the family trust, in part claiming that he had used money that belonged to the daughters to buy Annette $1.6 million in jewelry. One of the daughters used to turn the photos of Annette toward the wall whenever she visited the home. Annette had found it curious that a photo of her and Harold on her vanity had obviously been picked up and moved during the burglary. Could it have been a calling card from the daughters? Or was the burglar so well informed about the Simmons family feud that he moved the photo to cast suspicion on the daughters? As the weeks passed, Philpott found himself without a single decent lead. He tried to find out if a known jewel thief from Connecticut who was said to work on the East and West coasts had been making stopovers in Dallas. He checked into rumors that a legendary Dallas jewel thief from the sixties known as the King of Diamonds—a man who had never been identified but who had been bold enough to burglarize homes while the residents were throwing a dinner party—might have come out of retirement. Perhaps the most comical rumor that circulated through Dallas was that Annette herself had staged the robbery so that she could get insurance money to buy more jewels. (The Simmonses did receive $600,000 from the insurance company to cover their losses.) Then, in the spring of 1998, Philpott got one of those nutty phone calls that detectives often get from citizens who claim to have inside information on cases. A man said he had seen the advertisement in the newspaper about a reward for missing jewels and he thought he knew who had them. The man told Philpott that a pretty girl named Jennifer had been coming to a couple of

T4096.indb 125

the man who loved cat burgling

1/18/07 7:19:12 AM

6 Skip North Dallas apartment complexes known for drug dealing and Hollandsworth was trading jewels for little bags of crack cocaine. 126

the man’s real name was essie evans, but he was known as Chickenman because he delivered orders for a small fast-food chicken restaurant near the apartment complexes. Over the years, he had gotten to know the drug dealers in the complexes, and sometimes when he’d make his chicken deliveries he’d tell customers that he could get them some nice crack for dessert. One evening, he saw a well-dressed young woman slowly driving by in a turquoise Tercel. She rolled down her window and told him she wanted to try some crack herself; soon a relationship was born. Once again, Jennifer was sneaking off from Mitch. “I don’t know what it was that made me do it,” Jennifer later told me during one of our conversations. “It started, I guess, a few months before the Simmons burglary, when a girlfriend of mine, who’s pretty wild, asked if I’d like to do some crack. I thought it would be fun to see what it was like, and then as time went on, I sort of, well, lost it.” Mitch eventually found out where Jennifer was going, and whenever she disappeared, he’d drive through the parking lots of the apartment complexes, looking for the telltale Tercel. He’d knock on apartment doors asking if she was there. “Come home,” he’d say when he saw her. She always did, letting him put his arms around her as he took her away. She’d tell him she was sorry, he’d forgive her, but then she’d keep returning to do drugs with Chickenman. He introduced her to different dealers, almost all of whom were women. (One of the most prominent dealers was a black woman named Blue; her chief rival was a black woman named Black.) A couple of days after the Simmons heist, before Mitch sold Annette’s jewelry to his fence for a paltry $25,000, Jennifer grabbed several pieces when Mitch wasn’t looking and hid them. Then, on subsequent visits to the apartment complexes, she’d pull the jewelry out of her Gucci purse and offer to make a trade. Soon, throughout the apartment complexes, female crack dealers were wearing Annette Simmons’ rings, earrings, brooches, bracelets, and necklaces. “It was nice ice,” said Becky Reno, a dealer who took a necklace and four rings—two of which were matching

T4096.indb 126

1/18/07 7:19:12 AM

6 127 ruby guards that she wore next to her wedding band—in return for a $40 bag of crack. But in what would turn out to be a fateful decision for Mitch and Jennifer, Becky tired of the rings and pawned them at a nearby Cash America pawnshop, which offered them for sale for $29.58 each, advertising them as “ladies fashion rings.” Philpott checked pawnshop sales slips and hit pay dirt—a description that sounded like Annette’s rings. As is required by law, the sales slip listed the name of the purchaser, who turned out to be an employee of Mrs. Baird’s bread. Philpott got the rings and took them to Annette, who identified them as hers. Realizing he would still need some leverage to get Jennifer to talk, Philpott told Chickenman that to get the reward, he’d have to agree to set up Jennifer. The next time she came to the apartment complexes to meet Chickenman and buy some crack, undercover police officers were waiting. They arrested Jennifer and took her to Philpott, who told her he could recommend to the district attorney’s office that the crack cocaine possession charges be dropped in return for her full cooperation in the police investigation. For nearly four hours she dodged Philpott’s questions. ( Jennifer said she asked for an attorney: Philpott said all she asked for was her mother.) Finally, Jennifer broke down, told Philpott about Mitch, identified Mitch’s fence, talked about their previous burglaries, and then wrote out a confession about the details of the Simmons burglary. The Simmonses’ property manager met Chickenman and gave him a reward of $25,000 along with a sweet thank-you note from the always-polite Annette, encouraging him to find Jesus and be saved. Chickenman had told Philpott he was going to use the money to go to drug treatment and buy a car so he could visit his mother in Mississippi. But he was so overcome with remorse about betraying Jennifer—she was such a nice girl, he kept telling Philpott—that he tracked her down one last time, gave her half of the reward money, and disappeared. Meanwhile, in hopes of avoiding her own criminal charges, Jennifer had promised Philpott, who was still worried that he didn’t have enough evidence to convict Mitch, that she wouldn’t tell Mitch about her confession and that she would let Philpott

T4096.indb 127

the man who loved cat burgling

1/18/07 7:19:13 AM

6 Skip know when and where Mitch would be doing his next burglary. Hollandsworth Instead, Jennifer broke down and told Mitch at least part of the truth. She said the police had somehow found out about them and were trying to get her to talk. For weeks, she and Mitch didn’t go out of their apartment except for quick trips to Jack in the Box. They peeked out of the window shades at the unmarked police cars in the parking lot. They became convinced that two young women who had just moved into a nearby apartment were not topless dancers as they had said but undercover cops who might try to seduce Mitch and get him to confess. Because Mitch believed that the satellite dish the two women had installed on their balcony was designed to pick up his conversations with Jennifer, he turned up the stereo whenever he and Jennifer talked. Figuring he would get nothing more, Philpott obtained an arrest warrant for Jennifer and then one for Mitch. If he thought the arrests might get them to talk, he was mistaken. At the intake area of the jail, Mitch and Jennifer saw each other. Mitch suddenly broke away from sheriff ’s deputies and ran to Jennifer, shouting, “I’m so sorry. I love you.” Just as he reached out to embrace her, the deputies dragged him away. “I love you too, Mitch,” Jennifer cried. For most of the trial, which was held last summer, Mitch looked like he belonged behind a computer, sitting hunched forward in his chair, resting the side of his pale face against the palm of one hand. He was so devoid of expression that one attorney later said he seemed autistic. Because Dallas’ most successful jewel thief owned no dress shirt and no tie of his own, he had to borrow them from an attorney. In a holding tank outside the courtroom, Mitch complained to a bystander that his shirt was too tight. The man answered, “Hey, if you can squeeze through a window, then you can squeeze through a goddam shirt.” Mitch’s lawyers were the legendary Dallas defense attorney Doug Mulder and his son Chris. The elder Mulder told the jury that Mitch couldn’t possibly be a jewel thief. He was so poor that his grandmother was paying his legal bills. (But Nancy Wiener later told me that she had never heard of Mulder and that she didn’t pay him a cent. The police speculate that Mitch’s legal fees were paid for by his fence in return for Mitch saying nothing about 128

T4096.indb 128

1/18/07 7:19:13 AM

6 129 him.) Once testimony began, the Mulders had a field day mocking the drug dealers who arrived to talk about the jewels Jennifer sold them. The trial did seem to go badly for the prosecution. Jennifer refused to testify, citing her Fifth Amendment rights, and according to the police, the fence had conveniently disappeared for several weeks and could not be found in time to testify. But how could the Mulders get around the fact that Annette’s wedding guards had ended up at the pawnshop? In a hilarious last-gasp maneuver, the Mulders brought out a man who identified himself as a jeweler; he stared at the rings, blew on them, and pronounced, “They’re fake. You could get these at a Kmart.” The socialites who had come to the trial to support Annette gasped: Annette had been accused of wearing costume jewelry! The prosecution quickly called Bill Noble, the jeweler to Dallas’ moneyed class and one of Annette’s closest friends. He strutted into the courtroom in a beautiful Italian suit, performed a scientific acid test on the rings in front of the jury, and pronounced them authentic. Annette’s daughter, Amy, rushed out of the courtroom to tell her mother, who was anxiously sitting on a bench in the hallway. “They’re real,” Amy exclaimed. “They’re real!” The two women hugged. The twelve jurors, mostly middle-class citizens who chuckled through much of the testimony, found Mitch guilty, but in the trial’s biggest surprise, they decided that he deserved only probation. The judge gave him a ten-year probated sentence, then ordered Mitch to pay $400,000 in restitution to the Simmonses as compensation for the stolen jewels that their insurance didn’t cover, which caused the socialites to gasp again. One of Annette’s close friends, Sandra Tucker, turned to me and said, “Oh, my God, this means he’s going to rob other people’s homes to get the money he owes Annette.” In a later plea bargain, Jennifer pleaded guilty and also received ten years’ probation. She and Mitch were ordered by the judge not to contact each other during the length of their probation. Jennifer went to a drug rehabilitation program and then to a halfway house, and Mitch moved to a small apartment building owned by Jennifer’s mother that was behind a cheap Chinese restaurant near downtown Dallas. Some Mexican Americans who lived in the same building took pity on him and got him hired as

T4096.indb 129

the man who loved cat burgling

1/18/07 7:19:13 AM

6 Skip a laborer at a construction site where they were working on a new Hollandsworth home. The site happened to be in the Preston Hollow estates area that Mitch knew all too well. But the story was hardly over. Late last fall Philpott arrived at Mitch’s apartment with a warrant for his arrest. The detective had been so disturbed over Mitch’s probated sentence that he had pulled out the files of every unsolved burglary in North Dallas in the previous five years—the period that would still be under the statute of limitations for burglary. He found a February 1997 case in far north Dallas where the burglar had cut himself as he came through a window and dripped blood through the house. When Philpott learned that an enterprising officer at the scene had collected blood samples, he ordered DNA tests. The DNA from that blood perfectly matched Mitch’s DNA. This case, as the cops like to say, was open and shut. If no plea bargain is arranged, Mitch’s new burglary trial will begin later in the year. (Chris Mulder is again defending him.) It is unlikely that Mitch and Jennifer will be arrested for their other burglaries. Some are protected by the five-year statute of limitations and others cannot be prosecuted because of a lack of evidence—no jewels have been found, and it’s likely that neither Mitch nor Jennifer will testify. Jennifer’s oral statements are not enough to produce a conviction, and her only written confession was limited to the Simmons case. Nevertheless, Philpott remains obsessed with Mitch’s earlier burglaries, and he still suspects some of the jewelry was hidden in Dallas. He got a court order to dig up the yard of one of Mitch’s great-aunts, where he thought some jewelry might be, causing a minor scandal in her neighborhood. There is also the question of whether Mitch had received any inside information about where to look for the jewels once he got inside these large mansions. By all accounts, he did have an uncanny knack for finding the loot. Was it possible that someone who was part of Dallas society, someone who went to lunches or parties at these homes, had passed on to someone else, who then passed the information on to Mitch, details about where the jewelry might be? Mitch isn’t talking about any details of the crimes. He still insists to his friends and family that he is an innocent victim of 130

T4096.indb 130

1/18/07 7:19:13 AM

6 131 a vengeful Harold and Annette Simmons, who are trying to use their muscle around town to keep him behind bars. In one letter to his grandmother, he wrote that the police were “using the other inmates to harass me, intimidate me, question me about my personal life and case. In one case they were trying to use an extremely well-built black man, to threaten me with bodily harm and un-natural sex . . .” At least in his letters to his grandmother, he seems desperate and even terrified. “I have suffered a nervous breakdown for 3 days in a row now because of this matter,” he wrote in one letter. It’s as if the daring persona he put on as a cat burglar is now shattered, and he is once again the quiet, unassuming computer nerd who wants to spend his evenings designing Web sites. In fact, Mitch recently made a collect call from jail to a friend to remind him what still needed to be changed on a Web site that Mitch had created for him. Then, after a pause, Mitch asked if his own computer was in a safe place. As for Jennifer, she should be out of her halfway house shortly and on to a new life—one that she says will be free of drugs and crime. She started writing poetry (“I’m no longer a fallen angel / I can spread my wings and fly”). And she got a job at a sandwich shop. After a few weeks she was asked to be an assistant manager. It seemed that all the other employees kept getting fired for stealing. When I met her for the last time, just before Christmas, she was wearing a batch of costume jewelry. On each of her fingers (except for her thumbs) were little silver rings, one shaped like a butterfly, another like a frog. She wore large hoop earrings and a gold bracelet adorned with fake diamonds. “Nothing cost me more than ten dollars,” she said proudly. I asked her how it was going to feel living without Mitch. “It’s best for both of us if it happens,” she said, but her face was pensive. “You know, I’ll always look back on those days and think, ‘How in the world did we do all that? How did we pull it off?’” She told me that she had heard Mitch had sent a letter to a mutual friend in which he wrote, “Tell Jennifer we were always a team, and they can’t take that away from us.” For a moment, I thought she was going to cry. “Oh, well,” she said, “we were a team, that’s for sure.” Her Adam’s apple bobbed

T4096.indb 131

the man who loved cat burgling

1/18/07 7:19:14 AM

6 Skip up and down. Then she took another sip of Diet Coke, her straw Hollandsworth making a snerkling sound as she fished for the last drops among the ice at the bottom of the glass. 132

6 February 2000

T4096.indb 132

1/18/07 7:19:14 AM

two barmaids, five alligators, and the butcher of elmendorf

6

Did Joe Ball Really Do What Everyone Says He Did?

michael hall “

T

he squawling [sic] kitten flopped into the pool. A big alligator lifted its jaws, closed like a vice, and the screaming cat was bitten in half. ‘There’s more to come, my pets!’ Big Joe Ball shouted, as the drunk-crazed crowd roared in appreciation. And he next tossed a puppy into the bloody pool!!”

—from a vertical file in the San Antonio Public Library

in the photograph joe ball pauses on a beach, wearing one of those old-fashioned bathing suits. His right hand grips an open whiskey bottle at his belly, as if between sips, and his left holds what appears to be a pair of binoculars. He’s standing barefoot in white sand next to weedy brush, like the kind that grows in the dunes along the Texas coast. He’s handsome in a roguish way and looks at the camera with either a squint or a sneer—it’s hard to tell which. If you didn’t know Joe Ball’s history, you might think he was just another old-time party boy, a genteel William Faulkner look-alike whooping it up. If, however, you’ve heard the legend of Joe Ball, his close-cropped hair and cramped face make him appear sordid, murderous. He looks like, on this day or one like it, he could get his girlfriend drunk, entice her to look off into the distance, shoot her in the head, bury her in the sand, and then return home to his bar, his waitresses, and his alligators. And that is just what Joe Ball did.

T4096.indb 133

1/18/07 7:19:14 AM

6 He was a bootlegger and a gambler, a scion of the richest famMichael Hall ily in tiny Elmendorf, about fifteen miles southeast of downtown San Antonio. He was, they say, a ladies’ man who had his way with the waitresses at his bar, and when they got pregnant, he got rid of them. Sometimes by alligator. When deputy sheriffs finally caught up with him, in September 1938, they dug up the dismembered corpse of one of his barmaids, dug up the girlfriend in the sand, and hauled away the gators. Ball became known as the Bluebeard of Texas, the Butcher of Elmendorf, and Alligator Man, and his story—told and retold in various newspapers, true-crime magazines, and books—caught the fancy of anyone who was ever fascinated by how low people could go, how much deeper the pit of human infamy could be dug. It was impossible to figure the final death count, so many women had come and gone through Ball’s doors over the years, but the total was at least five. Seven or eight. Twelve. Twenty. Twenty-five. This, it would seem, makes Joe Ball one of the first modern serial killers. The facts in Ball’s story vary wildly with the source, from the number of victims to the names of the principals to what the witnesses saw. This is especially so online, where Web sites like the Wacky World of Murder and Homicidal Heroes treat Ball as if he were an early rock star, the Chuck Berry of serial killers. It’s almost as if they are rooting him on. Indeed, Ball is often hailed as mythic kin to Ed Gein, the Wisconsin weirdo who, in the fifties, killed people and dug up and flailed corpses and wore their skin—the guy on whom Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre were based. (It should come as no surprise that Hooper’s second movie, Eaten Alive, concerned a deranged Texas hotelier who fed his guests, including a pretty prostitute he hacked to death with a rake, to an alligator he kept in his yard.) Was Ball truly, as one site insisted, “one of the U.S.’s greatest nutcases”? Or was he, as other modern maniacs have defended themselves, merely misunderstood? In San Antonio I found shades of the truth. Because the men from the Bexar County Sheriff ’s Office who cornered Ball are dead, I asked their successors in an e-mail if any kind of written history of the department had survived from the thirties. No, replied a corporal there, but his great-grandfather had been the sheriff of 134

T4096.indb 134

1/18/07 7:19:14 AM

6 135 neighboring Wilson County. “I heard Joe Ball was a black man,” he wrote, “and he would kill the waitresses and throw their bodies in a pond behind his place.” I went to the San Antonio Public Library and asked a librarian in the Texana-genealogy department if she had any files on the Ball family. She drew a blank until I said that the best-known member was a reputed serial killer. “Oh,” she said cheerfully, “this is the guy with the alligator farm?” Well, not exactly, but close enough for a legend like Joe Ball’s. His tale is proof, once again, that people see what they want to see. Especially when it involves flesh-eating alligators.

two barmaids, five alligators, and the butcher of elmendorf

blink and you’ll miss elmendorf, especially if you’re heading south on U.S. 181 and thinking about the beaches at Port Aransas or Corpus Christi. Most people speed right by the small town (population: 664) just outside the San Antonio city limits sign. If you turn west toward Elmendorf, you’ll drive through a couple of miles of scrubby fields, wide-open pastures, mobile homes, and mobile-home subdivisions. Many of the double-wides are nice, with tailored yards and pretty gardens. Their mailboxes reveal the town’s makeup: Garcia, Ramos, Guerrero. Elmendorf is about two thirds Hispanic, and it is pretty poor. Nobody ever photographed it for a tourist brochure. Many of the roads in town are gravel. The main intersection, at FM 327 and Third Avenue, has a stop sign and a hair salon. Just behind the intersection is a hand-drawn sign; on one side it advertises Tony’s Bar and Grill and on the other it shows a caricature of an alligator in a baseball cap with a bat on his shoulder that reads “Gators.” Nearby are Roy’s Place and DeLeon’s Grocery, which have been in business for seventy years. The Elmendorf Lounge used to be here, but now it’s out on 181. The town was incorporated in 1963, and its first mayor was Raymond Ball, Joe’s brother. But it has had a troubled history of late. Elmendorf developed a reputation as a speed trap in the seventies, and in 1983 the mayor resigned, as did two successive police chiefs who were accused of submitting false documents to a state agency. In 1987 the mayor and a council member walked out of a meeting because of a disagreement; they resigned and later tried to come back, but the council wouldn’t let them. In 2000 the mayor and

T4096.indb 135

1/18/07 7:19:14 AM

6 Michael Hall four council members, including Richard “Bucky” Ball, Jr., (Joe’s nephew), were indicted for violating the Texas Open Meetings Act (a misdemeanor). The town got water lines laid only three years ago, and sewer lines are still in the works. Most of the commerce— restaurants, gas stations, antiques stores—is carried out on U.S. 181, which leads the rest of the world to pass Elmendorf by. There’s plenty of action, though, at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, the largest and oldest church in town. Inside the parish hall on any weekday morning you’ll find a crowd of elderly people from the area, there to hang out with friends and eat a free lunch provided by the Texas Department on Aging and the City of San Antonio. On a good morning there are eighty, about half Mexican American, half Anglo. Some of the women start playing Mexican-train dominoes at ten-thirty; others spend their time visiting at the five lines of tables strung together cafeteria-style. The program has been going on since 1973. The first manager was a Mrs. Michael Ball. I sat there for several mornings in the spring, pretending to understand Mexican-train dominoes and asking the seniors about Joe Ball. Everyone here knows the name; some actually remember the man. Lawrence Liedecke was fourteen in 1938. He used to sneak into Ball’s yard to see the gators. He said Ball was a good shot and that he could shoot a bullet through the mouth of a beer bottle or hit a coin in the air. But he was mean. “We were afraid of him,” remembered Pollie Merian, who is 88 years old. “He’d get mad and kill you.” Townspeople were suspicious of Ball even before his death, she said. “He was a dirty rat. He had some black people there; he treated them so mean.” Locals take a certain hushed pleasure in talking about the town’s most infamous son, even if they don’t always get the facts right. “They found two bodies on the beach somewhere,” said Jesse Bayer, who lives in nearby Floresville. “But they never found any other bodies. He fed them to the alligators, what I hear. I don’t know how many.” I asked Alex Saucedo, who also grew up in Floresville, if he thought Ball had fed his waitresses to his gators. “Oh, yeah!” he said brightly. Someone at the table said it was a matter of the women all being whores, disappearing, moving on 136

T4096.indb 136

1/18/07 7:19:15 AM

6 137 like whores do. I nodded, pretending to understand. Ultimately, Liedecke is skeptical about the bloody body count. “Too many liars,” he said. “I think there really were two.” But nobody knows for sure? He shrugged. “Oh, yeah.” I walked outside to the large graveyard, where most of the headstones were decorated with colorful flowers. I thought Joe Ball’s grave would be off in some corner, hidden by neglect. But his is the first grave you see when you walk in the gate from the church: “Joseph D. Ball, Jan. 7, 1896—Sept. 24, 1938.” He’s next to his father, Frank X. Ball. Balls lie all over this cemetery.

two barmaids, five alligators, and the butcher of elmendorf

frank x. ball built elmendorf, which had been established in 1885 by Henry Elmendorf, who would later become the mayor of San Antonio. This was cotton country, and Ball borrowed some money and built a gin to process the crop. The railroad put a depot in town, and Elmendorf cotton—as well as pottery, bricks, and tile made at a local factory—were exported to the rest of the world. A school opened in 1902. By the late twenties the town was thriving, with general stores, a hotel, a doctor’s office, meat markets, a confectionery, and a couple of cotton gins. “My daddy said there’d be cotton wagons two miles up the old highway,” remembered Bucky, whose father, Richard, was Joe’s brother. “Elmendorf was a jumping town way back then.” And Frank Ball was rich. He began buying and selling farms, especially when they got cheap during the Depression. He opened a general store, from which he sold everything from caskets to shoes. He built the first stone home in the area, and he and his wife, Elizabeth, had eight children, many of whom became pillars of the community. Frank Junior became a school trustee in 1914. Raymond opened a new grocery store, which also held the post office; his wife, Jane, would become the postmaster. Their second child, Joe, was no politician. He was, however, good with guns. “My uncle could shoot a bird off a telephone line with a pistol from the bumper of his Model A Ford,” Bucky said. Ball joined the Army in 1917 to fight in the Great War. In his official Army photo he looks pale and innocent, as a lot of Americans did who went off to fight for democracy. Ball saw action in Europe,

T4096.indb 137

1/18/07 7:19:15 AM

6 Michael Hall according to Bucky, received his honorable discharge in 1919, and returned to Elmendorf. Joe may not have followed in his father’s footsteps, but he learned something from him about business. Just as people needed a gin to process their cotton, they needed, well, gin. And whiskey and beer. As Prohibition settled in during the twenties, Ball became a bootlegger. “He drove all around the area,” said Liedecke, “selling whiskey to people out of a big fifty-gallon barrel.” Ball was about six feet tall and 160 pounds, according to Elton Cude, Jr., whose father, a Bexar County deputy sheriff, helped investigate Ball and later wrote about him in a book titled The Wild and Free Dukedom of Bexar. “He wasn’t near as good-looking as they describe in those detective magazines,” said Cude, Jr. “He could be dangerous.” In the mid-twenties Ball began hiring, off and on, a young black man named Clifton Wheeler to help around the house and the business. Wheeler was a handyman, but he did a lot of Ball’s manual labor and dirty work. According to many, Wheeler lived in fear of Ball. Liedecke says that Ball would shoot at Wheeler’s feet to make him dance the jitterbug. As expected, Ball’s nephew has a different image of Joe based on the stories his father told him. “He was always kindhearted,” Bucky told me, remembering a tale about his uncle paying for a poor Mexican American couple to go to the doctor to have their baby. “He did things like that a lot of times.” After Prohibition, Ball opened a tavern. In the back were two bedrooms and up front was a bar, a player piano, and a room with tables, where the men drank and played cards. Sometimes Ball hosted cockfights. At some point he went to one of the nearby low-water areas where alligators were occasionally seen, caught some, and put them in a concrete pool behind the tavern. He strung wire ten feet high around the pool. Perhaps he loved alligators, or perhaps he just knew how to bring in customers. “It was common knowledge that every Saturday night a drunken orgy occurred. . . .” wrote Cude in his book. “Any wild animal, possum, cat, dog, or any other animal without an owner helped make the show a little better. Get drunk, throw an animal in and watch the alligators.” Ball hired women, dance-hall girls, to wait tables. It was the Depression, hard times, and women came through 138

T4096.indb 138

1/18/07 7:19:15 AM

6 139 Elmendorf, looking for work. Some stayed, and some just seemed two to disappear. barmaids, hazel brown stares straight into your eyes. She is all confidence and dangerous beauty and looks like one of those hardbitten starlets in Hollywood in the forties, like Elizabeth Short, the Black Dahlia, whose gruesome 1947 murder was never solved. Maybe it’s just the age of the photo or the era in which it was shot. It’s easy to see how Joe Ball fell in love with her. Before her, Ball had fallen for other waitresses. In 1934 or so he met a woman from Seguin named Minnie Gotthardt, also known as Big Minnie. Big Minnie was, according to Cude, “a bossy, displeasing, and obnoxious person.” But Ball liked her—she ran the bar with him and Wheeler and had no fear of the drunks. At some point, though, Ball began seeing barmaid Dolores “Buddy” Goodwin, who was fifteen years his junior. She fell in love with him, even after one night in the spring of 1937 when he threw a bottle and hit her in the face, giving her a scar that ran from her eye to her neck. By then Brown, who was from McDade and known as Schatzie, was working at Ball’s. She was also young, only 22, and popular with the customers. She and Buddy became friends. Big Minnie, though, didn’t like Buddy one bit and wasn’t afraid to show it. That summer, Big Minnie disappeared. Ball told people that she was pregnant in a Corpus Christi hospital; Wheeler heard Ball tell someone she was going to have a “nigger” baby. She must have skipped town in a big hurry, though, because she left all of her clothes behind. In September Ball married Buddy, and he revealed to her his secret, that he had taken Minnie to the beach and killed her. She wouldn’t make any more trouble for them. Buddy told Schatzie about Minnie’s demise. She told her a couple of times. In January 1938 Buddy’s left arm was cut off and stories flew around Elmendorf that Ball’s crazed alligators had torn it off or that Ball had cut it off and fed it to them. (In fact Buddy had lost the arm in a car wreck.) In April Buddy disappeared. By then Joe was seeing Schatzie. And then she disappeared too. On September 23, 1938, an old Mexican American man approached Bexar County deputy sheriff John Gray, who was dove hunting in Elmendorf, and told him about a foul-smelling barrel

T4096.indb 139

five alligators, and the butcher of elmendorf

1/18/07 7:19:15 AM

6 Michael Hall covered in flies that Joe Ball had left behind his sister’s barn. It smelled, he said, like something dead was inside. Enough women in Ball’s world had disappeared that the next day Gray and deputy John Klevenhagen drove out to talk to him. Klevenhagen, who would later become a Texas Ranger, was a hunting buddy of Ball’s; he was as good a shot too. They went to the barn, but the stinky barrel was gone. They drove to the bar about noon and talked to Ball, who denied knowing anything about it. But when they all returned to the barn, his sister corroborated the old man’s story. That was enough for the deputies, who told Ball they were taking him to San Antonio for questioning. Ball asked if he could first be allowed to have a beer and close down his place. The sheriffs agreed, and the trio returned to the bar. Ball got a beer, took a few sips, went to his register, opened it, and then pulled out a .45 from under the counter. He waved it at Gray and Klevenhagen, who yelled, “Don’t!” and went for his own pistol just as Ball turned his and pointed it at his heart. He pulled the trigger and fell dead on the barroom floor. 140

four other deputies, including Cude, descended on the tavern. They checked the five gators (one large and four small) in their pond, which was surrounded by rotting meat. They found an ax matted with blood and hair. Their first theory was an obvious one, that the fearsome drunk had killed and mutilated his wife and other victims and fed them to the alligators. The cops talked about other disappearances, including two missing barmaids and a sixteen-year-old boy who hung out at Joe’s. Perhaps the Saturday night feeding frenzies had just been a cover for Sunday night murders. Maybe the old bootlegging barrels now held alligator food. But then Wheeler, who had been taken by sheriffs to San Antonio, spilled the beans. Schatzie had fallen for someone else, he said, one of the bar’s customers, a guy with a home and a good job. She wanted out, but Ball wouldn’t hear of it. When she threatened to tell the police about Big Minnie, he killed her. And now the handyman knew exactly where Schatzie was. He took the sheriffs back to Elmendorf, about three miles from town, on a bluff some three hundred feet from the San Antonio River. By the light of a campfire, he began to dig. Blood bubbled up in the dirt,

T4096.indb 140

1/18/07 7:19:16 AM

6 141 and the odor became unbearable. Wheeler pulled up two arms and two legs and finally a torso. The sight and smell were so bad, wrote Cude, “the sightseers ran in all directions and started heaving and up-chuking [sic].” Wheeler was asked where the head was, and he pointed to the remains of another campfire. After careful sifting, cops found a jawbone, some teeth, and finally some pieces of the skull that had once held the pretty face of Hazel Brown. Wheeler told how, after a night of heavy drinking, Ball had asked him to load up the car with blankets and beer; Joe had a saw, an ax, and a posthole digger with him, as well as his pistol. They went to his sister’s barn, stopping along the way to drink, and then picked up the fetid 55-gallon iron barrel, which they took to the river. Ball forced Wheeler at gunpoint to dig a grave, and they opened the barrel. Out came Brown’s body. Wheeler refused to help Ball dismember the corpse, so he tried to do it himself. But he got so enraged when one of her hands got in the way of sawing off her head that Wheeler reached over and held Brown’s hand, and then helped further, holding her arms and legs while his boss sawed. They each got sick to their stomachs, so they drank some more beer and then buried the corpse, though they threw the head, as well as her clothes, on a campfire. As dawn broke, they sat around and drank beer and then drove back to the bar. Wheeler also solved the mystery of Big Minnie. The previous June, Ball told Wheeler to pack the Model A Coupe and be sure to stow plenty of whiskey and beer. Then he took Minnie and Wheeler to Ingleside, near Corpus Christi. Ball found a secluded area and, after a little swimming and a lot of drinking, asked the doomed Minnie to take her clothes off. Wheeler made himself scarce, but when Ball called for more whiskey, Wheeler noticed that his boss had his pistol by his side. Ball pointed off in the distance, and when Minnie turned her head to look, he shot her in the temple. Wheeler was shocked, but Ball told him he had no choice—she was pregnant and he was seeing Buddy. The two buried her in the sand and drove back to Elmendorf. Police officers questioned Wheeler about other women, and they found a packet of letters as well as a scrapbook with photos of dozens of women. This, said chief deputy sheriff J. W. Davis, “might lead to the discovery of one or a dozen more murders.” The

T4096.indb 141

two barmaids, five alligators, and the butcher of elmendorf

1/18/07 7:19:16 AM

6 Michael Hall San Antonio papers wrote of the disappearance of more than a dozen barmaids, including “Stella,” who had had a fight with Ball about Big Minnie. The sheriffs also had a theory that Ball was dealing narcotics and that it would have been a “simple matter” to put the dope in bottles and store it in the gators’ lair. They drained the pool but found no drugs. Three days after Ball’s suicide, the police began digging in the sand four miles southeast of Ingleside. They took heavy machinery and hired local laborers, and people with nothing better to do—sometimes hundreds of them—came and watched. A local merchant set up a stand and began selling cold drinks. The crowds swelled. “Excitement and rumors ran high,” reported the San Antonio Light. Other dunes looked suspiciously like burial mounds and mysterious shapes were seen walking around at night. Finally, on October 14, they found the remains of Big Minnie, well-preserved in the deep, cold sand. Meanwhile, the police had located Buddy in San Diego, where she had fled from her husband and gone to be with her sister. Two weeks later Klevenhagen and Gray brought her to San Antonio. On the way they stopped in Phoenix and found one of the women listed as “missing” from the tavern. Buddy later said that Wheeler told her that on her last night on earth, Schatzie, who didn’t know Buddy was in San Diego, had accused Ball of killing her, just as he had killed Big Minnie. Schatzie badgered Ball until he flew into a rage. “After a while,” said Buddy, “Joe hit her with his pistol, and I reckon that killed her.” He shot her too, just to make sure. 142

in the aftermath, the alligators went to the San Antonio Zoo, and Wheeler received two years in jail as an accessory. He got out and opened his own bar in town but soon left and was never heard from again. And Joe Ball’s legend bloomed. The pulp press had a lot to do with it. True Detective, the monthly bible of sordid true crime, found his story irresistible and wouldn’t let it go, returning often to the sensational tale of the murderous ladies’ man, dozens of hapless ladies, unborn children, mutilation, kitties and puppies, and of course, alligators starved for human flesh. Hungry gators sold magazines, just as Ball had used them to sell beer, but the facts in the stories sometimes came from the

T4096.indb 142

1/18/07 7:19:16 AM

6 143 writer’s imagination. Elton Cude, Jr., said, “My father called them once and asked, ‘Where’d you get those stories?’ According to one story, my dad was the roughest, toughest manhandling deputy sheriff in Bexar County history. Well, he wasn’t like that, though he did throw some drunks out of a bar occasionally.” Bucky told me about his aunt Madeline, Joe’s sister, who sued True Detective several times for their imaginative versions of Uncle Joe. “I don’t know if she ever collected,” he said. “She didn’t need the money.” Other pulp magazines picked up the distorted story and so did books like The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers and America’s Most Vicious Criminals. Eventually the tale made its way to Web sites, where anyone can write history. So the hype kept building and the mistakes repeating: how Ball shot himself in the head, how his handyman was named Wilfred Sneed, how Sneed said that he had cut up twenty women, how chunks of human flesh were found in the pool. In retrospect, it’s hard to tell whom to trust. For example, according to a 1938 article in something called the Sheriff ’s Association Magazine, that mysterious packet of letters found by the police contained one from Big Minnie telling Ball, “I am still willing to break up you and Buddy, if it is the last thing I do . . . Uncle Henry and I are going to take you to jail as soon as he gets here. I am going to testify as to what I know . . .” About what? Bodies? Gators? There were plenty of other tales too, including the oft-told one of an old man who, in 1932, had stumbled onto Ball pitching a woman’s body into the pool. According to local lore, Ball threatened the man into leaving town; he fled to California and returned only after Ball was dead. Others claimed to have seen Ball throwing pieces of human flesh into the pit. Ultimately, of course, it’s impossible to prove he didn’t. Even though most of the “missing” women were accounted for (usually in San Antonio), some never were. And even though no human remains were found in the alligator pond, that didn’t mean Ball didn’t clean them up. And even though Wheeler, the only eyewitness to Ball’s crimes, never said anything about the alligators, that didn’t mean he didn’t know how to keep his mouth shut when he had to. With Ball, it was easy to believe the worst. It still is. Take one violent, sadistic drunk known for throwing stray pets to his alligators, add a one-armed

T4096.indb 143

two barmaids, five alligators, and the butcher of elmendorf

1/18/07 7:19:16 AM

6 Michael Hall missing wife, one hacked-up girlfriend and another buried in the sand, who knows how many stray women coming and going—you do the math. Six, ten, a dozen, two dozen barmaids hacked up. Gator food. Buddy tried to set the record straight in a 1957 interview. “Joe never put no people in that alligator tank,” she said. “Joe wouldn’t do a thing like that. He wasn’t no horrible monster . . . Joe was a sweet, kind, good man, and he never hurt nobody unless he was driven to it.” Referring to the scar on her face, she said, “He didn’t even mean to cut me. He was throwing the bottle at another guy.” There were just two murders, she said. Elton Cude, Jr., agrees, as did his father, who in a 1988 interview said, “I don’t think those alligators ate a human body of any kind.” Bucky, of course, agrees too. Contrary to expectations, he has a sense of humor about the tale that has blackened his family name. Truthfully, he has no choice. When Bucky was training with the Green Berets in North Carolina in 1959, a friend’s mother, who lived in New Jersey and knew his last name, sent her son a comic book that told the horrifying tale of Joe Ball and the alligators. Bucky, who at seventy wears a jet-black pompadour and looks like an old rockabilly, chuckled as he remembered their shock when he said, “That was my uncle.” In April Bucky and his wife, who barrel race in their spare time, were in Giddings. “This friend of mine saw me and said, ‘Hey, Ball, did you bring your alligator with you?’ ” In truth, alligators aren’t that unusual in this part of South Texas, said Bucky, who remembers a stuffed one in the Floresville courthouse when he was a kid. “They get in the San Antonio River,” he told me. “I saw four over in Braunig Lake recently. They like that still water.” Bucky said his uncle probably got his from around Graytown, about three miles from Elmendorf, in the lowlands, where they go to lay eggs. Bucky has his uncle’s World War I portrait and a 48-star flag given to the family after his death. He keeps them in a glass case in his living room. The 24-year veteran goes to counseling at Brook Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston and thinks his uncle’s experience in the war had something to do with his actions afterward. “My dad told me that after my uncle came back from the war, he was different. I guess what you see and do comes back 144

T4096.indb 144

1/18/07 7:19:17 AM

6 145 to you. My counselor tells me your brain’s like a tape, and this two stuff is on your brain. It’ll never go away.” barmaids, There wasn’t much Army counseling during the Depression, five and Joe Ball probably wouldn’t have taken it anyway. He didn’t alligators, seem to be the type to talk about his feelings. Or maybe that’s just and the the myth talking. butcher of

6

elmendorf

July 2002

T4096.indb 145

1/18/07 7:19:17 AM

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

the day treva throneberry disappeared

6

sk ip holl andsworth

I

n the mid-eighties the cheerful high school student vanished. After more than a decade had passed, her friends and family in her tiny North Texas hometown of Electra had no idea where she was—or if she was dead or alive. They certainly didn’t know that almost two thousand miles away her fate was kept secret by a teenage girl named Brianna Stewart.

electra, texas—1985 she was a pretty girl , thin, with a spray of pale freckles across her face and light brown hair that curled just above her shoulders. The librarian at the high school called her “a quiet-type person,” the kind of student who yes-ma’amed and no-ma’amed her teachers. She played on the tennis team, practicing with an old wooden racket on a crack-lined court behind the school. In the afternoons she waitressed at the Whistle Stop, the local drive-in hamburger restaurant, jumping up on the running boards of the pickup trucks so she could hear better when the drivers placed their orders. Her name was Treva Throneberry, and just about everybody in that two-stoplight North Texas oil town knew her by sight. She was never unhappy, people said. She never complained. She always greeted her customers with a shy smile, even when she had to walk out to their cars on winter days when the northers came

T4096.indb 147

1/18/07 7:19:17 AM

6 Skip whipping off the plains, swirling ribbons of dust down the street. Hollandsworth During her breaks, she’d sit at a back table and read from her red Bible that zipped open and shut. There were times, the townspeople would later say, when they did wonder about the girl. No one had actually seen her do anything that could be defined, really, as crazy. But people noticed that she would occasionally get a vacant look in her blue eyes. One day at school she drew a picture of a young girl standing under a leafless tree, her face blue, the sun black. One Sunday at the Pentecostal church she stumbled to the front altar, fell to her knees, and began telling Jesus that she didn’t deserve to live. And then there was that day when Treva’s young niece J’Lisha, who was staying at the Throneberry home, told people that Treva had shaken her awake the previous night and whispered that a man was outside their room with a gun—which turned out to be not true at all. But surely, everyone in town said, all teenage girls go through phases. They get overly emotional every now and then. Treva was going to turn out just fine. She didn’t even drink or smoke cigarettes like some of the other girls in town. Then, that December, just as the Electra High School Tigers were headed toward their first state football championship and the town was feeling a rare surge of pride, Treva, who was sixteen years old, stopped working at the Whistle Stop. She stopped coming to school. “She disappeared,” a former classmate said. “And nobody knew where she went.” 148

vancouver, washington—1997 the new girl arrived at evergreen High School wearing loose bib overalls, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes, and her hair was braided in pigtails. She was fuller-figured than most teenage girls, wide-hipped, but she had an appealing, slightly lopsided smile and a childlike voice tinged with a Southern drawl. She was carrying a graphite tennis racket and a Bible. Her name, she told school officials, was Brianna Stewart. She was sixteen years old, she said, and for almost a year she had been living in Portland, Oregon, just across the Columbia River from

T4096.indb 148

1/18/07 7:19:17 AM

6 149 Vancouver, walking the streets during the day and sleeping in grim youth shelters at night. She started attending services at Vancouver’s charismatic Glad Tidings Church, where she met a young couple who took her into their home after hearing her testimony. The couple, who had accompanied Brianna to school that morning, said that she was full of potential, determined to succeed— and that all she needed was a chance to get over her past. “What is your past?” asked one of the school’s counselors, Greg Merrill. For a moment Brianna said nothing, as if she was trying to maintain her composure. Then she told Merrill that she had been raised just outside Mobile, Alabama, by her mother and her Navajo stepfather, a sheriff ’s deputy. Brianna said that when she was a child, her mother had been murdered, and after that she lived with her stepfather. At about the age of thirteen, she ran away, hitchhiking from state to state. Because Brianna remembered her mother telling her that her real father lived somewhere in the Northwest, she had come to the area hoping that she could find clues to her past. It was the most unusual case Merrill had ever heard in his thirty years of counseling students. When he asked about her education, she told him she had only been home schooled, but she promised she would be a good student. “I’ve never had a normal life,” she said. “That’s all I want—to be a normal teenager like everyone else.” She was enrolled in the tenth grade at the 1,900-student school. One of her first classes was Algebra I. She walked in and was given a seat toward the back, where she pulled out a notebook and began listening intently to the teacher. Then she glanced over at the boy sitting next to her. “Hi,” said Ken Dunn, who couldn’t stop smiling at her. She giggled shyly. “Hi,” she said. “I’m Brianna. I’m new here.”

the day treva throneberry disappeared

electra, texas—1985 it didn’t take long for the rumor to spread through town that Treva Throneberry had last been seen down at the police station, where she had given a statement claiming that her daddy,

T4096.indb 149

1/18/07 7:19:18 AM

6 Skip holding a gun in his hand, had raped her. She added that her Hollandsworth mother had only laughed when she found out what had happened. A stunned police officer called child welfare, which quickly sent a social worker to Electra to whisk Treva away, and a judge entered emergency protection orders temporarily preventing Treva’s parents from seeing their daughter or even finding out where she was. Soon, Electra was buzzing: Was it possible that Carl Throneberry had raped his own daughter? Carl and his wife, Patsy, were known as good country people. They lived in a small frame home decorated with a photo of John Wayne on one wall and a rug that depicted the Last Supper on another. Carl was a big, lumbering man, a truck driver in the oil fields. He had met Patsy in the early fifties at a soda fountain in Oklahoma, and after a few weeks of courting, they had driven to the A&P supermarket in Wichita Falls, where the butcher, who was also a preacher, had wiped his hands on his apron, pulled out a small pocket Bible, and performed their wedding ceremony out in the A&P parking lot while the couple sat holding hands in the back seat of Carl’s Chevy. Yes, Carl admitted, he sometimes had trouble making ends meet, but he had always made sure his children—one son and four daughters, of whom Treva was the youngest—were well fed and dressed properly for school. In fact, Carl said, his older brother Billy Ray often dropped by to give the four Throneberry girls presents. After the older girls had left home, Billy Ray especially doted on Treva, bringing her candy bars, buying her clothes from the dollar store, and taking her on drives in his car. In court Carl and Patsy insisted that Treva had made up the entire story, and their attorney went so far as to demand that Treva be given a lie-detector test. Treva’s sisters also gave affidavits saying they too believed that their father was innocent. If anyone had raped Treva, Carl told police officers and social workers, it was one of those fanatical members of Electra’s Pentecostal church. He knew for a fact, he said, that they had been trying to brainwash her into becoming a missionary. The church members, in turn, said they had only been trying to help a young girl who was obviously in great distress. They said that in the weeks leading up to her rape allegation, Treva had been telling 150

T4096.indb 150

1/18/07 7:19:18 AM

6 151 them that she was scared of being at her home and that she had been slipping out at night to sleep in an abandoned house next door or even on a pew at the church itself. What was also perplexing to social workers was Treva’s behavior at the foster home in Wichita Falls where she had been taken. Her foster mother, Sharon Gentry, a middle school science teacher, said that she would often find Treva at night curled in a fetal position in the corner of her bedroom, the bedcovers pulled over her head. On other nights Gentry would find her banging her head against the wall, murmuring in her sleep, “Please don’t hurt me. I’ll be a good girl.” Like so many who had known Treva, Gentry was touched by the girl’s gentleness. Around the house, she was soft-spoken and exceedingly polite. She began attending Wichita Falls High School, where she developed a reputation as a diligent, thoughtful student. She regularly read her Bible, and she wrote soulful teenage poetry in her notebook. One poem began:

the day treva throneberry disappeared

Raining tears, flowing down my face Yours forever, a lost case No one cares or sees you fall No one hears you when you call.

As the weeks passed, however, Treva started to leave disturbing handwritten notes on the ironing board for Gentry. “Sometimes I wish I were dead,” she wrote in one note. “Sometimes I don’t. Life seems impossible and death seems eternal. I will have no life after death.” She came out of her bedroom one morning and told Gentry that she had been dreaming about shooting herself. In the dream, she said, she could see the bullet entering her head. She later told her a story about how she had been kidnapped in Electra and taken blindfolded by members of a satanic cult to an abandoned oil field, where she was tied to a stake. People in black robes danced around her, she said, then slit the throats of black cats and dogs and forced her to drink their blood. In May 1986 Treva went to see her counselor at Wichita Falls High School and said in an eerily calm voice that she was thinking about jumping off the third floor of the building to kill herself. Police officers sped to the school, handcuffed Treva, and drove her

T4096.indb 151

1/18/07 7:19:18 AM

6 Skip to the old, redbrick Wichita Falls State Hospital at the edge of the Hollandsworth city. There she spent long periods of time by herself, sitting in the dayroom of the adolescent unit, looking out through large windows on the neatly mowed lawns. According to hospital reports, she was often seen crying. She rarely ate. Her face was blank, her cheeks sunken, her hair flat. Doctors and therapists arrived to give her various tests, including the Woodcock-Johnson Psychoeducational Battery. They sat beside her and asked if she felt detached, if she felt hostile, if she felt withdrawn, if she felt lonely. They prescribed Xanax, for anxiety, and Trilafon, which was designed to combat what they called thought disorders, and Tofranil, an antidepressant. They put her in a weekly group-therapy session, where she and other adolescents sat in a circle on vinyl-covered chairs. But she said little. She did write a few sad letters to Gentry and a boy from Wichita Falls High School who had once taken her on a date to Six Flags Over Texas. “I feel like a living robot,” she wrote to him. “I walk when they say walk. I sit when they say sit. I do everything they say because I have to. I can’t take it anymore. I have to die.” Needing to put something in their reports, the baffled doctors described Treva’s condition as a “characterological disorder.” “She’s kind of quiet and secretive and she may have a personality problem,” wrote one therapist. Perhaps to get a better clue of what had happened to her, staffers finally arranged for her to meet with her parents, who had been coming to the hospital demanding to see her. (The district attorney’s office ultimately dismissed the sexual assault charges against Carl, saying there was no evidence to prosecute.) Treva sat with Carl and Patsy in the presence of a social worker and a therapist as her parents told her to admit that she had been lying about the rape. Treva rose and said that they were the ones who were the liars, that they didn’t love her, and then she announced that she had nothing more to say and that she wished to return to her room. 152

vancouver, washington—1997 brianna stewart seemed so grateful just to have the chance to be at Evergreen High. Each morning, she rode a city bus

T4096.indb 152

1/18/07 7:19:18 AM

6 153 to the school, her backpack crammed with her textbooks and her Bible. Like a lot of students she had trouble with algebra, but she shone in English. She was able to quote entire passages of Macbeth from memory, the Shakespeare play the sophomore class was required to read, and for extra credit she wrote poems and stories, including one about a little girl who had only imaginary friends as playmates. Almost every day she came to school in the same outfit— overalls, a T-shirt, and tennis shoes—and she wore pigtails, a serious teenage fashion faux pas. One afternoon a classmate named Cheyanne McKay asked Brianna if she would like to go to the mall with a group of other girls. On the way there Cheyanne cranked up the stereo, and she and a couple of other girls in the car started dancing. When Brianna tried to dance along, she moved in jerky, arrhythmic ways, as if she had never danced to that kind of music in her life. To most of the Evergreen kids, Brianna was the classic teenage wallflower. But for Ken Dunn, an amiable sandy-haired sophomore, Brianna was unlike any other girl he had ever known. “I like the way she walks, and I really like the way she talks,” he told his friends, referring to her Southern accent. In algebra he began imitating the way she wrote sevens on her homework, adding a short horizontal line through the middle of the number. He escorted her from class to class, and he smiled encouragingly at her during tennis practice, despite the fact that she was easily the worst player on the girls’ team. He spent much of his time helping her work on her lines for her drama class. Brianna was a hopelessly awkward actress, yet she still tried out for all the school plays. Perhaps out of pity, the drama teacher put her in the chorus of the school’s production of Man of La Mancha, where she moved leadenly across the stage, smiling bravely, making stilted gestures, and nearly colliding with the other performers. Soon, Ken and Brianna were swapping flirtatious notes. (“Hi!” Brianna wrote. “What’s up? I know—the great blue sky!!! . . . You’re the best guy I’ve ever known as a friend. You’re more than that to me . . . Class of 2000 rules! ”) In his 1978 brown El Camino, known around school as the Turd Tank, Ken began taking Brianna on little dates—to the bargain stores in downtown Vancouver, to the

T4096.indb 153

the day treva throneberry disappeared

1/18/07 7:19:19 AM

6 Skip roller rink, and to the mall, where they sat in the food court and Hollandsworth talked. He attended services with her at the Glad Tidings Church and went with her to the Thursday-night youth group meetings, where she often gave her testimony. He was amazed at the amount of Scripture Brianna knew. He told his parents that she must have studied the Bible for years—for years! Initially, Brianna told Ken only a few details about her past. But sitting at the food court one day, Brianna took a deep breath and told Ken stories she said she hadn’t told anyone. She said she had watched her stepfather stab her mother to death and carry the body away. He then made tapes of himself and his friends raping her, which he sold on the black market. When she became pregnant at the age of eleven or twelve, he pushed her down a flight of stairs to force her to miscarry. She went to the police station to turn him in, but no one would believe her. They called her stepfather to come pick her up, which is why she knew she had to flee. And there was one more thing, Brianna said, her voice softer than ever. Earlier that summer, just before coming to Evergreen, she had gotten to know a security guard who worked in downtown Vancouver. One day while the two of them were sitting in his car, she said, he pulled down his pants, then pulled down her pants, and forced her to have intercourse. “He raped me. He raped me. He raped me,” she repeated over and over, tears streaming down her face. “I wanted to kill myself. I began to think about standing on an overpass and jumping off.” “Here was this beautiful girl who had been forced to endure unimaginable atrocities,” Ken would later say. “And yet here she was at Evergreen, wanting to make something of herself in life. I wanted to help. I wanted to make her happy. I wanted her to know that someone cared for her.” He took her to the school’s Sadie Hawkins dance, where they dressed in matching blue overalls and crimson shirts. When the disc jockey played Shania Twain’s “You’re Still the One,” he escorted her onto the dance floor, looked her in the eyes, and said, “I love you.” “I love you too,” Brianna replied. Ken pushed her hair back and kissed her on the mouth. Then he kissed her again. 154

T4096.indb 154

1/18/07 7:19:19 AM

6 155 “I was sixteen, and she was sixteen,” he recalled. “It was the the day perfect teenage romance. I couldn’t imagine that anything could treva go wrong.” throne-

wichita falls, texas—1986

berry disappeared

after treva had spent five months at the state hospital, the doctors declared that she was no longer suicidal or severely depressed. Her biggest issue, said her adolescent-unit therapist, was that she was “unpredictable.” She was discharged in October 1986, yet even then no one was sure what to do with her. Treva begged her social workers not to return her to her parents, which suited Carl and Patsy just fine. They didn’t want her home, they said, until she recanted her rape story. It was finally decided that Treva would be sent to the Lena Pope Home, the Fort Worth residential treatment center for troubled adolescents. There, counselors came up with a therapeutic plan to improve her skills in “self confidence” and “to develop and maintain interpersonal relationships.” She was enrolled at nearby Arlington Heights High School so that she could finish her senior year. In June 1987 she wore a beautiful blue graduation gown as she walked across the stage to receive her diploma, smiling politely at the principal. Treva had just turned eighteen, and by law she could no longer be under state juvenile supervision. She was completely on her own. When her counselors at Lena Pope asked what she would do next, she said she planned to apply to a Bible college that didn’t require an SAT test. “All I want is to be and to feel normal,” she wrote to one of her social workers before she left state care. “I want to live life, but I want it to be normal and most of all, I want to live a normal life.” Treva did return to Electra for a couple of days. Although she refused to go to her parents’ home, she visited with her three older sisters—Carlene, Kim, and Sue. “Treva, honey, what you said about Daddy is still breaking his heart,” said Carlene. “You need to go apologize.” Treva did not respond. She kept her eyes locked on the floor. Each of the sisters asked Treva what was bothering her, but the truth was that they didn’t really need to be told. They knew

T4096.indb 155

1/18/07 7:19:19 AM

6 Skip why Treva didn’t want to return to that house. They knew what Hollandsworth she had endured there—because they had endured it themselves. When they were children, they too had lain awake in their own beds at night, praying that he would not come to touch them. “He” was not their dad. “He” was their father’s older brother, Uncle Billy Ray. He was a Vietnam veteran, divorced and a heavy drinker, and he often stayed at the Throneberry home. Sometimes he’d ask one of the girls if she wanted to go with him to the store. “Go on,” their dad would say. He adored his older brother. “Let Billy Ray buy you something nice.” According to the statements that Carlene, Kim, and Sue would give years later, long after Billy Ray had died, they didn’t just receive cute presents from their uncle. On the nights that he stayed at their home, he’d slip out of his bed and tiptoe to where his nieces were sleeping, moving from one bed to another, running his hands restlessly, endlessly, over their bellies, thighs, and bottoms. He’d put his hands up their shirts to feel their undeveloped breasts, and he’d put them down their panties to feel between their legs. His breathing would get faster and faster. “Keep your mouth shut,” he’d say, his breath stinking with liquor. Sometimes, he’d grab them for just a few seconds; other times, for minutes. No matter how long it lasted, the girls would shut their eyes, their teeth clenched, and they would make no sound at all—no scream, not even a whimper. “We didn’t know what to do,” Carlene recalled. “We were just children—uneducated, small-town girls. I know you’re not going to understand this, but those times were different. We were too scared to say anything because we thought people would make us feel ashamed and tell us it was our fault. We had tried to let Momma and Daddy know what he was doing—at least we thought we had. But we didn’t come out and say anything outright because Billy Ray had told us that if we ever did, he’d have Momma and Daddy killed, and then he’d have us all to himself. What were we supposed to do? We thought, and I know this sounds so terrible, that this was the way things worked, that this was how everyone lived.” As they got older, Carlene, Kim, and Sue still didn’t say anything—“We had been trained from an early age not to talk about it, not even to each other,” said Sue—but they did everything 156

T4096.indb 156

1/18/07 7:19:19 AM

6 157 to keep their distance from Billy Ray. They worked double shifts at their waitressing jobs. Sue ran away once, and when she was caught in the Panhandle town of Childress, she was too scared to tell her parents why she had left. All three of them got married as teenagers so they could live in their own homes. Which meant that Treva was left alone, the sweetest and the quietest of all the Throneberry girls—and the favorite of Uncle Billy Ray. Each of the older Throneberry girls believe that Billy Ray turned into an even greater predator with Treva. When Sue came back to the house one day, she saw little Treva sitting on Billy Ray’s lap. His hips were squirming back and forth, his hand underneath her shirt. Sue froze, torn between the desire to race forward and grab her little sister and the fear she had of her uncle. When Carlene was sixteen and already married, she asked Treva, who was then ten, if she needed any help with Billy Ray. “You know what I mean, don’t you?” Carlene asked. But Treva said she liked Billy Ray’s presents. “She still didn’t understand what was happening to her,” Carlene said. “I’ll never get over the shame that I didn’t do something for her right then.” Carlene paused. “I’ll never get over that shame.” When Treva reached the age of sixteen and accused her father of rape, the sisters assumed that she too had finally reached the point where she had to make her own escape. “She knew child welfare would get her out of there if she accused Daddy,” Carlene said. “I think she was just like us, too scared about what people might say or believe if she told the truth.” The sisters also assumed that she would handle the rest of her life the way they had handled theirs—suffering in silence, praying to God that they could get through a day without the memories returning. But as they talked to her, they began to wonder if Treva’s escape had come too late. They listened in disbelief as Treva began to tell them stories that seemed, well, crazy. She told Kim the story about being kidnapped by a satanic cult, which forced her to drink blood and participate in infant sacrifices. “Treva, why are you talking like that?” Kim asked. But she could not tell if Treva was listening to her. That vacant look had returned to Treva’s eyes, as if she were somewhere else entirely.

T4096.indb 157

the day treva throneberry disappeared

1/18/07 7:19:20 AM

6 A day after her arrival in Electra, Treva left. She never did go Skip Hollandsworth to college. She lived briefly in the Fort Worth area with a woman who was raising three children, and then reportedly she went to live at a YWCA. On one occasion Sharon Gentry received a collect phone call from Treva, who said she was working at a rundown motel in Arlington. She called again and said she was living on the streets. And then she disappeared. “We never really did look too hard for her,” said Sue. “It wasn’t that we didn’t want to see her. We figured that she wanted to get away, to get a new start. At least that’s what we hoped she was doing—that she was alive somewhere, doing her best.” 158

vancouver, washington—1998 by the fall of 1998, her junior year, Brianna Stewart had become a well-known figure at Evergreen High. Most of the kids had heard the stories of her tormented childhood. They had learned that she had courageously gone to the Vancouver police to file rape charges against the security guard, who had pleaded guilty to “communicating with a minor for immoral purposes.” Whenever students would see her in her oversized overalls and her pigtails, they’d say, “Hi, Bri”—she preferred the shortened version of her name, pronounced “Bree”—and she’d shyly smile back and tell them to have a nice day. Brianna said her goal in life was to become a lawyer, focusing on children’s issues. She spent her free time in the library reading books about law or researching elaborate reports she would turn in to her teachers bearing the titles “Society’s Missing Youth,” “Child Abuse,” and “Adjustive Behaviors.” For an English class she wrote a poignant short story titled “Betrayed” about a girl named Jessica who has no idea where she came from. In it the police and the FBI conduct a DNA test that proves that Jessica was abducted as a child. The story was not unlike Brianna’s own search for her past. As she told almost anyone who would listen, she desperately needed a Social Security number that identified her as Brianna Stewart. If she could just get one, then she would be able to move on with her life—obtain a driver’s license, apply for college, find a job. The

T4096.indb 158

1/18/07 7:19:20 AM

6 159 problem was that the federal government would not issue her a new Social Security number unless she could track down her birth certificate or find her real father—or at least find some evidence to show that he, and she, existed. What complicated the search was that Brianna was hazy about many parts of her past. The mental-health professionals in Vancouver who had interviewed her believed she suffered from amnesia or some sort of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Brianna, for instance, was not even sure what her real name was. She knew only that when she was a little girl her stepfather had started calling her Brianna, which he had told her meant “Bright Eyes” in Navajo. “I probably wasn’t always Brianna Stewart,” she told a sympathetic reporter from a weekly Portland newspaper who interviewed her in 1999. “I may not know who I was before I was three.” But then she added adamantly, “I do know who I am now.” Numerous people were more than willing to help her. A state social worker conducted exhaustive governmental record searches looking for any evidence of Brianna, her mother, or the man she said was her stepfather. A staffer from Indian Health Services, who had been unable to get Brianna off his mind since meeting her, scoured national databases of missing children and even asked her to give blood in hopes of finding a DNA match. She reportedly asked an FBI agent in Portland to investigate whether she was the victim of an unsolved kidnapping in Salt Lake City and visited a Montana sheriff ’s office to find out if she was a girl who went missing in 1983. Everyone came up empty-handed. Undeterred, Brianna took time off from school in January 2000 and rode the bus to Daphne, Alabama, where she said she had been raised. A police detective from Daphne spent several days driving her around, hoping she would see something that would jog her memory. She saw a swing set at a park that she remembered playing on. She saw a table at a McDonald’s where she believed she had once sat. Nevertheless, no one could find any evidence that she had ever lived there. One possible clue came when she visited a dentist in Portland. The dentist later told a social worker that he was surprised to notice that Brianna’s wisdom teeth had been extracted and that the scars had healed—highly unusual for a sixteen-year-old girl.

T4096.indb 159

the day treva throneberry disappeared

1/18/07 7:19:20 AM

6 Skip When the social worker asked Brianna about the dentist’s stateHollandsworth ment, she responded with a blistering five-page, single-spaced letter criticizing those who would doubt her story. “My word means much to me,” she wrote, “and when I give my word that I am doing and being as honest and upfront as I can with the information about myself, I mean it.” When Brianna talked to Ken about the dentist’s story one afternoon while they cruised around in the Turd Tank, he found himself, to his astonishment, under attack when he asked if there might be anything to what the dentist was saying. “How dare you think that I’m not sixteen?” Brianna said, furious. “How dare you even ask that? How can you even say you love me?” Ken tried to put the confrontation out of his mind. He knew deep down that she loved him. Just a few weeks earlier she had worn a dress to the homecoming dance that his mother had made using yards of the most expensive gold lamé that she could find at Fabric Depot. To show that he still loved her, he bought her a sterling silver ring for Christmas, the inside of which was engraved with her favorite line from the new Romeo and Juliet movie, starring Leonardo DiCaprio: “I love thee.” But at the end of their junior year, something happened that devastated him. By then Brianna was staying with the Gambetta family, whose son was good friends with Ken. (She had told him that she needed a new place to live because the church families could no longer afford to keep her.) The Gambettas had been treating her like a daughter, giving her the spare bedroom, where she could put her tennis posters on the wall, and providing her with an allowance of $10 a week. Everything, in fact, seemed idyllic—until Brianna called the police in May 1999 and said that David Gambetta, the father of the household, had been spying on her. She said he had put miniature cameras in the light fixtures in her room and was making videotapes of her as she undressed. After a quick investigation the police decided that the accusations were groundless, and the Gambettas ordered Brianna to move out. Yet Brianna, who soon found new lodging with the mother of a police officer, kept insisting she was telling the truth. For the first time, Ken didn’t believe what she was saying. In fact, he began thinking back on all the dramatic stories she had told 160

T4096.indb 160

1/18/07 7:19:20 AM

6 161 him. “My God,” he said to one of his friends, “what if Brianna has the day been making everything up?” treva

electra, texas—1992

throneberry disappeared

As the years passed and nothing more was heard from Treva Throneberry, many people in town assumed she had been killed. Carl and Patsy maintained a $3,000 burial insurance policy on their daughter. In 1993 a rumor swept through Electra that Treva had died in the fire at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco. Sharon Gentry even sent Treva’s dental records to the authorities investigating the fire to see if one of the burned bodies might be Treva. Treva was not there. But in the little town of Corvallis, Oregon, two thousand miles away, there was a teenager named Keili T. Throneberry Smitt working at a McDonald’s and staying with a family she had met at a church. She told people she preferred the name Keili Smitt. In fact, she went to court in Corvallis to change her name legally to Keili Smitt because she said she was hiding from her father, who lived in Dallas. She told Corvallis police officers that he had already found her once in Oregon, forced her into his car, and raped her. But the police could never find Keili’s father, and eventually she disappeared. The next summer she surfaced in Portland, telling the police there that she was on the run from her sexually abusive father. This time she said that her father was a Portland police officer. Once again, an investigation was begun, and once again, Keili disappeared. She reappeared in the summer of 1994 in the town of Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, where she told the police her name was Cara Leanna Davis. She said her mother had been murdered and her father, a police officer, had been a member of a satanic cult and had repeatedly raped her. After two months in Coeur d’Alene, she vanished. Later that year she arrived in Plano, a suburb north of Dallas. She told rapt police officers and social workers that her name was Kara Williams, that she was sixteen years old, and that she had been born and raised in a satanic cult, where she had been taught that her destiny was to honor Satan and to die in a lake of fire. She said that many of the children she had grown up

T4096.indb 161

1/18/07 7:19:21 AM

6 Skip with had been sacrificed, stabbed to death with daggers. Her own Hollandsworth mother had been murdered by her father, a cult leader who happened to be a police officer in Colleyville, another Dallas suburb. He also raped her repeatedly, she said, and at bedtime would force her to chant prayers to Lucifer. One female detective was so determined to discover who had harmed Kara that she drove to Colleyville and asked the police chief if he knew of any officer who might have any kind of special interest in the study of satanic activities. A volunteer for a socialwork agency took it upon herself to show Kara the outside world, taking her to malls and to Six Flags. Social workers shuttled her from various foster homes and youth shelters around the Dallas area, trying to find a place where she would feel safe. At one shelter she accused a young male staffer of sexually molesting her, which led her to be moved again. With each move she was enrolled in a new high school. In the spring of 1995 alone, Kara attended high schools in Sadler, Sherman, and Dallas, joining the tennis team at each new place. The Child Protective Services worker supervising Kara’s case, Susanne Arnold, went so far as to buy her a new tennis racket to help her play better. But in September 1995 Arnold received a call at home from a staffer at the residential treatment center where Kara was staying. The staffer, who just happened to be from the little town of Electra, said, “Susanne, I think Kara is actually a twenty-six-yearold woman named Treva Throneberry.” Days later Kara was confronted at the treatment center with records, photographs, and handwriting samples that proved her identity. Yet she confessed to nothing. Her protests were so adamant, and so tearful, that more than one person watching her came to the conclusion that she truly believed what she was saying. After a court hearing discharged her from government supervision, Arnold handed her a quarter and gave her the phone numbers for the state’s mental health office and for a homeless shelter. “Please get some help,” Arnold said. But as Kara got on an elevator, she told Arnold one last time that she was not Treva Throneberry, and she disappeared again. In June 1996 a sixteen-year-old teenager named Emily Kharra Williams arrived in Asheville, North Carolina, where she told 162

T4096.indb 162

1/18/07 7:19:21 AM

6 163 police officers she was on the run from a cult in Texas. In August 1996 a sixteen-year-old girl named Stephanie Williams came to Altoona, Pennsylvania, where she told the police she was on the run from her father in Memphis, Tennessee, who was involved in a cult and a child pornography ring. A social worker spotted a reference in the girl’s notebook to a Susanne Arnold in Texas, and some phone calls and records checks proved that the girl was Treva Throneberry. She was arrested and sent to jail for nine days for providing a false report to law enforcement. At one point an Altoona social worker called Carl and Patsy and asked them to speak to their daughter, to remind her who she was. “Hi, baby,” said Carl. “It’s your daddy.” “You sound like an awful nice man, and I wish you were my father, but you’re not,” Treva replied. “I’m not who you think I am.” “Honey, you’ll be Treva Throneberry until the day you die,” Patsy said in a wobbly voice. “Now stop playing games.” “Oh, no,” she said. “You got me mixed up with someone else. But someday I may just get that way to see you.” And once again, after her release from the Altoona jail, she was on the road, making appearances in Louisiana, New Jersey, and Ohio, where she’d show up at youth shelters carrying some luggage, a teddy bear, a Bible, a flute with sheet music, and algebra homework. She kept reenacting the same scenario, looping back in time. She found her refuge in high school: eating cafeteria food, playing on the tennis team, studying Macbeth in English, and memorizing quadratic equations in algebra year after year after year. She kept trying to get back to the one place every teenager wants to leave. Why? Why had Treva Throneberry used at least eighteen teenage aliases since the early nineties, and why had she spun such gruesomely outlandish tales? Was she nothing more than a con artist, pretending to be a downtrodden teenager to receive free foster care and a free education? Was she afflicted with what doctors call psychiatric Munchausen syndrome, in which she intentionally feigned intense emotional distress to receive extra attention? Or was she slowly descending into an irreparable insanity, the likes of which no one had ever seen before? Was it indeed possible that by the time she entered Evergreen High School in 1997, she had completely forgotten the girl she had once been in 1985?

T4096.indb 163

the day treva throneberry disappeared

1/18/07 7:19:21 AM

164 Skip Hollandsworth

6

vancouver, washington—2000 in june 2000 brianna stewart wore a beautiful green graduation gown as she walked across the stage to receive her diploma from Evergreen High School, where she earned a 2.33 grade point average. At a graduation party Ken Dunn approached her. Although he and Brianna had broken up after the Gambetta “hidden camera” episode, no one had ever affected him in the way she did. As the head-banger band Burner played in the background, the two talked about her plans to attend a community college in Vancouver. The financial aid office at the college would allow Brianna to enroll with a tuition scholarship despite the fact that she had no Social Security number. Ken, who would leave Vancouver for a job at Disney World that fall, said, “You’re going to do great, Brianna, and I mean it.” She spent the summer of 2000 working as a volunteer answering phones for the Ralph Nader presidential campaign, but most of her time was devoted to getting a Social Security number. She wrote a six-page letter to the governor of Washington asking for help. She also enlisted the services of two lawyers—one in Portland and one in Vancouver, neither of whom knew what the other was doing. The attorney in Vancouver sued the state to force the Vital Records Office to issue Brianna a birth certificate. To support the claim, he provided letters from school officials, Brianna’s high school transcripts, her state picture identification, and medical statements about her mental health. The attorney in Portland chose to petition the federal government directly, asking it to issue Brianna a Social Security number. Before filing the petition, however, he had asked Brianna to submit to a fingerprint test just to make sure there was no chance she could be someone else. Weeks later the Vancouver attorney was informed by a state deputy attorney general that the state would not oppose Brianna’s petition for a birth certificate. All Brianna would have to do was appear for a simple court hearing set for March 2001. Brianna’s three-year fight for an identity was finally over. She was about to officially become known as Brianna Stewart. But on March 22, a week before the hearing, a Vancouver police detective arrested Brianna on charges of theft and perjury. He told

T4096.indb 164

1/18/07 7:19:21 AM

6 165 her that she was a 31-year-old woman and that she had fraudulently received free foster care and free public education from the State of Washington. When Brianna told the detective that there had to be some mistake, he said that her fingerprints, which had been requested by her Portland attorney, had matched those of a woman from Altoona, Pennsylvania, by the name of Treva Throneberry. Ken Dunn’s mother called him in Disney World with the news. He nearly dropped the phone. “Mom, I went to homecoming with a woman twelve years older than me,” he said. Most of the Evergreen kids were convinced that Brianna had brilliantly hoodwinked them all. They thought she had deliberately acted awkward in her drama class, where she received a D, and had lost all of her tennis matches against girls half her age as part of her plot to deceive. But others weren’t so sure about her motives. They were fascinated, for example, that she still couldn’t make an A in algebra despite fifteen years of high school. “It just goes to show you how algebra can really suck,” one girl said. Just as curious was the reaction of the community itself. Although Clark County senior deputy prosecutor Michael Kinnie said that Treva needed to be treated as a common criminal— “What we are dealing with here is a woman who knows exactly what she’s doing,” he said—a writer for the Vancouver newspaper suggested that Treva’s behavior “doesn’t suggest maliciousness so much as misery.” As for Kinnie’s contention that Treva was dangerous—after all, a Vancouver security guard went to jail because of her accusation of rape—the writer reminded his readers that the security guard pleaded guilty. “Even though his record has since been cleared because no minor was actually involved,” the writer’s editorial pointed out, “he apparently thought there was, so he might not be without guilt himself.” Letters to the editor from Vancouver’s citizens came in that favored Treva’s getting psychiatric help rather than being sent to prison. One angry writer said that the authorities were “spending far more taxpayer money through the legal system than Throneberry’s relatively harmless scam cost.” There was an even greater outpouring of sympathy for Treva after her sisters told reporters about the sexual abuse she, and they, had suffered. “This case is not about fraud but about a

T4096.indb 165

the day treva throneberry disappeared

1/18/07 7:19:22 AM

6 Skip tremendous emptiness, a need, a trauma very early in her life,” one Hollandsworth of her court-appointed attorneys told reporters. If Treva was truly a con artist looking for financial gain, the attorney added, she could have picked a far better ruse than wandering the country as a homeless youth. But for many, the greatest mystery about the story was why Treva Throneberry—after being caught in Plano, Texas, in 1995; Altoona, Pennsylvania, in 1996; and now Vancouver, Washington, in 2001—still refused to admit who she was. From her jail cell she declared in letters to the judge and in interviews with the news media that she had never before heard of Treva Throneberry. When her niece J’Lisha wrote her, she says that Treva responded with a letter of her own: “Dear J’Lisha Throneberry . . . I’m sorry to tell you this. I don’t know who you are.” How much Treva actually remembered about her past had become a topic of enormous interest to psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers. Some experts speculated that her past abuse from her uncle had been like a physical trauma, disconnecting memories in her brain. One professor of psychology said the abuse could have set off what is known as a “dissociative fugue,” a type of amnesia in which she didn’t know how she got where she was or why she was there. Others suggested she could have a multiplepersonality disorder, in which she had created several personalities over the years to deal with her sexual abuse. A psychologist who had examined her for several days in 1995 when she was in Texas pretending to be Kara Williams was intrigued by her sincerity when she talked of satanic rituals and gang rape. “There was nothing in her behavior or presentation to suggest that she was knowingly misrepresenting the facts,” the psychologist had written in his report. What baffled everyone in Vancouver was her decision to give her fingerprints to the attorney. If she had been thinking rationally, she would certainly have known that the fingerprints would link her to Altoona. It was equally odd that, after her arrest, she demanded that her DNA be compared with the DNA of Carl and Patsy Throneberry. She said that she was certain such a test would prove she was not their child. (The DNA tests showed a 99.93 percent likelihood that she was.) And why did she try so hard to get people to look into her past, to discover her real identity? If 166

T4096.indb 166

1/18/07 7:19:22 AM

6 167 she was deliberately trying to con people, why would she set herself up to be discovered? There was little in medical or psychological literature that came close to helping the experts understand what had happened to Treva. “If it is what people think—a woman needing to go back to a certain age and relive it again and again—then it would be one for the books,” said Kenneth Muscatel, a Seattle psychologist who had been hired by the court to examine Treva. “Here is a woman who invents stories to get the love and affection she had never known in her home, yet a woman so profoundly disturbed that she ends up turning on the very people who are trying to help her, accusing them of abuse.” Other than J’Lisha, no one from Treva’s family tried to contact her after her arrest. Carl said he didn’t write Treva because he had dropped out of school in the sixth grade and didn’t know how to spell. He did want it known, however, that he was angry that “completely untrue stories” about Treva and his brother had made the newspapers. Patsy said she didn’t write because she was still hurt by the way Treva had turned her back on the family. She did say that she believed that Treva hadn’t forgotten about her entirely. At the funeral of her own mother, in 1998, Patsy said there was an elderly lady sitting at the back, wearing an old faded dress. The lady brushed against her as everyone was leaving the funeral parlor. Patsy noticed she was wearing a gray wig and granny glasses, and she had loads of pancake makeup on her face. “In my heart,” she said, “I know it was Treva.” Treva’s arrest did motivate her sisters to start talking to one another for the first time about their own feelings of shame about the past. But they didn’t write Treva either. “We thought that maybe it would be best to just let her continue pretending to believe that she was a teenager,” said Sue. “If she thought she was living in a better place, then so be it.” The prosecutor offered Treva a plea bargain—a recommendation of two years in prison in return for her admitting who she was. She wouldn’t take the deal. She then fired her courtappointed attorneys when she learned that they were planning to argue that even though she was indeed Treva Throneberry, she had no idea she was committing a crime because she really did

T4096.indb 167

the day treva throneberry disappeared

1/18/07 7:19:22 AM

6 Skip believe that she was Brianna Stewart. Treva told the judge that Hollandsworth she wanted to exercise her constitutional right—which she apparently had read about in a law book at the library—to defend herself. She said she wanted to convince the jury that she truly was Brianna Stewart. “It is very important for me to clear my name,” she said at a hearing. The judge could not say no. By law, to act as her own counsel Treva only had to demonstrate that she understood the nature of the charges against her and their potential punishment. Her nemesis, prosecutor Michael Kinnie, snarled to the press that Treva was perfectly competent. “She’s graduated from high school at least twice,” he said. When Muscatel told the judge that he could not find sufficient mental problems to prove her incompetent, the stage was set for a disaster. 168

vancouver, washington—2001 her trial began in mid-november, and each day, Treva shuffled into the courtroom, carrying a stack of law books and notebooks. Although she often kept her hair braided in her usual pigtails, she had traded her overalls for denim skirts that came down to her ankles. Before testimony began, she always smiled at Superior Court judge Robert Harris and said in her little girl’s voice, “Hi.” The esteemed judge was completely discombobulated by Treva. At one point he said, “Hello, Miss Stewart, Miss Throneberry, whatever.” He had one of her court-appointed attorneys sit beside her to answer any questions she might have about courtroom procedure and other points of law, but Treva seemed perfectly comfortable in her role as defense attorney. “Objection, relevance,” she often called out, beaming at the judge. After several such objections, Kinnie, a serious, bearded fellow, began clenching his fists, trying to control his anger. When an investigator from the prosecutor’s office took the stand and explained the complexities of fingerprint evidence, Treva nodded thoughtfully and, in her cross-examination, asked several rather pointless questions about ridge patterns on particular fingers. It was as if she were back in a high school science class asking a teacher how an experiment worked. Later, when another

T4096.indb 168

1/18/07 7:19:22 AM

6 169 law enforcement officer told the jury about the way Keili Smitt in Corvallis, Oregon, used numerous aliases, she seemed mystified. “Why would someone come up with so many names?” she asked. “It makes no sense.” This time, she turned and beamed at the jury. The officer just shrugged, staring at her. Kinnie was so adamant about proving that Brianna really knew her true identity that he called to the stand a woman from a Vancouver convenience store. She said that she had remembered Brianna once coming in with some other teenagers to buy a pack of cigarettes and that Brianna showed an identification card with the name Treva Throneberry. The Evergreen teenagers who had been close to Brianna, however, were convinced that the clerk was lying. They said that Brianna never smoked, and no one could remember going to that store with her. To further bolster his case, Kinnie had flown in Sharon Gentry, Treva’s foster mother from fifteen years ago, to testify that she had known Treva in 1985, when she was sixteen years old. Gentry’s unexpected appearance led to a moment in the trial that can only be described as heartbreaking. After she answered some perfunctory questions from Kinnie, Treva rose slowly from the defense table, approached the witness, and asked to see some photos that Gentry had brought with her. For the first time Treva seemed ill at ease. She stared at the photo of herself and Gentry on the beach at Port Aransas for spring break, then she stared at a photo of herself with the high school boyfriend from Wichita Falls who had taken her to Six Flags. After a long silence Treva said, “This Treva in these pictures. What was she like?” Gentry glanced around. She wasn’t sure what to say. “She was a very polite young lady,” she finally said. “She enjoyed church. She enjoyed tennis. She had a wooden tennis racket. She was always very appropriate, very thankful. She always apologized if she hurt my feelings.” There was another long silence. Treva stared down at her notebook, her eyes blinking. Was it possible that the past was returning—that she was remembering the girl she once was? “Was Treva smart?” Treva asked. “Oh, yes. She loved to read and really enjoyed school activities. She made good grades.”

T4096.indb 169

the day treva throneberry disappeared

1/18/07 7:19:23 AM

6 Another silence. “Did she work hard?” Treva asked. Skip It was clear that Gentry was now struggling to control her Hollandsworth emotions. She would later say that she almost stood up at that moment and leaned across the witness box so that she could wrap her arms around Treva. “She worked very hard,” Gentry said. “She tried hard. Treva was a wonderful young woman.” “Oh,” said Treva. “Thank you.” As the trial hurried to its conclusion, Treva presented little evidence to counter Kinnie’s case. She attempted to introduce a report from a therapist in Vancouver who had once guessed that Brianna Stewart was about twenty years old, but the judge ruled the report inadmissible. She called her former teachers and counselors to the stand to testify that she had only wanted a Social Security number so that she could continue her schooling. “I wanted to go to college so I could take care of myself, isn’t that right?” she asked her former Evergreen counselor, Greg Merrill. “And not have someone take care of me?” “All of our conversations were about you being self-sufficient,” Merrill replied stiffly, obviously embarrassed that he had believed Brianna’s story for so long. In his final argument Kinnie was merciless. He loomed over the jurors and said, “If you feel sorry for her, we don’t give a damn about your tears. That’s not why we’re here.” He then mimicked Treva’s voice, telling the jury that she just wanted to remain a “pampered child” and that she wanted a free financial ride. For her final argument Treva stood before the jury and read a short speech that she had handwritten in one of her notebooks. “I still say I am Brianna Rebecca Stewart,” she said, polite as always. “I don’t pretend to be anyone else but me.” It was a slam dunk of a case, of course. The jury quickly found her guilty, and the judge sentenced her to three years in prison. The attorney who had been assisting Treva, Gerry Wear, made a last-minute request for the judge to state for the record whether he thought that Treva was competent to stand trial. “There’s no question in my mind, having spent as much time with her as I have, that she is of the opinion that she is Brianna Stewart,” Wear said. But it was too late. Judge Harris said he wished he could send her to a state hospital for treatment, but his only legal option was 170

T4096.indb 170

1/18/07 7:19:23 AM

6 171 prison. The problem with prison in Washington State, he admitted, was that there were limited mental-health services available for inmates. Nor was there any supervision for nonviolent offenders after their release. When Treva completes her sentence, she will be sent out the front door with a little money and perhaps a phone number for a women’s shelter. And without any help, her cross-country odyssey might very well resume. Treva told the judge she would immediately file an appeal. Before she walked out of the courtroom for the last time, she looked out a window. Rain was beginning to fall outside. With no wind, it came down in a sprinkling whisper, little drops flicking through the last of the maple leaves hanging on the trees. “It’s so unfair,” she said. “It’s so unfair.” A reporter standing nearby said, “What’s unfair? Are you talking about what happened to you a long time ago?” She looked at the reporter quizzically, then she gathered her law books and sheets of paper. “My name,” she said, “is Brianna Stewart, and I am nineteen years old.” As bailiffs led her into an elevator, she said once again, in a much louder voice, to the crowd who had gathered to see her, “I’m nineteen! I’m not guilty of anything except being a teenager!”

the day treva throneberry disappeared

6 March 2002

T4096.indb 171

1/18/07 7:19:23 AM

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

a bend in the r iver

6

pamel a colloff

A

cheerleader lies dead in dark waters, and life in the small towns along the Red River will never be the same. A tale of restless youth in a lonely land.

had a hard rain fallen , she might have drifted out to the Red River and never been found. But just before dusk on a fall day six years ago, in the rough clay bottomland on the Texas side, a rancher driving down a dirt road with his seven-year-old granddaughter stopped his pickup at a backwater creek. The little girl spotted the body first, pointing to a muddy spot near banks overgrown with greenbrier vines. The rancher squinted—he had left his glasses back home—and decided he was looking at a drowned calf that had washed downstream. “There’s a body in the water,” his granddaughter said, even after they returned home. On his morning rounds the next day, the rancher drove out to the Belknap Creek bridge. The pale, ethereal object had glided closer, and he could see now that it was indeed a girl, her sandy-colored hair fanning out along the murky surface of the water. Within hours, local lawmen had identified her as Heather Rich, a high school sophomore from Waurika, Oklahoma, a small town just across the Red River. Her face was unrecognizable because she had been shot in the back of the head. She could be identified only

T4096.indb 173

1/18/07 7:19:23 AM

6 Pamela Colloff by her gold signet ring, heart-shaped and inset with a diamond, which had been a present for her sixteenth birthday. Everyone in Waurika, a town of 1,988 people, knew Heather Rich. A slight, pretty girl with blue-gray eyes, she was vivacious and laughed easily and enjoyed the attention of boys—something her three brothers, all football players, tried hard to shield her from. “Heather was beautiful; pictures don’t capture just how pretty she was,” says Pat Harmon, of Pat’s Beauty Shop in Waurika. “People adored her because she was always so bubbly and made a point of being nice to everyone.” Voted sophomore-class favorite, Heather was a Waurika Eagles cheerleader—the girl who smiled while teetering at the top of the human pyramid—and she was nominated for homecoming queen just days before she disappeared. A diligent student, she also made the honor roll. But in the weeks before her murder, she had been acting strangely. She was suspended from school for being drunk while leading cheers at a football game, and around the house, she had become moody and withdrawn. A close friend would later tell the FBI that, despite her ebullient public persona, Heather was a “very troubled girl.” All anyone knew for sure was that she had slipped out of her bedroom window on a school night, just after eleven o’clock, and hadn’t come home. Rumors flourished in the days following her disappearance. People had last seen Heather walking along the highway trying to hitch a ride, they said, or sitting in a pickup with two boys or placing a call from a phone booth on the outskirts of town. She was silenced, went one story, because a local teenager’s suspicious death, ruled a suicide, had in fact been a homicide that she had witnessed. Another had Heather falling victim to foul play after dancing in a strip club or, alternately, running around with a group of local methamphetamine dealers, who killed her at a cotton gin. Every town has a story onto which it projects its fears, and in Waurika the story of Heather’s murder was embroidered with each telling. Her family suspected that her killer was not a stranger. “We had her funeral out of town, in Comanche, and we wouldn’t let anyone touch the casket because I promised Heather that whoever did this to her would never touch her again,” says her mother, Gail. As the rumors multiplied and grew 174

T4096.indb 174

1/18/07 7:19:24 AM

6 175 more fantastic, no one could fathom who would want to hurt a bend in Heather Rich. the river heather rich’s murder outraged the inhabitants of Red River country, not once but twice—first, when she was killed, in 1996, and again this past winter, when her killers slipped from the Montague County jail, northwest of Fort Worth, and headed for the river. Newspaper accounts of the escape focused on the manhunt, paying scant attention to the original crime or the victim, invariably described as a “sixteen-year-old Waurika, Okla., cheerleader.” Only along the river did people know what the crime had done to their isolated slice of the world, the illusions it had cruelly stripped away. Waurika lies on what was once the Chisholm Trail, now U.S. 81, a long, lonely stretch of blacktop that threads north from Fort Worth through a succession of fading cattle towns into Oklahoma. Here, an abrupt bend in the river slows its waters enough to allow for crossings, but the river is mercurial: Just a few miles from Belknap Creek is a cemetery lined with rough-hewn sandstone markers, the makeshift graves for cowboys who drowned fording the river more than a century ago. The river can be a place of sudden violence—a mean, mud-red waterway whose banks are thick with quicksand and diamondbacks and old Comanche arrowheads—and so can the land around it. Years ago, the rancher who found Heather Rich’s body unearthed an old nickel-plated .45-70 rifle while he was plowing his pasture. “That’s a cavalryman’s gun,” he explains. “It’s anyone’s guess why it was buried three feet deep, but its owner was probably buried along with it.” As brutal as this corner of Texas has always been, north of the Red River has always been wilder. Sheriffs were scarce in Indian Territory, as Oklahoma was still known at the turn of the past century, and Waurika was no exception. “People came here to escape the law,” says Nancy Way, the town historian. By the time the Riches moved there from nearby Lawton, in 1974, after one of their neighbors was raped, Waurika was a quieter, blander place, content to forget its history. Duane and Gail Rich had hoped the town would insulate their children from the hardness of the world. Waurika seemed peaceful and safe, the

T4096.indb 175

1/18/07 7:19:24 AM

6 Pamela Colloff sort of place where kids couldn’t get into too much trouble because there wasn’t much trouble to get into. With no stoplights and few temptations, it reminded them of the tiny town of Elgin, Oklahoma, where they had grown up and met as teenagers. Gail was fourteen when, at a Future Farmers of America auction, she asked her father to bid on Duane—a sturdy farm boy who was offering a day’s labor—in hopes she might catch his eye. Their first date was to a prison rodeo, and they married when Gail was seventeen. She was offered a full music scholarship to the University of Oklahoma, but Duane wanted her to stay home, so she poured her energies into teaching Sunday school and playing piano at their church instead. In the summers she sang in local revivals, while her children—three boys and Heather, the thirdborn—napped in the pews. “Heather was a naive girl with a big heart,” says Gail, now 47, with a faint smile. “Blond all the way to the roots.” If Waurika seemed to Gail and Duane an idyllic rural town, it had an entirely different effect on Heather. Waurika has no movie theater, no park, no rec center, no cafes open late; the nearest fastfood place then was in Comanche, seventeen miles away. “Heather always wanted to break the monotony,” says ex-boyfriend Randy Wood. “She was always restless. She hated being bored.” Some nights she would slip out her bedroom window to smoke a cigarette in the dark; other nights she would catch a ride and cruise Main Street, the three-block-long strip where teenagers line up their pickups and talk about the night’s possibilities. The only reliable entertainment in town, remembers Randy, was “getting drunk and partying.” Heather and her friends would drive the back roads to Lake Waurika or out to remote pastures where they could build bonfires and drink and smoke pot. What was passed around as often as marijuana on those country nights was methamphetamine, a homemade form of speed that causes a heartpounding euphoria. Heather didn’t smoke meth at first; Randy did. He was the captain of the football team and a popular senior, a ruddy, broad-shouldered boy who was universally liked. But underneath the bulky uniform, he was another lost kid. Heather thrived on male attention and knew how to garner it. “If you’ve got it, flaunt it,” she liked to say. “She had no idea the 176

T4096.indb 176

1/18/07 7:19:24 AM

6 177 power she had over men,” says Gail, who had watched men her a bend in age flirt with her daughter. “She assumed everyone had the best the river of intentions.” The Riches forbade Heather to date until she was sixteen, and after that, she had to double-date with her brother Stephen and his girlfriend—a circumstance Heather found mortifying. “I’ll be an old maid,” she used to moan. “I’m already the last girl in school who’s still a virgin.” In a heart-shaped box, she stashed the pieces of gum she was chewing when boys had kissed her, with a list of the boys’ names: proof to herself, perhaps, of her own romantic and sexual worth. She spent hours holed up in her bedroom—a pink-and-white sanctuary with porcelain dolls and a dressing table arrayed with makeup—primping and appraising her flaws in the mirror. She was meticulous about her appearance, tweezing her eyebrows into precise half-moons and sometimes washing her hair two or three times a day, until she had styled it just right. Her perfectionism took a dark turn starting in the summer before the eighth grade, when she began vomiting to control her weight. Boys liked her figure, and she was determined to stay a size 2. Randy resented Heather’s flirtations with other boys. His own teenage uncertainty was heightened by his hard-luck background. His family was one of the poorest in town; he had never known his father, and his mother had a history of drug use. He had started smoking pot in the third grade after stealing it from his mother, and he often had the glassy-eyed look of a kid in a world of his own. Still, as a Waurika Eagles running back, he had earned the respect of his team, and around town, people liked the soft-spoken, well-mannered teenager who was making the best of the bad hand life had dealt him. His family’s poverty was evident from their run-down frame house, where broken windows were covered up with old quilts and cardboard, but Randy tried to present himself well, wearing oxford shirts and khakis and holding his head up when he walked the mile to school. Randy was just a “big, dumb kid” back then, people say, “a little slow” but adored around town. “Heather befriended the underdogs—that’s why she liked Randy,” says Gail. “She felt sorry for him. She took him to church. She felt like Randy had never been given a chance.” His five-month relationship with Heather was intimate but not one of great passion; they would never sleep together. The relationship

T4096.indb 177

1/18/07 7:19:24 AM

6 Pamela Colloff was so low-key that many people, including the Riches, mistook them for friends. Heather and Randy liked to sit and talk for hours on end—but even after so much time together, Heather could seem like a stranger. “I knew her but not like I wanted to,” Randy says, “not like I should have.” Heather was also growing more distant from her parents, who were consumed by a family crisis. Duane, an electrician, had nearly been killed on the job when a transformer blew up, burning him over 65 percent of his body. His injuries changed him from an involved father and husband into a helpless patient: Skin grafts and physical therapy would follow, and he had to learn to walk again. Heather fed him and dressed his wounds, and when her mother began working long hours to make ends meet, the cooking and cleaning duties fell largely to her. “Our lives were in chaos,” says Gail. “I didn’t give Heather the time she needed. I should’ve checked up on her friends instead of taking her word. She’d say, ‘But, Momma, there’s good in everybody’ and look at me with those big blue eyes.” Mother and daughter were close, though Gail didn’t know the extent of her daughter’s self-destruction: Heather had begun to cut herself now and then, running a razor blade across her legs until she drew blood. A few weeks after school started, Randy broke up with Heather after hearing a rumor that she had gone skinny-dipping at a co-ed pool party. Within a week, an acquaintance of theirs named Dennis Wayne Goss, a twenty-year-old from the nearby town of Terral, fatally shot himself in the head. Deeply rattled by the breakup and perhaps Goss’ suicide, Heather’s behavior grew more erratic. “She had a brightness, a glitteryness, about her eyes,” says Gail. She would later learn that Heather had started experimenting with meth not long after Randy stopped seeing her. Toward the end of September, six days before she disappeared, she was drunk on the sidelines at a football game. She was suspended from school for three days while administrators decided whether to kick her off the cheerleading squad. The Riches became so concerned about Heather that they made an appointment with a therapist for the following Thursday, October 3, 1996. “We wanted to get her help and figure out why she wanted to hurt herself,” says Gail. 178

T4096.indb 178

1/18/07 7:19:25 AM

6 179 On October 2 Gail came home to find a $300 long-distance a bend in phone bill that Heather had racked up calling friends from church the river camp—a bill the family could not pay. Angry and exhausted from the strain of working sixteen-hour days, Gail lost her temper. “All you ever do is cost me money,” she snapped. Wounded, Heather retreated to her room. She came to her parents’ bedroom later that evening and wished Duane good-night, telling him she loved him. She ignored her mother, walking past her without meeting her glance. Gail never saw her daughter again. the next morning, the riches went to the Jefferson County Sheriff ’s Department to report Heather missing. Sheriff ’s deputies refused to take the disappearance seriously, assuring Gail that Heather had probably just run away for a few hours to give her a scare and advising her to return home. “When your daughter’s missing, you can sit at home,” Gail said angrily. She knew her daughter hadn’t run away; Heather’s makeup bag, which she never left behind, was still in her bedroom. None of her clothes were missing, and her diary lay open on her bed. As Gail made frantic inquiries around town that morning—“I was beating on people’s doors,” she says. “I was working on pure adrenaline and anger”—a friend at Waurika High School slipped her the day’s absentee list, which included Randy Wood. Gail reached him by phone and asked if he had seen Heather. Randy said he hadn’t, then added, “I was with Josh Bagwell all night, till six this morning.” His voice sounded tired and flat. When Gail pressed him, he repeated that he hadn’t seen Heather; he was with Josh Bagwell all night. “Randy, if you knew anything that could help us find Heather, you would tell us, right?” Gail asked him. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied. When she hung up, she added Josh Bagwell to her list of people to question. Randy and Josh were good friends, though they made a curious pair. Josh was a snob, say some who knew him—a clean-cut, pampered seventeen-year-old who lived with his wealthy grandparents, Toad and Hattie Dale Anderson. “The Andersons were always a little bit better than everybody else,” says one local. “They’re showy with their money. They have a big house, the newest cars. For Waurika, they’re high rollers.” Josh’s mother was divorced

T4096.indb 179

1/18/07 7:19:25 AM

6 Pamela Colloff and lived out of town; at sixteen, he moved in with his maternal grandparents, who liked to indulge him. With little discipline at home, he bristled at authority. When he was arrested once for drunk driving, he scuffled with police officers, yelling, “I want my f—-ing attorney,” and was charged with resisting arrest. His white Dodge Stealth was the fanciest car that any teenager had in town, and Randy was awed by his easy wealth. “Josh told me it was his sixth brand-new car,” says Randy. “He said he’d wrecked some of the others.” Heather was taken with Josh’s life of privilege too. Her ongoing flirtation with him had paid off that September, when Josh promised she could ride on the back of his car in the homecoming parade. The day of Heather’s disappearance, Josh was also absent from school. He had been suspended for three days for cutting class; earlier that week, he had attended his friend Dennis Wayne Goss’s funeral. When members of the Rich family questioned Josh, as they did dozens of teenagers around town that day, he shrugged and said he hadn’t seen Heather in a week. As days went by with no sign of their daughter, the Riches’ desperation led them to hire a private detective and to use a friend’s bloodhounds to sniff around wooded areas near town. Many tips that came in about Heather’s whereabouts circled back to something Gail had not previously known existed: Waurika’s drug culture. “We discovered that there were several meth labs in town and houses where people dealt drugs on nearly every block,” Gail says. “Duane and I had raised four kids in Waurika, and we had no idea this was going on. Our kids, everyone’s kids, knew about it. After the sun went down, our town was full of dope.” On the eighth day of the Riches’ search, a rancher reported finding a body. The victim’s identity was soon confirmed. “Duane walked in the door and I took one look at him and I knew she was dead,” Gail says. “I said, ‘Just tell me. Say it real fast and get it over with.’ He told me that someone had shot her and thrown her in the water and that she was never coming home. I remember screaming and beating on him for an hour, saying, ‘No, no, no.’” Word filtered through Waurika the next day. “There was shock and total disbelief,” remembers Mayor Biff Eck. “No one could understand how something like this could happen to someone from our 180

T4096.indb 180

1/18/07 7:19:25 AM

6 181 town.” Randy was at school, standing at a water fountain, when a bend in he heard the news that Heather’s body had been found. “It was the river like time stopped,” he says. That night he was crowned Waurika High School’s homecoming king. During the halftime ceremony, he looked haunted under the glare of the stadium lights. a team of twenty investigators interviewed more than one hundred people in the days to come, with little luck. “Nobody wanted to talk,” says Montague County sheriff Chris Hamilton, one of the Texas investigators working the case. “There was a party culture up there, and kids didn’t want to snitch. There was a code of honor, an us-against-the-police kind of attitude.” Even the Waurika newspaper, the News-Democrat, observed that local teenagers were adhering “to a code of silence that would make the Mafia proud.” The Riches often stopped by the investigation’s makeshift command post—the old redbrick train depot, newly wired with laptops and phone lines—to offer home cooking and words of thanks. But as days, and then a week, passed with no progress, a sense of unease settled in. One of the few credible leads was that Heather had sneaked out to go to a party at Josh Bagwell’s house the night she vanished. Randy Wood had told Gail earlier that he had been there until six in the morning. They hadn’t seen Heather, Josh said. Only two people had stopped by his house that night: Randy and Curtis Gambill, Josh’s drinking buddy. Curtis Gambill lived with his grandmother Reda Robbins, in Terral, twenty miles downriver from Waurika. At 64, Reda had spent her whole life on the river, and she knew it well: At dusk, she could stare up at the sky and then out at the river and tell whether its water would run red the next day or gin-clear. She knew where the imprints of wagon wheels were still worn deep in the sandstone lining its banks and where, among the wild lilac and blackthorn and yucca, gold was rumored to be buried. Reda has both Cherokee and Choctaw blood in her; her high cheekbones are set against jet-black hair and wide, expressive blue eyes that catch the sunlight, and she is eccentric in the way that all people deeply connected to this river are. She has had a series of husbands, and for years she sang in a local country and western band, crooning lonesome love songs. As a girl living on the river’s Texas side, she

T4096.indb 181

1/18/07 7:19:25 AM

6 Pamela Colloff spent countless afternoons fishing on Belknap Creek. Back then, she used to walk the five miles from her house, down a dead-end dirt road, and sit on the Belknap Creek bridge, baiting hooks with earthworms and lowering them down below. Years later, she liked to take Curtis fishing there too. Reda was disturbed by the news of Heather’s death, not only because it happened in her most beloved, and secret, corner of the river bottom, but also because she intimately knew the anguish of murder. Her mother was one of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas’ first victims; in 1982 he stabbed her in the heart and shoved her in a wood-burning stove in Ringgold, only a few miles from Belknap Creek. In the years that followed, Reda had worried about her grandson, Curtis. He had taken an unloaded gun to school and was sent to a juvenile facility as a result; after that, he got mixed up in drugs. “Curtis had a mean streak,” says one local. “He was always raising Cain, and everyone knew to steer clear of him.” A river rat, Curtis was tan and straw-haired, with green eyes that assessed whatever stood in his way with a cold, hard stare. He liked to camp and fish and roam the bottomland, and Reda spent a great deal of her time worrying about him. She knew he had been brooding ever since his best friend, Dennis Wayne Goss, had committed suicide. Curtis had made some strange remarks to her about his late friend: Dennis Wayne hadn’t killed himself; he had been murdered, and Curtis intended to find out who did it. Reda watched her grandson as she made supper on the day Heather’s body was found, wondering what he knew. He was sitting on the back porch, playing her old guitar. “They found that missing girl from Waurika,” Reda called out from the kitchen, through the screen door. “They found her floating in Belknap Creek.” Curtis stopped strumming the guitar and fell silent. Reda began to say more, but he cut her off. “Grandma,” he said, his voice ice-cold. “I don’t give a f—-about that little girl.” 182

texas ranger lane akin arrived at Belknap Creek on the afternoon of October 10, 1996, when Heather was still floating among the reeds. After crime scene photos were taken, the lawman waded into the creek with Sheriff Hamilton and gently

T4096.indb 182

1/18/07 7:19:26 AM

6 183 carried her to dry land. Her body was so badly damaged that the a bend in Riches were never allowed to see her; the autopsy photos would the river later make jurors recoil. She had been shot nine times—once in the head, eight times in the back—not with a pistol but a shotgun. All the Riches had left of their daughter was her ring. As the murder investigation got under way, Gail was reassured by the presence of the Texas Ranger. Akin’s calm, deliberate style had served him well in the past, when criminals had felt so at ease around him that they had sometimes divulged the details of their crimes. But while he had worked dozens of murder cases before, this case would take a greater emotional toll—something his fellow investigators noticed from the moment he carried Heather’s body from the creek. Akin’s only daughter was then a high school cheerleader, an outgoing fifteen-year-old girl in the North Texas town of Decatur whom he had done his share of worrying about. “This one hit real close to home,” Akin says. Each night, as he drove back to Texas, he wondered what he was overlooking. “It was very hard to leave at the end of the day, knowing we weren’t any closer to making an arrest,” he says. The investigation had initially focused on a red herring: a meth dealer Heather may have known who turned out to have an alibi. Akin now began to look more closely at the party Josh had thrown the night of Heather’s disappearance. Josh, Curtis, and Randy all claimed they had played dominoes and drunk whiskey in the “party trailer” behind Josh’s house that night, and they all insisted they hadn’t seen Heather. Akin was skeptical. As the investigation plodded along, Randy often sat on his porch, holding his head in his hands. He drank heavily, and he stayed high most of the time. In a newspaper profile of the new homecoming king, he seemed gloomy and remote. He shrugged off several questions, listing his favorite color as black, and when asked for “words of wisdom for underclassmen,” he answered cryptically, “Cruise the back roads.” Was he grieving or, as Akin suspected, did he know more than he was saying? With Paul Smith of the Montague County district attorney’s office, his partner for the investigation, Akin decided to stop by football practice one afternoon and pay Randy a visit. When Randy walked off the field and saw the two lawmen waiting for

T4096.indb 183

1/18/07 7:19:26 AM

6 Pamela Colloff him, his face froze. “Lane and I looked at each other,” says Smith, “and we knew for sure Randy was involved in Heather’s murder.” Randy stuck to his story, though Akin made note of the flat, detached way that he described the evening. “He had rehearsed that story again and again,” Akin says. “Telling it kept him from showing any emotion.” The next morning, Akin got the break he needed. A local sheriff ’s deputy discovered that Josh had bought four boxes of shotgun shells at Beaver Hardware a few days before Heather’s murder: Winchester double-aught buckshot, the ammunition that a firearms expert had determined was the kind used by Heather’s killer. The owner of Beaver Hardware also identified Curtis Gambill from a photo lineup; he had accompanied Josh to the store. Paul Smith had investigated the brutal murder of Curtis’ great-grandmother by Henry Lee Lucas years earlier, and he knew the family well. He suggested to Akin that they visit Reda Robbins. Reda had not been forthcoming with investigators until then, but when she saw the detective who had helped find her mother’s killer, she agreed to talk. During the course of their conversation, Reda mentioned that Curtis had had a shotgun but that he’d said he had gotten rid of it. “Old Blackie” was a Mossberg twelve-gauge shotgun: the firearm that investigators would determine was the murder weapon. Only later would it come to light that Curtis Gambill had once bragged about his “ultimate fantasy”: to kidnap a girl, rape her, and then “blow her head off.” He made the boast at the age of fifteen in a juvenile detention center, where he was being held after threatening to kill several teachers. He was a volatile kid with a long criminal record. He was rumored to have shot other people’s livestock for sport, and he had broken out of every juvenile facility that held him. He ran with a rough crowd of meth users, including the late Dennis Wayne Goss, and in school he terrorized other kids, making boys fight each other by threatening that otherwise they would have to fight him. At seventeen he was briefly committed to a psychiatric hospital. “Curtis Gambill is the most violent person I’ve ever known,” Akin says now. “When you’re around him, you literally feel like you’re in the presence of evil.” Both misfits, Curtis and Josh found solace in drinking and hanging out along the river—often camping and fishing together—and they 184

T4096.indb 184

1/18/07 7:19:26 AM

6 185 shared a love of guns. Randy was the odd man out, having met a bend in Curtis only briefly when they worked one summer in the water- the river melon fields. What brought them all together the night of Heather’s murder had its own simple logic: Josh had a bottle of whiskey. The story would unravel the following day, when Curtis broke under Akin’s questioning. “Gambill knew he was in a bind, so he told us a story that made Randy Wood out to be the killer,” says Akin. “He was extremely cooperative and seemed to be enjoying the attention.” Between bites of tacos, Curtis cavalierly offered up the details. “I didn’t know her,” he began, while Akin typed. “She snuck out. Her and Josh had a date.” Curtis explained that he and Randy had left the trailer to give them some time alone. While they were gone, Josh got Heather drunk. “Josh had sex with her for a couple of hours,” he said. “When me and Woody, Randy Wood, got back, she was hammered. She was kissing on us. Me and Woody was going to get a piece, but she passed out.” The boys drank more. “When she woke up, she was crying and screaming. Then she passed back out. Josh started freaking out. . . . Josh said he didn’t want to go down for it, raping Heather.” Randy was anxious about rape charges too, Curtis said, because Randy had tried to have sex with Heather. So Randy carried her, still unconscious, to Josh’s pickup, and they all drove to the Belknap Creek bridge. “Woody shot her,” Curtis claimed. “Woody said, ‘Throw her ass over.’ All of us grabbed her and threw her over in the creek.” Akin had heard a lot in his twenty years in law enforcement, but as he slid the typed confession across the desk for Curtis to sign, he felt sick. Heather’s life, to these boys, had been so easily disposable. “I had to grit my teeth and go on,” Akin says. He believed most of Curtis’ story, though he sensed that Curtis had killed her: The murder weapon was his, and the crime scene was a place only he was familiar with. Akin’s hunch was confirmed when Randy told almost the same story later that night but with Curtis firing the gun. Heather had been drifting in and out of consciousness when Curtis “had sex” with her too. “I had my pants down, but I didn’t,” Randy said in a low monotone. When they arrived at the creek, they “sat Heather on the bridge and she fell over. I got back in the truck, and I just sat there with my hands covering my face, and that’s when I heard the shots. Josh and Curtis were

T4096.indb 185

1/18/07 7:19:26 AM

6 Pamela Colloff outside. After the shots stopped, I looked up and Curtis had the shotgun.” Randy would pass a polygraph test; Curtis failed his. But why had Randy not tried to save her? “I really didn’t believe it would happen until we got to the bridge,” Randy told me. “I hoped Curtis was joking, but when we got out of the truck, he had the shotgun. He was giving orders; he was firing himself up. I let it happen. I was scared to death of him.” While Randy was giving his statement to Sheriff Hamilton, Akin served the warrant for Josh’s arrest. In Josh’s bedroom were two swords, an SKS assault rifle with a bayonet, another assault rifle, and a book on making bombs. Though he initially refused to go with the Texas Ranger, he finally relented. As Akin drove, he tried to engage Josh in conversation. “I’m sure you’ve had some sleepless nights since Heather’s murder,” Akin offered. “You just woke me up,” Josh said with a sneer. “Did it look like I was having trouble sleeping?” Six years later Akin is still galled by those words. “Josh Bagwell had participated in a crime that devastated an entire community,” Akin says. “A family would never know their daughter. Heather would never grow up, never get married, never have children of her own. And his conscience wasn’t troubled at all. He could sleep just fine.” 186

the son of a church of christ preacher, Montague County district attorney Tim Cole is an intense, unyielding adversary in the courtroom—he prefers facts to florid oratory—whose sense of moral certainty has helped him persuade juries to convict in all twelve murder trials he has prosecuted. Curtis Gambill’s capital murder case, which was the first to come to trial, presented a tactical problem: To convict Josh Bagwell of capital murder, Cole needed testimony that Josh knew of the plan to kill Heather before they reached the creek. Cole had sought the death penalty against Curtis, but during jury selection, a plea bargain was struck: Curtis would admit he shot Heather and testify against Josh if he was spared death. After much agonizing, the Riches agreed that the state should accept the deal, even though it meant foregoing the death penalty for their daughter’s killer. “They gave Curtis

T4096.indb 186

1/18/07 7:19:26 AM

6 187 Gambill his life,” Cole says. Moments after Curtis pleaded guilty a bend in and was given a thirty-year sentence, he flew into a rage, grabbing the river the bailiff by the neck and trying to choke him. It took six men to wrestle Curtis to the ground, including Lane Akin, who leaped out of the spectator section to put him in a stranglehold. Cole watched, his face drained of color. What sort of Faustian bargain, he wondered, had they made? Even with Curtis’ testimony, Cole harbored doubts about winning a conviction against Josh Bagwell. Josh had refused to give a statement to investigators—he was the only one of the three boys not to admit his guilt—or to take a polygraph test, and his family had hired a team of high-priced defense attorneys to secure his acquittal. The case against him rested largely on the word of Curtis and Randy, who could implicate Josh in the murder scheme but who could also compromise their credibility by pointing fingers at each other for pulling the trigger. Before the trial, Josh bragged to friends that there wasn’t enough evidence to try him. “His family’s attitude was that I was a country bumpkin who couldn’t win this case and that Josh hadn’t done anything wrong,” Cole says. “They had the arrogance to bring his sports car to the courthouse while the jury was deliberating because they were so sure the jury was going to let him off.” From the first day of The State of Texas v. Joshua Luke Bagwell, the defense elected to put Heather’s character on trial, painting her as a promiscuous drunk. “They made her look like the Whore of Babylon,” says Jeff Hall, a former publisher of the Waurika News-Democrat. Scant was said about the boys’ own alcoholism or enthusiasm for casual sex, only Heather’s supposed transgressions. The subtext of the defense’s argument was that Josh could not have raped Heather because she was always ready and willing. Defense attorney John Zelbst went so far as to crossexamine Gail about each of her dead daughter’s failings—her smoking, her bulimia, her marijuana use: “She was your perfect child, but she wasn’t quite perfect, right?” Josh sat quietly behind the defense table, taking notes on a yellow legal pad. What the jury could not see beneath his suit were his jailhouse tattoos—among them the swastika and other white power symbols that adorned his arms. Nor did the jury know that Josh had not only tried to

T4096.indb 187

1/18/07 7:19:27 AM

6 Pamela Colloff incite a riot on his cell block but also threatened to kill several guards and attacked a police officer. Guards also discovered a hole he had chipped through the cinder-block walls. “We were all afraid that Josh was going to walk,” says Cole. Though Curtis had originally agreed to testify against Josh, he had welshed on his plea agreement, insisting that it was Randy, not himself, who shot Heather, and that Josh had known nothing of the murder plot. That night Cole got word of yet another setback for the prosecution: Randy, who was scheduled to testify the next day, was backing out of his plea bargain as well. Cole thought all was lost. But Randy Wood had something else in mind. Consciencestricken, he still wanted to testify against Josh, but he would not accept a plea bargain in return, for fear that it would taint the veracity of his testimony in the eyes of the jury. And so Randy sacrificed his future, doing what no lawman who worked this case can remember a defendant ever doing: He turned down a forty-year sentence with the possibility of parole after thirty years and testified anyway, thereby incriminating himself and subjecting himself to, at best, a mandatory life sentence for murder. At worst, he would face a death sentence. Randy’s attorney urged him to take the deal, but Randy had made up his mind. “I wanted everyone to know I was telling the truth,” Randy told me. “I owed that to Heather and her family.” The next day, Randy testified in a low, halting voice that Josh had known full well of the plan to kill Heather: Contrary to the defense’s story, Josh was present in the trailer when the plot was hatched to shoot her. Before the shooting, he had helped carry her from the pickup to the bridge, Randy said. Afterward, he had weighed her body down with a rock and helped throw her into the creek. “I looked in Randy’s eyes, and I knew he was sincere,” says Gail. “I wanted to reach out to him, to thank him for his honesty.” Josh took the stand next, giving a convincing performance of a polite, respectful eighteen-year-old. (“He was so well prepared that I could’ve slapped him and he would have said, ‘Thank you,’” Cole recalls.) Josh testified that he hadn’t known about a plan to kill Heather and that it was Randy who had killed her. Only once 188

T4096.indb 188

1/18/07 7:19:27 AM

6 189 did Josh stray from the script, but it was a costly slip: After hear- a bend in ing gunshots while urinating near the bridge that night, he said, the river he ran back to see what had happened. Then, he testified in the present tense, as if watching the events unfold before him, “I see Curtis—or, I mean, excuse me—I see Randy lowering the gun.” The jury found Josh guilty of capital murder, which carries an automatic life sentence, and of conspiracy to commit murder, for which the jury assessed a 99-year sentence to be served concurrently. Gail kissed Heather’s signet ring over and over as the jury read its verdict, silently rocking back and forth in her seat. In addition to his sports car, Josh’s family had taken to the courthouse dozens of balloons and presents for him—so sure had they been that he would be acquitted. Now they sat in stunned silence. “My son is no angel, but he damn sure is no murderer,” his mother, Cherese Smith, told reporters. Before the defendant was led away, Gail was allowed to say a few words to him directly. As she began to speak, imploring him to never forget Heather or the horror of his crime, Josh’s relatives stood up and filed out of the courtroom. “By your family exiting, I see why you are the way you are,” Gail told Josh, who stared back at her blankly. “You haven’t ever had to pay for the mistakes you made. But you’re going to now. You took away the most important thing in our life.” Randy would stand trial later that year and be found guilty of capital murder. He too must serve a mandatory life sentence and will not be eligible for parole until the year 2036, when he will be 57 years old. While Cole is deservedly proud of his victories in these trials, he is subdued when he speaks of the teenager who, late in the game, found the strength of character to own up to his crime and paid for it dearly. “I don’t feel very good about Randy Wood being in prison for the rest of his life,” says Cole. “I tried every way in the world to get him to plead guilty, but he would not take the plea. I’m sure there was some self-interest in his decision: He wanted people to know he didn’t kill Heather. But I will forever believe it’s because he has a conscience.” Cole’s opinion is shared by Gail, who speaks of Randy with a bittersweet smile and says he is redeemed in her eyes. “Heather lay in that creek for

T4096.indb 189

1/18/07 7:19:27 AM

6 Pamela Colloff eight days and he didn’t tell me, so he must be punished,” she says. “But a lifetime is too much for Randy.” 190

on january 28, just before midnight, Curtis Gambill and Josh Bagwell slipped out of the Montague County jail and fled with two other inmates into the North Texas plains. The Montague Four, as they were soon known on TV news bulletins, escaped after taking a guard hostage with a homemade knife, forcing the only other guard on duty to open an outside gate. Though Curtis and Josh had been incarcerated in state prison, they had been transferred to Montague County earlier that month for Curtis to be prosecuted by Cole on charges of conspiracy to commit murder. Curtis was convicted on January 16 and given a life sentence, ensuring that he would spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole. When Cole learned of the escape, he was apoplectic. “You spend six years trying to make sure that these people will never hurt anyone ever again, and then in the blink of an eye, they’re gone,” says Cole. “I carried a gun for the first time in my life. They had absolutely nothing to lose.” Curtis and Josh headed to the place they knew best, the Red River. Despite a massive manhunt with hundreds of lawmen from Texas and Oklahoma, the escapees traced their way through gullies and dry washes back to Belknap Creek, hiding in caves along the river bottom. Heather Rich’s killers went unseen for more than a week, holing up in a hunting cabin, then stealing a flatbed truck and a .22-caliber revolver from Dennis Wayne Goss’s parents’ home. Up and down the river, people loaded their guns and stayed indoors, while local law enforcement braced for a bloody shootout. But after nine days on the lam, Curtis and Josh found themselves surrounded by dozens of lawmen at a convenience store in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and surrendered after six hours of negotiation with the FBI. As Curtis was being led away in handcuffs, he locked eyes with Jefferson County sheriff Stan Barnes. “I’ll be seeing you again,” Curtis told him with a cocky smile. Several weeks later prison guards thwarted yet another escape when they discovered that Josh’s mother, Cherese, had slipped Curtis and Josh hacksaw blades hidden inside two Bibles. She is in jail, awaiting trial.

T4096.indb 190

1/18/07 7:19:27 AM

6 191 Sheriff Barnes has reopened the investigation into Dennis a bend in Wayne Goss’s death, which was ruled a suicide by his predeces- the river sor. “Goss was a good friend of Curtis Gambill’s, and he was shot one week before Heather,” Barnes says. “It was made to look like a suicide, but the shell casing next to him didn’t match the wadding found in his head wound. He’d told his dad he feared for his life.” Barnes believes there is a connection between the two deaths. “Heather might have known something she wasn’t supposed to about the Goss murder.” His opinion is widely shared around Waurika. Now 23, Randy has tried hard to put distance between himself and the boy he was that night on Belknap Creek. While his co-defendants were classified as some of Texas’ most ill-behaved inmates even before the jailbreak, Randy has a spotless record. He now works on the prison garden crew, digging flower beds and pruning shrubs. “Heather is the first thing I think of in the morning and the last thing at night,” he says. “I punish myself worse than anything in this prison ever could.” Gail and Duane divorced after the murder; the pain of memory was too great, she says. Both have moved away from Waurika and the bridge at Belknap Creek. It is still pocked with the buckshot that tore apart Heather’s body and scarred with tiny fissures that fan out along the bridge’s concrete edge. There, in faded blue spray paint, someone has scrawled the word “murderers.” The creek, a deep blue ribbon shaded by hackberry and pecan trees, is a place of unlikely beauty; when the wind blows through the switchgrass lining its banks, ruffling the surface of the water, it is hard to believe that a crime of such horror could have happened in such a serene spot. The creek appears in Gail’s nightmares, which have haunted her from the day Heather was found dead. In the dream, Heather is lying in the creek. She is alive, and she is begging for help. She is only a few feet away in the cold water. Gail holds out her hands, grasping for her daughter. But she can’t reach her. Heather is too far away.

6 July 2002

T4096.indb 191

1/18/07 7:19:28 AM

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

the last r ide of cowboy bob

6

sk ip holl andsworth

H

e wore a Western hat, never spoke a word, and robbed bank after bank. When the feds finally arrested him, they discovered that their suspect was actually a soft-spoken woman. They thought they’d never hear from her again—but she had other plans.

peggy jo tallas was, by all accounts , the classic good-hearted Texas woman. For much of her adult life, she lived with her ailing mother in a small apartment in the Dallas suburbs. Every morning, after waking up and making her bed, always taking the time to smooth out all the wrinkles in the sheets with her hands, she’d walk into her mother’s bedroom. She’d wrap a robe around her mother’s shoulders, lead her to the kitchen, fix her cereal, and lay out her pills. For a few minutes, the two of them would sit at the table, making small talk. Peggy Jo, who didn’t like to eat until later in the day, would often smoke a cigarette and drink Pepsi out of a coffee cup. Then, after her mother was finished eating, Peggy Jo would gently guide her back to her bedroom, prop a pillow behind her head, set a glass of tap water and her romance novel on the side table, and walk back into her own room to get dressed. Usually, she liked wearing khaki pants, a simple blouse, and loafers. But on a lovely morning in May 1991, Peggy Jo, who was then 46 years old, decided to wear something different. She walked

T4096.indb 193

1/18/07 7:19:28 AM

6 Skip over to her dresser, the top of which held a few small glass sculpHollandsworth tures of dolphins with iridescent eyes that she had been collecting off and on for more than a decade. She opened one of the lower drawers and pulled out a pair of men’s pants and a dark men’s shirt. From her closet, she grabbed a men’s brown leather jacket that she kept on a hanger. She then reached for a Styrofoam mannequin’s head that was on a shelf in the closet. A fake beard was pinned to it and on top was a white cowboy hat. She took off her nightshirt and put on the clothes along with some boots that were too big for her feet. She stuffed a towel under her shirt to make herself look heavier. She stepped into the bathroom, rubbed some adhesive across her face, pasted on the fake beard, and colored her hair with gray paint she had bought at a costume shop. She placed the cowboy hat on her head, put on a large pair of silver-rimmed sunglasses, and pulled on a pair of gloves. She then took a few minutes to write a note on a sheet of lined paper and put it in her pocket. “Be back in a minute,” Peggy Jo told her mother, tiptoeing past her room. She walked outside, got behind the wheel of her 1975 two-door Pontiac Grand Prix, drove to the American Federal Bank just off West Airport Freeway in Irving, pulled into the parking lot, stepped into the bank’s lobby, and headed toward the counter, where a young female teller was smiling cheerfully. “Hello, sir,” the teller said. “How may I help you?” Peggy Jo pulled out the note she had written. “This is a bank robbery,” it read. “Give me your money. No marked bills or dye packs.” The stunned teller handed over a stack of cash from her drawer. Peggy Jo nodded, stuck the money into a satchel, and walked out of the bank. She then drove straight back to her apartment, where her mother was still in bed, getting hungry, hoping Peggy Jo would return soon to fix her lunch. 194

in the criminology textbooks, they are invariably described as products of a deprived socioeconomic background. Most of them are young male drug addicts who don’t have the slightest idea what they are doing. When they burst into banks, their fingers twitch and their heads swivel back and forth as they look for

T4096.indb 194

1/18/07 7:19:28 AM

6 195 security guards. They shout out threats and wave guns in the air. the last When they get their money, they run madly for the exits, bowling ride of over anyone in their path, and they squeal away in their cars, leav- cowboy bob ing tire tracks on the road. And then there was Peggy Jo Tallas. “I promise you, my Aunt Peggy was the last person on earth you would ever imagine robbing a bank,” said her niece, Michelle. “Whenever I was in a car with her, she never drove above the speed limit. If anything, she drove below it. And she always came to a complete stop at stop signs.” But Peggy Jo didn’t just rob a bank. Beginning with that May 1991 trip to American Federal, she robbed lots of banks. According to the FBI, she was one of the most unusual bank robbers of her generation, a modern-day Bonnie without a Clyde who always worked alone, never using a partner to operate as her lookout or drive her getaway car. She was also a master of disguise, her cross-dressing outfits so carefully designed that law enforcement officials, studying bank surveillance tapes, had no idea they were chasing a woman. What’s more, she was so determined not to hurt anyone that she never carried a weapon into any bank she robbed. “I have to admit, I admired her style,” said Steve Powell, a former FBI agent who spent most of his thirty-year career chasing bank robbers and who supervised bank robbery investigations for the Dallas office of the FBI in the early nineties. “She knew how to get in and out of a bank in sixty seconds. She was very skilled and very efficient, as good as any man I’ve ever come across.” Although female bank robbers are not unheard of—it is estimated that women commit less than 5 percent of the some 7,600 bank robberies that take place each year in the United States— almost all of them are young women who, like most of the men, rob banks for drug money. And only a few of those women rob more than a bank or two before they quit or get caught. Accordingly, when Powell and his team of FBI agents happened to corner Peggy Jo near her apartment in 1992, they assumed they would never be dealing with her again. She was one of those women, they believed, who had succumbed to a strange bout of middle-aged craziness. She wasn’t poor. She wasn’t an addict or an alcoholic. And from what people who knew her said, she was utterly harmless— “A sweet lady who once chatted with me about the best way to

T4096.indb 195

1/18/07 7:19:29 AM

6 Skip grow plants on the front porch,” one neighbor noted. Seemingly reHollandsworth pentant, Peggy Jo pleaded guilty to bank robbery and quietly went off to prison for almost three years. And that seemed to be that. But then, this past May, the story broke that a small bank in the East Texas city of Tyler had been robbed by a sixty-year-old woman. The woman was dressed in black, wearing a black widebrimmed hat and dark sunglasses that covered much of her face. She was polite and did not use a gun when she confronted the teller. She placed the money she received in a black satchel, nodded “thank you,” walked out the door, and climbed into a twentyfoot Frontier RV with pretty purple shades around the windows. She turned on the ignition, pushed on the gas pedal, and headed south on Texas Highway 69, straight out of town. After all those years, Peggy Jo Tallas had returned. 196

if you want to understand her, her friends say, you’ve got to go back to Dallas in the late fifties, when she was an irrepressibly free-spirited teenager, her hair brownish-blond and curly and her green eyes as shiny as marbles. “She had a beautiful, wide smile that made you want to smile back at her,” said Karen Jones, her closest childhood friend. “And what was most special about her was that she loved doing things other kids didn’t do. She once drove me around looking for stray dogs to adopt. And then she took me over to the Yellow Belly drag strip just to watch the cars race.” She was the youngest of three children. When she was four years old, her father died of cancer, and her mother, Helen, found a job as a nurse’s aide to support the family. They lived in a tiny rent house in the suburb of Grand Prairie. Peggy Jo’s sister, Nancy, was a high school majorette, and her older brother, Pete, played on the district’s championship basketball team. Peggy Jo, however, dropped out of high school after the tenth grade. “She told me there was just too much else to do in life than spend so many days at school,” Karen said. One day, in fact, Peggy Jo jumped in her car and drove to San Francisco because she wanted to see what life was like there. When she returned, she gave Karen a book of poems written by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the co-founder of San Francisco’s famous City Lights bookstore and an influential Beat poet whose work often decried the emptiness of modern life. (In

T4096.indb 196

1/18/07 7:19:29 AM

6 197 one of his most famous poems, from A Coney Island of the Mind, he the last described America as a country of “. . . freeways fifty lanes wide / ride of on a concrete continent / spaced with bland billboards / illustrat- cowboy bob ing imbecile illusions of happiness.”) “I laughed and thought, ‘Of all people, Peggy Jo’s been off reading poetry in San Francisco,’” Karen said. “But that was just who she was, always ready for an adventure.” When she was in her twenties, Peggy Jo got her own apartment in North Dallas and started working as a receptionist at a Marriott hotel near downtown. She and another receptionist, a cute blonde named Cherry Young, went out almost every night. Peggy Jo always drove in her little burgundy Fiat, gunning the engine, racing other cars from stoplight to stoplight. They hit all the great Dallas nightclubs: Soul City, the Fog, and the Filling Station, on Greenville Avenue, ordering Coors, playing pool, and flirting with men. They went to see the Doors and the Doobie Brothers and even the Rolling Stones, screaming at the top of their lungs as a young, wrinkle-free Mick Jagger gyrated madly across the stage. Peggy Jo took Cherry to a coffeehouse where amateur poets read out of their notebooks, and they also went to see movies. Peggy Jo’s favorite, which she saw over and over, was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford, the movie tells the story of the famous bank- and train-robbing duo who lived in the last days of the Old West: two good-natured, Robin Hood–like outlaws who never believed that what they were doing was wrong because they never hurt innocent bystanders and they always robbed from institutions that took advantage of downtrodden citizens. Although Butch and Sundance knew they had little chance of survival, they refused to walk away from the life they loved, and they ended up in South America, still robbing banks, finally dying in a hail of gunfire. According to Cherry, Peggy Jo didn’t have any immediate plans to get married and have children, she didn’t care about finding the right career, and she didn’t worry about money. All she wanted was enough to get by, to pay her bills and have a little left over for a few drinks or a couple of meals each week at El Fenix. “She told me she was saving a little so that she could someday go to Mexico, just to live on the beach in a hacienda and wear bathing suits night

T4096.indb 197

1/18/07 7:19:29 AM

6 Skip and day,” Cherry said. “She was beautiful and she was rambuncHollandsworth tious. She always told me that deep down she was wild at heart.” But just how wild? One afternoon, when Peggy Jo and Cherry were driving around in the Fiat, they passed a Wells Fargo armored truck, and Peggy Jo made a rather odd comment: “You know, I could go rob that and not have to worry about anything for a while.” “You’d need a gun,” Cherry said. “Oh, heck, I’m smarter than that,” Peggy Jo replied. Cherry laughed. It never once occurred to her that Peggy Jo would ever work up the courage to commit an actual robbery. True, she could get a little feisty: When a police officer pulled her over one evening for speeding, she laughed and tore up the ticket in his face. And there was the night when she and Cherry had a spat at a restaurant in Fort Worth. To calm down, Cherry walked to another bar. A few minutes later, Peggy Jo walked outside and saw an unlocked pickup with the keys in the ignition. She jumped in and drove away. The police caught up with her, and she eventually pleaded guilty to a felony charge of unauthorized use of a motor vehicle, receiving a five-year probated sentence. Still, it’s one thing to go on a joyride in a stolen car after a night of drinking. It’s another thing entirely to become an outlaw. “And what everyone needs to remember is that my aunt was a wonderful, loving woman,” said Michelle (who asked that her last name not be used). “When she came over to babysit me and my brothers, she made up funny games for us to play, she cooked us popcorn, and then at the end of the night, she told us ghost stories, where the ghosts were always creaking up the stairs and doors were squeaking. She truly had a heart of gold.” 198

her life was not without disappointment, of course. In the mid-seventies, she told her friends she had fallen in love with a man who lived near Dallas. Then, several months later, she mentioned that the relationship was over. “She told me that she had gone to the town where the man lived and that she had seen his car parked in front of a business,” Karen said. “She said she then saw a woman getting into the driver’s seat. Peggy Jo walked up to the woman, asked her what she was doing, and the woman said,

T4096.indb 198

1/18/07 7:19:29 AM

6 199 ‘Well, ma’am, this is my husband’s car.’ Peggy Jo was completely the last devastated. She had no idea she had been dating a married man.” ride of Not long after that, she moved into an apartment in Irving to cowboy bob live with her mother, who was battling a degenerative bone disease. Peggy Jo found a new job near the apartment at a computer factory, and then she worked in the office of a mobile-home construction company. She remained friends with Cherry, who by then was working as a cocktail waitress. “Every now and then, we’d have an old-fashioned night and hit all the old places and listen to rock and roll,” Cherry said. “And one day she called and persuaded me to quit my job so that we could go to Florida and live for a couple of months on the beach.” But by 1980 Cherry had married and moved to Oklahoma City. Peggy Jo’s childhood friend Karen had also married. Peggy Jo, who was still quite attractive, with a slender body and, in the words of Karen, “movie star long legs,” certainly had plenty of chances to start another relationship, but she kept her distance from men. “I don’t think she was ever able to get over the pain of the betrayal from the married man,” Karen said. “I think she decided to be alone.” A year passed, then another, then another. And suddenly, just like that, it was 1984, and Peggy Jo was forty years old, with lines tracking out from the corners of her eyes and a touch of gray slipping into her hair. She found another job working for the Pony Express Courier Service, driving a van up and down Dallas’s freeways, past a series of bland billboards, and delivering pack ages to businesses, and she also moved with Helen to a new apartment in another Dallas suburb—the Pecan Knoll Apartments, in Garland—to be closer to Michelle and her family. (Peggy Jo’s sister, Nancy, was then living in East Texas; Peggy Jo and her brother, Pete, who had had disagreements in their younger years, were rarely speaking.) Over the next couple of years, she endured her own medical problems. She injured her back and later underwent an emergency mastectomy, which kept her in bed for several weeks. She also began taking anti-anxiety medication, in large part because her income and her mother’s Social Security checks barely covered the bills, especially as her mother’s medical costs rose. “I think she was

T4096.indb 199

1/18/07 7:19:30 AM

6 Skip beginning to feel like she could never catch up,” said Cherry, who Hollandsworth occasionally came down from Oklahoma City to visit. “And she was too proud to ask anyone for help. She liked helping people. She didn’t want people to help her.” Cherry paused. “And there’s another thing that was going on with her,” she finally said. “This is hard to explain, but I think Peg was starting to feel, well, like her life was slipping away. Do you know what I mean? It’s the way women get sometimes. You get to a place in your life and you start looking back and you say to yourself that it’s not working out the way you hoped. You think everything is slipping away and you feel—I don’t know—crazy. You want to scream or something.” Cherry paused again. “I think Peg missed being wild at heart.” 200

she had to have been scared out of her wits when she walked into American Federal in Irving in May 1991. Although a notejob bank robbery does not involve the same kind of drama as an old-fashioned bank heist, in which the robber tunnels through the walls and blows apart the vault, it is still an incredibly daring act, a very public performance that is not only witnessed by employees and customers but is also always caught on tape. Amazingly, however, Peggy Jo did not commit any of the amateur mistakes that many first-time bank robbers make. She kept her head down so the security cameras could not get a good shot of her face. She did not fidget as the teller read her note. During those long seconds that ticked away as the teller pulled the money out of her drawer, she remained absolutely silent, saying nothing. Then came that long walk out of the bank, when she had to be wondering if a security guard she had not seen was coming up behind her, a gun in his hand. But she did not break into a run. Nor did she squeal away in her car, running red lights and drawing more attention to herself. In fact, after the FBI’s Steve Powell interviewed bank employees and watched the surveillance tapes, he had no doubt that he was dealing with a professional bank robber. Powell, who grew up in the small Panhandle town of Tulia, eventually noticed that the robber had worn his cowboy hat backward. And he figured that 0

T4096.indb 200

1/18/07 7:19:30 AM

6 201 the beard was fake. But it never occurred to him that the suspect the last wasn’t a man. ride of In December 1991 Peggy Jo, dressed in the same outfit, stole cowboy bob $1,258 from the Savings of America, which was also located in Irving. This time, an eyewitness was able to write down the license plate number of the Grand Prix. But when Powell’s agents tracked the license plate and converged on the owner’s home not far from the bank, they found a lady sitting in her living room who said she had not been out of the house that day. She took them outside to show them her car, which was a red Chevrolet. That’s when she noticed that the license plate was missing. Obviously, the FBI agents said, the bank robber had stolen the license plate earlier that day and put it on his own car to mislead them. A month later, Peggy Jo struck again. This time, she moved to the other side of Dallas, hitting the Texas Heritage Bank in Garland for approximately $3,000. In May 1992 she robbed $5,317 from the Nations Bank in the adjoining suburb of Mesquite. During the robbery, she wisely handed back a stack of bills that contained a hidden dye pack, a small package that is triggered to explode a few seconds after it passes underneath an electronic eye positioned at a bank’s exit, staining the money with permanent ink and sometimes staining the robber himself. By then, Powell had named the robber Cowboy Bob. “And he was making me start to pull my hair out,” he said. “How could this thin, little dried-up cowboy be whipping us this bad, time after time?” In September 1992 Cowboy Bob robbed First Gibraltar Bank in Mesquite of $1,772. Police officers roared up in their squad cars, followed about ten minutes later by several vehicles filled with FBI agents. They tracked the license plate on Cowboy Bob’s car to a Mesquite resident who, predictably, went outside to his driveway to find his license plate missing. Then, while agents were wrapping up their investigation at First Gibraltar, a call came in that Mesquite’s First Interstate Bank, about a mile away, had just been robbed by a man in a beard, a cowboy hat, a leather coat, and gloves. And he had hit the jackpot, escaping with $13,706. He was so pleased, the teller said, that

T4096.indb 201

1/18/07 7:19:30 AM

6 Skip he gave her a kind of salute as he left, tipping his hat with his Hollandsworth gloved hand. “Cowboy Bob is at it again!” shouted Powell, jumping into his car and racing toward First Interstate. “Son of a bitch!” This time the license plate that an eyewitness saw on Cowboy Bob’s brown Pontiac Grand Prix was traced to a man named Pete Tallas. FBI agents found Tallas at work at a Ford auto parts factory in nearby Carrollton. “The agents asked me if I owned a Grand Prix with a certain license plate number, and I said, ‘That’s right,’ ” recalled Peggy Jo’s brother. “I told them I had given it to my mother and Peggy Jo a year or so back because they couldn’t afford a car. They said, ‘It was just used in a bank robbery.’ I said, ‘Bullshit, that car can’t go fast enough.’” Pete gave the FBI the address of Helen and Peggy Jo’s apartment. When Powell and the other agents arrived, they spotted the car in the parking lot. As they discussed the possibility of storming the apartment and catching Cowboy Bob red-handed, they saw a woman in shorts and a T-shirt walk toward the car. Powell stared at her. “It must be Cowboy Bob’s girlfriend,” he murmured to the other agents. They allowed her to drive away from the apartment so that the assumed boyfriend wouldn’t see them. When they finally stopped her around the corner, Powell introduced himself to the woman, who politely said hello and told him her name was Peggy Jo Tallas. She admitted that the car was hers, and she said she had driven it earlier that morning to a nursery to buy fertilizer. Powell opened the trunk of the car: There was, indeed, a bag of fertilizer. He asked her if he could look around her apartment. For a moment, just a brief moment, she paused. No one was in the apartment, she said, except for her sick mother. Helen slowly eased herself out of her bed after she heard the doorbell ring and walked to the front door. She opened it and screamed as the FBI agents darted past her, their guns drawn. They moved into Peggy Jo’s bedroom. Her bed was immaculately made, and all of her clothes were hanging neatly in her closet. “What the hell?” said one agent. Then, looking on the top shelf in her closet, another agent saw the Styrofoam mannequin’s head with the beard pinned to it. He 202

T4096.indb 202

1/18/07 7:19:30 AM

6 203 noticed the cowboy hat. When he looked under the bed, he saw a the last bag full of money. ride of “Come on, Peggy Jo, you’re hiding a man from us,” Powell said. cowboy bob She gave him a look. “There isn’t any man,” she said. “I promise you that.” Powell kept studying her. That’s when he noticed the spots of gray dye in her hair and the faint splotches of glue above her lip. “I’ll be damned,” he said as he pulled out his handcuffs. He read Peggy Jo her rights and drove her to the downtown FBI office, where other agents were waiting. “Gentlemen,” Powell said, “Cowboy Bob is actually Cowboy Babette.” the newspapers, of course, had a field day, writing story after story about the cross-dressing bank robber who used her mother’s apartment as a hideout. The reporters hunted down Peggy Jo’s relatives, but they refused to say anything, in large part because they were so stunned about what Peggy Jo had been doing. “We had absolutely no idea,” Michelle said. “We asked Helen if she knew what Aunt Peggy had been doing, and she kept saying, ‘Robbing banks? Peggy was robbing banks?’ ” Powell himself, realizing he had the case of a lifetime, did what he could to get Peggy Jo to talk. He wanted to know how she had learned to rob banks in the first place. He also wanted to know why she had decided to rob two banks in one day and why, before the second robbery, she didn’t take the time to steal another license plate. Had she gotten so cocky that she thought the FBI would never catch her? “If she had just followed her usual routine,” Powell later said, “we could still very well be wondering who Cowboy Bob really was.” But Peggy Jo wouldn’t tell him anything. Nor would she say much to her court-appointed attorney, who then hired Richard Schmitt, a psychologist who specialized in evaluating criminals, to interview her. During their session, she eventually admitted that she had decided to rob a bank to pay for her mother’s medications. But she certainly had no intention of robbing a second bank, she said. Or a third or a fourth, she continued, pulling out a cigarette and lighting it. Schmitt could not take his eyes off her. Up until that point, he had interviewed approximately fifty bank robbers, all of them

T4096.indb 203

1/18/07 7:19:31 AM

6 Skip male. He had never before interviewed what he described as “a nice, Hollandsworth normal-looking woman” who crossed her legs while she talked with him. “So why did you keep robbing banks?” he asked her. But Peggy Jo never answered. She kept staring at a wall, shrugging her shoulders and shaking her head as if she wasn’t sure what else to tell him. “I guess it was hard for her to admit just how much fun she had being a bank robber,” Cherry said. Perhaps because she carried out her crimes without using weapons—or perhaps because the judge agreed with the defense attorney’s argument that Peggy Jo’s behavior was “completely out of character”—she received a mild, 33-month sentence. Michelle later went to see her at the federal prison in Bryan. “I knew that she was unhappy, confined to a cell most of the day,” Michelle said. “But she came out smiling, and she asked me all about me and my daughter. She didn’t say anything to me about the bank robberies. She didn’t say a single word. She just said it was something that would never happen again.” A true-crime author contacted Peggy Jo while she was in prison, asking her to collaborate on a book and perhaps sell it to Hollywood and make a lot of money, but she turned him down. “She told me she didn’t want to embarrass her family with more publicity,” Cherry said. “And I think she also was determined to put that part of her life behind her.” Peggy Jo did try to put it behind her. By the mid-nineties she was out of prison and back living with her mother. To avoid the stares of their neighbors at the apartment complex, they moved to a two-bedroom townhome in Garland, 1,120 square feet in size, with a tiny backyard. She spent most of her time with her mother, whose hands by then were shaking so badly that she couldn’t hold her own silverware. Every night, she gave her mother a bath and put her to bed. Then Peggy Jo sat alone in her bedroom, usually watching nature documentaries on the Discovery Channel until late at night. For a while she worked as a telemarketer, going to an office for a few hours a day and making cold calls, offering whoever answered the phone the opportunity to receive a catalog filled with lovely home decorative items. She later found a job as a cashier 204

4

T4096.indb 204

1/18/07 7:19:31 AM

6 205 at the Harbor Bay Marina, at Lake Ray Hubbard, just outside the last Dallas, selling customers everything from coolers to minnows to ride of those key chains that float in the water. “She was one of our best cowboy bob employees,” said Suzy Leslie, who was then a manager at the marina. “Not once did the money in the cash register come up short on her shift. And what I loved about Peggy Jo was that she checked on the poorer customers. She was constantly pulling out her own money to help some of the families pay for bait. She used to visit with a poor Vietnamese woman who came out here to fish off the docks for her family’s supper. There was a man who came out here who was deaf, and Peggy would write down questions on a sheet of paper, asking him if there was anything he needed. And I know she used to give some money to a man out here who had been in prison and was still down on his luck. One day I asked her why she did that, and she said, ‘Well, we all got a past, you know.’” Occasionally, at the end of the day, some man at the marina would ask Peggy Jo if she’d like to join him for a cocktail at Weekends, a little restaurant nearby that had a dance floor next to the bar. But she’d turn him down. She’d tell him she needed to get back to her house to look after her mother. Maybe next time, she’d say, giving the man an apologetic smile. Then she’d sweep the floors, take one more stroll around the docks, watch the sun set, and head for her car. Once again, a year passed, and then another. Peggy Jo lost touch with her old friends like Cherry and Karen. Her sister, Nancy, died of breast cancer, and in December 2002 Helen died in her sleep at the age of 83. Peggy Jo was at her mother’s bedside, holding her hand. “She could have put her mother in a nursing home a long time ago,” said Suzy, who by then had become close friends with Peggy Jo. “But when we talked up at the marina, she said to me that she wanted her mother to be at home, to live out her last years in dignity, sleeping in her own bed. She was relieved her mother was no longer in pain, yet you could tell she was still heartbroken. She couldn’t talk about Helen without tears coming to her eyes.” At Helen’s funeral, Peggy Jo and her brother reconciled. She later went to the annual Christmas dinner that Pete and his wife put on for the Tallas family. “She was friendly to all of us, she loved

T4096.indb 205

1/18/07 7:19:31 AM

6 Skip on the kids, and when I asked her what she was going to do now, Hollandsworth she said she had some plans,” Pete said. “But she never told me what they were.” 206

in the spring of 2004 Peggy Jo approached a man at the marina who was selling a Frontier RV. She gave him $5,900 in cash and promised to pay him $500 more at a later date. She told Suzy that the time had come to move on. “She said she was going to put some money together and head down to Padre Island or to Mexico and live on the beach like she had always wanted to,” Suzy recalled. “She told me I ought to come along while I had the chance, before life ran out on us. I’ll never forget her saying that. ‘Before life ran out on us.’ ” Peggy Jo sold or gave away all of the furniture in her townhome, and she sold an old Volvo she had been driving. She carried a few potted plants over to a neighbor’s front porch, and then she drove away in her RV—“Just flew the coop,” one neighbor later said. For a few weeks, she stayed at a public park near Lake Ray Hubbard, spending part of the day fishing or walking along the shore, watching the herons fly across the water. Occasionally, Michelle came out in the late afternoons to visit. She and Peggy Jo would sit on maroon folding chairs next to the RV. Peggy would drink Pepsi out of a coffee cup and smoke Merit menthol cigarettes, grinding them out in a little ashtray she held in her hand. “Sometimes she’d turn on the radio and listen to old rock and roll from her younger days, groups like Lynyrd Skynyrd and Bob Seger,” Michelle said. “She’d watch the sun set and then she’d go inside the RV and pull out a skillet and cook up some fajita meat with chopped onions. You know, it wouldn’t have been the life I would have chosen for myself, but I couldn’t help but admire her, doing her own thing and doing it her way. She loved being completely free.” In the late summer of 2004, Peggy Jo left a telephone message for Carla Dunlap, another friend from the marina. When Carla had developed breast cancer the previous year, Peggy Jo had checked on her nearly every day and had brought her a cap to wear when her hair began to fall out from chemotherapy. “On the

T4096.indb 206

1/18/07 7:19:31 AM

6 207 message, she asked how I was doing and she said she was about to the last hit the road,” Carla said. “And then she said, ‘And no matter what ride of happens to me, always remember that I love you.’ ” cowboy bob Concerned, Carla’s husband, John, drove out to the park to see if he could find her and perhaps give her some money, but she was already gone. where peggy jo went still remains the subject of great speculation. Months later, people would say that they had seen her at Lake Texoma and Lake Lavon. Others would say they had seen her driving her RV through various East Texas towns. And some would say they had seen her in Tyler in October 2004, right about the time that an odd bank robbery occurred at the small Guaranty Bank on the southern edge of the city. According to the tellers, the robber was an older man with a round stomach and a scraggly mustache; he wore a dark floppy hat, baggy clothes, and gloves. He placed a green canvas bag on the counter and said, “All your money. No bait bills. No blow-up money.” Then, after receiving a stack of cash (the authorities would not say exactly how much), he walked out of the bank and down a street. No one got a glimpse of his getaway vehicle. One of the tellers did tell FBI agents that she was struck by the softness of the robber’s voice; it sounded a bit feminine. What’s more, the teller said, the robber’s mustache appeared to have been glued on, and his stomach looked more padded than real. Perhaps if Steve Powell was still working for the FBI, he might have had an idea who had committed the robbery. But by then he was retired, living on a ranch outside Lubbock, occasionally teaching seminars to bank employees about how to spot a bank robber. At the end of each seminar, he’d pass around a photo of Cowboy Bob and tell her story with a certain relish, like a man reminiscing about his first lover. The agents who were investigating this robbery, however, brought in an older male suspect to take a lie detector test. After he passed with flying colors, they began investigating other men. If they had been told that their suspect was a sixty-year-old spinster who drove an RV with pretty purple curtains, they would have laughed out loud.

T4096.indb 207

1/18/07 7:19:32 AM

6 Peggy Jo’s own family certainly had no suspicions that she had Skip Hollandsworth returned to her secret life. Periodically, throughout the fall of 2004 and the early months of 2005, she would call them from pay phones, telling them she was doing just fine. One afternoon, Michelle ran into Peggy Jo at a Wal-Mart in Garland where Peggy Jo was picking up supplies—a couple cartons of cigarettes, some paper towels, and fajita meat. “She seemed to be in great spirits,” Michelle said. And this past May—May 4, to be exact—Pete happened to be in Kaufman County, east of Dallas, when he heard that Peggy Jo’s RV was parked next to a small lake on a farm owned by a relative. “I drove out to see her, and we spent about an hour together,” Pete said. “She pulled out a bunch of family photos from a big old box, and we looked at all of them. I’ve got to tell you, we had a really good time, the two of us. Then she told me she was going to be packing up shortly and leaving, hitting the road, going on one of her adventures. I said, ‘You okay, Peggy Jo?’ And she hugged me and said she was happy, and then I said, ‘See you later.’” 208

the next morning, Peggy Jo woke up and made her bed, smoothing out the wrinkles in the sheets and spreading a fake sheepskin blanket over the mattress, making sure the bottom edge of the blanket was as straight as a ruler. Nearby, hanging from two wooden rods, were her nicer clothes: a few pairs of blue jeans, a couple pairs of khaki pants, and six blouses, all of them neatly ironed. But on this particular morning, she put on a black longsleeved shirt and a pair of black pants that she kept in a plastic drawer. From a shelf, she grabbed a sandwich baggie filled with makeup and applied some lipstick and rouge to her face, and she ran a brush through her graying hair. She looked at herself in a mirror that she kept on another shelf, right next to some photos of young children with freckles and lopsided grins—her grandnieces and grandnephews—and she then made her way to the front of the RV, where she kept a variety of sunglasses and wide-brimmed hats along with a couple of black wigs and hair extensions. After choosing a large black straw hat that came down over her forehead and a pair of black sunglasses that practically covered the top half of her face, Peggy Jo slipped into the driver’s seat and drove to Tyler, parking her RV next to a Jack in the Box, which

T4096.indb 208

1/18/07 7:19:32 AM

6 209 happened to be across the street from Guaranty Bank, the very the last bank that had been robbed the previous October. Holding a black ride of satchel, she stood at the street corner waiting for the traffic light cowboy bob to change; then she headed for the bank. She walked through the front door, past a sign in the lobby that read “You Need the Right Tools to Build Your Dreams,” and said to the teller, “This is a robbery. I need all of your money. Don’t set any alarms.” The teller, a young woman barely out of her teens, gave Peggy Jo everything she had in her drawer: $11,241. Peggy Jo’s heart had to have started racing. This was big. This was like the robbery back in Mesquite in 1992. All she had to do was get out of there and head south, and she could finally get to Mexico and start her new life on a beach. In her haste to get away, however, she made one simple mistake. She didn’t check for a dye pack. It exploded as soon as she walked out the door, covering the money with red ink. A plume of red smoke also began to rise from the satchel as she headed back across the street, dodging traffic to get to her RV. The smoking satchel caught the attention of a TXU crew working in cherry-picking buckets above the street. A young Tyler couple named Chris and Courtney Smith, who were driving away with their children from a nearby Wal-Mart, also saw Peggy Jo. Because of her disguise, however, they couldn’t tell whether they were watching a woman or a man dressed as a woman. “I bet that person robbed a bank,” Courtney said, dialing 911 on her cell phone while Chris whipped the car around to follow Peggy Jo, ordering the children in the backseat to keep their heads down. It just so happened that a group of FBI agents and Tyler police officers were out in their cars that very morning, cruising the streets. They literally were searching for bank robbers. Three banks had been robbed recently in the Tyler area, and the authorities believed that two or three young black men were the robbers. As a matter of fact, when the police radios crackled with the news about Guaranty Bank, Jeff Millslagle, the burly senior agent in charge of the FBI’s Tyler office, had just begun to interview a young black man in the northern part of the city who had been caught driving a stolen car. Millslagle and other FBI agents raced south in their unmarked SUVs. Officers from the Tyler 2

T4096.indb 209

1/18/07 7:19:32 AM

6 Skip Police Department also came roaring toward the bank, their Hollandsworth sirens screaming, as did state troopers from the Department of Public Safety. Within minutes, a posse of law enforcement officers and such curious citizens as Chris and Courtney Smith and their children were right behind Peggy Jo as she headed down the highway. Because the RV was going up a hill, it was not able to get above the speed limit. Its gears grinding, it lumbered past the Colonial Hills Baptist Church, the Heritage Baptist Church, a movie theater, and a skating rink. Exhaust billowed out of the tailpipe and floated over a field of bluebonnets blooming in the highway’s median. Peggy Jo made one last-ditch attempt to get away, suddenly hitting the brakes and turning the RV into a quiet, middle-class subdivision at the edge of the city. She immediately turned again, onto the poetically named Irish Moss Drive. Before she could get to the end of that street, however, a couple of police cars raced past the RV, boxing it in. Officers in bulletproof vests leaped out of their cars, some holding handguns, a few holding rifles. One officer crouched near an azalea bush; another bent down behind a tree. One of the residents on Irish Moss Drive grabbed his video camera and stood in his doorway to film whatever was going to happen next. The truth was that no one was exactly sure who was in the RV. The police dispatcher had reported that the bank robber was possibly a white female, but the officers could not rule out that the robber was one of their black suspects who had disguised himself as a woman. Nor could they rule out the possibility that other members of the bank-robbing gang were inside the RV, all of them wielding guns. Minutes ticked by. Because the curtains were pulled across the windows, the officers were unable to see inside. Some of those close to the RV were saying the things that officers always say in such situations. “Come on out, now.” “You’re surrounded.” “Just make it easy on yourself.” From what could later be determined, she sat at the RV’s little kitchen table, smoking a Merit, the smoke drifting from her nostrils. On the floor next to the table was her black satchel, the 210

T4096.indb 210

1/18/07 7:19:32 AM

6 211 money useless, almost all of it stained red. A couple of feet away the last from the satchel was her fishing pole, and beside the pole was her ride of box of family photos. cowboy bob Who knows what she thought about during those moments? Surely she had to have realized that she was facing a long prison sentence. Maybe, if she was lucky, she would get a couple of hours a day in a prison yard where she could feel the sun against her face. Maybe, if she was lucky, she would be released before she died. A few more minutes passed. Finally, Peggy Jo went back to her bedroom, where a .357 Magnum loaded with hollow point bullets was hidden underneath a pillow. But she didn’t touch that gun. Instead, she picked up a toy pistol that she also kept in the bedroom. She had bought it, apparently, to carry with her in case she ever needed to threaten a bank employee in a future robbery. She walked to the door and opened it, her hands at her side. The police officers who had surrounded the RV could not believe what they were seeing: an unassuming woman in a wide-brimmed hat. A woman who was the age of their grandmothers. “You’re going to have to kill me,” she said. “Ma’am, you don’t have to do this,” replied one of the officers, a young man who would later be advised by his superiors to seek counseling for the guilt that would haunt him. “You mean to tell me if I come out of here with a gun and point it at y’all, you’re not going to shoot me?” “Please don’t. Please don’t do that,” yelled another officer. But then she took a step out of the RV, and from the doorway her hand emerged, holding the toy pistol. Just as she began to lower it, four officers fired, the sound of the shots echoing off the surrounding houses and Peggy Jo’s RV. The bullets came at her all at once, hitting her at nearly the same time, and she didn’t even stagger. She fell forward, like a stalk of celery being snapped. Once she hit the ground, however, she somehow found the strength to pull off her sunglasses. For a moment, she lifted her head. That May morning, the light was like honey. A soft breeze blew across the yard. From somewhere came the sound of pigeons

T4096.indb 211

1/18/07 7:19:33 AM

6 Skip cooing. Peggy Jo looked up at the dense new foliage of a sweet gum Hollandsworth tree that rose above her. Then she closed her eyes and died. 212

still assuming that accomplices were in the RV, a police SWAT team shot tear gas canisters through the windows and stormed through the front door, stepping over her fishing pole and box of photos and turning toward the bedroom. They stared at the bed, still perfectly made up, and at a couple of glass dolphin sculptures on the windowsill. After the “all clear” was announced, one officer found a small baggie of marijuana and another officer found her purse, which contained $38 in cash and her driver’s license. The FBI’s Millslagle ran a records check and realized that the dead woman was none other than Cowboy Bob. He called Steve Powell at his ranch and left him a message, saying he had some bad news about his old nemesis. Powell called back. “Say it ain’t so,” he said almost wistfully. “Yeah, I’m afraid we killed Peggy Jo,” Millslagle said. For the FBI, of course, the biggest question was how many other banks had Peggy Jo robbed. Some agents wondered if she had tried a bank robbery or two back in the sixties, when she was a freewheeling young woman tooling around Dallas in her burgundy Fiat. Others wondered if she had begun her career in the seventies, when she had been caught stealing the pickup. It is not an uncommon practice, after all, for a bank robber to avoid detection by using a stolen car as a getaway vehicle and then later abandoning it. Still others wondered if she had returned to robbing banks soon after her release from prison. After studying the evidence from the October 2004 robbery at Guaranty Bank, Millslagle did conclude that Peggy Jo was the robber. But that only led to other questions. Why had she gone back to that bank? Was she imitating her heroes Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who had once robbed the same train twice? And why didn’t she dress as a man for that second Guaranty robbery? Why also did she decide to speak to the teller instead of handing the teller a note? Was she hoping that FBI agents would study the bank’s surveillance tapes and realize she had returned? Meanwhile, newspaper and television reporters once again hunted down Peggy Jo’s relatives. But they stayed silent. “I didn’t

T4096.indb 212

1/18/07 7:19:33 AM

6 213 know what to tell them,” said Pete, who’s now retired and living in the last Plano. “I mean, none of it made the slightest bit of sense. Surely ride of Peggy Jo had to know that if she was in some kind of financial jam cowboy bob again, we would have helped her out.” About thirty members of the Tallas family and a few of Peggy Jo’s friends gathered at the Kaufman city cemetery for a private burial service. In an impromptu eulogy, Michelle told a story about Peggy Jo’s adopting a wounded duck at the marina and naming it Bernice. One of Michelle’s brothers read some Scripture and then said, “I am certain that in the few minutes leading up to her death, as she sat in her RV contemplating her fate, Peg was making peace with God.” There was a long silence. Michelle and Karen covered their faces with their hands and wept. “Okay, I guess we’re done,” said Pete, nodding at the undertaker, walking away before anyone could see the strain on his face. Cherry Young, still living in Oklahoma, wasn’t at the funeral. She didn’t hear about Peggy Jo’s death until August, when she called Pete to catch up. “There still isn’t a night that goes by that I don’t wake up and think about her,” Cherry said. “Sometimes I can’t get over the sadness that she’s gone. But then I think about her walking out of that bank, sixty years old, that bag full of money, and I have to say that she went out doing what she loved. We’ll never understand it, but she was doing exactly what she loved. I wish I could write her a note and say, ‘Good for you, my sweet Peg. Good for you.’ ”

6 November 2005

T4096.indb 213

1/18/07 7:19:33 AM

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

the family man

6

sk ip holl andsworth

A

s a churchgoing father with a loving wife, four healthy kids, and a comfortable two-story house in one of Dallas’s tidiest suburban enclaves, Todd Becker did everything he could to set a good example for his less fortunate siblings. He even went so far as to invite them into his successful business: stealing millions of dollars out of safes throughout Florida and Texas.

when mothers saw todd becker in the carpool line at the elementary school in Stonebridge Ranch, an upscale bedroom community in McKinney, north of Dallas, they’d occasionally stop chatting on their cell phones and do a double take. Becker was a good-looking young guy in his early thirties, with neatly cut hair and brown eyes. He wore khaki pants and crisp T-shirts. He had a pleasant smile, his teeth very white and straight. But it wasn’t his looks, the mothers later said, that were the most attractive part about him. Around Stonebridge Ranch, Todd Becker was known as the family man, a devoted husband who always took the time to eat lunch with his sweet blond wife, Cathy, and a doting father who coached his children’s soccer teams and took them to their ballet lessons. Some of the mothers were impressed that he liked to go to the school and read stories to his children’s classes. Others noted that he was happy to let the neighborhood kids swim in his backyard pool or jump on the trampoline. He was

T4096.indb 215

1/18/07 7:19:33 AM

6 Skip pleasant and soft-spoken, never one to talk too much about himself. Hollandsworth He rarely had more than a beer or two at parties. He took his family to Sunday services at the Lutheran church not far from his home, and at the Stonebridge Country Club, where he was one of the top tennis players, he never threw his racket when he was losing. “Let’s face it,” one mother would later say. “A lot of women around Stonebridge Ranch wished their own husbands were more like Todd.” At his $280,000 two-story custom-built home on Fallen Leaf Lane, in Stonebridge’s Autumn Ridge neighborhood, where he had turned the living room into an extra playroom for the kids, Becker always led the family in a prayer at dinner. At bedtime, he would kiss his children good-night and tell them to sleep well. He would kiss his wife good-night and tell her to sleep well too. Then, he would get into his minivan or his Ford Expedition, back out of the driveway, and head off to commit some of the most daring, professionally executed burglaries that law enforcement authorities have ever seen. Todd Becker made his living by stealing the cash out of safes from stores, restaurants, and businesses throughout Texas and Florida, where he had lived before moving to Texas. He and his small band of employees would pry the safes open with crowbars, slam them apart with sledgehammers, hack into them with concrete saws, or cut them open with torches. Many times they’d yank the entire safe out of the floor and carry it away to be opened at a more discreet location, occasionally inside Becker’s own garage. Becker would split up the loot with his team and then take his cut to his bedroom, hiding the money under some clothes in his closet. He’d shower, comb his hair, and be downstairs by the time his kids awakened, ready to fix them pancakes and drive them to school. When a torrent of gun-wielding police officers arrived at his house one morning in late 2002, bursting through his front door and stepping over children’s toys to arrest him, his neighbors stood in their front yards, cups of coffee in their hands, their mouths open. A few of them later told the cops that they had made a terrible mistake. “We said there is no way he could be a thief,” one neighbor recalled. “He’s just like the rest of us.” A few months ago, while the 33-year-old Becker was still out on bond, he allowed me to come see him. When I walked up to his 216

T4096.indb 216

1/18/07 7:19:34 AM

6 217 house, he greeted me at the door, gave me a friendly handshake, the family and said with a half-smile, “Well, here’s my crime den.” He led man me to his dining room table, made of burnished cherry, while his youngest daughter, aged two, watched Barney in the family room and Cathy, who’s 35, made coffee. It was a couple of weeks before Halloween, and Cathy had decorated the front of their house, as she did every year, with pumpkins and plastic skeletons hanging from a tree and a sign on the front door that read “Autumn Greetings From the Beckers.” Next to the sewing machine in the kitchen were Halloween costumes that she was making for their four children. “Usually, I’m in charge of the neighborhood Halloween parade,” she told me with a slight shrug of her shoulders. “But this year I thought someone else should do it.” As she talked, Becker flipped through a scrapbook to a page that showed pictures of his wife and children in costumes from a previous Halloween parade, cheerfully marching down the street with their neighbors. Then he turned the page and showed me photos of birthday parties that he and Cathy had thrown for their kids. “Not what you were expecting, huh?” Becker asked me. Nor the authorities. According to police detectives, burglars are typically impoverished young males looking for money to buy drugs. Wearing sweatshirts with hoods, they amateurishly smash through store windows and grab what they can while the alarms are blaring. “You don’t find these guys meticulously planning out their crimes so that they can live an all-American lifestyle in a nice neighborhood with a nice family,” said Bill Hardman, a detective from Fort Pierce, Florida, one of the many cities plagued by Becker. “They want crack or guns. But Todd Becker was one of a kind—a clean-cut yuppie daddy who bought dolls for his children.” What especially intrigued the cops about Becker was the way he chose his accomplices. Like the Old West outlaw Jesse James, who also had a love of snatching money out of safes and strongboxes, Becker relied mostly on kinfolk to help him: his two half brothers, his brother-in-law, a step-nephew, and a childhood friend. Unlike Jesse James, however, he didn’t choose them because they were experienced criminals or good with guns. (Becker didn’t allow weapons of any kind to be used during his burglaries. He didn’t even allow guns in his home, fearing that his children might

T4096.indb 217

1/18/07 7:19:34 AM

6 Skip find them and accidentally shoot themselves.) He picked relatives Hollandsworth and friends who happened to be down on their luck, involved in unhappy relationships, or stuck in dead-end jobs, if they had jobs at all. One brother who worked for Becker had a job on the side performing as an “entertainer” on a subscription Internet sex site, and another worked part-time as a Santa’s helper at a mall. His childhood friend was battling a weight problem. Becker even used his own sister Kim, who was dancing at a strip club in Florida, to work as a lookout on one of his burglaries, telling her that he hoped the money she made on the venture would encourage her to quit stripping and lead a more stable life. “Maybe to someone else, none of this makes any sense, but you’ve got to understand Todd,” said Kim, a perky single mother of five. “He had created this really happy life for himself in the suburbs, with church and soccer and good schools and all that. And I think he wanted all the rest of us in his family to experience what he had.” Indeed, Becker was a new kind of American criminal, so intent on improving his life and the lives of his fellow family members that he would often tune the radio in his vehicle to the nationally syndicated show of self-help counselor Dr. Laura Schlessinger as he drove through various shopping centers with his team, scouting out potential businesses to rob. He talked to his accomplices about the dangers of drinking and drug abuse. He encouraged them to save their money for the future. “I really thought I was helping out everyone who went to work for me, helping them put some money together and get a new start with their lives,” Becker told me, staring out his dining room window. “It’s still hard to believe just how it all turned out.” 218

he was literally an altar boy at a Lutheran church in Port St. Lucie, the small city on Florida’s east coast where he was raised. When he signed up for junior tennis tournaments, he would inform the tournament directors that he could not play matches on Sunday mornings because he had to attend church. “Todd never smoked cigarettes, and he would have only one beer at high school parties,” recalled one of his Florida friends, Jeff Drock. “And he wouldn’t even drink that.” What amazed almost everyone who got to know Todd Becker during his teenage years

T4096.indb 218

1/18/07 7:19:34 AM

6 219 was that he never tried to have sex with girls. He said that he the family wanted to save himself for marriage. man If he had gone into the ministry, none of his childhood friends would have been surprised. But during Becker’s adolescence, his father, William Becker, began having run-ins with the law. A former police officer from Detroit, the elder Becker had quit the force in the sixties to sell encyclopedias door-to-door, then moved to Florida to sell video games during the era when Pac-Man and Donkey Kong were the biggest sellers. Although he had been decorated as a cop for fighting crime, he apparently went the other way when it came to making money as a salesman. He spent some time in jail for business fraud during Becker’s youth, and when he got out, he had trouble finding steady employment. While Becker’s father went through his legal problems, Becker’s mother worked at Domino’s delivering pizzas, but her income was hardly adequate to support herself and her three children, of whom Becker was the eldest. “I think the family was evicted out of a couple of houses,” said Todd’s half brother Dwayne Becker, one of four sons from William Becker’s first marriage who were raised by their mother in another home. “And I remember Todd said he was never going to live this way again, and maybe that explains him a little.” Becker told me he began to steal simply to help out his family. He swiped tennis balls from a tennis club because he didn’t want his mother to use her money on him. To pay for gasoline for his car, he stole money from a country club. By his junior year in high school, he was stealing radar detectors out of cars and selling them for $50 to $60 each and taking his siblings to the mall to buy clothes. Two years later, Becker enrolled at the University of Central Florida, in Orlando, on a tennis scholarship. But after hurting his neck, he quit the team and dropped out of school in 1989, just after his freshman year. He returned to Port St. Lucie to attend junior college, where he ran across a guy who told him that he knew about some Apple computers that could be stolen from a warehouse. “That was when Apple computers cost four thousand dollars, which sure beat radar detectors,” Becker said. Becker did get arrested a couple of times in his late teens and early twenties, but either the charges were dropped or he was given

T4096.indb 219

1/18/07 7:19:34 AM

6 Skip a minor probated sentence. When he met Cathy, in 1992, at a Hollandsworth nightclub on the beach frequented by college students, he told her on their first date about his past burglaries. But he also talked about his love for family and his intentions to go straight. Cathy had been raised in West Texas by her mother after her father, a crop duster, had died in a plane crash. She too wanted a stable family life after having been moved from home to home, and she found herself drawn to Becker’s old-fashioned sincerity, especially when he told her his goal was to own a family-friendly business, like a Chuck E. Cheese. “Todd really wanted to be Ward Cleaver, and he wanted Cathy to be June,” said another of Becker’s half brothers, Bill Becker. “And they lived in the perfect community, where they could walk around at night and not have to worry about the wrong elements.” Still, Becker could not get away from the fact that he possessed a special gift for burglary. To pay for his and Cathy’s 1993 wedding, for instance, he slipped out one night and quickly burglarized a couple of computer stores. Six months after the marriage, when he learned Cathy was pregnant, he committed a few more burglaries so they could rent a nice house in a quiet neighborhood on the Florida coast. Cathy believed Becker when he kept promising that his next burglary would be his last, but as criminals like to say when describing their pasts, one thing led to another, and soon Becker was a full-time burglar, focusing on computer companies located in out-of-the-way business parks throughout Florida. He asked Dwayne, a part-time construction worker who was then hanging out at bars in the afternoons, drinking and playing darts, to help him break into businesses, and he persuaded Bill, a Grizzly Adams look-alike who had been unsuccessfully trying to build a career as a manager of Holiday Inn restaurants, to allow the stolen computers to be stored in his garage. Although he could have found other professional burglars to work as his accomplices, Becker told me that he decided to work with family members and friends because he felt they would not squeal on anyone else if they ever got arrested. He said he also thought it might be nice to boost the fortunes of his family, especially those Beckers who were facing personal or financial challenges. As a favor to his sister Kim, Becker asked her 220

T4096.indb 220

1/18/07 7:19:35 AM

6 221 husband, Danny Birtwell, an electrician who had shown little com- the family petence in the workforce—“He was a complete idiot,” Kim told man me—to work with him. And he also recruited a friend from his old high school tennis team, Paulo Rodrigues, who had become somewhat disheartened because he was seriously overweight (Becker estimated he weighed three hundred pounds) and because he had a rather mundane job as a salesman at Mattress Giant. It seemed to be the unlikeliest of operations, this partnership between a fastidious young suburban dad and his unambitious relatives. Initially, they looked more like the Marx Brothers than Butch Cassidy’s Wild Bunch. The beer-drinking Dwayne occasionally broke into the wrong businesses. Danny once fell off a roof while trying to get into an office building. After one burglary, while the team was unloading the computers from Becker’s car, Danny accidentally locked the keys inside the vehicle. Unwilling to damage his own car, Becker called a locksmith in the middle of the night. When Danny took a break from the burglary business, complaining that he had been working too hard, Becker brought in Kim to work one job with him. She wore a cute sweat suit, brushed her hair back into a ponytail, and hid behind some bushes to look for cops. When Becker was ready to leave with a stack of computers, she sprinted to the minivan, her enhanced breasts bouncing like beach balls. Against all odds, Becker kept himself and his employees one step ahead of the cops. He taught his guys how to pry open the front door of a business with a crowbar without shattering the glass or tearing the door frame, thus allowing the door to shut behind them and preventing a cop or security guard driving by from realizing that a burglary was in process. He showed them how to cut certain phone lines, which would disconnect most alarm systems. To make sure they hadn’t tripped a silent alarm, Becker would have everyone pile back into the car after cutting the phone lines, drive fifteen minutes in one direction, and then return. If no police officers had shown up by that time, they would break in. Becker told me that he and his team made $2 million in a tenyear span selling their stolen computers to fences (other criminals who purchase stolen goods). He was doing so much work that police departments all over Florida had begun to share information

T4096.indb 221

1/18/07 7:19:35 AM

6 Skip in an attempt to find the computer thief. Becker figured that the Hollandsworth cops had to be thinking about him: Because of his earlier arrests, his name was in their databases. What’s more, Cathy wanted to find a place for the family to live where they wouldn’t always have to look over their shoulder, a place where they could be anonymous. So Becker did exactly what so many nineteenth-century lawbreakers once did to hide out from the long arm of the law. He moved to Texas. And just like the outlaws of old, Becker decided to hide out on a ranch. 222

well, it was called a ranch. At the edge of almost every large American city there is a development like Stonebridge Ranch: a master-planned community, filled with just the right amenities for the upper middle class, including eighteen-hole golf courses, a large community swimming pool, hike-and-bike trails surrounding man-made ponds, and strategically placed shopping centers. All the neighborhoods are given lofty names (Eldorado, Stone Canyon), and the custom-built houses that line the uncracked streets look nearly identical, with nearly identical trees planted in the front yards and nearly identical SUVs sitting in the driveways. In such communities can be found the newest generation of Americans bonded together by their striving for entitlement. The setting couldn’t have been more perfect for Todd Becker. In 1996, Becker put down $56,000 for his new home, which Cathy loved because it had a second-floor catwalk. (“Perfect for decorating for Christmas,” she told me.) They added a chandelier to the living room, and on a dining room wall they hung vases from which poured fake ivy. On another wall they placed photos of themselves holding each of their children. “He was a very caring, loving neighbor, friendly to everyone,” said Kathy Scherer, who lived on the same street and who believed Becker’s story that he worked in “computer consulting,” one of those nineties catchall phrases that could mean absolutely anything. He helped clean up one neighbor’s house when it was toilet-papered by some kids. He used his extra-long ladder to help another neighbor put up Christmas lights. He tracked down another neighbor at work to let him know that his burglar alarm was going off and that he’d be happy to check the house out for him. Parents appreciated the way

T4096.indb 222

1/18/07 7:19:35 AM

6 223 he never yelled at the kids on the soccer teams he helped coach, the family and the elders at the Lutheran church near the Becker home ap- man preciated the $500 checks he deposited in the collection plate. Cathy, meanwhile, babysat anytime someone needed her. She generously gave money to a friend on the block who was running in a charity race to raise funds for breast cancer research. She taught vacation Bible school at the church, and she made sure to invite the neighborhood kids over for her children’s birthday parties, for which she brought in petting zoos and pony rides. “What can I say? We loved them,” said neighbor Jodi Anderson. “My husband works for a defense contractor, and he used to be in the Navy, so he’s trained to be a little skeptical of people. He can always spot the bad seed. But he never thought twice about Todd. He told me that he wished he could find a job like Todd’s so he could be around the house more.” Becker still held onto his dream of opening a Chuck E. Cheese’s. He also talked with Cathy about someday owning a Stride Rite children’s shoe store and perhaps a tanning salon. With his new Stonebridge Ranch lifestyle, however, he knew he wouldn’t be going straight anytime soon. On his way to Texas, as a matter of fact, he had committed a couple of computer burglaries in Louisiana and Mississippi to get a jump start on his upcoming mortgage payments. To help out the other members of his family, he used some of his burglary earnings to buy a restaurant near Port St. Lucie called Big Al’s Catfish House, changed the name to Becker Boys Big Al’s, and hired Bill to manage it. But the restaurant failed. He then opened a check-cashing and quick-loan business called Treasure Coast Cash Company, which he had his father run. That company shut down after the State of Florida charged the elder Becker with loan sharking. To cover his debts and to pay his father’s legal fees, Becker found himself forced to carry out even more burglaries, and it wasn’t long before he was flying in his old burglary buddies to help him plunder from Texas’s computer companies. During one job, his brother-in-law Danny stumbled across a small safe in the corner of a store, pulled it from the floor, and carried it out to the minivan. When they got the safe open, they found more than $10,000 inside. Becker, always one to look for new entrepreneurial

T4096.indb 223

1/18/07 7:19:35 AM

6 Skip opportunities, took a breath. His career in crime was about to Hollandsworth take a major step forward. 224

in the annals of american crime, few criminals have been romanticized like those who can get into a safe. Almost since moviemaking began, Hollywood has loved producing films about a gentleman burglar leaning his ear against a safe and trying to decipher its combination. The reality, however, is that safecrackers cannot compete with today’s manufacturers, who can build safes with electronically controlled locks. Bank safes, surrounded by reinforced vaults and state-of-the-art security systems, are virtually impossible to penetrate. But smaller safes and ATMs found inside many businesses can be broken apart or dislodged from their moorings. They can be stolen—which is exactly what Becker decided to do. He did not have to be told that compared with the pilfering of computers, safe-stealing would be a high-risk, noisy business. The sound of a sledgehammer pounding into the bolts holding a safe to the floor or the ear-splitting whine of a gasoline-powered saw slamming into a steel safe could be heard dozens of yards away. What’s more, most businesses with safes—at least safes with substantial money—are located in busy commercial sections of cities rather than remote business parks, increasing the likelihood of eyewitnesses and cops. But as far as Becker could tell, about the only criminals willing to steal safes were stupid kids who would drive stolen pickups through the plate-glass windows of convenience stores and frantically try to dislodge the safe behind the counter before the cops arrived. He became convinced that he could beat the cops by carefully planning his burglaries, spending days scouting locations, looking for stores that his team could get into and then get away from without causing too much disturbance. He studied stores on the Internet to see what kind of cash transactions they did. He particularly looked for stores that cashed payroll checks, as well as stores owned by foreign-born shopkeepers, because they tended not to trust American banks and thus were likely to keep more money in their own safes.

T4096.indb 224

1/18/07 7:19:36 AM

6 225 Becker’s team was also ready to make some more money. Al- the family though Dwayne’s life had improved somewhat through the com- man puter thefts—he had used his earnings to buy a Mercedes—he remained in dicey financial shape. To make extra money, Dwayne’s new girlfriend had persuaded him to perform sex acts with her in front of a camera attached to their computer, which were then shown on an Internet sex site. (Viewers who paid to watch the notparticularly-good-looking couple could e-mail them and request that they try new positions.) Meanwhile, Bill was still having trouble keeping a steady job in the restaurant business, and Danny was still relying on the money Kim made as a topless dancer. Paulo Rodrigues was still fat. Becker brought in one more family member: his step-nephew Julian Gavin, whose mother had married Bill. Julian was a rawboned, chain-smoking country boy who liked to take his mother “mudding” (driving her in his pickup through big mud pits). He was also, by his own admission, a crack cocaine user who had been drifting through life ever since his fiancée had died in a car crash. A concerned Becker told Julian that he could get a new start in life with the money he would make robbing safes. (“Since I had nothing else to lose at the time,” Julian would later tell a police detective, “I took him up on the offer.”) According to police reports, Becker also recruited a Stonebridge Ranch neighbor, 43-year-old Joey Thompson, an unhappy salesman of heavy equipment with no past criminal record. Becker told me that Joey, depressed after losing $60,000 in the stock market, had come to him to talk about new career opportunities. Like Becker, Joey loved Stonebridge Ranch and didn’t want to lose his home. “Whatever you’re doing, I want in,” Becker recalled Joey saying. Taking pity on his sad-sack neighbor, Becker replied, “Well, I’ve got something, but it might not be exactly what you’re expecting.” Becker told his team that he would keep 65 percent of whatever was found in a safe; whoever was working with him on that particular job would receive the rest. (Typically, Becker would commit a burglary with either one or two members of his team.) Becker said he would pay all expenses and that he would purchase all the burglary tools, including two-way radios with headsets so

T4096.indb 225

1/18/07 7:19:36 AM

6 Skip that everyone could remain in contact during the heists. He promHollandsworth ised they would hit the businesses only late at night, when no one would be there, thus avoiding the need to use guns and hold anyone up. And if anyone was arrested, he said, he would pay for his bail and his lawyer. Whether he liked it or not, Becker was coming into his prime as a criminal mastermind. After spending the day substituteteaching for his daughter’s kindergarten class or playing shortstop for a Stonebridge Ranch league softball team, shouting out encouragement to his teammates, he would find himself sitting at his dining room table, sketching diagrams about how he could get into his next target. On Sunday nights, when he and Cathy watched The Sopranos, the HBO series about the fictional mob family that lives in a nice suburban neighborhood in New Jersey, he would instantly spot the mistakes that Tony Soprano and his mobsters were making when they committed their crimes. For his own burglaries, he had his guys wear light-colored T-shirts or polo shirts, along with shorts or regular jeans, because he thought that anyone wearing too much black at night would look suspicious. He rented green or blue minivans for the burglaries because they blended in with traffic and were hard for potential eyewitnesses to remember. He also did all the driving, because he had learned how to stay calm, no matter what, when dealing with the cops. While casing a location in Dallas, for instance, Becker and his team were pulled over by a police officer. Becker lowered the window of the minivan and pleasantly told the officer that he was giving his out-of-town brothers a sightseeing tour. The officer, unable to detect anything suspicious, smiled back and told them to be careful because several burglaries had recently taken place in the area. Regardless of Becker’s ingenuity, it was hard to imagine that the Becker Crew, the name the cops would later give to Becker and his cohorts, would last long enough to make a name for itself. Julian, an eccentric sort, refused to wear baseball caps during the heists—he believed hats made a man go bald—which made him an easier target for identification. Dwayne would get so nervous that he constantly had to stop what he was doing to use the restroom. During one burglary, he unzipped his pants in the middle 226

T4096.indb 226

1/18/07 7:19:36 AM

6 227 of the store and urinated on the floor. During another burglary, the family Paulo tried to lift a safe, lost his balance, fell on his back, and man could not get up without assistance. On another job, the lumbering Paulo ran so slowly during a getaway that Becker was forced to drive toward him in the minivan to pick him up before he collapsed from exhaustion. Becker told me that Danny was not quite focused during burglaries because he was worried about what Kim was doing in his absence. Occasionally, he would call her during a burglary just to make sure that she wasn’t cheating on him with someone from the topless bar. As for Joey Thompson, he happened to own a high-powered torch that could cut through steel safes. Unfortunately, he wasn’t as skilled with it as Becker had hoped. According to Becker, he and Joey broke into a company in Rockwall, a Dallas suburb. While using his torch, Joey burned the entire business to the ground. The Becker Crew split time between Florida and Texas, going after safes in bingo halls, liquor stores, small supermarkets, self-storage businesses, camera shops, clothing outlets, gasoline stations, convenience stores, and restaurants, from Burger Kings to Red Lobsters. (A typical suburbanite, Becker didn’t like to venture into the inner city because he was afraid of gangs.) If a safe could be moved, the Becker Crew would carry it into the back of the minivan, where it would be taken either to Becker’s garage if they were in the Dallas area or to Bill’s garage if they were working along Florida’s east coast. Or sometimes they would dismantle the safe right in the minivan, remove the money, and then dump the safe out the back doors. One time Becker watched his team dump a safe in the parking lot of a Lutheran church in Florida. A Lutheran church! Becker’s very own denomination! “Guys, please, show some respect!” Becker yelled. Becker told me that during 2001 and 2002, he and his crew pulled $650,000 from as many as one hundred safes in Florida and Texas. Sometimes, he said, they would strike three or four times in one night, the money in each safe ranging from a few hundred dollars to $50,000 or more. Other times, weeks would pass before Becker would round up his guys and do a job. During that period, police departments in Texas and Florida were beginning to sense, by the similar way the phone lines were being cut and the front

T4096.indb 227

1/18/07 7:19:36 AM

6 Skip doors carefully opened and the in-store surveillance videotapes Hollandsworth taken, that one group was probably responsible for the sharp increase in safe thefts. At one point, at least thirty local agencies were on the case. But amazingly, despite numerous hair-raising escapes, the Becker Crew was never caught. In one foiled burglary attempt in Texas, in which an alarm was accidentally tripped, Julian escaped from the cops by jumping over a fence, only to find himself in a small pasture where he was chased by an angry horse that kept nipping at his rear end. In Florida, Becker and Julian broke into Norris’s Famous Place for Ribs in Port St. Lucie and came across an unmovable, five-hundred-pound safe. They started cutting it apart with a gasoline-powered saw that Bill had rented for them. But before they could get through the steel walls, they ran out of gasoline. They had Bill bring them a can of gasoline, and then they started again. By daybreak, however, they had worn out their saw blade trying to get into the safe. They drove to Lowe’s hardware store, waited for the store to open so they could purchase a new blade, returned to the scene of the crime, began again, and then saw a restaurant employee arriving. As they were fleeing, Becker suddenly realized that Julian had left the rented saw, which could be traced back to them, in the restaurant. Julian ran back inside, dashed past the startled employee, grabbed the saw, and raced out. As Becker pulled away in the minivan, a few police cars were gathering on the street in front of the restaurant, setting up a morning rush-hour speed trap. The police didn’t realize until Becker was long gone that a burglary had been attempted. 228

when i asked becker if he ever felt remorse about his chosen profession on Sunday mornings, when he was sitting in a church pew with his family, he told me that he constantly prayed for forgiveness. He said he also asked God to let him have one big score, so he could finally quit and fulfill his dream of living the noncriminal life. Although he did buy a few nice things for his family—a Rolex for Cathy and $500 porcelain dolls for his daughters on their birthdays—he was not that big of a spender. He was always trying to save money, he said, for that Chuck E. Cheese franchise. When Becker took the family to Orlando for

T4096.indb 228

1/18/07 7:19:37 AM

6 229 an expensive vacation at Disney World, he told me (and later told the family investigators) that he paid for the trip by having his Stonebridge man Ranch buddy Joey fly there and meet him so that they could burglarize businesses at night after Becker had spent the day taking the children through the Magic Kingdom. As for Cathy, there would be times during her Friday night bunco games with other mothers when the conversation would inevitably turn to the challenges the women were facing in their marriages. Cathy would look searchingly for a moment across the table, not sure what to say. The women believed she simply had no complaints about her life. What she told me, however, was that she lived in constant fear that her husband would someday go to jail. “It preyed on my mind, every day,” she said. “When Todd would leave for the night, I’d lie in bed, unable to sleep, about to throw up every single second.” At one point, Cathy got her residential real estate license and went to work for Coldwell Banker, vainly hoping that she could bring in enough income that her husband would no longer feel a need to steal. She went to a counselor at the Lutheran church, telling him she wasn’t sure how to deal with a problem in her marriage. But when the counselor asked exactly what that problem was, she didn’t dare tell him. To use the self-help vernacular that she would hear on such television shows as Oprah, Cathy was the classic enabler. She had to admit that she loved the kind of life that Todd had provided for her. She could never convince herself that Todd, a man who truly loved his family and did everything he could to make their lives better, was any worse than those corporate executives, plenty of whom lived right there in Stonebridge Ranch, who ignored their kids and kept mistresses on the side and did their own bit of white-collar thievery, bending accounting rules or hiding income from the IRS. She knew that Todd would never harm anyone: After all, he tried to hit only businesses that had insurance, so the owners could recover their losses. And, she liked to point out, if Todd were really that bad of a man, would he go to such trouble to try to improve the lives of those who worked for him? When he flew his accomplices to Texas to do burglaries, for instance, he always invited them to come to his house to play with the children and eat one of Cathy’s home-cooked meals.

T4096.indb 229

1/18/07 7:19:37 AM

6 Skip It was as if he wanted to show them that they too could climb the Hollandsworth ladder to . . . yes, suburban life! (After one dinner at Becker’s home, Julian went outside to smoke a cigarette. A neighbor saw the wiry young man wearing a very un-suburbanish muscle shirt and called the police, thinking the Becker house was being burglarized.) Despite their attempts to get him to change the radio to a rock station during their scouting expeditions, Becker kept playing Dr. Laura, because he believed they could use her no-nonsense advice on improving relationships and raising children. When Dwayne asked Becker to invest $25,000 of his burglary earnings into the Internet sex venture, Becker refused, telling him that he didn’t like those sex sites and that he believed Dwayne needed to do something more productive with himself. The truth was that his lessons didn’t seem to be catching on. Behind his back, the crew called Becker “Ken” and Cathy “Barbie.” Despite Dr. Laura’s admonitions about living an immoral life, the crew still liked to get drunk at topless clubs to celebrate successful burglaries. One night, Julian and the others persuaded Becker to come with them to the Lodge, one of Dallas’s more famous topless nightclubs. For a while, Becker sat uncomfortably in a booth, then he went back outside to sit in his minivan. Julian eventually showed up with a woman he had met and promptly had sex with her nearby on the hood of the woman’s car. Periodically, Julian would shout at the disgusted Becker, “I’m giving her the mustard, baby! I’m giving her the mustard!” What Becker never could have imagined was that his desire to help his brothers would eventually lead to his own arrest. It wasn’t a crack police investigation that exposed Becker. What brought him down was his own perplexing moral code. In July 2002 Dwayne’s girlfriend frantically called the St. Lucie county sheriff ’s department and claimed that Dwayne had hit her and kicked her in the face and taken a six-pack of beer from her refrigerator. After Dwayne was jailed on a charge of aggravated battery, he tried to get Becker to bail him out. Although Becker had promised his co-workers he would always take care of them if anything happened to them during one of his burglaries, he made it clear he was not going to help them 230

T4096.indb 230

1/18/07 7:19:37 AM

6 231 if they got into their own trouble, like a drug arrest. And he was the family certainly not going to help out Dwayne for battering his girlfriend. man “I had had conversations with Dwayne about hitting women,” Becker told me. “I had said to him, ‘What kind of man could do that?’ I was disgusted with Dwayne. So I said no, I’m not bailing him out.” It was a tough decision. Becker knew that Dwayne was already somewhat disenchanted with him because of his lack of interest in his Internet venture. Dwayne had also been arguing with Becker about his share of the burglary proceeds, which he thought needed to be bigger. The fact that Becker would not bail him out was the last straw. An angry Dwayne impulsively contacted a police detective and said that he might know a thing or two about the mysterious safe burglaries that had been occurring around Florida. Indeed, Dwayne was so willing to talk that he forgot to arrange any kind of immunity deal for himself before making his confession. When the cops located Julian and confronted him with the statements Dwayne had made, he did quickly cut a deal, perhaps because a few months earlier he’d been arrested for doing some burglaries on his own. Apparently, Julian had begun to believe he was as good as Becker and no longer needed him. In Orlando, in a single evening, he had attempted to steal the safes of a Dairy Queen, a check-cashing business, and a Steak and Ale—all of them located within a block of one another. An Orlando police officer saw Julian running from the last burglary, drove up beside him, and shot him with a stun gun, causing him to soil his pants. Julian realized that the only way he could avoid prison for his tripleburglary stunt was to betray the very person who had taught him how to do it. And just like that, the Becker Crew was no more. Police officers descended on Todd and Cathy’s dream home, yelling at them, “Where are the safes? Where is the money?” They found only a couple thousand dollars in the bedroom closet and around a hundred dollars in Cathy’s purse, which she told them was money from her daughters’ Girl Scout cookie sales. When Becker’s fiveyear-old son watched the officers lead Becker away, he told his mother that the men were soldiers and that they wanted Becker

T4096.indb 231

1/18/07 7:19:37 AM

6 Skip to go away with them to fight terrorists. Cathy said, “I bet that’s Hollandsworth right,” and then she burst into tears. When police officers in Florida went looking for Bill, they found him working part-time as a Santa’s helper at a mall because he was still having trouble finding a good job in the restaurant business. (He was also a very bad criminal: The cops found one of the stolen safes, which he had been too lazy to discard, in his garage.) As the police approached, he was wearing a Santa’s hat and a bright green vest festooned with decorations of candy canes, telling children to smile for their photo with Santa. According to Bill, the police shouted, “Step away from the Santa booth!” During the arrest of Paulo in another part of Florida, the police found a sculpture of a purple dolphin, titled “Taking Flight,” that had been taken from one of the Florida stores where a safe had been stolen. The sculpture was so beautiful, Paulo later said, that he just had to have it for his living room. Becker was taken to Florida to be booked on state burglary charges. In the jail, he came across Dwayne. “We were sitting there by ourselves,” Becker recalled, “and I said, ‘What did I do to you that was so terrible that you had to do this to me?’ I said, ‘My kids love you—they jump on you. They call you Uncle Dwayne. They jump all over you.’ ” Becker paused, still stunned by the betrayal. “And there was nothing Dwayne could say. Nothing he could say.” 232

for days at stonebridge ranch, people drove past the Becker house to gawk. Neighbors on the street talked about how Becker used to give each of them a nice bottle of wine for Christmas. Parents from the soccer teams that Becker helped coach wondered if the soccer league would let him coach again after he got out of prison. He was, after all, so good with the kids. “We definitely knew what he did was criminal,” said Jodi Anderson, “but we did admire the way he pulled it off. It did take a lot of courage. And it’s pretty hard to get away with something like that for so long in this neighborhood, where everyone knows your business.” Some neighbors withdrew from the Beckers, and one woman on the street told her children they could no longer play with the Becker children because their daddy was a burglar. Cathy told me she was so furious at what the neighbor had said that she marched

T4096.indb 232

1/18/07 7:19:37 AM

6 233 up the street to where the woman and others were gathered one the family evening and shouted, “You hypocrites! I’ve seen you get drunk in man front of your own kids. I know you smoke pot. I know you went swimming naked in someone else’s pool!” When investigators asked Becker to explain how he could maintain his Stonebridge Ranch lifestyle despite filing income tax returns that showed him earning less than six figures, Becker said that he had made money gambling in Las Vegas. (Becker had indeed done some gambling over the years in hopes that he could earn enough money to quit burglarizing.) But Becker quickly succumbed after hearing the evidence accumulated against him. Besides the state burglary charges he was facing, an IRS task force was charging Becker with money laundering and was planning to take away all his assets. M. Andrew Stover, an assistant U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, met with Becker and told him that Cathy could well be prosecuted for conspiracy. “His reaction was amazing,” said Stover. “He started crying and shaking— something you rarely see a major criminal do—and he said that all he wanted was to take care of his wife and family.” To keep his wife out of prison, Becker agreed to confess to everything he had done. His attorney, Mark Watson, of Dallas, also arranged that in return for a five-year federal prison sentence, Becker would reveal the names of the various fences around the country who had bought his stolen computers years before. Dwayne, Bill, and Paulo received two-year sentences in Florida. The cases against Joey and Danny are still pending. Kim was never charged because the statute of limitations had expired for her particular criminal adventure. (Due to Becker’s encouragement, she did quit dancing and now works as a waitress at an Italian restaurant.) Meanwhile, with his full immunity, Julian has disappeared from Florida. The rumor is that he has used his burglary money to help out members of his family, just as Becker used to do. Julian has allegedly purchased his father a Camaro and given money to his mother, who now has no income with her husband, Bill, in jail. (When I talked to Becker about Julian’s new life, he paused for a moment, then said, “I hope I had an effect on him, getting him to help out his family, because that’s what it’s all about.”) Perhaps the greatest irony of all is that Dwayne, Becker’s Judas, told me

T4096.indb 233

1/18/07 7:19:38 AM

6 Skip when I went to see him in Florida that as soon as he gets out of Hollandsworth prison, he is going to get his dog back from his girlfriend and move to Tennessee. “I’m going to get started again,” he said. “Find a nice house in a nice neighborhood and not drink or anything.” “It sounds just like the life Todd wanted you to live,” I said. There was a pause. “Well, no,” said Dwayne. He paused again. “I don’t know. Maybe.” I went to see Becker and his wife for the last time this past November, just before he left for federal prison. The IRS had decided not to confiscate his Stonebridge Ranch home, which still had a sizable mortgage, because real estate values had decreased in the area and the home would be difficult for the federal government to sell at a profit. As a result, Cathy and the children were going to be able to stay in the house. (Although Cathy, who has gone back to work as a real estate agent, said she was going to make the mortgage payments with her income, some detectives speculate that the Beckers still have a secret stash of stolen money.) When I walked through the front door, Cathy was busy decorating the house for Thanksgiving and Becker had just returned from his next-door neighbor’s home, where the woman there had locked herself out of the house. “I used a flat-head screwdriver to pop open her back door,” he said with a shrug. Becker had been busy that week—cleaning out the attic so that Cathy wouldn’t have to do it for the next five years, going to the school cafeteria to eat lunch with his children, and attending church. I asked Becker if he could imagine ever returning to the craft that he does so well. There are plenty of police detectives who believe he will go right back to burglary when he gets out of prison, because it’s the only profession he knows. But Becker firmly insisted that this time, he was going to go straight. When I asked what he might do for a living after prison, he mentioned a seminar he had given a few months earlier to a group of detectives on the burglaries he had committed. The audience was so attentive that he had begun to ponder the idea of becoming some sort of paid consultant to police departments and businesses that wanted to know how to stop good burglars. “I think that’s a good idea, honey,” said Cathy, coming in from the kitchen. 234

T4096.indb 234

1/18/07 7:19:38 AM

6 235 “There could be some money in it,” Becker agreed. “We might the family finally get the money to open that Chuck E. Cheese.” man He grabbed Cathy’s hand, and the two of them smiled at each other. For a moment, they looked just like Ward and June.

6 February 2004

T4096.indb 235

1/18/07 7:19:38 AM

T4096.indb 236

1/18/07 7:19:38 AM