Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir Read online

  NINE

  Early 1970s

  Before I left Flint, an assistant prosecutor there had warned me I'd find guys in Houston who could chew up Simmons and Moran before breakfast then spit them out for lunch because they just weren't mean enough to make a good meal. I didn't realize then that list of Houston's toughest "guys" eventually would include a five-foot-three-inch, green-eyed blonde. But I was still nearly a decade away from hooking up with Catherine when I arrived in December of 1971 in Houston for the next level of post-graduate education in journalism and crime reporting. While any murder in Flint rated a story for The Journal, the two Houston papers had to prioritize. They did not have enough room to cover all, so each murder story needed its own "man-bites-dog" element to justify the space.

  I had my first taste of the fast lane when I reported for duty in the fourth floor press room at the Houston Police Department's 61 Reisner Street headquarters. Before noon I had lost about $25 in a poker game that was interrupted by the killing of a bank president who had tried to stop a robbery with his personal sidearm only to die in a hail of gunfire as he chased the robbers down the street.

  The morning delivery Post had hired me specifically to become one of its night police beat reporters. New hires usually covered the cops for about a year before promotion to assignments with less gore and more reasonable hours. After my daytime orientation, I began working the night shift of six-to-two, Sunday through Wednesday. I filed stories directly from a community press room in the police station using a Western Union-style teletype machine.

  Houston's economy was large enough to support two daily papers, and I welcomed the challenge of a true competitive situation with the rival afternoon Houston Chronicle. The Post was owned by the venerable Hobby family, then headed by the matriarch, Oveta Culp Hobby. She was the widow of a former Texas governor and had distinguished herself as well heading the Women's Army Corps during World War II. Her son, William P. Hobby Jr., served as editor of The Post but had divided his time just then running what would be a successful campaign to win election as Texas Lieutenant Governor, a position he would hold from 1973 until 1991. To her credit, Mrs. Hobby was a hands-on, news junkie type of executive with a penchant for popping into the newsroom just to see what might be going on. The Post served as a flagship for a family media empire that also included ownership of the local NBC radio and television affiliates. Although those electronic outlets generated greater revenues, the daily paper ranked as her professional love. A true matriarch, she considered its stories the diary for her town and its reporters part of her family. She seemed less concerned with how much money the paper made than with how it was done.

  My city editor was an easygoing fellow named Jim Holley who had supervised the reporting six years earlier on a series of articles that won the paper its only Pulitzer Prize. That saga still ranks among the most exciting of the Pulitzer Prize archives as The Post uncovered a web of corruption in the neighboring City of Pasadena, an industrial enclave along the Houston Ship Channel. At one point the paper hired a bodyguard for the reporter who eventually claimed the national investigative prize under Holley's supervision.

  As the night police reporter for The Post, I shared the police station press room with my counterpart from the Chronicle, a reporter my same age named Tim Fleck. He later would earn fame as a local political commentator in the 1990s. But back in those days we occupied the lowest link on the food chain at our respective publications. We usually played several games of chess each night while waiting for news to break by monitoring the six individual radio speakers that broadcast conversations between police cruisers and central dispatch. Once an hour we would walk the halls visiting detectives in the homicide and robbery divisions to ferret out stories from them. Back in those days, reporters enjoyed an amicable relationship with cops, and we were usually welcome in their offices. Often we served as witnesses on confessions, and I sometimes participated in lineups when detectives needed extras to fill the slots around the usual suspects. On one occasion a witness actually picked me as the perpetrator in some case only to hear the detective sigh: "Unfortunately he has an iron-clad alibi."

  We also had extracurricular duties for the dean of the police reporting community, a colorful TV reporter named Jack Cato. His Mustang fastback was packed with police monitors that covered every channel, and he often just cruised the streets like a news cabbie rushing to a scene for film before anyone could haul away the body. In addition, he also owned a soda machine on the fourth floor of the police station and assigned me to keep it full or refund money to cops who lost their change when it didn't work. He benefited from a remarkable relationship with all the cops, and you could always hear him coming down the hall: "Hey, how's the family? Have a cigar? Had that baby yet?" Cato's political savvy paid off later when he was elected in the 1990s to serve as Harris County Treasurer, a position he held until his death in 2006.

  So, I was paying my dues, spending every night trying to make sense of a cacophony of radio conversations on the wall—listening specifically for the red light codes of "DOA" or "officer down" or any other cry with news potential. Usually once a night we'd hear something interesting, interrupt our chess game, and drive to the scene of a crime. Back then, the cops usually allowed us to walk around the dead bodies with them as long as we didn't intrude or offend.

  The big story from my one year of night police duty occurred in November of 1972 when I fielded the report of a DOA at an upscale address in Houston's posh River Oaks section. The call came blaring from a police speaker early one Sunday evening when I was alone in the press room. As a result, I was the first reporter to arrive on the scene of the murder of Dr. John Hill, a plastic surgeon who would become immortalized in Tommy Thompson's best-selling true crime book Blood and Money. Hill had been suspected in the poisoning death of his first wife, the daughter of a wealthy Houston oil man. He was facing a second trial in the case when intruders shot him dead in the doorway of his River Oaks mansion.

  I finished that one-year tour of night police satisfied I had made the right move coming to Houston. The stories just seemed to keep growing larger and more exciting. As a reporter in Houston in the 1970s, I felt like a dog abandoned in a butcher shop.

  TEN

  Mid-1970s

  The larger community of reporters in Houston was closer to my own age, and I had no mentors to help me navigate the rivalries of this more political environment. Reporters can be among the most egocentric of professionals and back-stabbing ranks as a natural hazard of the job. We could work together as a team, have some beers, and laugh about outsiders. But once the Post presses rolled, we were as competitive among ourselves as with our rivals at the Chronicle. The hidden side of every newsroom resembles something out of Wild Kingdom as the reporters cautiously circle each other while looking for weaknesses. It's a rough place for anyone with thin skin, but that same natural system also works more efficiently than pay hikes at producing special stories. Peer pressure pushes almost everyone to reach while also holding them in check against abusing their power.

  Of course, no system is perfect, and, despite the fear of social scorn, every newsroom produces its share of laggards content to slide by on one end and overachievers willing to risk exposure for an exaggerated scoop on the other. Overstepping the public trust with exaggeration generates more vicious peer contempt than goofing off. Goof-offs pose little threat to reporters vying for a chance to cover the big one. Like jackals attacking a wounded lion, however, reporters move faster than management when they see a chance to bring down a prima donna from their own tribe by uncovering a fireable offense such as plagiarism or invention of a source. And it's no coincidence that the well-publicized scandals of plagiarism and fictionalized copy at major news institutions in recent years were sparked primarily by opportunistic whistle-blowing peers rather than any quality control system designed by management. I watched journalism's version of this natural selection process unfold in its basic state during the 1970s at The Post.<
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  In the tradition of all the night police beat reporters before me, I spent much of my time that first year plotting a plan to escape it. Although the beat offered many moments of excitement, night police overall resembled fireman's duty that involved hours of waiting for something to happen. But night police ranked as the standard first stop for new reporters, forcing them to learn about the city by rapidly driving its streets and testing their ability to get facts straight. I learned quickly that success in this business springs not from talent as a writer but from credibility as a reporter. The writing part of journalism is less than 20 percent of the job. If a story is compared with a journey, reporting is the selection of the destination and the mapping for the trip. Writing is just the vehicle used to go there. You may be driving a Porsche, but, if your destination is just a McDonald's, you're still only eating fast food.

  Over the next few years I worked a variety of beats at The Post that kept me outside the newsroom itself. I covered county government and civil courts, working from the press room at the civil courts building downtown. I also created a state prison beat on a part-time basis, convincing editors to let me spend one day each week looking for stories in Huntsville, seventy miles north of Houston, where the Texas Department of Corrections had its headquarters and primary unit known affectionately as "The Walls." I also worked general assignment for a while, just hanging out at the city desk and taking any stories that might come along. Eventually I nabbed one of the glamour beats, assuming the criminal courts mantle in 1977.

  During those years between police and courts, I developed a reputation as a trustworthy reporter who could handle a wide range of stories, from the serious to the silly. One of my major assignments began the night of July 24, 1974, when a south Texas drug lord named Fred Carrasco seized control of the Walls prison unit in Huntsville. Aided by henchmen Rudy Dominguez and Ignacio Cuevas, he grabbed eighty hostages using pistols smuggled inside a ham. Taking refuge in the prison library, they whittled their hostage roster down to a more manageable eleven that included the system's chaplain, educators and some other inmates. Aware that Carrasco was reputed to have murdered more than a hundred persons running a drug empire along the border, prison officials prepared for the worst and began negotiating a solution to what would become, at eleven days, the longest prison hostage siege in US history.

  The national press quickly joined us locals at the TDC headquarters in Huntsville, covering the grounds around the stately, dark bricks of The Walls like some invading army. Various news organizations pitched tents on the grassy prison grounds for use as shelter while waiting for the standoff to play out. The duty involved hours of monotony broken by two or three daily briefings that allowed the prison staff to share their latest exchanges with the inmates.

  Our mood turned somber and serious on the Saturday evening of August 3 as we sensed something set to happen. Word spread through the press corps that a vehicle of some sort had been moved into the unit, and we waited silently for a showdown. We would learn later that prison officials had teamed with the legendary Texas Rangers and hatched a plan to offer the inmates transportation out aboard an armored car. As the inmates and their hostages moved from the library to the car, lawmen hoped to knock them down with high pressure water hoses and avoid a bloodbath.

  But Carrasco feared a trap. Before leaving the library, he and his sidekicks taped together chalkboards and textbooks to build what became known as their "Trojan Horse" to shield them as they and the hostages walked through the door and down a ramp to the armored car. When the hoses failed to topple the horse, the shooting began. Within minutes, two of the hostages lay dead beside Carrasco and Dominguez. And Cuevas would spend the next seventeen years fighting the death penalty, with the state's top criminal appellate lawyer, Will Gray, winning appeals for Cuevas on three convictions before Cuevas finally received a lethal injection in 1991. I did not know it then, but Gray was destined to play an important role in my relationship later with Catherine Mehaffey.

  My previous work developing the prison beat paid off the morning after the siege when I got an exclusive interview with the system's bedraggled director, Jim Estelle. With most of the deadline work completed just after the shootout and unable to sleep, I had wandered over to The Walls from our offsite motel room sanctuary to find the prison grounds deserted, the tents emptied, and the grass littered with coffee cups and other debris. Concluding no one was around, I prepared to leave when a car drove by. Estelle sat behind the wheel, all alone, and he spotted me. He pointed a finger toward his office window and nodded. While he parked his car, I entered the administration building that stood just a few hundred yards from the last night's carnage. We talked for two hours about the event, the burdens of responsibility, the realities of crime and punishment, and the myth of rehabilitation. When we were done, I had a page one story. And Estelle had the rest of his life to punish himself for all the tragic things that went wrong.

  I wish I could say I nailed the best story from the Carrasco siege with my interview of Estelle, but another reporter trumped that the next day. He cornered the local justice of peace who had authority in that rural area to declare the cause of death for Carrasco and Dominguez. His decision: Suicide.

  "Suicide?"

  "Yep, suicide," said his honor. "Everybody knows it's just plain suicide to go up against the Texas Rangers."

  ELEVEN

  Mid-1970s

  As a general assignments reporter at The Post during the 1970s, I polished a reputation for versatility. I showed I could handle soft features, hard-breaking news and investigative challenges. The paper sent me to spend a weekend in a Texas nudist camp. I covered a Ku Klux Klan rally. I sat with blind children at a circus. I attended an underwater wedding held in a tank on the front lawn of a church where a skin-diving minister married a skin-diving couple who wrote their "I dos" on an underwater slate. I stood in line for the movie Jaws and wrote a feature about the people willing to wait to see a movie. I covered explosions. Every day was a new adventure. I joined a prison inmate as he left The Walls after serving a sentence for marijuana possession and experienced his first three days of freedom with him. I won a statewide enterprise reporting award for work on a series of stories exposing the use of electric cattle prods by a local police department to extract confessions.

  In late 1975 I received an unexpected phone call from a recruiter for the weekly tabloid scandal sheet, The National Enquirer. He said he had read one of my Post features about the tactics of bill collectors headlined "Wolf at the Door" and thought that I might be Enquirer material. Still a bit confused over whether I wanted to be "Enquirer material," I nevertheless joined him for breakfast. As a result I used four weeks of vacation in January 1976 living in the Lantana, Florida, Holiday Inn and earning about three times my Houston Post salary on a "tryout" with The Enquirer to sample the tabloid experience.

  My sojourn at The Enquirer proved to be one of the most interesting escapades in my journalism career. It also served to invigorate my imagination when I returned to The Post after learning that I probably was not "Enquirer material." Or, maybe I would have been had I not gotten caught in the middle of an internal political squabble between the paper's British and American editors. At the end of my "tryout" working for one of the American editors, the paper offered an extension with no guarantee of a job. Since I had exhausted my vacation time, I declined, choosing instead to return to a sure thing at The Post.

  Contrary to what might be the popular perception, I found my Enquirer colleagues to be the most professional group of journalism heavyweights I had ever encountered. The staff included many burned-out mainstream stars who sought a high-paying change of pace. One example was a former political writer from The Chicago Tribune who greeted me with a smile and said, "Can you believe this place? I just got back from Rio doing a story on a bleeding statue of Christ. What a hoot!" That list also included The Houston Post's Pulitzer winner, Gene Goltz, who, I was told, had been assigned to stake out the Jackie Onas
sis apartment in New York City. What an image for me: Gene Goltz on the Jackie O nightshift waiting for her to step into the street so he could scream embarrassing questions. The Enquirer remains an incredible commercial success, providing mostly entertainment but also, I found, a good deal of important information buried behind its facade of outrage. As such, the paper carefully monitored its sales demographics, and it was well known that any time Jackie O's face appeared on the front page, sales soared off the charts.

  The current star on the staff, however, was a former Boston Globe reporter about my own age who took me under his wing. Jeff had done a story the month before that sent sales to a record for the year. Crashing Frank Sinatra's birthday party and being physically evicted by Old Blue Eyes himself, Jeff had written an unforgettable piece on celebrity rage that shared the experience of having the legendary crooner spit in his face. Beyond the smokescreen of celebrity coverage that paid the bills, however, Jeff offered an anecdote demonstrating the way the paper actually developed solid stories of general interest that even the nation's most prestigious publications would want to have. Searching through obscure historical journals, Jeff had uncovered an academic treatise by some anthropologists who had analyzed some old stone tablets discovered in New England and linked them to ninth-century Iberia to show that the Spanish had reached the New World some five hundred years before Columbus. He wrote a story and presented it to his editor who smiled and said: "Something isn't right."