Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir Page 8
I would see Bo Peep again in 1987 on assignment for Time magazine shortly before his execution that year on May 28. Time was researching a broader story on the death penalty and assigned me to interview three residents of Texas's Death Row. I picked the subjects myself and included Bo Peep in that group because I had never been able to shake him from my mind. On Death Row, Bo Peep had found religion. But he remained adamant about his innocence. Another Bo Peep had killed that girl, he told me. He had been there, too, but he hadn't struck the blows. Those came from the other Bo Peep, the bad one who always got him trouble. And I wondered again: What are we supposed to do?
Daily the courts beat offered more difficult lessons on cruelty and violence than I had ever experienced covering police. While the police beat exposed me to the gore at crime scenes, trials provided the final review with all the pieces in place—excuses and whining from the defendants drowning out the cries of the victims as each case presented a neatly finished story to digest. Every time I thought I had heard it all, I would arrive at court to hear something worse, and it hardly came only from the capital trials.
One assault case, for example, involved a strip club bouncer convicted for beating a customer into a vegetative state, overreacting to his resistance when evicted from the club. Prosecutors wheeled the customer into the courtroom on a gurney where he lay in a coma like an organic Exhibit A while jurors heard testimony from witnesses. The bouncer went to prison, and the customer never left the nursing home.
Another case involved a mother who had intentionally infected her own child with feces to keep her sick and bedridden in a hospital because the mother was infatuated with physicians. The mother suffered an obsessive psychological disorder known as Munchausen's Syndrome by Proxy that forced her to constantly seek the excitement of hospitals while pretending to be a victim of unexplainable illness to her child. A jury convicted her of injury to the child.
Although odds usually favor the state, some sensational cases did end with acquittals. In 1979, prominent attorney David Berg won acquittal for a woman accused of killing her lover, cutting his body into five pieces, and burying him in an orange grove. He convinced the jury that the dead man had been a monster who beat his client regularly, read books on Satan worship, and even rooted for the Nazis during a television movie about the Holocaust. At Berg's victory press conference I couldn't resist the urge and asked in front of the cameras: "Is it true you were paid an arm and a leg?"
Two of the biggest cases on my watch did not involve capital murder. First came the 1977 trial of two Houston cops accused of murder in the drowning of an Hispanic laborer named Joe Torres. They had thrown him into a creek after he resisted arrest for being drunk. Even before the trial, the incident had swallowed the city, pitting its Hispanic community against the police department, and spawning a riot. The two cops hired top legal guns Mike Ramsey and Bob Bennett, who had the trial moved to Huntsville seeking an impartial jury. The trial was held in an auditorium at Sam Houston State University's criminology school, allowing students to fill the audience seats and witness real justice in action. Reporters sat at a table on the main floor, right beside the defendants taking notes. I lived in a dormitory room at the school for about three weeks, sending stories back to the newsroom every evening.
In the end, prosecutors could not prove that the cops had intended Torres to die when they tossed him into the bayou. The cops admitted losing their tempers and beating on Torres. But they said they meant to cut him a break by releasing him instead of taking him to jail. They were surprised he didn't survive. Prosecutors Bert Graham and Ted Poe argued the cops probably didn't want to take Torres to jail where his beating would be discovered. Nevertheless, they couldn't sell all the jurors on a theory of murder-by-drowning, and the jury compromised with a verdict of negligent homicide. I thought that decision pretty fair after hearing all the evidence, but Bert considered it the first case he ever had lost. The sentence of one year's probation on the misdemeanor charge only incited new animosity among Houston's Hispanics, and the Torres case remained a sore spot for years.
I couldn't know it then, but Bert was destined for an important role ahead in the explosion of my relationship with Catherine Mehaffey.
Between October of 1978 and January 1979, Houston hosted one of the sensational trials of Fort Worth industrialist and millionaire T. Cullen Davis. A leading Fort Worth citizen and socialite, Davis had been embroiled in a high stakes divorce case that reached a crescendo when someone entered his Fort Worth mansion and killed his estranged wife's boyfriend as well as her daughter from a prior marriage. Police focused on Davis as the killer and took him to trial in 1977 with a hung jury as the result. While waiting for a second trial on the murder, the case took another bizarre twist as police arrested Davis again, alleging he had tried to hire a hit man to assassinate the judge in his hotly contested divorce case. Because of Davis's standing in Fort Worth, prosecutors wanted to move the Davis cases elsewhere. So, they showed up in my courthouse seeking an impartial Houston jury to hear their charges of conspiracy to commit capital murder in the plot on the judge.
The Davis trial in Houston gave new meaning to the phrase "legal circus." The millionaire had a high-priced defense team headed by legendary Houston attorney Richard "Racehorse" Haynes, who had just won the mistrial for Davis in the first murder trial and eventually would succeed in clearing Davis on all charges. But the Fort Worth prosecutors boasted strong evidence in the alleged plot on the judge. It had begun when police character David McCrory visited police claiming Davis had hired him to kill the judge. Detectives enlisted McCrory as an undercover operative and told him to continue with the plot while they secretly monitored his negotiations with the millionaire. They persuaded the targeted judge to feign a death pose in the trunk of a car with ketchup splattered on his body for a photo used by McCrory to collect his fee from Davis. They wired McCrory for sound and took film of him meeting with Davis in the parking lot of a Fort Worth diner. Essentially, they had captured the conspiracy on film. Jurors needed only to watch the screen and listen to the tapes. But Racehorse had other ideas.
After Percy Foreman and with the possible exception of Foreman protégé Dick DeGuerin, Racehorse still ranks as the most colorful criminal defense attorney ever in a city that seems to breed them. His nickname stemmed from high school football in Houston where he excelled as an undersized but aggressive linebacker. Pacing back and forth behind his line waiting to move for the kill, young Richard's coach compared him with a racehorse and the name stuck. It also became a great handle for a criminal defense icon in Houston, and Racehorse had achieved that stature by the end of the 1970s. Handsome, eloquent, and witty, he enthralled jurors with his language and knowledge of the law.
For Davis, he conducted a clinic on how to drag out a trial until no jurors remember the evidence or why they even are there. He questioned all witnesses relentlessly, asking the same questions dozens of different ways. Even as the judge overruled his questions on objections from prosecutors, he hammered away. He attacked McCrory head on, questioning every word uttered on the tapes, and challenging his unsavory background. On the defense, he called multiple witnesses designed to paint Davis's estranged wife, Priscilla, as the cause of the trouble. The parade included an old boyfriend whose motorcycle had left oil stains in the Davis driveway. Outside the courthouse one day, the biker sold custom T-shirts that displayed pictures of Davis and Racehorse sitting beside a chimpanzee above the slogan: "What price justice, Racehorse?" Although overpriced at ten dollars, I bought a couple as souvenirs and took the biker out for a few beers. The defense finally climaxed with testimony from Davis himself claiming the plot had been McCrory's idea. He said he had gone along with the plot as a self-appointed undercover agent gathering evidence against McCrory and just hadn't had time to deliver his case to police. Racehorse painted Davis as the victim of a prosecutorial scam motivated by their failure to convict him in the murder. The jury hung up eight-to-four for conviction, and Fort Wor
th's prosecutors decided against retrying that case, choosing instead to move ahead on the original murder. Eventually, that ended with an acquittal in Fort Worth.
To outsiders, the job of covering something like the Davis trial likely appears to be more fun than work—just sit around the court, listen to the excitement, and have a few laughs. In truth, it ranks as a good example of the kind of grind reporters face behind the scenes. For starters, the days ran long. After sitting through eight hours of testimony, I then had to digest it into a written version for the next morning's newspaper—a job that usually kept me writing at the courthouse until nine or ten each night. Moreover, turning the day's action into an understandable story required sideline interviews with members of the legal teams or, in some cases, the judge, who often agreed to chat off the record. Since the court had not imposed a gag order, Racehorse and one of the prosecutors usually held impromptu press conferences in different corners of the courtroom after each day's testimony. In addition, I had to oversee the work of another reporter dispatched to cover the rest of the action at the courthouse while I focused on that trial.
In short, I recall the Davis trial as a marathon that worked me harder than any other story of my career. In contrast, the courthouse slowed to a state of boredom a year later, in the fall of 1979, when Catherine came into my life. For me, she would provide proof for the old saying about idle hands and the devil's workshop. I would often look back during the later days of our fatal attraction to realize that, had I met her a year before, I would not have had time for Catherine's shenanigans.
The same week the Davis trial ended at the courthouse, George Tedesco's bludgeoned body was found in his condo across town.
FOURTEEN
Late 1960s
I've always believed the demands of covering that Cullen Davis trial drove the final nail into the coffin that had become my second marriage. It also underscored the connection and conflicts between my professional and domestic lives. But I also realize that my general attitude about marriage and relationships likely doomed them from the start. Whenever anyone asks why I was married twice, I usually smile and say: "I guess I'm just not the marrying kind." I'm only half joking about that line, and I am completely serious when I add: "I consider both of my marriages successes."
Why do people get married? My answer to that question evolved over the years to reflect the events of my life. Before my first marriage in 1969, I thought people should get married if they fall in love. After my first divorce in 1973, I revised that theory. People should get married, I decided, if they find someone really rich, or if one of them gets pregnant. Then, when my second marriage ended in 1979—and I was broke with two children—I revised my philosophy again. I concluded the only real reason for marriage is to commit adultery.
As a teenager, I had planned never to marry. I was so committed to that plan that the thought of sexual activity terrified me for fear I might impregnate someone who would saddle me with a kid. I had positive role models for marriage in my parents. Although they fought occasionally, the institution seemed to work well for them. It provided security for my mom and a guarantee of companionship for the old man. But it just didn't appeal to me. It simply looked like a tremendous bore. I was determined to get out in the world, out of St. Louis, away from the family business, and fulfill some fanciful dreams of adventure. I saw marriage and family as an anchor that would hold me down. Most normal folks likely would describe that view as anti-American, sacrilegious, antisocial, or all three, but I really didn't care. My religion was agnostic, and my goal was to experience life.
Eventually, however, in failing to stay unmarried, I did learn that marriage and family constitute a special sort of adventure—one of life's experiences I am glad to have survived. As a result, I do consider both of my marriages as successes that provided the kind of emotional education unavailable through any alternative experience. I still recommend it to all my younger friends nervous about taking such a serious step. "Try it," I tell them. "If it doesn't work, you can always do something else. It won't be the end of the world."
I know that Domestic Gary began to emerge during my junior year of college. But even with hindsight, I don't really understand how the first marriage happened, and I bet my first wife would agree to some confusion about that as well. The best explanation might just be because there was nothing else to do. We met at the start of my junior year at Mizzou in 1967. She was a freshman just hanging around her dormitory when I called looking for another girl I had dated the year before. Classes hadn't even started yet. She answered the phone and said she couldn't find the girl I wanted.
"You'll do," I said. "How do you look? Want to come out to a party?"
She hesitated only a heartbeat, then answered with a confident: "You'll like me. Let's go." She was destined to become wife number one.
When I introduced her to my roommates, one of them noted her uncanny resemblance to the 1930s flapper cartoon character Betty Boop—flashing doe eyes, infectious smile, puffy cheeks, a football helmet hair cut, and, most importantly, an attitude of independence. It didn't hurt that she also packed a pair of thirty-eights. Of course, Boop automatically became her nickname. And as we became better acquainted, she found a way to humor me by playing a little game with Betty Boop's trademark buzz phrase: "Boop-oop-a-doop." If I asked nicely, she would say it for me and shake her hips like the cartoon. It could have been pretty corny, but she managed to pull it off, creating another level of comfort with her.
Boop entered my life at a particularly unsettled point, and I've always given her a lot of credit for my career. In the beginning, I wanted to do well for her. She provided motivation. I wanted to impress her. I was showing off for her. And in the process, I proved to myself how good I really should be.
At the start of my junior year I stood at a personal crossroads. I had burned out on school. I was just starting my journalism curriculum after two years of preliminary coursework, and it was proving pretty much of a basics bore that would not trigger my excitement until later when I actually started reporting. I seriously considered dropping out and heading for Vietnam.
Boop did not arrive in a loveless vacuum. I had endured at least three serious relationships to that point. A high school sweetheart sat heartbroken in St. Louis, and a Mizzou co-ed had broken my heart by dumping me the year before to stick with her high school boyfriend. Then, there was a girl named Pixie attending one of the girls colleges in Columbia. Everyone should have an old girlfriend named Pixie. She was still in the picture at the start of the year, and for a while I juggled her with Boop. But Boop won out with her reaction when I told her I had decided to go steady with Pixie. She laughed in my face. So I broke up with Pixie and went steady with Boop.
Just as our relationship grew tighter, my best friends started peeling off to lives of their own. Suddenly one day, I looked around to realize my entourage had boiled away to myself, my last remaining roommate, and Boop. But Boop was two years behind. I realized I had started thinking in terms of "us" when I noticed I had decided I needed to resolve the future.
So, in a drunken haze one night at a party, I slobbered something like, "We should get married." I expected her sarcastic laugh again, but instead I got a wink and a nod. She, too, had reached a point where she wanted something new for a lifestyle. I had already agreed to take that job in Flint and the options seemed clear. We either got married or broke up. Marriage suddenly looked like a pretty interesting adventure of its own.
The next week found us making wedding plans with her astonished father in Kansas City. He didn't look that thrilled, and I guessed he had always imagined his daughter as a college graduate rather than a newspaper reporter's wife in Flint, Michigan. My sympathy for his plight grew even larger a few years later when I calculated we probably got divorced before he had finished paying for the full-blown church ceremony of June 8, 1969.
FIFTEEN
Early 1970s
With my student deferment gone and Vietnam looming just ah
ead, Boop and I approached our move to Flint with a fatalistic view. We figured we'd go up, learn about sharing a life, have a good time, and keep an open mind about the future. We packed everything we owned into a trailer and pulled it to Flint one sunny day in June behind the black 1966 Mustang I had bought with money saved from my part-time jobs. She wanted to continue school up there, working at that point toward some kind of a degree in psychology. But we learned she would not qualify for the affordable Michigan resident tuition until we had lived there a year, and we couldn't afford it until then. But she didn't seem all that upset and found a job in a shoe repair shop just around the corner from The Flint Journal. We rented a furnished apartment just outside Flint and drove back and forth together each day in that Mustang. We settled in to wait on the draft.