Evil and Then Some: Texas True Crime, #3

Introduction

The stories and events contained in this book are all true. I have changed the names of the suspects, victims, and locations to lower my civil liability. The information related here is a matter of great interest to those of us that study criminal behavior. Police work is an attempt to play catch-up after the fact. For those in law enforcement, the only hope of safeguarding future victims is to catch and prosecute criminals after a crime has already been committed.

A Church House Killing

This story comes out of the city of Port Arthur, Texas. I’ll call the man who told it to me Elton Jones. He worked there as a policeman for several years. Jones was a cop in Texas for a total of thirty-seven years and during that time worked for three different police agencies throughout the state. He grew up in Port Arthur, a Gulf Coast town that had both black and white cat houses, and slot machines, scattered around it.

That city was then a controlled town where some levels of illegal activity were permitted, while others were not. The idea behind the concept is that the folks in charge of the illegal operations kept the local authorities informed as to any of the forbidden illegal operations going on. If dope was being sold, the cops knew who was dealing and where. When they ran a warrant on some location, the cops would know where to find the stash. The crooks they arrested may or may not have known a stash existed, but it was ultimately found where the cops had been told to look.

The days of winking at some criminal activity had thankfully passed by the time Jones got out of the military and returned home and into a law enforcement career. He did however work with a few of the old dinosaurs who had worked under the previous—and somewhat crooked—regimes. The old duffers hung onto their jobs for a few short years before they too were able to retire and be put out to pasture.

Jones was dispatched one afternoon (as a one-man unit) to a shooting scene inside a black church’s chapel. There had been a funeral going on when the fatal shooting took place. Now this was not your standard old Baptist or Catholic church, but rather a new wave sort of establishment, referred to locally as the church what’s happening now kind of place. The neighborhood where the church was located was called Acres Homes, named such because when it was originally laid out, each residential lot was one acre in size. That way everyone had enough room for a large vegetable garden.

There were two sections of Acres Homes—one white and one black, and the black population was further divided among two sub-groups known as the Redbones and Yellow Bones. These terms relate to the undertones of the skin and hair. A Redbone is a black person who has red undertones in their hair and skin; a Yellow Bone is the lightest type of light-skinned black person, with skin tones leaning toward yellow-tan, yellowish-red, or even a Caucasian look. These sub-groups are not necessarily the result of the infusion of Anglo blood, because even in Africa members of many tribes, such as the Bushmen, have yellow or peach coloration to their skin.

Now that the groundwork has been laid, let’s get back to the investigation.

The majority of the mourners present at the southeast Texas church this particular day were Redbones. Now this was never really a very genteel crowd, and many of the women in this population were often referred to as straight-razor totin’ women. The men were not really any better in their dispositions, and as such, the potential existed for this scene to become very volatile in a hurry. Emotions oftentimes run high at funerals, both during and after.

The Acres Homes ladies often carried straight razors upon their persons and would regularly cut one another (or anybody else for that matter) at the drop of a hat if provoked. If a cutting were due to someone being insulted or disrespected, the blade wielder would often cut the offending party upon the face. This was done to make a statement. That way the guilty party would remember their indiscretion every time they looked in a mirror and saw the raised keloid scars that blacks so often get.

When the call came in, Jones handled it alone but did call for an ID man to photograph the murder scene.

The facts of the case were that there was a dead man laid out inside a coffin, and it was known he had died of natural causes. There was also a very rotund and very dead black woman lying on the floor beside the coffin. The first fact determined was that the dead woman had been the girlfriend of the man in the coffin. She had been shot once in the back by the widow of the dearly departed. It seems the wife was sitting on a front row pew when the girlfriend walked up beside the coffin and began putting on quite a show. She was said to be caterwauling and hugging on the coffin. Apparently, the wife quickly got a belly full of the other woman’s foolish behavior, simply stood up, opened her purse, and pulled out her RG model 10 revolver. She then proceeded to shoot the reportedly loud-mouthed woman one time in the back. The shooting victim first collapsed onto the coffin, hugged it for a moment, and then fell to the floor. The rest is history.

There were multiple witnesses present, and some tried to claim the shooting was just a self-defense situation. Surprisingly enough very few people present claimed to have been in the bathroom at the time. Had a person been out of the room at the time of the shooting, they could claim not to have any information to pass along. The only problem with the self-defense scenario was that acting the fool does not justify killing someone, at least not in Texas. It may well be justifiable homicide in some third-world country such as Louisiana, but I’m not sure of that. The dead woman had been accompanied to the funeral by two friends and their version of what transpired was likely far closer to the truth than the versions of other witnesses.

The shooter was transported to jail without incident, and the case—with photos, statements, and the report—was left for the detectives. Manslaughter charges were filed the next day because the act itself came about due to a sudden arousal of passion on the part of the shooter. Perhaps that is legalese for getting pissed off but would knock down the criminal penalty range group by one whole notch.

Those old .22 pistols known as the Saturday Night Special accounted for many of the homicides in the era in which this killing took place. I have been told by people at the morgue that those old .22- and .32-caliber bullets would bounce around inside a rib cage and cause no end of fatal injuries. In this particular case one round from a junky old pistol dropped one loud-mouth like a bad habit.

Cases such as these are sometimes called natural deaths in police circles. You see, if you shoot someone in the right spot they are just naturally going to die. Perhaps it sounds crass, but gallows humor is an effective coping mechanism employed in police work and other high-pressure vocations. For some, it’s the only way to stay sane.

Nightmare Quality Stuff

This story needed writing, for no other reason than to point out that weak minds can be easily influenced and unfortunately cause unreal tragedies. Most of what you see while working murder cases is the result of lifestyle and behavior. Drug addicts and those who take male or female prostitutes home or to a motel are flirting with disaster, which is often fatal. Sometimes it is a fatal disease but other times it is a gunshot or stab wound. When you work murders, truly innocent victims seem to be somewhat of a rarity, at least in your mind. Now and then however, you will get one that sets you back on your heels.

Here is the story, in the words of a guy who worked the case.

This case involved a woman who had been stabbed 254 times and had her throat cut all the way across. She was the killer’s girlfriend. The neck wound could only be described as gaping. Her face had also been terribly disfigured. That part had me stumped, but I made sure the scene was well-documented, as well as photographed. I knew we had one sick son-of-a-bitch on our hands, and most likely he was in our custody.

We (the police) had been called to the scene by family members unable to reach their daughter. We found blood spray all over the apartment, and her passed-out and drunken boyfriend was sprawled on the couch next to her remains.

I had never before been assigned a scene that rattled me with regard to this amount of violence like this one did. Killings and violence had not shaken me very often in the past several decades. I guess you develop a protective hard shell. The assignment was a DOA woman at the scene and well as her passed out boyfriend. He was heavily liquored up, to the point he had passed out and we could not bring him around. In spite of the horrific injuries to the victim and the amount of blood at the scene, paramedics could find no injuries on or about his person. We had to ship him off to the county hospital due to his advanced level of intoxication. We could not take the chance that he would die on us from alcohol toxicity with civil liability being what it is. I wanted to see a pension someday and I was closing on being able to retire. That and I did not want to incur more civil liability than ex-wives and kids’ college educations had already heaped me with.

Anyway, I sent a uniformed unit to follow the ambulance that carted off lover boy and directed them to not let people in the emergency room clean the boyfriend up. I told them I would have a crime scene unit meet them there at the hospital for photos and the collection of his clothing. An officer sat with the prisoner as they admitted him for observation. When he sobered up enough to where he was no longer in jeopardy, the unit transported him to Homicide, wearing a paper suit that crime scene units use from time to time. We got him a trusty jail jumpsuit (coveralls) to wear while we interviewed him at the station.

He said he honestly did not know how his girlfriend got killed, and I doubt he really did. After reading him his legal rights, he said he understood them. He admitted drinking way too much alcohol the night before while they were watching horror movies. He named his favorite films, which I came to find out were what are called slasher films and some were a series about two male and one female zombies. I ultimately had to rent those stupid films and watch them to see if he acted them out. He had. It turned out he had worked diligently at recreating his favorite scenes. The zombie struck in reality this time. No special effects were involved, but this time the chewing-off of faces was for real, not Hollywood fiction.

If the visual information leading up to suspect’s statement had not been enough, something happened that really shocked me. While I was interviewing the boyfriend, he began picking some things out from between his teeth. He would then throw these objects into the garbage can. I figured out quickly just how the girlfriend’s face had been torn up. He had bitten chunks off her face and what he was picking out from between his teeth was skin, facial muscle, and tendon. I kept visiting with him because he was collecting evidence for me and discarding it in a plastic-lined trash can. He was still wearing the blood spatter on his hands and face during the recorded oral confession.

The suspect was jailed and charges were filed. Then the follow-up work began. The blood spray on his clothes and face were analyzed by experts in the field and said to be arterial. The stuff he picked out from between his teeth was submitted to the morgue for testing, because all body-related evidence goes to them. It was matched to her body.

When fiction becomes reality it can cause you to retch. I have always held that weak minds could be influenced by visual trash—in this case, slasher movies. Unfortunately, I was right. This lowlife entered a plea of guilty and went away to prison. His attorney explained it to him like this, Her DNA being on your clothes, face, and hands is not in your favor. Pieces of her flesh, muscle, and tissue identified by her DNA that was collected on video getting pulled from between your teeth is really gonna hang you out to dry.

Author’s Note

When you think you have seen it all, something will come along and prove you wrong. If there was ever an example of something justifying censorship, these types of movies are right up there in front.

This is the romantic life led by the big-city homicide detective. Most of what they deal with are junkies, dirt bags, idiots, and crack whores. Thankfully, murders of the sort described here do not come along all that often. Like we say, dirtbag killings (called trash killings) are strictly practice runs to keep you sharp enough to recall how to handle cases where a real innocent victim gets involved. I always preferred working urban renewal cases to those where real humans were involved. LAPD once rubber-stamped their file folders of trash killings with a large printed NHI. This stood for No Human Involvement. Political correctness stopped that practice, however.

Observations from an

Emergency Room Surgeon

This is a story written by a retired medical doctor. He was introduced to the knife and gun club as a medical student at Parkland Hospital in Dallas, Texas where he was a resident at the time President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. The man was gun savvy before entering the medical profession and picked up a lot more knowledge during his years of practice. He typed out these observations one day and shared them with me and some others. Doc was good enough to let me put them into this book. His knowledge into the world of Triggernomitry is well worth taking in, as are his other observations.

—

It must have been my fourth year at Southwestern Medical School and during a rotation on surgery or surgery emergency room. I had just read an article in the Dallas Morning News that there had been a sudden increase in armed robberies of drive-in grocery stores. This coincided with political pressure to stop a program of off-duty policemen rotating through some drive-in groceries that were seemingly chosen on a random basis by a group of policemen armed with shotguns. The operation had some formal name, but it was commonly known as the shotgun squad. This was based no doubt on their highly effective, close-quarters weapon of choice.

The newspaper article stated that the owner of a chain of 7-Eleven stores had two clerks murdered in the previous week, and he had very few job seekers willing to take their places. He had loudly requested the city fathers re-institute the squad. Recently, a past schoolmate of mine had been robbed in an all-night Fina station. They tied him up and shot him in the back of the head. He was executed in the coldest of blood. A bad end to a good old boy from Ballinger, Texas. I was in sympathy with the 7-Eleven owner’s request.

On this particular night, I was in the Parkland emergency room following a first-year surgery resident around who had given me the impression that he just had to tolerate me. I knew most of the surgery residents fairly well, but not this one. I was working as a scrub nurse when I had the time. While I got along pretty well with the other residents I knew, this one was a city boy who did not know much about the world outside of the city limits.

Suddenly an ambulance crew wheeled a customer into a cubicle and dumped him on a cart. One of the crew said this one wasn’t going to be much trouble for us. The other ambulance guy said cheerfully that the shotgun squad was back in town, and the man in question had made a break for the door. The policeman would have been seated on a stool at the convenience store looking out of a one-way mirror as bona fide customers came and went. If necessary, the policeman stepped out and gave the cursory warning, more or less, and then unloaded both barrels.

We rolled the patient over and examined his back side after determining he was deceased—or to use the vernacular—he was graveyard dead. I began to count and came up with eighteen entrance wounds. I exclaimed, Perfect pattern, got him with all eighteen. Look—see, some of the holes are almost perfectly round, and some are almost triangles. I counted six round ones and five or six triangular ones. The rest were only slightly out of round. This shocked the resident out of his superiority shell and he asked what I was talking about. The patient did not enter into the conversation because he was slowly assuming room temperature.

As much as the resident had no concept of exterior ballistics and had never so much shot at a jackrabbit, I tried to explain. There are nine thirty-three-caliber shot pellets of triple-ought buckshot in a single shotgun shell, and this victim had two perfect patterns from each load. Also, the three bottom shot pellets are deformed tetrahedrons when caught between the powder charge and the top six balls. That and the top three are quite free to move out of the barrel without much resistance of deformity.

I also volunteered that double-ought buck was the logical choice for the shotgun squad as there are twelve shots of thirty-one caliber in each load, giving it a better probability of a hit, and almost with the same amount of energy in each ball. The resident blinked as if I were speaking in Swahili. He also had the same reaction when I spoke of the lack of tissue damage caused by lower velocity rounds from .25- and .32-caliber pistols.

Unfortunately, the shotgun squads did not last much longer. It seems that the bleeding hearts seemed to have no sympathy for the poor minimum wage clerks that were getting killed so regularly.

John Peter Smith Hospital, One Year Later

An ambulance crew wheeled in a deceased person with the story that a little gray-haired lady had done him in as he had been trying to kick in her back screen door. It seems his carnal desires had extended past the ham sandwich the lady had so generously offered him. It was apparent from the body odor, unkempt two-week beard growth, and double flannel shirts that the deceased was a transient. That or he could fall under the heading that our University of Colorado intern classified them, a troll. Like one who lives under a bridge, for those who can recall the childhood fable Three Billy Goats Gruff.

After the onerous task of peeling off layers of filthy clothing and saving for the police those with bullet holes, I began to count. There were exactly nine holes in the body, all of which appeared to be from a .22-caliber weapon. They were in his head, neck, ear, chest, arms, and abdomen. I then made the pronouncement that lady’s son, or maybe her nephew, had likely bought her a nine-shot .22-caliber pistol for personal protection. I figured it was probably an Iver Johnson or a Harrington and Richards brand pistol. Women are often reluctant to learn how to handle a firearm, and they often will just empty them in an emergency situation. In this case she did it pretty well.

After about twenty minutes a policeman brought the shooter into the emergency room. She was understandably hysterical and crying incessantly. I walked over to her after picking up a box of cheap hospital tissues. I sat down next to her and the uniformed policeman sat on the other side of her. I spoke to her in a soothing voice and told her that she had done what she had to do to avoid being raped and possibly murdered. What’s more I told her that she very likely saved someone else from being raped or murdered if she had not acted like she had. I learned that her nephew was on his way to the hospital to take her home. I told her that after the police report that she would probably not even have to go before a grand jury. The officer agreed with me.

After about six or seven minutes she stopped crying and began to speak rationally. The officer who had initially asked for a shot for her looked at me with a look of admiration. I wrote her a no-refill prescription for a few tranquilizers and told her not to fill it unless she had trouble sleeping, as I did not want her to get hooked on any drugs.

At that point she was handling it all pretty well. I told her that in a week or two her nephew needed to take her somewhere and teach her how to improve her shooting and get more confidence with her pistol. As I stood up to go back to the next patient I added, You just need to tighten your groups up a little. The officer’s mouth dropped open.

Not everything we learned in teaching hospitals was so dramatic. Years later in the early morning hours in an emergency room, while waiting on lab work on one of my patients, a muscular black male walked past to have his vital signs taken before seeing a doctor. I had been visiting with either a couple of nurses or respiratory techs. The young man’s tongue was protruding, and he was salivating and gagging as he meekly followed the nurse. One of the nurses commented, I wonder what is wrong with him?

I glanced at him for a moment or two and pronounced, He’s got a carp bone stuck in his throat.

She responded indignantly demanding, How would you know that from here? I just shrugged my shoulders and went back to small talk.

Five minutes later the other nurse emerged and said, He said he was just eating fish and.....

Those carp bones can stab a tonsil like a miniature hand-thrown javelin and are nothing short of amazing.

Parkland Hospital, November 1963

I opened my copy of Southwestern Medicine last night and read in the memorials that James Carrico, MD had passed away several years ago. That fact had previously escaped my awareness. Pepper Jenkins, MD and Malcolm Perry, MD also shared the memorial page, and all three men had shared some history. I knew all three men, and of the three I worked more with Jim Carrico after the event in question. I awoke early this morning thinking about them and could not go back to sleep.

In November 1963 I was in my third month of school at Southwest Medical School. Classmates Harry Whipp, Jim Hammond, and I decided to go to the Parkland cafeteria for lunch. Theirs was the cheapest menu to be found and this was a major consideration for medical students. If we had time during our lunch break, we would go down to the emergency room. It was cheap entertainment and there was always a chance of learning something. We joked about going downtown as President John Kennedy was in town and there was going to be a motorcade. There was not enough time to get there, and none of us held him in very high esteem anyway. I ate the tuna tetrazzini, which was the cheapest thing on the serving line menu. I was nauseated and went back to class. I felt like I might see the tuna once again. We parted company and Harry and Jim went to the emergency room.

Harry helped transfer President Kennedy’s soon-to-be-lifeless body out of the limousine onto an ER cart. Harry said that in short order he was crowded out of the emergency room by real medical personnel and Secret Service agents wielding Uzi machine guns. He told me the agents all appeared to be looking for someone to shoot. Harry also told me that Jackie Kennedy was just walking around in a daze