The Poker Night Murders

The

Poker Night

Murders

D. R. Taylor

Copyright © 2022 D. R. Taylor

All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission of the publisher, except for the use of quotations in a book review or for educational purposes.

ISBN: 979-8-9862399-0-3 (Paperback)

ISBN: 979-8-9862399-1-0 (eBook)

Editing by Kathleen Strattan

Cover and interior design by John Reinhardt Book Design

Printed in the United States of America

To DoVo, Lucy and Ali

The First Thursday

June 1, 2017 has been a good day for this player, a player in every sense of the word. He spent the morning playing golf. He shot a 76, winning $700 in the process. He just won over $3000 at the weekly poker game where he is a regular. Driving home, he made plans to get laid. He pulls his car into his garage at ten minutes to midnight, time enough to take his dog for a short walk before his female guest arrives. He is winning the game that is his life. But in a few minutes, he will lose everything. Someone will enter the garage and put a bullet in his head.

To know the full story of what happens tonight, it is necessary to rewind six hours and twenty miles. Ronald Turner steps into his poker room at exactly 6:00 p.m. At the center is an octagonal table surrounded by eight swivel chairs with pneumatic lifts. To the right sits a storage cabinet containing a small refrigerator and shelves for poker supplies. A buffet table is positioned next to the storage cabinet. An entertainment center is built into the opposite wall. It houses a surround sound system and a 55-inch television set.

Ronald is a sixty-one-year-old forensic psychiatrist who recently retired. He has played poker regularly for most of his life. His parents taught him to play Five Card Draw, Five Card Stud and Seven Card Stud during family games at the kitchen table. He occasionally played with friends in high school and college. While in medical school and residency he and his classmates took turns hosting low stakes games. Since 1990 he has hosted a weekly game at his home in Hunter’s Green, a suburb in an area northeast of Tampa often referred to as New Tampa. By 7:00 eight players will be seated at the table, including the one who will soon be murdered.

For men like Ronald, poker provides a sedentary opportunity to compete. The chance to win money while watching sports and talking trash checks just about every box in the cerebral cortex of the average male. Like a mid-life tree fort, no girls allowed. You can learn a lot about a man from the way he plays poker. It’s not just about winning and losing. Is he daring or risk-averse? How does he react when the stakes are high? Does he base decisions on data or instinct? Is he creative or an a-b-c thinker? If you’re choosing between two guys to hire, invite them to a poker game.

Ronald was born in Tampa. Before he started school the family moved outside the city limits to Temple Terrace, a small town near the University of South Florida. Ronald and his two younger siblings were raised with the expectation that they would enter professions requiring advanced degrees. Ronald eventually graduated from medical school and became a psychiatrist. His brother Lee took a different path and attended law school. After graduation, Lee worked as a prosecutor in Hillsborough County for eight years before embarking on a career as a criminal defense attorney. Their sister Susan also chose the legal profession. After six years with the Florida Office of the Attorney General, she founded her own firm specializing in wills and estate planning.

As a youth, Ronald wanted to become an athlete rather than a scholar. His father engaged him in athletic contests almost as soon as he could walk. He would usually let Ronald win in order to build his confidence. Later, Ronald was able to dominate his younger siblings. This resulted in his belief that he was athletically invincible. On the rare occasions he experienced defeat he viewed it as a personal failure which must be rectified. His aversion to losing fueled an intense competitive drive that persisted into adulthood.

At 6:28 Ronald is counting and stacking chips. From his left a cat suddenly springs to the top of the table, scattering chips in the process. Ronald claps his hands and yells, Off!

The cat hops off the table and scurries to the corner farthest from Ronald, who raises his voice.

Lisa! Get this frickin’ cat out of the poker room!

Within a minute Ronald’s wife appears at the door. She is an attractive, brown-eyed brunette. Some of the patients and staff at the hospital where she works have told her she resembles Sandra Bullock. Not the kind of woman you expect to be married to a guy with a round face, pale skin and rapidly receding gray hair. She bends to gather the cat and smiles, sweetly.

She’s just being curious. You don’t have to yell at her.

Curious, my ass. She made a mess. I don’t want to have to deal with her on poker night.

Lisa pets the cat. Come on, Sneakers. Grumpy old man doesn’t want you in his room. They make their exit.

Things have been tense between Ronald and Lisa this week. On Monday, she unexpectedly brought the cat home from a shelter. Ronald is not a cat person, and he does not like surprises. Lisa had been talking about adopting a cat for years, but Ronald thought he had convinced her to wait. Now, he is annoyed by the intrusion. By the time he reconstructs the toppled stacks it is 6:32. He is four minutes behind schedule.

Ronald’s childhood fantasy was to exceed the exploits of idols such as Mickey Mantle and Roman Gabriel. In youth sports he was always the starting shortstop on his baseball team and the quarterback of the football team. Based on family history, he expected to grow to a height of six feet or more. However, at age fifteen he reached his full height of five feet ten inches. He was a good high school athlete, but not a great one. During his junior and senior years at King High School he made all-county teams, but never all-state. No major college offered him a football scholarship. His name was not called in the 1974 Major League Baseball draft.

Ronald attended USF on a baseball scholarship. By his sophomore year he realized his career would involve something other than sports. He gave up baseball and decided to become a physician, an ambitious goal that he viewed as a challenge. After getting his undergraduate degree, he attended medical school at the University of Florida. Following graduation he remained at UF to complete a four-year residency program in psychiatry, then a one-year fellowship in forensic psychiatry. The verbal sparring with attorneys while testifying in court provided a satisfying outlet for his competitive nature. After completing his training in 1987 he established a private practice in Tampa.

Soon after opening his practice, Ronald devised a plan to retire after thirty years. The timetable involved dividing his career into ten-year increments. For the first ten years he evaluated and treated patients in his office and at area hospitals. During that time he also built a forensic psychiatry practice, which largely consisted of evaluating criminal defendants for the court system. As his forensic practice expanded, he began to cut back on his clinical practice. He stopped doing hospital work in 1997. He continued to see patients in his office, but he grew more focused on forensic cases. In 2007 he stopped treating patients altogether. For the final ten years he practiced exclusively as a forensic psychiatrist, conducting criminal court evaluations and testifying in court. By 2017 he was ready to retire. He had evaluated almost 10,000 criminal defendants, including more than 200 charged with murder. He had testified in court over 500 times. He stopped accepting new cases, but he remained available to testify regarding defendants he had already evaluated. In April he testified for the last time at the trial of a schizophrenic man accused in the brutal stabbing death of a young woman. At the end of that month, he closed his office. In May he attended the American Psychiatric Association annual meeting in San Diego, mostly to say goodbye to old friends. When he returned to Tampa he looked forward to a retirement highlighted by international travel, reading the great books and hosting Thursday night poker games.

When Ronald lived alone in a Tampa apartment in the late 1980s, he and a group of friends took turns hosting weekly poker games. Most of the other players were psychiatrists and psychologists he met through his practice. Ronald cultivated the activity into an outlet for his competitive drive. If he was going to play, he was determined to win. He read books on poker strategy and learned how to calculate odds. He became a consistent winner. When he built a house in 1990, he chose a model with a bonus room that could be optimized for poker. He began hosting games every Thursday night. Interest in the game eventually exceeded the number of seats available. In addition to eight regular players there were alternates ready to fill a seat in someone’s absence. When a regular player moved or dropped out of the game there was always a replacement. Most of the newer players were attorneys Ronald had met through his siblings or his professional activities. The format of the game evolved, and the stakes steadily rose. By 2017 it cost $1000 to buy into the game plus $10 for food, beverages and supplies.

Ronald is a creature of routine. By 6:53 he has completed his usual preparation tasks. Four folding trays have been placed around the table so that one is within easy reach of each seat. Five discs have been loaded into the CD player. Tonight’s selection includes Led Zeppelin, Lynrd Skynyrd and the Moody Blues, to be played in alphabetical order. In front of each chair is $1000 worth of poker chips in uniform stacks of red ($5), blue ($10), green ($25) and black ($100). Potato chips, nuts and other snacks are in serving bowls. The refrigerator is stocked with beer and soft drinks. An ice bucket and a pitcher of water are filled and placed on top of the buffet table. The TV set is tuned to the channel broadcasting the Stanley Cup finals. Tonight is Game 2 between the Nashville Predators and the Pittsburgh Penguins. Ronald counts and shuffles two decks of cards while waiting for his guests to arrive.

For over twenty years the first one through the doorway was usually Jason Bowen. Born and raised in Miami, Jason had a distinguished career as an experimental psychologist. After completing graduate school, he served in the United States Army for twenty years, He advanced to the rank of colonel. During the Vietnam War he was instrumental in developing interrogation techniques designed to extract information from captured enemy soldiers. Following his discharge, he embarked on a second career as a professor and later chairman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Tampa. He met and married a professor eighteen years his junior. After retiring in 2001 he got involved in a variety of community activities, most significantly as a major fundraiser for the Republican Party. For years he was the most successful player in the weekly poker game despite the fact that he was significantly older than the others. He often told them he would stop playing before his skills eroded rather than afford them the opportunity to regain the money he had taken from them. By 2014 the game had become tougher. He decided that reaching eighty years of