Behind the Yellow Tape Read online

  “There were turnip greens cookin’ on the stove and Ray Charles playin’ on the record player,” John said, with a chuckle. “It was like we had stepped back in time.” And sure enough, right where the shooting had occurred nearly twenty-five years earlier were a couple of poorly patched bullet holes, low to the floor, hidden behind a wardrobe. Again, more information pointed that [Wanda’s] original statement didn’t add up.

  “I almost cringe when I hear the term criminal profiling,” John said. “The way it has been portrayed in movies and television is not accurate. Criminal profiling or criminal behavioral analysis is simply a way to lend a behavioral perspective that traditional law enforcement training doesn’t necessarily expose you to.” Essentially, what a profiler does, broken down into its base components, is to try to look at a crime and think what happened, why did this happen from the offender’s perspective, what role did the victim play, and who would have been motivated to do this. Simply stated, but a real art form in practice. John ultimately interviewed Wanda in 2006 about her husband’s death. She hadn’t had as much as a speeding ticket in twenty-five years, but within minutes, she confessed to having fabricated the whole self-defense story.

  Ultimately, Wanda was indicted by the grand jury and arraigned in the Gregg County 124th District Court, where the trial was set to begin in early 2007. Nobody wanted to see this case go to court except for one person—John Gough’s brother Fred. “The DA offered to plea the case, getting a guilty verdict, and [have] Wanda serve no time, maybe pay a dollar or something,” John told us, over a huge piece of cheesecake. But Fred would have none of it. She was guilty and she would stand trial. And she did. Ranger Martin flew down and testified on the case, just as he was supposed to. He had garnered a complete confession from Wanda and had matched the evidence to corroborate her own incriminating statement. It was a slam-dunk case. And yet, “When the jury went back to deliberate, they came back with a verdict of not guilty,” he said, shaking his head. Not guilty. That’s how it goes in the world of cold cases. Solving one is a combination of good luck, hard work, and serendipity. And even when all of those things line up, the final decision is still left up to a jury.

  John had arranged for us to take a helicopter ride in the Texas Department of Public Safety’s very own helicopter the next morning. It flew all of the way in from headquarters just to take us up for a bird’s-eye view of San Antonio. While we waited for the copter to arrive, we asked John whether there was a case that still haunted him. Indeed there was; there always is. “Yeah, I’ve got one,” John said, taking a swig of Dr Pepper. “When I just joined the unit, this guy came in with a story about a murder in San Antonio that he knew something about. Most times, these stories go nowhere, but this one, well, it was interesting.” It was interesting indeed. John’s case came during all of the publicity that occurred when the unit was created. The guy was a walk-in off the street, seemingly a nut. But John dug around in the files of the San Antonio Police Department and found an unsolved murder that had occurred at nearly the exact time frame this guy was talking about.

  “Did he get a lot of detail right?” we asked.

  “No,” John responded flatly. The street the murder had actually occurred on was one over from the one he had claimed, and the details weren’t really any more accurate than what could have been read by anyone in the paper. But the guy had led John to an unsolved homicide, so he decided to try to work it. And he’s never stopped working it. There was an unidentified suspect’s DNA as part of the evidence, but that was about it. So John dove deep into the area, making contacts, trying to revive the details about the victim and the neighborhood.

  “The vic was a good-looking real estate agent who was doing work on her house, so she had a lot of people coming in and out,” John explained. “I even got a DNA profile from one of the construction guys who I thought could have done it, who was then living in Utah—it turned out not to be him. I’ve been all over the country getting DNA; I have no real leads. I even asked around the neighborhood, asking if there were any perverts who were known to peep around, and I found one, a young kid who would go around skinning his carrot looking into people’s houses.” But despite the potential lead, who admitted to being a peeping Tom, the swab came back negative. “I didn’t think he’d done it anyway,” John admitted. Nobody’s DNA matched the suspect’s, not even the guy who’d started the whole thing by coming in. Eventually, John polygraphed the guy, who failed the test miserably. “I didn’t know what to think,” he said as the roar of the helicopter began to hum through the hangar. “I even contacted the guy’s wife, who said she knew all about her husband claiming he had intimate knowledge of that crime. I believe the guy is just a drug burnout who was around when the murder happened and absorbed some of the details; I don’t think he had anything to do with it.”

  “Do you ever think you’ll solve it?” we asked.

  “Maybe,” John shouted, over the roar of the rotors that had yet to come to a stop. “Maybe I’ll get a hit in CODIS or something one day. But he could have died or been incarcerated before the DNA law went into effect for felons.” John was referring to the thousands of convicts all across the country who were incarcerated before it was common practice to swab felons for DNA to be entered into the FBI’s national DNA database CODIS (Combined DNA Index System). “Texas passed a law, and we are going back and swabbing all felons,” John told us, before we posed for our picture with the Ranger and the helicopter. “But with the backlog, it will be years and years before they are all submitted.” Unfortunately, as wonderful as DNA evidence can be, it’s worthless if it’s not collected and analyzed. John may never solve this particular case, but he works on it, even if for just a little while, every month.

  When we returned from our helicopter ride, it was off to another meal. John and his wife had made reservations for dinner at an off-the-beaten-path place named the Grey Moss Inn.

  The authors, Jarrett and Amy, with Ranger John Martin (center)

  in front of the Texas DPS helicopter.

  HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

  The inn resides along the original stagecoach route that ran all the way from San Antonio, Texas, to San Diego, California, and has a deep and rich Texas history, complimented nicely by authentic Texas cuisine—meaning meat. Lots of meat. All kinds of animals were being roasted on a huge open fire at the inn. Vegetarians beware.

  John had also invited some of the other Rangers and their families to dinner, including Chance Collins and Troy Wilson. Ranger Wilson is now an instructor at the NFA whom we originally met through John. Troy and another Ranger, Oscar Rivera (with whom we unfortunately didn’t get a chance to visit on our trip) often teach crime scene mapping, showing CSIs how to sketch crime scenes on a computer.

  The dinner was a nice change of pace, just time to relax, decompress, and laugh. “We ought to do this more often,” John said, swirling his glass of wine at the head of the table. These guys and their families don’t see as much of each other as one might think. This dinner was a quasi family reunion for them, and a chance for us to meet their wives and children.

  After a huge meal was served to us by a wacky waitress, and with dessert on its way, John told a few tall tales about his days as a state trooper. “We had these ol’ boys, and all they wanted to do was pull pranks,” John said, with that all-too-familiar Texas grin. “These boys would do just about anything. One evening, getting toward dark, these two troopers happened on a car with a flat tire and a New York license plate. These poor folks were driving across country and were getting close to one of the reservations in the area frequented by out-of-towners—a. k.a. a tourist trap. The troopers pulled up behind and got out of their car. One of the guys went up to the group and asked them, did they know what they were doing and that they were driving through Indian country and that the Indians were on the warpath? Before the New Yorkers could answer, the other trooper turned his back to the group and pulled out both pistols and began firing wildly with both hands into th
e woods, screaming, “Here they come!” The poor New Yorkers nearly killed themselves speeding away, leaving their jack and three lug nuts behind. They had watched too many Gunsmoke reruns. We all sat there laughing and wiping tears away while John grinned proudly at the entertainment that he had provided. With stomachs full and sore from laughter, we all got up to leave, with hugs and handshakes all around on our last night in San Antonio.

  But there was still more food to come in the morning. Every Friday morning in San Antonio, you will find a gathering of Texas Rangers eating breakfast at one of the local establishments named Las Chiladas. This breakfast meeting has become a tradition for the Rangers in San Antonio to come and eat, hang out, catch up, gossip, and talk. We arrived at Las Chiladas and were ushered back to the reserved table beneath the two wall hangers—purchased by the Rangers themselves—needed for hanging up all of the cowboy hats.

  During breakfast, the Rangers chatted, talking a little about active cases, bouncing ideas off one another, most being a little quieter than usual because there were two authors in the room. Eventually, though, they loosened up and started telling war stories: about murder, about drag queens, and about ghosts. Stories about how after thirty years, people who had gotten away with murder begin to lose sleep and begin telling others, because it eats at their very souls. John chimed in and said, “When you get a guy close, just reach in and touch him on the stomach, he’ll tell it all.”

  Texas Rangers’ hats hanging on the wall during breakfast.

  HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

  After about an hour of talking and laughing about all of the crap that they see, John unloaded probably the best quote and the strangest story of the trip. “A policeman’s badge is a front-row seat to the greatest show on Earth,” he said, with a laugh. It sure seems that police officers deal with some of the most outrageous circumstances; at times, you just can’t help but laugh, or at the very least let your mouth hang open, at the unbelievability of what you are hearing. “We had this case one time that was about the strangest thing I’d ever heard,” John began, knowing he had captured our attention. When cops think something is strange or weird, look out.

  “This ol’ gal was crying, walking along the side of the road,” John said, posturing to tell the story in the way only he can, “when this van pulled up and stopped next to her. There was a normal-looking, middle-class husband and wife in the van, both trying to console the girl. As the conversation continued, the husband got out of the van and walked around to the passenger side door, while his wife continued to talk to the girl. When the old boy got close, he shocked the girl with a Taser gun, opened the sliding door, shoved her in, cuffed her to an eyehook in the middle of the van, and drove off.”

  John continued. “They took this girl to a weird little house with no doors or windows, except for in the back of the house. They got her out of the van, stripped her naked, and threw a rope up over an exposed rafter inside the house and collared her around the neck. After they had tied the girl up with the rope, making sure she was secure, the old guy and the gal pushed up a dinner table next to the girl, stripped naked themselves, and sat down and commenced to eating spaghetti.” At this point we’re all listening to this with our mouths agape, just waiting for the punch line.

  “The couple didn’t talk much, the girl said. They just communicated with hand signals. At one point, she explained, the old boy popped his elbow up on the table, and held up the peace sign or the number two to his wife, who immediately jumped up and ran down the hallway. When she came back, she was carrying one of those hospital urinals and without missing a beat, hit her knees, crawled under the table, and crammed the ole boy’s root down into the urinal, where he relieved himself. When he was done, she pulled the ole boy’s root out, cleaned him off, crawled out from under the table, took the urinal back down the hallway, came back, sat down, and went back to eating spaghetti without saying a word.” (“Ah shit,” someone said.)

  “She then said that when the couple finished eating, they pushed back from the table and untied her from the rafters and marched her down a hallway to nowhere. When they reached the end, the wife grabbed for the fake wall, revealing a hidden bedroom with an old mattress on the floor and another exposed rafter in the ceiling. They again tied her up, but allowed her enough slack to lie down. The wife then tossed her a book and told her to study it.” The couple closed the wall back, went next door, and commenced, as John so eloquently explained, “whip-pin’ and spurrin’ and fuckin’ like there was no tomorrow”—all night long. “The girl told us that the book was full of phrases used to say to your master,” John said.

  “When the next morning arrived, the girl told us that she was glad and surprised to be alive, so she decided to go along with what the book said, to try and survive, call him master and stuff like that. That morning, the wife put on clothes, went to the grocery store, and, at some point—the police later found out—went bowling, believe it or not. The ol’ boy cleaned his rifle and put the girl on the vacuum, still naked and still tied up. After she had called him master a couple times, the ol’ boy untied her and allowed her to vacuum freely while he continued to clean his gun.”

  “With every pass she made, she tried to get close to the sliding door that led out the back of the house. When she finally got close enough, she waited until he wasn’t looking and dashed, buck naked, all ninety pounds of her, a quarter mile up the road to this old farmhouse. She rounded the driveway and literally busted through the back door, where this eighty-year-old lady was sitting having her morning coffee. She began yelling for the woman to call 911. The old lady did, at the same time clutching at her chest. At virtually the same time, the ol’ naked boy rounded through the back entrance wearing nothing but his rifle. He threatened the old lady repeatedly, demanding she tell him where the girl was (she had hidden under some clothes in the closet). He scuttled about and found an old pair of pants that didn’t fit, pulling them up to just barely on his hips.

  “As he continued to threaten the old woman, the old lady’s son and daughter-in-law arrived on scene to the chaos, and the ol’ boy commenced to threatening them too, and still threatening to kill the old lady if she didn’t tell him what he wanted to know.”

  John continued the story. “Unbelievably, and as if on cue, the sheriff’s deputies showed up—all four of them—including the paper-pushing constable that nobody liked. Immediately, a standoff ensued as the guy, with his pants barely on his hips, yelled at the cops and they yelled back. The son decided to be a hero, going back to a chest of drawers and grabbing a .22 pistol. He ran to the back of the house where the standoff continued and fired a shot, missing the ol’ boy completely. But the shot started World War III,” John said, shaking his head.

  “As the shooting began, one of the deputies had a clear line of sight on the ol’ boy and fired all six of his bullets, missing him every time, and having no bullets remaining. Another deputy simply froze and cried, never drawing his weapon. The deputy sheriff was firing on the ol’ boy from behind his cruiser door when the naked guy shot out the windshield and shot part of [the deputy’s] finger off. The ol’ boy, having wounded the deputy, came down from the porch to lay him out when the constable, the guy nobody even liked, went to his trunk, got a rifle, and shot the ol’ boy square in the back, ending the whole scene.”

  “What happened?” we asked, with childlike wonder.

  “Well,” John said, “the old lady had a heart attack and eventually died in the hospital. So we worked the scene, collected the evidence, and prosecuted the wife who was part of the kidnapping. Ultimately, though she claimed she was a battered wife, she got forty years for what happened.”

  “What about the evidence?” we asked, laughing, already expecting the answer. “We collected swings and dildos and homemade shit none of us had ever seen or heard of. We had no idea how some of it would be used or where most of it would even fit.” Guess it is true what they say—everything is bigger in Texas. And with that, the boys grabbed their hats
, paid their checks, said their good-byes, and set us off on the road to catch a plane in Houston.

  Walking through the terminal at George Bush Intercontinental Airport, the fourth-largest airport in the United States and the sixth-largest in the world, we realized something—we stood out. We were decked out in our shorts and tennis shoes while all around us men and women alike wore cowboy hats and Wranglers. We had slipped through a portal, our very own Twilight Zone, where everything was different. But what do you expect from a state that had to write its own declaration of independence against another country, from a state that was another country, and from a state that prides itself on its gunslinging heritage? Different it is. And thank God for that. Where else would the concept of the Texas Rangers work except Texas? Nowhere. And it probably won’t always work in Texas either. Some unthinking lawmaker will one day abolish this last vestige of another era of law enforcement that harks back, even if just a little, to Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. A time that everyone wishes he or she could be a part of—even if just for a few seconds. We were able to get that experience with the Rangers, traveling back in time. No, we didn’t ride on horses; instead we drove around in a Ford Taurus. And no, there were no High Noon shootouts in the middle of the street. But there were tips of the brim of the hat, “howdy ma’ams,” and sippin’ whiskey. Currently, the Rangers enjoy just about the best reputation they’ve ever had, for solving crimes and holding state officials’ feet to the fire. One bright legislator, when an argument erupted over who should guard some sensitive data, told the rest of the representatives that the information should be given to the Rangers to watch over. When asked why, he simply stated that there were only two things in the world that he trusted—“God and the Texas Rangers.” Amen to that.