Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (18 page)

“By the time I came to the NFA, I had been a Ranger for seven years,” John said later, as we walked back to our car after lunch. He chucked his cowboy hat into the backseat. “I felt like I had a pretty good handle on it. Then I got to the NFA and saw the quality of instruction, and it made me reflect back on some of the cases I had investigated over the years and how I could have done things better or differently. Not only did I recognize my own deficiencies, I recognized that my deficiencies were also the Rangers’ deficiencies.” John had laid the groundwork for other Rangers to come to the academy, and he even started a mini-crime scene school for the Rangers, building on many of the concepts that he learned at the NFA.

That’s been a constant theme with virtually every graduate we have ever talked to. It’s not that anyone was doing a bad job; that’s certainly not the case. But there had never been a place specifically dedicated to the art of crime scene investigation, where CSIs could learn from other CSIs and practice their craft, developing new and innovative techniques. Not to mention the NFA’s unique environment, far different from most other police training academies. “I’ve been around these little regional police academies in the state, where they’ve hired some retired police officer who thinks he knows it all,” John told us as we drove around San Antonio. “What you get is a guy with one year of experience he’s had twenty-five times over, and he’s over there trying to teach new police officers, and completely closed-minded to anything that is outside his realm of knowledge and understanding. You guys impressed me right off the bat saying that you would never be satisfied with the way it is right now. I thought, wow, what a great attitude to have for any training program or educational endeavor, and these folks are going to be successful and make a big splash.”

John’s comments were very flattering, and they reflected what the NFA set out to do. We intentionally engineered the academy to be unlike traditional police-training venues. We had made a concerted effort to be different, to be more interactive. We wanted input, we wanted feedback, we were open to change, and we listened to everybody’s opinion. These were not ideas readily accepted in the rigid, paramilitary, and very strict hierarchical police world. But they’re concepts that are very conducive to learning.

The next day, we went with John and his lovely wife for a taste of San Antonio culture—Fiesta. Originally called the Fiesta San Jacinto, Fiesta is a ten-day celebration in honor of the heroes who died during the battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto. In modern times, Fiesta has morphed into a drunken fest with cheap taco bars and thousands of
cascarones
—colored empty eggshells filled with confetti. As we ate the Fiesta food, John talked about a recent cold case he’d investigated.

Partygoers at Fiesta, a San Antonio celebration.
HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

Back in October 1980, John Gough was shot and killed by his wife, Wanda, in what was determined to be an act of self-defense. But John’s brother Fred had never believed the story and had tried unsuccessfully for years to get the case reopened. Finally, after much persistence, the case landed in John’s lap in May 2005.

“I could tell right away that it more than likely wasn’t self-defense, as Wanda had described in her statement twenty-five years [earlier],” John said. He matched the wounds from the photos of the deceased to Wanda’s original statement and was able to make out inconsistencies. “Where she says she shot her husband, and how, just didn’t match with what I was seeing,” John recalled. “So we went back to the house where the shooting had occurred.” When they arrived, “we asked the owners if we could take a look around the house, and they let us in.”

“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 the 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.