Behind the Yellow Tape: On the Road With Some of America's Hardest Working Crime Scene Investigators (19 page)

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.

SEATTLE POLICE DEPARTMENT, WASHINGTON

Seattle, Washington, probably best known these days for Starbucks Coffee, was once known for its lumber and shipbuilding industries. Though Seattle was officially founded in 1851, archaeological evidence has shown that humans have been there since as early as 8000 B.C. The city is surrounded by natural beauty, bordered by Lake Washington and Puget Sound and surrounded by the Olympic Mountains to the west and the Cascade mountain ranges to the east. The city also sits atop an active geological fault known as the Seattle Fault, which was last active in 2001 when a magnitude-6.8 earthquake shook the city. Most people think of rain when they think of Seattle, but the average rainfall is actually one of the lowest in the country. The Seattle Police Department has 1,837 employees; in 2005, the Crime Scene Investigations Unit worked twenty-five murders within its jurisdiction.

Back in the sixties, Perry Como crooned that “the bluest skies you’ve ever seen are in Seattle.” And it may be true to those who live and work in the magnificent Emerald City, though we’re not sure how they even remember what color the sky
is
, considering the cloud cover that seems to always blanket the city. The city of Seattle, Washington, is sandwiched between two mountain chains—the Olympic Mountains to the west and the Cascades to the east—and it looks out across Puget Sound, where the warm waters of the Pacific Ocean keep the temperatures relatively mild year round. These waters and high mountains keep Seattle vested underneath a layer of marine clouds most of the time. But when the sun does shine and that wonderful blue sky comes into view, Seattle’s remarkable natural wonders are revealed, including the breathtaking and usually snowcapped Mt. Rainier that seems to sit guard over the city. Yet contrary to popular belief, Seattle is not nearly the rainiest city in America—it’s not even close. As a matter of fact, it usually doesn’t even crack the top ten; Mobile, Alabama, takes the number one prize in that category. It is, however, the city that experiences the least amount of sunshine, the cloudiest city in America. This lack of sunshine has contributed to three things Seattle is best known for: serial killers, suicide, and coffee—three very different, yet uniquely related issues. This overtly cloudy area has produced one of the world’s most notorious serial killers in one Gary Ridgway, better known as the Green River Killer, who admitted to killing forty-nine women in and around the Seattle area over the course of more than twenty years.