The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (15 page)

I
T WAS TENA’S
turn on the stand: “Mark treated me like—he was—he treated me like I was—he gave me everything. That’s why—that’s why I fell in love with him when I met him. He gave me everything. He made me—he made sure I didn’t need nothing—no, sir.” Fate and age had swollen her considerably from the woman that Mark had met in the streets of Pleasant Grove. She looked out at the jury from small, well-meaning eyes, set in a puffy, weather-beaten face. She was telling the jury about those long afternoons in the mid-1980s when Mark had entered her life. He was a refugee from Plano and from his parents, taken in by his grandparents. He and Tena and her sister would play in the streets. He was always getting the girls into
trouble, always raising the stakes of play—whether smoking an illicit cigarette or racing riding mowers around and nearly running Tena over.

The jury would have gathered that the period of their courtship was a volatile time for Mark. After bouncing around the outfits of the TYC system—the Statewide Reception Center, the Gainesville State School, the Fairfield Camp—he had been released on parole. He returned home, and it quickly grew clear that the TYC’s aspiration to reform children hadn’t worked in this case. The old struggles resumed. At times, Mark showed progress; at times, he seemed destined for a life of trivial crimes and unprovoked bar fights. The paperwork told the story. If he wasn’t at one school lunging at Mexican students with a chrome-plated chain and carrying a studded wristband in his back pocket, he might be at another school pulling a five-inch pocketknife on black kids and threatening them with a baseball bat. If his family wasn’t reporting problems with spray paint, beer, and girls in his bedroom, the police would be finding him with a butterfly knife on the 400 block of South Buckner, a quarter mile from where he would many years later shoot a Bangladeshi clerk. If he wasn’t getting suspended or expelled from a Christian school for making threats, he might be smashing a double-pane window to break into a guy’s house. A juror could easily surmise that the true problems lay under the choppy surface of this young man’s life, but these underlying currents remained invisible.

“I, Mark Anthony Baker, am relating this statement to Det. Leon Mace, as he writes it for me,” began one of the many police reports, in which he relayed one of his crimes (and exotically renamed his mother).

Today, Friday, 06/21/85, I decided to go to the house at 1816 Williamsburg to steal the guy’s weed (marijuana) that lives there. I know this guy’s name is Glenn. I went to the back part of this house and used my knife to unlock the kitchen window
and then I crawled through this window. I had only been inside a minute or two when the police arrived and caught me as I was trying to sneak out a front window. I knew this Glen guy had marijuana because I had broken into this same house a couple of weeks ago and stole his marijuana and $100.00 in coins. I had broken into this house the first time to steal marijuana also.…

I did not know where Glen kept his marijuana so I had to search all over for it. I finally found it inside a box on a shelf in a closet in a room which must have been an office because there was a computor in this room. I also took the coins out of a large glass bottle which was holding the door open in the master bedroom. There was exactly $100.00 in coins, which I took. I have since then spent all of this money, and I have smoked all of the marijuana.…

My mother, Guadalupe Baker, lives in Austin, TX, but I live with my aunt and uncle, Joe Garza in McKinney and have for about one year. However, I have not been at their home for about 1-2 weeks. I have been staying in the Plano area, with various friends. Last night, Thursday night, I had spent just wandering around Plano.

There were many such incidents. But the jury also discovered how, earlier that year, when Tena built up the courage to tell Mark that he’d gotten her pregnant, that a pea-sized Stroman lurked within her, Mark had seemed to step up. The details provided were sketchy, but a few months later, Mark’s parole officer reported that he had agreed with his family to work full-time at his grandparents’ construction company. Not long afterward, he was said to be doing “extremely well” there.

Amber Stroman entered the world on September 9, 1985. She favored Mark from the start, looked just like him. Tena and Mark were married the following January. She was fifteen; he was sixteen.

The three of them lived in a place of their own down the street from Tena’s relatives. A portrait from the period shows them all dressed up, Mark in a dark jacket and red mullet, Tena looking older
than her years in a sweater vest and a white shirt. They were young and in love, and she could tell Mark’s devotion by how he acted anytime another man so much as laid an eye on her. They fought and cleaved, Mark and Tena, fought and cleaved—but always loved.

The jury learned of these things but also learned that, six weeks after their wedding, the police found Mark living alone and illegally in a vacant apartment in eastern Plano. His bicycle was propped up against the door to fend off people with guns and questions. A few months later, the cops caught him pointing a rifle at four boys and threatening them. On Christmas Day 1986, Mark was arrested for burglarizing a building. That crime was to steal food, according to one of his lawyers. Three weeks later, Tena gave birth to their second child, Robert. These facts were, again, easily available; the reasons behind the lurches remained for the jurors to interpret and explain.

A parole officer who visited the Stromans around this time was able to muster some hope. “Prior to his marriage this past year,” the officer wrote, “he had a poor, negative attitude and seemed to have a chip on his shoulder. Since his marriage, he seems to have settled down and seems to realize his responsibilities of working and taking care of his wife and daughter, with another child on the way.” The officer noted that, although Mark’s education had not gone beyond middle school, he was now “seriously considering on getting his GED.” He was working full-time for the Layfield Construction Company out of Kearns, operating a bridge machine, taking home $331.26 a week and spending less than a fifth of that on rent and utilities. (This left it unclear why Stroman would be caught living in vacant houses around the same time.) The Stromans’ home on Clearfield Road was a “nicely furnished two bedroom frame house,” the report said. Mark and Tena were “very close and supportive of each other. Communication is very good.”

The parole officer added, “Mark admits that he has in the past been associated with negative peers. He admits to a rugged life but now he is married with a small child and another child on the way.
He works long hours and hopefully has settled down to a productive life.”

Later that year, though, three days after Stroman’s eighteenth birthday, he and a buddy began a string of burglaries—burglaries in which, again and again, the thieving paused and the thieves ate some of the food they had found. After being caught, Mark confessed:

On Friday, Oct 16, 1987 in the morning Charles Kenney and I went to the back of the house. We jumped the fence knocked on the back door. No one answered so we broke out the window. I went in and let Charles in the sliding glass door. I hit a bedroom and Charles sacking food. We gathered up the jewelry, and things we wanted and left the back way. We jumped the brick wall and entered a vaccant building and ate some of the food. We seperated some of the jewelry and left going to the vaccant house. I used the credit card (a Mobil card) from 3441 Ave N at Hwy 5 and Parker Rd to buy a carton of cigerettes and a case of beer.…

On Monday Oct 19, 1987 during the morning Charles Kenney and I entered a vaccant house next to 1620 Armstrong. Open a window in vaccant house jumped out went into the back yard of the next house looked around and I broke the window. I entered and let Charles in the back door. Charles started taking the VCR. I started in the bedroom. We found coins, jewelery, knifes, camera, binos, jam box shirts, boots, hat, and a pillow case which we put everything into. We took everything to the vaccant house (next door) stashed VCR in the attic and we left with the jewelry and went to the vaccant house on Williamsburg. We seperated everything and we went to the Texas Pawn Shop and Charles pawned a pocket watch. In the vaccant house on Williamsburg we stashed the pillow case, the coin boxes and some of the jewelery. I took the coins from the collection to byuy food, that Charles and I ate.…

It was around this time that Tena got the gash in her neck that she insists Mark didn’t cut. The jury heard the story from her, which gave a flavor of their life together. “Me and Mark was down
at my grandmother’s,” she started. “And we were kids, we were kids. And we were down at my grandmother’s and we started off going to watch movies with my mom, and we winded up going getting beer. And we sat down there and we played quarters between the two of us with the case of beer, and we winded up getting drunk. And we walked home and left our car down there, and we got to arguing. And I got the knife and I acted—in my mind I knew I wasn’t going to hurt myself, but I got to acting—I acted towards him like I was …”

She paused to find the right words.

“… like I was going to cut my wrist. Because I didn’t think that he loved me anymore and I wanted him—I wanted to see that he would stop me. And so I acted like I was going to cut my wrist. And he come in there, and he said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said—you know, it just went into an argument. And he said, ‘Give me that knife.’ And I said, ‘No.’ I said, you know, I said, because I felt like I was pregnant. And I said, ‘I’m not—if we’re not going to be together, then, you know, I’ve already had one baby by myself,’ and I said, ‘I’m not doing it again.’ And he tried to take the knife away from me, and we had it, and he had his hands on it, and we were pulling at it like this. And he must have looked off or blinked or something, but it—I did like this, and when I did, it stabbed me right here.”

The jury also heard how, on September 8, 1988, Tena gave birth to her third child, Erica. Mark, then eighteen, was on and off with Tena at this point, and it was one of his virtues that he treated Erica like his own daughter—though he and everyone else knew she wasn’t. He even tried to convince the authorities to let him be there for the birth, but a felony was a felony. He had robbed again, stealing rifles and jewelry and checks; he had then gone on a spree with those checks. This time the reckoning was serious. They gave him five years in hard time at TDC. Then a strange thing happened. Some official came to interview him in the Dallas County jail, where he was awaiting his transfer. Because of overcrowding in Texas penal facilities, there was an order to grant “parole in absentia” to certain
prisoners before they even made it to prison. Despite his intimate personal history with Texas law enforcement over the years, Stroman was deemed suitable for release.

On Election Day 1990, more than a year after he got out, Stroman was picked up, along with a buddy, at a Dillard’s store on Preston Road in Dallas. He had in his shopping bags a pair of cross-training shoes, a London Fog jacket, a bottle of Yves St. Laurent cologne and another scent by Polo, a woman’s purse, three men’s sweaters, two pairs of men’s pants, and three pairs of jeans. The $589 spree was the unintended courtesy of one Mrs. Terry Hanes, who was leaving a nearby Pep Boys a short while earlier when a man rushed up behind her, grabbed her neck, and jerked away her purse. This, too, was a felony—and now the second one. Mark pleaded guilty and received an eight-year sentence. But again he was paroled—perhaps for the same reasons as before, though the record isn’t clear—and freed after a matter of months.

The jury heard how, during one of Mark’s stints in jail, his grandfather came to visit him. He told his grandson that he would likely die while Mark was serving out his sentence—and that Mark would probably lose Tena. As it happened, both prophecies came true. When Stroman emerged from his considerably abbreviated sentence in the middle of 1991, Mr. Cox had gone to the next world, and Tena was more or less finished with Mark.

The defense lawyers presented no witnesses who could speak about Mark after this period. The people he’d known since boyhood mostly fell out of his life. New faces came into the picture. The expert-witness psychologist who was working for Mark’s side and interviewed him extensively testified that he became involved with a waitress named Shawna. The psychologist also testified about his growing reliance on drugs in the 1990s—including meth. Stroman told the psychologist that sometimes he woke up early in the morning and saw trees out the window, and all he could think was that the narco police must be hiding in there. Mark told the
psychologist that meth for him was like coffee for others—not some exotic drug, just the fuel he came to need to row himself through the days.

For the next several years, however, Stroman stayed clear of police reports and prison terms. He appeared to be enjoying some measure of domestic tranquility, which meant that the state’s tracking of him mostly stopped. Then in the middle of 2001, not long after Rais Bhuiyan and Salim finished cleaning out the gas station and opened it for business, Stroman was out drinking one evening at the Texas Trap. He loved the joint, always had. Someone called 911 and reported that a man at the bar had a gun on him. One of the things Texas is strict about is keeping guns out of establishments where alcohol accounts for a majority of revenue. The police arrived around 6:15 p.m. and found a .45 caliber semiautomatic, with one round in the chamber and two in the magazine, tucked into Stroman’s waistline, just above the family jewels. They took him straight to jail. Fortunately for Stroman, he had some friends called the Templetons, who were generous people. He was friends with Bob and had gotten to know the parents, too.

They bailed him out and brought him home. Soon he would be crashing on their living room sofa, not far from the gun cabinet that had grown fuller and fuller through the senior Mr. Templeton’s long service with the Dallas Police Department. Far from Dallas, meanwhile, final preparations were under way for a series of airplane attacks on the country Stroman so professed to love.