Authors: Ken Englade
While the exact dynamics of Joy and Larry’s marriage at that stage are not known, it seemed to continue on a roller coaster path. On January 8, 1986, six months after she filed for divorce, Joy withdrew the petition, telling friends and relatives that she and Larry were going to try yet again to make a go of their union. But something was strange. Even though they were ostensibly reconciled, the marriage slipped back into the same pattern that had predominated in 1982 and 1983, before Larry’s affair with Rozanne. They were distant to each other and pursued separate lives.
Early in June 1986, Joy came to Larry with some very disturbing news. “We’re broke,” she said.
Larry was shocked. “What do you mean, ‘broke’?” he asked. By his calculations there should have been almost $200,000 in their bank account.
There had been many unexpected recent expenses, Joy explained, and, what with the taxes they owed, their money had vanished. The situation was so bad, she said, they might have to borrow $30,000 from her father just to carry them through until Larry sold another house.
“Like hell we will,” Larry said.
The next morning Larry went to see their accountant, who confirmed that there had been a lot of outgo but said he did not yet have all the records from Joy, who acted as the family bookkeeper, to give Larry any specifics.
Before he could get an answer to his questions about the money, Larry and Joy’s relationship took a decidedly downward turn. Within days, it had slipped to the point where they barely were speaking.
A few days after she told him about their financial problems, Joy told Larry that she wanted to meet him so they could have a lengthy discussion about their marital difficulties. She wanted a quiet place for the meeting, she said, someplace where they could both relax and get away from the distractions of everyday life. She suggested the ranch in Kaufman County. She asked Larry if he would saddle up a couple of horses so she and her mother could go for a ride. Then she and Larry would have time to talk.
Larry was puzzled. Neither Joy nor Frances Davis—
especially
Frances—had ever taken any interest in either the ranch or horseback riding. Joy, in fact, was not even sure where the ranch was. She was so uncertain of its location, she said, she wanted Larry to draw her a detailed map showing her how to get there.
Reaching for a piece of paper, Larry sketched the directions, conceding that it was relatively hard to find. The ranch was located near the center of Kaufman County, about an hour’s drive from Dallas. The nearest town was Poetry, a flyspeck even on local maps.
Several days later, on the way to the ranch, Larry ran into an old friend, an ex-rodeo performer named Don Kennedy. Stopping to chat with him, Larry explained that he was on the way to Kaufman County to prepare a couple of saddle horses for Joy and her mother.
Kennedy, who knew both women, broke into a huge grin. “Joy?” he asked in disbelief. “And
Frances?
They’re going to go
horseback
riding?”
“Yeah,” Larry laughed. “Ain’t that something?”
“I’d like to see that,” Kennedy chuckled.
“Then why don’t you come along?” Larry suggested. “Those horses we have aren’t exactly the tamest in the world, but we can take them out for a run and get them tired before Joy and her mother show up.”
Kennedy accepted the invitation, climbing into the passenger seat of Larry’s red Suburban four-wheel-drive vehicle.
Hours later, after a long ride, Kennedy and Larry sat on the porch of Larry’s ranch house, drinking bourbon and Coke and still waiting for Joy and Frances.
“I figured they weren’t going to be here,” Larry said in disgust. “It just sounded too impossible.”
As he spoke, he looked up and pointed to a pickup truck driving down the road that ran in front of the ranch. “That’s the third or fourth time that truck’s been by here,” Larry observed. “I wonder what the hell those two guys want?”
Kennedy shrugged. “Who knows?” Glancing at his watch, he asked Larry how much longer he planned to wait.
“To hell with it,” Larry replied. “If they were going to be here, they would have shown by now. Let’s go home.”
Again, Kennedy slipped into the passenger seat and Larry got behind the wheel. Angry, because he had been stood up, Larry gunned the motor and pulled away in a cloud of dust. A few minutes later, however, after driving through the ranch’s gate, he had to slow down to cross a narrow wooden bridge that spanned a small creek. Just on the other side of the bridge was a copse of trees, mainly the spindly pines that cover much of east and south-central Texas.
He had just crossed the bridge and was shifting into a higher gear when his driver’s side window shattered and he heard a series of soft thuds followed by several popping noises. The first bullet had come through his window, narrowly missed, and buried itself in the seat behind him. A second bullet zipped through his hair. Seconds later, his friend Kennedy shouted, “I’m hit!” and grabbed his elbow. A third bullet had entered through a back window, passed between the seats, and hit Kennedy. The slug traveled down his arm and lodged near his wrist. “Where?” Larry screamed.
“In the arm,” Kennedy moaned.
“Well, get down,” Larry ordered. “They’re still shooting.”
Stunned, Larry floored the accelerator and sped away. Several hundred feet down the road, when there were no more shots, he braked to a stop. Turning to Kennedy he asked, “How bad is it?”
Kennedy grimaced in pain, still clutching his elbow, which was bleeding profusely.
“I don’t think it’s bad,” he said, “but I’d better get to a doctor.”
Larry and Kennedy were treated at a nearby hospital, Kennedy for the gunshot wound to the elbow, Larry for shards of glass embedded in his back.
While waiting for his friend to be released, Larry went to a pay phone on the wall nearby and called home. When he got no answer, he tried the Davises’ home. Again he got no answer, so he made a third call: to the Davises’ cottage on Cedar Creek Lake near the town of Gunbarrel. On that try he reached Joy.
“Where were you?” Larry asked testily.
“What business is that of yours?” Joy replied, also angry.
“You never showed up,” Larry said. “Instead someone shot at me.”
“Oh,” Joy replied icily. “Whose wife are you screwing now?”
Later, when Kaufman County deputies examined Larry’s truck, they found several small bullet holes in the front of the vehicle and deduced that the shots had come from a .22 caliber rifle, probably fired accidentally by sportsmen hunting illegally in the area.
But Larry was convinced that it had not been an accident. That evening, as soon as he got back to Richardson, he telephoned Investigator McGowan.
“Someone shot at me today,” he said, his voice still shaky.
“Come by and see me tomorrow,” McGowan replied disinterestedly, “and we’ll talk about it.”
Although McGowan dutifully took down the details and checked with the Kaufman County Sheriff’s Office to see what they had found, he was highly doubtful that the attack had anything to do with Gailiunas or with Rozanne’s murder. They were, he felt, too entirely different to be connected. In one case, a woman was tied spread-eagled on her bed and shot, execution-style, in the head. In the other, a pickup truck was hit by bullets in an area known to be frequented by hunters and poachers. Besides, the incidents occurred almost three years apart. He figured the Kaufman deputies had come to the right conclusion: that Larry and Kennedy had been victims of an unfortunate accident. In any event, he would not be investigating it since the incident had occurred outside his jurisdiction.
His advice to Larry was to forget about it.
But Larry had not received his last shock of the summer. Two days later the veteran philanderer discovered that Joy, then thirty-seven, was having an affair with a man named Jodie Timothy Packer, an athletic-looking, forty-year-old former husband of a Dallas civil court judge and owner of an interior-remodeling firm.
On the night of the sniping incident, Larry had returned to his house, but Joy was not there. When she did not show up several hours later, he again telephoned the Davises’ cottage and asked for his wife.
“When are you coming home?” he asked her.
“I’m not,” she said.
“Why not?” he asked.
“Because someone’s trying to kill you and I don’t want to be around.”
Several days later, he returned home early one afternoon and, although the house was empty, he knew Joy had been there. He could smell her perfume, a brand called “Joy,” which was sold at Dallas’s most expensive department store, Neiman Marcus. Immediately, one thought flashed through Larry’s mind: That woman has dolled up and gone out on me. Furious, he stomped into his office and picked up the telephone, punching the redial button. A voice at the other end answered with the name of a local plumbing company.
“I’d like to send you some material,” Larry told the receptionist. “Where are you located?”
With the address in hand, Larry drove to the company. Joy’s Porsche was in the lot. Nodding grimly, Larry settled down to wait.
Twenty minutes later, another car pulled up. Inside were Joy and a man whom Larry later identified as Jodie Packer, the man Larry believed to have been the jogger Joy had met at White Rock Lake some three years previously.
After confronting his wife and Packer, Larry climbed back into his truck and drove away. Outraged, he called his attorney and told him to draw up a new divorce petition. When it was filed in July, it was the third such request involving Larry and Joy Aylor. First, Larry had filed for divorce in June 1983, when he was having his affair with Rozanne. He withdrew it in the fall after she was murdered. Then Joy filed for divorce in June 1985, and withdrew the request six months later, in January 1986. However, the third filing ended the marriage.
On August 19, five days shy of what would have been Larry and Joy’s eighteenth wedding anniversary, the divorce was granted. It was not an amicable settlement. After a bitter fight, Larry retained the contracting business, all furniture other than what was in their house on Arbor Trail, his own bank accounts, the bullet-riddled 1985 Suburban, the ranch in Kaufman County, his life insurance policies, $7,000 in cash, and a $20,000 promissory note covering a loan Larry and Joy had made to Larry’s parents. Joy got the Arbor Trail house, the furniture, and the Porsche that had been a Christmas present from Larry after their seemingly happy 1983 reconciliation.
The two of them, in what would prove to be an extremely touchy arrangement, were named joint managing conservators for their son, Chris, who was then sixteen. It would not be the last legal battle they would have involving Chris, nor would it be the most hostile.
Although each was now technically free of the other, they were not able to resume their lives as if nothing had happened. The terrible times they had endured in the early Eighties were only going to get worse. And, as time progressed, each would come to view their 1965 meeting at a high school football game as an encounter from hell. Despite the divorce, Larry’s and Joy’s lives would continue to be intertwined in a series of unusual and increasingly antagonistic encounters over their son. If they indeed once loved each other, that feeling came to be replaced by a pure and lasting hatred.
Joy, working at a series of minor jobs while trying to raise a teenage son, got the first indication that something was very wrong in 1987 when she received several mysterious and semithreatening telephone calls. Another more grotesque incident occurred one day when she went to her mailbox and discovered an unexpected package. Curious, she carried it into the house, opened it, and gagged. Inside was the rotting head of a fish.
On the surface, Larry seemed to drop back into everyday life with less trouble. He continued operating the custom home-building business and he found a new love, a woman named Jan Bell. On January 30, 1988, they were married. But Joy was not out of his life. Nor was he out of hers.
PART II
1988-91
10
By the time 1988 rolled around, finding a solution to the murder of Rozanne Gailiunas was, along with winning the lottery, one of the last things that Mo McGowan expected to happen. Fifty-one months, more than enough time for someone to go through college or serve a term as president, had elapsed since the night he had first gone to 804 Loganwood Drive. In the interim, despite thousands of hours of work and prayer, not a single clue had popped up that might propel him on the path toward finding her killer. Although he still had nightmares about the case, the file had long since been relegated to the inactive drawer in a cabinet in a corner of his office.
But then the unexpected occurred. On a muggy evening in late April, as he was getting ready to go home, McGowan’s telephone rang. The caller was Larry Aylor, from whom he had not heard since the summer of 1986. Larry was excited, as hyper as he had been when he had called the detective to tell him about the bullets slamming into his pickup truck.
“I have some information for you,” Larry said eagerly.
“Go ahead,” replied the laconic detective.
“I just had a conversation with a woman who said she had information about those people who shot at me,” he said.