Authors: Ken Englade
Andy had been gone less than a month when McGowan’s prediction proved accurate. Shelley called the detective and told him that Andy had telephoned from Idaho and that he wanted her to fly up to visit him.
McGowan went to his boss and got him to okay expenses for the detective and Shelley to fly to Boise in the hope that Shelley would be able to get Andy to talk. At that point, all McGowan had was a strong suspicion that Andy was somehow involved with Rozanne’s murder. When he had followed the chain of allegations from Bill Garland to Brian Kreafle, the next name down the line was Andy’s. Later, McGowan would swear that he did not believe then that Andy had been the triggerman. When asking for permission to pursue Andy in distant Idaho, McGowan explained to his captain that he did not have enough evidence to arrest him and charge him, nor was he sure that Andy was the final person in the Rozanne chain. However, the investigator hoped that with coaxing from Shelley, Andy would open up and talk about his involvement, that he could provide information that would lead police to the killer.
When McGowan and Shelley flew into Boise on a bright, late-summer day, two plainclothesmen were waiting at the airport to offer their assistance. Andy was there as well.
McGowan let Shelley deplane separately to meet Andy alone. The detective feared that Andy might connect him to Shelley if they were seen together and he didn’t want to blow the opportunity. While Shelley went off with her lover on the back of a motorcycle Andy had obtained since skipping town, McGowan climbed into an unmarked car with the two Idaho detectives. At that point, the investigation began to resemble an episode out of the
Keystone Kops
.
Although McGowan had arranged in advance for Shelley to lead Andy to a specific motel where a bugged room was awaiting them, Andy had ideas of his own. He took Shelley to a motel of
his
choice, frustrating investigators who had gone to considerable lengths to prepare the trap. Since McGowan could not approach Shelley in Andy’s presence without exposing the would-be trap, there was nothing McGowan could do except wait and hope that Shelley would contact him. Fortunately, he had given her a telephone number where he could be reached just in case something like this occurred.
That night, she took advantage of Andy’s temporary absence and called the detective. “Get him to our motel!” McGowan ordered.
The following day, Shelley convinced Andy to change inns and they checked into the one where a room had been prepared for their arrival. McGowan and detectives from Boise were in the room next door, anxiously listening to Shelley and Andy’s conversations, hoping Andy would tell her something that would further the Texas investigation.
The bugs worked as planned. McGowan picked up a lot of heavy breathing and the dialogue from “Donohue,” which was playing in the background. But Andy adamantly refused to talk about Rozanne or any connection he might have had with her.
The next morning, Andy climbed on his motorcycle and disappeared into the mountains. The last view McGowan had of him, he was heading north, toward the Canadian border.
Later, when he testified at Andy’s trial, McGowan looked embarrassed as the defense pounded away about the Idaho fiasco. Clearly, he did not regard it as one of the finer moments in his investigative career.
18
If he had come up empty-handed in his effort to get Andy, McGowan could take some consolation in the fact that the Matthews brothers had finally surfaced and, as he had expected, come to the attention of law officers by committing another crime.
Before they were picked up, McGowan had learned some of the circumstances under which they had been hired. When Joy allegedly finally decided to make her move against her husband and asked Garland to make the necessary arrangements, the pest exterminator turned accused fixer went through the same chain he had used for Rozanne. More than two years before Andy fled from Dallas, he was approached with an offer to kill Larry. But Andy was not even slightly tempted. Instead, he made up a story so he could gracefully back out of the offer.
After he had accepted the money to kill Rozanne in the fall of 1983, Andy, anxious not to let on that he was doing the job himself, claimed that the actual hitman was someone from Houston. When Andy was approached about the planned murder of Larry in the spring of 1986, he replied he’d check with the man to whom he had given the money to kill Rozanne. A couple of days later, Andy reported that the man from Houston had gotten married, settled down, and was no longer interested in that kind of work.
It was then, supposedly, that Garland went to Joseph Walter Thomas, who, in turn, allegedly went to Buster Matthews, a burly roofer. Apparently feeling the job would be more attractive if he painted the potential victim as a true blackguard, Thomas allegedly told Buster that he knew someone seeking a rough-and-ready type to “hurt” a man named Larry Aylor, who Thomas claimed was a child molester and wife abuser. The job paid $5,000, Buster learned: $2,500 up front and the balance upon completion. It didn’t take him long to reply that he and his brother, Gary, might be willing to perform the task.
Once Buster and Gary agreed to do the job, they were told that a plan had already been worked out and they only had to follow orders. The scheme was simple: Their target would be lured to a rural area where they would ambush him. In preparation for the attack, which had changed from a proposal to “hurt” Larry to one to kill him, they were driven to Kaufman County and shown possible locations for the trap. They picked a copse of trees near the entrance to the target’s ranch.
On June 16, the brothers hid in the trees and waited for Larry to drive into range. In the way of armament, Gary was waiting with a .22 caliber rifle, not exactly a high-powered ambush weapon. To make the task they had set for themselves even more difficult, the rifle was only a semiautomatic, which meant the shooter had to pull the trigger each time he wanted to fire a round.
Except for the weapon and the choice of assassins, the plan worked perfectly. Larry walked right into the trap. But there were two crucial things not included in the scheme: the friend Don Kennedy, whom Larry had brought along, and Gary being an incredibly bad marksman.
It was later estimated that Gary fired close to a dozen shots at Larry’s pickup from a distance of eighty to one hundred feet. Fewer than one fourth of the rounds even struck the truck and none of them found their mark. The only wound suffered by either man was a nick on Kennedy’s elbow.
The only phase of the ambush that succeeded was that Buster and Gary, despite their bumbling, easily escaped in the confusion. And they successfully disappeared again in the early summer of 1988 when McGowan tried to track them down. But in August of that year, they ran out of luck.
As would so many others involved in the tangled series of events swirling around Joy and Larry, when Buster and Gary Matthews discovered that authorities were looking for them, they decided to get out of town. They headed west into New Mexico, setting up camp in the Lincoln National Forest in the south-central part of the state. Obviously, they had picked the area for its remoteness. To the south of their camp site was the thinly populated Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation. Immediately to the west was a barren area known as The Malpais, an incredibly desolate expanse of sharp, black rocks, a river of jagged stones left behind by some ancient lava flow. Just a little farther in that direction was the even more desolate parched tableland known as the Jornado del Muerto, or Plain of Death. It got its name from the fact that it had been a deathtrap for the Spanish conquistadors who tried to cross it without adequate water. In the northeast corner of the Jornado, snuggled up against an arm of the moonscapelike San Andres Mountains, was Trinity Site, the place where the world’s first atomic bomb was detonated on July 16, 1945. Furthermore, in an ironic thrust, Buster and Gary had chosen as their place of refuge New Mexico’s notorious Lincoln County, one of the bloodiest counties in the history of the Old West and the former stomping ground of the infamous William H. Bonney, a.k.a. Billy the Kid.
Buster and Gary certainly had found isolation; they probably were as removed as they could be from investigators in Richardson and Kaufman County and still be in the United States. But they had not counted on the locals.
They bolted to New Mexico in August, a time when Lincoln County’s pleasant, sunny afternoons are often shattered by thunderstorms that gather like the ghosts of ancient Indian warriors over the mile-and-a-half-tall peaks. When the thunderstorms dissipate after drenching the Ponderosa pine- and fir-covered slopes, it is almost as if God has turned on His air conditioner. Temperatures drop rapidly and a warm sweater becomes a necessity. It is even more comfortable if a camper has a toasty fire to huddle over. When fellow-Texan Robert Lindquist found the hapless Matthews brothers at 7:15 on the evening of Saturday, August 27, 1988, they had neither.
A sixty-three-year-old retiree from Fort Worth, Lindquist had come to Lincoln County for much the same reason as Buster and Gary: its remoteness. The difference was, there was no one on his trail; he was there simply to enjoy the clean air and perhaps snag a trout for dinner. On that evening he had been fishing at nearby Eagle Lake and had, himself, been caught unprepared in the usual afternoon downpour. When the fish quit biting, Lindquist, interested only in a hot shower and warm clothes, was driving down Highway 532 en route to the vacation cabin where he was staying when he spotted the Matthews brothers standing underneath the crumbling canopy of an abandoned gas station. In a neighborly fashion common to the rural West, he stopped and asked if they needed help.
“Yeah,” mumbled a wet and bedraggled Buster, “we’d like to get to town.”
“Hop in,” said Lindquist, opening the door of his pickup. “I’ll drive you there. I don’t have anything else to do anyway.”
Exactly why he picked them up remains something of a mystery; they were a rough-looking duo. At six feet tall and 190 pounds, Gary sported a thick, dark beard, a tattoo reading “Sherry” on his right bicep and a knife scar along the right side of his neck. And he was the more presentable of the two. Buster, with wild bushy hair and a bulging beer belly (he packed 230 pounds on his 5-foot-10!/2-inch frame), had eyes as cold and dark as a December night and the personality of a chain gang boss.
Lindquist, however, seemed not to be put off by the two men and happily drove them up and down a sizable section of Lincoln County in search of a particular motel they said they had heard about. After a lengthy and unsuccessful search, Gary asked Lindquist if he would stop at a convenience store while he and his brother got a cup of coffee. When they climbed back in the truck, Buster made Lindquist an unusual offer: He told the Texan he could have all their camping gear if he would just drive them to their camp site to pick it up. “We’re through camping,” he said, claiming the two of them were disgusted with the cold mountain nights and the daily soakings, and were anxious to get back to civilization.
When they got there, Buster curtly ordered Gary to load the gear into the bed of Lindquist’s truck, standing back, as Lindquist later related to sheriffs deputies, like a man who disdained soiling his hands with manual labor. When it looked as if everything had been loaded, Lindquist and Gary were ready to climb into the truck’s cab when Buster stopped them.
“Did you get the shovel?” Buster asked his brother.
“No,” Gary said, shaking his head and stalking somewhat unhappily back into the trees.
Lindquist watched him walk away, then turned to Buster, shocked to see the man holding a large black pistol. Lindquist’s eyes popped when he noted that the gun was pointed directly at his heart.
“Don’t fool around now,” Buster told him with a mean edge in his voice. “Lay down on your stomach with your hands folded out or I’ll kill you right now. I have no reason not to.”
“Okay,” stuttered Lindquist. “Okay. I’m getting down.”
“I don’t like to do this,” Buster added, “but if I don’t get to California by tomorrow they’re going to put me in prison.”
Lindquist, who figured he was in no position to argue, stretched out on the ground and gritted his teeth as Gary systematically went through his pockets, removing his money, his wallet, a pocket knife, a fingernail clipper, even his drugstore reading glasses. The only thing they left him was a soiled handkerchief.
After he had been stripped of everything of value, Lindquist was ordered to climb into one of the sleeping bags, which Gary then zipped up to his chin. Then Gary grabbed a roll of twine and began wrapping it around the outside of the sleeping bag, sealing Lindquist inside. When he saw what they were doing, Lindquist moved his arms and legs slightly away from his body so, once they left, there would be some slack in the binding.
Trussed up like a calf at a rodeo, Lindquist watched as Buster and Gary climbed into his 1984 Ford pickup and Buster turned the key in the ignition. When it refused to start, Lindquist grimaced apprehensively.
“God,” he mumbled to himself. “I hope that son of a bitch runs and gets ’em out of here.” Lindquist breathed an audible sigh of relief seconds later when the engine caught.
Propping himself up on his elbows, he watched the brothers and his truck disappear up the road that led to the top of the mountain. As soon as they were out of sight, Lindquist wiggled out of the sleeping bag and hurried down the same road. He went no more than a few hundred yards when he spotted a turnoff to a cabin nestled protectively in the trees. Shaking with anger and fright, Lindquist pounded on the door and asked the startled inhabitants to call the police.