Authors: Ken Englade
22
In March 1989, some two weeks after Andy’s confession, Buster and Gary were brought into court in Carrizozo, New Mexico. In addition to the charges already pending against them in connection with the Lindquist incident, Lincoln County prosecutor Scot D. Key asked that both be considered habitual offenders because of their previous records, a move that could result in suffer prison sentences if District Judge Richard A. Parsons agreed, which he did.
On March 9, Parsons sentenced Gary to eight years in the state penitentiary at Santa Fe. And six days later, he sentenced Buster to six years. Both men had pleaded “no contest” to the charges, which meant trials were unnecessary.
McGowan, more than six hundred miles away in Richardson, found the news interesting, but his role in those proceedings was relegated to that of a long-range spectator. He would not be directly involved in any action against the brothers until they were returned to Texas to be tried for the attempted assassination of Larry, and then McGowan’s role would be that of a spectator because the attempt did not occur within his jurisdiction and he was not an investigator in the case.
At that point, with Andy’s confession in hand and the Matthews brothers safely locked away—secure in the belief that the “Larry chain” ended with the hapless Matthews brothers—McGowan figured his job was done except for the necessity of testifying at the other trials. Joy, Garland, Kreafle, and Thomas all were under indictment and it appeared that the situation was well in hand. The only thing that remained for him to do, the detective reckoned, was to turn over his material to the district attorney’s office. For virtually the first time in years, he felt, he could draw a breath without worrying about what was going on in the seemingly endless drama swirling around Joy Aylor and the murder of Rozanne Gailiunas.
The only thing wrong with McGowan’s reasoning was that it was premature. When the department gave him a badge and a gun, they had neglected to furnish him with a crystal ball.
After the trauma of February and the shock of Andy’s confession, the rest of 1989 slipped by relatively quietly for McGowan, at least as far as developments went in the cases involving Rozanne and Larry.
In November, a Dallas County grand jury indicted Carol for soliciting her former brother-in-law’s murder and conspiring to kill him, the same charges faced by her husband, Kreafle, and Thomas. The fact that she was indicted when she thought she was going to be rewarded infuriated Carol, as did McGowan’s alleged refusal to help her get into the witness protection program. She vented some of her anger in her interview with D magazine, telling Glenna Whitley that she was having her lawyer look into the possibility of filing suit against the Richardson Police Department.
Sometime that year, Joy’s younger sister, Elizabeth, divorced her husband and moved into her parents’ house. Her actions had absolutely no connection to the criminal cases other than the fact that her alleged affair with Larry may have been the event that pushed Joy over the edge and supposedly made her decide to try to kill her husband.
There were developments on the civil front, but they, too, had nothing to do with McGowan or with the criminal cases. Larry filed suit against Joy, seeking millions of dollars in damages and recompense for money he claimed she stole from their joint bank account to pay blackmailers in connection with Rozanne’s murder. Since it was Joy’s father who had the real money, Larry tried to get the court to make him a party to the suit, contending that Henry Davis was involved in the conspiracy. The court refused to go along and Davis’s name was later dropped from the document.
But in December a tragic event, while not directly connected to the criminal cases, would nevertheless play a major role in events that followed, events that
did
have repercussions on the criminal cases.
After his parents were divorced in August 1986, Chris Aylor ostensibly went to live with Joy, although he spent as much time with his grandparents Henry and Frances as he did with his mother. From Chris’s point of view, it did not seem like such a bad deal: His parents and his grandparents could afford to lavish expensive gifts upon him, and what Chris wanted Chris got. His grandparents saw that he was expensively clothed and his parents kept him supplied with pocket money. For his high school graduation, Larry gave him a $2,500 Rolex. And just before Christmas in 1989, when Chris was nineteen, his grandparents gave him an almost-new Corvette.
On Christmas Day, Chris went out with friends to celebrate and show off his new wheels. For reasons that were never explained, he let a longtime friend, Raymond Slupecki, Jr., drive the car. At 1:30
A
.
M
., technically the day
after
Christmas, Chris and Slupecki were speeding eastward on the eight-lane LBJ Freeway, a sort of inner loop around the city, racing with another car. Near the Marsh Lane exit, Slupecki lost control of the vehicle and ran onto the shoulder. Bouncing off the guard rail, the Vette smashed into a disabled vehicle that had been abandoned along the highway. Both cars burst into flames. Slupecki burned to death behind the wheel. Although Chris was still alive when he was pulled from the wreckage, he was rushed to Parkland Hospital in critical condition, where he died shortly afterward.
When police called Joy about the accident, she sought support from a new friend, a lawyer named John Michael “Mike” Wilson, whom she had met several months previously when she went to an attorney’s office with a cousin who was seeking a divorce. Wilson and the divorce lawyer shared office space, and while Joy’s cousin was closeted with her attorney, Wilson and Joy struck up an acquaintance. An admitted addict who was later convicted of conspiracy to distribute cocaine, Wilson eventually became romantically involved with Joy.
Exactly why Joy decided to call Wilson that night is not known since at the time she hardly knew him. In any case, the lawyer responded immediately to Joy’s plea. He picked her up and together they kept an all-night vigil in Chris’s room. The youth died at 11
A
.
M
., some nine and a half hours after the crash. He would have been twenty years old in four more months.
Although it seemed on the surface to be nothing more than a pathetic accident, doubt continues to linger about the incident and the events leading up to it. For one thing, in the months preceding the crash, Chris underwent a remarkable physical change. From a buoyant, slightly beefy teen, he slimmed down considerably and took on the look of a much older youth. Part of that may have been normal adolescent development, but his father worried that some other forces may have been at work. Larry had seen one of Chris’s friends go through the same transformation and when he asked Chris about it, Chris had said that his friend had a “nose problem.” Although Chris had always exhibited an extremely low tolerance for alcohol or drugs or anyone using them, the thought did indeed cross Larry’s mind that his son may have changed.
The previous autumn Chris and Larry had gotten into an argument when Larry refused to defend Joy in regard to the criminal charges filed against her. Chris sped away from Larry’s house in a huff and the two did not speak for almost two months. By the time the holiday season rolled around, however, they had reconciled and Chris had told his father that he planned to come to Virginia to live. He was supposed to make the trip after spending Christmas with Joy and his grandparents.
There were several other things that made Larry suspicious as well. One was a sizable collection of weapons that were found in Chris’s room after his death. The youth had been reared as a hunter and Larry was not surprised to learn that his son still had his old hunting rifles and two shotguns, along with a .22 caliber rifle that the two had used to hunt prairie dogs. But it was the other weapons that made Larry wonder what Chris may have been involved in before his death. Also found in Chris’s room was a long-barreled .357 Magnum pistol complete with telescopic sight, a nine-millimeter automatic pistol, an AK-47 assault rifle, and an Uzi machine pistol, weapons generally regarded as “street guns” and commonly outside the interest of casual collectors.
Also curious was a report given him by the police officers who investigated the crash, which said Joy and Mike Wilson arrived at the site soon after the accident occurred, apparently before going to the hospital. Some of Chris’s friends who were at the crash site said Joy and a man none of them recognized arrived soon after the fire was extinguished. While Joy searched the interior of the burnt-out shell of the car, the man began picking up pieces of the wreckage, which they took with them when they left. The same youths who then went to the hospital said Joy and the man, whom they later learned was Wilson, had decorated Chris’s room with bits of the car: the Corvette symbol, part of the grill, and pieces of the fiberglass body, creating a macabre homemade shrine.
Another strange development was the death of another youth, a close friend of Chris’s and Slupecki’s. Within a couple of hours of the accident, even before Chris died, twenty-one-year-old Kirk Mauthe drove to a quiet park near his home and shot himself in the head with a .357 caliber pistol. His death was ruled a suicide.
Joy took Chris’s death extremely hard. After that, she seemed to collapse mentally, becoming increasingly more agitated. The fact that she and Larry became locked in an incredibly hostile legal battle over Chris certainly did not help.
Larry, who had rushed to Dallas from his home in Virginia as soon as he heard about the accident, arrived in time to stop Joy from claiming Chris’s body.
Joy wanted her son to be buried on the Davis family farm in Alma, in East Texas, but Larry argued that he would never be permitted to visit the gravesite because it would be on private property. Chris’s body lay in the county morgue for nearly three weeks while Larry and Joy fought over where the youth would be interred. Eventually, the judge ruled in Larry’s favor and Chris was buried in a Dallas cemetery.
The bitterness between Larry and Joy engendered by the fight over Chris’s body would be total and lasting. From then on any possibility of an amicable relationship between the two, if the probability had ever existed after the attempt on Larry’s life, was irrevocably crushed.
The trauma Joy underwent as a result of that fight was increased by the pressure of her legal difficulties. As spring 1991 approached, Joy’s trial date seemed to be drawing closer and she became increasingly worried about what was going to happen to her despite the fact that her lawyer, Doug Mulder, had a reputation as one of the best defense attorneys in the city, if not in the entire state. His reputation, however, was not entirely unblemished. A cloud still hung over his head due to an incident that had taken place while he was one of the county’s most high-profile prosecutors.
23
In a single sentence the English novelist Charles Dickens once commented on the presence of evil in the world and the need for dealing with the situation in an organized, civilized manner: “If there were no bad people there would be no good lawyers.” Certainly there has been no dearth of bad people traveling through the Dallas judicial system. And just as certainly, there has been no dearth of good lawyers to either prosecute them or defend them. Doug Mulder, a husky, dark-haired man with a Texas-sized ego and, reputedly, a bank account to match, qualified on both counts.
As a prospective graduate of the Southern Methodist University Law School in 1964, the young Mulder—a youth of some privilege from Des Moines, Iowa, who chose SMU because he was impressed with the city of Dallas—applied for a job with then-District Attorney Henry Wade, reasoning that a career in criminal law might be more exciting than following in the footsteps of his father, a banker of local renown who had died when Mulder was still in high school.
At the time, Wade had been in office for more than a dozen years and had become nationally recognized because of two events: the recent conviction of Jack Ruby for the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, and as the titular defendant in
Roe
v.
Wade
, the country’s landmark abortion case.
As a result of his prominence, Wade could pick and chose among the cream of the prosecutorial wannabe crop. But he felt an immediate affinity for Mulder despite the fact that the applicant’s grades were only slightly better than average and he had shown his professors nothing that would have predicted his future success. At his first meeting with the ambitious student, Wade listened to his inner voice and offered Mulder a position without even a second interview. It was, Wade recalled later, the first time he had ever acted that impulsively.
Wade may have felt a temporary twinge of regret for his impetuousness not long afterward when Mulder, who had been assigned as a third-team prosecutor in the misdemeanor court division, tried and lost his first case, that of a man accused of drunk driving. But Mulder, who hates to lose as much as he hates being without the trappings of wealth and power, bounced back and won his next trial. And the one after that and the one after that. By the time he left the prosecutor’s office some sixteen years later, he had compiled the best conviction record in the history of Dallas County.
As he kept winning, he also kept moving closer to Wade’s inner circle. As a result, before Mulder was thirty, he had been named the chief assistant to the irascible district attorney, a colorful figure who literally defined law and order in Dallas for thirty-six years.