Authors: Ken Englade
In the spring of his last year of law school, 1971, he was impressed by an assistant district attorney who had come to speak to his class, so impressed, in fact, that he applied for a job with the DA’s office as soon as he graduated. Already working in the office at the time was another SMU graduate named Doug Mulder.
As excited as he had been to adopt the title of prosecutor, Wilson soon became disillusioned by what he considered the slow progress of his career as an ADA. An ambitious, competitive attorney, Wilson was anxious to try the murder cases that got a lot of press, the kinds of cases that seemed to crop up with amazing frequency in Dallas. However, those cases just as invariably went to the office superstar, Mulder, who had preceded Wilson as an ADA by seven years.
In 1974, Wilson decided to escape from Mulder’s shadow to try to make it as a defense attorney. But, in his typical bad-luck fashion, he moved too soon; he quickly discovered that he did not have the experience he needed to make his way successfully as a defender. His bank account made no appreciable leaps. The more he thought about his problems, the more he turned to alcohol as a means of escape. By 1976, he had developed what even he recognized as a real problem with booze. After drying out at a special treatment center, Wilson reapplied for a job in the DA’s office. His application was accepted.
For the next few years, Wilson fought a continuing battle with the bottle. Before the Seventies were over, he had been in and out of one facility after another at least a half dozen times. Booze was Wilson’s black cloud. He left the DA’s office for the final time in 1981, taking a good job as a civil lawyer with a railroad. Not long after he joined the company, however, he was fired for getting drunk, making a scene, and embarrassing his employers.
His career was not the only thing that suffered. His marriage also was on the rocks. Frightened by his alcohol dependency, Wilson once more entered an alcohol treatment center and stayed for thirty days. Upon emerging, he joined AA and made a determined, apparently successful fight to stay away from the bottle. But a new gremlin soon arose to take the place of alcohol.
After being fired from the railroad job, Wilson went back into private practice as a defense lawyer. This time, he was eminently more successful; it was not long before he began pulling down $300,000 a year, which was about six times what he had been making as a prosecutor. But the job had its downside: The bulk of his clients were drug dealers. Wilson began using drugs himself in 1987 and, although he had apparently won his fight against alcohol, he became addicted to cocaine.
On February 24, 1988, a year before he met Joy and some two months before Carol went to McGowan, Wilson and a client who was on probation for possession of cocaine were arrested at a routine traffic stop. In the car was a pistol and a small amount of coke. Since police could not prove which of the men the dope belonged to, they did not prosecute. But at that point, Wilson became a target for the Drug Enforcement Administration, which suspected that he was involved in drugs in a big way.
By this time, too, Wilson’s first marriage had ended in a bitter divorce. But he was an engaging, charming fellow and within a few months he was seeing another woman seriously. In February 1989, about the time Andy confessed to killing Rozanne, Wilson married Mona Brunson. Three months later, he met Joy Aylor.
The more he saw of Joy, the closer they got, much to the frustration of his second wife. Joy and Wilson’s relationship was cemented when Joy called him after Chris’s accident and he went running to her side. For months after the tragedy, Wilson and Joy were virtually inseparable.
But whatever Joy brought to the relationship with Wilson, it was not a change of fortune; the hapless attorney’s bad luck soon got even worse.
After Chris’s accident and Wilson’s infatuation with Joy, Wilson’s bride of only thirteen months filed for divorce. Then, on March 20, 1990, he and a male friend went to a local motel to confirm that a suitcase containing almost fifty pounds of cocaine was secreted in one of the rooms waiting for them to pick it up.
The next day, a Wednesday, Wilson returned to the motel, transferred nearly half of the coke to a canvas overnight bag he had brought along, and was exiting through the parking lot when DEA agents, who had been watching the attorney since soon after his first arrest, swooped down. Despite Wilson’s contention that the more than twenty pounds of coke in the bag was strictly for “personal use,” he was charged with conspiracy and possession with intent to distribute cocaine, a serious offense that could net him a long term in a federal penitentiary. Authorities further asserted that Wilson was given the drug in lieu of legal fees to represent an alleged dope dealer, which put him in even hotter water with the state bar association. Because of his standing as an attorney, he was released on his own recognizance pending trial.
The car he had driven to the motel—the visit that resulted in his arrest—was Joy Aylor’s Porsche. There was one further irony as well: The motel at which Wilson was arrested was the same one in which Larry Aylor was staying while he was in Dallas to attend a hearing in one of his court cases.
After his arrest, Wilson went into a state of deep depression. Not only was he in serious legal trouble—possibly losing his license to practice law was the least of his problems—but his personal difficulties were mounting as well. His second wife was about to get her divorce. He also found out that his father was fatally ill with cancer, and the youngest of his three sons, the last one still at home, had abandoned him and gone to Houston to live with his mother, Wilson’s first wife. There was no doubt that at that time Wilson and Joy were feeding off each other’s troubles.
Joy had hired the highly regarded Doug Mulder to defend her and was moving steadily closer to trial. Her case had been assigned to Judge Patrick McDowell, a distinguished-looking, graying Irishman with a reputation as a no-nonsense jurist. Worse yet, from Joy’s point of view, was McDowell’s apparent determination to bring the issue to a speedy conclusion. It had been almost six and a half years since Rozanne’s murder and three and a half years since Larry had been ambushed. McDowell was deceptively easygoing, an impression hiding the fact that he could be stern and uncompromising when he felt certain limits had been reached. He had decided that it was time to air the charges against Joy in the courtroom.
On February 23, 1990, a little less than a month before Wilson’s arrest at the motel, McDowell had ruled that Joy and Andy would be tried separately on charges stemming from Rozanne’s murder. Indications were that Joy would be tried first. At the time, Andy was in jail without any hope of getting out, at least until he was tried. Joy, on the other hand, was free on a $140,000 bond.
But as Joy’s trial date grew closer, she became increasingly more agitated, not only because of her legal difficulties but because of the grief she still suffered as a result of Chris’s death just a few months before and her painful court battle with her former husband over their son’s body. That her new lover, Wilson, also was under extreme stress did not help. Both Joy and Wilson dreaded the prospects of going to trial.
Quietly, they decided to do something about it. In anticipation of needing some ready cash in the near future, Joy began building an emergency fund, using money withdrawn clandestinely from her accounts in deliberately small amounts so the banks would not have to report the transactions to federal authorities. A U.S. grand jury would later contend that she had help in this project from Dallas businessman Jodie Packer, her ostensibly rejected lover. Packer would deny helping Joy in any way.
Joy’s legal situation came to a crisis on Friday, May 4, when she, with Mulder at her side, appeared in McDowell’s court for what she thought was going to be another uncomplicated bond hearing. In fact, the session proved to be hardly routine. Once she got in the courtroom, she discovered that the judge had a more significant plan in mind: He told her he was ordering jury selection to begin in her case on May 14, a scant ten days away. Turning to Mulder and the prosecutors, ADAs Kevin Chapman and Daniel Hagood, McDowell ordered them to meet with him three days hence, on May 7, for a final pretrial hearing.
Shocked by the unexpectedly rapid movement toward trial, Joy panicked.
25
Joy left McDowell’s courtroom as quickly as she could. Running to Wilson, she proposed a radical suggestion: Let’s split. Wilson felt there was nothing in Dallas worth waiting around for as far as he was concerned. He readily agreed.
The next day, Saturday, May 5, Joy and Wilson fled with the help, according to investigators, of Joy’s cousin, Hugh Bradford “Brad” Davis. Authorities contend they left Dallas in Davis’s vehicle, headed for the same part of the country in which Andy Hopper had lost himself almost two years earlier: the Rocky Mountain West.
Wilson had a small suitcase and Joy brought along her purse, which contained an American Express card and a voter registration card belonging to Jodie Packer. She also had a bag. In it was the emergency fund she had been building, some $300,000 in cash.
Investigators believe that Joy’s escape was far from impulsive. According to an indictment handed up by a federal grand jury in December 1992, Jodie Packer methodically made the rounds of several Dallas banks beginning in April 1990, withdrawing money to help Joy flee. The withdrawals made by Packer allegedly ranged from $7,000 to $25,000 and totaled $64,000.
Additional funds also may have been withdrawn on Joy’s behalf by others. A few weeks before she fled, Larry’s father was in his bank when he saw one of Joy’s relatives making a large withdrawal. Slipping away unseen, Clyde Aylor called Larry, who called the assistant district attorney assigned to Joy’s case, Kevin Chapman.
“I think Joy’s getting ready to run,” Larry reported breathlessly.
“I hope she does,” Chapman replied. “That will just make my case better.”
Brad Davis allegedly drove the couple to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he dropped them at a Jeep dealer. Using $7,800 from Joy’s stash, she and Wilson paid cash for a 1984 Wagoneer. After that, Davis returned to Dallas while Joy and Wilson headed west.
As soon as he discovered that Joy was missing, McGowan sent investigators to Joy’s home to see if she had left any clues. A few minutes after they left empty-handed, another set of law enforcement officers showed up: uniformed patrolmen from Dallas. They had arrived in response to a shrill burglar alarm set off by the Richardson detectives.
From Cheyenne, Joy and Wilson drove their new vehicle to Cut Bank in northwestern Montana, on the edge of the Blackfoot Indian Reservation. But they stayed there only long enough to register the Jeep, pick up Montana license plates, and buy new clothes from a western-wear store. They hit the road again for Vancouver, Canada, where they stayed for three weeks in an apartment rented under the aliases Mr. and Mrs. John Storms.
By the first week of June, about a month after they left Dallas, Wilson was getting increasingly despondent and Joy was becoming extremely nervous.
After she learned through a telephone conversation with a friend or relative in Dallas that Brad had been arrested and charged with perjury for telling Richardson authorities that he had left the couple in Denver, Joy was ready to go again.
Unknown to her, Wilson had been in touch with an old law school friend with whom he had gone into practice the first time he left the DA’s office, Bob Fain. Fain had left Texas years before and had opened a practice in Montana. He and Wilson had kept in contact.
When Wilson told Fain how depressed he was, Fain feared that he might be contemplating suicide. As a result, Fain began trying to convince him to surrender. Go back to Dallas to face the consequences, he told him. It was no worse than living on the run.
About the time Joy learned of her cousin’s arrest, Wilson had also decided that Fain was right. He and his old friend had worked out a plan whereby Wilson would recross the border into the United States and surrender to federal authorities in Billings.
While Wilson was working out his own agenda, Joy had decided to go to Mexico.
Wilson, unwilling to let Joy know he was giving up the fight, led her to believe that he planned to follow her once she had gotten to Mexico and determined that it was safe. He told her to call him once she arrived, signaling him to take the next plane.
On June 7, traveling under the handy unisex name of Jodie Packer, Joy took a Japan Air Lines flight from Vancouver to Mexico City. Wilson, in the meantime, had moved to a rural resort in backcountry British Columbia, three hundred miles from Vancouver, still using the name John Storms.
A federal warrant charging him with unlawful flight to avoid prosecution had been issued in Dallas on May 10, three days after Judge McDowell issued a similar warrant for Joy when she failed to show up for her pretrial hearing.
Wilson, getting jumpy himself, changed hotels before Joy could reach him. But when he left the first hotel, he told the clerk that he would call with a number where he could be reached in case someone—Joy—was looking for him.
Unknown to Wilson, soon after he checked out, the hotel manager, Judy Culos, received a call from a Canadian immigration official, who said his department was looking for “John Storms.” Frustrated when told that he had left only hours before, the official asked Culos to notify him if Wilson/Storms came back.
A few hours later Wilson called Culos and wanted to know if he had received any telephone messages. Thinking quickly, Culos said a woman had called and asked for him but she did not identify herself.