Death of a Ranger
By the time a minor dope dealer discovered the man kicking in his door was a Texas Ranger, it was too late for them both.
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There are two versions of what happened next. According to Ben Neel: “I told Mr. Baker that if he would assist us in going ahead with the entire fifty pounds … in other words, by getting the remaining thirty pounds … I would advise the district attorney that he cooperated.” Baker then told the lawmen that he had a friend named Greg who lived in the country and might be able to fill the order. But Jimmy Baker’s version was different: “It was already known that I was going to get the next shipment from Greg and they already knew it and they knew where his house was and it was just a matter of time. They were going out there anyway.” Linda Baker added one more detail. She said: “One of them told Jimmy that if he didn’t cooperate, he wouldn’t ever get to jail alive.” All parties agreed that Baker then telephoned Greg Ott, a 27-year-old honor graduate student at North Texas State University, and arranged to bring his pal “Steve” to Ott’s place in the country later that night.
While Dwight Crawford returned to town to book Linda Baker and Fultner and to secure another $1400 in “buy” money, Neel and the deputies finished the beer and planned the raid. To Ranger Doherty it was like a military operation, but deputies Gilliland and Douglas looked on it more as a possum hunt. They gave the impression they had been waiting a long time for some real action. Sometime before Crawford returned with the buy money, DPS narcotics agent Don Jones joined the party at the Ramada Inn. Jones apparently wasn’t expecting a raid because he didn’t bring a gun. Neel loaned him one.
It was about 11 p.m. when a pickup truck with a camper on the back turned off Hickory Hill Road, near the tiny Denton County community of Argyle, and headed up the long, curving black-top of Twin Pines Ranch. The ranch was primarily a place where wealthy girls stabled their horses and took riding lessons, but there were several rent houses on the property, including the small frame structure where Greg Ott had lived for about four years. Jimmy Baker, who was now in the uncomfortable role of informant, rode in the cab with Ben Neel. Hiding under a blanket in the camper were Ranger Bob Doherty, Captain Dwight Crawford, agent Don Jones, and the two deputies. None of them were wearing uniforms, although Crawford had a Denton County Sheriff’s Department emblem on either shoulder of his quilted, fur-collared jacket. Bob Doherty still wore the brown Western-cut jacket he had put on before he left home, but he had replaced his Texas Ranger Stetson with a red baseball cap and, according to the testimony of the other officers, now displayed his Ranger badge over his left chest pocket. Even in the light of a nearly full moon the five men must have looked more like duck hunters than lawmen.
Jimmy Baker had told them that Ott kept his goods in the barn behind the house. Agent Neel, the expert in these matters, formulated this plan: Baker would take Neel inside and introduce him as “Steve McCloud” (Neel even carried an out-of-state driver’s license issued in that name), and they would begin negotiating a deal. Neel would accompany Ott to the barn, and, when they returned to the house with the marijuana, Neel would leave the kitchen door open as a signal for the raid to commence. Things went as planned up to that point.
What happened in the next ten to fifteen seconds could have passed for a Keystone Kops comedy if it hadn’t ended so tragically. As Ranger Doherty was leading the raiding party out of the back of the camper, the swing-up overhead door dropped and hit him on the back, rendering into the crisp winter night a dreadful noise. The Ranger grabbed his shotgun and ran toward the southwest corner of the house. Dwight Crawford, the second man out, followed Doherty. Crawford would testify later that as he ran along the edge of the house he twice shouted, “Police officers!” Agent Don Jones was the third man on the ground, and he ran straight toward the door that Neel had left open, the door leading to the kitchen. Deputies Bailey Gilliland and Tracker Douglas got tangled in the blanket and were slow getting out of the camper. Tracker, who got his nick-name because of his distinctive Indian features, would testify that as he was climbing down he glanced at the kitchen door and saw the figure of a man.” I told Bailey to be real careful, somebody was gonna get blowed away,” he recalled. Both deputies would testify that they heard unidentified voices inside holler, “Drop the gun or I’ll kill you!” and “He’s got a gun!” followed by two gunshots several seconds apart.
Ben Neel, Greg Ott, and Jimmy Baker were in the back bedroom examining the marijuana when they heard the noise of the camper door falling. Neel testified that Ott hurried to the kitchen door and looked out. From Ott’s point of view it must have been a terrifying sight: five heavily armed strangers in hunters’ clothes climbing from the rear of a camper. Ott ran back through the middle room and toward the beaded curtains leading to the living room, passing very close to the bedroom door where Neel was still standing. Ott had a pistol in his hand, and by now Neel had drawn his own .45. Neel testified: “I stepped out into the doorway of the bedroom and I hollered in a real loud voice just right in his face, ‘Police officer! Drop the gun!’ He . . . started toward the doorway [to the living room]. . . . Again I yelled, ‘Police officer! Freeze!’ “
Just as Ott was about to disappear through the beaded curtains and into the living room, Neel fired at Ott and missed. Ott, gun in hand, was headed toward the living room door at the northwest corner of the house.
Outside the northwest corner of the house, Ranger Doherty and Deputy Gilliland heard Neel’s shot. Gilliland leaned across a pile of firewood and tried to see through a window curtain. Ranger Doherty positioned himself directly in front of the living room door, crouched slightly, and kicked it open. At the exact second that the Ranger’s boot smashed into the door, a bullet fired from inside the house passed through the door and hit him above the right eye. Bob Doherty fell straight back, staining the snow with blood. He never saw the man who killed him.
Telephone calls in the middle of the night never bothered Carolyn Doherty. But for twenty years she had lived with the dread of a knock at the door. “I knew if I heard a knock in the middle of the night and I opened the door and a lieutenant or sergeant was standing there. . . I knew Bob would be dead.” But on the night of February 20, there was no time for official courtesy. Bob Doherty was unconscious but still showed vital signs as the ambulance raced from Denton to John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth, escorted by maybe a dozen police units sealing off traffic in every direction. Police radios all over North Texas crackled like leaves in a storm.
It was sometime after 11 p.m. when Carolyn Doherty answered the phone. Ranger Tom Arnold, calling from Arlington, told her, “Carolyn, I hate to tell you, but Bob’s been hurt.”
“How?” she asked.
“Gunshot,” Arnold said.
She didn’t want to ask the next question, but she had to. “Where?”
“In the head region,” Arnold said.
He said he was coming to get her, but Carolyn told him there was no time. She hung up, amazed at her own calm. She telephoned her preacher, Jesse Leonard; then her mother, who lived next door; then Charlie Stewart, chief of the Azle Police Department. The calls had awakened Kelly. “Your daddy’s been shot,” Carolyn told her daughter. “Don’t wake Buster till we see how bad it is.” Carolyn’s father arrived from next door to stay with the children. In a matter of minutes Carolyn, her mother, and the preacher were passengers in Chief Stewart’s police car, screaming toward the hospital in Fort Worth. At every traffic light there was a city or county or state police vehicle sealing off traffic. Nobody but another policeman could understand, Carolyn thought to herself. It’s a brotherhood. The crackling of the police radio gave her a block by block account of her husband’s race against death.
Carolyn is a large woman with a gentle face and, by her own admission, could “cry at the drop of a pin.” But no one this night would see her tears. All the way to the hospital, all she could think was: Isn’t it odd how things turn out. Carolyn and Bobby Paul Doherty had been sweethearts since they first met in the early fifties at Lake Worth High School, not more than a mile from where they lived now, and yet they had come so far. Bob Doherty was an all-around athlete in high school, good enough to win a football scholarship to Lamar Tech in Beaumont. He lasted only that first year. She remembered: “Beaumont was along way from Lake Worth. He tried it, but after a while he came home to be close to me.” Even in high school Doherty had talked about becoming a Texas Ranger. But that seemed an impossible distance from where they were when they got married in 1957. Maybe if he had stayed in college. But things turn out. Doherty worked for a while at General Dynamics in Fort Worth and served as a volunteer fireman and reserve police officer in Lake Worth, all the time waiting for word on his DPS application. Today it takes a minimum of sixty college hours for an applicant to be admitted to the Department of Public Safety Academy, but in those days it was easier, and she remembered their jubilation when he was finally accepted in 1958. “We didn’t have much money then,” she recalled,” and yet things were so good that sometimes it scared me.”
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