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.
(Page 3 of 6)
For his first five years as a DPS trooper, Doherty was stationed in Wharton. Carolyn recalled how happy she had been when she heard they were transferring to Gainesville, much closer to home, but now there was a lump in her throat as she remembered how the vacancy came about--a DPS trooper had been shot to death. In 1969 they were transferred to Fort Worth and built their home in Azle. Even then she had mixed feelings. Doherty had already decided to apply for the Rangers, and Carolyn knew that when he was accepted he would likely be stationed in another part of the state. Both children were established in school now--Kelly was an honor student, and Buster a promising young middle guard on the football team. It would be very hard to move again. Sitting in the front seat of Charlie Stewart’s police car, Carolyn almost cried when she recalled that day in 1976 when Bob suddenly asked: “If you could have two wishes, what would they be?” She had answered immediately: “For you to get promoted to the Rangers, and for us to stay here.” Bob had smiled and told her: “You guessed it.” Bob’s career prospered, and they settled into their house. So things turn out, but in such odd ways.
Charlie Stewart’s police car arrived at John Peter Smith Hospital just ahead of the ambulance. Carolyn waited at the emergency room door. “My first thought,” she said later, “was, Lord, don’t let it be serious. Then I saw them bringing Bob in and I knew it was too late. My next thought was, Lord, give me strength to accept what will be.” By now the emergency room was swarming with every variety of cop. It was only a few minutes before Ranger Captain G. W. Burks, Doherty’s commanding officer, took her aside and said, “Carolyn, he’s gone.”
“It’s funny the things you think to say at a moment like that,” she recalled. “I asked if Bob had ever been conscious. He said no. That’s what I wanted to hear. I asked if they got the man who did it. He said yes.” Someone gave her Bob’s briefcase. She almost felt like a trespasser opening it. The briefcase contained a number of unanswered letters postmarked from all over the state. One was a note from Roy D. Tavender of Texas Refinery Corporation thanking the Ranger “for signing all those Gunslinger Awards.” Taped to the inside lid of the briefcase was a card titled “The Ranger’s Prayer.” At the top of the card was a picture of a machine gun. Carolyn’s mother was crying, and the preacher looked like he was experiencing Judgment Day, but Carolyn Doherty was thinking, I’m glad he didn’t get killed going to the grocery store. He hated to go to the grocery store.
When Carolyn picked up the newspaper the following morning, there, staring at her, was a picture of the accused killer, Greg Ott. His hands were cuffed across his chest and through the wild nest of long, black hair and scrubby beard, his eyes burned with a terrible light. It was impossible to look at the picture without thinking Charles Manson. How strange, Carolyn thought; she felt no bitterness, no hatred, just a permanent sense of loss. But she said to herself: This man is everything Bob was against.
No one in Fort Worth could recall a funeral quite like Bob Doherty’s. The Lakeside Baptist Church where he was a deacon was too small, so the service was held at the Rosen Heights Baptist Church. A crowd estimated at 2000 filled the church and its auxiliary chapel. Hundreds more waited outside. Letters and flowers and telegrams came from all over the world. Dolph Briscoe was expected but didn’t show. Attorney General John Hill was in prominent attendance. DPS Director Colonel Wilson Speir was there, as was the largest gathering of Texas Rangers anyone had seen since the dedication of the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame in Waco. Outside the church about 350 uniformed lawmen, representing departments as faraway as Texarkana and Houston, lined the parking lot in an honor guard. It had been 47 years since anyone had killed a Texas Ranger in the line of duty.
Forty miles north of Fort Worth, in the quiet college town of Denton, Greg Ott was being charged with capital murder and held without bond. Ott’s face was badly swollen and his ribs were bruised. He had been handcuffed facedown on the floor when Bailey Gilliland jerked him up by the hair and held him for Tracker Douglas, who said. “You won’t forget this Indian!” and smashed Ott between the eyes with his fist.
The folktale of “one riot, one Ranger,” is the perfect example of the Ranger legend, because it probably never happened. Like their nearest counterparts, the Canadian North West Mounted Police, the Texas Rangers were too wild and improbable for most history books, so their exploits had to be reconstituted for general consumption. So mystical is this branch of law enforcement that when a woman friend of mine read that a Texas Ranger had been killed she automatically assumed he was a baseball player. The “one riot, one Ranger” parable apparently refers to an incident in 1906 when Captain Bill McDonald faced down a group of twenty black U.S. Army soldiers at Fort Brown. But what McDonald said on another occasion probably speaks more accurately of the Ranger mentality, past and present: “No man in the wrong can stand up against a fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a-coming.”
The museum at the Texas Ranger Hall of Fame in Waco commemorates the legacy of violence and celebrates the myth of “the fellow that’s in the right and keeps on a-coming.” Almost all the museum exhibits are firearms once wielded by famous lawmen or equally famous outlaws. There are a number of guns used by famous Rangers like Lone Wolf Gonzaullas, Frank Hamer, A. Y. Allee, and Bill Wilson, along with Clyde Barrow’s Colt revolver and Bonnie Parker’s sawed-off shotgun. The curator of the museum has asked Mrs. Doherty for her husband’s .45; he hasn’t yet requested Greg Ott’s .38, but it is not unreasonable to think that someday he might. Some of the exhibits have nothing specifically to do with the Texas Rangers, but they do glorify the code and legend of the West, of which the Rangers no doubt consider themselves the custodians.
There was hardly any law in Texas when Stephen F. Austin created the Rangers in 1823, so the Rangers made their own. Their mission was to protect the lives and property of Anglo settlers and businessmen against Indians and other renegades unsympathetic to the white man’s ways, and legal disputes were often as not settled on the spot with a Colt revolver. An anonymous outlaw once remarked to old-time Ranger W. M. Green, “It is easy to see a graveyard in the muzzle of a Ranger’s gun.” Back around 1880, in an operation that became known as the “Red Tide,” a Ranger sergeant working undercover took crude photographs of outlaws and might-be outlaws along the border, then dispatched fifteen Rangers to “remove from circulation” anyone resembling the men in the snapshots. In a few weeks some one hundred “out-laws” were buzzard food.
In the early days the Rangers were a military organization, but one with a special mission. Walter Prescott Webb wrote: “The Rangers were Indian exterminators; the soldiers were only guards.” They also played a special role on the Mexican border, continually reminding those Mexicans living north of the Rio Grande that the tejanos had won the Battle of San Jacinto. On one memorable occasion, a few Rangers invaded Mexico, attacking a heavily armed rancho to regain some rustled King Ranch cattle. Early Rangers like Rip Ford and Ben McCulloch would charge a band of Comanches or confront an angry mob singlehandedly, but as the Indians vanished and the border settled down, the Rangers had to adapt to a new role. Some say they were never the same once they exchanged their horses for automobiles, once they became just another breed of peace officers, constrained by bureaucrats and red tape. They couldn’t be the law anymore; they had to serve it.
Throughout their history, the Rangers have always found it easier to handle Indians than politicians. This was particularly true from the turn of the century until Governor James Allred instigated sweeping reforms in the state police force in 1935. Until 1935 the Rangers were the state police, operating under the direction of the adjutant general. These were times of world war and revolution in Mexico, of Prohibition and oil boom towns, of political corruption and pitched battles between ethnic groups. And there was turmoil within the Ranger service itself. In those days governors would replace key Rangers with favored lackeys and stooges. The fabled Ma Ferguson discharged the entire Ranger service and replaced it with 2300 “special” Rangers, some of them ex-convicts and others getting ready to be. A legislative investigation in 1919 charged Rangers with crimes ranging from murder to being in the pay of German spies. One of Allred’s first tasks was to cancel all “special” Rangers and to establish new criteria for special commissions not to exceed 300, a legal quota that still exists. Special Rangers (there are about 170 of them today) are mostly agents hired by railroads, cattle ranches, and oil companies, though some of them are merely good ol’ rich boys who get pumped up when they pin on a star.
Although Allred’s reforms created the modern agency called the Department of Public Safety and placed the Rangers under its direction, it did not impede the power of a governor to use the Rangers for his own purposes. As an intimidating arm of the governor, Rangers have been called on to break strikes, suppress minority groups, and generally chill political dissent. This practice seemed particularly blatant in the sixties. When John Connally was governor, the Rangers built a reputation for brutalizing Mexican Americans in the Valley. The first incident was in 1963 when Crystal City’s majority emerged and elected all Mexican Americans to the city council. Under the command of Captain A. Y. Allee, Rangers were sent to “keep the peace,” which Allee apparently proceeded to do after his own fashion. He was later charged in a civil suit with cursing at Mayor Juan Cornejo and then banging his honor’s head against the wall six times.
My Library
