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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Nobody who knows him likes to talk about it, but ten years ago Greg Ott spent fifteen months in psychiatric detention at Timberlawn in Dallas. He was seventeen at the time. The son of a career Army officer, Greg had stabbed another teenager at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. This wasn’t the first time he had demonstrated tendencies toward aggression. He had once tried to stab his mother and, on another occasion, his older brother. Faced with the choice of being prosecuted for assault or submitting to psychiatric care, Ott bent to his family’s wishes and entered Timberlawn. The diagnosis was paranoid personality.
In a hearing last March, Dr. Doyle Carson, who had treated Ott, pointed out that a person with a personality disorder shouldn’t be confused with a psychotic. “A personality disorder is more in the area of someone having immature features about his personality.” One trait of a paranoid person is hypersensitivity, which causes him to think frequently that people are mistreating him. Ott’s pattern of response to insults had been, in the doctor’s words, “to defend his self-esteem by striking back physically.” Carson thought that Ott felt his masculinity was being threatened. “He had a lot of doubts about whether or not he was strong and manly and would interpret critical comments directed toward him as meaning he was weak.” Carson also explained that personality disorders are not unusual in late adolescence, but it is not unusual for a person to outgrow the problems.
Greg Ott was not discharged from Timberlawn. After fifteen months there he just ran away. Dr. Carson recalled that he refused a staff recommendation to have Ott readmitted. “He simply wasn’t heading in the same direction we were,” the doctor said. By this time Ott’s parents had moved out of the state and he was on his own. You might say he became a man at Timberlawn. About that time Ott met Ron Mickey, who for the next ten years would be his closest friend. “They were like brothers,” Shirley Smith told me.
Nothing had ever shaken the scholarly community of Denton like the slaying of the Texas Ranger. There was hatred and sorrow and great confusion as people tried to sort out the details. The case was less a murder than a political hot potato. If the victim had been someone else, one of the deputies, for example, the case would have attracted very little attention, and District Attorney Jerry Cobb might have been inclined to file a lesser charge than capital murder. Cobb had never had a capital murder case; to memory, there had never been a capital murder case tried to conclusion in Denton. Cobb was only 34 years old; it was a type of political pressure he could do without.
“Hell, yes. I’m on the spot,” Cobb admitted weeks before the trial. “It’s not a capital offense unless you canshow that the officers were acting in the lawful discharge of their duty and Ott knew they were police officers. You always have trouble proving it when the officers are not in uniform.” There were times when Cobb must have thought the case hopelessly circumstantial. No one actually saw Ott pull the trigger. The bullet that killed Bob Doherty had been so badly fragmented it was impossible to say it came from Ott’s .38. Witnesses told conflicting stories. Captain Dwight Crawford claimed that he shouted “Police officers!” twice before a shot was fired, but agent Ben Neel, who was inside the house with Ott and Jimmy Baker, didn’t hear him. Deputies Gilliland and Douglas had sworn that as they were climbing out of the truck they heard voices inside shouting “Drop that gun or I’ll kill you” and “He’s got a gun,” but agent Don Jones, who was much closer to the house than the deputies, didn’t hear either shout. Neel claimed that he shouted “Police officer! Freeze’” just before he fired at Ott. Could this have been what Gilliland heard? Not likely, because by the time Neel shouted this, Deputy Gilliland had already made his way to the northwest corner of the house where Doherty was about to kick in the door. Remember, Neel had just spent considerable time and effort convincing Ott he wasn’t a cop. The whole fiasco took place in a matter of seconds. Wasn’t it reasonable to believe that Greg Ott didn’t recognize this as a police raid until after the Ranger was killed? Some of the officers agreed that the first thing Ott said after he surrendered was “Why didn’t you tell me you were police officers!” So this was Jerry Cobb’s case and he had no choice but to pursue it with a vengeance.
There was a lot of backstage maneuvering in the days just after the killing. Jimmy Baker, who helped set up the raid, had also been charged with capital murder, but that charge was quietly dropped, and after some days of freedom Baker went to federal prison for violating probation. Kenneth Ray Bunyard, who had started the whole chain of events, now volunteered the information that while trying to take a nap in his cell he overheard a conversation between Ott and one of Ott’s attorneys. According to Bunyard, Ott admitted he saw someone at the door just before he fired. A day after the killing, Bunyard and Mary Nosser were married in jail. By the time the trial started in May, Bunyard was again walking the streets of Denton. Jimmy Baker, the only eyewitness who was not a cop, first confirmed the police version of what happened at Ott’s house, but two months later, in a taped interview with his lawyer, Baker changed his story, claiming the only reason he lied in the first place was that two Rangers threatened to kill him in his cell. Baker now claimed that Ben Neel fired not one but two shots, and that Ott fired back at Neel rather than at the door, which would have been in the opposite direction. If Baker was telling the truth, the bullet that killed Bob Doherty must have come from Noel’s .45. Certainly there was plenty of time that night for a cover-up, and without an identifiable bullet, who could say?
It would be up to Jerry Cobb to convince the jury that Greg Ott wantonly and deliberately killed a Texas Ranger, his motives being to save himself and protect his stash of marijuana. The jury would have to believe that Greg Ott was a violent and dangerous man who had killed once and if set free would likely do so again. It would be a tall order, but by the time the trial had ended Cobb had not only convinced the jury, he had also convinced himself. What is more, he had convinced Alan Levy, one of the two lawyers hired to defend Greg Ott.
Retired Colonel Bruce Ott had spent more than twenty years in the military and been around the world a time or two, but until he watched his son tried for capital murder he had never been inside a courtroom. He was a stiff, curt, red-faced man with silver hair and bifocals, good Pennsylvania Dutch stock. He was a self-made man. Against his family’s wishes he had worked his way through veterinary school and now held a top position as head of research for a New Jersey pharmaceutical company. Marion Ott came from a well-placed family on Long Island and could still laugh about the time long ago when Bruce’s family thought filet mignon was the name of her French poodle. Greg was the second of their six children. Their oldest son lived in New York and was an airline pilot. Mary Ott Joyce, their only daughter and the apple of her daddy’s eye, was married and lived in Michigan. The next brother was studying medicine in California, and the two youngest boys still lived at home in New Jersey. “It’s brought us all together,” Bruce Ott kept telling people. But it went without saying that this was the worst experience of their lives.
It came as no shock to Marion Ott to learn that her son was fooling around with marijuana, but the old colonel was dumbfounded. The connection of his son with two crimes, marijuana and murder, was almost incomprehensible. Bruce Ott sat in the courtroom next to his wife and daughter, trying very hard to sort it out. Marion Ott knew as a certainty that her son did not deliberately kill a Texas Ranger, and the colonel had sworn to spend his last dime if that’s what it took to get an acquittal in the murder case. “I guess I’m the redneck’s redneck,” he said at one point, “but why did he have to be messing around with marijuana?” His daughter, Mary, reminded him that he was exceptionally fond of martinis. He reminded her that martinis were not illegal. The second or third day of the trial Mary amazed herself by blurting out, “Daddy, would it shock you to know that I’ve been smoking marijuana for five years?” Only a lifetime of military bearing prevented him from crying. All he could say was “I’m very disappointed in you.”
The Otts had retained the two lawyers originally appointed by the court. Hal Jackson and Al Levy were respected courtroom lawyers with good local connections. They were known as the Odd Couple. Jackson was the 58-year-old silver fox of Denton criminal law, a lifelong native and a highly decorated war hero; Levy was a 28-year-old boy wonder in town who had immedately tested the waters by running for district attorney. Levy had run against Jerry Cobb and Cobb’s top assistant, Fred Marsh. The three of them remained good friends. Marsh and Cobb frequently kidded Levy that his one mistake was running as a Republican. Jackson was the odd part of the couple. He regarded prosecutors as worthy quarry, but damned if he would go for the throat and damned if he would let the other fellow go for his. Whatever their differences in age and style, Jackson and Levy worked well together. Levy was glib and funny and self-effacing, while Jackson played counterpoint as the stumbling old fool, leading juries up alleys of his choice and then pouncing on them.
Once the town had recovered from its initial hysteria, Levy and Jackson put their plan into action. The first order of business was to prevent future outbreaks of hysteria--the emergence of another unexpected jailhouse informant, for example, or loose talk about their client’s days at Timberlawn. Several of Greg’s old friends were urged to take long vacations, including Ron Mickey, who according to a report was threatening to bring a Dallas motorcycle gang to town and lead a jail-break. Their defense rested on the well-founded theory that an intelligent, independent-minded jury would see the incident of February 20 as a massive police foul-up.
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