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 was reasonable doubt that Greg Ott even fired a pistol, much less at a man he knew to be a cop. There was hardly any physical evidence, and part of what the prosecution had was mutilated by the bunglings of the Denton sheriff’s office. The state might have proved the bullet hole in the door was made with a .38, except some deputy had rammed his pencil through the hole so it would look neater. The test that could have proved that Greg Ott indeed fired a pistol that night was inconclusive because the deputies had first insisted on fingerprinting their man. Jackson had calculated that the state’s weakest witness would be agent Neel, who fired the first shot. Neel’s own record was not lily white. He had been involved in other dope shootouts and had killed a suspect in an abortive dope raid in Houston. The most recent example of Neel’s proclivity toward the wrong move came less than a month before the killing of Ranger Doherty. Neel awoke one morning to find not only his prize informant but also $9500 in state buy money missing from his home. The informant’s whereabouts and how he managed to get the money out of the locked trunk of Neel’s car were mysteries that still bothered the DPS. The department had suspended Neel for five days, which indicated they were not entirely happy with his performance.
Unfortunately for the defense, Jackson was not able to get much of Neel’s biography to the jury, but he still had a use for him. During direct examination, the prosecution had asked Neel to step over to the schematic near the jury box and draw the trajectory of the shot he fired at the fleeing Greg Ott. When it was the defense’s turn to cross-examine, Jackson asked Neel to return to the schematic and continue his line of trajectory. Cobb quickly objected, and Judge Bob Scofield, who several times seemed on the verge of having Jackson clamped in irons, just as quickly sustained the objection. But it didn’t matter. Suddenly everyone in the courtroom was drawing a mental trajectory. The bullet would have gone right through the door where Ranger Doherty was killed.
When it came time for the defense to present its case, Levy and Jackson had to answer one quick and momentous question: had the state proved its case? Although the jury had been permitted to examine a photograph of Ott taken on the night of February 20--the one in which he looked like Charles Manson--the defendant they had seen in the courtroom was scrubbed, groomed, and attractively attired in a three-piece suit borrowed from Jackson’s closet. This was the impression they hoped the jury would take with them. Levy took a straw vote among members of the press, who mostly agreed that the worst they could get was involuntary manslaughter and long probation. The lawyers weighed whether to call Jimmy Baker as a witness and decided it was a poor risk. They would have to vouch for Baker’s reputation, which was hardly what their client needed at the moment, and they couldn’t really be sure what Baker would say under oath. “Anybody who tells two different stories has obviously lied once,” Hal Jackson reasoned. The only other nonpolice witness was Ott himself, and they would call him only as a last resort--in the punishment phase after a verdict of capital murder. They couldn’t afford to open up Ott’s psychiatric record, however dated and oblique. The jury already knew that Ott was a dope dealer; if they also had to wrestle with expert testimony that he had once been diagnosed as having paranoid personality with aggressive tendencies, then, sir, it would be time to make a fist and wait for the last needle.
Levy and Jackson decided to call only three witnesses, all of them law officers who would testify that the mysterious Jimmy Baker had also been charged with capital murder. This was done merely to make the jury wonder, Where the hell is Baker and why didn’t the state call him as a witness? Only an hour or so after the defense began, it rested its case. Things looked pretty good. Bruce Ott was so happy that he offered to buy martinis all around. Marion Ott protested that it would be bad luck to celebrate prematurely and led the colonel off by the arm. In retrospect, it was a wise move.
Al Levy’s closing statement was predictably incisive, except for one very unfortunate slip. Pointing to the door with the hole, which sat in the middle of the courtroom, Levy told the jury, “When Greg Ott fired that shot . . .” Say what? This was the first and only evidence the jury had that Ott did fire a shot. When someone asked Jerry Cobb later why he didn’t pounce on Levy’s slip in his own closing statement, the young district attorney said sheepishly, “I was thinking so hard what I was going to say I didn’t even hear him.” Cobb’s final statement was short and explosive. He described Greg Ott as a “man ready to kill for his stash,” and demanded that Ott be convicted of capital murder and pay for his crime with his life. Later, outside the courtroom, Cobb would fight back his own tears and describe it as the hardest thing he had ever done.
It took the jury about four hours to find Ott guilty of the lesser crime of murder.
When Judge Scofield read the verdict, the only one at the defense table who didn’t look slightly relieved was Greg Ott. There were tears in his eyes as he was led off in handcuffs. The jury would still have to come back in the morning and deliberate the sentence, which could range anywhere from five years to life. But the threat of the death penalty had ended. “It feels like a tie,” Al Levy told reporters. Levy seemed as relieved in defeat as Jerry Cobb did in victory, and Bruce Ott watched in wonderment as the two lawyers shook hands.
“I can’t understand lawyers,” the colonel said, shaking his head. “They laugh and joke with each other while my son’s life is at stake.”
That night as Levy, Cobb, and Fred Marsh were cooling their emotions and indulging in some serious drinking, Levy called it “probably the best verdict I’ve ever seen.”
“Ott’s a violent and dangerous person,” Jerry Cobb said. “His whole personality proves it.”
“If he hadn’t killed the Ranger he would have probably ended up killing someone else,” Levy agreed.
“Where’s your evidence?” I asked the lawyers. I hadn’t seen it. The psychiatric report was ten years old and vague to the point of being irrelevant. True, Ott didn’t conform to some people’s standards of behavior, but not a single witness had testified to an act of aggressive behavior since that time long ago in San Antonio. “I got some pictures to prove he was into S&M and bondage and all kinds of kinky sex,” Cobb said. “Come to my office in the morning and I’ll show you.” The following morning, with a couple of Texas Rangers looking over my shoulder, I examined the material seized from Ott’s home. There were photographs of whips, body harnesses, dildos, and spiked collars, the sort of stuff you’d see in any pornography shop. There were also some lesbian magazines and a book titled Sex with Dogs. “What do you think the jury would have thought if they’d seen this stuff?” one of Cobb’s investigators asked.
The only witness called by the defense in the punishment stage of the trial was Greg’s mother. She was not called as a character witness--that would have opened up those doors Levy and Jackson wanted shut--but rather to testify that her son had never been convicted of a felony. But, on the grounds that she hadn’t really kept up with her son for ten years, Judge Scofield refused to allow her testimony. Greg Ott kissed his mother’s hand as she walked down from the witness stand. She didn’t have it in her to smile again. A few hours later, when the jury returned and sentenced Greg Ott to life in prison, Marion Ott fainted.
I do not know what went through the minds of the jurors, but I think they felt obliged to pinpoint the blame for the tragedy of February 20. Obviously the jurors believed that Ott did not know he was shooting at a cop, otherwise they would have found him guilty of capital murder. But if Ott didn’t know the man on the other side of the door was a cop, who did he think it was? The prosecution argued that he shot to protect his marijuana, but I don’t think this is a reasonable assumption. In the few seconds of action, all Ott really had time to know was that his house was being broken into from all directions and that he was being shot at. In that situation my guess is that he did what any other Texan inside his home with a gun in his hand would do. He fired back. Because of fate, a member of one of the legendary police agencies of the world was killed. I believe that in their honest attempt to attach blame, the jurors reduced the tragedy to a single notion: dope dealer kills Texas Ranger. No matter how they weighed the evidence, that was the crime.
What lingers is not so much the crime as the tragedy. Caught up in the scent of the chase, five heavily armed law enforcement officers, none in uniform, surrounded an isolated house in the middle of the night, hoping to trap and arrest a man with twenty pounds of marijuana. That is their duty, but why were they pursuing it as though they had just cornered the whole French Connection? Ott was a dealer of illegal chicken feed, not an all-points-bulletin fugitive. He wasn’t going anywhere, except to class the next day. The crime of selling twenty pounds of marijuana to an undercover agent would probably have been worth no more than a long probation in Denton County. It wasn’t the crime that obsessed the officers; it was the chase, the irresistable urge, against common sense, to play cops and robbers. Because of this, a Texas Ranger was killed and a 27-year-old graduate student will spend at least the next twenty years of his life in prison. Bob Doherty should be taking his long-overdue vacation right now, just as Greg Ott should be working on his master’s thesis and living according to the terms of his probation. Instead, two lives are destroyed. This is the tragedy for which no blame has yet been fixed.
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