August 1978
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.
When Texas Ranger Bobby Paul Doherty looked out of his kitchen window and saw patches of snow, he thought about the firewood he hadn’t cut on Sunday. He had promised his wife, Carolyn, that he and Buster would do it right after church, but there had been a meeting of deacons, then the telephone call from the Denton sheriff’s office saying the drug raid was set for that afternoon. Sunday had been a day of prolonged frustration. The drug raid hadn’t gone down after all. He didn’t know why. That’s the way it was with dope dealers. You could work for days or weeks setting it up, then the whole show could fold at the whim of a dealer or the duplicity of an informant.
There was only one thing in this world that Ranger Bob Doherty hated worse than dope and that was dope dealers. He was a fanatic on the subject. “They call us Mr. and Mrs. Redneck,” Carolyn had joked to friends. Carolyn certainly did not approve of drugs but she was not vehement about the long hair and beards and weird lifestyles that her husband automatically associated with major crime. “In his line of work,” she said, “he had to think that way.” Even out in Azle where they made their home, well away from the degenerate streets of Fort Worth where a school kid could score a lid of grass as easily as he could buy a soda pop, drugs occupied an alarming share of school-yard conversations.
All that talk about victimless crimes made Bob Doherty sick. Someone always got hurt, someone other than the person using the drugs. “You ask them if they think drugs are a victimless crime!” he had told his seventeen-year-old daughter, Kelly, on the morning that she was to attend a high school assembly conducted by three former addicts. The Ranger had told his sixteen-year-old son, Buster, about the time, only a few months before, when he had kicked in the door of a gambling den, crashed through a hole in the floor, and landed dead center on a homemade bomb placed there to destroy evidence in the event of just such a raid. If the bomb had exploded, the entire Doherty family would have been its victims. Only a lawman knew what it was like below the surface of the drug culture. It was like his old friend Dwight Crawford, captain of criminal investigation for the Denton County Sheriff’s Department, had said so often: “Bob, it’s a sewer down there. Dark tunnels leading off in ever’ what direction.” That’s why they had all been so frustrated on Sunday. They had an opportunity to explore a few of those tunnels, but someone slammed the door too soon.
Now it was Monday, February 20. It was the official state holiday for Washington’s Birthday, but for Ranger Doherty it was just another morning for wondering if he would ever find time to cut the firewood. This was no mere ceremonial task like trimming the Christmas tree or painting the porch.Their house was heated entirely by wood-burning fireplaces. Bob and Carolyn Doherty had built their handsome white brick home on an isolated three-and-a-half-acre plot that had been part of her daddy’s dairy, and though it contained many modern conveniences, the center of their family life was the den with its large fireplace. The den was the Ranger’s favorite room, the place he kept his collection of handguns and the antique rifle that was supposed to have been used by one of General Custer’s troopers. The stone fireplace reminded Bob Doherty of times past, times he had only read about: when old-timeTexas Rangers lived on parched corn, jerky, and brackish coffee, freezing on some desolate plateau and ranging hundreds of miles alone on horseback to protect life and property from Indians, Mexican bandits, and other desperadoes. The Ranger had told Carolyn on many occasions: “Honey, I think I was born a hundred years too late.” But he was still a Texas Ranger, and it was far and away the proudest fact of his life.
It was not yet 8 a.m. when Captain Dwight Crawford telephoned from Denton. “Mary Nosser claims Baker tried to kill her last night,” he said, while Bob Doherty listened without comment. “Says Baker tried to overdose her with some heroin mixed in a Coca-Cola. Sounded like they had some party.”
Bob Doherty hung up and grabbed his white Stetson. Carolyn met him at the front door with his briefcase. Everything else he would need was in the trunk of his car. “I’ll be home as soon as I can,” Doherty told his wife. In the eighteen months that he had been a Ranger, Doherty had told his wife good-bye every morning with almost the same words, and Carolyn seldom asked the question that was on her mind--when did he intend to slow down? It had been four years since their last vacation and almost two years since his last full day off. “The kids and I weren’t jealous of his job, but we were jealous of his time,” she would admit later. “But Bob wanted to be a working Ranger, and we knew he would slow down when he felt he was able.” The only times Doherty’s family could be certain he would be with them was when Buster’s Azle High School team played football. The Ranger, who had been a football player himself, never missed a game.
Carolyn stood on the porch under the graceful Spanish arches and watched as her husband strode through the patches of snow to his car. The arches had been his idea. Someday, he had said, he would hang a hammock here and watch the sun do its work. She suddenly remembered something. “Remember the deacons’ meeting at the church tonight,” she called out. “I’ll try to make it,” he said. She watched him turn his car and head out the driveway.
On his way to Denton, Bob Doherty thought about Mary Nosser. If Jimmy Baker really had tried to kill her, then it was likely that the whole deal was off. The Ranger and Dwight Crawford had been working for weeks to land Jimmy Baker; Nosser was their bait. The case had developed when Nosser’s boyfriend, Kenneth Ray Bunyard, called Dwight Crawford to his cell in the Denton County jail and suggested a deal. Bunyard and Baker had once been partners in a drug operation, but they fell out and Bunyard was later arrested and charged with stealing cocaine from a local hospital. In return for certain considerations that were never made public, Bunyard fingered Jimmy Baker as “a heavy dealer of marijuana, cocaine, and speed in the Gainesville-Denton area.” Since Baker didn’t live in Denton County, Crawford asked Ranger Bob Doherty for assistance. A big part of a Ranger’s job is to assist local law enforcement agencies, especially in cases where more than one county is involved. Mary Nosser agreed to set up Baker for a marijuana buy, but they also would need an undercover agent to act as the customer. Ranger Doherty telephoned DPS Narcotics in Austin, and agent Ben Neel was dispatched to Denton on special assignment. Neel, a shaggy-haired 41-year-old agent who looked like an aging hippie, posed as “Steve McCloud,” an ex-mafioso heroin dealer from Saint Louis. Nosser had already convinced Baker and his wife, Linda, that “McCloud” was a trusted contact from her own days of street dealing in Saint Louis, and Baker had agreed to sell him fifty pounds of grass. The shipment had arrived over the weekend, but Baker and some of his friends, including Mary Nosser, had decided they would rather party than work, so the meeting with “McCloud” never took place. Maybe Baker had seen the setup and really had tried to kill Nosser, or maybe in the paranoia of the heroin party Nosser just thought so. Either way, it could jeopardize weeks of undercover work. This was a side of Bob Doherty’s job that the public never understood and that made it even more frustrating. The Ranger knew about those dark tunnels that Dwight Crawford described. He knew that without a few breaks they went nowhere.
The break came late Monday afternoon. Apparently the episode with the heroin hadn’t been serious, because Mary Nosser called Captain Crawford and said, “He’s ready to do the deal tonight.”
They moved into action. Crawford arranged for two rooms at the local Ramada Inn, room 154 for “Steve McCloud” and room 155 for his raiding party of cops. By the time Mary Nosser delivered Jimmy and Linda Baker to room 154, the trap was set. Agent Ben Neel, posing as the dealer from Saint Louis, was alone when he opened the door, but listening at the unlocked door of the adjacent room were four heavily armed lawmen—Ranger Bob Doherty, Captain Dwight Crawford, and two of Crawford’s deputies, Bailey Gilliland and Ron “Tracker” Douglas. From the opening conversation, Doherty and Crawford could tell that things were not going as planned. Baker had agreed to bring fifty pounds of marijuana but showed up with only one pound. “I thought you’d want to taste it first,” he told Neel. Neel would testify later that he “simulated” smoking the grass, then gave his approval. Baker telephoned a friend, Joe Fultner, who was supposed to bring the remaining 49 pounds. Neel sent out for beer, and while they waited for the full shipment they drank, passed joints, and listened to Neel’s concocted tales about his Mafia and heroin-dealing days in Saint Louis. When Joe Fultner arrived about an hour later, Doherty, Crawford, and the two deputies burst into the room and made the arrests.
Crawford took charge of the sack that Fultner had delivered. “There’s only nineteen pounds here,” he said--twenty counting the sample Baker brought. Baker told them that was all he could get.
