A Legacy of Evil
Once San Diego was home to Texas’ most ruthless dynasty. Now, in the town of the Parrs corrupted, a savage gang rape has resurrected the old ghosts of lawlessness, fear, and betrayal.
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Frank Gaitan knew something was wrong when he got home around two in the morning and found his mother still there with the kids. He and his wife, Linda, had gone to a family barbecue at his uncle’s trailer around the corner that Saturday night, and as usual, Frankie, a 23-year-old tattoo artist, had talked and laughed and drunk with his relatives while his 19-year-old wife remained more subdued. Linda was a pretty enough girl—pale with shiny black hair, an inviting smile, and a nice light in her eyes—but because she wasn’t from San Diego, she wasn’t much of a talker. Frankie was a spindly guy—even his moustache refused to grow in fully—but he knew how to tell a story and would do so at the slightest request and for as long as he could hold a crowd. He didn’t mind that, after he announced he would go on to another party with his cousin Roel Soliz, Linda said she wanted to go home to check on Frank Junior, sixteen months old, and Sara, who was just four months old. The street was dark—because of hard times, there was no money to light the streets at night—but Frankie let her go. After all, home was just around the corner.
But now here was his mother, giving him nothing but a confused look, and no Linda. Uneasy, Frankie went back to his uncle’s house to round up his cousin and set out in search of his wife. Frankie wasn’t too suspicious when he spied a few of Linda’s friends collected on Corando Perez’s porch—it was, after all, a Saturday night. He asked if they had seen Linda; they said no. But when Frankie, after walking on about half a block, turned back to ask more questions and saw that the porch was empty, he began to worry. Frankie and Roel went home. No Linda. Later, Frankie went back to Corando Perez’s house; he heard sounds inside but got no answer when he banged on the door. Frankie caught sight of his neighbor, Felipe Chew, approaching on foot. The two men exchanged insults. Two of the women who had been at the Perez house appeared; growing more agitated, Frankie warned them that if anything had happened to Linda and they knew it, they would live to regret it. Frankie’s mother came out of the house and tried to calm him; instead, he demanded she bring him his gun.
Gradually, other men began returning from the cockfight. In his statement, Frankie told law-enforcement officials that Ruben Vela bragged to him and Roel that he had had sex with a woman at the Gallegos ranch. The neighbors began to crowd around Frankie and threaten him. He saw that one man had a rifle and heard him cock it. It was only when Frankie turned and saw a familiar figure limping toward him that the crowd vanished—in a hurry, it seemed. He thought he heard someone laughing. As his wife drew nearer, Frankie gave his familiar whistle. But when he was close enough to see Linda’s face he demanded to know where she had been. She looked at him and looked at Roel. “Out riding,” she said.
Once inside the house, Frankie saw that his wife’s eyes were wild. She couldn’t think straight. She was afraid. This time he ordered her to tell him what had happened. Finally, when her husband’s fury seemed more menacing than her attackers’ threats, Linda Gaitan told him she had been raped. If the men had assumed that Linda knew and understood the code of the neighborhood—poor women did what poor men wanted and shut up—they had seriously miscalculated. Hearing the news, Frankie walked out the door into the street, and yelling loud enough to wake anyone who dared to sleep, swore that he would get even. Then after sunrise on Palm Sunday, Frank Gaitan, betrayed by his buddies, betrayed them in turn. He reported the crime to the authorities. Later that morning, tearful and disoriented, Linda stood before an elderly justice of the peace and named her attackers so that warrants for their arrest could be issued. “Him too?” was all Frankie could say, as he sobbed along with his wife. These were men he had grown up with, gone to school with, gone drinking with, gotten into trouble with. Lots of them wore tattoos Frankie had given them. Just last week Orlando Garza—“Him too?”—had offered to help Frankie fix his van in exchange for a tattoo. Frankie had known Robert Garcia—“Him too?”—ever since they had been altar boys together. What Frankie could not have dreamed at that moment, when the treachery of his friends stung like the slice of a knife across his cheek, was that the worst was yet to come. He had seen evil for what it was and in so doing broke San Diego’s rule of silence. For him and his brutalized wife, the price would be expulsion.
San Diego has wrestled with darkness for most of its life. Like all of Texas between the Nueces and the Rio Grande, it was settled slowly. For years after Texas won its independence from Mexico, the region remained disputed territory, and even when the issue of sovereignty was settled, the issue of which race and culture would rule was not.
Any land held by the old Mexican families was too much for the restless Anglos who coveted it. Onto the old culture of refinement—Spanish spinsters once gave croquet parties on the lawn of the town’s only hotel—was grafted a culture of violence, where due process was dismissed in favor of shoot-outs and impromptu hangings. For a time, prosperity obscured deeper divisions. By the 1880’s Duval County’s population had soared to around five thousand; San Diego was a sheep-ranching boomtown, a rough-and-tumble stop on the railway between Corpus Christi and Laredo. But then, in a mysterious plague, the sheep began to die, taking with them the town’s vision of a glorious future.
It is fitting that a violent crime would be the definitive event that catapulted a shrewd ranch manager named Archer Parr to power. In 1912 racial tensions could no longer be contained when three Anglo ranchers murdered a Mexican deputy sheriff in broad daylight. Parr, who had sided with the Mexicans against the Anglos in an earlier attempt to move the county seat to a neighboring town, came forward again on behalf of the oppressed. According to Dudley Lunch’s history, The Duke of Duval County, Anglo powers paid off the crucial witness, and the men were acquitted. But what looked like another victory for the Anglos was actually the beginning of the end. Hispanics lined up behind one man whose loyalty had never wavered: Archer Parr.
Parr became their patron. If your aunt was sick or your son needed money for schoolbooks, you went to Mr. Parr. That the money came from the country treasury (and that Parr regularly helped himself to it) was of little importance—families could keep their land, their way of life, their identity. All Parr expected in return was their vote. Established law was something Parr cut to fit his needs: Anglo ranchers tried to roust him by convening a grand jury in 1914 to investigate his abuse of county funds; months later a mysterious fire engulfed the courthouse, destroying records that would have been used as evidence. He had proved- if anyone needed convincing- that opposition would not be tolerated.
Archer’s son George absorbed his father’s lessons and improved upon them. If his father had won the hearts of the townspeople because he tried to understand them, George, a burly young man whose smile glistened with mischief, captivated the people because he was one of them. San Diegoans didn’t consider George Parr an American, an Anglo, or even a Texan. He was a Mexican: Archer Parr had spoken a mangled and halting Spanish; George, who took over from his father in the thirties, spoke it flawlessly. George was macho—he hunted and whored and was afraid of no one. “He did not impose his morality on anyone, because he had no morality,” one former San Diego resident told me. It was George Parr who had orchestrated the stuffing of ballots in the infamous Box 13 that sent Lyndon Johnson to the Senate in 1948.
But there was a darker side to Parr’s power that increased as his grip tightened on the town. “When he laughed, everybody laughed,” one longtime resident of San Diego noted. The liberator has become the oppressor; Parr sealed San Diego off from the world. He controlled all jobs. Then as now, the two places to work were the county courthouse and the school district. The people learned what he wanted them to learn; when the American Legion campaigned to raise the country’s literacy rate, Parr abolished Duval’s veterans training program. There was only one law in San Diego, and it was brutally, elegantly simple: To stay on the inside—to survive—one did as Parr ordered.
To disobey him was to face punishments expertly devised to poison a close-knit community. Those who tried to oppose Parr by joining what was called the Freedom party would soon find themselves out of a job, with no prospects and only a sorry, embarrassed shake of the head in answer to further inquiries. Habitues of a local drive-in run by two brothers who opposed Parr were often arrested for drunkenness by Parr’s deputy sheriffs. Children whose parents tried to fight Parr couldn’t sell their stock at 4-H clubs. Friend turned against friend, brother against brother; one learned to go along or face expulsion. Few, if any, were foolish enough to assume the sheriff was on their side; Parr controlled not just law enforcement but the law as well. Just as he had his own deputy sheriffs, he had his own judges. “He wouldn’t let you breathe,” one citizen said.
Indictments against Parr for fraud and tax evasion totaled 656 counts by the sixties, but nothing stuck. Ten more years would pass before his rule was ended; he was finally convicted of tax evasion in 1974. In response, Parr, who had gone to jail once in the thirties on a similar charge, shot himself in the head on his ranch near Benavidea in 1975.
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