The Cheerleader Murder Plot
Everyone in Channelview knew that Wanda Holloway would do anything for her daughter. That was the problem.
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With the assistance of Sergeant Flynt Blackwell, Helton put a wire on Terry and showed him how to record his phone conversations with Wanda. Over the next three weeks, Helton came to believe Terry’s story: The police became convinced that Wanda did intend to go through with the crime and that she was no longer shopping for a killer — she had settled on Terry’s choice of a murderer for hire. Then they haggled over price: The $2,5000 that the police quoted to assassinate Verna, coupled with the $5,000 quoted to do in Amber, was, in Terry’s words, “just too much money for her.” Wanda had to settle on only one murder and figured that killing Verna would leave Amber too distraught to compete. On the day that she was to make the down payment that would lead to her arrest, Wanda dropped Shanna off at church and then passed on a pair of diamond earrings as payment to Terry. Removing them, she said, “I couldn’t pull the trigger myself, but I can sure do it this way.” When Flynt Blackwell went with Helton to arrest Wanda the next day, he noticed that she was impeccably dressed.
As spring progressed, it became much harder to remember that the lives of several people — including those of two teenage girls — had been so adversely affected. (“I felt numb and I felt hurt and I sank into the couch,” Verna said of the day the police told her of Holloway’s intentions. “You’ve really got to dislike someone to do that.”) The story was simply too entertaining, too ripe for exploitation. As Alice Johnson principal Jim Barker noted, “The farther you get from this building, the bigger the story become.”
In appeared to have everything, at least as far as neighborhood gossips, news directors, and movie producers were concerned: It had Texas, it had cheerleading. (A Current Affair neatly linked the two by asserting that “the bizarre murder-for-hire scheme” was “unfolding in the back yard of the most famous cheerleading squad in history, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders.”) It had indisputable evil: “I just hope we never experience anybody in this country doing this again,” Terry Harper’s attorney, former district attorney Mike Hinton, huffed to a camera crew from Inside Edition. “Over a cheerleader, for God’s sake! Our country cannot tolerate this — period.” It was also a cautionary tale of parental love gone awry, complete with an inarguable moral: The police’s casting of Wanda Holloway as the ultimate stage mother inspired Houston Post columnist Bonnie Gangelhoff to write, “The lesson here, perhaps, is that for children to grow into confident adults, honors must be their own and so must the pain of losing cheerleader competitions.” Wanda’s story may have been played as a grotesque archetypal — and predictable — components, which meant that it gave everyone a chance to feel smug. Once again, people in Pasadena — and elsewhere — had a place to look down on.
Naturally, the case of the Pom-pom Mom sparked much tortured and unnecessary debate on the value of cheerleading, which in turn embarrassed many Texans who had hoped that they had put cheerleading behind them. “Cheerleading,” posited the Dallas Morning News cautiously, “is a big deal to some in Texas. To them, the ideal boy plays football and his girlfriend twirls a baton on the field or waves pompons on the sidelines. And it is seen that way in Channelview.” The Houston Chronicle was more bullish on the activity: CHEERLEADING ‘NOT THE ISSUE’ IN ALLEGED MURDER CONTRACT was on headline. (Perhaps the most-subdued coverage was the local Channelview paper’s: MURDER-FOR-HIRE CASE CALLED ‘REALLY STRANGE’ was the headline a few days after the story broke.) The national press, of course, had no qualms about blurring the carefully constructed distinctions the rest of Texas put between itself, cheerleading, and Channelview. A Current Affair drew the logical, time-honored conclusion: “At one time or another every girl in America dreams of being a cheerleader,” intoned the reporter. “That’s especially true in Texas. Pom-poms are a major part of the Lone Star legend.”
It was only a matter of time before the rest of the press dropped any pretense of seriousness, largely because the story was such a tabloid-TV natural. Representatives of Sally Jessy Raphaël, Oprah, and Geraldo holed up at the Galleria. A gutsier team from a British network bunked at the I-10 Holiday Inn, much closer to Channelview. Their targets were the drama’s stars: Verna Heath received roses every day from a producer from A Current Affair and, after refusing to go on camera, was supposedly ambushed by another reporter wearing a hidden microphone. Verna briefly agreed to do the Sally Jessy Raphaël show — until the topic was changed from stage mothers to people who have been the targets of hired killers.
When the major players proved elusive — Wanda’s besieged lawyers, it was stated on the evening news, had refused interview from “around the world” — the press set out to create other stars: Inside Edition offered to fly to principal Barker’s home, for instance, and then turned to Terry Harper, who appeared on camera in jeans, boots, a new duster, a pink bandanna, and a gamma cap. Casting him as a hero of the story, the reporter asked how he felt. “Tired,” he said, sighing deeply. That was not a universal feeling. Virtually every character in the drama — including a Houston Chronicle reporter — was contacted by a movie company. “I cannot answer any questions unless they are submitted in writing,” on newly savvy player joked. The press coverage even produced a bonanza for Alice Johnson students: Yearbooks containing pictures of Shanna and Amber, which once sold for $15, started going to reporters for $50.
It was, then, not surprising that what had initially been shaped as a tragedy became a comedy. A reporter on the incident that appeared in a Bowling Green, Ohio, paper ran under the heading of THE LIGHTER SIDE. The story was also featured humorously in Newsweek and in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. A series of Scotty cartoons in the Houston Post linked it to the war in the Middle East — a main character headed for a peace demonstration not in Washington but in Channelview. It was a source of some pride in Channelview that Johny Carson added the topic of his monologue. (Wanda, he asserted, wasn’t hard to find: “She was out on Mainstreet, saying, ‘Gimme me a g, gimme a u, gimme an n, gimme a g-u-n.’”)
Before long, this seemed a story with only one loser, Wanda Holloway. “I’m gonna sic Mrs. Holloway on you” became a running joke at Alice Johnson Junior High.
By the time of cheerleader tryouts on March 22, school administrators had had more than enough. They tried to keep the date and time from the press, and now, administrators in shirt-sleeves patrolled the grounds, their arms folded, their eyes fixed on the crowd like Secret Service men. The one reporter who found her way into the boys’ gym, where the event was held, was summarily ejected.
On this day, Verna heath looked like a woman who had had more than enough too. She had lost weight, and her jaw was firmly set; she fixed a steely gaze on strangers who ventured into the gym. She sat high up in the bleachers with other cheerleading parents, who held video cameras and silver balloons emblazoned with the word “Good Luck.” Her ensemble made you think of Wanda Holloway, and how natural she would have looked, sitting proudly in the stand: Verna’s opulent mane was coiffed superbly, her purple jacket matched her purple pumps, which coordinated nicely with her aqua slacks and her print blouse, which contained both colors. Once, she left the bleachers to place a steadying hand on Amber’s shoulder. Dressed in black shorts and a chartreuse T-shirt with her name in cursive across the back, Amber looked less like the vamp of her newspaper photographs and more like a gangly teenager, with long skinny legs and her thick, coarse hair barely restrained by two hair clips. Everyone hoped that she could put the chilling times behind her, though it hadn’t been easy — during the tryouts campaign, someone had defaced Amber’s photograph on one of her elaborate posters by writing “bull’s-eye” on her forehead. But, in the gym, the audience acted as if nothing had happened. There was no special applause for Amber, and the program went off without a hitch. With four candidates for four placed on the freshman cheerleading squad, everyone could be a winner. “Amber did make cheerleader and she was happy and her mama was happy,” recalled one person there. “Everyone met in the hall and cried and hugged afterward.” Shanna did not perform that day.
It was a more arduous time for Wanda Holloway. People turned on her. She was no longer a lovely person, but one who looked far too comfortable in front of the television cameras. A more penitent performance was called for (just as, at school, Shanna was being scorned by her fellow students for acting as if nothing was wrong). When Wanda refused to get counseling for her children, Tony Harper sued his ex-wife for custody, which for a time gave credence to an alternative theory of the entire narrative — that Terry and Tony had framed Wanda in order to get custody of Tony’s children, an interesting notion but one that was not supported by any prior attempts at custody on Tony’s part. In eleven years he had made no effort to modify his custody or visitation rights. Now, with the trial date approaching, Tony and wanda share custody of their children, though Shane, an honor student himself, has shown a clear preference for his father. His college money will now go to his mother’s defense: “It’s all down the tube,” he told Tony, disgusted.
As the June trial date approached, people began to turn aspects of the case intoa kind of parlor game. “This case has to many ironies,” they said, shaking their heads and smiling. They speculated that if the Channelview High School band director had not forbidden ninth-graders to do so, Amber would have tried out for twirler instead of cheerleader. They said if Wanda had just let things be, Shanna’s talent would have won her a spot on the cheerleading squad this year. They might have also said that in setting out to destroy Verna, Wanda had managed to hand her enemy the kind of victory she sought to avoid at all costs: The agony of the Heath family notwithstanding, they are sure to realize some fame and fortune from the movie offers that are coming their way. Meanwhile, Holloway may lose virtually everything if she is found guilty. “She created a scenario where her own daughter will be deprived of her mother,” said Tony’s lawyer, Paula Asher. “What she sought out to do to Amber Heath is what she created for her own child.”
But losing should be nothing new to someone from Channelview, which is, of course, who Wanda Holloway has been all along. In her desperate attempt to escape it, she has come to embody it: as victim and villain, she has made herself into a true heroine of Channelview, putting herself in her place for good.
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