Possessed by the Devil
Two mysterious deaths and rumors of satanism have created widespread hysteria in Childress, a town that fears it is …
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“Aw, hell,” says Frank Wilks, an unemployed carpenter with a thick, hillbilly-style beard. “That was the doing of Ray, my youngest son. He was trying to win the affection of a girl, so he wrote, ‘I Love Lettie.’ I said, ‘Ray, you get that shit off the wall.’ So he painted over it, and now everybody thinks it says, ‘I Love the Devil.’ ” Frank says that his two sons living in Childress (the other two live in Dallas) couldn’t have been at Tate’s hanging. “They have the best alibis for that night,” he told me almost proudly. “My older son, Darwin, was in jail, and Ray was being held in a youth detention center.”
Rumors continued to be believed, however, if for no other reason than that they were repeated so often. Kids in town accused one another of being in the cult. Brenda Rowland didn’t believe everything she heard—the mysterious woman in black at the funeral, for example, was an old friend of hers—but she did fuel the fires by calling kids at home and asking them point-blank if they were cult members. Tate’s friend, the bespectacled Clifton Hodges, says he wouldn’t check out a book on the occult at the school library for fear of being labeled a cult member. He was accused anyway. Clifton eventually moved out of Childress for a couple of years, he says, “to get away from all the talk.”
No one’s name was slandered, however, like that of Tate’s old girlfriend, Karen. For a brief period after Tate’s death, a couple of kids seeing her on the drag would hold up their fingers in the form of a cross, as if to ward her away. She was said to have witchcraft books and a Ouija board in her bedroom. According to town gossip, it was Karen who had lured Tate into the cult. One mother in town called Karen the cult’s Queen Bee.
Karen, now 26, is the mother of two young boys. She works at a video rental shop in town and is not unaware of what has been said about her. “My name is smeared everywhere,” she said in a soft voice, sitting one evening on a couch at her parents’ farmhouse, her older son playing at her feet. “I don’t know where it has come from, but I don’t have to listen to that garbage. Childress just wants to believe it because this town has nothing else to do.”
Karen pressed her hands firmly together. “I’m not going to let all the talk hurt me,” she said. “People who know me and my family know that none of this is true.”
One might have thought so. One might have figured, as time passed, that the whole story would finally die down. But then Terrie Trosper showed up dead—and when Childress residents heard where she had died, they couldn’t believe their ears.
Terrie had died in the infamous “devil house” of Frank Wilks.
Masters of Satan?
By all accounts, Terrie Trosper had been going through hard times. She had separated from her husband, had given up custody of her four girls, and had begun running with a crowd that, as one friend delicately put it, “liked to party a lot.” In fact, Terrie’s new boyfriend was a 28-year-old ex-convict named Ricky Bradford, who was then a close friend of Frank Wilks’s 22-year-old son, Darwin. Both Darwin and Ricky had been convicted and sent to the state prison in separate cases of aggravated assault. District attorney McCoy, never one to mince words, says they are “sorry to the core.”
On the night of her death, Terrie, Ricky Bradford, Darwin, and some friends were at the Wilkses’ house, drinking. Frank Wilks, however, was not there: He was in the Childress jail for assaulting a police officer.
Terrie had been drinking heavily—at the autopsy, her blood alcohol level was determined to be .23, more than twice the legal intoxication limit—and according to Ricky Bradford, the two of them went to bed in one of the small bedrooms. At one point, says Ricky, Terrie got up, staggered around the living room, collapsed, and then was helped back to bed. About nine-thirty the next morning, he says, his voice as flat as a fence post, “I just touched her, and she was cold and stiff. I didn’t even look at her. I just got up. And I informed everybody I thought she was dead.”
An autopsy determined that Terrie had died by choking on her own vomit. Officers from the Childress Police Department, finding no evidence of foul play, closed the case. Yet allegations quickly surfaced that Terrie’s death was somehow linked to Tate’s. “She never believed Tate took his own life,” says Lisa
Barber, a courthouse secretary and long-time friend of Terrie’s. “Right up to her death, she never accepted it. She was hell-bent on finding out who killed him.” Ricky Bradford admitted to me that Terrie once told him that Tate had warned her to keep her daughters in the house because the cult was going to sacrifice one of them in a satanic ritual. “But I’ve lived here all my life,” Ricky said, “and I’ve never seen any kind of cult.” Ricky speculated that Terrie, depressed over her family situation, was suicidal—he said she had already made one suicide attempt by trying to overdose on pills—and that she probably had tried again, this time successfully.
Although Frank Wilks gave a statement to the police that Ricky once boasted that he was “the devil,” Ricky scoffed at the allegation. “Oh, God,” he said, rolling his deep blue eyes, “I don’t believe in no Satan.” In fact, other members of the Bradford family say it is the Wilks brothers who are associated with devil worship. “I’ve listened to Darwin say that he works for the devil and knows the devil personally,” says Ricky’s sister, Leticia Broom, who is Ray Wilks’s ex-girlfriend. Furthermore, says Ronny Bradford, Ricky’s younger brother, “Them Wilks brothers have been seen wearing black capes and doing Ouija boards and loading goats into a car. I ain’t lying.” Ronny says a group of young men, including Darwin, had once asked him to join them in the graveyard to call up spirits.
Frankly, it’s difficult to believe that capes and Ouija boards and spirit calling would appeal to Ray and Darwin Wilks, two hardass, blue-collar boys who can drink a couple of six packs of beer a night and cheerfully get into fistfights with anyone who just looks at them wrong. Sitting one night in the very bedroom where Terrie was found dead, his arms covered with tattoos that he had gotten in prison, Darwin hand-rolled a cigarette, stuck it in his mouth, and said, “Oh, shit, me and Ray do crazy things when we get pissed off at people. We say we’re masters of Satan, and we say horns are going to come out of our heads. But that’s just having some fun. We don’t believe in nothing. We’re atheists. All these rumors about devil worship in this town is just made-up bullshit by people who are scared.”
Still, something seemed odd about Terrie Trosper’s death. She was the fourth of Jimmie Rowland’s six children to die—one died in infancy of crib death, another died in a car wreck when she was four years old, then Tate and Terrie—and Jimmie and Brenda, whom he married in 1988, demanded an investigation. (Tate and Terrie’s mother lives in seclusion in Childress and does not speak publicly about her children’s deaths.) The former Childress County sheriff, Claude Lane, had adamantly refused to look into the Tate Rowland case, insisting it was suicide—which, in turn, led to predictable rumors that he too was in the cult and part of a cover-up.
But after Lane was sent to jail for dealing marijuana, the case was reopened by the new sheriff, a redheaded, straight-backed Childress-area native named Reece Bowen, and his young deputy, Kevin Overstreet. Both men reinterviewed witnesses. Overstreet traveled to Lockhart to double-check the story of the Childress girl’s dreams. Then, a few weeks after Terrie’s death, there came yet another astonishing twist in the case: Darwin Wilks attempted to kill himself by swallowing 25 to 30 tablets of Elavil, a mild anti-depressant that has tranquilizing effects. He left a suicide note that read, “I know something that the cops don’t know. I know who killed Terrie. I can’t live anymore.” Was Darwin’s note a confession or was he saying he knew the murderer? When he recovered, he said that he didn’t remember writing the note and that he certainly didn’t know who killed Terrie. The sheriff wanted Darwin to take a lie detector test, but Darwin had left for Dallas.
Meanwhile, a forensic pathologist from Amarillo, Dr. Sparks Veasey, had been asked to help with the investigation. He said an autopsy should have been conducted long ago on Tate. After examining the photos of the two rope burns on Tate’s neck, Veasey said it might have determined if Tate had been strangled first and then hanged.
On July 27, 1991, three years after his death, Tate’s body was exhumed from the Childress Cemetery. Autopsy to Determine If Death Was Sacrifice, read the three-column front-page headline in the Index. For the first time, the Satan rumors had gone public, and the area news media came running. One television crew reportedly obtained an interview from a solemn Childress man who said cult members could be seen dancing around bonfires on the banks of the Red River, just north of town. In another interview the boyish-looking David McCoy, a highly excitable yet respected DA who had lost only three trial cases in eleven years, declared that he had received an anonymous death threat. “This is the stuff movies are made of,” he said.
McCoy did release one intriguing piece of information. He said that the boy who was with Tate at the hanging, Chad Johnston—now living in Lubbock—had told a third story to the sheriff. In that statement Chad said Tate didn’t try to hang himself twice. He said that Tate “started jacking around with the rope by swinging around the tree with it.” Chad went behind the car, this time to “take a leak,” and when he came back, he saw that Tate had hanged himself.
Because Tate’s casket was not airtight, his body was too decomposed for Veasey to make any conclusive judgments about the hanging. But an autopsy test did find traces of Elavil: The same drug Darwin Wilks used to attempt suicide. By no means a pleasure drug—“It’s the kind of drug that you would take and then lay down and go to sleep,” says McCoy—Elavil, it was suggested, could have been the very thing a cult would use to sedate someone and then kill him. The rumor mill went berserk.
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