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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In September 1991, McCoy convened a grand jury to study the evidence. “Suicide or murder? That’s the question,” the normally staid Index asked with a Shakespearean flair. At the hearing a great deal of gossip was repeated, but little truth came out, because some of the most important subpoenaed witnesses, including Darwin Wilks and Chad Johnston, didn’t show up.
The grand jury did ask that Terrie Trosper’s body be exhumed. Dr. Veasey, after studying the previous autopsy of her death, said it was unlikely that she could have choked to death since she had been lying face down. (The first autopsy had been conducted by Dr. Ralph Erdmann, the embattled Lubbock pathologist who has been indicted on two counts of misconduct.) In front of television cameras and reporters, Terrie’s casket was lifted from the ground. Less than a week before Halloween 1991, the new autopsy results were announced: Terrie had died of asphyxiation, most likely smothering. The report said that contusions on her body, especially on her inner thigh, and bruises in her mouth “indicated blunt trauma, likely incurred during an assault.” McCoy told the press that more than one person may have been involved in her killing—someone held her down while another did the smothering.
There was another thing found in Terrie’s body—Elavil. Though Veasey warned that he could only be 70 percent certain that Terrie Trosper’s death was from murder, McCoy vowed that he would pursue the case as a homicide.
At that point, it was hard to find anybody in Childress who did not believe a cult was on the loose. The more the rumors were mentioned, the more they grabbed the imaginations of the townspeople. Word spread that the cult had been seen meeting at a mobile home factory or a dry cleaning store, that a baby lamb with its heart cut out had been found near a cotton gin, that a Childress man had showed he had the powers of Satan by pointing at a cat and commanding it to die. When the First Baptist Church in Childress presented a satanism seminar, more than 450 residents listened intently as an occult expert told of cults’ luring teens with heavy metal music and teaching them to dig up coffins at the cemetery and have sex with the bodies.
As fear swept the town, the grand jury reconvened. Darwin Wilks still could not be found, and Ricky Bradford did not appear, but just about everyone else did. Regarding Terrie’s death, it was learned that the Elavil probably came from Frank Wilks’s elderly father. Frank himself took the stand to say that Darwin told him that Terrie had been murdered by another person in the house that night. But no one who was at the house would confess to anything.
Outside the grand jury room, tempers flared. Brenda Rowland got into a shoving match with Brenda Stokes, the sister of Terrie and Tate’s mother. Brenda Stokes accused Brenda Rowland of hitting Tate and Terrie when they were alive. “You better quit lying on me,” replied Brenda Rowland, and they started pushing each other around.
Then most of the Hackler family arrived at the courthouse to clear their names. Karen’s younger sister testified that on the day Tate died, he had called the Hackler home and said he wanted to kill himself. And Karen said she knew nothing about a cult. When the Hacklers emerged from the grand jury room, the girls’ father, James Ray, wearing a big white cowboy hat, angrily thrust a briefcase at a photographer trying to take a picture of his family.
A stocky Chad Johnston arrived, repeated his third hanging story and stuck to his claim that Tate’s death was suicide. According to McCoy, “Chad’s testimony was that Tate thought Karen was messing with his mind and that Tate got sick of it. And Tate thought he could make her feel sorry.”
So why was there a second rope mark on Tate’s neck? Chad couldn’t—or wouldn’t—say. Who killed Terrie Trosper? McCoy could only reply, “We’re one witness away from knowing that.” The grand jury ended its work with just as many questions as answers.
Witch-hunt
For four months, that’s where the matter stood. Then, this past March, the case broke wide open again. Frank and Darwin Wilks arrived at the sheriff’s department to say that Ricky Bradford had admitted at a barbecue at their home the previous night that he had killed Terrie. The Wilkses alleged that Ricky had threatened to kill them if they snitched. Darwin said Ricky had become provoked by questions about Terrie’s death. According to Darwin, Ricky had said, “Yes, I killed the bitch,” and then threatened to burn down Frank’s house and cut out Darwin’s eyes if they told. Based on the new information, the sheriff arrested Ricky for first-degree murder.
Ricky, insisting that he had said nothing about killing Terrie, claimed Darwin had set him up. Ricky said Darwin was broke, and by making his statement about Terrie’s murder, Darwin knew he could get the $1,000 reward that the sheriff’s department had been offering. (The sheriff’s department confirmed that Darwin had been given the reward money.) In fact, Darwin did admit to me that he had been worried that the police were going to arrest him. He said he had finally submitted to a lie detector test a few weeks before Ricky’s arrest and had flunked when asked by the examiner if he had smothered Terrie. “The cops were trying to frame me,” Darwin said. “But, hell, I was asleep that whole time she was supposed to have been killed. I couldn’t have smothered anyone.” After Ricky’s arrest, Darwin took another polygraph test and passed it.
In truth, no one seems convinced that the latest turn of events clears up Terrie’s death. David McCoy admits that with an inconclusive autopsy and a list of unreliable witnesses, he doesn’t have as strong a case against Ricky as he would like to have. He says that before going to trial sometime this summer, he wants to give lie detector tests to all the witnesses. “Ricky Bradford is a sorry individual,” McCoy says, “but I don’t want to send him to prison just for being sorry.”
What the latest publicity about the Trosper case has triggered, of course, is a rash of even more satanic rumors and cult sightings. A few days after Ricky’s arrest, for instance, a white cat with its heart cut out was found on a road outside of town. Sheriff Bowen and his deputy dutifully went out in the squad car to take color photographs of the dead animal. “I don’t know what it means,” says Bowen, shaking his head slowly, “but it’s got to mean something.”
Then, just before Ricky’s murder charge went to the grand jury, David McCoy’s house mysteriously burned to the ground. The fire marshal said the fire was accidental. “But the first thing I thought was that someone was after me,” McCoy says. “I still wonder if that’s not what happened. Anything can be made to look accidental.”
A few weeks later, a middle-aged couple was found in possession of strange works of art. Some were pornographic, and some were interpreted as, well, satanic. In one, a devilish goat’s head was drawn over a human body; in another, an outline of Texas was drawn inside an emblem that looks like a pentagram. Also found in the house was a thick metal rod that McCoy describes as “some kind of staff that the priest of a [cult] organization is supposed to have.”
Such publicity has certainly damaged Childress’ image. One woman from the nearby town of Quanah stopped by the Childress County courthouse and asked if it was safe to drive down U.S. 83 at night, considering that’s where the cult allegedly worshiped. An Amarillo reporter covering the story wouldn’t come to Childress without carrying a gun. “We all feel violated by the attention,” says Nancy Garrison, a rancher’s wife and the district clerk at the courthouse. “There are kids in Childress doing great things, really great things. They’re not in cults.”
In fact, to this day, not one person in Childress has confessed to membership in a cult. Nor has Sheriff Bowen or his deputy been able to find any concrete evidence that a satanic cult ever operated in town. In the end, Tate’s death might have truly been one of those tragically impulsive suicidal acts of youth. Terrie’s death, while possibly a murder, was more likely due to personal problems than supernatural ones. Was there truly a satanic menace—or was it all a hoax, a haunting twentieth-century reminder of the days of the Salem witch trials?
It will be a long time before some of the families, like the Hacklers, put their lives back together. “We lived in this county all our lives,” says James Ray Hackler, who blames McCoy for taking advantage of Tate’s death to get publicity for himself. “We’re victims of lies.” The Rowlands, who still aren’t speaking to the Hacklers, say they too are victims—their children dead, and no one to account for it. “There must have been something to this,” says Brenda Rowland, “or else these rumors wouldn’t have all gotten started. Rumors don’t get started on nothing, you know.”
A few people, targets of the rumors, have moved on to other towns. The Bradfords and Wilkses don’t plan on leaving, despite the blight on their reputations. Darwin Wilks’s young girlfriend has just given birth to their first baby, “but every time she goes out of the house just to go someplace like the grocery store,” he says, “people make her cry by saying, ‘Oh, you’re the one who had Satan’s child.’” (Darwin, incidentally, has left his girlfriend and plans to remarry his ex-wife.)
As for Frank Wilks, no one is hiring him even for part-time farm work. “People won’t have nothing to do with me,” he says. “When I get near them, they step back and say, ‘Don’t you put a spell on me.’”
But Frank takes a philosophical view of his troubles. One evening, he was out drinking at the VFW hall with one of his girlfriends—“A lady who the whole town thinks is a high priestess just because she’s seen with me,” he says. Another woman approached and told them her boyfriend had a skin rash. Did he and his girlfriend have any kind of magic potion?
According to Frank, his girlfriend went into the bathroom, poured some calamine lotion in a glass, walked back, and said, “Rub this all over him, and it will go away.”
“It worked,” Frank says, “and the old gal later thanked us. So, hell, maybe something good came out of this mess after all.”
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