Manhunt at Menard Creek
Surrounded by snarling prison dogs, a thief drowns in a muddy slough after a two-day chase through the Big Thicket. Lawmen swear it was an accident, but the U.S. Justice Department wants to make a federal case out of it.
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The deputies approached the trailer. Hayes was not home, but a fresh set of boot prints led from the residence to the wood line just east of the property. A few minutes later, the thief’s wallet was found. The name on the driver’s license was not John Hayes. It was Tommy Earl Haynes. The deputies radioed in the name. Out spewed the vital statistics. Tommy Earl Haynes, former TDCJ inmate #375010. Theft and burglary convictions in 1967, 1970, 1974, 1975, 1980, and 1984. One prison escape in 1974. Also arrested in Louisiana. Also escaped in that state. Currently violating parole. Has a speech impediment. Severed his right index finger in a prison machine shop. Wears an Eastham prison tattoo on his left wrist.
“Tommy Earl Haynes,” murmured Gene Stokes at the end of the briefing. “I know that name.” HE turned to Beene. “Bo, ain’t we chased him before?”
They had, and so had Stokes’s predecessor, Gerald Wood. In 1970 dog sergeant Wood sent the Wynne Unit hounds after Haynes, who had stolen a tractor and unaccountably had buried it in the back yard of his family’s house in Woodville. Haynes crisscrossed his way through the East Texas pines, confounding the dogs and Wood, who never caught him. A decade later, in September 1980, Stokes and Beene pursued Haynes with the dogs for three hours along the bluffs of Lake Livingston. They discovered the thief hunkered down in a washout hole beneath a tangle of tree roots. Three years after that, Haynes was fresh out of prison and back to his old tricks. Stokes and Beene were dispatched to the vicinity of Sam Rayburn state Park, where they were told Haynes had abandoned a stolen truck. Stokes put out the dogs, but the chase was fruitless: their quarry had swum the Neches River and was long gone.
Now the thief had a five-hour head start and was somewhere out there in the darkness, running through the pine jungle. Stokes and Beene saddled up. The kennelmen unchained the dogs, who immediately bolted into the woods. The hunt for Haynes was on.
The Chase
The trail led through a pine plantation spiked everywhere with seedlings. Recent heavy rains had reduced the acreage to swampland. Stokes and Beene carefully picked their way through the area, but at times the water rose to the horses’ flanks. The two barely spoke to each other – it was enough simply to see through the darkness, follow the sounds of the dogs, and remain atop their stumbling horses while fending off the brambles and pine limbs that slapped at their bodies. Both men worried that they might hit a deep slough and drown. The dogs swam from one spot to the next, sniffing at bushes and tree limbs, searching for any scent of Tommy Earl Haynes. After a mile and a half, the trail followed a dirt road that ran through a second pine plantation, where the water kept getting deeper. Though the dirt road cut straight through the plantation, Haynes’s trail was parallel to the road, in standing water. Stokes knew what this meant: They were dealing with a man who knew how to lose dogs.
Indeed, at the edge of a flooded creek bottom, the dogs lost the trail entirely. Beene gathered the hounds, and Stokes got on his walkie-talkie and conferred with the Hardin County deputies. One of them suggested that Stokes and Beene drag the dogs through a clear-cut that ran alongside the far end of the creek bottom. It was good advice: Haynes had emerged from the creek, dashed through the clear-cut, and crossed Texas Highway 1293. The deputies stopped traffic while the dogs charged across the highway with the horsemen in pursuit. The trail led down a set of railroad tracks, westbound toward the town of Votaw. While the hounds set out on the tracks, the horses slogged through a damp firebreak, which, on top of being cluttered with vines and scrap lumber, had the consistency of peanut butter. For five miles they persevered alongside the tracks. Despite their plodding pace, Stokes and Beene passed six of their dogs along the way. The hounds were hobbled from the run; the crushed rock along the tracks was tearing up their pads. Stay on the tracks – another Haynes trick, Stokes figured ruefully.
A train was coming. Stokes collected his dogs just in time. After the train passed, the dogs rushed toward a nearby camp house. The dog sergeant radioed the deputies: “Got something here y’all need to shake down,” he said. The squad cards drove up and the officers approached the camp house. Sure enough, Haynes had been there. A window had been broken, a pile of wet clothes and a machete lay on the floor, and a bag of half-eaten food lay in the adjacent hay barn, along with a bloody bandage. Wynne Unit warden Lester Beaird and assistant warden Mickey Liles showed up on the scene and saw that their men were wet and tired and the dogs were beaten all to hell. It was three o’clock in the morning. Somewhere out there, Haynes would have to wait. The lawmen called the Wynne Unit on a deputy’s car radio and asked for a fresh pack.
A bitter chill had crept into the January air. The men built a fire and huddled beside it, thinking, “How much longer can this man run?” A few Polk County officers arrived with food and coffee from Livingston. Just after seven, a trailer containing a new pack of ten dogs and two fresh horses drove up. Stokes dragged the dogs in the area surrounding the camp house. No scent anywhere. He decided that Haynes had gone straight from the barn into the slough and waded back toward the railroad. He guessed right. Another train came through. A dog from the fresh pack, Ruby, was killed. Onward the horsemen rode. For another five miles both packs followed Haynes’ scent, which weaved from one side of the tracks to the other. At Votaw they came to a switchyard, where the scent and the boot prints of Tommy Earl Haynes vanished altogether. By now the crushed rock had maimed the pads of the fresh pack, and almost every dog was limping. Stokes didn’t bother asking Warden Beaird for another fresh pack. Only one pack was left, and those dogs had to stay home in the event of a prison escape. Stokes Beene, Beaird, and Liles evaluated the situation with the deputies, the glumly decided to call off the manhunt.
The TDCJ officers loaded up their horses and their half-lame dogs. They had all but pulled out toward Huntsville when a dispatch from a Hardin County constable came over the radio: some four miles west of Votaw, a few yards from the tracks, in a densely thicketed subdivision called Hoop and Holler, a fresh boot print had been spotted. The company drove by caravan to the site, a sandy road known as Outlaw Bend because bikers and thieves frequented the area. The boot prints matched those along the railroad tracks. Stokes and Beene followed the prints on horseback, accompanied by a third horseman, Polk county reserve deputy Tim Harkness. Along the road, a truck drove up from the opposite direction. Yes, said the driver, he had seen a man walking down the road earlier, and the fellow appeared to be toting a rifle. Farther down the road, the three horsemen noticed an elderly man and his grandson burning leaves in their front yard. They too had seen a man ambling down the road with what appeared to be a rifle. The horsemen kept going until the tracks played out. Stokes, Beene, and Harkness dismounted and studied the ground. No doubt about it: Tommy Earl Haynes had left the road and burrowed into the thicket.
The three men donned bulletproof vests while the kennelmen brought in the second pack of dogs. One of the hounds was dead, another was lost, and two others were unable to walk. The remaining six were hardly in optimum condition but nonetheless could tell that the trail was fresh; once unchained, they sprang into the woods. The horsemen zigzagged through the pine forest. By the time they caught up, the dogs were gathered at the banks of Menard Creek.
The Lie
The land through which Tommy Earl Haynes would lead the officers in the last hours of his life was flooded with fast-moving creekwater, and the air was choked with mosquitoes. Even on a temperate day, the Menard Creek corridor is godless country. The water is the color of rust, and it burbles here and there with the movements of catfish that are surely inedible. Even the butterflies are black. Rows of cypress knees jut out of the ground like the spine of a half-buried dinosaur. The trees seem to block out the air itself, and the mud traps and vines sap the wanderer of his spirit; only the mosquitoes compel movement. And this is how it seems on a nice day, in good walking shoes, after a full night’s sleep and a decent meal. This is not how things were for Gene Stokes, Bo Beene, and Tim Harkness on January 20, 1991, as they wallowed on horseback through whatever bogs and sloughs and hellholes the dogs led them. And it is certainly not how things were for Tommy Earl Haynes – a man on the run since four-fifteen the afternoon before, running in a pair of rubber boots, two pairs of jeans, a shirt, two coats, and a nylon jacket with a down-filled vest, bleeding, hungry, half mad from fatigue and fear, with the hounds of hell crying for his flesh in the near distance.
By early afternoon, the distance was closing. The dogs were more than 100 yards ahead of the horsemen, but by trailing the barks, they could tell that the thief had crossed the creek once, then crossed back over a slough. Finally, from a distance of perhaps 75 yards, they heard the dogs baying. Single file on horseback, Stokes, Beene, and Harkness approached the creekbed. According to all three men, this is what happened next:
The horsemen halted at the edge of a thirty-yard-wide slough of slow-moving water. Several of the dogs were at the water’s edge; three others – Houston, Stonewall, and Cowboy – were in the slough itself, clinging to something. “Looks like a coat floating out there,” said Stokes.
They nylon jacket bobbed at the tugging of the dogs, and the outline of a hairy scalp became visible. “No,” said Beene. “That’s him.”
Without a moment’s hesitation, the farm manager dismounted. “You pop your whip, and I’m going in after him,” Beene said, and one by one handed Harkness his boots, chaps, gun belt, and bulletproof vest. . As Beene paddled through the frigid water toward the body, someone cracked a whip several times. Instantly the anxious voice of Warden Beaird came over the walkie-talkie: “Who shot?”
“That was my whip. I was moving the dogs,” was the answer. “We’ve got him in custody.”
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