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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Beene hauled the waterlogged, rapidly stiffening body to the opposite shore. Frantically he pumped on Haynes’s back while the dogs milled around the thief’s body. “I been around convicts all my life,” the farm manager would later explain, “but I am a compassionate man, and I was going to do everything humanly possible…to save his life so I wouldn’t have to think about nothing afterward.”
But no signs of life could be coaxed from Haynes. Stokes said into his radio, “We need an ambulance and some emergency personnel.”
Wearily, the dog sergeant sat on a stump and gazed out at his partner, who was shivering over the body of Tommy Earl Haynes – “As depressed as I’ve ever been in my life,” he would later say. Any prison veteran knew what dead bodies meant: an avalanche of paperwork, tedious interviews with the tough guys in Internal Affairs, and the kind of publicity TDCJ didn’t need. “Well,” Stokes said to nobody in particular, “I guess this is the end of the dog program.”
Then Tim Harkness spoke. “As far as I’m concerned,” the Polk County reserve deputy said, “the man just drowned.”
Within minutes, other law enforcement officials began to arrive on the scene followed by a justice of the peace, who pronounced Tommy Earl Haynes dead. They zipped up the corpse in a body bag and shipped it off to Beaumont for an autopsy.
A few days later, Bo Beene visited Gene Stokes at the Wynne kennels to discuss how they would word their incident reports to Warden Beaird. Beene remembers asking, “What are you going to say about [what happened] right at the end?” And he remembers that Stokes replied, “Well, I just put that the dogs was there on the edge of the water, barking.” It was a lie, a cover-up to save the dog program, and neither man had an inkling of what trouble it would bring them.
The Investigation
Hardin County Sheriff Mike Holzapfel couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “There was what?” he hollered into the telephone receiver.
“There were some blows to the deceased’s head,” repeated Thomas Molina, the Beaumont pathologist who had performed the autopsy on Tommy Earl Haynes.
“Now wait a minute, Doc,” said the sheriff. “You mean blows to the head like running into tree limbs or blows to the head like someone hit him in the head?”
Molina replied that, well, certainly it was possible that Haynes had incurred the head injuries while running through the woods. But the autopsy report that Holzapfel received in the mail a few weeks later didn’t read that way: “A significant condition found at autopsy and believed to have contributed to his death by drowning was blunt traumatic injury to the head.” In all, Molina noted six irregular lacerations on the top and posterior of Haynes’ scalp, accompanied by bruises and congested blood vessels. The blunt trauma, in Molina’s view, would have been sufficient to render Haynes dazed or unconscious.
Holzapfel got on the phone and called up Texas Ranger Haskell Taylor. “I already screwed things by not looking into this death sooner,” the sheriff confessed to the Ranger. “You better take over from here.” But before Ranger Taylor could begin his interviews, an ugly new context developed a week later. On March 3, 1991, television news stations around the world aired a videotape in which a black man named Rodney King was savagely beaten by a group of Los Angeles police officers. In the wake of the beating, U.S. attorney general Dick Thornburgh announced that the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division would be reviewing some 15,000 police misconduct complaints it had received over the past six years.
Were it not for this development, the Haynes case might have been handled quietly by Texas lawmen. But the King beating resounded through television talk shows, through Congress; the entire nation engaged itself in the debate over what constituted “excessive use of force.” Sheriff Holzapfel and Hardin County district attorney Bo Horka began to feel out of their depth. “To be frank with you,” Horka later told a reporter, “the L.A. thing happened during our investigation and …it made us think about going to the feds.”
A day after the Rodney King tape was aired, Texas Rangers Haskell Taylor and Ronnie McBride visited the Wynne Unit. In the Wynne conference room, the Rangers advised Gene Stokes of his Miranda rights. At the conclusion of a two-hour interview, Taylor told the dog sergeant, “What we’re doing here at this time is a civil rights investigation. And we’re trying to get to the bottom of what did happen and we’re not in any position to pointing fingers, but there is three people down in that bottom and we’ve got to clear the air that one of you three did not do something...I hope you understand where we’re coming from…a normal drowning wouldn’t have these wounds.”
“Well, I haven’t got anything to hide about it,” stammered Stokes, according to the interview transcript. “I hadn’t hit the man, Mr. Beene didn’t hit the man, and Deputy Hartness [sic] didn’t hit the man…it may be hard for y’all to believe, but it’s not hard for me to believe because I was standing right there, you know.”
Next the Rangers interviewed Beene. “Far as you know,” said Ranger McBride, “the dogs never got up close to him.”
The Wynne farm manager knew the truth. He also knew that the truth would doom the dog program. “No, sir,” said Beene, thereby committing himself to a cover-up conspiracy. But at the time, Bo Beene had no way of anticipating that this fatal lie would lead investigators to believe that the farm manager was guilty of a crime.
Ranger Taylor focused on Haynes’ scalp. “Can you give me any idea why those wounds might have been there?” he asked.
Recalling the terrain, Beene replied, “Oh, I can give you a dozen times that it could have happened during the twenty-two-mile run we had.”
“Did you hit him?”
“No, sir.”
“Did you see anybody else hit him?”
“Nobody hit him.”
“Are you trying to cover up for anybody else?”
“Would not cover up for nobody,” declared Bo Beene.
Two days later, Stokes and Beene were voluntarily polygraphed by TDCJ Internal Affairs personnel. The chief questions asked were: “During the free-world chase of Tommy Earl Haynes, did you at any time hit Tommy Earl Haynes in the head with anything? Did you at any time see someone hit Tommy Earl Haynes? Are you deliberately withholding information? Regarding the death of Tommy Earl Haynes, did you answer each question truthfully?”
The polygraph charts indicated that Beene’s answers were deceptive; the results for Stokes were inconclusive.
Two days afterward, Polk County reserve deputy Tim Harkness was polygraphed. He was found to be untruthful.
Following the examinations, the Rangers asked Stokes and Beene, “Are y’all holding back something about the dogs?” The men cratered and at last gave the Rangers the full story about what they had seen down on Menard Creek. “My problem with the polygraph is I was trying to cover up for the dogs,” Stokes aid. “I believe the dogs put the cuts in the man’s head.” He and Beene agreed to take another polygraph.
Both men flunked the second polygraph. They promptly hired a private investigator, who arranged for an independent examiner to polygraph them one more time. Stokes, Beene, and Harkness passed the independent polygraph, but by then the damage was done. On March 22, at the request of the Hardin County district attorney, the FBI formally entered the Haynes investigation.
At about that time, Ranger Taylor urged Harkness to make a full confession to the Hardin County authorities. Don’t cover up for the other two, the Ranger told him. Let them take their lumps. The feds are in on the case now. They’re publicity-seekers; they’ll take everyone down if necessary.
The Ranger’s warning turned out to be eerily prescient. Taylor may have jumped to a premature conclusion about what had happened at Menard Creek, but his assumptions about the case were far exceeded by federal investigators, who seemed to arrive in East Texas with the attitude that the lawmen were guilty until proven innocent. “We don’t think your client did it,” said FBI agent Vernon Glossup to Harkness’ attorney in Beaumont, Jimmy Nettles. “But we think he saw it.” Then the tall, red-headed agent with the Moses-like voice threw down the scene-of-the-incident photos on Nettles’ desk. “Haynes was a bad guy,” he declared, “but he didn’t deserve to die like that!”
The Feds
No one could have confused Tommy Earl Haynes’s avenging angel with an East Texas girl. Federal trial attorney Francesca Freccero wore the short hairdo and the crisp business suits of a fast-track federal bureaucrat. She looked and behaved at least a decade older than her 32 years, and her rapid speech pattern suggested both a keen mind and an aggressive skepticism. Freccero hailed from California, attending law school at Berkeley and spending three years in Oakland as one of Alameda County’s 140 deputy district attorneys. While in Oakland, Freccero was regarded as a rising star by her superiors by the time she landed the plum job as 1 of the 29 attorneys in the criminal section of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division. She started work for the division in April 1991, two weeks after the FBI entered the Haynes case. Ten months later, the case was hers.
The furor this year over Lani Guinier’s failed bid to head the Civil Rights Division is a measure of the division’s significance in America’s domestic affairs. For it is this branch of the Justice Department that has traditionally protected individuals from the biases and brute force of the state. The Civil Rights Division has been particularly active in Texas. Between 1987 and 1991, according to an investigation by the Dallas Morning News, Texas led the nation in the number of law enforcement officials convicted of federal civil rights violations.
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