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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Now it fell to Freccero to determine whether three more Texas lawmen were crooked. The case against them consisted of no solid evidence, just unanswered questions, disputed polygraph results, and innuendo. Still, a number of troublesome matters begged explanation. Where was the rifle Haynes was supposed to have been carrying? If, as Stokes, Beene, and Harkness had originally theorized, Haynes’s head wounds had come from running through the woods, why weren’t the cuts on the front of his head? Did Haynes run those 22 miles backward? Of course, Stokes was now blaming some cuts on the dogs. But Haynes’ scalp revealed no teeth marks, nor were there bites elsewhere on his body. And speaking of the body: The three men claimed it was floating in the slough when they arrived on the scene. Dead bodies, however, don’t float.
Then there were the polygraphs. Stokes had admitted to the polygraph examiner that in the past he had lied to avoid trouble – and since this was the worst trouble he had ever experienced, wouldn’t it follow that the dog sergeant would say anything to save his skin? Furthermore, Beene and Stokes admitted that they had lied to cover up the involvement of the dogs. The only question that remained was, What else was being covered up? Beene said he had done everything possible to save Haynes’s life; yet he did not employ mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and had left Haynes’s legs submerged in the frigid creekwater while supposedly pumping the thief’s back. As for Harkness, he had admitted to the investigators that on previous manhunts he had used force to take fugitives into custody.
Finally, there was innuendo. Freccero told grand jury witnesses that there was “a pattern of violence” in Gene Stokes’s history. The dog sergeant had told the polygraph examiner that he had slapped inmates before and had hit one with a pistol butt. Additionally, in 1985 an escapee claimed that, after being captured by Stokes in a manhunt, the dog sergeant had beaten him and dragged him around with a lariat. And on August 26, 1983, a Wynne Unit kennelman named Willie Lee Steward drowned in a stock tank at the conclusion of a stimulated manhunt – sinking to the bottom, incidentally – while dog sergeant Gene Stokes stood at the edge of the stock tank and watched.
Freccero knew that Stokes had been toting both a pistol and a flashlight down on Menard Creek. Both of these instruments were now in federal hands, and either was capable of dealing Haynes the fateful blows. She had in her possession a deposition in which a former East Texas sheriff who had examined Haynes’s head was quoted: “I know what I’m looking at when I’m looking at this, because I have inflicted this kind of wound on people myself.” Yet another East Texas sheriff Freccero had interviewed obligingly told one investigator, “I have been on a bunch of chases, and I hadn’t seen one run yet that didn’t get his ass whopped at the end of that chase. When I chase a son of a bitch all night long, I’m gonna thump him. Hell, you probably done the same thing. I can see that horse running up on that old boy and running that horse into him and taking a whop handle or whatever and popping his ass, saying, “You son of a bitch, you won’t run from me no more.’”
None of this was proof of wrongdoing, but there was a very good reason why Francesca Freccero might find it compelling. The view held among the criminal section attorneys was that this wasn’t just a Texas case; it was a TDCJ case, making the Haynes saga the latest installment of a continuing feud between two stubborn bureaucracies. To the Justice Department attorneys, the Texas prison bosses were primitive and corrupt. To the prison officials, the attorneys were sanctimonious bullies who had no concept of how a prison system had to work. Ever since the seventies, Civil Rights Division lawyers have been engaged in a protracted, and at times ugly, wrangle with TDCJ over the issue of how prison cells are to be racially integrated. And shortly before Freccero took over the Haynes case, the Civil Rights Division began an investigation of the Ellis II Unit where an inordinate number of inmate deaths had recently taken place. When confronted about the deaths, prison officials patiently explained that Ellis II had, in the past year, become a hospice for terminally ill inmates. Unmoved, the head of the Civil Rights Division fired off a letter to state officials, announcing the division’s intention to tour Ellis II accompanied by medical experts. At a chance meeting, TDCJ institutional director Andy Collins conveyed his exasperation to then-U.S. attorney general William Barr. Barr gave Collins the name of a top-ranking U.S. Justice Department staffer, and after the ominous letter arrived, Texas officials asked the staffer to intercede. It worked: The prison tour was canceled, and the Ellis II investigation terminated. While this pleased TDCJ officials, a few of them realized that the Civil Rights Division attorneys might be fuming over Collins’ maneuver and looking for a chance to vent their fury.
How important was this case to the Civil Rights Division? In 1991, the FBI received 9,835 civil rights complaints and investigated 3,583 of them. Those investigations, in turn, were reviewed by the criminal section’s 29 attorneys, including Freccero. Of the 3,583 cases, the attorneys picked only 63, or 1.8 percent, to bring before a federal grand jury. According to one of the attorneys present during the selection process, the Haynes case was viewed not simply as a case with strong prosecutorial merit but also as a chance to “clean up TCD.”
Francesca Freccero bore a double burden. She had to make her grand jury investigation count – to justify the considerable taxpayer expense and to fulfill the mission of shaking up the Texas prison system. Through the summer months of 1992, she bided her time while a particularly independent-minded Beaumont grand jury completed its term. In August a new federal grand jury was impaneled, and thereafter Freccero unleashed dozens of subpoenas. Like one of Gene Stokes’s hounds, she bit down hard on the idea that Tommy Earl Haynes was killed and now Texas prison officials were covering it up. And she would not let go.
The Scalp
As Freccero and FBI agent Glossup rummaged through East Texas for proof that Tommy Earl Haynes had been murdered, anxious speculation descended upon the region like a summer gully washer. It seemed a foregone conclusion that Stokes, Beene, and Harkness would be brought to trial; the only question was when. Glossup had been pursuing the federal case since March 1991, Freccero since February 1992, and the new grand jury since August of the same year. But as 1993 advanced, Freccero’s investigation seemed to be plodding along like an East Texas lumber truck. “We can indict anytime we want to,” Freccero and Glossup both assured Haynes’ sister Elizabeth Martines. “We just want to assemble the best possible case before we do so.”
Freccero will not talk about her investigation, but the list of people she has subpoenaed in the case suggests what the federal case might be: Stokes beat up Haynes while Beene and Harkness watched. Unconscious, Haynes fell in Menard Creek and drowned. On the drive back to Huntsville, the two TDCJ horsemen had confessed to Warden Beaird and assistant warden Liles – a confession that was eventually relayed up the TDCJ hierarchy. When the autopsy uncovered the lacerations and the horsemen failed their polygraphs, the new story became that the dogs had mauled Haynes. Seemingly to serve this theory, Freccero subpoenaed the personnel records of Stokes, Beene, Beaird, and Liles. She brought Beaird, Liles, and TDCJ deputy director Wayne Scott before the grand jury, where each official underwent a hostile grilling. Stokes’s wife, his brother-in-law, his sister, and his colleagues were interviewed by Freccero. And, presumably in an effort to turn up the heat on Tim Harkness, agent Glossup flew out to California and gathered legal documents relating to Harkness’ first marriage.
Freccero’s maneuverings were intimidating, but they produced no smoking gun, no sudden confessions – perhaps, one began to suspect, because there was nothing to confess to. Apart from the lie about the dogs, the three horsemen had not budged from their original stories, which were consistent with each other and with accounts given by the Polk and Hardin county deputies who had been in the vicinity. And if there were a few East Texas lawmen who could envision foul play, there were far more who were insisting that these particular officers would never have done something so brutal or idiotic. (Says Haynes’s old friend, former Tyler County deputy sheriff B.J. Vardeman: “I’ve seen those two TDC boys do good work, and I just don’t believe they’re the type who’d do any prisoner bodily harm”) To accept the federal investigators’ view of Haynes’s death required one to accept that Stokes and Beene, knowing that a swarm of local lawmen had surrounded Menard Creek, would be willing to sacrifice their long-standing careers for a few swings of a pistol butt. It also required one to believe that Harkness – who could not even recall the names of the two Wynne Unit trackers when interviewed by the Rangers – would risk going to jail to cover up for two strangers.
On close inspection, the innuendo concerning the horsemen’s violent tendencies also rested on flimsy evidence. Yes, Stokes had gotten rough with escaped inmates. But he was investigated and exonerated for acting in self-defense. Yes, Stokes had been investigated by the FBI for allegedly dragging a fugitive around with a lariat – and he had been cleared by the FBI of any wrongdoing. True, the dog sergeant hadn’t jumped into the stock tank to save a drowning inmate. But it was also true that to have done so would have been an unheard-of security risk, and further true that Stokes held out a pole to a second inmate, who had jumped into the stock tank and tried, unsuccessfully, to rescue Willie Lee Steward. Yes, all three horsemen had failed a polygraph – and all three had passed one as well. (“The only problem with polygraphs,” said one high-ranking TDCJ official, “is that they don’t weigh twenty pounds more so that they can be used as boat anchors.”) And while it was true that dead bodies tend to sink, this particular body wore a nylon jacket with a down vest that could have kept Haynes buoyant – certainly more buoyant than the case being assembled by Francesca Freccero.
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