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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After all was said and done, the only hard evidence of foul play remained the six lacerations on the scalp of Tommy Earl Haynes. Thomas Molina’s opinion that Haynes’s head wounds were “believed to have contributed to his death” was what had gotten the attention of the federal investigators to begin with, and the entire federal case against Stokes, Beene, and Harkness rested on Molina’s judgment. But that judgment was open to question: The Beaumont pathologist’s record reflected a tendency to form alarming conclusions. Hardin County sheriff Mike Holzapfel knew this firsthand. In 1990 Molina concluded that a man found dead by Hardin County deputies had not, as the deputies said, been killed by a hit-and-run driver, but rather had been beaten to death. Dismayed, Holzapfel called in the Rangers, who found conclusively that the deputies had been right after all; as a result, Molina rewrote his autopsy report.
Far more disturbing was a pathology report Molina had rendered in 1988 while working in northeast Texas. A Paris businessman, Russell Gifford, had been complaining of a sore throat, which his physician had diagnosed as esophagitis. After examining the biopsy slides, Molina insisted that Gifford had cancer of the throat. Gifford therefore underwent six weeks of chemotherapy and radiation treatment. Just prior to major surgery, Gifford was informed by a rather startled Dallas surgeon, who had run a few preliminary tests, that he didn’t have cancer at all – he was merely suffering from esophagitis. Gifford’s attorneys successfully sued Molina for $1.2 million.
Molina’s finding in the Gifford case had appalled Linda Norton, a Dallas pathologist who achieved early fame when she performed the exhumation-autopsy of Lee Harvey Oswald in 1981. Testifying for Gifford, Norton declared that Molina had misdiagnosed what happened to be one of the easier types of cancer to identify under the microscope. When the attorneys representing Stokes and Beene contacted her about Molina’s autopsy of Haynes, Norton decided to take a close look at the autopsy report and the photographs of Haynes’s wounds. “It’s ridiculous to conclude that these lacerations would render a man unconscious,” she says today. “The blows did not transgress the skull. There were no bruises on the brain. There was a congestion of blood vessels, but that’s simply an agonal [death agony] phenomenon, suggesting that the right heart failed before the left heart did. I doubt these wounds felt very good when Haynes suffered them, but do you know how hard it is to knock someone out with a blunt object? The Rodney King videotape shows you how hard it is.
“I took a camera out to Menard Creek and took pictures of everything I saw out in those woods that could have caused these kinds of wounds. It didn’t take me long to run out of film. Not only is it not a matter of whether Haynes could have suffered these lacerations while running through the woods – the only reason he wasn’t more seriously injured was that he was wearing heavy clothing. And, yes, I’m aware that much has been made of the location of the wounds. But, logically, that argument makes no sense. When you’re running through the woods you’re aware of the need to protect your face. Particularly when fatigued, you are apt to run with your head down, thus exposing the top and back of your head.”
Whether or not Haynes’ scalp harbored definitive evidence therefore depended upon whom you asked. Freccero determined on her own not to rely upon Molina’s opinion. She did not bother to bring the Beaumont pathologist before the grand jury. Instead, in August 1992 Francesca Freccero took a step that seems tellingly desperate: She ordered an exhumation and a second autopsy of Haynes’s body. When the prison officers’ attorneys heard that an exhumation might be taking place, they telephoned Freccero. She refused to confirm if or when an exhumation would take place. When asked if she would be willing to let Linda Norton witness the second autopsy, Freccero coolly replied, “Absolutely not.” A few days later, TDCJ attorneys brought the matter before a federal judge – only to be informed by Freccero that the issue was moot: The exhumation and second autopsy had already taken place.
Infuriated, the state attorneys went to Haynes’ sister Elizabeth Martines and asked for permission to conduct a second exhumation and a third autopsy. Freccero urged Martines to deny the request. After months of negotiating, Haynes’ sister consented. In February 1993 the casket containing the remains of Tommy Earl Haynes was removed from the Mount Pisgah Cemetery in Woodville, transported to San Antonio, and in the presence of Bexar county medical examiner Vincent DiMaio and Linda Norton, unsealed.
And there lay Tommy Earl Haynes – minus his scalp.
What had happened to the most important piece of evidence in the Tommy Earl Haynes case? “We don’t have it,” agent Glossup told Haynes’ sister. Yet when Haynes was buried the first time, his scalp was on his head. When federal authorities had exhumed the corpse in August, presumably they would have let it be known if the body they examined had somehow been scalped. For her part, Freccero refused to comment one way or the other. Already her approach to the Haynes case betrayed a certain bureaucratic vindictiveness. But now, by refusing to clear up the matter of the missing scalp, she was descending to Watergate-like depths. As to what the federal investigators might do with the scalp – preserve it, destroy it, alter its appearance – once could only guess. But the disappearance of Tommy earl Haynes’ scalp, as Linda Norton would observe, “inescapably lends the appearance of obstruction.”
The Secret
This past summer, outside the grand jury room of the Jack Brooks Federal Building in Beaumont, I approached Francesca Freccero with a list of questions pertaining to her, the Civil Rights Division, TDCJ, and the Tommy Earl Haynes case. They gray-suited attorney shook my hand, offered a tight smile, and confirmed a couple of details about her background while FBI agent Glossup loomed nearby. On every other matter, she refused to comment, explaining crisply, “I hope you understand that I’m bound by both departmental policy and by Section 6E of the Federal Grand Jury Act, which in a nutshell forbids me to discuss matters that are before a pending grand jury investigation.” Yet Freccero’s interpretation of this law seemed far-reaching. She would not confirm when she was officially assigned the Haynes case, when she first came to Texas, or even when the present grand jury term would expire. When I asked her if she was aware that TDCJ officials viewed the Haynes case as part of a federal vendetta, she quickly replied, “I’m not going to make a single comment about TCD.” When I asked her about the missing scalp, Francesca Freccero just laughed.
An aroma of pettiness has begun to hang over the Menard Creek episode, only some of which is due to the behavior of the federal investigators. Earlier this year, Elizabeth Martines pressed forward with a civil suit. With tears in her eyes, the 37-year-old Nacogdoches woman spoke lovingly of her dead brother to local lawmen, federal investigators, and reporters. Seldom did Martines volunteer, however, that she had not seen Tommy Earl in the eight years prior to his death. And no one seemed aware that, when she viewed Haynes’s corpse on January 22, 1991, she was so unsure that it really was her beloved brother that she called upon former Tyler county deputy sheriff B.J. Vardeman to identify the body. Fittingly, then, it wasn’t a member of Haynes’s family but rather his frequent captor who was able to say: “Yep, that’s Tommy Earl, all right.”
The civil suit filed by Haynes’ sister may drag on for another year; the federal investigation, even longer. In the meantime, Tim Harkness, Gene Stokes, and Bo Beene already have spent thousands of dollars in attorneys’ fees, and criminal charges haven’t even been filed. Harkness’ duties at the Polk County sheriff’s office have been limited to narcotics cases. Stokes has been ordered by prison officials not to participate in any free-world manhunts. “I’m pretty much grounded,” he says over the din of the hounds as he traverses the kennels, scuffling his boots through the Wynne farm’s mud. “But not being on chases doesn’t bother me. I’ve paid my dues. I’ve been doing this job for fifteen years, and it ain’t getting’ any easier. Used to be you’d chase ‘em, and they’d give up in a matter of minutes. Nowadays everyone’s carrying a gun and they’re on some crazy drugs and you don’t know what you’re up against. So I’m not aching to get back to that. It’s why I’m grounded that pisses me off.”
Like everyone else, the dog sergeant occasionally puzzles over what happened at the conclusion of his last chase. “I used to think the dogs gave him those cuts,” Stokes says. “But when I think about all those tree limbs and briars we rode through in the dead of night, t makes perfect sense to me that Haynes banged up his head long before he ever got to that slough.”
Prison officials fear that no matter how the case ends, the furor over Haynes’s death will spell the end of the dog program. Ironically, Thomas Molina and Linda Norton are in rare agreement that Haynes’s head wounds do not look like dog bites. Former Wynne dog sergeant Gerald Wood, on the other hand, believes that at least one of the lacerations was almost certainly inflicted by a dog’s tooth. The most plausible cause-of-death theory seems to be Norton’s: “He was exhausted, he was wearing several layers of wet clothing, he dove into the slough, the dogs caught up to him and did what they were supposed to do, which is restrain him, and which is exactly what they were doing when the three officers showed up. But being held down in water, Haynes was unable to breathe, and so he lost consciousness.”
Still, it is only a theory. In all likelihood, the secret of why Tommy Earl Haynes drowned in Menard Creek remains kept, and shall always be kept, by a pack of dogs and a scalped corpse.
The thief’s body and its pine vessel have been returned to Mount Pisgah Cemetery in Woodville, the town of Haynes’s birth. The cemetery caretakers express dismay at the approach of a visitor. “You ain’t here to dig his body up again, are you?” one of them asks. “I won’t do it anymore. I’ll retire first. Oh, you just wanna look? Well, you can’t miss it. It’s all the way at the back. Ain’t no big marker, but you still can’t miss it.”
And there, at the eastern edge of the graveyard, lies a mound of clay – and six feet underneath, the keeper of the secret, yielding nothing of the East Texas mystery, still elusive, still running.
My Library
