The Twilight of the Texas Rangers
For 170 years, the legendary lawmen have faced down cattle rustlers, serial killers, and every threat imaginable. Now they must grapple with their most dangerous foe: the modern world.
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The committee members made it clear: If the DPS and the Rangers wanted to survive the 1993 session unscathed, they would have to make a demonstrative commitment to minority hiring. “You hate to write policy through appropriation, but that’s the only way you get people’s attention,” says Conley. “The Rangers are the last bastion of the good-old-boy system. We sent them a message that their ranks would have to be reflective of the state as a whole.”
It was a message that the Rangers had been hearing from Governor Ann Richards as well, with an additional twist: The lawmen had been wary of Richards from the start. At a Ranger reunion in Waco in the spring of 1992, Richards addressed the current and retired lawmen over dinner. Among the old-timers was former senior Ranger captain Clint Peoples, who had told a reporter in 1990 that he would vote against Richards because “I don’t care to see any petticoats in the governor’s office.” Now Richards’ blue eyes fell on the 81-year-old retired Ranger. “I’m glad to see y’all eating some good steak,” she cracked, “but in my opinion ol’ Clint ought to be eating some crow.”
Women had been employed by the Rangers in the past for security detail, and in 1935 a “petticoat brigade” of four female Rangers was used in undercover nightclub work. But these were only brief assignments. Word spread among Ranger ranks that Governor Richards had something far more lasting in mind. On an instinctive level, the notion was anathema. What would McNelly and Big Foot Wallace and Frank Hamer and Cap Allee have thought? Former Ranger chiefs had vowed that as long as they were in charge, no woman would ever wear a Ranger’s badge. When Maurice Cook became chief in 1992, he reaffirmed the sentiment. But on August 1, 1993, DPS officials announced the hiring of nine new Rangers: two white males, three Hispanic males, one black male, one Asian American male … and two women.
The appointments fulfilled Representative Karyne Conley’s demand that the Rangers “be reflective of the state as a whole.” Beyond that, they fulfilled little else. One of the Hispanic males hired, Duane Henderson, happened to be the nephew of House Hispanic Caucus chairperson Irma Rangel, who had previously been critical of Ranger hiring practices. As a nine-year-old veteran of the highway patrol, Henderson had no formal investigative experience but had been hired over 62 applicants who did. The new black Ranger was once again not Michael Scott but rather a highway patrolman named Marcus Hilton. Hilton was hired despite having logged fewer years in law enforcement than 246 of the 261 DPS employees who applied for a Ranger position. Of the 19 female applicants, only 2 of them were criminal investigators—and those were not the 2 who were hired. The Ranger interview board had chosen from a woefully limited field of minorities and women to begin with and compounded the problem by selecting individuals who were clearly less qualified than other minority and women applicants. Word circulated throughout the Ranger force that the only thing these new Rangers had in common, besides their inexperience, was their willingness not to rock the boat. And while Rangers saw nothing wrong with the hiring of Richard Shing—who had been a DPS veteran for seventeen years and looked, notes Glenn Elliott with approval, “just like George Strait”—they thought it unseemly that the DPS was openly advertising Shing as the Rangers’ first Asian American officer. The Texas Rangers had now become politically correct and were the worse for it.
When Sid Merchant heard the news about the hirings, he vowed never to attend another Ranger reunion. “The damn women,” he mutters today. “Some things ought to remain sacred, and the Rangers are one of them.”
Three weeks after the hirings were announced, Chief Maurice Cook addressed a conference room filled with criminal investigatiors from around the state. The attendees worked for cities and counties that had relied on the Texas Rangers for law enforcement leadership for more than a century. But today Cook was not here to offer advice. Instead, the Ranger chief told the attendees that his newest Rangers lacked experience and would benefit greatly from any guidance those present could give the rookies.
It was a startling admission by the Ranger chief. To some, however, Cook was merely stating what had been obvious for some time. “A sheriff told me not long ago, ‘When we call the Rangers, it’s because we need help,’” says Alfred Allee, Jr. “He said, ‘These new Rangers, they’re nice folks, but they ‘re just inexperienced troopers, and we can’t get help from them.’”
Today’s Rangers find themselves hemmed in by bureaucratic absurdities and civil rights edicts. But they must share the blame for their own decline. Once media darlings, the modern Rangers are thin-skinned when it comes to their public image and generally—as Chief Cook did for this story—refuse to explain themselves to the press. Cook, the Ranger chief since July 1992, is a 23-year veteran of the DPS, a lifer like Homer Garrison, but his ascension through the ranks has not garnered him the admiration of his men as Garrison’s rise did. Then again, Chief Cook inherited a force that is now paying dearly for the insularity of the Garrison era. In their stubborn arrogance, the Rangers did not think to prepare for the inevitable equal-opportunity demands and had a shallow talent pool at the DPS from which to draw qualified women. For every Michael Scott who has patiently reapplied for the Rangers every year, there are several other talented black law enforcement agents elsewhere. The cynical recent hirings, combined with prior hirings based purely on the old-boy spoils system, have produced a roster that would not fit anyone’s description of an elite force.
Many outstanding Rangers remain, of course, and the best of them are greatly admired and relied upon by sheriffs and district attorneys throughout the state. Even a run-of-the-mill Ranger can move with more freedom than the average deputy, can devote more time to a case than the average investigator, can make use of the DPS’s sophisticated crime labs, and can cut through the department’s red tape at will. For these reasons, the Rangers remain useful. Nonetheless, the performance of the force over the past decade suggests an organization still struggling to square the utter rightness of its holy frontier ethnic with the imperatives of the modern world.
The infamous Brandley case epitomized the wrongheadness of the Ranger Way. On August 28, 1980, Texas Ranger Wesley Styles was called in to investigate the sexual assault and strangulation of a Conroe High School cheerleader. The following day, before interviewing a single witness, Styles arrested high school custodian Clarence Brandley and charged him with capital murder. A Montgomery County jury sentenced Brandley to death. Today a number of Rangers contend that Styles had collared the right culprit. After all, Bradley had recently had been arrested for an attempted rape and abduction, was on felony probation for a weapons charge, was spotted near the scene of the crime, had no solid alibi, and had failed a polygraph in connection with the offense.
The Rangers believed they had gotten their man. But he ultimately slipped through their fingers, due entirely to the Rangers’ outmoded methods. In 1989 the Court of Criminal Appeals determined that Styles had conducted his investigation with a “blind focus” on Brandley, ignoring crucial evidence that incriminated other potential suspects. Styles had led other janitors on a “walk through” of the crime scene that “contributed a due process violation by creating false testimony.” He had roughed up and threatened to kill the state’s star witness. He had suppressed crucial tape recordings of witness interviews. Finally, presiding judge Perry Pickett determined that Ranger Styles had lied on the witness stand. The court was thereby left with no choice but to reverse the conviction in 1989 and set Brandley free after seven years on death row.
The Brandley episode indicated that the classic Ranger style could not survive modern legal scrutiny. But as an embarrassment to the force, it paled in comparison to the Henry Lee Lucas fiasco. Lucas, a drifter who had served time for killing his mother, stunned a Montague County courtroom audience in June 1983 when he pleaded guilty to two murders and then added that he had committed at least a hundred more across the nation. Later Lucas revised the body count to more than six hundred. The Rangers dove in the gray, speardheading the Henry Lee Lucas Task Force, which would oversee the clearing of unsolved murder cases to which Lucas was now confessing. The Ranger in charge of the task force, Bob Prince, would later insist that its role was purely to facilitate interviews with Lucas by outside law enforcement parties, that it played no role in the confessions. But that was not the case at all. As Ranger memos confirm, the Rangers helped “refresh Lucas’ memory” by providing him with details of specific cases that Lucas had more or less claimed were his offenses—crimes that, as evidence would later show, he could not possibly have committed.
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