The Bookmaker’s Wife
She was a beautiful woman. He was a millionaire many times over. Some of their neighbors in Houston’s exclusive River Oaks knew about his secret life. Almost no one knew about hers—until she was murdered.
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Haunted by the killing, a group of Doris’ female friends, who would come to be known as the River Oaks Nancy Drews, began meeting almost weekly for dinner to discuss what happened. Most of their questions revolved around Bob. If he was really worried about Doris, wouldn’t he have rushed into the house when he saw the open door? Or was it more logical for him to be cautious since he had the girls with him? Was it possible he told Doris about the softball bat as a way to make sure she went back to the house that night? If so, then why did Bob voluntarily tell the police about the softball bat in the first place? Wouldn’t that story have been something he would have wanted to hide?
The rumors got so thick that Angleton took the extraordinary step of having a letter passed out to parents at one of the girls’ softball games. “Doris and I were living together in a friendly and loving relationship that always kept our children’s best interests foremost in our minds… . I still love my wife very deeply and I am grieving more than anyone can imagine.”
What he didn’t mention was that he had already told the police whom he suspected was the killer: his brother, Roger. Not only did Bob tell homicide detectives the story about Roger’s 1990 extortion attempt but he also told them that, after several years of silence, Roger had suddenly contacted him again in January of this year and asked for a meeting. They met the next month at a Houston Denny’s and frisked each other to make sure neither was carrying a weapon. According to Bob, Roger said that he still had documentation about Bob’s bookmaking business and that he wanted $200,000 in hush money. Bob told the police that he got up and left, but that Roger later sent him a letter demanding the money. The letter said, “If I don’t hear from you agreeing to the 200K, I am coming there and will make you pay dearly… . I will hurt you in a way that will be with you for the rest of your life.” The letter, Bob insists, came six weeks before Doris’ murder.
Angleton turned the letter over to the police, and through credit card receipts detectives discovered that Roger had been in Houston at the time of the killing. But detectives had to wonder about the timing of Roger’s alleged threat. Why had Roger waited until this moment to again demand money from Bob? Was he really so angry at his younger brother that he would brutally murder Doris out of spite? Had Roger even written that letter?
The problem was that they couldn’t find Roger—until late July, when the cops got the kind of lucky break that seems to happen only in bad detective novels. Roger had been arrested in Las Vegas after the police there discovered he was wanted in San Diego on a criminal charge involving the theft of prescription drugs. Houston detectives obtained a search warrant to look at the contents of a briefcase Roger had with him in Las Vegas. Inside they found $64,242 in cash and several paper money wrappers, one of which, they later learned, had Bob Angleton’s fingerprint on it. The police found several notes, including one typewritten page that detailed the gate code, the alarm code, and other information about the Angleton house. The notes seemed to lay out how exactly a murder should be committed: “Let dog out. Wait in kitchen. Subject comes home, hit immediately if with either girl, leave via back entrance … Leave gate open or leave sign in front of house that is done.”
The police also found a microcassette tape recording, on which two men discuss how to disarm an alarm system. The men refer to the same numerical code that is used to disarm the Angleton home. They discuss various hypothetical situations in which a woman, who is at one point referred to by one of the men as “Doris,” comes to the house. Finally, they discuss ways to kill “her.” The first gunshot, one voice says, “has to be on the money. See what I mean?”
It is a chilling conversation, and the homicide detectives say that the two men on the tape are Bob and Roger Angleton. The police theorize that Bob hired Roger to do the killing—according to the typed notes, the hit man was to be paid nearly $1 million—and that afterward, unbeknownst to Roger, Bob went to the cops and pointed the finger at Roger to divert suspicion from himself. It appeared to them that Bob had devised a shrewd murder plot: He was getting rid of Doris and Roger at the same time. The only thing he didn’t count on was that Roger—perhaps as a way to ensure that he got his million-dollar payday—would secretly tape one of their conversations. If the police were to be believed, the secret lives of Bob, Roger, and Doris had finally, and brutally, collided. Bob and Roger were arrested in early August on charges of capital murder. They could receive the death penalty if convicted.
THE STORY, OF COURSE, IS FAR FROM OVER. At Bob’s upcoming trial, two distinguished River Oaks couples—Missy and Tex Welsh and Tommy and Julie Hughes—plan to testify that Bob’s lawyers allowed them to listen to the audiotape for several hours and that they do not believe Bob’s voice is on it. “Parts of the tape sound like Bob,” Tommy Hughes says. “But other parts of the tape, when Bob is supposed to be talking, are definitely not him. I am absolutely positive it’s not Bob.”
Bob’s attorneys, Michael Ramsey and George Tyson (Tyson was a former supper club member), will not reveal their trial strategy. But they will certainly try to get the tape thrown out as evidence, either claiming that an improper search warrant was used to obtain it or that there is no conclusive way of authenticating who is speaking on it. If that fails, they must convince the jury that it is Roger who is the evil brother, not Bob. They might suggest that Roger invented those typed notes and doctored an audiotape after Doris’ killing so that he could blackmail Bob for more money. (If so, they are faced with the far more difficult task of explaining why Roger was willing to put his own voice on the tape and implicate himself in murder.) They could also bring out an array of other suspects, asserting that the murder was committed by Asian American bookies or even by a random house burglar Doris accidentally encountered. (After the murder, the police found the safe in Bob’s office open, and according to Bob’s statement, $10,000 to $12,000 was missing.) Courthouse wags say the trial, scheduled for March, could be as dramatic as Houston’s other infamous case involving the River Oaks rich: the 1971 trial of Dr. John Hill for the murder of his socialite wife, a story chronicled in the best-seller Blood and Money.
One of the biggest issues in Angleton’s trial will be motive—a subject that still bafßes everyone involved in the investigation. According to one theory, Angleton was anxious that Doris, once divorced, might reveal the size of his bookmaking operation, perhaps leading to an IRS investigation and a stint in prison if the IRS discovered the extent of his unreported income. Or maybe Angleton did indeed find out about the affair and angrily plot Doris’ murder. He might have believed that because he had operated for so long outside the law, easily avoiding police investigation, he would be able to get away with the murder.
But in a visiting room at the county jail in downtown Houston, where he is being held without bond (Roger is also being held without bond in Las Vegas), Angleton leans forward in his plastic chair and tells me, “Doris stood for everything that was good, okay? She had a knack for dealing with kids, for dealing with people—for being friends with all of them.” Tears fill his eyes. “Everyone who knows me knows I loved Doris. Why would they think I would want to hurt her?”
Angleton insists that he never knew about Doris’ affair until the police asked him about it after her death. “And if Bob had ever accused Doris of an affair, I am certain Doris would have told me,” says a woman who spoke to Doris almost daily in the last months of her life. But the woman also says that Doris had mentioned this spring that she thought she was being followed and that Bob was keeping tabs on her whereabouts. The week of Doris’ death, the woman says, when Doris put on a designer dress and told Bob she was going to pick up her mother for dinner, Bob called her mother just to make sure Doris was headed there. “Doris had always been his prize, his trophy,” says another friend. “It was her social skills that made him far more accepted among the River Oaks crowd. And with her walking away from him, I wonder if he decided to …” She pauses, tries to compose herself, and then says, “Maybe it was one of those things where he loved her too much—where if he couldn’t have her, then he was going to make sure no one else did.”
At this point, no one can say for sure if Angleton is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, and no one knows for certain what Roger was doing with those notes and the audiotape. His face close to the bulletproof glass that separates the two of us, Bob looks me straight in the eye and tells me that he believes he would have been able to save the marriage if Doris had not been shot. He says they were communicating much better, and their therapy with a marriage counselor was working. He tells me that he was so in love with her that he would have thrown her an even bigger forty-sixth birthday party that night at Ruggles if she would have let him. (According to a friend, Angleton wanted to book Dwight Yoakam, at a cost of $300,000, to make a surprise appearance at the restaurant.) “I was not reconciled to the idea of divorce,” he says, ßashing me a steely look.
Angleton is about to say something else, but tears fill his eyes again and he puts his hands to his face. To me, it looks almost as if he is embarrassed that he is crying. To someone else, it might look as if he is trying to hide another secret.
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