Swing for the Fences 
Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
The Last Posse
We don’t hang horse thieves anymore, which is lucky for the men who took Marisa McNamara’s sorrel mare. But as the band of old-time Texas lawmen who hunted them down will proudly tell you, frontier justice is alive and well.
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THE UPLIFT SOCIETY IS A RELIC of bygone days—we don’t hang horse thieves anymore. But it’s still okay to assemble a posse. This one couldn’t have had a better commander than Eddie Foreman, a large, jovial man whose infectious sense of humor belies an unyielding commitment to the law. Like all field inspectors for the TSCRA, Foreman is a commissioned Texas Ranger, an arrangement that dates back to 1893 and pays homage to the state’s emotional and economic bonds to its livestock. Foreman was a cowhand before getting into law enforcement 31 years ago, and he acknowledges that some livestock are more equal than others, at least emotionally. “Who loves a cow?” he says with a laugh.
Foreman’s blue-ribbon posse was as relentless as it was historically deep, starting with the McNamaras. Parnell and Mike’s great uncle Guy McNamara, was the McLennon County constable from 1902 to 1915 and later the chief of the Waco Police Department, a deputy U.S. marshal, and finally, the U.S. marshal for the Western District of Texas, from 1933 until his death in 1947. Their father, the legendary T. P. McNamara, ran the U.S. marshal’s office in Waco for 37 years and was so dedicated to his hometown that in the sixties he turned down a chance for promotion—to full U.S. marshal—to stay in Waco. His sons are cut from the same timber: When Parnell and Mike joined the United States Marshals Service in 1970, fresh out of Baylor, they agreed to waive all pensions and benefits for a promise that they would never be transferred to another city. Mike and Parnell’s duties are not that different from their father’s: tracking down federal fugitives, serving federal warrants, and transporting federal prisoners.
Everything about Parnell echoes tradition, including his strong will and direct manner. He lives in the house his great-grandfather built shortly after the family emigrated from Ireland in the 1870’s. Parnell’s no-nonsense commitment to the law is exemplified by his massive personal arsenal, which includes two highly lethal weapons once owned by his father—a 1928 Thompson submachine gun and “Shorty,” a prepare-to-meet-your-maker extremely short double-barreled shotgun with a pistol grip. Mike is reserved and less physically menacing than his brother, but he is more intellectual, and his almost infinite patience makes him a serious threat to outlaws. Friends joke that Parnell is always late, but Mike makes up for it by being early.
Bill Johnston and Robert Blossman are also the sons of well-known lawmen. Like the McNamaras, they speak of their famous fathers as though they were a living part of their lives and memorialize them in dozens of portraits that wall their homes and offices. Johnston grew up in Dallas, where his father, Wilson Johnston, was a crusading assistant district attorney under Henry Wade during the wild fifties and sixties. “He used to ride night patrol with [Sheriff] Bill Decker, tracking down criminals,” Bill says, dropping his gangling six-foot-five frame deep into his swivel chair, flopping his boots on the desk, and enjoying the view of the Texas Ranger Museum across the freeway. “I involve myself as much as I ethically can with agents from other bureaus because that’s what my dad did.” Bill, who is 38, graduated from Baylor School of Law and in 1987 became the first assistant U.S. attorney permanently assigned to Waco.
The 44-year-old Blossman came to Waco in 1985 as the city’s first full-time Secret Service agent and remains a one-man bureau. He grew up in the nearby Hill Country—first in San Saba, where his father was a deputy sheriff, and later in Johnson City, where his father was a special agent for the Secret Service and was assigned to the LBJ Ranch. Lyndon Johnson took a liking to Ben Blossman, impressed by the way the agent could field-dress a deer. Robert was an all-around athlete at Llano High School in the early seventies, though rodeoing was his favorite sport. He also rode bulls and bareback bucking broncos and wrestled steers at Southwest Texas State University. On his father’s advice, Robert applied for and was accepted as a Secret Service agent in 1976. When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, Robert was assigned to the presidential protection division, traveling to China, South America, and Europe with the president. Reagan, of course, was a famous horseman himself, and Robert’s background got him the assignment of riding along when the president galloped across his ranch in California, down Virginia bridle paths, or over South American pampas. Blossman has the same dogged devotion to duty and love of the chase as the other members of the posse, and he sometimes quotes this line from Ernest Hemingway: “There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and like it, never care for anything else thereafter.”
Blossman, Johnston, and the McNamaras see and talk to one another regularly at the federal courthouse, ride together on weekends, and gather for large family outings. Parnell and Robert used to team-rope at Central Texas rodeos. Unfortunately, the tight bond of friendship that unites them is rare among agents from assorted law enforcement groups. In most cities turf wars and backstabbings are the norm, not just between agencies but within the ranks of the same bureaucracy. While these four old friends have taken their share of flak for their independence—and may get some more following the current media attention to this case—their style has often produced spectacular results, snaring in the federal net hardcore felons who might otherwise have slipped away from state authorities.
The most infamous was serial killer McDuff, whose appetite for raping and killing young women had been a topic of conversation in the McNamara household since the sixties, when T. P. McNamara first tangled with him. McDuff would eventually be sentenced to death for the murder of three Fort Worth teenagers. But in 1989 McDuff was inexplicably paroled. That same month police officers began finding the bodies of young women along the Interstate 35 corridor. Over lunch in downtown Waco, the McNamaras and Johnston, the U.S. attorney, discussed their strong suspicions that McDuff was the killer and complained that state and local authorities were ignoring this obvious lead. “We festered and fumed over it at lunch,” Johnston recalls. “That afternoon I found a deputy sheriff who had an informant who had gotten a tab of LSD from McDuff. Any state drug crime is a federal drug crime if we choose to take it, and marshals have jurisdiction over drug cases.” On the basis of the informant’s statement, a federal arrest warrant was issued. The McNamaras led an armada of lawmen who tracked the killer down and turned him over to the state for trial. McDuff received two death sentences and waits for his final justice.
Similarly, the state was able to make its eventual case against Ricky Kevin Smith, a suspect in the brutal rape and murder of an eleven-year-old Waco girl, Cheryl Logan, only because Robert Blossman discovered that Smith was also wanted for the federal offense of forging a government check. Johnston secured a warrant for Smith’s arrest. Armed with the warrant—and backed up by the McNamaras and Parnell’s trusty sawed-off shotgun, Shorty—Blossman chased the suspect from his housing project, across a vacant lot, through a mob of his angry friends, and then hauled him to jail. Smith got ten years on the check charge. While he was doing federal time, the state managed to collect evidence to indict him for the wanton murder of the girl.
“Bill Johnston believes in looking not just at the particular crime but at the individual—who he is, what he’s capable of doing,” Blossman says. While Johnston cannot actively participate in raids, he often stands by to advise agents on the law and draft warrants. He explains it this way: “Because we are sons of lawmen, we are especially tormented by crimes. We look for reasons to get involved. We believe it makes the community safer.” Adds Foreman: “The reason our area is not overwhelmed with crime is that we have peace officers who work together and a prosecutor who is not only willing to take the cases but devotes time to making the charges stick. Bill Johnston has done more to promote good relations between local and federal agencies than anyone in any place I’ve ever heard of.”
IN THE BEGINNING FOREMAN AND THE OTHERS kept Parnell at arm’s length from the investigation, since he was technically a victim. That didn’t prevent the McNamara brothers from doing their own detective work. “This called for old-fashioned legwork,” Mike McNamara observes. “You don’t catch a horse thief by pecking on a computer.” Every morning and every evening after work, they tacked up posters in pawnshops, feedstores, sporting goods store, cafes, and other public places. They questioned horse traders, interviewed informants, and traded tips with other lawmen. Within a week, people began giving names to the posse.
Two names in particular emerged as prime suspects—Gary Hoctel, 43, and Lonnie McNew, 50, a pair of drifters from Ohio who had arrived in Central Texas about a year earlier, shortly before ranchers began reporting the thefts. (A third name the lawmen heard was Matthew Rothesbarger, a friend of Hoctel’s who had moved back to Ohio.) Hoctel, a horse trader by profession, had acquired free title to a handsome, well-equipped hundred-acre horse ranch in China Spring, a ten-minute drive from the McNamara ranch. McNew, who trained and raised horses, rented a smaller spread near Robinson. A number of witnesses had heard Hoctel and McNew brag that they were selling horses with phony registration papers. A woman who was being held in the McLennan County jail informed the posse that Hoctel kept a briefcase full of phony registration forms.
Foreman suspected that the two missing horses would eventually lead them on this paper trail. Though hunting down horse and cattle thieves is the TSCRA’s raison d’être, he spends much of his time dealing with con men who forge or switch registration papers to sell cut-rate nags for Thoroughbred prices. “It’s like they’re buying Hyundais and selling ’em as Mercedes-Benzs,” Foreman explains. Breeder’s certificates are fairly easy to alter. Many breeders merely sign the form and fill in the names of the sire and the dam, leaving blank the boxes indicating the age, sex, and color of the colt or filly. “A crook could buy a solid-colored paint cheap, say $300, sell that horse to the slaughterhouse or wherever, but keep the registration papers,” says Foreman. “Meanwhile, he’d look for a loud little paint, finish filling in the papers, and sell him for $2,500.”
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