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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One good source for blank certificates is the killer market, where papers of horses long since slaughtered are bought and sold. Another is auction barns. “I grew up around auction barns,” Blossman tells me. “You heard it all the time: ‘I’ll sell you the horse, but I’m keeping the paper.’” In many ways the altering of registration papers is far more serious than stealing or even selling Hyundais as Mercedes: Cars can’t breed, but an Appaloosa passed off as, say, a paint can contaminate an entire herd. “It might take a breeder ten years to discover that one of his horses has phony papers,” Foreman explains. “By that time, his gene pool is contaminated, his reputation ruined, and he’s out of business.”
The posse’s big break came on September 6, about ten weeks after the theft, when Parnell received a telephone call from Teresea Erwin, who had bought a horse from McNew in May. The registration papers turned out to be phony. A banker by profession, Teresea and her husband, Randy Erwin, started a small horse farm on the edge of Gatesville in 1993, breeding and showing registered paints. Paints are a popular breed because of their loud color patterns—white on red or white on black. The Erwins knew there were risks: there’s a fifty-fifty chance the offspring of a loudly colored sire and dam can be born solid, which in breeders’ language means without color. Solid paint colts are worthless as breeders.
Teresea was looking for a trainer for a newly purchased mare when she was introduced to McNew at a horse show in Belton in February 1996. McNew had droopy, watery eyes and walked with a limp, but his looks were softened somewhat by a sort of country charisma. Impressed with his riding ability and his supposed credentials, she hired him. McNew was such a good trainer the Erwins didn’t see the con coming.
One day while the Erwins were visiting McNew’s ranch, he tried to convince them that they needed a quarter horse stud to upgrade their operation. Of course, he had one for sale, a shiny black colt named Malachi. The Erwins bred paints, not quarter horses, but McNew informed them that good breeders hedge their bets. “Color breeds, like your paint, your Appaloosa, your buckskin, your palomino, they’re hot right now, but they can turn cold on you real quick. Over the long haul your blood breeds, like your quarter horse, are your best bet.” McNew gambled that the Erwins were too inexperienced to know the rules: that the offspring of a quarter horse stud and a paint mare cannot be registered as a quarter horse. He also gambled that they wouldn’t realize that Malachi wasn’t a quarter horse at all, but a solid-colored Appaloosa. “McNew saw us for what we were—novices, hungry for knowledge,” recalls Teresea, a petite forty-year-old.
The Erwins wisely declined on the black colt, but McNew was back in a couple weeks with another offer—a registered white-on-red paint filly with an outstanding bloodline for an unbelievably low price. He told the Erwins that he and Gary Hoctel—whom he introduced as his nephew—had bought the horse from a woman in Hillsboro named Betty Miller. Hoctel was younger and more articulate than McNew, and also more arrogant.
When Teresea got a close look at the horse, her heart sank. “Her eyes were white and wild, and she was so nervous you couldn’t touch her,” she says. “She had a respiratory infection, what we call ‘the snots,’ and she was thin and malnourished.” Still, $2,500 sounded like a good price, and the Erwins couldn’t say no. Determined to train the filly herself, Teresea worked with the horse twenty to thirty hours a week for more than three months. The filly gradually gained weight, got over the snots, and came to trust Teresea enough to follow a voice command and allow herself to be led into a trailer. Teresea was feeling the exhilaration of a miracle when a telephone call shocked her back to reality.
The caller identified herself as Betty Miller and said to Teresea: “You bought a paint filly out of my mare? Well, I’m sorry to tell you this, but my mare didn’t have a filly, she had a colt—and it wasn’t a paint.” Miller had indeed sold two solid colts to McNew and Hoctel. Though the colts had outstanding bloodlines, they were worthless to her breeding program and not worth registering. Miller had left the age, sex, and color boxes blank on the certificate. McNew easily transformed a solid colt into the loud paint filly that he sold to the Erwins.
Miller had learned about McNew’s scam from his old pal, Hoctel—apparently McNew and Hoctel had a falling out and this was Hoctel’s revenge. Teresea’s filly actually came from a killer auction in Waco, what Hoctel called a Thrifty Nickel. At this point Teresea didn’t know who or what to believe. She telephoned the auction and eventually learned that the filly had come without papers from New Mexico and had been bought by a man named McNew for about $500.
When the Erwins confronted McNew, he denied that the papers were phony but promised to return their money, which he eventually did. In the meantime a warm and sympathetic Hoctel telephoned Teresea out of the blue, advising her that the best way to get her money back was to do what they did—cheat. Keep the papers, shut her mouth, breed the mare, sell the babies, make money. “Everybody does it,” he told her. Teresea said she couldn’t do that. “It’s only a big deal if you make it one,” the con man replied. “Did you like the filly before Betty called? Then button your lip, slap her on the ass, and that’s what she is!”
AS SOON AS HE’D HEARD TERESEA’S STORY, Eddie Foreman suspected that the crooks were running a double con, with one selling her the horse and the other telling her what happened and recruiting her to be part of the scheme. “If Teresea did what Hoctel told her,” Foreman theorized, “they’d come back later and shake her down.”
Erwin decided to call Hoctel back, this time with a tape recorder. Unaware that he was being recorded, he spilled the whole operation, careful to make it appear that McNew was the bad guy. McNew had swindled a number of horse owners in Florida and Georgia, Hoctel said, including a former catcher for the Oakland Athletics. When he first arrived in Texas, in 1994, McNew traded a rancher in Elmont two months’ worth of riding for a sorrel stallion named Zan Parr Majors, a son of the world-champion quarter horse Zan Parr. Hoctel didn’t think much of the horse’s looks or potential virility: “He was just a nickel hunting change.” McNew bought a stack of phony papers from a Waco man who specialized in the killer trade and put papers on a colt, claiming he was the son of Zan Parr Majors. Says Hoctel: “Then he made out a stallion report like he’d bred all these mares to Zan Parr Majors. But he had no mares—they were all phantoms!” Eventually, after a series of phone calls, faxes, and letters, Hoctel and McNew sold the bogus colt—as well as Zan Parr Majors and some other horses—to a breeder in Oklahoma.
U.S. attorney Johnston had been looking for an opening—a way to give their mixed-pedigree posse federal jurisdiction—and now he saw it. Horse stealing isn’t a federal crime, but mailing or faxing phony papers to perpetrate a fraud scheme certainly is. Eddie Foreman had collected an impressive array of witnesses and additional evidence, including the set of phony papers given to Teresea Erwin and the incriminating tape she had made of Hoctel. The posse had tracked down the trucker who hauled the wild-eyed filly to the Waco auction from New Mexico; he remembered the horse distinctly. Another witness had seen the filly on the auction block and heard Hoctel call out to McNew, “Buy that filly. I got papers to match her!” That was more than enough to get a search warrant. Everything in order, Johnston telephoned Blossman and the McNamaras, and Foreman’s posse galloped into action, serving Hoctel and McNew with warrants and searching their ranches.
To everyone’s surprise, Hoctel freely admitted that he altered registration papers: “Every horse trader does it,” he told the posse. He showed them his briefcase of phony certificates. He also showed them a videotape of the spurious colt. But Hoctel denied stealing Marisa McNamara’s horse or anyone else’s. “I’ll screw you out of your last penny and laugh when your kids go hungry,” he boasted. “But I never stole a horse!” Later, a polygraph expert found that Hoctel was being deceptive on the question of horse stealing. McNew denied everything, but the posse found plenty of incriminating evidence at his home, including a catalog for the Shawnee sale with the page touting Zan Parr Majors’ supposed colt conveniently dog-eared.
Eventually, the posse developed evidence pointing to Hoctel as the mastermind of the theft at the McNamara ranch but indicating that McNew wasn’t there. The second man at the crime scene was Matthew Rothesbarger, Hoctel’s friend from Ohio. When subpoenaed to come back to Texas and subjected to several polygraphs, Rothesbarger admitted that he had helped load Penny and Mr. Deck Note into Hoctel’s trailer, though he said he believed that he was assisting in a sale, not taking part in a crime. A few days later the horses were hauled to the auction barn in Groesbeck.
Searching records at the auction, the posse discovered sales receipts for two horses that matched the descriptions of Penny and Mr. Deck Note. Penny was purchased by the same killer trader who Hoctel said sold the bogus papers to McNew, and Mr. Deck Note was purchased by a roper from Mexia who had outbid the killer trader by a mere $5. Marisa’s mare was one of the two hundred or so horses slaughtered at Bel Tex a day or so after the auction, but Tonia Smith’s quarter horse was recovered—haggard, frightened, three hundred pounds lighter, but basically okay. “When I saw Tonia crying and throwing her arms around that horse,” Parnell told me, close to tears himself, “that moment made the whole thing worthwhile for me.”
In October 1997 Hoctel and McNew decided against a jury trial—where a Secret Service handwriting expert was ready to nail them—and pleaded out to federal fraud charges. Hoctel is doing ten months in federal prison and faces state charges for horse theft when he gets out. McNew did four months of home detention and is on probation for five years. Hoctel’s attorney complained that if it hadn’t been Parnell’s daughter’s horse that was stolen, none of this would have ended up in court. He’s probably right. As far as anyone can tell, this is the first time a stolen horse has led to a conviction in federal court, at least in modern times. As for the argument that everyone alters registration papers, that too is a given.
“It was just their bad luck to have picked this place,” Eddie Foreman concludes, chuckling merrily at the irony. “I tell horse traders: Before today, you could get fifty dollars for a set of bogus papers. If I catch you after today, you’ll get five years in the federal pen.”
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