Free Greg Ott!
Twenty-two years ago a Texas Ranger was shot and killed during a drug raid on the home of a philosophy graduate student. even today, no one really knows what happened on that tragic night.
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Posing as a gangster from St. Louis, DPS undercover agent Ben Neel arranged to buy fifty pounds of pot from Baker, at which time Doherty, Crawford, and two deputies rushed into the room and busted the dealer and two of his friends. The operation went perfectly, except for one thing: Baker was thirty pounds light. The difference between fifty and twenty pounds was of no legal consequence—the lawmen should have taken Baker to jail and called it a night—but by now they were caught up in the chase more than the crime. Baker was promised certain unspecified considerations if he would name names and help them get the remaining pounds. Baker claimed that he could get a large amount from Greg Ott. He told them that Ott was a "heavy dealer," which was a lie. Baker barely knew Ott. They had met through a mutual friend, and Baker had smoked dope on several occasions at Ott's house, which was coincidentally adjacent to a ranch owned by a man named Rex Cauble.
That name meant something to Bob Doherty. In the 1970's Denton was a major drug center. One of the cases Bob Doherty was working at the time of his death involved the clandestine movements of Cauble, a wealthy rancher and prominent antidrug crusader who paid for and personally recorded antidrug messages on a local radio station. Cauble was a friend, a confidant, and sometimes an employer of a number of DPS narcotics agents or former agents. The Texas Rangers' distrust of DPS narcotics officers was well known in law enforcement circles even though the Rangers are a branch of the DPS. Cauble went out of his way to kiss up to the narcs, hosting barbecues for them, furnishing them with buy money for undercover operations, making his airplanes available. Doherty suspected that Cauble's real business was smuggling dope. And he turned out to be right. In 1982, four years after Doherty was killed, Cauble was convicted of being the brains and money behind the so-called Cowboy Mafia, a smuggling ring that imported more than one hundred tons of marijuana [see "Rex Cauble and the Cowboy Mafia," Texas Monthly, November 1980]. Perhaps Doherty thought that Ott and his neighbor Cauble were somehow connected.
Flying now by the seat of their pants, the lawmen instructed Baker to telephone Ott and say that he was desperate to find some dope for an important client from St. Louis. Ott allowed that he had a couple of lids to spare. "No, man," Baker pleaded, "I've got to have a lot. Isn't there anything you can do?" Ott promised to make some phone calls, foolishly placing himself in the middle of a major dope deal. Another North Texas State student, identified only as "Larry," delivered twenty pounds of marijuana to the barn behind Ott's house later that night, at which time the raiding party went into action.
The raid was an accident waiting to happen. It was now after ten o'clock and none of the lawmen were in uniform. Some had been drinking beer earlier in the evening, and undercover agent Ben Neel had been seen smoking pot, or at least pretending to, in his undercover role. While Neel and the informant Baker went inside Ott's house to make the buy, the five members of the raiding party, which now included a young DPS narcotics agent named Don Jones, hid under a blanket in the back of a camper. Neel followed Ott to the barn to get the marijuana, and when they returned to the house, he left the back door open, a signal that the buy was complete.
Only God knows for certain what happened in the next few seconds. Neel testified that Ott went back to close the door, and he observed Ott wearing a holster and gun. Neel drew his .45 and shouted, "Police officer! Freeze!" Ott acknowledged to me that he had been wearing a holster—one that he had just made and was molding to his belt before delivering it to a customer—but claimed the holster was empty. He said he didn't hear Neel identify himself as an officer or realize that other police officers were outside. Fearing that he was being robbed again, Ott bolted for the walk-through closet where he kept a .38, along with a .22 rifle and a twelve-gauge shotgun. Neel fired and missed. As Ott grabbed his .38 from the shelf, Ott maintains, the gun became entangled in a beaded curtain and went off accidentally.
No one actually saw Ott fire a shot—and, for that matter, no one can prove that the shot he fired was the fatal one. The bullet that killed Doherty passed through the closed door of the new entranceway, which the Ranger was apparently about to kick down when Ott's gun discharged. The bullet was so badly fragmented that it was impossible to say that it came from Ott's gun. Witnesses told conflicting stories. In his original statement, the informant Baker confirmed Neel's version, but in a deposition taken later by Ott's attorney, Baker changed his story, claiming that Neel fired not one but two shots. Captain Crawford claimed that he shouted, "Police officers!" twice before a shot was fired, but Neel didn't hear him, so it's safe to speculate that Ott didn't either. The postmortem investigation was as inept as the raid. One investigator rammed a pencil through the bullet hole in the door, making it impossible to tell whether the hole was caused by a .45 or a .38 slug. Neel didn't surrender his .45 until at least an hour after the shooting of Doherty; if he had indeed fired more than one round, as Baker claimed, he would have had ample time to reload.
Doherty was the first Texas Ranger killed in the line of duty in 47 years, and the story attracted national attention. It was aired early the following morning on ABC's Good Morning America, and for days afterward newspapers and television stations featured the photograph of the killer. Carolyn Doherty, Bob's widow, told me at the time about her reaction to it. She and Bob had been high school sweethearts when they married 21 years earlier, and they had two teenagers, Buster and Kelly. Though Carolyn had joked to friends that she and Bob were "Mr. and Mrs. Redneck," I found her to be a gentle and thoughtful woman, and I fought back tears listening to her describe that frantic ride to the emergency room, where the Ranger was dead on arrival. Then she told me about seeing Ott's picture in the paper the next morning. The defendant's hands were cuffed across his chest and his eyes burned with a terrible light through his wild nest of long, black hair and scraggly beard. It was impossible to look at that picture, she said, without thinking, "Charles Manson."
The board of pardons and paroles was ready to release Ott ten years ago. In 1990 he was transferred to the Walls Unit at Huntsville to process out. He was a few hours from walking free when a prison official who had never met Ott tipped off the Rangers, who immediately launched a blizzard of faxes protesting the parole, at which time the board changed its mind. Since then they have kept up the pressure. The Rangers as an organization are not opposed to Ott's parole, or at least that's the claim of the Ranger commander, Captain Bruce Casteel. Casteel acknowledges that he protested directly to the chairman of the parole board last year, but that was merely his personal policy. "I don't speak for the Rangers individually," he told me. "I wouldn't ask them to file a protest if they didn't feel it was the right thing to do." Many Rangers too young to remember Doherty or the events that led to his death have nevertheless protested. "They know that a Ranger was killed and that's inexcusable," Casteel said.If and when Ott does get paroled, it is understood that he must be paroled out of the state, probably to Florida, where his sister and aging parents live. One member of the parole board told me that the Rangers were contacting law enforcement officials in other states and advising them against accepting Ott. "They're cutting off any possibility he can ever be set free," the board member said. Casteel denies knowledge of an orchestrated attempt to shut off Ott's parole avenues but concedes: "Many retired Rangers could be making contacts—it would not surprise me."
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