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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Orchestrated or not, the campaign to keep Ott behind bars is powerful and effective and has gone mostly unchallenged by the media. When Ott's case comes up for its annual parole review, newspapers often republish the photo that reminds people of Manson. Sometimes they run companion pictures of Carolyn Doherty holding a photograph of her dead husband and flanked by her family. In March 1995 the Denton Record-Chronicle published a front-page story reporting that the law enforcement community was distributing petitions (they had already gathered 870 signatures) and urging people to write letters protesting Ott's possible release. Inserted at the top of the story was a box giving the address of the Board of Pardons and Paroles. People who had never heard of Ott and knew nothing of the circumstances of his crime were writing letters or lining up in supermarket parking lots to sign the petition. The Record-Chronicle story was full of misinformation, some of it, I'm ashamed to admit, taken from my piece in Texas Monthly. At the time of the trial, I had read a copy of Ott's psychiatric record, compiled while he was at Timberlawn. Using the report as my source, I reported that Ott had once attempted to stab his mother and his brother and that he had been a heroin addict. None of this is true, I've learned since from his family.
The lawmen who took part in the raid have gradually obscured the record in a way that makes Ott look like a cold-blooded killer. A story in the Record-Chronicle last year and a similar one in 1995 included several astonishing recollections that are not in the record or the trial transcript. Dwight Crawford of the Denton County Sheriff's Department, whose phone call to Doherty about James Leonard Baker started the tragic affair, was quoted as recalling: "Ott opened the door, saw [Ranger Doherty] and slammed it shut in his face, firing at the same time." If Crawford had so testified at the trial, Ott would have been executed long ago. I asked Crawford about the quote when I visited Denton this spring. "I don't remember saying that," he told me, shaking his head. "I think maybe I read something along those lines in one of the reports." Crawford, who is now a forensic investigator for the county medical examiner, had kept his case file and allowed me to read it. There's nothing remotely like that recollection in any of the documents. Other lawmen have taken similar liberties. When Ott's case was up for review last year, Denton County sheriff Weldon Lucas, the former DPS supervisor of narcotics for the area and a former Ranger, told the Dallas Morning News: "Twenty-one years ago [Ott] was willing to shoot a police officer to protect his drug investment. [My opposition to the parole] is not blind loyalty to the Rangers. I am thinking of the danger he would bring to the police officers out there today. I don't think he's changed."
The supposition that Ott killed to protect his stash became a handy rationale after Doherty was killed and has remained a rationale for keeping him in prison. It neatly explains why the raiding party went after a hippie weed-head as though it had cornered the French Connection. One of the most interesting things I read in Crawford's file was a previously undisclosed second statement from Baker, taken seven hours after his initial statement. In this revised remembrance, the informant told of buying twenty or thirty pounds of marijuana from Ott over the previous year and spoke of Ott's extreme paranoia and his vow to "kill anybody that tries to steal my stuff." This statement was so at odds with what I knew about Ott from his family and friends that I checked with them again, reading them Baker's comments. "That's ridiculous. Greg wasn't a dealer by any stretch of the imagination," said James Althaus, a college friend who has visited Ott regularly in prison. "He was philosophically nonviolent. He was very intelligent, and with that went a lot of arrogance, but he never talked about killing anybody." Ott did have the three guns, but he kept the shotgun loaded with rock salt to protect his calves from coyotes, and the .22 was for target practice and hunting rabbits. He purchased the .38 after the second robbery.
Understandably, the subject of Ott's parole arouses considerable emotion among law enforcement people in Denton. DPS narcotics agent Don Jones, who was on the raid, told me angrily, "The jury gave Ott life. I don't think that a writer or a parole board ought to arbitrarily decide he should get out. If that's the case we should do away with the writer and the parole board." Jones expressed no regrets over the tactics used that night, and neither did any of the others. "It should have been a simple deal," Ben Neel told me. "I meet Ott, I make the buy, we make the bust. I didn't know he had a gun." Neel described Ott as a "cold-blooded murderer" and said, "There's no place in society for a man who shoots a police officer."
A few years after the Ranger was killed, Neel got caught up in the Rex Cauble investigation. He was subpoenaed by Cauble's attorney and testified that Cauble was a good friend of the DPS narcotics service and violently opposed to any type of drugs. When he denied that he knew that Cauble was the target of an investigation before it became public, federal prosecutors indicted him for perjury. Weldon Lucas and other lawmen testified against him. Though Neel was acquitted, the cozy arrangement between Cauble and DPS narcotics continues to arouse bitter feelings. Dwight Crawford believes that the Rangers ended the Ott investigation too soon. If they'd kept digging, he speculates, they may have connected what happened that night at Ott's house to Cauble and his association with narcotics agents.
One of the most passionate crusaders against Ott's parole is Denton County's current district attorney, Bruce Isaacks, who first learned of the case by reading my account in Texas Monthly in 1978. Isaacks was a student at the University of Texas at Arlington at the time and remembers being surprised "that anyone would have the gall to murder a Texas Ranger." His ambition was to be a highway patrolman—he'd been a reserve policeman in his hometown of Joshua—but later he decided to become a prosecutor. In 1990, when district attorney Jerry Cobb declined to protest Ott's parole, Isaacks used it as a campaign issue and defeated him. Isaacks has filed an annual protest and solicited protests from other law enforcement officials and politicians. Last year he wrote a letter to fellow Republican George W. Bush, warning the governor that Ott "is a violent and dangerous criminal." He urged Bush to "take the time right now" to write a protest letter and to encourage his friends to do the same.
I asked Isaacks what he knew about Ott's case. Had he read the trial transcript or the case file? "I looked at the file," he replied, "And I talked about it with Weldon Lucas, Dwight Crawford, and Don Jones." Ott's fate is open and shut, in the opinion of this DA: "Anyone who kills a police officer shouldn't be let out until they carry him out in a pine box."
When Ott comes up for parole in late August or early September, his fate will be in the hands of the same three-member panel that considered his case last year. Linda Garcia, a former Harris County prosecutor, and Cynthia Tauss of League City, who has long been involved in juvenile justice issues, both gave him favorable votes last year, but when the protests poured in, Tauss withdrew her vote. The third member of the panel, Houston attorney Dan Lang, gave Ott thumbs down. State law prohibits board members from discussing protests or any information in the file. "All I can tell you is that additional information was received," Tauss said. Since Garcia presumably received the same "additional information," I asked her, why didn't she change her vote? "Reasonable minds can differ," Garcia replied. Because parole is a privilege, not a right, inmates have no due process protection. Not even the inmate's lawyer can see his file. It is impossible, therefore, to defend against any "additional information" a protester may proffer, however inaccurate or malicious. What Tauss, Garcia, and Lang received was not additional information, of course, but opinion—an atavistic reaction aggravated by more than a century and a half of Texas Ranger myth. A Ranger was killed in the line of duty, and it's the Rangers' opinion that Ott should be deprived of the rest of his life too, even if that means to die in prison.
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