Hit Man
Gary Johnson is the most sought-after professional killer in Houston. In the past decade, he's been hired to kill more than sixty people. But if you pay him to rub out a cheating spouse or an abusive boss, you'd better watch your own back: He works for the cops.
Kathy Scott hired Johnson as a hit man.
On a nice, quiet street in a nice, quiet neighborhood just north of Houston lives a nice, quiet man. He is 54 years old, tall but not too tall, thin but not too thin, with short brown hair that has turned gray around the sideburns. He has soft brown eyes. He sometimes wears wire-rimmed glasses that give him a scholarly appearance.
The man lives alone with his two cats. Every morning, he pads barefoot into the kitchen to feed his cats, then he steps out the back door to feed the goldfish that live in a small pond. He takes a few minutes to tend to his garden, which is filled with caladiums and lilies, gardenias and wisteria, a Japanese plum tree, and rare green roses. Sometimes the man sits silently on a little bench by the goldfish pond, next to a small sculpture of a Balinese dancer. He breathes in and out, calming his mind. Or he goes back inside his house, where he sits in his recliner in the living room and reads. He reads Shakespeare, psychiatrist Carl Jung, and Gandhi. He even keeps a book of Gandhi's quotations on his coffee table. One of his favorites is "Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man."
He is always polite, his neighbors say. He smiles when they see him, and he says hello in a light, gentle voice. But he reveals little about himself, they say. When he is asked what he does for a living, he says only that he works in "human resources" at a company downtown. Then he smiles one more time, and he heads back inside his house.
What the neighbors don't know is that in his bedroom, next to his four-poster bed, the man has a black telephone, on which he receives very unusual calls.
"We've got something for you," a voice says when he answers. "A new client."
"Okay," the man says.
The voice on the other end of the line tells him that a husband is interested in ending his marriage or that a wife would like to be single again or that an entrepreneur is ready to dissolve a relationship with a partner.
The man hangs up and returns to his recliner. He thinks about what service he should offer his new client. A car bombing, perhaps. Or maybe a drive-by shooting. Or he can always bring up the old standby, the faked residential burglary.
As he sits in his recliner, his cats jump onto his lap. They purr as he strokes them behind their ears. The man sighs, then he returns to his reading. "Always aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed," wrote Gandhi. "Always aim at purifying your thoughts and everything will be well."
The man's name is Gary Johnson, but his clients know him by such names as Mike Caine, Jody Eagle, and Chris Buck. He is, they believe, the greatest professional hit man in Houston, the city's leading expert in conflict resolution. For the past decade, more than sixty Houston-area residents have hired him to shoot, stab, chop, poison, or suffocate their enemies, their romantic rivals, or their former loved ones. He has met with housewives who tell him they cannot spend one more day on this earth with their adulterous husbands, and he has met with husbands who say they cannot survive any longer with their nagging wives. He has met with ex-wives who are angry that their ex-husbands left them with so little in their divorce, and he has met with ex-husbands who are furious that their ex-wives got so much. He has been asked by employees to kill their bosses, and he has been asked by bosses to kill their employees. He has been hired by scorned lovers, broke businessmen, and teenagers who are mad at their mothers or fathers. He has even gone to the county jail to visit inmates who tell him they have been unfairly arrested and that their only way out is for him to shoot the witnesses scheduled to testify against them at their upcoming trials.
To his clients, he is like something out of a movie: the lone vigilante, the mysterious gun for hire. Whatever he is asked to do, he simply shrugs and says that he can handle it. His work, he tells them, is like science: a matter of proper observation, correct instrumentation, and exact coordination. He does not ever let emotion get in the way of his job. And when the time comes for him to make his move, he promises that he will dispatch his targets quickly and then disappear so that the police will never be able to learn who he is.
Actually, the police know all about him. They like to drink coffee with him. Gary Johnson is not a hit man. He is a staff investigator for the Harris County district attorney's office who is on call, night and day, to play the role of the hit man for police departments in and around Houston. Whenever the police learn through an informant that a person wants to hire someone to knock off someone else, they cannot just go out and arrest that person. To get the proper evidence to win a conviction, they need to catch that person ordering the hit and then paying for it. That's where Johnson comes in. The police have their informant introduce Johnson to the person looking for a contract killer. Then it's up to Johnson, who is wired for sound, to get that person to say that he wants someone murdered and then to pay Johnson to do the job.
Although plenty of cops have pretended to be hit men in undercover murder-for-hire investigations, Johnson is the Laurence Olivier of the field. In law enforcement circles, he is considered to be one of the greatest actors of his generation, so talented that he can perform on any stage and with any kind of script. If he is meeting a client who lives in one of Houston's more exclusive neighborhoods, he can put on the polished demeanor of a sleek, skilled assassin who will not sniff at a job for less than six figures. If he is meeting a client who lives in a working-class neighborhood, he can come across like a wily country boy, willing to whack anyone at any time for whatever money he can get. He leads some of his clients to believe that he's connected to the mob; with others, he hints that he is a retired marksman from the U.S. Army's Special Forces who has never lost his appetite for action.
"He's the perfect chameleon," says prominent Houston lawyer Michael Hinton, who during his days as a Harris County prosecutor served as one of Johnson's supervisors. "Gary is a truly great performer who can turn into whatever he needs to be in whatever situation he finds himself. He never gets flustered, and he never says the wrong thing. He's somehow able to persuade people who are rich and not so rich, successful and not so successful, that he's the real thing. He fools them every time."
In his most publicized case so far, Johnson recently fooled one of Houston's wealthier women, a 38-year-old beautiful blonde named Lynn Kilroy, the former vice president of the Houstonaires Republican Women, who is married to Billy Kilroy, the heir to a vast oil fortune. Last year, during her evening walks with a close friend through Houston's wealthy Tanglewood neighborhood, Kilroy had begun talking about how much she disliked her husband, to whom she had been married for only a year. She told her friend that his behavior had become so infuriating that she had considered covering the floor of his shower with baby oil in hopes that he would slip and crack his head open. But she was afraid of divorcing him because she thought he would try to get full custody of their infant child and also try to keep her from getting any of his money. She then reportedly said she wished there was some way she could have her husband killed. Weeks later, she met a man with whom she began an affair and reportedly asked him if he knew of someone who could do away with her husband.
Soon, word of her alleged conversations got to the police, and a sting was arranged. Kilroy was told by her friends that someone who specialized in such matters was waiting for her in room 1008 at the Doubletree Hotel at Post Oak. When she walked through the door, she saw a pleasant-looking man in nice slacks and a button-down shirt. He was not carrying a gun. Johnson (whom she knew as "Chris") stood up, shook her hand, and said with a friendly smile, "Come on, sweetheart. I'll take the pressure off."
Johnson seemed so self-assured and so relaxed, that she started smiling too. He acted just like any guy from the country club. With a wink, he asked, "You're not gonna drop me in the grease?" She said, as if aghast at the idea, "Oh, no. Absolutely not. . . . I will never come back on you."
In a chillingly calm voice, Johnson then began to talk about what he was going to do to her husband. "I'm not here to beat him up. I didn't come down here to scare him," he said. "I just want you to understand how serious this is."
She could not take her eyes off him. She began telling him that he could find her husband at a trendy cigar bar, where he often went to drink. Getting to him at home, she said, could be dangerous because of the security system. The way she talked, she seemed to be plotting not the death of her husband but the itinerary of a fabulous trip. Johnson sat back on the couch and listened, nodding his head, never looking at the television set where a hidden camera was videotaping the conversation. He asked her what her husband looked like and what kind of car he drove. Then he asked her what she planned to give him as a down payment. Kilroy removed about $200,000 in jewelry that she was wearing, including a wedding ring and an engagement ring with a total of ten and a half carats of diamonds and a pearl necklace. "Do what you need to do," the socialite said to him.
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