A Bend in the River
A cheerleader lies dead in dark waters, and life in the small towns along the Red River will never be the same. A tale of restless youth in a lonely land.
BeeJay says: I agree with callie to a certain extint. Violent henious crimes happen for a reason. So that reason has to be researched. Why can you be charged with the actual crime if you didn’t pull the trigger? Hand of one hand of all, thats how and its a . I agree Texas takes things beyond the extreme - for instance you don’t send a mentally ill 15 to prison for the rest of his life because he made a mistake. You give young people a chance to correct thier mistakes. How is it a 31 year old man can rape a two year old until she’s four and only gets 3 years but a rapist of an adult woman who can fight back you’ll give out a life sentence for. If anyone ever touches my children the police won’t be called but you might read about it in the paper. Theres no stability in Texas. They look for convictions and not the truth. (November 9th, 2009 at 1:55pm)
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Reda watched her grandson as she made supper on the day Heather’s body was found, wondering what he knew. He was sitting on the back porch, playing her old guitar.
"They found that missing girl from Waurika," Reda called out from the kitchen, through the screen door. "They found her floating in Belknap Creek." Curtis stopped strumming the guitar and fell silent. Reda began to say more, but he cut her off.
"Grandma," he said, his voice ice-cold. "I don’t give a f— about that little girl."
TEXAS RANGER LANE AKIN ARRIVED at Belknap Creek on the afternoon of October 10, 1996, when Heather was still floating among the reeds. After crime scene photos were taken, the lawman waded into the creek with Sheriff Hamilton and gently carried her to dry land. Her body was so badly damaged that the Riches were never allowed to see her; the autopsy photos would later make jurors recoil. She had been shot nine times—once in the head, eight times in the back—not with a pistol but a shotgun. All the Riches had left of their daughter was her ring. As the murder investigation got under way, Gail was reassured by the presence of the Texas Ranger. Akin’s calm, deliberate style had served him well in the past, when criminals had felt so at ease around him that they had sometimes divulged the details of their crimes. But while he had worked dozens of murder cases before, this case would take a greater emotional toll—something his fellow investigators noticed from the moment he carried Heather’s body from the creek. Akin’s only daughter was then a high school cheerleader, an outgoing fifteen-year-old girl in the North Texas town of Decatur whom he had done his share of worrying about. "This one hit real close to home," Akin says.
Each night, as he drove back to Texas, he wondered what he was overlooking. "It was very hard to leave at the end of the day, knowing we weren’t any closer to making an arrest," he says. The investigation had initially focused on a red herring: a meth dealer Heather may have known who turned out to have an alibi. Akin now began to look more closely at the party Josh had thrown the night of Heather’s disappearance.
Josh, Curtis, and Randy all claimed they had played dominoes and drunk whiskey in the "party trailer" behind Josh’s house that night, and they all insisted they hadn’t seen Heather. Akin was skeptical. As the investigation plodded along, Randy often sat on his porch, holding his head in his hands. He drank heavily, and he stayed high most of the time. In a newspaper profile of the new homecoming king, he seemed gloomy and remote. He shrugged off several questions, listing his favorite color as black, and when asked for "words of wisdom for underclassmen," he answered cryptically, "Cruise the back roads." Was he grieving or, as Akin suspected, did he know more than he was saying?
With Paul Smith of the Montague County district attorney’s office, his partner for the investigation, Akin decided to stop by football practice one afternoon and pay Randy a visit. When Randy walked off the field and saw the two lawmen waiting for him, his face froze. "Lane and I looked at each other," says Smith, "and we knew for sure Randy was involved in Heather’s murder."
Randy stuck to his story, though Akin made note of the flat, detached way that he described the evening. "He had rehearsed that story again and again," Akin says. "Telling it kept him from showing any emotion." The next morning, Akin got the break he needed. A local sheriff’s deputy discovered that Josh had bought four boxes of shotgun shells at Beaver Hardware a few days before Heather’s murder: Winchester double-aught buckshot, the ammunition that a firearms expert had determined was the kind used by Heather’s killer. The owner of Beaver Hardware also identified Curtis Gambill from a photo lineup; he had accompanied Josh to the store. Paul Smith had investigated the brutal murder of Curtis’ great-grandmother by Henry Lee Lucas years earlier, and he knew the family well. He suggested to Akin that they visit Reda Robbins. Reda had not been forthcoming with investigators until then, but when she saw the detective who had helped find her mother’s killer, she agreed to talk. During the course of their conversation, Reda mentioned that Curtis had had a shotgun but that he’d said he had gotten rid of it. "Old Blackie" was a Mossberg twelve-gauge shotgun: the firearm that investigators would determine was the murder weapon.
Only later would it come to light that Curtis Gambill had once bragged about his "ultimate fantasy": to kidnap a girl, rape her, and then "blow her head off." He made the boast at the age of fifteen in a juvenile detention center, where he was being held after threatening to kill several teachers. He was a volatile kid with a long criminal record. He was rumored to have shot other people’s livestock for sport, and he had broken out of every juvenile facility that held him. He ran with a rough crowd of meth users, including the late Dennis Wayne Goss, and in school he terrorized other kids, making boys fight each other by threatening that otherwise they would have to fight him. At seventeen he was briefly committed to a psychiatric hospital. "Curtis Gambill is the most violent person I’ve ever known," Akin says now. "When you’re around him, you literally feel like you’re in the presence of evil." Both misfits, Curtis and Josh found solace in drinking and hanging out along the river—often camping and fishing together—and they shared a love of guns. Randy was the odd man out, having met Curtis only briefly when they worked one summer in the watermelon fields. What brought them all together the night of Heather’s murder had its own simple logic: Josh had a bottle of whiskey.
The story would unravel the following day, when Curtis broke under Akin’s questioning. "Gambill knew he was in a bind, so he told us a story that made Randy Wood out to be the killer," says Akin. "He was extremely cooperative and seemed to be enjoying the attention." Between bites of tacos, Curtis cavalierly offered up the details. "I didn’t know her," he began, while Akin typed. "She snuck out. Her and Josh had a date." Curtis explained that he and Randy had left the trailer to give them some time alone. While they were gone, Josh got Heather drunk. "Josh had sex with her for a couple of hours," he said. "When me and Woody, Randy Wood, got back, she was hammered. She was kissing on us. Me and Woody was going to get a piece, but she passed out." The boys drank more. "When she woke up, she was crying and screaming. Then she passed back out. Josh started freaking out. . . . Josh said he didn’t want to go down for it, raping Heather." Randy was anxious about rape charges too, Curtis said, because Randy had tried to have sex with Heather. So Randy carried her, still unconscious, to Josh’s pickup, and they all drove to the Belknap Creek bridge. "Woody shot her," Curtis claimed. "Woody said, ’Throw her ass over.’ All of us grabbed her and threw her over in the creek."
Akin had heard a lot in his twenty years in law enforcement, but as he slid the typed confession across the desk for Curtis to sign, he felt sick. Heather’s life, to these boys, had been so easily disposable. "I had to grit my teeth and go on," Akin says. He believed most of Curtis’ story, though he sensed that Curtis had killed her: The murder weapon was his, and the crime scene was a place only he was familiar with. Akin’s hunch was confirmed when Randy told almost the same story later that night but with Curtis firing the gun. Heather had been drifting in and out of consciousness when Curtis "had sex" with her too. "I had my pants down, but I didn’t," Randy said in a low monotone. When they arrived at the creek, they "sat Heather on the bridge and she fell over. I got back in the truck, and I just sat there with my hands covering my face, and that’s when I heard the shots. Josh and Curtis were outside. After the shots stopped, I looked up and Curtis had the shotgun." Randy would pass a polygraph test; Curtis failed his. But why had Randy not tried to save her? "I really didn’t believe it would happen until we got to the bridge," Randy told me. "I hoped Curtis was joking, but when we got out of the truck, he had the shotgun. He was giving orders; he was firing himself up. I let it happen. I was scared to death of him."
While Randy was giving his statement to Sheriff Hamilton, Akin served the warrant for Josh’s arrest. In Josh’s bedroom were two swords, an SKS assault rifle with a bayonet, another assault rifle, and a book on making bombs. Though he initially refused to go with the Texas Ranger, he finally relented. As Akin drove, he tried to engage Josh in conversation.
"I’m sure you’ve had some sleepless nights since Heather’s murder," Akin offered.
"You just woke me up," Josh said with a sneer. "Did it look like I was having trouble sleeping?"
Six years later Akin is still galled by those words. "Josh Bagwell had participated in a crime that devastated an entire community," Akin says. "A family would never know their daughter. Heather would never grow up, never get married, never have children of her own. And his conscience wasn’t troubled at all. He could sleep just fine."
THE SON OF A CHURCH OF CHRIST PREACHER, Montague County district attorney Tim Cole is an intense, unyielding adversary in the courtroom—he prefers facts to florid oratory—whose sense of moral certainty has helped him persuade juries to convict in all twelve murder trials he has prosecuted. Curtis Gambill’s capital murder case, which was the first to come to trial, presented a tactical problem: To convict Josh Bagwell of capital murder, Cole needed testimony that Josh knew of the plan to kill Heather before they reached the creek. Cole had sought the death penalty against Curtis, but during jury selection, a plea bargain was struck: Curtis would admit he shot Heather and testify against Josh if he was spared death. After much agonizing, the Riches agreed that the state should accept the deal, even though it meant forgoing the death penalty for their daughter’s killer. "They gave Curtis Gambill his life," Cole says. Moments after Curtis pleaded guilty and was given a thirty-year sentence, he flew into a rage, grabbing the bailiff by the neck and trying to choke him. It took six men to wrestle Curtis to the ground, including Lane Akin, who leaped out of the spectator section to put him in a stranglehold. Cole watched, his face drained of color. What sort of Faustian bargain, he wondered, had they made?
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