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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Even with Curtis’ testimony, Cole harbored doubts about winning a conviction against Josh Bagwell. Josh had refused to give a statement to investigators—he was the only one of the three boys not to admit his guilt—or to take a polygraph test, and his family had hired a team of high-priced defense attorneys to secure his acquittal. The case against him rested largely on the word of Curtis and Randy, who could implicate Josh in the murder scheme but who could also compromise their credibility by pointing fingers at each other for pulling the trigger. Before the trial, Josh bragged to friends that there wasn’t enough evidence to try him. "His family’s attitude was that I was a country bumpkin who couldn’t win this case and that Josh hadn’t done anything wrong," Cole says. "They had the arrogance to bring his sports car to the courthouse while the jury was deliberating because they were so sure the jury was going to let him off."
From the first day of The State of Texas v. Joshua Luke Bagwell, the defense elected to put Heather’s character on trial, painting her as a promiscuous drunk. "They made her look like the Whore of Babylon," says Jeff Hall, a former publisher of the Waurika News-Democrat. Scant was said about the boys’ own alcoholism or enthusiasm for casual sex, only Heather’s supposed transgressions. The subtext of the defense’s argument was that Josh could not have raped Heather because she was always ready and willing. Defense attorney John Zelbst went so far as to cross-examine Gail about each of her dead daughter’s failings—her smoking, her bulimia, her marijuana use: "She was your perfect child, but she wasn’t quite perfect, right?" Josh sat quietly behind the defense table, taking notes on a yellow legal pad. What the jury could not see beneath his suit were his jailhouse tattoos—among them the swastika and other white power symbols that adorned his arms. Nor did the jury know that Josh had not only tried to incite a riot on his cell block but also threatened to kill several guards and attacked a police officer. Guards also discovered a hole he had chipped through the cinder-block walls.
"We were all afraid that Josh was going to walk," says Cole. Though Curtis had originally agreed to testify against Josh, he had welshed on his plea agreement, insisting that it was Randy, not himself, who shot Heather, and that Josh had known nothing of the murder plot. That night Cole got word of yet another setback for the prosecution: Randy, who was scheduled to testify the next day, was backing out of his plea bargain as well. Cole thought all was lost.
But Randy Wood had something else in mind. Conscience-stricken, he still wanted to testify against Josh, but he would not accept a plea bargain in return, for fear that it would taint the veracity of his testimony in the eyes of the jury. And so Randy sacrificed his future, doing what no lawman who worked this case can remember a defendant ever doing: He turned down a forty-year sentence with the possibility of parole after thirty years and testified anyway, thereby incriminating himself and subjecting himself to, at best, a mandatory life sentence for murder. At worst, he would face a death sentence. Randy’s attorney urged him to take the deal, but Randy had made up his mind. "I wanted everyone to know I was telling the truth," Randy told me. "I owed that to Heather and her family."
The next day, Randy testified in a low, halting voice that Josh had known full well of the plan to kill Heather: Contrary to the defense’s story, Josh was present in the trailer when the plot was hatched to shoot her. Before the shooting, he had helped carry her from the pickup to the bridge, Randy said. Afterward, he had weighed her body down with a rock and helped throw her into the creek. "I looked in Randy’s eyes, and I knew he was sincere," says Gail. "I wanted to reach out to him, to thank him for his honesty." Josh took the stand next, giving a convincing performance of a polite, respectful eighteen-year-old. ("He was so well prepared that I could’ve slapped him and he would have said, ’Thank you,’" Cole recalls.) Josh testified that he hadn’t known about a plan to kill Heather and that it was Randy who had killed her. Only once did Josh stray from the script, but it was a costly slip: After hearing gunshots while urinating near the bridge that night, he said, he ran back to see what had happened. Then, he testified in the present tense, as if watching the events unfold before him, "I see Curtis—or, I mean, excuse me—I see Randy lowering the gun."
The jury found Josh guilty of capital murder, which carries an automatic life sentence, and of conspiracy to commit murder, for which the jury assessed a 99-year sentence to be served concurrently. Gail kissed Heather’s signet ring over and over as the jury read its verdict, silently rocking back and forth in her seat. In addition to his sports car, Josh’s family had taken to the courthouse dozens of balloons and presents for him—so sure had they been that he would be acquitted. Now they sat in stunned silence. "My son is no angel, but he damn sure is no murderer," his mother, Cherese Smith, told reporters.
Before the defendant was led away, Gail was allowed to say a few words to him directly. As she began to speak, imploring him to never forget Heather or the horror of his crime, Josh’s relatives stood up and filed out of the courtroom. "By your family exiting, I see why you are the way you are," Gail told Josh, who stared back at her blankly. "You haven’t ever had to pay for the mistakes you made. But you’re going to now. You took away the most important thing in our life."
Randy would stand trial later that year and be found guilty of capital murder. He too must serve a mandatory life sentence and will not be eligible for parole until the year 2036, when he will be 57 years old. While Cole is deservedly proud of his victories in these trials, he is subdued when he speaks of the teenager who, late in the game, found the strength of character to own up to his crime and paid for it dearly. "I don’t feel very good about Randy Wood being in prison for the rest of his life," says Cole. "I tried every way in the world to get him to plead guilty, but he would not take the plea. I’m sure there was some self-interest in his decision: He wanted people to know he didn’t kill Heather. But I will forever believe it’s because he has a conscience." Cole’s opinion is shared by Gail, who speaks of Randy with a bittersweet smile and says he is redeemed in her eyes. "Heather lay in that creek for eight days and he didn’t tell me, so he must be punished," she says. "But a lifetime is too much for Randy."
ON JANUARY 28, JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT, Curtis Gambill and Josh Bagwell slipped out of the Montague County jail and fled with two other inmates into the North Texas plains. The Montague Four, as they were soon known on TV news bulletins, escaped after taking a guard hostage with a homemade knife, forcing the only other guard on duty to open an outside gate. Though Curtis and Josh had been incarcerated in state prison, they had been transferred to Montague County earlier that month for Curtis to be prosecuted by Cole on charges of conspiracy to commit murder. Curtis was convicted on January 16 and given a life sentence, ensuring that he would spend the rest of his life in prison without the possibility of parole. When Cole learned of the escape, he was apoplectic. "You spend six years trying to make sure that these people will never hurt anyone ever again, and then in the blink of an eye, they’re gone," says Cole. "I carried a gun for the first time in my life. They had absolutely nothing to lose."
Curtis and Josh headed to the place they knew best, the Red River. Despite a massive manhunt with hundreds of lawmen from Texas and Oklahoma, the escapees traced their way through gullies and dry washes back to Belknap Creek, hiding in caves along the river bottom. Heather Rich’s killers went unseen for more than a week, holing up in a hunting cabin, then stealing a flatbed truck and a .22-caliber revolver from Dennis Wayne Goss’s parents’ home. Up and down the river, people loaded their guns and stayed indoors, while local law enforcement braced for a bloody shoot-out. But after nine days on the lam, Curtis and Josh found themselves surrounded by dozens of lawmen at a convenience store in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and surrendered after six hours of negotiation with the FBI. As Curtis was being led away in handcuffs, he locked eyes with Jefferson County sheriff Stan Barnes. "I’ll be seeing you again," Curtis told him with a cocky smile. Several weeks later prison guards thwarted yet another escape when they discovered that Josh’s mother, Cherese, had slipped Curtis and Josh hacksaw blades hidden inside two Bibles. She is in jail, awaiting trial.
Sheriff Barnes has reopened the investigation into Dennis Wayne Goss’s death, which was ruled a suicide by his predecessor. "Goss was a good friend of Curtis Gambill’s, and he was shot one week before Heather," Barnes says. "It was made to look like a suicide, but the shell casing next to him didn’t match the wadding found in his head wound. He’d told his dad he feared for his life." Barnes believes there is a connection between the two deaths. "Heather might have known something she wasn’t supposed to about the Goss murder." His opinion is widely shared around Waurika.
Now 23, Randy has tried hard to put distance between himself and the boy he was that night on Belknap Creek. While his co-defendants were classified as some of Texas’ most ill-behaved inmates even before the jailbreak, Randy has a spotless record. He now works on the prison garden crew, digging flower beds and pruning shrubs. "Heather is the first thing I think of in the morning and the last thing at night," he says. "I punish myself worse than anything in this prison ever could."
Gail and Duane divorced after the murder; the pain of memory was too great, she says. Both have moved away from Waurika and the bridge at Belknap Creek. It is still pocked with the buckshot that tore apart Heather’s body and scarred with tiny fissures that fan out along the bridge’s concrete edge. There, in faded blue spray paint, someone has scrawled the word "murderers." The creek, a deep blue ribbon shaded by hackberry and pecan trees, is a place of unlikely beauty; when the wind blows through the switchgrass lining its banks, ruffling the surface of the water, it is hard to believe that a crime of such horror could have happened in such a serene spot.
The creek appears in Gail’s nightmares, which have haunted her from the day Heather was found dead. In the dream, Heather is lying in the creek. She is alive, and she is begging for help. She is only a few feet away in the cold water. Gail holds out her hands, grasping for her daughter. But she can’t reach her. Heather is too far away.
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