Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
“She Had Brains, a Body, and the Ability To Make Men Love Her”
How a 22-year-old former homecoming queen discovered prostitution, helped put 68 high-profile johns in handcuffs, and brought Odessa to its knees.
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THE HEALING TOUCH HAD been looking for a new employee since the late summer, when a 32-year-old prostitute named “Kelly” had abruptly quit. A mother and former waitress who had been raised Pentecostal, Kelly had worked at the Healing Touch from the beginning and had established herself as a reliable moneymaker. Desperate for cash, she was working up to fourteen clients a day, taking in $2,000 to $3,000 a week. But one day she recognized a customer in the lobby, and it hit a little too close to home. “Aren’t you the preacher who gave my grandma’s eulogy?” she asked. “Who baptized my son?” The man nodded, unfazed. Then he asked for a massage, and Kelly led him into one of the private rooms.
Everyone who worked at the Healing Touch was used to this kind of awkward overlap between the two worlds of Odessa. Day-to-day navigation through restaurants or convenience stores was always risky for the prostitutes, who learned to politely ignore their customers outside of work. Encounters were even trickier for Kathy and Sharon, who were both social and knew many folks around town. The madams frequently ran into couples they knew, and they’d listen to the wives give updates about their children or details about their most recent vacation, pretending that they didn’t know all of the details, that they hadn’t already heard the news back at the Healing Touch from the husband that very afternoon. “You just smile and ooh and aah and go about your business,” Sharon said.
But after a second visit from her pastor, Kelly couldn’t stomach business as usual. The next time he showed up, she passed him off to one of the other girls. Still, nightmares about her job at the Healing Touch began to wake her up at night. At work and at home, she started popping Xanax like potato chips. One day she was putting on her makeup at work when she decided to stop in next door at the Higher Realm Ministries, where she cried for hours and confessed her sins to the preacher, Kennith Hughes. She quit that afternoon and took the next bus back to her dad, in Arkansas. Hughes, meanwhile, called Crime Stoppers. “Now, I’m not a criminal investigator,” he told them, “but it’s strange that only women work at the Healing Touch and only men go in.” A week later, Kelly herself phoned the hotline and reported the business’s illegal activities, adding, “There’s an assistant district attorney involved, lawyers, businessmen.”
“I think they thought I was bullshitting them,” she told me.
But Kelly wasn’t lying. From the beginning, even before Lexus showed up, the parlor’s clients were not young men sowing their oats or truck drivers pulling over to the side of the road for a quickie. Those who stopped in at the Healing Touch were the kind of men you’d meet at a Rotary Club luncheon. Some were older, like the septuagenarian who finished a threesome with two prostitutes by telling Sharon, “This is simultaneously my biggest waste of money and my best use of it.” But more often they were married Odessa professionals aged forty to sixty. For them, the Healing Touch was almost considered an errand, part of their routine. In the middle of the day, on the way to the bank or the drugstore, they’d stop in for a half-hour visit. “God, I had no idea how much a man needs to be told he’s studly,” said Sharon. “You’d be surprised how many times I’d hear the girls chuckling over how so-and-so came in and spent fifteen minutes flexing in the mirror and asking, ‘Do you think I’m fat?’ Oh, absolutely not. Men need to feel important. And sometimes family and pressure at work and aging takes that away from them.” These men included Scott Tidwell, a well-known lawyer who stopped by now and then, and Lee Hadden, an assistant district attorney who was a weekly regular despite the fact that his wife was considered to be one of the best-looking women in town.
And in truth, Hughes’s claim that the Healing Touch might be more than an honest-to-goodness massage parlor was not earth-shattering news to Jesse “Chuy” Duarte and Mike Tacker, both detective sergeants and supervisors in the Odessa Police Department’s Narcotics and Vice Unit. Duarte, a tattooed, soft-spoken cop with salt-and-pepper hair, and Tacker, a redhead with cropped hair and brown eyes, had met Kathy back when they had busted her during a drug raid at her house in the early nineties. They were aware that she was a madam by trade but generally left her alone. Tacker explains, “You get a misdemeanor versus a meth lab next to a day care? You have to pick and choose.” Duarte said the only remarkable characteristic about the Healing Touch, from the outside, was the business’s one-thousand-foot proximity to a school zone. And it wasn’t until the investigations unit began getting flooded with calls that they felt compelled to check it out. “I received ten or fifteen tips on this place a day,” said Duarte incredulously, leaning forward over a table for emphasis. Tacker grinned with amused bewilderment. “We got more calls on this place than any other prostitution place I’ve seen,” he said.
Duarte and Tacker sent an undercover agent in for a massage, but he was no match for Sharon. She deftly sent him away with instructions to get a referral, laughing into her sleeve as he walked out the door. The officers realized that if they were going to bring the Healing Touch down, they’d need something bigger. And when a source accused the madams of dealing drugs, they knew just what to look for.
In November, with the help of the FBI, the Odessa police installed a surveillance camera across the street from the parlor and began to man the monitor from the police station around the clock. The officer on surveillance duty wrote down license plate numbers and names of recognizable figures, zooming in on the Hummers, Jaguars, and Mercedes for a better look. Members of the narcotics crew would walk past the monitor on the way out of the office and shake their heads and groan as they watched men who owned major businesses in town, men they knew well. “I had been best man at one client’s wedding,” an officer told me.
A FEW WEEKS LATER, on her first day at the Healing Touch, Lexus took home $700. It was good enough money to keep her coming back. Within a week she was pulling in $200 to $1,000 per day working the ten-to-six shift Monday through Friday. She drove the hour-and-a-half commute between Big Spring and Odessa, returning home each night to cook dinner, draw her kids their baths, and give her husband (who believed she was working as a legitimate massage therapist) a kiss good-night.
And initially, at least, she took pride in her work. “You have to know how to give an actual massage,” she told me, reminding me that she had been formally trained in that skill. “You have to get in there and rub on them. When they leave, their back should feel better . . . You have to use your elbows.”
And she understood that the job took more than physical labor. “I didn’t see myself as a prostitute,” she said. “I was a friend. I always said, ‘I’m not a prostitute. I’m customer service.’” She laughed, straightened her back, cocked her head to the side, and clarified this idea in a tone of mock seriousness: “Customer service rep.” She said she counseled her clients on ways they could reengage their wives in a relationship. Many of them told her things like, “I wish my wife would call me when she was thinking about me.” If Lexus was unsympathetic to these complaints, she always felt free to swat them on the shoulder and tell them they were “being an ass.” “You need to buy your wife some flowers,” she’d say. And they would.
Her work ethic did not go unnoticed. Clients who used to ask for the blond bombshell Paige were now asking for the bubblier Lexus. And hardly anybody went for the all-business Melinda. “Bless her heart,” Paige said. “Melinda would always talk about her problems, and nobody wanted to hear them.” (“Customers didn’t really like my attitude,” Melinda admitted to me.) That Christmas, clients were already giving Lexus bonuses of up to $1,500. They’d ask her to go on vacations, even beg to be her sugar daddy.
Kathy and Sharon, meanwhile, were hearing reports from their in-the-know clients that the police were hoping to infiltrate their operation. But the two madams figured that as long as they could keep the cops from getting into one of their massage rooms, no prostitution charges could be made. They figured they were facing misdemeanor charges at the most; they had no idea there was a drug investigation going on. And with wealthier and wealthier clients showing up by the day, they continued undaunted.
Like all good businesswomen, they also wished to increase productivity. They knew that the industry was changing. Sharon put a computer in the girls’ waiting room and had them post their photos and contact information on an international adult-entertainment Web page. Within each profile, the site listed the tricks a girl was willing to perform, how much she charged, and reviews that tended to read more like testimonials. The evaluations poured in from Healing Touch clients. “Oh, God, I checked those reviews!” Lexus said, laughing. “I hated them. Some of them were such lies.” Within a few weeks, Lexus was so popular that the Web site’s administrator requested a limit on her customers’ postings because the inundation of reviews was crashing his server. Thanks to the exposure, Lexus began taking “out-calls” with men from as far away as Germany. “They came in from New York, Colorado, San Antonio,” she said, grinning her big cheerleader smile. “I was like, ‘You want me?’ and they were like, ‘Yeah!’”
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