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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As much as she liked the attention, the job took its toll on Lexus’s family life. “There were days,” she said, “when I went home and thought, ‘You can’t kiss these kids after what you’ve been doing,’ and it was hard. I’d go home and tell myself, ‘You’re doing it for those babies.’ If they wanted those little Shocker tennis shoes, they had them. That was the only way I could justify going there every day.” But the money wasn’t just going to the kids. Lexus began using cocaine. Before long, she was snorting up to $250 worth of powder a day. She lost weight, dwindling to a boyish 98-pound frame. “The cocaine made this job a lot easier,” Lexus said. But her relationship with her husband grew strained. Once, he asked if she did “extras” on the job, and she looked over at him and wanted to admit everything. Instead she laughed and shot back, “Why, do you want one?” Unlike her eager out-of-towners, he dropped the subject.
By midwinter, Lexus had separated from her husband. She moved out of their home and into a rented townhouse in Odessa, taking her escalating drug habit with her. Now that she was living in town, the line of men willing to risk their careers and marriages for a few minutes with Lexus only grew longer. Anyone with an agenda and the knowledge of the parlor’s customer base would have perfect ammunition to bring down the lot of them. Worse for the customers, Lexus had a flawless memory: “I’d say, ‘How’d the game go?’ ‘How are the kids?’ ‘How was the marathon?’ They were amazed. I could remember everything about them.”
AT TEN O’CLOCK in the morning on May 27, Kathy, Sharon, Paige, and Melinda were lounging around on couches in the front room of the Healing Touch, waiting for Lexus to return from the store with a couple packs of beer. When she finally arrived, she put down the cases and took a call on her cell phone; before she could hang up, more than a dozen officers had rushed in and slammed the girls up against the walls. Sharon, still unaware that the officers were investigating her for drugs, sat calmly and finished chewing her burrito. “You got some paperwork for me?” she asked.
The agents responded by handing her a search warrant for drugs based on an undercover informant’s report that Kathy and Sharon had sold him seven grams of cocaine. Their search of the madams’ home and business came up dry. But when the police searched the girls and their cars, they found cocaine on Melinda and Lexus. And just like that, nobody’s secrets were safe in Odessa. After Paige, Lexus, and Melinda were separated, the three did what all prostitutes do: They spilled the names of their clients. When they didn’t know the clients’ full names, the girls would be shown pictures of men that the officers had seen on the tape; the girls would answer, “Yes, I’ve been with him x number of times and he wanted y done to him and I charged him z.”
The officers were stunned at the girls’ memories, particularly Lexus’s. Despite being so nervous that her hands were shaking and so strung out on cocaine that her nose bled through the entire five-hour interview, she had a “photographic memory,” said Tacker, who was still impressed months after the arrest. “At first I thought she was bullshitting, until I started interviewing the guys and the stories were identical. I’d ask, ‘How many times have you been with that guy?’ and she’d say, ‘Nine.’ Then I’d ask the guy the same question and he’d say, ‘Nine.’ She remembered everything. There was no discrepancy.”
What puzzled Lexus was the investigators’ interest in specific individuals. “There were many names we gave them that they didn’t want, people who weren’t prominent enough,” Lexus said. “They said, ‘We want folks we can do something with.’”
With the help of Lexus’s and the other girls’ statements and a client book obtained from Kathy’s former parlor, Middessa Therapy, the police got to work conducting interviews. When officers brought the accused men into the station for questioning, 95 percent of them confessed to soliciting prostitution. Still, the matter remained relatively quiet until the June 3 edition of the Odessa American, whose headline read “Deputy District Attorney Hadden Resigns: Prostitution Investigation Implicates Dozens of Prominent Businessmen.” At that point the town went crazy.
“The calls started coming,” said Duarte. “‘Who else is on the list?’”
The names circulating around town, based on nothing more than rumors, were soon being discussed in local barbershops, and in Odessa’s offices there were endless games around the water cooler of guess-the-john. On the “wish list” were men who had nothing in common, one officer said, except that they were “universally disliked.” The local media were demanding that the names be released to shut down the rumor mill, but the police insisted that the nature of the case required that they investigate fully, which meant that only a handful of officers were available to conduct more than one hundred interviews.
For the next two months, everybody in town was on edge, including the cops. Even innocent men grew nervous. One man with a common first and last name warned his wife, “Honey, there are a lot of men in this town with the same name as mine.”
“You’re right,” the wife responded curtly. “And you better hope none of them are on that list.”
WHEN THE ARRESTS BEGAN on July 27, Odessans gathered around televisions to watch the news unfold. Channel 9 broke into its programming at 8:15 a.m. and carried the event live. On a morning of pouring rain, the police arrested the Healing Touch women and 68 men, along with Middessa Therapy’s owner, Janet Lietz, who was arrested for promoting prostitution. In order to process the group with the utmost efficiency, they brought everyone to a large facility close to the Ector County Detention Center. By the time the police arrived with the first batch of detainees, television reporters had already set up outside. Next to the news trucks, half a dozen angry wives, clearly plotting their divorces, stood stone-faced as they taped the entire episode with home video cameras.
Inside the building, some of the men recognized each other and tipped their hats or chuckled nervously. They sat in rows and waited for their turn at one of four processing tables, which were set up alphabetically by last name. The men faced a $2,000 fine and up to six months in jail, but the standard plea offer was $1,500 and thirty days in jail, with a trial to begin in late December or sometime this month. Most of them begged the officers to hurry up and get them the hell out of the building.
But the humiliation didn’t end there. The list of 68 johns was also printed in the Odessa American the next morning. Locals immediately picked off the names they recognized: A substitute teacher. Attorneys. Ranchers and multimillionaires. Two deacons. An accountant. A welder. Even an editor at the Odessa American. Attorney Scott Tidwell, who had been a Healing Touch client but who also threw parties with his favorite Irving prostitute at Odessa’s finest hotel, was charged with two counts of promotion of prostitution and one count of prostitution.
The bust provided endless entertainment for those who weren’t involved. “When their favorite villains didn’t appear [on the list], they just knew there had to be a conspiracy,” said Rick Pippins, a lieutenant at the Criminal Investigations Bureau. “They were so disappointed they didn’t appear on the list that they figured there had to be a cover-up.” Some people around town whispered that the sting operation was politically motivated, that members of one party or another were overlooked. Others, who took the matter less seriously, began wearing T-shirts with slogans that read “As a matter of fact, I am not on ‘The List’!” and “As a matter of fact, my man is not on ‘The List’!”—even “Odessa Sex Scandal 2004,” with all the names of the johns printed on the back. The accused were razzed around town with comments like, “Goddam! Why didn’t you tell me about that place?”
Sharon and Kathy received a year and a day in prison for the federal drug charges and two years for the state prostitution charges. The prostitutes faced an average of fifteen days in jail and a $1,000 fine (sentencing will be concluded by the end of this month). They have had difficulty adjusting to the salary of a grocery store clerk or a secretary, but they all seem relieved that the Healing Touch is closed.
When I last saw Lexus, in October, she still seemed unashamed of her past. Her family weathered the scandal well and even teased her about her involvement. When the news of the bust hit the media, her mother joked, “My baby made the front of the newspaper!” But her perky and positive perspective seemed strained as she discussed quitting her cocaine habit and going in front of a judge to get joint custody of her children. She was discouraged with her job searches, and even when she had found work, she told me, she’d been fired promptly enough to suspect that her bosses had been tipped off about her affiliation with the list. At one point, she looked at the palms of her hands with disgust when she talked about the things she had done. “I think I may have to leave this place,” she told me.
But for the men on the list, Odessa is a forgive-and-forget kind of town. Time passes quickly there, just as it passed in La Grange, which is now better known for the ZZ Top song than the Chicken Ranch. One Odessa local told me, “Several years ago a county law judge was sanctioned for tying up his secretary and watching S&M tapes with her; now he writes plays for the community theater.” And don’t expect the parlor business to disappear anytime soon. Just before Sharon Joyner went to jail in October, she told me she’d received so many calls that she had to change her number. “Are you crazy?” she would ask, when prodded for recommendations on other parlors. “Have you not been reading the paper? Didn’t I see your name on the list?”
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