The Last Rustler
Roddy Dean Pippin was a polite young cowboy who loved Louis L’Amour novels and dreamed about life on the open range. He said he was in the cattle business—but he actually led an unlikely gang of thieves who hit countless ranches across North Texas. And, just like in the stories from the Old West, he couldn’t outrun the law forever.
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Although Roddy was not feeling well—he had spent a few days at a hospital in Chillicothe recovering from another diabetic episode—he told the twins he was ready. One morning in early August, Darrell arrived with Melissa, and the three of them spent the day looking for cattle. That night, while the very pregnant Melissa stayed at Roddy’s home, relaxing on the couch, Roddy and Darrell grabbed eight head of cattle from a pen on a ranch near Quanah belonging to Joe Lindsey.
They returned to Odell to pick up Melissa, and at about two in the morning, they headed off for the sale barn in Decatur, Roddy driving his pickup with the trailer full of cattle and Darrell and Melissa behind him in their pickup. It wasn’t long before they realized they were being followed by another pickup. In that truck was the same woman who had seen the pickup and cattle trailer racing down the highway earlier that summer. The woman, Shawn Wise, the 29-year-old daughter of a retired county farm agent, had decided that this time she was going to find out who was behind the wheel.
Roddy and Darrell, talking on their cell phones, tried to outrun her. They roared down one farm-to-market road after another. Inside Roddy’s trailer, dizzy from the wild getaway ride, the cattle mooed and mooed. Roddy and Darrell then split up, Roddy heading toward the Oklahoma border and Darrell and Melissa heading toward Vernon. Sticking with Roddy, Wise pulled out her cell phone and called Larry Lee, who was then the chief sheriff’s deputy of Wilbarger County. Lee threw on his clothes and caught up with Roddy, while the Vernon police caught up with Darrell and Melissa. When Roddy, Darrell, and Melissa were taken to jail, Lee looked at them and said to himself, “These people are cattle rustlers?”
The next morning, after attending church services at the First Baptist Church in Seymour, where his son was being baptized, Williamson arrived at the county jail to interrogate Roddy. Roddy insisted that he had purchased the cows in Oklahoma. But by then Lindsey, the rancher, had called Williamson to say he couldn’t find some cattle he had just penned the night before. The brand on the cattle, he said, was Lazy J, which happened to be the same brand on the cattle in Roddy’s trailer.
Roddy suddenly had no defense. Despite all his plans to evade detection, he had been brought down, like cattle rustlers of old, by the simple branding iron.
IF, AT THAT POINT, Roddy had kept his mouth shut, he probably would have been booked on a single charge: theft of livestock under ten head, a fourth-degree felony. And because he had no prior criminal record, it was likely he would get probation. But a day after he was arrested, Roddy talked with his father. “My dad said to me, ‘Son, we raised you to be better than this,’” Roddy recalled. “‘If there’s anything else you need to get off your chest, you need to do it. Your game is over, acting like a rustler. You need to stand up and take your punishment like a real man.’”
Roddy nodded, shook his father’s hand, and over the next few days told Williamson about dozens of thefts, from cattle to trailers to saddles. “I told him that I was sorry, but that the rustling had gotten into my blood,” Roddy said.
Williamson and district attorney Dan Mike Bird, who knew most of the ranchers who had been robbed, made it clear that they were not going to show Roddy any mercy. “Out here, our opinions about cattle rustlers haven’t changed since the frontier days, when cattle thieves were hanged,” Bird told me. “We don’t take kindly to any cattle rustler, no matter how pleasant he may be.” A plea bargain was arranged in which Roddy received four consecutive two-year sentences with no chance of parole. Roddy gave interviews to a few newspaper reporters—“One hundred years ago, I would have gotten the rope,” he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, explaining his decision to accept such a harsh sentence—and then off he went to state prison.
THAT’S WHEN RODDY and I began corresponding. “I would be honored to tell a few of my stories and intrigue the Texas Public,” he wrote in his first letter. “God willing that the creek don’t rise, I’ll hear back from you soon.”
Then, over the next few months, he began sending me short stories he had written in his prison cell that were based on his days as a rustler—the first stories, he said, he had ever written. In one of the stories, titled “The Red River Herd,” he wrote about two hundred head of cattle nearly trampling him to death in a stampede. (Roddy always served as the narrator and main character in his stories.) In another, “Twister on the Red River,” he wrote about a tornado descending from the sky just as he was rounding up some stolen cattle. He began “Russeling from the Hyson Well Road” (Roddy always spelled “rustling” as “russeling”) with a scene of himself awakening in bed with his girlfriend. “The white satin curtain drapes blew in the window as I twisted in my blue silk sheet and rolled to my left to find Alexcia’s warm body compressed against mine,” he wrote.
But, Roddy continued, as much as he wanted to stay next to her, “cattle ran through my mind.” He slipped out of bed, put on his cowboy clothes, and drove out Hyson Well Road, where he knew cattle were grazing—“large, hairy, horned, hooved animals known as the last true legacy to me of the west. … I could hear the sound of two red tailed hawks screeching as they circled over the herd. … In the smell of manure drifting in the fresh air, I could smell money. And in my mind that particular odor was the sweetest scent a man could and ever would have the pleasure of smelling.”
In the last scene of the story, Roddy walked out of the sale barn with a check in his hand. “My spur rolls rattled on the pavement below my feet, and I walked with my head held highly tilted toward the sky,” Roddy wrote. “I knew that I had once again successfully accomplished another cattle russeling, and would live to russel again, from Hyson Well Road.”
When I went to see Roddy in prison, I told him that maybe he was on his way to becoming the next Louis L’Amour. “Sir, it would be an honor if I could become a writer and pass on my love of the Western life to others,” he replied.
By then, Roddy had been incarcerated for nearly a year and a half. Because of his diabetes, he didn’t look good at all; his blood sugar levels had been fluctuating wildly, and he had suffered a number of life-threatening seizures. Although he had been transferred to Huntsville’s W. J. Estelle Unit, which contained a 136-bed medical facility, two Huntsville lawyers who had learned of his deteriorating condition, David O’Neill and Scott Pawgan, were asking the state’s parole board to grant Roddy an early release, claiming that he needed to be treated by qualified doctors at a hospital. O’Neill went so far as to say that because of the prison’s limited resources to treat severe diabetes, Roddy could very well lose some limbs and perhaps die in prison before completing his sentence.
“All I want is one more chance to be outside,” Roddy told me. “I dream of sitting beneath an oak tree, fully dressed in my cowboy apparel, with my felt cowboy hat arched toward the heavens on a beautiful spring morning.”
“But wouldn’t you be tempted to rustle again?” I asked him.
He looked me right in the eye and said, “If people knew how I felt now, they would know that I would never go back,” he said. “Sir, I promise you, that is in my past. I truly hope that someday I can visit churches and schools and speak to children about the temptations of rustling and of the outlaw life in general.”
RODDY’S APPLICATION for a medical release was turned down by the state parole board. His lawyers then filed a motion for “shock probation,” which argued that Roddy had been so changed by going to prison that he was no longer a criminal threat. The hearing was held in Quanah in early March, in the court where Roddy had received his original sentence. A few of the ranchers who had lost their cattle to Roddy were in the courtroom. Out of respect for the proceedings, they had removed their cowboy hats and held them in their hands. Williamson testified about the extent of Roddy’s career as a rustler (as always, he referred to Roddy only as a “thief”), and the head of the Estelle Unit’s medical facility testified that Roddy was receiving the “best care under the circumstances.” He said that the nurses were checking his glucose levels every day and that a doctor was always on call in case Roddy suffered a seizure.
Roddy’s lawyers had his mother testify. She said that if her son was given probation, “I will be his ball and chain. He will not be a reoffender.” She paused. “He will be the boy he used to be.”
When Roddy took the stand, he looked toward the ranchers and in a halting voice said, “If I could take it all back, if I could pay you all back, I would.” And then the young man who had turned himself into one of Texas’s great cattle rustlers burst into tears.
Though there were plenty of people in the courtroom who believed that Roddy was genuinely sorry, he had no chance, of course. The judge, who lives outside Vernon, denied the motion for probation. I watched as a sheriff’s deputy escorted Roddy out the main door of the courthouse and across the street to the county jail, where he would spend the night before being taken back to Huntsville. It was a beautiful spring morning. The sun was out, shining right down on Roddy’s face, and in the distance, just past downtown, were some pastures dotted with cattle.
It was exactly the kind of morning that Roddy liked to write about in his stories. I thought I saw him lift his head and look around. But if he did, he had only a moment to take everything in. “Come on, boy,” the sheriff’s deputy said, and Roddy lowered his head and walked away.
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