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.
In 2003, A YOUNG MAN NAMED RODDY DEAN PIPPIN moved into a two-bedroom frame house in the tiny community of Odell, just south of the Red River in far North Texas. It was a nice little house with a front porch that didn’t sag too much. Behind the house were a stable and a corral for Roddy’s horse, and the driveway was long enough for his Dodge four-by-four pickup and his fourteen-foot cattle trailer.
Roddy was a handsome fellow, lean as a fence post, with tousled brown hair and piercing brown eyes. Whenever he drove into the nearby towns of Vernon or Quanah, he wore starched Wranglers held up by a hand-tooled belt with a trophy buckle, Justin cowboy boots, a pearl-button Western shirt, and a gray beaver Resistol that must have set him back at least $500. He was invariably polite, never failing to raise his Resistol upon meeting a lady. He’d drop by the Medicine Mound Depot, Quanah’s best restaurant, and order a medium-rare steak, fried okra, a baked potato with all the trimmings, a garden salad with ranch dressing, and a glass of milk with ice, and he’d talk in an almost courtly manner to the waitress about the weather and country music and the cattle business.
If the waitress asked him what he did for a living, Roddy would smile and say that he dabbled in cattle himself. He’d throw down a generous tip and head out the door. “Vaya con Dios,” he’d tell the waitress. “God willing that the creek don’t rise, we’ll meet again soon.” Then he would get into his pickup and drive up and down the back highways that ran alongside some of the state’s most prosperous ranches.
Roddy was indeed in the cattle business. But he didn’t exactly buy and sell cows. He was a professional cattle rustler, and he was as good as they come. In an eighteen-month spree, he slipped onto ranches in North Texas at least 25 times, hauling away more than 130 head of cattle, their total worth reportedly around $100,000. Like the great rustlers from the Old West, he used broken limbs from mesquite trees to cover his tracks (his tire tracks, that is, not horse tracks). In the bed of his pickup, he carried an iron to brand the cows he stole (actually, an electric brand heated with a twelve-volt battery, not an old-fashioned brand heated over a campfire), as well as portable fencing, which he used to erect temporary pens on back pastures to corral cattle. He went so far as to put together what he described as a “rustling gang”; according to the police, his was made up of two rather dim-witted twin brothers and their girlfriends.
In August 2004, when Roddy was finally cornered, law enforcement officers were stunned to discover that he was not a hardened renegade cowboy. He was barely an adult, only twenty years old, with no ranching background and no criminal record whatsoever. He was also a severe diabetic who injected himself up to six times a day with insulin to avoid debilitating seizures—hardly the kind of condition associated with a Texas outlaw.
What was perhaps most surprising about Roddy, however, was his personality. “In all the talks I had with him after his arrest, he was completely well mannered and courteous, never using one word of profanity,” said Scott Williamson, a respected field inspector for the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association (TSCRA) who works throughout northwest Texas investigating livestock theft. “He didn’t have tattoos. He didn’t have a drinking or drug problem. He looked me in the eye, and he was strictly ‘yes sir, no sir.’ I couldn’t help but think, ‘Why would a kid with such nice qualities want to turn himself into a no-good cattle thief?’”
When I got my first look at Roddy, in a visitors room at the state prison in Huntsville, I asked myself the very same question. We were separated by a wall of safety glass, and he apologized for not being able to shake my hand. “Sir, I always believe a good handshake is important to begin a friendship,” he said, his voice gentle, with a soft country lilt. He remained standing, waiting for me to sit first. Then I noticed him looking over my shoulder toward an open door.
“Sir, is it a nice day out there, the sunlight coming through the trees?” Roddy asked. I stared at him, not sure what to say. Roddy paused and swallowed. “I can’t tell you how much I miss those afternoons riding my horse through the backcountry, breathing the pure Texas air and feeling that sun on my face.”
BEFORE I HEARD ABOUT RODDY, I had assumed that there was no such thing as a modern-day cattle rustler. Every now and then, I’d read a brief story in one of the state’s newspapers about a down-on-his-luck blue-collar worker who had swiped a few cows from someone else’s ranch and tried to sell them at a nearby sale barn. (With cattle worth more than $1 a pound, a six-hundred-pound steer now sells for more than $600.)
Occasionally, I’d come across a story about some men who had formed what the newspapers would describe as a “cattle theft ring.” But they too seemed to be mostly amateurs who had gotten together to pull off a single heist and then gone their separate ways. A while back, for instance, there was a story about a group of Texas Department of Criminal Justice employees, apparently unhappy with their low pay, who had decided to steal some cows off their own prison’s farm. I’d also read about some teenagers and young men who had devised a plan to steal cattle off the Santa Rosa Ranch, in South Texas, to pay for a spring break vacation. “You don’t exactly come across anyone these days who studies all his career options and then announces, ‘By God, I’m going to start a cattle rustling operation,’” said Dan Mike Bird, the burly district attorney of Hardeman and Wilbarger counties, where Roddy did most of his rustling. “There will always be someone who will give cattle rustling a try, especially when he learns the kind of money he can make. But he usually doesn’t last very long at it. He finds out in a hurry that it’s just a hell of a lot easier to steal other things.”
Indeed, trying to get away with one cow from a ranch can be backbreaking work, especially if you have little idea what you’re doing. Over the years, law enforcement officers have driven up on out-of-breath good old boys struggling to push wailing cows into the backs of their pickups (or, in one case, the backseat of a car). They’ve pulled over wild-eyed plumbers and air-conditioning repairmen who had been able to get a cow or two into their trucks but who then could not stop weaving back and forth across the highway during their getaways due to the cows constantly shifting their weight around.
What’s more, a Texas cattle rustler has to worry about not only the county sheriff but also the powerful TSCRA, an organization begun in 1877 by ranchers who were plagued by large-scale rustling. Today, whenever a rancher reports to the TSCRA that some of his cattle are missing, one of the association’s 29 field inspectors is immediately put on the case. The field inspectors, who literally wear white cowboy hats when they come to work, are genuine lawmen, still specially commissioned by the state, as they were a century ago, to carry guns and make arrests. Throughout rural Texas they are known as “the cattle rangers,” and they are famous for their ability to hunt down cattle thieves. At ranches, they study pastures, hoof prints, tire tracks, and broken fences like CSI detectives, and if necessary, they will take DNA samples from mother cows to see if they can be matched to stolen calves. Then, when they come across someone who they believe is stealing cattle, they will stake out his home, tail him day and night, and even put a GPS locator on his pickup to see where he goes.
When I spent a day this spring with Scott Williamson, he was at his office in the small town of Seymour by six in the morning, and for the next nine hours he drove more than two hundred miles, from one ranch to another and then on to county courthouses and small-town police departments. Williamson, who’s 43, is the field inspector for District Eight, an area of seventeen counties south and east of the Panhandle that is home to some of the state’s most historic ranches: the Pitchfork, the Four Sixes, the Matador, the Morehouse, the Swenson, and the Waggoner, which, at 520,000 acres, is the largest contiguous ranch in Texas. Every year he receives around 80 calls from ranchers in his district who believe they have suffered some sort of theft. (Statewide, the TSCRA receives between 1,100 and 1,700 calls annually from ranchers reporting potential theft.) Although most of his investigations go nowhere—he concludes that the missing cattle have either died, gotten lost, or wandered onto another ranch and been accidentally sold by another rancher—he still arrests about twenty individuals every year for theft of livestock or livestock equipment. He has not only nabbed the run-of-the-mill rural criminals, but he has also arrested small ranchers who have taken a few of their neighbor’s cows and rebranded them in an attempt to increase the size of their own herds. He has even brought down country con artists who lease out pastures to other ranchers, promising to watch over those ranchers’ cattle, but then sell the cattle instead, disappearing with the profits.
“A few of these thieves might get away from me once or twice, but if they stay around here, I’ll get them,” Williamson told me when he was back at his office, the walls of which were covered with photos of legendary field inspectors from years past along with crayon drawings of cattle brands that his young daughter had done for an elementary-school history project. “You can count on that.”
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