Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
Law of The Land
No institution in the state is as iconic, and for more than a century none has been as resistant to change. But the Texas Rangers have finally made peace with the modern world: They’re more diverse, they’re more high-tech, and they’re more…diplomatic. Whatever it takes to battle the bad guys in the twenty-first century.
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SERGEANT RAY RAMON became a Ranger in 1995. He is stationed in Kingsville: One time I was in Eagle Pass helping a police investigator interview some people, and I will never forget how afraid this older Hispanic man was of me. I couldn’t understand it, because I had been fair to him and treated him with respect. When we left, I turned to the investigator and I said, “Man, that guy was so scared of me. I wonder what the deal was?” He said, “You’ve got to remember, Ranger, there’s a lot of history behind you.”
“NOW, WHAT EXACTLY DO YOU ALL DO?”
Modern Texas Rangers, like FBI agents, are highly trained investigators who assist local authorities on everything from homicides to public corruption cases. But they must be versatile, especially in rural areas, where they may be called on to do just about anything.
SERGEANT MARRIE ALDRIDGE became a Ranger in 1993. She is stationed in San Antonio: People are always saying, “You’re a Ranger—wow! Now, what exactly do you all do?”
BROOKS LONG: The day I got the phone call from Austin that I was going to be made Ranger was a very proud day for me. After I called my wife and told her the news, she called our next-door neighbor, who called another neighbor on our block. And the neighbor said, “Gosh, I didn’t even know he plays baseball!”
SERGEANT CHANCE COLLINS became a Ranger in 2002. He is stationed in San Antonio: Our job is assisting local law enforcement agencies—particularly smaller, rural agencies—that don’t have a lot of resources. We assist them on cases that they might not have the manpower or expertise to handle on their own.
SERGEANT KENNY RAY became a Ranger in 2001. He is stationed in Tyler: There are a handful of small-town police departments in the two rural counties I have that, from the chief on down, have never worked a homicide. Never. They don’t have any money, any equipment, any training, any experience. When they have a violent crime, like a murder or a sexual assault of a child, they don’t even know where to start. But they can make one phone call—every one of my agencies has my home phone number and my cell—and get not only a trained investigator but all the resources of the state police: access to the crime lab, helicopters if we’re doing a manhunt, other Rangers to help investigate, highway patrolmen, everything. And the neat thing is, we don’t come in and kick them out. They are still the lead agency, and we are there to assist them.
SERGEANT KYLE DEAN became a Ranger in 1992. He is stationed in Kerrville: Some Rangers are responsible for 6 counties, some for as few as 2, and every area is different. Because we’re scattered across 254 counties, we have this networking ability. So if something happens here in Kerrville, and I need help from Lubbock, I just pick up the phone. It’s a Ranger tradition that if another Ranger calls and has something that he needs help on, you drop whatever you’re doing and you get it done.
SERGEANT DAVID HULLUM became a Ranger in 1998. He is stationed in Eastland: I probably have more training hours than all the officers in a small, rural police or sheriff’s office combined. I mean, there are no crime-scene technicians in Eastland County—I am the crime-scene tech. I take the pictures, I make the measurements, I collect the evidence, I do the interviews, I file the cases. Sometimes I kid the guys at the local agencies that I work with. I tell them, “Man, I’m just here to build the float for you to ride in the parade.” Our job is to stay in the background, so a lot of times we don’t get the press. Unlike the sheriff or the DA, we don’t have to fight for reelection.
TRACY MURPHREE: People expect a lot from the Rangers. I mean, you could find Jimmy Hoffa and it would be no big deal because you’re expected to do that. You’re a Ranger. But you could screw it up in a heartbeat, and that’s where the pressure comes in. I’ve got this fear in the back of my mind that if I don’t do this right, with one mistake I could ruin the reputation that has been bought and paid for by people long before me.
BROOKS LONG: You’ve got to be a jack-of-all-trades out here in the rural areas. In any given day, you may have to investigate anything from capital murder to livestock theft.
SERGEANT JESS MALONE became a Ranger in 1994. He is stationed in Midland: I’ve helped investigate close to three hundred homicides in my thirteen years as a Ranger. They don’t pay me for what I can do, they pay me for what I know. I can see things in a crime scene that maybe a younger, more inexperienced officer might miss. So the homicides I work are the whodunits, not the smoking guns. A case that jumps to mind is a violent homicide of a female who had been bludgeoned to death with a hammer in the Odessa area. It was a gruesome crime scene—there was a lot of blood on her tile floor and shoe prints in the blood. At first glance it looked like two perpetrators had been in there, because there were two sets of shoes: tennis shoes and hiking boots. But as I got to looking at it, I saw that the tennis shoe was consistently a left foot and the hiking boot was consistently a right foot. I said, “There were either two guys in here, both of them hopping around on one foot, or there was one guy with two different shoes on.” The police department did a wonderful job finding the guy, and he had two different shoes on when they found him. He had an ankle injury, so he was wearing a hiking boot on one foot to support his ankle. We were able to make a case on him and arrest him.
CAPTAIN GERARDO DE LOS SANTOS became a Ranger in 1989. He is stationed in Austin and heads the Unsolved Crimes Investigation Team: You can’t do this job for very long without seeing the worst of what one human being can do to another. I’ve seen every which way you can kill a person—stabbed, burned, decapitated, cut up in pieces. You name it, I’ve seen it.
RAY MARTINEZ: People see the Rangers as neutral, so Rangers are often called in when county officials are being investigated for misappropriation of funds, corruption, voter fraud, what have you. The biggest case I ever worked was in Duval County, after George Parr committed suicide on April Fools’ Day, 1975. Parr had ruled South Texas through the patrón system for decades, and he had enormous power; he could deliver votes and guarantee that a certain candidate would win the governor’s race or other state offices. When he killed himself, there was a war between the factions to see who was going to control the county. Attorney General John Hill and some of his assistants, as well as us Rangers, went down there, and we started investigating the corruption that existed. My Ranger buddy Rudy Rodriguez and I lived in a motel in Alice for two years. We would go out at night and meet with the locals and eat fajitas and drink beer with them. We would earn their confidence and get them talking. I believe we ended up with 118 indictments, and we were able to obtain convictions in about 98 percent of them.
“BUT THEY NEVER TOOK AWAY TRICKERY.”
Until the sixties, when new court rulings hemmed them in, the Texas Rangers could do as they pleased when they interrogated a suspect; they could rough him up, browbeat a confession out of him, or move him from one county to the next so his attorney couldn’t find him, a practice sometimes called the Mexican two-step. Now Rangers, whose every move is scrutinized by defense attorneys and jurors, must adhere to stringent rules if they want their suspects’ confessions to be admissible in court. And yet Rangers have proved to be more skillful than ever in getting suspects to tell them about their crimes.
DOYLE HOLDRIDGE: A lot of the old-time Rangers were not happy when they had to start reading Miranda warnings to suspects. They thought the world had ended. They couldn’t figure out why on earth you would want to spend months investigating a case and hunting down a suspect, and then once you’ve got him, the first thing you have to say is “You have the right not to talk to me.”
JOAQUIN JACKSON: The courts gave us the writ of habeas corpus, so Rangers couldn’t take a suspect to New Mexico or the Panhandle or South Texas while his lawyers were looking for him. Then they gave us Miranda. But they never took away trickery.
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