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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GERARDO DE LOS SANTOS: I had a case in Montague County in the early nineties, a homicide in a drug deal gone bad. We knew who had shot the victim, and we knew that the suspect and an accomplice had dumped the body, but we didn’t know where the body was. One day I visited the accomplice at work, and he agreed to come down to the police department for questioning. He told me, “I had nothing to do with that guy’s murder!” I said, “I know, I believe you. I also know where the body’s at, but I want to know the route you took. I’d really like for you to show me. If you lie to me, I’ll know it, and I’ll tell the DA you’re not cooperating.” He agreed, and so we went out into the country. He’d say, “Turn right here,” and I’d say, “Good, good,” like I knew where we were going. This was all a giant bluff, of course. Finally he said, “Okay, stop right here.” We got out of my car, and he took me through the brush, showing me how they carried the body. Finally we got to a ravine and he said, “We dragged him all the way out …,” and he looked down and the body was lying right in front of him. He was completely shocked. He looked at me and said, “I thought you’d found him!” And I said, “I just did.”
RAY RAMON: I remember Oscar Rivera, another Ranger, gave me some good advice. He told me, “Ray, if you ever want to get confessions from people, you have to be patient and you’ve got to be their friend. And you’ll be surprised at what people will tell you.”
DAVID HULLUM: When I first started my career, I thought the way you got confessions was you just hollered and screamed and finally the guy would confess. And then I got around investigators who knew what they were doing, and I realized that you can’t be confrontational. The first thing I’ll tell a suspect is “Look, I’m not here to judge you. I’m just here to deal with the facts pertaining to the offense.” They really respond to that. I’ve got a pretty high confession rate, which just goes to show you that even a blind hog can root up an acorn every once in a while.
TRACY MURPHREE: What you really want to do when you’re sitting across from a child killer or a child molester is reach across the table and strangle him, but you’ve got to buy him a Coke and talk to him and get on his level. I had a case in Lewisville where a four-year-old boy was beaten to death and his body was found stuffed in the trunk of his father’s car. I’ve got little ones at home, so that was very hard for me to comprehend. But I interviewed the boy’s father with Lewisville police, and we kept our cool and got down on his level. We told him that we understood that kids cry and drive you nuts and that accidents happen. We knew that we would be able to prove in court that it wasn’t an accident, but he went with that version of events. We got a confession, and now he’s doing life in prison.
KENNY RAY: I had a case where a guy was raping his own little girl. Not only was he doing that, he was allowing a friend to come over and rape her too. She was six years old. What you do when you sit down to talk to someone like that is you just decide that you’re going to be an advocate for that little girl. That’s what motivates you to sit there and deal with a monster like that in a humane way. Most of us are daddies, so the first thought that comes to mind is you just want to put a boot on the guy’s neck.
DOYLE HOLDRIDGE: There are a lot of expectations on a Ranger’s shoulders when he walks into a room to question a suspect. If he’s working on ten different cases, what does his community expect him to do with those ten cases? They expect him to solve all ten cases. They expect him to bat a thousand. They pay baseball players millions of dollars when they bat three hundred, but they expect us to bat a thousand so that is what you’ve got to have in your mind when you walk into a room to question a suspect: “I’m going to bat a thousand.”
AL CUELLAR was a Ranger from 1978 to 1996. He is now retired and lives in Helotes: You have to make a suspect like you; you have to make him want to tell you what he did. And another thing: You can’t go in there on an empty stomach, because you don’t want to tire out before they do. Go in there full, and them hungry.
SERGEANT MATT CAWTHON became a Ranger in 1992. He is stationed in Waco: Al Cuellar could get a confession out of someone and they would thank him. He’d say, “You’re at a crossroads in your life, and you can choose the right path or the wrong one. You can tell me what happened.” And they’d tell him everything.
AL CUELLAR: When I was promoted to Ranger in ’78, there weren’t but two Rangers besides me who could speak Spanish, so I was traveling all over the state interviewing people. I got confessions from murderers, from rapists, from arsonists and thieves. I would spend an hour chitchatting with them about everything in the world before we’d talk about what they had done. My favorite line I’d say—and it was very successful—was “And then things got out of hand, didn’t they?” A lot of times they would just nod their head. It was their first admission of guilt. They wouldn’t say anything at that point, they’d just nod their head, and I’d know that I had broken them.
DOYLE HOLDRIDGE: A good old boy who has the gift of gab, who can get out there and talk to people—that’s something that’s never going to be outdated. I’ve never seen anybody set a computer in a room with a crook and then walk out with a confession.
“YOU CAN TAKE THE HORSE AND THE WINCHESTER …”
In the past fifteen years, DNA technology and fingerprint analysis have transformed the Rangers’ job, allowing them to close cases that would otherwise remain unsolved.
CAPTAIN KIRBY DENDY became a Ranger in 1987. He heads Company F, in Waco: The cases are the same as they used to be, but the manner in which they’re solved—and the speed in which they are solved—has changed. Then again, in some cases, we don’t have any DNA evidence or fingerprints to work with, and the investigation still takes the same legwork and effort that it did a hundred years ago.
JESS MALONE: No matter how good the technology gets, some cases still require a lot of windshield time—just driving up and down the road, following leads.
CHANCE COLLINS: Jurors expect a lot more from us today because they watch shows like CSI, and criminals are getting savvier too. They will alter a crime scene based on what they have seen on TV. I had a case where a guy had stabbed a man more than twenty times, and before he left the victim’s house, he turned the thermostat all the way down. He told me in his confession that he had done that because he knew that the temperature could throw off our estimation of the time of death. The only problem? He left a bloody fingerprint on the wall.
SERGEANT FRANK MALINAK became a Ranger in 1993. He is stationed in Bryan: I tell people, “You can take the horse and the Winchester, but if you give me a cell phone and a laptop, I can get my job done.”
DAVID HULLUM: After I was promoted to Ranger, I decided to reopen a 1987 capital murder case of an old spinster in the town of Rising Star who had been sexually assaulted and strangled to death. I approached eight or nine men who had been questioned in the original investigation, and they all agreed to give me DNA samples, but none of them matched. Finally I tracked down this guy Leonard Self, who the police had looked at back then, and I visited him in jail in Abilene. He was real evasive, and he refused to give me a DNA sample. He was in jail for something minor, like a suspended driver’s license, and so I made some calls to see if he was on the jail’s work crew, which he was. I asked another Ranger, Calvin Cox, to use his connections at the jail. I said, “Get one of those jailers to let him smoke a cigarette when he’s working. After he smokes it, have the jailer pick that cigarette butt up.” The rest is history. DNA testing showed that only Leonard Self could have left the semen at the scene of the crime. He’s serving a life sentence now.
SERGEANT DAVID MAXWELL became a Ranger in 1986. He is stationed in Bay City: When I was in college, my intention was to become an attorney. And then, in 1969, my sister was murdered. She was 25, and I was 20, so this had a huge impact on my life. She had been working as an operator for Southwestern Bell Telephone, and when she went to work one Sunday, this man accosted her when she got out of her car. He drug her into an abandoned building, tied her up, raped her, and stabbed her to death. There was a vigorous investigation, but it never went anywhere. By 1972 the case was still unsolved, and so I decided to go into law enforcement. I joined DPS, and I made it my goal to become a Texas Ranger. It was my hope that, somewhere down the line, I could reopen my sister’s case and bring it to a conclusion.
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