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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FRANK MALINAK: I began my career in law enforcement at a time when even if you had good, readable fingerprints at a crime scene, they didn’t necessarily help you in your investigation. Unless you had a suspicion of who had committed the crime, they didn’t tell you much; you had to know which suspect to compare the prints to. Nowadays, with AFIS—the Automated Fingerprint Identification System—we enter fingerprints into a national database. I’ve gotten cold hits in cases where we had no suspects whatsoever.
DAVID MAXWELL: I tried reopening my sister’s case in 1986. After this man killed her, he stole her car and abandoned it several blocks from the crime scene. The Houston Police Department was able to lift his prints, so we had them on file. In ’86 the AFIS system was still in its infancy. It was rudimentary compared with what we have today—it just searched fingerprints that HPD had in its files—and we didn’t find anything. I did that kind of check periodically, because, of course, the technology was still developing.
FRANK MALINAK: Before I became a Ranger, I worked for the sheriff’s office in Lee County. There was a case I investigated there that I’ll never forget. In 1982 a woman was staying at a hotel in Giddings, and she was on the phone with her business partner up in Dallas when someone started knocking at her door. She called out and no one answered, so she cracked the door open to see who it was. The first thing that came through the door was a fist. This guy hit her so hard that he knocked her false eyelashes off. He ripped most of her clothes off and tried to beat her to death. Her business partner was still on the phone while all this was going on, thank goodness, so he called the front desk. The two managers came around the back side of the hotel and beat on the door. A short time later, the light went off inside the room; the guy bolted out, past the managers, and escaped into the darkness. He was never caught. In the photographs that were taken at the hospital, the victim was unrecognizable. She had to have many, many surgeries. We worked this case for years. We had the guy’s fingerprints; he hadn’t been able to find the switch when he tried to turn the lamp off, so he had unscrewed the lightbulb. But we had no suspect. We would come up with a name, but the prints wouldn’t match, and we did that for years.
DAVID MAXWELL: Four years ago I contacted a good friend of mine, Jim Ramsey, who was a homicide detective with HPD. Jim was one of their premier homicide detectives. Now, I’d known Jim since he was eighteen years old, when he was a cadet and I was a highway patrolman, so we’d been friends for thirtysomething years. But I had never really shared the story of my sister’s murder with anybody. I just didn’t talk about it. I went to Jim, and I told him the story. I asked him to pull the file, and he and I worked the case together. So that’s how we got started. When we pulled the file, we saw that the fingerprints weren’t there. The evidence was gone, the crime-scene photographs were gone—we had nothing. We searched and searched and searched. Finally, after some pressure was applied, several detectives were assigned to go through all the old homicide cases that were still open, and they found the fingerprint cards misfiled in a 1984 homicide. Once we got the cards, we submitted them to the statewide AFIS system, in Austin. A woman named Jill Kinkade spent three days running them and got a hit.
FRANK MALINAK: Years later, I’ve left the sheriff’s office, I’ve been through my tour of duty in highway patrol, I’ve spent seven years as an investigator in DPS auto theft, and I’m a Ranger in Midland. And I’m in a murder trial that takes me back to the area where this crime happened, and I got to thinking about the woman who was attacked in Giddings. AFIS was up and running by then, and so I got the prints submitted. Three days later we had a hit. This was more than twelve years after the crime. We charged the suspect with attempted capital murder. He was living in La Grange, eighteen miles away. He had a criminal record as long as your arm. We arrested him, went to trial the following year, and the jury sentenced him to 99 years in prison. When I called the victim to tell her that we had found the man who did this to her, she said, “There’s not a day that’s gone by that I haven’t thought about that horrible, horrible night.”
DAVID MAXWELL: Jim Ramsey and some Rangers were able to locate the suspect in Texarkana. I was ecstatic. But I also knew that Jim would have to get a confession because there was no physical evidence left. Any chance to do DNA tests had been lost. Jim drove to Texarkana, and he interviewed the suspect, James Ray Davis. It was a cold interview; the guy had no idea Jim was coming, and he had no idea what Jim was there to talk to him about. Jim taped the interview, and the guy ended up giving him a confession. He and his attorney decided to plead guilty, and on January 15, 2004, Judge Brian Rains sentenced him to life in prison. Before this had come to a conclusion, my dad, who is elderly, had told me every time I saw him, “Son, if you can find out who killed your sister before I die, that’s all I want. I just want to know who killed Diane.” So it was a good feeling that both my parents lived to see that day.
“THE RANGER BADGE IS STILL MADE FROM A CINCO PESO.”
While the job has changed, the Rangers’ Western dress has stayed the same throughout most of the past century.
KENNY RAY: You know, in rural Texas, we don’t really stick out. It’s when I go to an urban area that I attract attention. You just don’t normally see a guy in Houston or Dallas walking down the street wearing a cowboy hat and a big old gun belt. The double rig that a lot of us wear goes back to the Old West. If you watch a John Wayne movie, he’s got a belt that holds his britches up, and he’s also got his gun belt. Well, we wear the same thing, just like Rangers before us did. Most of us get them made in the prison system. Now, we pay for them, of course; it’s not a perk or anything. But I’ve always thought that was kind of ironic that we send those guys to prison and then they have to build our stuff.
CAPTAIN BARRY CAVER became a Ranger in 1989. He heads Company E, in Midland: We don’t have an official uniform. It’s Western dress—a hat, boots, a solid-colored shirt, a tie, and a jacket, depending on the occasion. DPS gives us a clothing allowance of $100 a month, so a $500 hat and a $400 pair of boots cut into your yearly budget pretty quick. But the way we look is important. I learned early on in my Ranger career that when you approach a crook you’re about to interview and you’re dressed like a Ranger, he immediately sits up and takes notice and, in most cases, shows you respect.
MARRIE ALDRIDGE: As silly as this sounds, I think one reason we don’t have more females in the Rangers is because we wear Western clothes. Most females coming up through the ranks at DPS are from metropolitan areas, and they wouldn’t feel comfortable wearing a cowboy hat. Personally, I love it. I mean, I get to wear this and you’re going to pay me? That’s awesome. If I had been told, “Okay, you’re going to make Ranger, but you have to wear a dress and high heels every day,” I would have said, “No thanks.”
RAY MARTINEZ: Some Rangers in the early days did not have badges, so they would take a knife and cut a five-pointed star out of a cinco peso silver piece. The Ranger badge is still made from a cinco peso. The coin has to be from 1947 or 1948, because after that, their silver content dropped, so they tarnish. If you look on the back of any Ranger’s badge, you will see the Mexican eagle and the words “Estados Unidos Mexicanos.”
BROOKS LONG: It’s not an accident that our badges are made from cinco pesos, because we are attached at the hip to Mexico. That’s why the Rangers were put here originally—to secure the border. Our history, our legacy, our traditions are tied up in the border. That’s what has made us and given us our reputation, whether it be good or bad. That’s who we are, and that’s where we came from, and it’s important for us not to forget that.
KYLE DEAN: I don’t carry the weapon that DPS issues us, which is the SIG Sauer P226. Like a lot of other Rangers, I carry the Colt .45. It’s a luxury we’re afforded that the other services are not. We can carry the firearm that we think best fits our assignment. The way I see it, the Colt is a link to the past. That’s what the Rangers who came before us carried, and we’re continuing that tradition.
MATT CAWTHON: A lot of us carry the Colt Model 1911 semiautomatic, .45-caliber handgun. It has been around for nearly one hundred years, and it is tried-and-true. I was involved several years ago in a gunfight with a bank robber. While he was surrounded, he raised a pistol and tried to shoot at the highway patrol. We ended up having to shoot him, and he died in that gunfight. Forty-five caliber does a good job, I’ll tell you.
BROOKS LONG: I carry a SIG, and the reason I carry a SIG is that my life is not going to depend on tradition or history. My life is going to depend on my training, and I trained with a SIG.
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