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: You know, we look back now at the Rangers in the late 1800’s as having old-fashioned firearms, but then, the Colt was cutting-edge technology. In fact, the Walker Colt is named for a Ranger, Samuel Walker, who helped develop it. The Rangers saw a need for a reliable, well-designed, heavy-duty revolver that they could take out on remote patrols. The firearms that were available back then weren’t as fast or as easy to load, so the Colt was a pretty revolutionary firearm. Until then, you had to hand-load every round, and if you carried one revolving pistol, you only had six rounds. We are always looking for new technology to make us better, and the Rangers were doing the same thing back then.
BARRY CAVER: Something that hasn’t changed since the old days is that we still mount up on horseback, believe it or not. Whatever the situation calls for, that’s what we do.
DAVID HULLUM: About four times a year I get to go on a manhunt, and let me tell you, that is some extreme horseback riding. Most manhunts are at night, and you’re going through thick brush at a dead run, and you have to fight just to stay on your horse because your horse is following those dogs. Horses can go places that no vehicle can—not a four-wheel drive, not a four-wheeler, not a motorcycle, nothing. For one manhunt, we were on horseback for six and a half hours riding through some of the roughest terrain I had ever been on. I told the sheriff, “Heck, I don’t know about putting this guy in jail. You ought to send him to the dadgum Olympics trial!” We chased him hard, and he stayed just ahead of us for fifteen and a half miles until we caught him.
“IT WAS THE END OF AN ERA.”
Change hasn’t always come easy for the Rangers, whether it’s evolving technology or allowing women into their ranks.
LANE AKIN: When things started changing in the late eighties, some Rangers balked. I saw that happen when we first got computers. It led to retirements because the older guys just refused to change. They had handwritten their reports for as long as they could remember, and they weren’t about to start doing things any differently. I remember going to Bill Quinn’s retirement party, in ’87. Bill took the podium and said, “The captain’s been talking about putting a computer on my desk, so I think the time has come for me to go.”
DOYLE HOLDRIDGE: When they started talking about giving us computers, you know, I was a street officer. I didn’t have any use for a computer. I didn’t think a Ranger should be tied down to an office. Anyway, they issued all of us laptops and sent us to a weeklong computer school so we would know what a cursor was and where the power button was. When I got back to Laredo, I used mine as a doorstop.
LANE AKIN: I remember one Ranger up in Childress, Leo Hickman. Leo had an eye shot out in a gunfight in East Texas. He was a World War II veteran and just a super guy—but he was crusty. Oh, my goodness, was he crusty. Well, we used to have mandatory retirement at the age of 65. Leo woke up on his sixty-fifth birthday and went to work. In Austin they were wringing their hands: “What are we going to do? Leo’s at work!” But they left him alone, and Leo worked until he was 72. Leo made up his mind that he’d been a Ranger long enough without a computer. He retired in 2001 and never used one.
KENNY RAY: The technology completely passed those guys by. I don’t want to say the older generation looks down on us, but they kind of kid us now: “You can’t do your job without a computer and a cell phone.”
JOAQUIN JACKSON: Computers came first. We all knew women were coming next.
DOYLE HOLDRIDGE: What did some of the older Rangers do when women came in? They quit! I personally know one who retired over that issue. They were of the opinion that men were just meant to be Rangers, and they thought it was going to be very hard for a female to intimidate and get a confession from, you know, a member of the Mexican Mafia who had been in the penitentiary for 25 years and had killed three people.
JOAQUIN JACKSON: It was the end of an era. I think some of us felt that things were changing too damn much. And we were tired, too. A lot of us retired in ’93, and we were all in our late fifties and sixties. At 57, I wasn’t getting out the door as fast when I was being called out at two or three o’clock in the morning. It was time to hang it up.
MARRIE ALDRIDGE: I was the first female Ranger. I made Ranger in 1993. There was a lot of publicity and TV cameras there for a while, and I was glad when it died down. Because to me, I had just made Ranger like all these other guys. Everybody wanted to interview me, and I hadn’t even done anything yet. I have a scrapbook of news clips from back then, and there is a cartoon that says something like “Are the Texas Rangers going to have saddlebags made out of Tupperware now?”
DOYLE HOLDRIDGE: When this all took place, I was very, very negative about females joining the Rangers. But attitudes change, and as time went on, I accepted it. You know, I work for the sheriff’s office now, and I’ve got about eighty people working for me. Some of them are women, and they’re excellent officers. And I’ve gotten to work with Marrie, and I’ve got nothing but the highest regard for her. Marrie is a friend of mine now. But the first five years she was a Ranger, I didn’t speak to her. I thought, “If I ignore this, maybe this will go away,” and that’s what I did until I realized how big an ass I was being one time when she went out of her way to help me on a case. I feel bad about how I treated her back then.
MARRIE ALDRIDGE: I think everyone was a little leery of me at first. They were told, “Watch what you say, watch what you do. There’s a woman in the house now.” But I didn’t run into any problems. After I was around for a little bit and people got to know me, I said, “Look, nothing y’all are going to say is going to bother me. You know, if it does, I’m not in the right field.” I was raised with four brothers, so it’s pretty hard to shock me.
TONY LEAL: People are slow to change. In the past we did not have the recruiting that we should have had when it came to women. But our chief, Ray Coffman, has made it a priority to make sure that women know they are needed, welcomed, and wanted within the Rangers, and I’m doing everything I can personally to make that happen. It is our job, as captains, to recruit those qualified people. You know, there was a time when a Hispanic man or a black man couldn’t think about being a Ranger. Everything evolves. That’s not an issue anymore, and there will come a day when it’s not an issue anymore for women either.
BROOKS LONG: Times have changed, okay? And so somebody who was a great Ranger thirty years ago might not be a great Ranger today. I’ll never forget the lessons I learned from those older guys when I was a rookie. But we live in a different society now. Back then, heavy-handedness might have been used when you were trying to get a confession. Now you have to be a good listener. How you document the chain of evidence, how you protect the crime scene—everything has changed. Thirty years ago a Ranger could pick something up at the crime scene, tell the jury, “I found it,” and that was good enough at trial. Now you need to document who located it, who it was turned over to, who retained custody—those kinds of things are crucial. The job is less physical and more mental.
FRANK MALINAK: In years past, Rangers were famous for few words and even fewer reports. Nowadays we spend a lot of our time writing reports and documenting our investigations. Sometimes the most damaging evidence a defense attorney can face is a well-documented, comprehensive police report.
TRACY MURPHREE: I think the reason the Rangers have survived since 1823 is our ability to adapt. The Rangers went from single-shot pistols to the Colt, from the horse to the automobile, and now we’ve grabbed onto the computer age, DNA, and new crime-scene technologies. You know, you can move forward or you can stay still and die.
MATT CAWTHON: The Rangers were here before there was a Texas, and we have survived all that time. Now, we didn’t survive because we were good at riding horses. We didn’t survive because we can hunt or camp out on the prairie. We survived by being able to change with the times. When Texas needed Indian fighters, we were Indian fighters. When Texas needed border war fighters, we were that. When Texas needed someone to quell oil boom riots, we did that. When Texas needed detectives, we became that. When DNA became the mainstay of law enforcement work, we got good at that. We’ve had to change, and there have been some growing pains along the way. We have tripped and stumbled, and we’ve had times that were not our finest hours. But by and large we’ve had more successes than we’ve had misses. And we’re going to keep changing and evolving so we’re still here a hundred years from now.
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