The Twilight of the Texas Rangers
(Page 5 of 5)
The task force’s role looked fishy to some from the outset. An Arkansas district attorney learned that Lucas had confessed to a Little Rock murder that had already been solved and that Lucas provided details of the case only after the Arkansas state police, in the presence of the Rangers, obligingly showed him a videotape of the crime scene. West Virginia officials learned that Lucas, at the urging of the Rangers, was now confessing to the murder of a West Virginia policeman despite an official ruling that the death had been a suicide. The attorneys for a Delaware murder defendant sent the task force their client’s case file, and once again Lucas confessed. But a tape of the confession later indicated that the Rangers had been, according to a Delaware prosecutor, “incredibly leading” in discussing the case with Lucas, and ultimately the defendant admitted that he, not Lucas, was the killer.
Through these dubious methods, the Rangers extracted literally hundreds of confessions from Henry Lee Lucas. But in 1985, a Dallas Times Herald article documented that Lucas had been out of the state and at times in jail when many of the murders were committed. McLennan County district attorney Vic Feazell, spurred by these revelations and two questionable confessions in his home county, brought Lucas before a grand jury, where the drifter admitted that he had taken the Rangers for a ride. Rather than own up to their mistakes, the Rangers continued to insist that Lucas was a mass murderer, even as they sought to distance themselves from some of his confessions. Feazell has testified that Ranger Prince assured him outside the grand jury room, “I’m going to make you regret this if it’s the last thing I do.” Indeed DPS officials undertook a full-scale investigation of the district attorney’s activities, culminating in a trial in which Feazell was found not guilty of various infractions.
The Lucas hoax drew international attention and brought shame to the Rangers of a magnitude not since the A.Y. Allee years. Today a number of retired Rangers, including Joaquin Jackson and Glenn Elliott, say they had interviewed Henry Lee Lucas about certain cases in their jurisdictions and could see for themselves that the task force was dealing with a habitual liar. “I remember him trying to cop to one he didn’t do,” says Elliott, “but there was another murder case where I’ll kiss your butt if he didn’t lead us right to the deer stand where the murder took place. Ain’t no way he could’ve guessed that, and I damn sure didn’t tell him. I think he did that one.” Yet the hoax aura of Lucas’ many confessions has left the resolution of this case in doubt.
The eroding credibility of the Rangers meant that defense attorneys no longer shuddered when a Ranger took the stand on behalf of the state. In 1986 an East Texas school principal named Hurley Fontenot stood trial for the murder of a football coach who had been dating a woman Fontenot had been in love with. Much of the evidence incriminated Fontenot, and as one of the jurors later said, “A lot of us felt that he was guilty, but the evidence just wasn’t trustworthy.” Specifically, Fontenot’s attorney, Dick DeGuerin, based his defense largely on the dubious investigation and testimony of Ranger Tommy Walker. As Wesley Styles had done in the Clarence Brandley case, Ranger Walker focused exclusively on Fontenot as a suspect, ignoring numerous leads along the way and emphasizing physical evidence that withered under DeGuerin’s cross-examination. “All of us thought Walker’s investigation was very slipshod and his credibility on the witness stand was blown from beginning to end,” the juror remembered. “Right after we looked at some of his conflicting testimony, we took the vote and decided to acquit Fontenot. It was not at all what I would have expected of a Ranger.”
Nor did the citizens of Brownsville expect the kind of investigation the Rangers conducted of their city officials in 1987. Following a grand jury’s determination that there were irregularities in Brownsville City Hall’s purchasing procedures, Ranger Rudy Rodriguez undertook a highly visible, leak-plagued seven-month investigation that led all of Brownsville to believe that a massive scandal was about to be unearthed. Those suspicions hardly abated when Rodriguez’s investigation led to 23 indictments of city officials, including Mayor Emilio Hernandez. Yet as one of the attorneys involved in the cases noted, “It was a results-oriented investigation from the start. The Ranger knew what he wanted and wouldn’t let the facts get in the way.” Indeed, 21 of the indictments were thrown out and another resulted in a not-guilty verdict. The lone conviction, that of Mayor Hernandez was later reversed after the Ranger’s main witness would not confirm in court information he had given Rodriguez. Far from cleaning up a corrupt city hall, the Rangers left Brownsville in a state of confusion and bitterness, with nothing to show for their efforts except a number of damaged reputations, including their own.
So tarnished was the Ranger image that by the beginning of the nineties, it was just as easy to suspect the Rangers of covering up evidence as it was to assume that they were doing their jobs honorably. When David Joost, the Texas Racing Commission’s chief financial officer, his wife, and their two children were found shot to death in March 1990, the Rangers promptly took charge of the case—and for the next four years seemingly did nothing. Though the Hays County sheriff’s department’s ruling had been that Joost had shot his family and then himself, numerous clues pointed to a multiple murder. Joost’s brother begged the state to let him know what the evidence in its possession suggested, but the Rangers refused to disclose anything, saying that the investigation was ongoing. Their silence, along with their refusal to pursue a number of angles to the case, led the media (including the news show 20/20) to speculate that the Rangers might be covering up a contract killing at the behest of powerful racing interests. Individuals involved in the Joost investigation say that this is not the case—that in fact the Rangers have been gathering evidence and are in the final stages of producing a documented finding. But the Rangers’ arrogant refusal to respond to earnest questions surrounding a high-profile case virtually guarantees that their conclusion about the Joost murders, whatever it happens to be, will not be accepted on faith.
This past year has seen the Texas Rangers consistently in the news yet somehow incidental to the day’s events. The Rangers were called upon to investigate the crime scene of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco; they comported themselves professionally but seemed all too willing to accept the FBI’s work on critical matters of dispute, such as whether or not helicopters from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had opened fire on the Davidians. When a black man named Craig Thomas died last June at the hands of white Corsicana police officers, the Rangers were called in. Yet the “investigation” promised by the Rangers was in fact a slender report that took only a day to produce and exonerated the Corsicana officers. City leaders promptly contacted the U.S. Justice Department in hopes of a more penetrating inquiry, swatting aside the Rangers’ work like a feeble first draft. Later in the year, the Rangers hired Marrie Garcia and Cheryl Steadman and put the latter to work processing extradition warrants. By the fall of 1993, Ranger Steadman had been assigned her first criminal case, but the media has already lost interest in the women Rangers—maybe in all Rangers. When it was announced this past December that the Rangers would be investigating the matter of an Odessa Permian High School football player’s stolen transcripts, no one seemed to be wondering whether the Rangers didn’t have something more important to do. Perhaps it was one of those questions that hit too close to home and was better left unasked.
“It used to be we’d have a controversy every two or three years by someone who wanted to do away with us,” says Lewis Rigler. “Now there’s no noise, and that means we’re not doing something right.”
The Rangers have seen through their own myths and are confronting their worst fear: that they may become uncontroversial and in fact irrelevant. It is the only threat that could drive a proud lawman like Joaquin Jackson out his life’s work. “The sheriff’s department county budgets have gotten bigger than when I first got here,” he acknowledges over chicken-fried steak in an Alpine restaurant. “They’re not as dependent on us as they used to be. And the city police—hell, they don’t need us. Normally I work about two homicides a year, where a Houston Police Department homicide detective works four or five a week.”
But Jackson lives upon the changeless West Texas prairie, and on its vistas he sees, through eyes both cold and unabashedly romantic, that a changeless struggle persists: good versus evil. In what remains of the frontier, the Rangers must still roam—if they can. “I see the brotherhood slipping,” he says quietly as he chews. “The government won’t let us pick our own people. The ones we’re recruiting are there strictly to meet federal standards. Politics and law enforcement don’t mix. They never did. A lot of us got tired of it. It just got to be too much.”
And so Jackson left the Rangers, the better to keep them in his heart. He looks down at a piece of paper that lists the Rangers who retired in 1993. Jackson’s name is there. His eyes go down the list. Robert Steele, the Yankee from the New York Police Department who had been worked over by the mob in a failed sting operation and left to die on the Long Island Expressway. Steele survived, relocated with his family to San Antonio, then flew back to New York and testified against the mobsters at their trail. A hell of a Ranger for thirteen years … George Fraiser, a fine investigator, now gone on to be a preacher … Bobby Prince and Clayton Smith, the men who had headed the Henry Lee Lucas Task Force. Maybe they got in over their heads a little on that one, but generally speaking, they did excellent work … Jack Dean, the captain of Company D for damn near forever. Now about to be a U.S. marshal … Joe Bailey Davis, been in Kerrville thirteen years. Hard to imagine anyone else in Kerrville. Or in Alpine, for that matter…
“Good men,” says the Ranger. “These are all good men.”
