History Lesson 
Hit Man
Gary Johnson is the most sought-after professional killer in Houston. In the past decade, he's been hired to kill more than sixty people. But if you pay him to rub out a cheating spouse or an abusive boss, you'd better watch your own back: He works for the cops.
(Page 2 of 4)
Johnson stood up, shook her hand again, and said, as if congratulating her, "You're going to be a widow." The next day, Houston society was stunned to learn that Lynn Kilroy had been arrested for solicitation of capital murder. The case is scheduled for trial this month.
Kilroy claims she never intended to solicit her husband's murder. Her attorneys plan to argue that she was unlawfully enticed into the plot during a period in her life when she was emotionally distraught. Some attorneys who have gone against Johnson in court have also claimed that he maneuvers his "clients" into saying things they don't really mean or that he cleverly twists the conversation to make it appear they are asking him to commit murder. Other attorneys have declared that he intimidates his clients so thoroughly that they feel they have to say what he wants them to say. "Let's imagine you're really upset with someone, and you're told that there is this hit man out there who will work for you," says Dan Cogdell, one of Houston's more seasoned defense attorneys. "You agree to meet him out of some morbid curiosity, but once you're there, you realize that this is not what you want to do. But then you start thinking that if you back out of the meeting, this stone-cold killer might take you out because now you know who he is. So out of fear of retribution, you mumble something about him doing his job, and then you get the hell out of there, hoping to forget the whole thing."
But Harris County juries have yet to buy that argument, especially after they hear the tapes of a defendant's conversations with Johnson. He invariably gives people the opportunity to reconsider their requests. "You know this is your last chance to get out," he likes to say. "Otherwise, when I leave here, your little friend will be dead. I don't want to hear you complaining later that you never meant to go this far. So, are you sure this is what you want?" And almost every time, his clients nod their heads and say yes.
How, I wanted to know, does the cat-loving, garden-tending Johnson manage to convince people that he is their one best hope for a better life? "What I'm really there to do is assist people in their communication skills," Johnson tells me one afternoon, sitting on his recliner in his living room. "That's all my job is—to help people open up, to get them to say what they really want, to reveal to me their deepest desires."
Although the professional hit man is a staple of detective fiction, no one is really certain if there is someone in this country who makes a living as a hired gun. Organized crime families and drug syndicates have employees who will do whatever their bosses tell them to do, which often includes firing machine guns at certain rivals or burying them in cement. And there are the occasional wannabe mercenaries who take out ads in the backs of military magazines claiming that they will do anything asked of them. But they almost always turn out to be frauds. If there are highly qualified triggermen making their talents available to ordinary citizens, says Johnson, "then they don't advertise very well. They certainly aren't advertising in Houston. I've never heard of such a person."
Nevertheless, the myth remains intact among a certain subset of Houstonians that if they just hunt hard enough, they will find that special someone willing to murder a complete stranger in cold blood. They typically first make contact with people they assume know the ins and outs of Houston's underworld—private investigators, bail bondsmen, tow-truck drivers, topless dancers, unshaven men who have served time in penal institutions—and they ask if there is anyone who can help them. Some are so anxious for help that they say they'll take a young gang member or a pistolero from Mexico.
There was a time when murder for hire was an exotic concept, confined mostly to ruthless rich people willing to pay large sums of money to persuade a third party to end another's life. (In Houston's infamous Blood and Money case in the early seventies, oilman Ash Robinson was suspected of hiring a hit man to murder his son-in-law, John Hill, after Hill's trial for the murder of Robinson's daughter ended in a mistrial.) The regular Joe, if he was not willing to take things into his own hands, basically resigned himself to fantasizing about his wife hurtling over a cliff in a flaming car or his boss being stabbed in the back on his way to the dry cleaners or his loudmouthed neighbor down the street being suffocated with Saran Wrap.
The fact that the district attorney needs a Gary Johnson speaks volumes about how the murder-for-hire climate has changed. Johnson estimates that he has investigated some three hundred murder-for-hire allegations since the late eighties. Although most of them turn out to be unfounded ("We get a lot of calls about a guy who was drinking too much in a bar and talking about a certain son of a bitch he wished was dead," Johnson says), his undercover investigations have led to more than sixty arrests. There is obviously no shortage of residents coming up with reasons others should die, ranging from the bloodcurdling to the positively nutty. If you thought Wanda Holloway's notorious 1991 attempt to find someone to kill the mother of her daughter's cheerleading rival was an aberration, then you apparently missed the story of William Keen Perry, a Houston-area used-car salesman who liked going to work dressed as Elvis Presley, sporting muttonchop sideburns, a pompadour, and a belt buckle emblazoned with a big E. His budding career as an Elvis impersonator came to an end when he was arrested in 1998 for trying to find a hit man to kill his wife. His wife, he explained, had been verbally abusing him.
"Except for one or two instances, the people I meet are not ex-cons," says Johnson. "If ex-cons want somebody dead, they know what to do. My people have spent their lives living within the law. A lot of them have never even gotten a traffic ticket. Yet they have developed such a frustration with their place in the world that they think they have no other option but to eliminate whoever is causing their frustration. They are all looking for the quick fix, which has become the American way. Today people can pay to get their televisions fixed and their garbage picked up, so why can't they pay me, a hit man, to fix their lives?"
If you saw Johnson at the district attorney's office, you would probably mistake him for a low-level clerk. He spends most of his days in a little room filled with video- and audio-recording machinery, where he duplicates or enhances tapes (such as a videotape shot on a department store camera of a shoplifter or an audiotape made of a criminal's confession) for prosecutors to use in their various court trials. He is a precise, fastidious man. He is the kind of person who likes to eat lunch every day at the same small Mexican restaurant near downtown. On his way there and back, he listens to classical music on his car stereo—in particular, he likes Wagner operas—and he taps his fingers against the steering wheel in time to the music. Sometimes, if he's tired of classical music, he listens to books on tape such as Carl Jung's autobiography about his life in psychiatry, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Then, at around five-thirty, he heads home to feed his cats (whom he named Id and Ego), check on his goldfish, tend to his garden, and meditate, read, or watch documentaries on the Discovery Channel about animals becoming extinct.
Two nights a week he teaches courses at a local community college: On Mondays he teaches human sexuality and on Tuesdays he teaches general psychology. His students, no doubt, think of him as just another mild-mannered professor, albeit one who has a tendency to drone on in his lectures about human beings' lack of coping skills during times of stress. Occasionally he goes out to a nearby sports bar, where he drinks a light beer and talks to women, using his old line about working in human resources.
Although women are drawn to Johnson—they think he is that rare male, a good listener—he is not exactly adept at maintaining long-term relationships. He has been married and divorced three times. "The true essence of Gary is that he is a loner," says his second wife, Sunny, who remains a friend. "He'll show up at parties and have a good time, and he's always friendly, but he likes being alone, being quiet. It's still amazing to me that he can turn on this other personality that makes people think he is a vicious killer."
My Library
