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.
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Raised in Louisiana—his father was a carpenter and his mother a housewife—Johnson says he lived a quiet, rural life (there were twelve students in his senior class in high school), then spent a year in Vietnam working as a military policeman overseeing convoys. Returning home, he worked as a sheriff's deputy in a Louisiana parish, then he moved to the Port Arthur police department in the mid-seventies, where he did some undercover work, playing a doper who wanted to make drug buys. He was good at what he did. "I don't think the drug dealers ever suspected I might be a cop because my personality was so weird to begin with," he says. But he didn't have any particular ambition to continue a law enforcement career. His dream was to teach psychology in college. He thought he would be happiest analyzing human behavior from a safe, academic perspective. He took courses at night at McNeese State University, in Lake Charles, Louisiana, eventually receiving a master's degree in psychology. In 1981 he moved to Houston in hopes of entering the University of Houston's doctoral program in psychology.When he wasn't accepted, he took a job as an investigator for the district attorney's office. He worked for various prosecutors, gathering physical evidence and finding witnesses for upcoming trials. He tracked down stolen automobiles and assisted in stakeouts. Except for receiving wounds to the left leg and foot when he was shot during an arrest in 1986, which kept him out of work for a week, his career was uneventful.
But in 1989 he found his true calling. That year a 37-year-old lab technician named Kathy Scott contacted a bail bondsman who was a former high school classmate. One thing led to another, and Scott told him she was planning "an elimination" of her husband and needed someone to carry it out. Their four-month marriage, she said, had collapsed. He had been complaining about her spending and had gone so far as to remove her name from the checking account. She felt she deserved better. It is also possible that she felt she deserved the $50,000 insurance policy, $47,000 in retirement benefits, and two houses worth an estimated $175,000 that would go to her if her husband died.
The bail bondsman called the police, and the police then called the special-crimes division of the DA's office to ask if it had anyone who specialized in murder-for-hire cases. There was Johnson, sitting at his desk. "Gary, you're our hit man," his bosses told him.
Suddenly, even if it was only for one evening, Johnson had a chance to live another life. He came up with the name Mike Caine and decided to look like a badass biker. He wore jeans, an old shirt, and a chain around his neck with a little silver human skull attached to it. He agreed to meet Scott at a Houston bowling alley, where she was bowling for her company team. He was standing at the bar when Scott sashayed up in a black jumpsuit with a pink belt. Her skin was beautiful, her makeup carefully applied. The sexual chemistry was instant.
When they went outside to sit in her car, Johnson planned to speak to her in as gruff a manner as possible. But as he stared at her, it occurred to him that there was no need for him to act like a thug. What Scott wanted, he realized, was someone to talk to, someone who would understand her pain, someone who would see her as a damsel in distress. He gave her a soft, sympathetic look. She looked him up and down with her dark green eyes. She then handed him her husband's picture, talking about his cruel nature and saying that "the perfect spot" for him to die would be in a black neighborhood that he had to drive through on his way home from work. "It's a drug haven," she said. When Johnson asked about his fee—he wanted $2,500, half up front and half on completion—she told him she had only $100 to give to him as a down payment, but she agreed to later put the rest of the money in the Yellow Pages in a public phone booth.
Johnson was stunned. He had barely had to say a thing. He had only needed to be a sympathetic listener. He rubbed his chin with the ball of his thumb. "Are you sure you want this sucker killed?" he finally asked.
"Yeah," she purred. A couple minutes later, here came the cops.
At her trial, Scott insisted she didn't want her husband to die. She had gotten carried away, she said. Besides, it was unfair for some undercover cop to show up and "bat" his eyes and encourage her to talk about murder. Unimpressed, jurors sentenced her to a staggering eighty years in prison.
Suddenly Johnson was the rising new undercover star in Houston-area law enforcement. The constable's office in Galveston County called to ask if he would handle one of their cases. A 31-year-old oil rig worker named Roberts Holliday had been telling a woman, a former topless dancer who had a variety of tattoos decorating her body, that he wanted full custody of his children and the only way to get it was to kill his wife, who had left him for another man. Holliday thought the dancer might know of a club patron who liked dabbling in murder. Instead she called the authorities.
Once again, Johnson dressed like a biker and called himself Mike Caine. Once again, he gave Holliday that same empathetic look he gave Kathy Scott. And once again, the ploy worked. At the Galveston motel room where they met, Holliday gave Johnson a photo of his estranged wife and a hand-drawn map to her home. He then said he wanted Johnson to drive over there, slit his wife's wrists, and hold her until she bled to death. Holliday explained that a few weeks earlier he had filed a mental-health warrant against his wife describing her as suicidal, but she had been quickly released from the hospital because doctors could find nothing wrong with her. If Johnson killed her in a way that looked like suicide, then Holliday would not only be able to collect on a $10,000 life insurance policy but also be able to sue his wife's doctors for malpractice for failing to treat her. The murder had to take place that week, he added, while he was out working on an offshore oil rig, so he could have an unassailable alibi.
Johnson didn't blink. He assured Holliday that when he got back to shore, he would have a brand-new life. All it would cost him was a $100 down payment on a $2,500 fee. They shook hands, and a few moments later the police busted through the motel room door. For a moment, Holliday seemed perplexed, as if he could not understand why they were there. Then he put his head on Johnson's shoulder and said, as if he were talking to his priest, "Mike, what should I do? What should I do?" It had not occurred to Holliday that Johnson was, in fact, his Judas.
When the prosecution of Channelview's Wanda Holloway, the pom-pom mom, nearly fell apart in 1991 because the undercover hit man had failed to get her on tape making a specific reference to wanting a murder done, more police departments began asking for Johnson. The word was that he knew how to get people talking. Once, when he asked a man what he wanted done to his enemy, the man ran a finger across his throat—which would not have gotten him convicted in court. "Look, there's got to be some trust between us," Johnson said, as if he was an old friend slightly offended by the man's gesture. "You want him killed? Then you'd better tell me. Come on, let's not beat around the bush here." The man started talking. When the Houston Police Department asked Johnson to talk with 32-year-old Katherine Beisel, who had been looking for a hit man after being spurned by her married lover, she told him at their first meeting that she only wanted her lover threatened. Maybe you could break his legs, she told Johnson. Maybe you could also slip into his office, upend furniture, and spray-paint the walls. Instead of trying to push her more, which could have made him look bad in court, Johnson just gave her his phone number. "I don't beat up people," he said with a gentle smile. "If you want the real thing, you call me sometime."
A few weeks later, Johnson's black phone rang beside his bed. "Hi," said a sultry voice. "Do you remember me?"
Johnson, thinking it was someone he had met at the sports bar, said, "I sure do."
"You still want to do it?" she said.
"Okay," Johnson said hesitantly. Then he realized to whom he was talking. They met again, and this time Beisel was all business: the real-life version of Glenn Close's character in Fatal Attraction. Her married lover, she said, deserved to be punished for leading her on and for not leaving his wife. She told Johnson she wanted him shot to pieces.
It had to have been the most seductive of experiences. For a few precious moments, Johnson was able to take off his wire-rimmed glasses and turn into evil incarnate, the remorseless giver of death. With each case, he kept getting better. He added nuances to what he called his "I-don't-give-a-shit, give-me-the-money, tough-guy act" that he used on certain men, and he improved the empathetic approach that he used on certain women. "It got to a point where I would be transcribing a tape of one of his murder-for-hire conversations, and I could not tell it was Gary on the tape," says Esmeralda Noyola, a secretary in the DA's special-crimes division. "Gary was that good at changing accents and disguising his voice."There was one instance when a potential client realized Johnson was a decoy and backed away from a contract. "That was because the informant, feeling guilty about giving up a friend, told the man who wanted to hire me who I really was," Johnson says. Furious that he had been exposed, Johnson paid an unannounced visit to the informant and to the would-be murderer and told them in no uncertain terms that they had better not go looking for another hit man. He would be watching them, he said. (So far, the men have taken his advice.)
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