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 4 of 4)
By the mid-nineties Johnson's performances were getting buzz in the local media: The Houston Chronicle regularly ran stories about his cases that contained both his name and the occasional quote from him. One would have thought that someone looking for a hit man might have read stories about Johnson and been concerned about running across him. Yet the clients kept arriving, ordinary men and women embracing what Johnson's beloved author Carl Jung once defined as their "shadow side." Some of them came to their meetings already having concocted murderous scenarios that could have been lifted straight out of a bad cable-television movie or a Mary Higgins Clark novel. A bookkeeper met with Johnson to outline her plan to have him blow up the home of her employer, a well-known Houston surgeon, with the surgeon in it. For her down payment, she offered Johnson a luxury motorboat. A chemical plant worker, who believed his daughter was being poorly treated by his ex-wife's new boyfriend, wanted Johnson to throw the new boyfriend down an abandoned water well. When Johnson suggested they meet at a Denny's to discuss the details of the murder—defense attorneys say Johnson is so fond of meeting his clients at Denny's that the restaurant should name a plate after him—the worker wanted them to have a secret code to recognize each other. When the worker saw Johnson sitting at the counter eating pie, he would say, "That looks like good pie." Johnson would reply, "All pie is good pie."
Some of his client meetings almost reached the level of farce. In 1996 he met the churchgoing 61-year-old Patsy Haggard, who so despised her husband that she once burned down the kitchen of their house just to irritate him. Still not satisfied, she asked a young woman from the neighborhood who once had run-ins with the law over her drug use if she knew of a hit man. Horrified, the young woman called the police, who called Johnson, who began meeting Haggard in the parking lot of a barbecue restaurant. Each time they met, she searched him to see if he was wired, occasionally brushing her hand over his private parts. She never found the wire—it was hidden in his clothes—but she did eventually become so infatuated with Johnson that she suggested they perform a certain sex act on the hood of her Cadillac. He politely declined, but he did agree to her request to shoot her husband.
Most client meetings, however, were textbook studies of the banality of evil. A Houston teenager named Shawn Quinn, a brilliant kid with an IQ of 131, gave Johnson seven Atari computer games, three dollar bills, and $2.30 in nickels and dimes to kill a male classmate he thought was trying to win the affection of a girl he liked. "If you drive back on the toll road, you won't need to get change," the boy casually told Johnson. Bobby Wigley, an employee at an Eckerd drugstore, told Johnson he wanted him to saw through the brake cable of his wife's car and then make sure his wife and their baby were killed in an automobile accident so that he could collect on a life insurance policy and start a new career as a private detective who travels the world solving crimes. Wigley hocked his own pistol to get the money for Johnson's down payment. Houston police officer William Peoples, a highly regarded eleven-year veteran of the force, decided his ex-wife should die because she was costing him too much money in child support. He hired a convicted murderer on parole to do the killing, but then that man got cold feet, started looking for a subcontractor, and came across Johnson. He offered Johnson $10,000 to carry out the hit. When the police officer was convicted of solicitation of capital murder, he wept as he embraced his parents. Like so many others Johnson had caught, he had apparently returned to his senses, but by then it was too late. He was off to the joint for a ten-year sentence.
In almost every case Johnson worked on, defense attorneys argued that these clients were not diabolical but were just letting off steam during a particularly stressful period in their lives. They would never have followed through with their murder plots if a "professional hit man" hadn't happened to show up, the attorneys said. In fact, many of them got probation or minor prison sentences, especially if they arrived at the courtroom with their victims, who had agreed to testify that all was forgiven. (After a young woman hired Johnson to kill her brother because he had received a larger inheritance than she had, the entire family, brother included, showed up in court and asked the judge that she receive probation, which he granted.) "I admit, a lot of people who have come to see me will probably never get in trouble again," says Johnson. "But all I can tell you is to listen to the tapes of those conversations I had with them at that time. Their cognitive reasoning was so far gone when I met them that they were not going to back down. They were not going to be talked out of it. And if they had not found me, they would have found someone else to do their killing for them—and that's what is so scary."
In the late nineties, however, fewer people were looking for a hit man, a phenomenon that Johnson attributed to the economy. "When the economy is good, as it was then, people don't get so frantic," he says. "But when it starts going bad, as it's doing now, everyone gets a little bit crazier and starts thinking about knocking someone else off." Sure enough, in the past twelve months, his workload has returned to normal. One of his more recent clients was a sixty-year-old used-car salesman in the town of Tomball who reportedly was not happy about the idea that his wife, the owner of a beauty shop, would get half of their community property in their upcoming divorce. According to the police version of events, the salesman asked a neighbor across the street to send her on to the next world, but he made it clear he would pay for the killing only when he saw evidence that his wife was dead.
Deciding that he just wanted a finder's fee, the neighbor went looking for a real hit man, met Johnson, and outlined the deal. Johnson and the other Tomball police officers involved decided they had no choice but to visit the wife. They waited until she had finished her last customer's permanent at her beauty shop, then they stopped her as she was leaving to go home. They told her that her husband had taken out a $20,000 contract on her life. "Good God almighty," the woman said. "How can you live with somebody this long who can hate you so much?"
They persuaded the wife to be photographed while lying "dead" on a tarp. To add realism, ketchup was poured over the back of her head, ruining her pretty hairdo, and her hands and feet were bound with duct tape. When the neighbor told Johnson that the used-car dealer didn't want to pay even after seeing the photo, Johnson, turning on his mean-as-a-snake persona, said, "Listen, motherf—er, if I don't get my money, that woman's body will be in your driveway the next morning and the cops will be called." Frantic, the neighbor went to confront the used-car dealer, and the two of them started yelling, throwing punches, and apparently trading gunfire. When the cops roared up in their squad cars, the salesman was found sitting on the tailgate of his pickup, bleeding from a gunshot wound in his right shoulder. "Just when you think you've seen it all," says Johnson," here comes another case."
As much as Johnson thrives on his double life, he is not sure how much longer it can last. Someday, he knows, a client is going to look at him and say, "You're Gary Johnson, aren't you?" There is also the question of the long-range psychological effect on a person who continues to do something that gives him, as Johnson himself puts it, "a rather depressing outlook on the human condition." One day I ask Johnson if he thinks his hit man job has anything to do with the fact that he doesn't have long-term relationships. "Doing what you do," I say, "it's sort of hard to trust people, isn't it?" He pauses. "I think it would be fair to say that I don't let many people get too close," he tells me in a masterpiece of understatement.On another afternoon, we are eating lunch at his favorite Mexican restaurant, and I notice him looking around. Around him are Houstonians of every stripe—businessmen in coats and ties, blue-collar laborers, office workers from the nearby downtown skyscrapers. For the moment, everyone is congenial, sharing tables, swapping stories. His brown eyes, like little concealed cameras, go back and forth across the room. "You're looking to see who might be your next client, aren't you?" I ask. He gives me an enigmatic smile.
What Johnson knows, perhaps better than anyone else, is the capability of people, given certain circumstances, to do absolutely savage things to each another. It's a good bet that someone in that restaurant with us that day was probably wishing someone else was dead. Perhaps it was the drab little man in the corner. Or maybe it was the slightly overweight woman sitting at a table with friends. "I am always here for them," says Johnson. "I am always here to wait for their calls and listen to them tell me their dark secrets."
But not long ago Johnson did something out of character for him. He got a call about a young woman who had been spending mornings at a Starbucks in Houston's Montrose area, talking to an employee there about the cruel way her boyfriend had been treating her. There was no way to escape him, she said. Her only hope was to find someone to kill him. She asked the Starbucks employee if he knew someone who could help. The employee called the police, who put him in touch with Johnson.
But before Johnson contacted her, he did some research into her case. He learned that she really was the victim of abuse, regularly battered by her boyfriend, too terrified to leave him because of her fear of what he might do if he found her.
Instead of setting up a sting to catch the woman and send her off to jail, he decided to help her. He referred her to social service agencies and a therapist to make sure she got proper help so she could leave her boyfriend and get into a women's shelter.
"The greatest hit man in Houston has just turned soft," I tell Johnson at the Mexican restaurant.
"Just this once," he says, giving me his same enigmatic smile. Then his eyes glance around one more time at the room, at various people picking up forks and knives and stabbing at their food. "Just this once," he says again.
My Library
