On . . . Texas True Crime
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on . Texas True Crime TT4096.indb4096.indb i 11/18/07/18/07 77:18:37:18:37 AAMM on . TT4096.indb4096.indb iiii 11/18/07/18/07 77:18:39:18:39 AAMM Texas True 6 Crime From the editors of texas monthly introduction by evan smith Editor, Texas Monthly University of Texas Press Austin TT4096.indb4096.indb iiiiii 11/18/07/18/07 77:18:39:18:39 AAMM Copyright © 2007 by Emmis Publishing LP d/b/a/ Texas Monthly All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2007 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html ∞ Th e paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Texas Monthly on — Texas true crime / from the editors of Texas Monthly ; introduction by Evan Smith, editor. — 1st ed. p. cm. isbn-13: 978-0-292-71675-9 (pbk. : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-292-71675-3 1. Crime—Texas—Case studies. 2. Criminals—Texas—Case studies. I. Smith, Evan, 1966— II. Texas monthly (Austin, Tex.) hv6793.t4t56 2007 364.1092′2764—dc22 2006038717 TT4096.indb4096.indb iivv 11/18/07/18/07 77:18:40:18:40 AAMM contents Introduction evan smith vii Suburban Madness skip hollandsworth 1 Th e Outsiders pamela colloff 19 Borderline Insanity cecilia ballí 39 A Kiss Before Dying pamela colloff 59 Midnight in the Garden of East Texas skip hollandsworth 79 Girls Gone Wild katy vine 95 Th e Man Who Loved Cat Burgling skip hollandsworth 111 Two Barmaids, Five Alligators, and the Butcher of Elmendorf michael hall 133 Th e Day Treva Th roneberry Disappeared skip hollandsworth 147 A Bend in the River pamela colloff 173 Th e Last Ride of Cowboy Bob skip hollandsworth 193 Th e Family Man skip hollandsworth 215 TT4096.indb4096.indb v 11/18/07/18/07 77:18:40:18:40 AAMM THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK introduction 6 When they say everything’s bigger in Texas, they mean nice things: hair, smiles, steaks, sky. Crime is too depressing to make the cut, but like it or not, our crime is not just big but bigger than anyone else’s, so we may as well brag about it. Our iconic criminals are larger than life, their names so well ingrained in our culture that they trip off the tongue without so much as a raised eyebrow: Bonnie and Clyde. Charles Whitman. Lee Harvey Oswald. An- drea Yates. Even if their acts were ghastly, they are or have been fi xtures in our lives, the stuff of everyday headlines, for as long as we can remember. Th ere’s no point in ignoring them or wishing they’d go away. From a journalistic standpoint, we couldn’t, and we haven’t. Since its inception, Texas Monthly has made hay of true crime, in the great tradition of our literary forebears. A previous anthol- ogy of terrifi c crime stories culled from our pages covered the cel- ebrated likes of the folks mentioned above. In your hand is, to my mind, a more interesting collection. Th e crimes chronicled are not as widely known, nor are the perpetrators. (With the possible ex- ception of that nice lady from Houston who ran over her adulter- ous husband with her Mercedes and then did it again and again, just to make sure she got him. Maybe you saw the TV movie? Th is stuff is entertainment gold.) But start reading about them—and then try to stop. TT4096.indb4096.indb vviiii 11/18/07/18/07 77:18:40:18:40 AAMM viii 6 Evan Smith Th ese twelve gems have in common what you’d want from any good read: memorable characters, a compelling plot, and rich scenes. And, of course, great writing. Th e authors are some of the fi nest, not just in Texas but anywhere. Perhaps the fi nest among them—at least when a dead body is at the center of the action—is Skip Hollandsworth, one of the magazine’s longtime executive editors. It’s no surprise that Skip wrote half the stories in this collection. A master spinner of yarns, he mixes deep-dive reporting with stylish storytelling in a way that gets his stories consistently talked about at dinner tables and around watercoolers. He’s such a favorite of our readers, and of mine, for one simple reason: He treats true crime not as pulp or pap but as serious journalism—every bit as worthy as any other genre, which it is. And also every bit as big. 6 Evan Smith, Editor texas monthly Au gust 2006 TT4096.indb4096.indb vviiiiii 11/18/07/18/07 77:18:41:18:41 AAMM on . Texas True Crime TT4096.indb4096.indb iixx 11/18/07/18/07 77:18:41:18:41 AAMM THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK suburban madness 6 skip hollandsworth Why would a devoted wife deliberately run over her beloved husband three times? It’s quite simple, really. He was having an af- fair with a woman accused by her allegedly pill-popping ex-husband of carrying on a lesbian relationship with her best friend, whose ex- husband has been indicted for an illegal wiretapping scheme designed to catch the two in the act and cover up his own infi delities with her former Lamaze-class buddy. Any questions? late in the afternoon of july 24, Clara Harris, a pretty and personable 44-year-old dentist from the Houston sub- urbs, put on a silky blue blouse and cream-colored slacks. She brushed her hair and tied it in place with a little bow. She then took Lindsey, her husband’s sixteen-year-old daughter from a brief fi rst marriage, for a drive in her silver S-Class 430 Mercedes-Benz. Clara loved her Mercedes-Benz. She had once told her hus- band, David Harris, a spectacularly successful orthodontist who had as many as 120 crooked-teethed adolescents a day coming through his offi ce, that the only extravagance in life she cared about was owning a Mercedes. For her, the car was a shining symbol of all that she had been able to accomplish. She had been born in Bogotá, Colombia, and raised by her widowed mother. Determined to make a living for herself, she had studied dentistry there before coming to the United States for more training in the TT4096.indb4096.indb 1 11/18/07/18/07 77:18:41:18:41 AAMM 2 6 Skip late eighties. With her thick red hair and perfect smile and little Hollandsworth mole on her left cheek, she looked like a beauty queen. In fact, she had been. She was crowned Miss Colombia Houston in a local contest soon after completing her residency at the University of Texas–Houston Dental Branch. “I remember David calling soon after he had met Clara and telling me he was completely smitten,” his father, Gerald, would later tell me. Clara felt no diff erently about David. Th ey had met in 1991, when they were both in their early thirties and working at the Castle Dental Center in Houston. David was not only brilliant when it came to teeth—he had graduated second in his class (also from the Houston Dental Branch) —but he had a charming, folksy nature, his favorite word being “golly.” Th ey married on Valentine’s Day, 1992, less than a year after their fi rst date, and held the recep- tion at the Nassau Bay Hilton hotel, about thirty miles south of downtown Houston, across the highway from the looming Johnson Space Center and not far from where David would eventually open his fi rst practice, Space Center Orthodontics. “I found the best,” Clara once told a reporter from a Brazoria County newspaper serv- ing Lake Jackson, a nearby community where she had opened her own dental practice in 1993. “I found the one God had reserved for me.” She put photographs of the two of them in her offi ce, replac- ing them with new ones every few months, and she talked to David two or three times a day on the phone, never hanging up before say- ing, “I love you.” In 1998 she gave birth to healthy twin sons, and she enjoyed a splendid relationship with David’s daughter, Lindsey, a talented violinist who lived with them in the summers after spend- ing the school year with her mother, who had moved to Ohio. No matter how many patients Clara had to see, she always got home in time to cook dinner for her family in their palatial white-brick home, worth more than half a million dollars, in the cheerily named suburb of Friendswood. She had the perfect life, she often told her patients. “For Clara, it was always ‘David, David, David, ’ ” one of her co-workers said. “I used to tell people that I wished I could be able to love my husband in the same way that Clara loved David.” But on that July evening, David Harris had decided not to be with his wife. He was meeting a receptionist who worked at his offi ce, a petite, stylish 39-year-old mother of three named TT4096.indb4096.indb 2 11/18/07/18/07 77:18:42:18:42 AAMM 6 3 Gail Bridges. Less than two years earlier, Gail had divorced Steven suburban Bridges, a popular State Farm agent who had clients all over the madness suburbs south of Houston.