Behind the Yellow Tape

by Jarrett Hallcox

  Six years of accusations were wiped away with only two days’ worth of good police work. Cuellar would now be elbow deep into the case until he retired. Everyone considered him a great police officer, one of those investigators who lived and breathed the areas he worked, and who knew everybody in town. Some people just have a knack for investigating crime, and Cuellar was one of them. “This is one of those crimes where I bet you could throw a rock from the victim’s house and hit the son of a bitch who did it,” Cuellar said, about the case. He went into the neighborhood and resurrected the time frame, going door to door to ask the folks who lived in the community “who was the meanest no good son of a bitch who lived around here back then,” when the murder happened. The answer for most was easy—Billy Sutherland. Billy Sutherland became a suspect and was coaxed into giving a DNA sample. But at this point in 1996, DNA technology was still evolving, and the test did not pinpoint him as the assailant, though it didn’t rule him out either, as it had the husband. Of course, without any definitive evidence, no arrest could be made, and Cuellar, who was fast approaching retirement, turned the case over to Ranger John Martin. The case was a quagmire, but Martin was eventually able to confirm that Billy Sutherland was the killer through an advanced DNA test from a lab in North Carolina. (Oh, and the four cigarette butts? They were from the guys who’d originally worked the scene.) In the end, it was still hard to prosecute because everybody got their feelings hurt. “It was a pissing match,” Martin said. Even in the face of DNA evidence that proved it impossible, some people were still holding on to the theory that the invalid man had killed his wife. Though Billy didn’t get the sentence that he probably should have, justice was finally served. Solving the case was the impetus behind the creation of a dedicated cold-case unit, and thus UCIT was born.

  The UCIT unit is composed of eight Texas Rangers dedicated full time to investigating cold cases, as well as serialized or unusual murders. The office is located in San Antonio in a nondescript strip mall, bookended by what just about everything in Texas is bookended by—a Whataburger fast-food restaurant on one side and a mom-and-pop Mexican joint on the other. This office contains the highest concentration of Texas Rangers anywhere in the state, except for the Department of Public Safety home office in Austin, where the bureaucratic “suits” reside. Other Rangers are spread throughout the state, most working alone covering nine county areas.

  The offices at UCIT are very sparse and minimalistically decorated, save for a few pieces of cowboy paraphernalia. Ranger Martin’s office is no different. He has only one “I love myself” tribute displayed in his office: his U.S. Air Force commendation for outstanding military service, served mostly in Guam as a military police officer. (We did, however, notice one other piece of John Martin regalia, pushed back on his bookshelf between the DSM-IV psychology text and another book titled Practical Homicide Investigation Techniques: the Class Leader Award presented to him by the staff for serving as the Session VIII class president at the NFA.) Martin has a lot of books crammed on his shelves, all dealing in one way or another with the psychological aspects of crime scene investigation. Martin is the Texas Rangers’ one and only behavioral analyst, classically trained by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and stationed at the UCIT unit to analyze criminal behaviors related to cold-case murder investigations.

  Nearly all of the sixty-some-odd cold-case investigations that the unit is working on at any one time are truly the worst of the worst. Not necessarily worst in the way that the crime was committed, but in how the case was worked. We refer to these cases as the “cream of the crap.”

  “It’s hard to work a cold case,” John Martin began, a little preoccupied. On the day we arrived in San Antonio, he’d been busy on the Internet, requesting a custom-crafted gun to replace the one that had been stolen from his house just a few weeks before. In typical Ranger fashion, Martin worked his own crime scene, pissed off beyond belief that something like this had happened. God, Texas, women, children, and guns are the things most valued by Rangers, and we’ll let you put them in the proper order. “I bet the son of a bitch who stole it is back across the Rio Grande Valley, laughing with his buddies as to what he did,” Martin said, through gritted teeth, as he continued researching his gun. “But I found prints where he looked into the house and entered them into AFIS; one day, I’ll get a hit.” Martin had discovered one of the most common prints left at a scene—the karate chop print, which appears where a perp, usually a burglar, cups his hands around his eyes to look into a window, casing a place he wants to break into. Martin dusted and lifted these beautiful prints, and now, should the guy ever get caught, he’ll have something to compare them to. We wish the perp luck. Never separate a Ranger from his gun; it just might land you in the chair.

  “As I said earlier, it’s hard to work a cold case,” Martin started again, fidgeting over our recording our conversation. “Many agencies don’t even still have any of the original evidence from the case.” That’s true of virtually all cold-case investigations. There are no specific rules or laws covering every type of evidence or how long it must be kept in storage. After twenty years, many agencies purge old evidence, not expecting that a piece of clothing or a sheet from a homicide may hold any further value. Then along came DNA analysis, a way to investigate the past, so to speak—but only if the evidence still exists.

  “When you do get somewhere, few prosecutors even want to take on the case,” Martin continued. “Then you have a jury pool where very few were even born when the case happened.” Couple those circumstances with very little evidence, a few bad Polaroid photographs, some poorly written case notes, and you have a very difficult and unexciting case to prosecute.

  Yet cold-case work, or unsolved case work, is all the rage in law enforcement right now. Every case is unsolved until it is solved, no matter how long the investigation takes. Most departments have always, either formally or informally, worked cold cases. However, in today’s environment, many agencies are dedicating specific units to these cases, and thus, they compete for notoriety and, more importantly, funding. And funding is directly correlated to clearance rates. “When we started the unit,” Martin began, “we wanted to have something to compare it to.” So Martin and other Rangers called cold-case squads from across the country to see how they tracked their clearance rates. They found that some of the squads had extraordinarily high clearance rates compared to the others. “They were cooking the books,” Martin claims, with a crooked smile. “They told us that they counted everything.” And by everything, they even include theories on “whodunit.” But although investigators may “know” who really committed the crime, that’s not usually enough—an investigator must also be able to prove it with evidence, statements, and the like. From what John learned, several of the cold-case squads had simply counted theories about what they think they know, as well as what they can prove, in their number of closed cases. The Rangers in the UCIT unit count only what they can prove and resolve.

  Texas Ranger John Martin with one of his many cold-case files.

  HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

  One of the many downsides to theories, John says, is that “people get married to their pet theories and get plum mad when you pose another possibility.” He’d had a case up in Round Rock, Texas, in which Christina Moore, three months pregnant, had been brutally murdered. The police were sure that what they were seeing at the crime scene meant only one thing—that her husband had done it. “Anytime you work with an opinion already formed, you are going to miss a lot,” John said. The Round Rock police had asked him to take a look at the crime scene and, using his behavioral analyst training, give his opinion about the type of perpetrator who could have done it. “I believed that it was a sexual predator from the very beginning,” John said, disagreeing entirely with the direction of the Round Rock Police Department’s investigation. “They got really pissed off at my assessment.” Behavioral analysis can be very polarizing, particularly when an investigator cannot keep his biases
in check and clouds the investigation by formulating his own theories, differing from the behavior analyst’s and rooted in feelings instead of facts. Despite this, behavioral analysis is a useful forensic tool.

  The investigation into Christina Moore’s death dragged on, going nowhere for more than a year, with the Round Rock Police Department still convinced that the husband was the killer. Things such as an overturned coffee cup and a dog covered in blood led them to formulate their theory on the husband. “If the husband had done it, then he was a genius,” John said to us as he thumbed through his case files, referring to inconsistencies in behavior that he observed at the crime scene. “The gal had been attacked at the door,” John pointed out. “A husband doesn’t do that; he has access to the house.” What it boiled down to for John was that rarely do people plan a killing out to a T—thinking ahead, staging things, husbands attacking from the outside, and so on—unless they are unusually gifted criminals. And other nuances of the scene, observations we won’t give away here, indicated that it was a sexual homicide committed by someone other than the husband.

  Then, in 2004, a woman came forward with new information on the case. Betty Johnson, sister-in-law to one Michael Moore (no relation to Christina), got mad at Michael one day and decided to tell the Round Rock Police Department that he had checks belonging to a Christina Moore. Moreover, Michael had given his wife a new set of wedding rings, which he claimed he had purchased from a man at a day-labor center. Funny thing was, Christina’s rings had been missing; her husband had pictures of them for insurance purposes—and the rings Michael Moore had given his wife were a perfect match to the ones taken from Christina.

  Other things connected Michael to the case as well, and he was eventually arrested, ultimately confessing to this crime and to another murder, and sentenced to life in prison. Thus, John’s original theory was vindicated. “Did you get a call from the Round Rock Police Department when all this happened?” we asked, assuming that they would have called him back once the investigation concluded, especially because his original analysis proved correct. “Shiiiiitttt,” was all John had to say in response to that question.

  The next day, John made it his quest to keep us from eating at chain restaurants while we were in San Antonio. Fortunately for us, John’s lovely and artistic wife had introduced him to a nice, frou-frou type of restaurant called the Guenther House. The Guenther House is the original home of the founding family of the Pioneer Flour Mills, and this eclectic house has been turned into a part museum/part kitschy restaurant, the kind of place where, John claims, “They’ll make you put a pretty flower in your hair.” Translation: It’s a girly joint, though the food is really good.

  At this lunch, we also hooked up with another academy graduate, Ranger Chance Collins. Chance is also stationed in San Antonio but with one of the traditional Ranger units, Company D. Your typical all-American good-looking guy, Chance is six feet, six inches tall and built like an athlete. He has a very intimidating presence, and as a result he is known to be great at getting confessions out of suspects. He is also lovingly referred to by other Rangers as a chula, or pretty boy. A few of these chulas are employed by the Rangers, and they traditionally get assigned all of the governor or presidential details because they look good on camera. So we, along with Ranger Martin and Ranger Chula Collins, arrived at the Guenther House, minus the flowers in our hair but attracting many a stare nonetheless.

  The hostess led us to a small round metal table decorated with decoupage flowers on the top, and we seated ourselves on filigreed iron chairs. It was the type of table you might see in the corner of an English garden—not the type where two gun-totin’ Texas Rangers would usually be caught dead sitting. Most of the space was taken up by legs, elbows, and cowboy hats, but we made do.

  Texas Rangers John Martin and Chance Collins on the steps

  of the Bexar County Courthouse.

  HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

  “Any weird cases, Chance?” we asked, thumbing through the menu consisting of foods Rangers don’t typically eat, such as crepes, hollandaise sauce, and marmalade. We could tell that Chance’s wheels immediately began turning, deciding whether to pull our legs or tell us something for real. He chose, for the time being, a real story. “Yeah, I got this weird case,” he began, digging at his front teeth with his customary toothpick. A body had been found over in some woods on an officer’s piece of property. “Case goes to trial next week. Strangest part of the case was how the body had been messed with.” Indeed, the body had already gone through the bloat-and-purge stage, releasing volatile fatty-acid fluids such as putrescine and cadaverine. “I was smelling his shorts,” Chance said as John Martin gave him the crooked-eye. “I noticed his shorts smelled like decomp, and I thought it was strange.” It was strange, particularly considering that the shorts were not found on the body but at least a hundred feet away. The body was also covered by new-looking, fresh tree branches—too new, considering the length of time that the body had been there. It appeared that someone had disturbed the body postmortem by placing the newly cut branches over it as a rudimentary camouflage. “When we caught the suspects, they confessed to going back to the body and removing the dead guy’s shorts,” Chance told us. The reason they gave was that they’d seen on the show CSI that they might have left fingerprints on the body, and also that bleach gets rid of all kinds of evidence. So they went back, removed the guy’s shorts, and scrubbed him down with bleach. Perps learning from shows like CSI are becoming a common theme for real crime scene investigators. It’s another problem attributed to the CSI Effect: bad guys going that extra mile not to get caught, based on something they’ve seen on television. Sometimes, thankfully, it leads to blunders, as in this case or in the John T. Snow case (see Chapter 2). But other times, it does not.

  “By the time I came to the NFA, I had been a Ranger for seven years,” John said later, as we walked back to our car after lunch. He chucked his cowboy hat into the backseat. “I felt like I had a pretty good handle on it. Then I got to the NFA and saw the quality of instruction, and it made me reflect back on some of the cases I had investigated over the years and how I could have done things better or differently. Not only did I recognize my own deficiencies, I recognized that my deficiencies were also the Rangers’ deficiencies.” John had laid the groundwork for other Rangers to come to the academy, and he even started a mini-crime scene school for the Rangers, building on many of the concepts that he learned at the NFA.

  That’s been a constant theme with virtually every graduate we have ever talked to. It’s not that anyone was doing a bad job; that’s certainly not the case. But there had never been a place specifically dedicated to the art of crime scene investigation, where CSIs could learn from other CSIs and practice their craft, developing new and innovative techniques. Not to mention the NFA’s unique environment, far different from most other police training academies. “I’ve been around these little regional police academies in the state, where they’ve hired some retired police officer who thinks he knows it all,” John told us as we drove around San Antonio. “What you get is a guy with one year of experience he’s had twenty-five times over, and he’s over there trying to teach new police officers, and completely closed-minded to anything that is outside his realm of knowledge and understanding. You guys impressed me right off the bat saying that you would never be satisfied with the way it is right now. I thought, wow, what a great attitude to have for any training program or educational endeavor, and these folks are going to be successful and make a big splash.”

  John’s comments were very flattering, and they reflected what the NFA set out to do. We intentionally engineered the academy to be unlike traditional police-training venues. We had made a concerted effort to be different, to be more interactive. We wanted input, we wanted feedback, we were open to change, and we listened to everybody’s opinion. These were not ideas readily accepted in the rigid, paramilitary, and very strict hierarchical police world. But they’re concepts that a
re very conducive to learning.

  The next day, we went with John and his lovely wife for a taste of San Antonio culture—Fiesta. Originally called the Fiesta San Jacinto, Fiesta is a ten-day celebration in honor of the heroes who died during the battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto. In modern times, Fiesta has morphed into a drunken fest with cheap taco bars and thousands of cascarones—colored empty eggshells filled with confetti. As we ate the Fiesta food, John talked about a recent cold case he’d investigated.

  Partygoers at Fiesta, a San Antonio celebration.

  HALLCOX & WELCH, LLC

  Back in October 1980, John Gough was shot and killed by his wife, Wanda, in what was determined to be an act of self-defense. But John’s brother Fred had never believed the story and had tried unsuccessfully for years to get the case reopened. Finally, after much persistence, the case landed in John’s lap in May 2005.

  “I could tell right away that it more than likely wasn’t self-defense, as Wanda had described in her statement twenty-five years [earlier],” John said. He matched the wounds from the photos of the deceased to Wanda’s original statement and was able to make out inconsistencies. “Where she says she shot her husband, and how, just didn’t match with what I was seeing,” John recalled. “So we went back to the house where the shooting had occurred.” When they arrived, “we asked the owners if we could take a look around the house, and they let us in.”