by A. W. Gray
“In the late seventies she would have been in school back east. I don’t guess you ever knew Richard, either,” the interviewer says.
“Never laid eyes on the guy. What I know about that deal, the murder, is exactly what I read in the paper, just like everybody else.”
“But you knew his name was Dillard?”
“Later I did. First, though, he was just Cabbagehead to me.”
“And aside from your—your business, you really didn’t know him?”
“Now, I didn’t say that,” the dealer says. “You get to know these guys. If you’re going to be careful, you find out everything you can, the people you’re doing business with.” He glances around the visiting room. “Don’t guess I was careful enough, huh?”
“You had him pegged as an addict?” the interviewer says.
“Well, more than that. Most of them were addicts in one form or another. Anybody buys illegal drugs, they’re hooked to a certain extent. But old Cabbagehead, it was more than that with him.”
The interviewer frowns. “Oh?”
“Give you an example. We went hunting one time. Listen, you know what a doe permit is?”
The interviewer shrugs. “I don’t hunt. Never been in my life.”
The dealer gestures with his hands, flattening his palms. “It’s a deal from the Parks and Wildlife. When you get your license. You’re only supposed to kill a certain amount of does.”
“Has to do with prolonging the species.”
“Right. There’s permits you can buy to attach to the license, and if the game warden catches you with more does than you got permits, it’s a big fine. A bunch of us, we went down on this guy’s deer lease.”
“Who is ‘we’?” the interviewer says. He readies pad and pencil.
The dealer raises a hand. “Hold on, this is supposed to be about Cabbagehead. None of those other guys might want to—”
“Their names aren’t for publication,” the interviewer says. “But face it, some of this is pretty inflammatory. If I can’t verify the story, I can’t use it.”
“Look,” the dealer says. “This was ten, fifteen years, and I didn’t know all of those guys that well.”
“Just a few will do,” the interviewer says. “Enough so in case I have to …”
Hesitantly, skeptically, the dealer rattles off three names. The interviewer jots the names down, then watches with lifted brows as the dealer continues.
“The guy’s lease,” the dealer says, “he rented hunting rights, you know? We were up there in doe season, and the deal was that none of the other game on the property were we to touch. Or if we did shoot, say, a buck or any birds or anything, we were supposed to pay the guy so much a head for anything except doe.”
“He was trying to preserve the other game,” the interviewer says.
“Right. Or get paid for any other game that anybody killed. We were only paying for the right to hunt doe, in season. Anything else was extra.
“So anyhow,” the dealer says, “you know most of these guys didn’t really give a shit about hunting anything. Those hunting trips were just an excuse to get snorted up, shot up, whatever. Why the hell you think they invited me along? They stayed up all night, watched a few porno movies, and did more than a few lines, you know, and the next morning off they go. Except for me. If you think I was about to go tromping around in the woods while a bunch of coked-up bastards waved shotguns around, well, you’re wrong is all I can tell you.
“So Cabbagehead, he’d done about twice as much dope as anybody else, which was about par for the course for him, and the first thing you know he’s wandering around out there blowing the shit out of everything there was. Fence posts, trees, beer bottles, you name it. Didn’t take long before even the doped-up guys came back in, they were so afraid Cabbagehead might shoot one of them. There was this one other guy stayed out there with him, don’t ask me why, and first thing you know Cabbagehead shoots this buck. And instead of bringing the carcass in, he takes and buries the fucking thing under a brush pile, so’s the guy that has the lease won’t know that old Cabbagehead’s killed something which ain’t a doe. Hides the carcass and then leaves the deer lease, even though in the shape he was in I don’t see how he made it home driving.”
“Funny way for him to act,” the interviewer says. “How much was shooting the buck going to cost him?”
The dealer snorts derisively. “Shit, fifty bucks. Wasn’t any money, the way real estate was going in those days. The fifty dollars had nothing to do with it. This guy used to do dope till he was so zonked he’d do just about anything, lie, cheat, anything else. Other guys were addicted, sure. But there was more to it with Cabbagehead, let me tell you. He was on the world’s longest guilt trip about something. Ask anybody that knew him then, that guy had problems that the rest of us wouldn’t even want to think about. All that coke and booze, I think the guy wanted to forget some things.”
It was late 1981, during their third and last year at Harvard, when Richard and Nancy firmed up wedding plans. Both were soon to receive their master’s degrees, and decided that the ideal marriage date would be in early 1982. Nancy so notified Sue and Big Daddy, and the Dillards set about arranging a Dallas wedding for their daughter that would be an event to remember. Richard told his own folks back in Willimantic of his upcoming marriage, and Allan and Rosemary Lyon scurried to make friends and relatives aware, and to firm up travel plans.
During the months before their wedding, Richard and Nancy had a disagreement of sorts over where they wanted to live. Harvard graduates, particularly those with master’s degrees, have their pick of the jobs just about anywhere in the country. Nancy wanted to stay on the East Coast, preferably in Boston, for a number of reasons. She was still a history buff at heart, a throw-back to her museum days, and what better place for a history nut to live than the birthplace of freedom? Also, like many young women striving for independence Nancy didn’t want to live in the same town with her family; she confided in friends that she’d just as soon not spend her entire adult life under Sue and Big Daddy’s thumbs.
Richard, though, had other ideas. Ever since the first time he’d made the Dillards’ acquaintance, and particularly since he’d had the tour of Highland Park, Richard had wanted to move to Texas. As the wedding approached, he and Nancy spent many long nights debating their future place of residence. Richard told his future bride that while the East Coast was in a slowdown, things in Texas were booming. In 1981 Richard’s argument didn’t quite hold water; at that time the entire nation was on a financial upswing. Nonetheless, slowly and doggedly Richard wore down Nancy’s resistance, and she finally agreed that wherever he wanted to move would be fine with her. For the balance of her shortened life, Nancy was to give in to her husband’s wishes over and over again.
Just before Christmas of 1981, Richard called Big Daddy at the office. He told his future father-in-law that he and Nancy had decided, between them, that they wanted to live in Dallas, and he wanted to know if Big Daddy could be of any help in finding them a place to live and a place to work.
Big Daddy didn’t give his answer at once. First he had to contact Sue, to find out whether she concurred that it would be nice to have Nancy and her husband living nearby. Big Daddy needn’t have worried; Sue, of course, was delighted. Big Daddy then called Richard back, and told his future son-in-law to come on down. And if the young couple had any problems in getting settled, Big Daddy would be glad to lend a helping hand.
8
Debate rages, both among those who “know” and among those who only followed the case in the newspapers and on television, as to precisely who or what caused the death of Nancy Dillard Lyon, and more than one speculator points the finger at Park Cities itself as a contributing factor. That any one neighborhood or any one area could be in part responsible for a tragic death seems unthinkable at first, but Park Cities has a personality all its own. T
o some, the townships of Highland Park and University Park represent dreamed-about Camelots, places where most would like to live but could never afford, and many Dallasites regard the social antics of Park Citizens with envy and even faint amusement. Events within the townships’ boundaries take on more significance merely because of where they occur. In Oak Cliff, Bluff View, or any one of a dozen other Dallas neighborhoods, Nancy’s death would likely have received a quarter column in the obits, nothing more, and would have been soon forgotten.
A squatter named W. W. Caruth began the legend in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Whether he was far of vision or short of bankroll begs a question; the fact is that the center of fledgling Dallas sprang up near the Trinity River—just as all major cities were born near the waterways and spread outward from there—and at the time Caruth built his home place near what is now the intersection of North Central Expressway and South-western Boulevard, his farm was out in the toolies and far to the north of Big D proper. While Reconstruction land hawks did battle for the downtown acreage, Caruth quietly went about acquiring countryside property in wholesale lots; the land was cheap and the bidders few in number. At the turn of the century it was a full day’s wagon ride over rutted and washed-out trails from Caruth’s front door to the Dallas cornerstone cross streets of Main and Akard, and the single largest landowner in Dallas County was largely unknown to—and completely unnoticed by—the big cigars down in the financial district. During World War I, the Caruth image underwent quite a facelift.
Actually, the Methodists had more to do with the growth surge in Park Cities than did the war. The Methodist Church has always been one of the leading proponents of higher education, and by the time the war began they had already established their flagship Texas college, Southwestern University, in Georgetown, only a few highway miles north of Austin. The state capital is centrally located on the banks of the Colorado River, and up until the turn of the century was thought of as the state’s main center of population. Neither educators nor growth-center analysts were prepared for the explosion in the Dallas–Fort Worth area—the Trinity is hardly navigable, and even today Dallas continues to defy the rules to remain the largest city in the world not located on a major body of water—but by 1913 the Methodists realized that there was a need for a second university to service the large number of Wesleyans who’d settled beside the Trinity. During the next two years several college scouting parties came to tour the area, and in 1915 the Methodist Church settled on a plot of Caruth land on a pleasant grassy hilltop, constructed a now famous domed building known as Dallas Hall, and founded the now even more famous college that they christened Southern Methodist University. Southwestern U even lost its president to the new institution when Dr. Robert S. Hyer made the trek north to become SMU’s first mentor, and although Dr. Hyer’s name remains on a couple of college buildings and one University Park street even today, his granddaughter Martha went on to even greater fame as the beautiful and wholesome blonde who brought out the best in Frank Sinatra in the sixties hit movie Some Came Running.
Although the sale to SMU was the most important transfer of Caruth land, it was not the first and hardly the last. Anyone who wished to subdivide in the north central area of Dallas County had to deal with the Caruth family, and by 1915 a few residential neighborhoods had taken birth. But the founding of the college brought about an intriguing name for the newly formed township: University Park. A prestigious campus in the area meant the construction of homes for faculty and staff, new shopping areas, and new public schools for younger children associated with the university to attend. As the years rolled by and university enrollment increased, the residential neighborhoods that appeared around the college grew as well, so that by 1950 every available foot of space in University Park was subdivided into shopping centers or lots occupied by middle-class homeowners. It was a nice place to raise a family.
Whereas University Park grew as a modest college community, its sister township of Highland Park catered to the wealthy from its very beginnings. Before World War I, Dallas’ rich lived for the most part in one of two areas, either along Forest Avenue south of downtown or close to Swiss Avenue, which lay directly to the east of the financial district. Two wide boulevards, Gaston Avenue and Akard Street, provided the wealthy easy access to the center of the city, but around the turn of the century the two main thoroughfares also became the primary streetcar lines. The rich had no need for public transportation because they could afford the newfangled motor cars, and the super-elite Texans of east and southeast Dallas found the clanging trolleys and the bumpy auto rides along streets rutted with streetcar tracks more than a little annoying. So, during the same period when the Methodists scouted for a college location, Dallas’ wealthy sought out a more peaceful place in which to live.
The City of Highland Park provided the answer. Not only did the tributary of the Trinity River known as Turtle Creek provide a majestic, tree-shaded setting in which to build one’s mansion, the fledgling township offered a more attractive tax base than did the City of Dallas. It was the golden era of silent pictures, and it was no accident that the main street that wound its way through Highland Park and skirted the banks of Turtle Creek was christened Beverly Drive. Highland Park wanted the wealthy to come and build their movie-star mansions, and the town soon had its wish. As Dallas moved into the Roaring Twenties, the grand homes along Beverly and Lakeside Drives became tourist must-sees.
The event that forever cemented the bond between Highland Park and its more modest college-community neighbor, thus identifying the two townships forevermore under the joint title of Park Cities, was at the time considered somewhat of a coup for Highland Park. The cost of living on or around Beverly Drive naturally dictated that the population was sparse, and therein lay a problem in the formation of schools. The price per head of public education exclusive to Highland Park children was prohibitive even to its wealthiest citizens, so in forming the Highland Park Independent School District, the township invited University Park to join. The addition of University Park’s population to the district kept school taxes at a manageable level, and for almost four decades the two townships, one super-wealthy and the other middle-class, lived peacefully a stone’s throw apart while their children attended classes and buddied around together. In the meantime the City of Dallas grew to the north and completely encircled the Park Cities, so that Highland Park and University Park had no expansion room. For a long time no one thought the fact that the Park Cities had no more space in which to expand bore much significance; though the townships had their own mayors, police, and fire departments, they were considered by most to be mere extensions of Dallas proper. Then, in 1958, Little Rock Central came along.
That University Park has the battle over public school integration to thank for its current wealthy status is somewhat sad, but true nonetheless. As National Guard troops escorted frightened black children to and from Little Rock’s Central High in front of a national TV audience, and street rioting over the prospect of forced busing broke out from coast to coast, Park Cities residents saw the integration furor as a mere dinnertime diversion. There was no racial tension in Park Cities schools because the population was totally white. There were blacks living in Highland Park, of course, but those people occupied servants’ quarters, and families with children need not apply for the Beverly and Lakeside Drive domestic jobs. Court-ordered busing had no effect on the two townships, because at the time the Highland Park Independent School District existed without federal funding, and even if the busing had been effective in Park Cities, there were simply no black children to bus. Thus while City of Dallas residents scrambled for the suburbs, and private schools burst at the seams, Park Cities residents went calmly on about their business; in effect, the events of the late fifties and sixties transformed the cities of Highland Park and University Park into Dallas County’s version of Whitey’s last stand.
And stand in Park Cities Whitey has done, and quite
effectively. The resistance to black residents in the community isn’t official, of course, but is rigid nonetheless, and the exceptions have been few and far between.
For example: For a ten- to fifteen-year period in the fifties and sixties there lived on Miramar Street, one block off of Beverly Drive, a locally notorious lunatic named Hazel Vincent. Dame Vincent was a surgeon’s widow, and while unarguably nutty as a fruitcake, she possessed the financial wherewithal to keep most of her eccentricities a poorly held secret. She had a forty-foot yacht built on runners in her backyard so she could sit on the deck and pretend that she was on the high seas, and in the middle of the night her cries of “Land ho!” and her off-key rendition of the “Song of the Volga Boatmen” would keep the phone lines jammed for hours while neighbors called in complaints to the police department. Once, when served with a civil restraining order regarding her nighttime activities, Dame Vincent tore the legal paper into bits in front of the astonished constable and ordered the officer of the court into her backyard to “Weigh anchor and set sail for Galveston.”
Although Mrs. Vincent’s landlocked maritime jaunts were a source of amusement (for all who lived far enough away from her not to have to put up with the racket through the night, that is), the lady was far from harmless. For years she waged a one-woman war with mischievous Highland Park teenagers who, egged on, took delight in making her life as miserable as possible. Baiting Old Lady Vincent became as exciting a pastime for Park Cities kids as sneaking up on Boo Radley for the fictional children of To Kill a Mockingbird. Her phone number was listed in the book; the less venturesome teenagers of the area called her at all hours and had anonymous screaming fights with Mrs. Vincent, who recorded all calls and threatened the kids with intervention from the Coast Guard. The braver adolescents, mostly acting on dares, conducted raiding parties into her yard—after first casing the joint to make certain she wasn’t out and about—to drill holes in her ship deck and scrawl obscenities on the yacht’s bulkhead. Dame Vincent countered by sitting in her upstairs window for days, armed with a Daisy Red Ryder BB gun, keeping out of sight while the preliminary adolescent scouts peered into her yard, and then pelting the unsuspecting teenagers with BB’s as they crept onto her boat like Boston Tea Party patriots.