The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime

by Gregg Olsen

  The pot was a natural. "It wasn't just financial,” says a close friend. “It was a way to compensate for a loss of self-esteem. If he couldn't be one of the big boys, he could sell them their pot.” On the career ladder of the drug world, Vandiver was a middleman, a "mule,” who made frequent trips to Miami to bring back trunks and later trucks - filled with pot, which he then sold through a network of friends in Texas and Colorado and throughout the Midwest.

  "In our circle of friends everybody knew what John was doing,” says Mashkes, who along with Russell had followed Vandiver to Houston. “It all seemed pretty innocent. Everybody had a lot of good pot and, later, a lot of cheap cocaine."

  There was one shadowy figure in Vandiver's life, however, which made his friends uneasy – an apprentice mechanic named Tom Mathes. He was a short, slight man in his late twenties, with small, piercing dark eyes, long, thinning brown hair and a sullen manner. They met in Houston in 1982, when Vandiver hired Mathes to work on his Triumph TR3. Vandiver was taken with Mathes and soon brought him into his drug business. Russell attributes their friendship to the fact that "they were both grease monkeys. I immediately didn't like Mathes. He didn't have friendly vibes at all!”

  A bit of a drifter and a job hopper who had followed an army buddy to Houston, Mathes turned out to be a bad business risk. He was often unable to pay for the pot Vandiver fronted him, and he'd have to work off his debts by repairing Vandiver's collection of old Triumphs.

  Russell remembers that in 1984 he "hadn't seen Mathes on the ranch more than one time in the past year and a half." Russell assumed, mistakenly, that "Mathes was history."

  IN LATE 1983 A CHRONIC PROBLEM WITH VANDIVER'S right hand, carpal-tunnel syndrome, flared up. By the end of a performance, he would be nursing a sore, partially paralyzed hand. "He said the hands were a no man's land," says Fromholz. "Johnny was afraid he wouldn't be able to play again."

  Around the same time, Vandiver's source of marijuana dried up as a result of a government crackdown. With his pot money shut off, he started dealing cocaine, which was more easily transported and immensely more lucrative. At first, the amounts of cocaine he handled were moderate - just enough to "supply his regular customers,” says Mashkes. According to his friends, Vandiver himself never acquired a taste for the rich man's high. In fact, he had often warned his friends against cocaine, saying, “It takes the r out of friend.” Friends like Ewing Street Times drummer Billy Bucher would later say that John's failure to heed his own advice "probably cost him his life."

  The following spring, in May 1984, Vandiver put his music career on hold while he underwent surgery on his hand. He also developed a persistent back problem that threatened to require surgery. It was a dismal summer. Spending most of it flat on his back, he was unable to make the rounds to his supplier and his dealers. The ranch became overgrown, and the animals were barely cared for. When his hand finally healed that fall, Vandiver was able to perform again, but he seemed more interested in renewing his cocaine trade.

  “We used to talk about his music," says a friend. "But suddenly all John wanted to talk about was how he was going to make more and more money selling drugs."

  Around the same time, Tom Mathes began pressuring Vandiver to cut him in on the more profitable cocaine market. But Vandiver, perhaps wary of Mathes's history of inconsistent payments, held back for months, restricting Mathes to a marijuana-only arrangement. Mathes, who was making no more than $200 a week crating goods for a freight company, must have found that infuriating.

  By December 1984, Vandiver's life seemed to be back on track and under control. He was playing again, and Davis was handling his bookings. He was even considering marriage and having children, something Davis had wanted for many years. "It was as if Debbie had finally passed the test,” says a close friend, "and John had decided this was it."

  There was just one conflict that Davis couldn't seem to resolve: Vandiver's drug dealing. Since the music gigs brought in only between $200 and $400 a night, most of their income clearly came from cocaine. He was careful to conduct his business from pay phones and deal only with people he considered friends, but the large quantities of cocaine and marijuana stored in the cabin and outbuildings, as well as the thousands of dollars buried in canisters in the garage and the woods, made Davis feel as though she were living on a volcano.

  TOM MATHES WAS THE DRUG connection Davis felt the most apprehensive about. Once, when Mathes had no place to stay, Vandiver let him sleep on the couch in the living room, an arrangement that irritated Davis. She told friends that she found Mathes repulsive and complained, "John's drug friends drive me crazy."

  Mathes began regularly referring to her as "John's bitch." He told friends, "I wish I didn't have to see her every time I go over there to do business."

  By the end of 1984, Mathes was doing more and more business with Vandiver. Through an old army buddy, Chuck Blair, Mathes had received a $12,000 loan. "Tom told me that John Vandiver was going to make an investment, a large investment,” Blair later testified. “And after all these years of knowing John, he was finally going to let Tom invest along with him." Mathes agreed to repay the borrowed $12,000 twofold, plus a $10,000 commission to Blair for setting up the deal.

  During this same period, Vandiver told Shake Russell that he was working up to bigger things. "It's going to be quite a run this time - cocaine to Colorado,” Vandiver said with a laugh. “For a while, I'll be a thousandaire." Vandiver saw the profits as a quick way to get straight: to pay for the still-pending back surgery and to square $37,000 in back taxes with the IRS. Always the outlaw, he had never filed a tax return during all his years as a professional musician.

  Perhaps because "neither of them really liked the cocaine or the people it attracted,” says Russell, "John's plans changed. He wanted to make a big enough killing to get out of the business. He was talking about buying a sailboat and sailing around the world, stopping in ports to play his music.”

  The cocaine, after all, was merely a way for him to make easy money. If John Vandiver ever envisioned himself as an old man, it's doubtful that he would have pictured a retired drug dealer. He would have been more likely to have seen himself as Russell did: "John would have been sitting on his front porch, playing his guitar."

  But it was another story altogether for Tom Mathes. Positioning himself for what he saw as his future as a drug kingpin, Mathes moved from a rundown Houston apartment complex into a three-bedroom Spanish-style ranch house in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood. He also started putting together his own little organization. He hired Cecil Covington, a thirty-year-old car detailer with a black belt in karate, “to watch my back.” Covington’s salary was paid with cash and all the cocaine he could pack up his nose. Covington accompanied Mathes on twice-weekly coke runs to Florida and selling trips throughout the Midwest. According to Covington, Mathes said, "A year from now we'll be millionaires.”

  On January 6th, 1985, Mathes threw himself a thirtieth-birthday party for more than 200 people in a local hotel bar called the Brass Key. Dennis Holland, Covington's top karate student, met Mathes that night and remembers the party as “a blowout.’

  “He had a live band, plenty of booze, and the drugs were flowing freely,” says Holland. “Just an all-out shebang.” Soon after, Mathes hired Holland, 22, and Joe Makosky, 19, Covington's other lead disciple, to act as additional bodyguards. They were also paid with cocaine.

  The gaunt, six-foot-six-inch Holland became known as Sasquatch, another name for the mythical Big Foot. Makosky was called Mean Joe. Covington was Mr. C. or Sensei, a karate term for "the master,” and Mathes was called the Little Professor or the Brain. Vandiver was barely aware of the Mathes crew. In his efforts to maintain secrecy, he would deal only with Mathes.

  After the big coke buy went down at the beginning of January, Mathes began complaining that Vandiver was still treating him like his mechanic, making him repair the beat-up Oldsmobile they used to transport the drugs. Adding to Mathes's hostility w
as Vandiver's tendency to tease him about his size. "That was one joke Tom could never take,” says Michael Charbeneau, a Mathes hanger-on. There was also the matter of money - still unpaid - that Vandiver had fronted Mathes for part of the shipment. "Maybe it was a commercial conflict between them," says Covington. "Whatever it was aggravated Tom really bad." Ultimately, it may have been that Mathes began to resent Vandiver's control over his drug supply and saw Vandiver as an obstacle to his own ambitions.

  Mathes began painting a distorted portrait of Vandiver for his bodyguards. "Tom would manipulate their minds,” says Charbeneau. "He was feeding them information on John’s Colombian connections and how all John needed to do was make a phone call and he could have you dumped in a minute."

  Charbeneau also says Mathes was continually looking over his shoulder. "He was always talking about people who were out to get him.” Charbeneau attributed Mathes's idiosyncrasies to cocaine-induced paranoia.

  It wasn't long before Mathes and Covington began carrying guns. "Mathes said there was the possibility that we might have to bust someone,” says Holland. For emphasis, Mathes would remind them of a bloody scene in the Brian De Palma film Scarface. "I've seen a lot of movies,” says Makosky. "I knew what those Colombians were like.”

  Then Mathes would entice them with his grandiose visions. Makosky remembers Mathes promising them "within a year we'll have our own dojo [karate school] in Florida, to funnel the drug money through. We'll have everything."

  But Mathes's would-be drug empire was already in trouble. Relishing his imaginary role as drug lord, he burned up his profits on lavish parties and constant cocaine use. According to one friend, "Tom was the type, if he invited five or six people over, he would line up $800 in cocaine on a mirror." Another acquaintance recalls Mathes and his three bodyguards snorting coke, "even while their noses were bleeding from the irritation." By early February, says Makosky, "we were all taking mega-doses." Covington seemed the most changed; he had dropped from nearly 200 pounds to 150. "It was just wasting Cecil away,” says Holland.

  At the same time, Mathes's loan was overdue, his creditors were pushing for their money, and Vandiver refused to front him any more coke. "What's the matter?" Vandiver asked Mathes. "You can't make any money, you've got to get it fronted to you?"

  Mathes began acting jittery, on edge. "Tom looked like he was self-inflicting pressure,” says one friend, who saw Mathes regularly. "Any more pressure to the pressure cooker wouldn't have been wise.”

  Janice Covington, Cecil's wife, later testified that in mid-February her husband told her that “Tom Mathes had a plan. . . that he knew people that had a lot of drugs and money and that could be ripped off and, if need be, killed."

  The following week Covington told Holland and Makosky that their services would be needed that Thursday night. There was a big deal going down, and it had to do with Vandiver.

  THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 21ST, WAS A BRISK WINTER day, and the morning mist carried the heavy, bitter scent of oak burning in fireplaces. John Vandiver began the day by taking a long ride on Sugar, his favorite quarter horse, and then cooking a large breakfast, as he did every morning. He used the afternoon to dub tapes of his music, which Davis would sell during and after his performances.

  Davis, who usually slept later than Vandiver, spent the afternoon with the animals. Lulu, one of the dachshunds, had had a litter, and Davis got caught up in the excitement of caring for the newborn pups. But she also had a sense of dread. Earlier in the week she had confided over the phone to a friend, Judi Alderman, that she wasn't happy with the "goings-on at the house." To another friend she complained about Tom Mathes's hanging around. "She never said she was afraid, but she just didn't want him there."

  That same morning Mathes put all his cocaine and drug paraphernalia in boxes and had it stashed at a friend's house. Later in the day he called Vandiver to arrange a meeting at the ranch that night. "Mathes told him he wanted to get some pot from him to make some of the money back that he owed John for cocaine," says Holland.

  At 1:16 that afternoon, Covington rented a maroon minivan from National Car Rental. At approximately 5:00 p.m., Holland picked up Makosky at his house. They were both, as Covington had ordered, wearing dark clothes. Neither of them knew what Mathes had planned for the night. A few hours later Covington drove Makosky home one more time to get something he believed might come in handy Makosky's twenty-five-inch samurai sword.

  Holland had spent most of the day doing drugs at the home he shared with Covington, and as he, Makosky and Covington waited for the 9:00 p.m. meeting with Mathes, all three continued to snort coke and smoke pot.

  AT ABOUT SIX O'CLOCK THAT evening, Vandiver drove Davis to Judi Alderman's house in Houston. Davis seemed worried, but Alderman shrugged it off since Davis often seemed tense. After some cajoling, Davis persuaded Alderman to join her and Vandiver and Sarah Irwin at the River Cafe, in Houston's trendy Montrose section. Davis assured Alderman that they wouldn't be out late. "John has an appointment at the ranch tonight at ten o'clock," she said. After dropping Davis off, Vandiver made his rounds, collecting drug money, and then stopped at Michael Mashkes's apartment, not far from the River Cafe. The two musicians watched TV and talked about an upcoming gig; Mashkes would. be backing Vandiver up when he played at Fitzgerald's, in Houston.

  Vandiver was also looking forward to Saturday night, when he was scheduled to open for Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul & Mary fame, at Poor David's Pub, in Dallas. The club's owner, David Card, had described the booking as a possible break for Vandiver. Despite his years of disappointment, Vandiver still harbored the hope that somehow his music would make it big.

  Before he left Mashkes's, Vandiver asked his friend to accompany him on his drive to Telluride, Colorado, later in the month. "I've got some business to transact there,” he told Mashkes, who didn't need to ask what kind.

  “I’ll let you know,” he replied.

  Vandiver, Davis, Irwin and Alderman met for dinner at the River Cafe around seven o'clock. They shared a bottle of wine and talked about a horse Davis had sold, which was appearing in the rodeo the following week. But Davis, looking thin and tired, was less talkative than usual. "Debbie's long nails were all bitten down to the quick,” Irwin says, "and John seemed preoccupied throughout dinner and kept checking his watch."

  At 9:00 p.m. Vandiver looked at Davis and said, "It's time - let's go." As they divvied up the dinner bill, Irwin asked Vandiver if she could give him a personal check for her share. "Is it okay? Can you cover it?"

  Vandiver laughed. "I think so. I've got $42,000 on me."

  Davis dawdled at the table, seeming somewhat reluctant to leave. But the friends soon said goodbye in front of the restaurant.

  AS VANDIVER AND DAVIS HEADED HOME, Mathes, Covington, Makosky and Holland gathered in a Best Western hotel room north of Houston. Covington was carrying a .38-caliber revolver. Mathes had a .25-caliber pistol. The samurai sword was outside in the van. The men sat around snorting coke and smoking pot while Mathes sketched a map of Vandiver's ranch.

  Sometime after 11:00 p.m., Mathes called Vandiver to tell him that he was on his way. Then the four men loaded into the van. As they drove to the ranch, Mathes handed his personal two-gram vial of coke to Covington and told him to pass it around. While Mathes drove, Covington, in the seat next to him, loaded the guns. A few minutes later Mathes casually remarked that he would shoot Vandiver in the back first. "Mathes said John had a bad back and that should lay him up,” says Holland. And then Mathes matter-of-factly added, "If his old lady is there, she's got to die, too."

  AT THE RANCH, DAVIS WAS ON THE telephone with her mother, Sheila Davis. "I was feeling kind of under the weather,” Mrs. Davis says. “And I was procrastinating about whether or not to make a trip I'd planned to McAllen, Texas. Debbie said, 'Go, Mom. It'll be fun for you. You need the break.'"

  "I love you,” Debbie said, before hanging up.

  Then Debbie, dressed in her nightgown, climbed into bed. After setting
up the stereo equipment to dub some tapes, Vandiver turned on the television and settled into a large overstuffed chair to await Mathes's arrival.

  At approximately 12:30 a.m., Mathes drove the van past the cabin. "You'll have to get down on the floor,” Mathes said. “John will be highly pissed off if he knows I brought somebody up here to his house."

  Silently, Mathes pulled into the driveway. With the pistol in a shoulder holster under his jacket, he exited from the van through the door on the driver's side. A moment later, Holland heard him enter the cabin.

  "I felt like I was in an episode of Miami Vice,” Holland says. "A million things were going through my mind. Tom was inside for maybe ten minutes when we heard two shots. It seemed like an eternity."

  "All the time the cocaine kept telling me, 'Everything is going to be all right,’" says Makosky. "Then there are shots fired. Someone is getting killed. Cecil hollered out, 'Let's go.' As I was jumping out, Cecil handed me my sword."

  Holland, the first to reach the cabin door, remembers looking through the window. "I saw John laying there on his stomach,” he says. "He'd been shot in the back, and he was cussing at Tom, calling him a son of a bitch. Cecil pulled the door open and pushed me in. John looked up at me, and I'll never forget his expression. He looked relieved, like 'Somebody is here to help.'

  "A minute later, I saw Debbie Davis on her knees in a closet. She was holding her hand against her chest. There was blood dripping in front of her. She was crying."

  Mathes, waving the pistol in Vandiver's face, demanded money. Suddenly aware that the strangers were not there to help, Vandiver whispered, "On the shelf in the bedroom. Wrapped up like a Christmas package. Take whatever you want, just don't shoot anymore."

  With a knowing look, Mathes slapped the pistol into Covington's open hand, turned to Holland and ordered, "Watch the girl,” as he and Makosky disappeared into the bedroom.