by Gary Taylor
"Huh?" Jeff asked.
"These tablets," the editor continued. "I don't believe they came from Iberia."
Jeff shook his head and asked, "OK, where are they from?"
The editor just sighed and pointed toward the heavens.
"Of course," said Jeff. "I should have known."
He then spent the next week calling so-called authorities on UFOs for their reaction to discovery of these tablets. Finally, a former astronaut agreed these had to be from outer space. So his story ran with a headline: "Tablets from Outer Space Discovered in New England?" His first paragraph featured the astronaut as a primary source on the meaning of these tablets. Then, the rest of the story cited the anthropologists and their theory on Iberian origins. Anyone with half-a-brain reading past the first paragraph would glean information of anthropological significance and likely chuckle at the UFO link that had attracted their attention in the first place. Jeff's point had applications anywhere in the news business. Every editor or publisher has their own agenda. But it is possible to compromise and finesse your assignment so that somehow everyone is satisfied with the result, and, most importantly, the readers receive the information they need to carry on with their lives.
As a stimulant for finding scoops, The Enquirer employed a bounty system. It paid a hundred-dollar fee to anyone—staffer, reader or kook—who suggested an idea that eventually became a published story, even if someone else ended up writing it. Many staffers spent their weekends sitting in the local library pouring through arcane medical and scientific journals, seeking overlooked footnotes on potentially exciting breakthroughs and discoveries that might turn into articles of public significance. I got caught up in the frenzy for generating story ideas, and, when I returned to Houston, I put it to work at The Post, listing all sorts of ideas for local stories that might turn into something there.
I didn't have long to wait for that habit to pay off with what would be the strongest story I ever reported, one that would see me nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. That adventure began when I convinced my editors at The Post to let me research a story on old men in Texas prisons. I didn't really know what I would find. But roaming around the geriatrics ward at TDC's hospital behind The Walls in Huntsville, I struck up a conversation with an addled eighty-three-year-old con named Gene Winchester who couldn't even remember why he was there. Checking his file a little later to get the facts, I saw that he had received a fifty-year sentence in 1918 for murder. I did a quick calculation and realized he'd actually been locked up for fifty-eight years with no mention in his file of additional crimes. I showed the discrepancy to the prison bosses and waited several days for an explanation.
When it arrived, that explanation revealed a more interesting problem. Winchester had killed another inmate in 1920, and, instead of charging him in that crime, the prison simply shipped him off to the state mental hospital in Rusk, where he sat until 1968. He returned to TDC that year as part of a clearance at the hospital, and the state's attorney general had decreed he would not receive credit for the forty-eight years in Rusk. Not only had Winchester been lost in the system for several generations, he still had several more to serve. Although the state had locked him up since 1918 on a fifty-year term, official records showed he had served only ten of those years. I had exposed a bureaucratic mess with no apparent solution that triggered cries of outrage from legislators and penal reform advocates. It also drew a phone call from a woman who claimed Winchester as her "Uncle Gene"—a family icon believed to have died in prison forty years before.
Eager to take Winchester's story further, I buckled down and negotiated his release by brokering a deal between the Social Security Administration, the Board of Pardons and Paroles, and a nursing home south of Houston. The Board agreed to release him on parole while Social Security determined him eligible for special benefits. The nursing home offered a room. Within a month, I was back in Huntsville covering the release of Gene Winchester. He worried me a bit when I asked him about his plans only to hear him say with a sickening grin: "Goin' to find me a woman." I recognized him as a strong and healthy specimen for his age and wondered, What have I done?
After arriving in Huntsville fifty-eight years before in a horse-drawn cart, Winchester left with me in a car driving sixty miles per hour down an interstate highway. He had missed everything in the century, including women's lib. But he was destined to live several more years in that home without incident. Winning Winchester's release easily ranked as the high point in my reporting career. Besides the satisfaction of seeing justice properly done and helping an old man land a few years of rest before his death, I also gleaned greater appreciation for my powers as a journalist.
Although I didn't win the Pulitzer, the nomination alone was an accolade that continued to impress acquaintances even more than the awards I actually did collect in the next couple of years to follow, inspired to new ambitions by my experience getting an old man out of prison.
Unfortunately, however, I would soon become more widely known for something else. Just once now, I would enjoy walking into a bar and hearing someone say, "Yeah, you're the guy who was nominated for the Pulitzer on that Winchester story." Instead, I usually only hear, "Yeah, you're guy who got messed up with that Mehaffey bitch."
TWELVE
Late 1970s
Early in 1977 I received the assignment most responsible for placing me professionally on a collision course with Catherine Mehaffey. That's when The Post made me its criminal courthouse beat reporter, a job I had wanted since first arriving in Houston. Although the issues and basic elements were the same as I had seen covering courts in Flint, the system in Houston magnified the challenge and the adventure the way shopping in an urban mall would dwarf a trip to the neighborhood convenience store.
On its most basic level the physical demands of the beat were daunting. Just as in Flint, I was responsible for reporting all the important criminal court action in the county. While Flint's Genesee County was small enough to conduct its business in one building among six judges, Houston's Harris County system operated in multiple buildings with at least thirty separate judges dispensing justice every day. That system had just been expanded to reflect Houston's oilpatch-boomtown atmosphere and the crimes that entailed. Besides the regularly appointed and elected judges, the county also employed a number of part-time, or what it called "visiting judges," to handle additional cases and keep the treadmill rolling. As a result, it was nearly impossible to monitor all the courts like some omniscient chronicler of current history. Some days I would pass a room that had served as a broom closet just one week before only to find inside some retired judge from West Texas sitting as a visitor while a prosecutor, defense attorney, and a defendant haggled over a plea bargain. In addition to the courtrooms, I also had to monitor general activities of the district attorney's office, grand jury proceedings, and the defense attorneys who moved through the building while also tracking broader, big picture issues of crime and punishment.
In that era, one of the biggest issues on my plate involved the death penalty which had just been reinstated by the US Supreme Court after a ten-year hiatus. The Texas Legislature had moved quickly to fashion a new capital punishment statute designed to meet the parameters established by the high court and put Texas back on the execution hit parade. Those high court parameters had established crucial elements for bringing capital charges and selecting juries. Prosecutors in the past had enjoyed great leeway seeking death as punishment for crimes as far ranging as rape to murder in the heat of passion without premeditation. But the new rules required accusations of more substantial transgressions. They limited capital crimes to murders committed in the course of another felony, such as the armed robber who kills the store clerk or the rapist who leaves his victim dead. Also included were murders done for hire or the murder of a peace officer in the line of duty. Despite those limitations, Houston, in those days, became fertile ground for capital crimes, and the Harris County District Attorney's office quickl
y established itself as the nation's most aggressive grim reaper.
Although Texas would not resume executions until 1982, I caught the first wave of the tsunami caseload in the late 1970s as Harris County began holding trials to line them up for the gallows. I considered it my duty to try and attend as much of every capital case as possible on my watch, but sometimes that proved impossible. One week, for example, Harris County had five different capital trials under way simultaneously. I ran from courtroom to courtroom trying to keep up. Most of these cases needed only a minimal amount of actual trial time, but each one lasted for weeks because jury selection took so long. The attorneys interrogated potential jurors individually at great length to determine if they actually would have the courage to send anyone to Death Row.
Another important issue concerned the county's system for providing defense lawyers to impoverished defendants, a category that covered about 90 percent of the courthouse accused. While many jurisdictions created public defender bureaucracies to handle that role, Harris County had its own unique and controversial system of appointment by judges from the ranks of the county's criminal defense bar. Often I saw judges simply shout in a crowded courtroom for an attorney to step forward and take a case. Another judge occasionally collected business cards from all lawyers hanging around the courtroom, shuffled them, and then dealt from the top of the deck to his clerk, matching an attorney with a defendant as each case was called.
And there always were plenty of lawyers hungry for the assignments that generated fees based on a schedule established by the county: $250 for an appearance in court, five hundred dollars per day for trials, and so on. Although they belittled the fees and compared them derisively with grander sums they bragged they could have been making on car wrecks or divorces, they always lined up there like dock workers at the union hall waiting for a job. Many built a substantial portion of their practices on the foundation of daily appointments. Often they could grab an assignment, negotiate a plea, and collect $250 before noon, leaving the rest of the day free for those car wrecks anyhow. While the drama of trials captures our imagination, the overwhelming majority of criminal cases are resolved without them, often quickly with a deal. If this plea-bargaining system did not exist, the courts would grind to a smashing halt on the burden of the caseload. To begin each auction, prosecutors review the quality of evidence brought by police against an accused and weigh that against his likely defense and other mitigating factors like his looks or lack of a criminal background. Charged with burglary, a defendant might be facing a maximum sentence of ten years in prison. But the case can be disposed that morning if he agrees to plead guilty to trespassing and takes a year in jail. Often that's exactly what happens.
I wrote some memorable stories on this appointment system by annually scrutinizing the total bills paid out by the county for the past year and identifying the lawyers milking it dry. Their services definitely were needed, but, my stories in April 1978 and June of 1979, showed that some of them were earning more as appointed defense attorneys than the judges and other high ranking county officials actually on the public payroll. The highest earners rarely handled cases that went to trial. Moreover, my stories exposed a system in which many judges routinely assigned cases to the same small club of private attorneys working only in their courts, creating a de-facto public defender system at their personal disposal. Some judges explained their motives by touting the diligence of the lawyers working exclusively for them and bragging about the painstaking research on background checks before completing the rosters. Fair enough, I said, and included that defense in my stories. But I also knew that the most effective defense lawyers likely won that reputation by moving cases through the courts as quickly as possible, leaving the system open to charges it served the interest of the judges rather than indigent defendants. I also imagined that most of their painstaking background research likely had occurred in saloons rather than libraries. Since I watched the system work on a daily basis, I was confident that most of the time it accomplished its goal of providing justice for indigents and the public, too, at a reasonable taxpayer cost.
But anyone could recognize this system as rife with opportunity for cronyism or abuse, and Catherine Mehaffey would be no exception when she eventually entered my life a year later.
THIRTEEN
Late 1970s
Each capital murder trial in those early years of the new process promised its own special twist. Early in my tenure came the trial of "Sleeping" Billy Wayne White, who, at age twenty in March of 1977, became the youngest killer sentenced to death to that date from Harris County. I gave him his nickname and made him an international celebrity.
Billy had capped a short but illustrious juvenile record by killing a sixty-five-year-old woman who ran a furniture store with her husband. Billy shot her dead while robbing the couple in their store, killing her in front of her husband without provocation and for no reason anyone could fathom. No one could figure why he left the old man alive to testify at his trial, either. Billy had no defense and presented no witnesses. His court-appointed attorney, Leroy Peavy, emerged as his only hope. I discussed the case with Peavy before trial and eagerly awaited the event. It was to be Peavy's first death penalty defense, and he planned to put capital punishment on trial. He boned up for weeks, gathering all facts ever used against capital punishment. He knew Billy would never win an acquittal on the evidence. But Peavy hoped he could turn jurors against the system itself and convince them to sentence his client to life in prison instead of death.
I watched as Peavy began his impassioned plea. But I couldn't hear him clearly. Another sound was drowning him out. I looked around for signs of a broken air conditioner or some other mechanical malfunction and saw nothing. Then I spotted Billy at the defense table. While his lawyer begged for his life, Billy had laid his head on the table and gone sound to sleep. Billy wasn't just dozing. He snored like a big dog just home from a run in the park. Jurors poked each other and pointed at Billy while Peavy continued, pretending to ignore him. The lawyer resembled a singer who forgets the lyrics but continues to hum with the melody because the show must go on. Once Peavy completed his summation, however, he succumbed to his own disgust and that only made things worse. Taking his seat beside Billy as the prosecutor rose to offer the state's final argument, Peavy tried to nudge Billy with an elbow and jostle him awake. Billy raised his head, glanced at Peavy, and then waved him away with one of his hands while clearly mouthing the words: "Fuck off, asshole."
The jury deliberated all of thirty minutes before sending Billy to Death Row, and the wire services picked up my front page story to share it with the world. I felt sympathetic for Peavy as the hard working advocate, but he seemed unfazed the next day. He smiled and told me he would appeal the conviction on the grounds his client suffered a sleeping ailment and could not assist with the defense. So, for two days in a row, Sleeping Billy made front page news in Houston and around the world. The State of Texas eventually executed Billy on April 23, 1992, after exhausting all appeals.
About a year after Billy became the county's youngest immigrant to Death Row, eighteen-year-old Anthony "Bo Peep" Williams dislodged him from the record books. Bo Peep earned his nickname from the neighborhood where he had gained a reputation for peeking around trees and corners while hiding from other kids who generally wanted nothing to do with him. One night in 1977, Bo Peep was cruising through a bowling alley parking lot when he saw thirteen-year-old Vickie Lynn Wright walking to her sister's car. Vickie was really excited because this was the first time her parents had ever let her accompany their older daughter to bowl. She had left something in the car and went outside to retrieve it. But she never made it back inside. Bo Peep grabbed her, took her in the nearby woods, raped her, and then beat her to death with a two-by-four he'd found in a trash pile.
He had no defense for his crime, either, and faced an overwhelming collection of physical evidence. But his appointed lawyer also did his best, presenting witnesses to show
that Bo Peep lacked the mental faculties to accept responsibility. The night before a psychiatrist testified in court, I received a copy of National Geographic magazine and read the cover story about a research gorilla with a verifiable I.Q. of eighty-two at the Yerkes Primate Center. The next day I stared at Bo Peep in the courtroom and listened while that psychiatrist estimated his I.Q. at seventy-five. I thought about that little girl who had paid the ultimate penalty for leaving something in her sister's car. I thought about the older sister who likely would never forgive herself for letting Vickie run to the car alone. I thought of the parents in the hallway crying throughout the trial. I thought about that gorilla at Yerkes who probably had spent his day showing off his eighty-two I.Q. by moving wooden blocks around on a table while scientists recorded grades. I wondered: What are we supposed to do? Then I had to leave the courtroom because I realized I was fighting a nearly irresistible urge to grab Bo Peep around the throat and stomp his ugly face.