Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir

by Gary Taylor

  We emerged into the hall to find the county government reporter from the rival Chronicle waiting outside. She had followed me after I quietly left our press room to make sure I wasn't working some secret scoop. When she realized I had gone down on my lunch hour to get married, she didn't know whether to laugh, cry, or scream at me. Somewhere in Wayne's office she had found a package of rice and started tossing it at us in the hall. More than thirty years later I would run into an old editor from those days who greeted me in fond remembrance as "the reporter who got married on his lunch break."

  Cindy laughed about this cavalier and unromantic approach to matrimony, but I always suspected she was hiding some pain. When breaking up five years later she confided she never felt we had any kind of marriage, just a partnership. And, she wanted to be courted. At the time, however, she probably was more than a little frightened about the pregnancy, and those first few weeks she seemed in a daze. She was probably just satisfied that I was making an attempt to take care of us and seemed willing to let me take the lead on just about everything. But, let's face it. I had a good job, had put us in a house, and I was even smiling about the future. I figured plenty of unmarried pregnant women should wish they had her problems.

  I had even helped her find a new job. OK, so she was using her English degree to transcribe autopsy reports in the Harris County Morgue! But, it would turn out to lead into a couple of much more important positions for her, thanks to her personal initiative. She was destined to parlay that job into a caseworker's post with the welfare office investigating food stamp applications. And from there she would go on to become an important child welfare case investigator assigned to the main county hospital, Ben Taub.

  In the beginning, however, we both just settled in to wait for the baby. About the only thing really upsetting her was the suspicion that her supervisor at the morgue intentionally assigned all the dead-baby cases to her for transcription as a way to tease. But she could take it. Those days became an interesting and relaxing period for both of us. Besides feeling the baby move and picking out names, we attended the Lamaze natural childbirth classes that were all the rage back then. I learned how to be the coach and practiced those special breathing techniques until I almost wished I were the one who was pregnant. Besides helping her breathe, I planned to take photos in the delivery room and capture the moment for posterity, and, I figured, also for the kid's prom date to see eighteen years down the road.

  We made other plans for life after the delivery, too. If she had any desires to be a stay-at-home mom, Cindy never expressed them. No, she was too driven to take more than the minimum time allowed and had just started the more challenging job at the welfare department. She wanted to move her career forward as fast as possible. So we found a day care center about half-a-mile from our house with a suitable baby nursery and made a reservation. The cost nearly cancelled any financial advantage from her job, but that didn't matter. We believed each of us had to continue growing and felt comfortable the baby would do that, too, in the neighborhood nursery school.

  So, on April 25, 1975, the moment came, and we hustled to the hospital. As Cindy's labor pains increased I deployed my most inspired Lamaze drills.

  "Breathe," I demanded, huffing and puffing for her to follow. She responded as we had practiced for a while, and I continued to coax the best of natural childbirth from her. "Breathe. Hoo, hoo, hoo, hoo." Suddenly she stopped responding. She raised up on her elbows and looked into my eyes. I knew she wanted to tell me how wonderful I was. She pulled about three inches from my face. And then she snarled: "Get me a fucking shot."

  So much for natural childbirth. But that shot finished the job as our first daughter, Little E, entered the world. And I got plenty of shots of my own, capturing every angle with Kodachrome.

  EIGHTEEN

  Mid-1970s

  Cindy's later characterization of our marriage as more a partnership than a romance now seems right on target. We had launched the partnership with a deal to have a child and becoming good parents stood as our business mission. We never shared a joint checking account and Cindy continued to use her original last name, which had been restored after her divorce. She bought a wedding band, she insisted, to help keep the wolves away and make life easier in the workplace. I never wore one myself because, I insisted, a ring would irritate my finger. Our wedding featured no flowers or reception and, most importantly, no vows. Our honeymoon occurred at the hospital when Little E was born, and the photos of her birth were the closest we had to a wedding album.

  But I still argue that our partnership included plenty of romance. It might not have been the traditional hearts and flowers variety. But dictionaries define romance as the pleasure experienced with someone you love. They also describe it as the feeling of excitement or mystery from a particular experience or event. I can look back on those years as a period filled with excitement and mystery, a period good for all three of us.

  As inspirational as Boop had been in launching my professional life, Cindy proved indispensable in pushing it to the next level. By giving me Little E, she offered a new motivation to excel. Besides providing the inspiration of the baby, however, Cindy also pushed us positively in other directions. We had hardly finished our work on that first house, for example, when she decided we needed to cash out and move up. I grumbled. But, after learning we had prospective buyers offering twice our initial purchase price, I had to agree. I could take credit for establishing our real estate beachhead in Houston's Heights neighborhood, but Cindy deserved high marks for pushing it forward.

  By 1976 we had sold the first house and used the profit to buy a larger old house that needed some work. I spent weekends stripping six coats of paint off a built-in buffet to discover the original wood had been a gorgeous Philippine mahogany. I built a loose brick patio in the backyard. We started dabbling in antiques. We also bought a rental beach house that year on Galveston Island's west beach, about seventy miles south of Houston along the Gulf of Mexico. The house had been the oldest on that strip of beach, and, over the years, a community of more modern rental dwellings had grown up around it. We had hoped to make enough from summer rentals to allow us to use the house in the winter, but we found no summer vacationers wanted that place. We did manage to adjust and find regular tenants who could cover our payments so we could maintain the place as an investment likely to appreciate. At work for me, 1976 also had been the year of my Pulitzer Prize nomination. And Cindy had taken the next step in her career, landing a spot as a child welfare caseworker investigating allegations of abuse and neglect for the county.

  Despite our hectic work and investment project schedules, Little E remained the center of our lives, the glue that really held us together. We read books on parenting theories and shared the joys of watching her rapid development from infant to child. I'm still convinced her early transfer to day care four weeks after birth sparked more rapid development. Parents don't receive final grades on their decisions until twenty or thirty years after they've been made. Based on the success she's become as an adult, Little E now makes a persuasive argument for early day care. But she also gave me a new dimension and purpose of a more immediate nature at that time. Although I lost a lot of sleep with her nighttime restlessness, I actually came to enjoy the sound of Little E's cries because it meant I could spend the next hour rocking her back to sleep in the wicker rocking chair we'd bought for that purpose. For the first time in my life I felt in balance because she gave me a link to the future. I felt suspended in time by her in front and my parents in the past. She kindled an interest in researching my family history, and I started spending some of my few free moments reviewing old census reports at Houston's extensive genealogical library. She walked and talked at an early age, and, as she grew, I took great delight in trips to the park on Sunday mornings, infant swimming lessons, and Dr. Seuss at bedtime.

  So, Cindy and I decided Little E needed a sibling. This time we planned it. About the time she started to show, my dad in St. Louis
suffered a stroke—a big one destined to sideline him from life. He needed my help so I took a leave of absence from The Post in the summer of 1977 to spend a couple of months restructuring his life. My youngest sister was only fourteen, and my mom could not handle all the stress. In addition, he still owned that lawnmower repair business, which, by then, had grown into the largest in the city with about a dozen employees. When I came home for this extended visit, I brought Little E along so Cindy could concentrate on her new pregnancy without the dangerous hassles of also minding a two-year-old. More than that, however, I knew it would give my dad a chance to spend some precious time with his granddaughter, and it turned out to be an experience he revered.

  "It's just like you came back again," he said, noting the resemblance between Little E and photos of me as a child.

  Although she was barely two, Little E was talking like a chatterbox and had begun to demonstrate the spunk and gregariousness that would mark her personality. Her outbursts ranged from compassion to high comedy. One day she tumbled down a staircase and gave us a shock. An athletic little kid, she simply rolled across the floor at the bottom and started laughing. But five minutes later she spotted my poor old dad hobbling around near the top of the stairs on his cane and showed she obviously had taken note of his decrepit condition.

  "No, granddaddy, no," she screamed with the plea of a protective mama bear. "You stay away from those stairs."

  During that summer of 1977, we forged a special kind of relationship.

  By late August I had everything stabilized in St. Louis. The business was up for sale. My dad was getting around better and fortunately had not suffered much mental damage at all. He was destined to live another seven years before eventually succumbing to cancer. But his working days were done. While living there that summer I had bought a small 360 Honda motorcycle for transportation. So I put Little E on a plane and took my own little trip back to Houston. I mapped out a relaxing backwoods route through the Missouri Ozarks, Arkansas, and East Texas that would take five days. As I rolled along those deserted country roads, spending nights in isolated motels, I thought about my life and found it sweet. Fatherhood had not become the burden I had feared. And Cindy's January due date on our second child was just ahead.

  I had no way to foresee the catastrophic turmoil that lay just beyond the horizon.

  NINETEEN

  Late 1970s

  After that sabbatical to assist my dad, my domestic "partnership" with Cindy in Houston shifted to a higher gear of growth and prosperity. I returned to cover the criminal courts in what would become my most productive period as a newspaper reporter. Meanwhile, Cindy moved up the hierarchy at the child welfare department. We were making a solid living from satisfying and interesting jobs while building a good home for a family that increased by one on January 18, 1978, with the birth of our second daughter, Shannon.

  Cindy had been so convinced that the child in her womb was male, she had agreed I could pick the name if it emerged a girl. We hadn't been able to agree on names to that point, but I shrugged off the compromise in anticipation of a boy. Her doctor had gauged Shannon's activity level in the womb and also predicted a male. Even in the delivery room, the doctor kept saying, "Here he comes." Cindy was smiling, after having this time taken her shot a little earlier, and I was snapping pictures. The doctor and nurses took the child to the side to count its fingers and toes, and, then I heard the doctor say: "Oops. This is a girl. Do you have a name?" It was my turn to smile as I told them, "Shannon." Cindy just stuck out her tongue and laughed some more.

  Behind her façade as the joyful mother, however, Cindy was starting to develop some personal anxieties. Although I could notice them, there wasn't much I could do. She was growing restless with personal ambition and started grasping impulsively at projects designed to move both of us along at a faster pace. Some of these projects worked to our advantage while others just left her more frustrated.

  For starters, she decided we needed a more valuable, bigger house. Once again I resisted only to relent after learning we could double our money again thanks to appreciation of values in the Houston Heights and the sweat equity generated with renovations. So we sold out and bought another old house nearby. But this time we bought a two-story that needed no serious repairs. It also included a garage with an apartment on a second floor. Suddenly we were landlords with two tenants—one in a beach house in Galveston and another at the end of our driveway. In less than four years we had parlayed a fifteen-hundred-dollar investment for a fifteen-thousand-dollar bungalow into a two-story home worth seventy thousand dollars with extra income from apartment rental.

  We had moved Little E into a Montessori school that also had a nursery so the infant Shannon could go there, too. The price tag was steep, but the educational results worth the money. Little E continued to blossom both socially and intellectually in the Montessori environment designed to promote an early appreciation for the concept of learning. Cindy had responsibility for taking them to the campus and picking them up after work because my schedule usually kept me at the courthouse later in the day.

  But I would have had trouble carrying them around anyway, since an oversight by her had limited my transportation options to that little Honda motorcycle I had bought in St. Louis and ridden through Arkansas to get back home. While driving my car one day, she had failed to notice the heat lamp burning on the dashboard. By the time she returned to the house, a leaking radiator had warped my engine. I left the hunk of junk parked on the curb for six months until some guy came along and offered a hundred dollars to drag it away. I rode the motorcycle exclusively in Houston for a year but never really enjoyed it like some others might. I never felt comfortable enough with speed to be a safe motorcycle rider. I could not employ velocity to enhance my balance and always risked collisions from behind by moving too slowly. I never chanced riding that bike on Houston's freeways. But I still cultivated the image of a renegade, parking it outside the courthouse each morning after riding downtown wearing a jacket and tie. I finally managed to upgrade in early 1979, when I bought another reporter's beat-up old 1973 Chevy Vega for two hundred dollars.

  By 1978 Cindy had been promoted to one of child welfare's most stressful but crucial posts as the primary caseworker at Houston's largest public hospital, Ben Taub. She literally worked at ground zero for child abuse and neglect investigations with responsibility for reviewing the circumstances of any child posting to the emergency room. She worked closely with the physicians as well as the cops and daily saw the worst that Houston had to offer in brutality to children. Often her work dovetailed into mine, as I covered many of those cases in court. Sometimes she tipped me to stories as we discussed our day's experiences over dinner. More often, however, our discussions deteriorated into a depressing game of "Top It" as I shared the latest gore from a murder trial only to be trumped by her account of some kid beaten half to death. I was extremely proud of the work she did and still consider that job to be among the most important anywhere in the country.

  But she wanted more. First she enrolled in graduate school at night hoping for a Master's of Social Work that could propel her into administrative or executive contention. She dropped out quickly in 1978, however, after finding the demands on her time too daunting. I couldn't retrieve the girls after school, and she couldn't get to class. By summer of 1979, she was determined to try again. This time she enrolled in night law school. We made arrangements for a babysitter and tried to juggle our schedules, but I knew my late hours would remain an issue. I couldn't know an even bigger issue sat boiling toward a climax. Besides trying to balance law school with work and motherhood, Cindy had launched another secret project vying for even more of her time.

  "So, how was your weekend?" I naively asked Little E when I arrived home one Sunday night in August after a trip to Fort Worth.

  "Terrible," she snorted. "Uncle Al was here all weekend."

  "Uncle Al?" I asked, looking at Cindy for an explanation. She just shook her
head and tried to look firm. I sensed another one of those inevitable turning points in the air.

  "We need to talk," she said, confirming my suspicion. After ushering Little E to her bedroom, I learned that Cindy had been working a little too closely with one of those physicians at the hospital. She had been close enough to have quietly sustained an extramarital affair for the past year.

  "A year?" I asked in shock. I wondered how I could have missed it. Then I realized her tension and her scramble for improved status through law school or grad school had all been designed as part of a grander plan for an image more suitable to a doctor's wife. For a moment I thought maybe she had brought him to our house that weekend as a final gesture before ending it and confessing to me, so we could start anew. Then I learned this final gesture had been for my benefit. I was being replaced. The realization left me too stunned for anger, and she stood resolute.