Blood and Money

by Thomas Thompson

  Gamino and Carpenter stepped up their efforts to get Marcia McKittrick into their interrogation room for a little talk. The officers desperately needed Marcia to bolster the skimpy case against Lilla Paulus, and, if the string could reach that far, against Ash himself. Bobby Vandiver had mentioned that “perhaps” he had heard the name “Ash” from Marcia. It was his impression that Marcia had even met the old man and had seen him and Lilla in conversation together. The detectives had no clear-cut legal right to question the prostitute, but they saw nothing wrong with a bit of extracurricular squeezing. For six frenetic spring weeks in 1973, Marcia began to feel like the object of a Keystone Kops chase. “Every cop in Texas is ready to bust me for jaywalking,” she complained to Charles Caperton. On June 14 the brash Dallas lawyer filed a petition seeking to make the authorities stop “harassing” his client. “It’s completely outrageous the way these peace officers have been behaving,” he said. “She has the right to remain silent, and I’m not going to permit the entire might of the state of Texas to intimidate her.” Specifically, Caperton charged that police were bombarding Marcia’s family home near Dallas with post-midnight telephone calls and showing up with guns menacingly in view at their belts, wanting to interview his client. “On May 17,” charged Caperton, “two armed men, representing themselves as Texas Rangers, invaded the home of Miss McKittrick’s parents and in a threatening and abusive manner said they were going to talk to her one way or the other, sooner or later, and that they were tired of the whole family’s lies about the whereabouts of Miss McKittrick. The next day “six armed men, representing themselves as Texas Rangers,” repeated the act. But what really made Caperton’s gorge rise was Assistant DA Bob Bennett’s alleged behavior in the very lobby of the Harris County courthouse. On May 25, Marcia waltzed into Houston and pleaded “Not guilty” at her arraignment. After the brief hearing was concluded, she and her lawyer prepared to leave. According to Caperton, Assistant DA Bennett rushed up, breathing hard as if he had been in hot pursuit of Marcia, and began making both bargains and threats. Caperton quoted Bennett as saying to Marcia:

  “Has Caperton told you that I am going to give you immunity if you testify against Ash Robinson? I don’t care if we convict him or not, I just want him indicted. He is old and he will probably die before we can get him tried anyway. I just want to tell you that if you don’t, not only will I prosecute you on this murder charge, I am going to have the Harris County grand jury file felony indictments against you for failing to pay long-distance telephone calls and I am going to stack the sentences that you receive in each of these cases.” Bobby Vandiver, during his interrogation, had mentioned that Marcia often used a phony telephone credit card to make her calls.

  The very next day, claimed Marcia, she was about to board an airplane at Houston International Airport when two men in business suits appeared beside her, grabbed her arms, and announced they were Texas Rangers with instructions to take her in for questioning. Marcia wrestled with her would-be arrestors and freed herself, running pell-mell down a corridor crowded with approaching travelers, into the lobby, down an escalator, flinging herself onto an underground shuttle train to another terminal. She found a taxi and raced to town where she telephoned Charles Caperton and poured out the tale of the aborted abduction.

  With all of this exceptional attention being paid to her comings and goings, Marcia should have entered a cloister to remain shut away from all those who wanted to speak to her. But on June 12, needing money to pay for her heroin needs, a habit approaching two hundred dollars a day, she turned up at an old stand in a Lubbock motel, eager to turn a few tricks. That same day an informer revealed her presence to a pair of Lubbock detectives who quickly arrested her and then telephoned a delighted Jerry Carpenter in Houston.

  The arresting officers handed the telephone to Marcia and she said simply, “Hello, Jerry Carpenter.” In Houston, at the other end of the connection, the homicide detective felt a rush of excitement. She existed! She was real! The flaky whore who helped kill John Hill was at long last bound to him by a telephone cable.

  Marcia would later claim, in the petition sought by her lawyer, that Jerry Carpenter then urged her to come to Houston “as his protégé,” and promised to let her conduct her business of prostitution with no harassment from the vice squad. Her end of the bargain would be cooperation in the Hill case. When this failed to move her, the Houston cop allegedly turned surly, threatening prosecution for her use of a phony telephone credit card. Throughout the conversation, Marcia would contend, Carpenter heaped abuse on her lawyer, suggesting that he was in league with Ash Robinson and was preparing to sacrifice her to the penitentiary to keep the old man at liberty.

  None of the importunings disturbed her, said Marcia. All she wanted was to be left alone. Speak to her attorney in Dallas, Charles Caperton. She refused to talk further. One of the Lubbock detectives received instructions from his counterpart in Houston: “Put this girl on a flight to Houston and we will take it from there.” Marcia was placed alone on a flight to Houston that made an intermediate stop in Austin. She skipped off the airplane there, and a half hour later, when the craft landed in Houston without her, a furious Jerry Carpenter was ready to dismantle the jet with his bare hands.

  All of these harassments are illegal and harmful to Miss McKittrick, said Charles Caperton in his lengthy petition to the court. He demanded that the judge enjoin every single law enforcement authority in the state of Texas—from the chief of the Texas Rangers down to the lowest whistle-stop traffic cop—from bothering Marcia McKittrick in any way. Around the Harris County courthouse, none of the assistant DAs could ever remember a document quite like it.

  Bobby Vandiver, living under the code name “Taylor” at the Houston motel, found life tedious. His only activity was to lie around watching daytime television, waiting for Vicki to return from her job at the seafood restaurant. He was forbidden to leave the room, unless escorted by a man from the DA’s office. Hearing his complaint, Bennett discerned a hint of shame, for it clearly pained Bobby to depend upon the woman he loved and the DA to pay his way. His trial for the murder of John Hill was set for September 1973, and in early June he asked Bennett to grant a favor.

  Vicki’s first husband was trying to win custody of her two children, and she needed to go to Dallas and fight him. “She’s scared to death of losing her kids,” Bobby told his protector. Would the DA trust him to accompany Vicki to Dallas and stand beside her in the troubling matter? “I won’t run, Bob,” he said. “I think you know me pretty good by now. I just wanna get my business straight so Vicki and I can live together someday.”

  Bennett hesitated. He was not so much worried that his prisoner would flee, but he was deeply concerned that word might have leaked to the “character” fraternity that Bobby was co-operating with the state. Letting him go unescorted to a city where more than thirty of his professional brothers had been murdered in recent years was not a notion conducive to solid sleep. No. Too dangerous. Bobby pleaded. He would not be gone long, only a few days maximum. He would stay with Red, his sister. She was “straight city.” He would even check in with Dallas police if Bennett ordered.

  Reluctantly, Bennett gave permission. And several days later Bobby telephoned from Dallas. The custody hearing was delayed; it was now necessary for Vicki to stay there and establish a suitable nest for her children. The child welfare people insisted on it. Red had found space in her home. She had even found Bobby a temporary job doing roofing work.

  “You staying out of trouble?” asked Bennett.

  “Yeah,” said Bobby. “I’m so straight I bore myself.” No one in Dallas knew of his position in Houston, he said. As far as his world knew, he was simply out on bond in a murder rap. A couple of his character friends had even called to express sympathy over the jam he was in. Bennett, reasonably content that his prisoner’s life was in bounds, gave permission for Bobby to stay in Dallas until September, when the trial was to begin.

  One of those who c
alled Bobby was Marcia. Her voice slurred heavily on the telephone. She made little sense. Bobby gathered that she was somewhere in Dallas, wrecked on heroin, and living with a character who maintained a legitimate small business to conceal a back-room narcotics operation. When Bobby mentioned that he was living with Vicki, Marcia began to scream. In the middle of her rambling tirade of jealousy Bobby hung up. When the telephone rang again he did not answer. He was done with Marcia.

  By late June 1973, Marcia was spending most of her hours in the solace of heroin. Her new patron, Claude, was a gruff, fleshy man with a thick neck and a paradoxical attitude toward dope. He was pleased to sell it to others but he not only refused to use it himself, he railed at Marcia for succumbing to its power. Each day when he left his comfortable home in a Dallas suburb to operate his business, Marcia shredded the house in search of his hidden cache of drugs. Usually she found them, for she now required from six to eight fixes a day, sometimes shooting a frightening eight grams. Her habit was enormous. She passed her hours in basic fashion. She shot up, lay back and, once the drug had worn away, looked around for more. On September 21, after a screaming quarrel with Claude because he had purged his home of narcotics, Marcia unsteadily made exit, stole his Chrysler, a diamond ring, and a book of his manufacturing company’s payroll checks. Thirty minutes later she was arrested at the window of a drive-in bank, hands trembling, body near convulsion, attemption to cash a crudely forged $475 check that she had made out to herself on her patron’s account. Immediately word was teletyped to Houston homicide that the woman of the year was in the Dallas slammer. Jerry Carpenter, reached at home, was ecstatic. “Here we flat beat this state to death looking for Marcia,” he told Bob Bennett, “and she goes and arrests herself.”

  Carpenter and Gamino drove the 260 miles to Dallas in three hours and finally met Marcia McKittrick face to face. She was pathetic. In the agony of withdrawal, a splash of vomit soured and hardened on her blouse, frightened, angry at her lawyer Caperton because he had not responded to her call, she agreed to go to Houston and get her business straight. For almost a year Jerry Carpenter had conjured illusion of his prey; in his mind she was composed of equal parts of Salome and Houdini. But now, as she slept with her head in his lap, while Gamino drove quietly through the night back to the city where John Hill had been murdered, Carpenter studied her. “She’s just a poor old junkie whore,” he thought to himself. He knew a thousand just like her. And all of them, once the make-up was rubbed away, had the same sad eyes.

  In a later series of court hearings, the accusation would be made that the prostitute made confession only because she was promised narcotic relief by Jerry Carpenter. “That little girl would have confessed to starting World War II, the shape she was in,” insisted Charles Caperton. In answer, Jerry Carpenter swore, under penalty of perjury, that he did not dangle an opiate carrot in front of the stick to make Marcia talk. He said that only after she made full confession did he take her to a city drug clinic for examination and treatment. The record showed that on a September morning in 1973, while the city of Houston awoke and made ready for a day of work, Marcia McKittrick sat dully in an interrogation room at the city police headquarters where Bobby Vandiver had earlier spent nine days. She made elaborate confession to her part in the murder of Dr. John Hill. She not only bolstered Bobby’s sworn account, she firmly implicated Lilla Paulus and threw a weak rope around the neck of Ash Robinson.

  The most compelling part of her sworn statement:

  In the early part of summer, 1972, I was staying at Lilla Paulus’ home. And a heavy set man with thinning hair, in his 70’s, was introduced to me as Ash Robinson. Lilla told me that his daughter and her daughter had ridden horses together in horse shows. A short time after I was introduced to Ash Robinson, Lilla told me that he would do anything for her if she would just do him a favor. During the course of the summer, Ash Robinson visited Lilla’s house three or four times while I was there. During these visits, he would talk about getting custody of his grandson. He made the statement that it looked like the only way for him to get custody of the grandson was for Hill to be dead, or to be convicted for the murder of his daughter. During the course of the summer, Lilla met Ash two or three times while I was with her. She would meet Ash in the parking lot across the street from Ben Taub Hospital. Each of these times I would sit in Lilla’s car, and she and Ash would sit down together nearby or in Ash’s car, which was a big, black, new-looking car. I saw Ash hand her money every time that they would meet at this location, but I was too far away to tell how much money it was. About the only thing that Ash ever talked to me about was him wanting to get his grandson, and about how rotten Hill was for killing his daughter. He also talked about the Hill mistrial and about how much it upset him because he knew in his own mind that Hill had killed his daughter on purpose.

  Marcia swore that Ash further delivered a diagram of the Hill house floor plan and a batch of newspaper clippings that dealt with the events.

  On the day that Dr. Hill was killed [said Marcia in confession], Ash came to Lilla’s house in his black car and I watched Ash count out $7,000 in cash, mostly in hundreds and fifties, and he gave this money to Lilla. The best I can recall after he counted the money, he then said, “That about covers it.”

  Her statement, though not as lengthy as Bobby’s, nonetheless matched his in detail that only the two of them would have known. And Marcia had had no access to Vandiver’s document. The detectives and Bob Bennett felt certain that this statement would also stand up in court and would be considered as independent of the actual killer.

  Off the record, for she passed it on as gossip, Marcia believed that Lilla received $25,000 from Ash Robinson to finance the killing. “Since Bobby only got $5,000, and he gave $1,500 of that back to Lilla, she came off pretty good,” observed Marcia.

  Early in the afternoon, approximately twenty-four hours after her turbulent exit from her Dallas patron’s home in a stolen car, Marcia was put in the hospital ward of the Harris County jail where, having been awarded two barbiturates to help in her withdrawal from heroin, she fell asleep. Not until a week later was she fully conscious and functioning, demanding to see Charles Caperton and claiming that the “confession” had been coerced out of her.

  Bobby Vandiver lived quietly in Dallas until this same September, when he was scheduled to return to Houston for his murder trial. A quarter hour before the morning docket was called, he appeared in Bob Bennett’s office, holding his toothbrush in his hand. He was ready to play the scene and go to prison that very afternoon. So resolved was he, so seemingly at grips with his situation, that Bennett regretted to tell him that the trial had been delayed for seven months, until the next April. Because Bobby was co-indicted with Marcia and Lilla, their attorneys had requested more time to prepare a defense.

  “I’m really sorry,” said Bennett. “I know you were ready to go.”

  Bobby stirred uneasily. In that case, he wanted to go back to Dallas. Every day of his life was precious to him now. He wanted to store up the remaining hours in companionship with Vicki, her children, and Red. The district attorney was apprehensive. It was not comforting to rise each morning and realize that the cornerstone of the most important murder case of the decade in Houston was 260 miles away, completely out of supervision. “I can’t let you go back again,” said Bennett. “I think you’d better stay here. We’ll loosen up a little, let you move around the city.”

  For a haunting moment, a wild look passed through Bobby’s eyes. He had never seemed a cornered, frightened animal until now. Always he had been loose, cocky, in control. Bennett watched him fumble in his head for a counterproposal. He found one. Bobby pointed out that Bennett’s franchise at the DA’s office was organized crime. If he were permitted to return to Dallas, Bobby could nose around “the boys” up there. He knew a few alleged Mafia names; he could perhaps learn more, probably ferret out some Houston connections.

  Bennett shook his head quickly, in alarm. “Don’t do that,
Bobby,” he said. “For God’s sake, don’t do that. I don’t need that now. You might get hurt and I have to keep you as a witness. Right now getting this murder case cleaned up is more important.”

  “Then,” bargained Bobby, “if I promise to stay away from ‘those guys’ … can I go back?”

  Bennett hemmed and hawed.

  “Please.” It was a word Bobby had never used. The very foreignness was eloquent.

  Bennett rose and nodded. “All right, get outta here,” he said. “But you check in every week. Hear? Call collect!”

  Stewing in the downtown Harris County jail for six months, Marcia McKittrick grew bored and her skin turned the color of the mashed potatoes that filled her dinner plate. With her arrest in Dallas on the assortment of theft and forgery charges, her $15,000 bond in the John Hill murder case had been revoked. Moreover, the Dallas district attorney’s office had revived the long-ago worthless check charges from her youth. She needed a souvenir program to keep up with the various dramas of her life. Her attorney, Caperton, recommended that the best place for her to be was in jail. Implied was the hint that it was also the safest, for if word got out in the “character” world that Marcia had made confession, she might face harm. By April 1974, however, Marcia was going bananas in a sunless metropolitan basement jail, lacking even an exercise yard. She sent word to Caperton that she wanted him to assemble all of the charges against her—excepting the murder rap—and trade them out for the best possible sentence. “I’d rather be in Goree, where at least you all can come and visit me, and I can see Mikey,” she wrote her mother. She was desperate for a visit from her eight-year-old son.