by Jack Olsen
On this sultry day in July, with bilious storm clouds touching the tops of the massive oaks along Twenty-seventh Street, Wayne Henley’s grandmother arranged herself primly on one of the two overstuffed sofas in the Hilligiests’ immaculate living room and began talking. “I been sittin’ around listenin’ to the kids,” she said. “Did you know Tony Baulch is missin’ now? Did you know the Baulch boys?”
Dorothy said she did not know them personally.
“Well, Tony Baulch, he was at our house a few weeks before he disappeared,” Mrs. Weed went on. “He come around to ask if we’d seen his older brother. You know—Billy? The one that’s been missin’ a year? Well, right after that, Tony disappeared himself, and he hasn’t been seen since. Why, it’s gettin’ to be a neighborhood without boys!”
Mrs. Hilligiest said she had felt that way for two years.
CHARLES COBBLE, a blue-eyed bean pole with fine light hair, walked with a shambling, stoop-shouldered gait that seemed to diminish him. “He slank around here as though he didn’t want to be no trouble,” a neighbor said. “It was like he was scared to disturb your attention.” Charles was five feet ten inches in height, tall for a growing boy, but no one thought of him as tall; indeed, hardly anyone thought of him at all. The other children called him “loser” to his face; to adults, he barely existed. Like so many of the young men in The Heights, he was a high school dropout, his relations with his family were strained, and his life was bleak and unrewarding. “My son very seldom smiled,” said forty-six-year-old Betty Cobble, a tiny, forceful red-haired woman who was brought up in The Heights and spoke in the “raised” intonations, almost Cockney, of the native Houstonian. “He was a sad-lookin’ boy. We never knew what to do to make him happy, and we tried every single dye of his life.”
Betty and her husband, Vern, a forty-five-year-old postal supervisor with a soft voice and a retiring nature, had reared three daughters smoothly, but their youngest child was always a problem. “Oh, he was stubborn!” the diminutive mother said. “Just like me. We had to move twice when he was little to get him away from bad boys and girls. Once we moved because I overheard a phone call from another little boy tellin’ Charles about these little girls and what all they would do. I gave Charles a really bad spankin’ and we moved that weekend. This put him in a new school and separated him from his old friends and more or less kept him isolated, and it probably did him a lot of horm.” Betty Cobble was always critical of herself, and never more than when she was discussing her son. “Charles was very bright, extremely bright, but I doubt if he ever went one full week to school. If he was gonna be lite, he wouldn’t go. He didn’t want to walk in lite in front of the other students; he said the teacher would holler at him. One dye in the fifth grade, I was drivin’ him to school, and as we got closer, he cried louder and louder. He said, ‘Don’t stop, Mama! Please don’t stop!’ When we got near the school, he grabbed the wheel of the car and almost made me go in a ditch. I said, ‘I’m not stoppin’! I’m not stoppin’! I’m gonna tyke you back home!’ He’d get so upset he’d get diarrhea, or he’d throw up. I just didn’t know what to do, and I guess a lot of the things I did were wrong.”
The Cobbles took their son to psychologists and psychiatrists, to guidance centers and behavioral clinics. “We found he was deathly afraid I was gonna leave him,” Mrs. Cobble recalled. “I don’t know what on earth gave him that idea. Maybe it was because I’m not well; I’ve been in the hospital a lot. Maybe he thought I was gonna die. It’s my nerves. I used to have severe headaches all the time, till they put me on Dilantin. I’ve been on it steady for eight years. My brain wave is similar to epilepsy.”
Whatever the cause, Charles Cobble went through life on the edge of panic. “There was nothing he wasn’t afraid of,” an uncle said. “He was afraid of the water, he was afraid of the dark, he was afraid of people and dogs. Nobody liked him, and he knew it, because they made it obvious to him. My mother, Charles’ grandmother, is a real termagant, very outspoken, and she made it plain to Charles that she didn’t like him. So did my father. The truth is, Charles wasn’t much of a boy. He’d throw tantrums, and nineteen times in a row he’d get his way, and the twentieth time Betty would hit him hard. I’m afraid she was overprotective of him.”
Betty Cobble admitted that “maybe I overloved him, maybe I tried too hard. But Charles always suffered from a feelin’ that nobody loved him. A few months before he went away, he told me, ‘I might as well be dead.’ I was walkin’ out of his room at the time; he never would go to sleep without me tellin’ him good night, and if I were mad at him, I’d still have to go in and talk to him. So this night I turned around and walked back in and sat on his bed. I said, ‘Charles, you surely can’t believe that I don’t love you.’
“He said, ‘Well, maybe you do.’
“I said, ‘Well, what about your sister?’
” ‘Yeh,’ he said, ‘Donna loves me, but you and Donna are the only ones, and nobody else.’”
By the tenth grade, the boy had all but stopped attending classes. “His grades were down,” Betty said. “He wouldn’t do his homework. He’d stay home and watch TV all dye, sit around and play cards, and the doctor said he was on the verge of an ulcer. So we let him quit school at sixteen.”
One night Charles brought home a new friend. “Mama,” the boy said, “this is Marty Ray Jones.” Betty Cobble shook hands with a wide-smiling boy who resembled her son, with blue eyes and blond hair and a well-groomed exterior. Marty Ray Jones was short, about five feet five inches, but the two boys seemed almost equal in height because of Charles’s tendency to cower and stoop. Charles took his mother aside and said, “Marty’s had a hard life, Mama. His mother’s been married three or four times and he had a stepfather that beat him so bad he had to be taken to the hospital, and his real father’s remarried and they don’t get along too good and Marty Ray wants to stay overnight.”
“Stay overnight?” Mrs. Cobble said. “Why, Charles, he’s a stranger!”
“Well, he’s already checked with his daddy and it’s okay.”
Marty Ray Jones stayed Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and then went back to his father’s house to pick up fresh clothing. “Charles,” Betty Cobble said, “do you realize Marty’s movin’ in?”
“Yeh, well, it does look that way,” the boy said.
“Well, he has to go home! He can’t stay with us.” But in fact he could. The Cobbles had a four-bedroom house, large by contemporary Heights standards, and Betty Cobble had made a career of taking in “the strays and the strange,” as she put it herself.
“Once I counted and we had eleven children livin’ in our house, and only four of ’em were ours. A woman at Child Guidance had the nerve to tell me I had an earth-mother complex. That great big old fat thang told me that!”
Marty Ray Jones, the boy who came to dinner, began a tumultuous eighteen months under the Cobbles’ roof. “He had charm, he was funny, you could talk and life with him about anythang,” Betty Cobble said, “and I learned to love that child as my own. But I should have thrown him out the first day. He was deeply emotionally disturbed. I took him to a psychiatric clinic and they gave him bottles of tranquilizers, which he sold. The next time I took him they gave him ninety more, and he told me he could get to feelin’ pretty good by tykin’ four of ‘em.”
Before long, the Cobbles were aware that Marty Jones took more than tranquilizers. He was a heavy user of barbiturates and stimulants and marijuana, and they had reason to believe he experimented with other potions, perhaps heroin and cocaine, still relatively uncommon in the backward neighborhood. When they realized that they were harboring an incipient addict, the Cobbles packed Marty’s bags and deposited them on the front porch.
“That was all right with him,” Mrs. Cobble said. “He’d just sleep out there till we let him back in. Then he’d do some outrageous thang and we’d take all his clothes down to his father’s house and empty ’em at the door, and the next morning we’d find Marty asleep in th
e backseat of our car. He was just beyond control. His father couldn’t handle him and neither could anybody else. His father said it was the mother’s fault, and the mother said it was the father’s, and meanwhile he was livin’ in our house. There’d be times when Marty and Charles would be so mad at each other they wouldn’t even be speakin’, and still Charles would beg us to let him stay because he said Marty had no plice to go. Charles knew what it was like to be an outcast, and he had a deep sensitivity about thangs like that. We tried to make the best of it. I drove those two boys everywhere in the car, and I’d go back and pick ’em up. I don’t know what more we could have done.”
One night Marty came home to the Cobbles’ in a wild and manic state. “He was on somethin’ worse than marijuana,” Betty Cobble said. “He insisted on drivin’ our car, and we wouldn’t let him, so he began goin’ through my daughter’s purse to find the keys. Marty was very quick goin’ through purses. All you had to do was turn your back for a second and he’d have a ten-dollar bill. He was death on ten-dollar bills, because you could buy a lid for ten dollars.
“When he couldn’t find the keys, he began ravin’ and threatenin’. I said, ‘Marty, you better calm yourself or I’m gonna have to call the police.” He picked up a mortar block and threw it through the rear window of the Mustang, and I said, ‘Okay, I’m callin’ ’em!’ Marty sat on the front porch and waited.
“The police came and told him to stand up. Marty wouldn’t move, so one big cop grabbed him and jerked him to his feet. Marty started screamin’ ‘Police brutality! Police brutality!’ so the whole neighborhood could hear, but the cops were very good to him, considerin’ how he was actin’. They handcuffed him, and Marty turned to me and said, ‘Are you gonna let ’em treat me like this?’
“I said, ‘He’s not doin’ anythang to hurt you. And it’s your own fault.’ By that time he was pleadin’ and cryin’. They took him away, and I went to bed after midnight. When I got up at seven the next mornin’, about the time Vern usually gets home from the post office, Marty was sittin’ on the couch in our livin’ room.
“I said, ‘Marty, how did you get out?’
“He said, ‘Oh, my dad came down and got me.’”
In police records, the first mention of Marty Ray Jones was at age six, as the complainant in a sodomy case. In 1972, the year of the window-breaking incident, he was seventeen and on probation for theft. His lifelong behavior had alternated between acts of furious delinquency and mournful contrition. He stole Vern Cobble’s antique gold watch and later gave him a worn old time-piece with gold-plated case, purchased at a pawnshop for thirty dollars. After he had caused Betty Cobble untold misery, he bought her a ceramic elephant and presented it on her birthday with quiet pride. “He made it so hord for us,” Mrs. Cobble said, “because he was tryin’ to be liked, and at the same time makin’ everybody mad. He was a companion to Charles, yes, but my God, look what it cost Charles in the long run!”
In March, 1973, there were changes in the lives of the Cobbles and their bad-penny houseguest. Betty flew to Massachusetts to help one of her daughters through a difficult pregnancy, and Marty Ray moved in with a succession of hosts ranging from his mother and latest stepfather in Brownwood, Texas, to a dope dealer called “Satan” in the scabrous section of Houston called “Sin Alley.” Vern Cobble, the quiet man who worked at night and let his wife run the family, grew closer to his son Charles. “For the first time in his life,” Cobble said, “Charles would ask me questions, solicit my advice, and for the first time in his life he’d take it. Up to then, he’d been his mother’s boy, mainly because I wasn’t around much—I always had to hold two jobs, sometimes three, till I made supervisor. But with Betty gone to Massachusetts, Charles and I became friends, and it felt good. I think he was surprised how much I’d learned about life in the last year!”
One night Charles dragged home another waif, a tiny fifteen-year-old girl with orange hair and a doll’s face on which she had appliquéd heavy portions of rouge and lipstick and eye cosmetics. “This here’s Debbie,” Charles told his father. “She’s a beautician, and she’s working as a waitress on Yale Street. We’re gonna have a baby.”
Surprised at his own cool sophistication, Vern Cobble arranged a marriage and helped the newlyweds set up housekeeping in the Ben Hur Apartments, twelve blocks away, just across the street from the home of Elmer Wayne Henley, Jr., and a block from the Hilligiests. When Betty returned from the East, the elder Cobbles gave up their rambling old house and joined their son at the Ben Hur. Once again the seventeen-year-old boy and his mother were close, four doors apart on the second floor, overlooking the little swimming pool.
Only a few months passed before the child Debbie, not yet five feet in height, became disenchanted. “For a while, it was nice,” she said. “Charles got a job in the nickel-plating shop on Twenty-sixth Street, but then he quit because he was scared of his boss. He’d sit around the apartment and ask me to tell him I loved him, over and over and over and over and over. He felt that everybody else resented him. Then one day Marty Jones came back and started hanging around. Marty always brought marijuana, and he’d get Charles to go places with him, and Charles would come home in bad shape, spaced out, drugged, or drunk, and in a bad mood. Charles wouldn’t talk to me about it. He said that Marty was the only real friend he’d ever had; he said they tried to help each other. I asked him not to bring Marty back, but he said Marty didn’t have anyplace else to go.”
After a few months, the young married couple separated. “Charles just told me, ‘It’d be for your own good if you went away. I don’t want you to get hurt.’ He said he’d send for me when the time was right. That was the Fourth of July, and as soon as I moved out, Marty moved in.”
By this time, Marty Ray Jones had become known throughout The Heights as a smalltime supplier of narcotics, and also as a “burn” artist—a peddler who takes the money and fails to produce the goods, or substitutes dope of a low quality. With faithful Charles at his side, the Jones boy managed to alienate the whole neighborhood, including the young man who lived across the street, Wayne Henley. Eighteen-year-old Johnny Reyna recalled, “One night in the middle of July we were at Long John’s fish place, and Marty came in looking for a fight. He went up to Wayne and tried to start something, but Wayne just threw it off. Marty was getting real redneck, real mean, but nobody wanted to hassle with him. Charles was there; he was acting okay. You could talk to Charles, but not to Marty.”
A boy named Danny Ward remembered: “Marty and Charles, they tried to start a fight with everybody. Like Marty came up to the Jack-in-the-Box and asked me if I wanted to step outside and fight him. I told him no. Then I whipped his ass.” All along Twenty-seventh Street and Yale Street and Heights Boulevard, every place where teen-agers congregated, Marty Ray Jones and his shadow, Charles Cobble, became anathema.
At noon on Wednesday, July 25, a steaming summer day in Houston, Betty Cobble drove home from her new job making deliveries for a Heights florist. As usual, she stopped by apartment No. 26 to invite her son to join her for lunch. Mother and son ate together in the parents’ apartment, No. 30; then Betty returned to her route.
A few hours later, Charles was seen cooling off in the small pool in the Ben Hur’s courtyard, and toward the end of the day he and Marty made an appearance at Long John’s in their fanciest outfits, including new platform-sole shoes. “They was rappin’,” Sheila Hines said. “Nothin’ out of the way. If they woulda said somethin’ to me and Rhonda Williams about goin’ away, we wouldn’t’ve been so surprised later. But they didn’t. They just walked in and rapped a little bit and said they had to go and take care of some stuff.”
Mrs. Cobble dropped into her son’s apartment when she finished work late that afternoon, but neither Charles nor Marty was at home. She served dinner, and her husband, Vern, left for the post office about 9 P.M. Once again Betty looked into No. 26 and saw no signs of life. She returned to her own apartment to await the ten o’clock news on tele
vision.
Down in the courtyard, a Ben Hur resident sat by the small swimming pool, hoping to catch a breeze on the sweltering evening. It was just before 10 P.M., and like Betty Cobble she intended to watch the news in a few minutes. “I was looking at the water, deep in my own thoughts,” the woman said, “and I was startled by footsteps behind me. Three boys were walking over by the sidewalk one behind the other: Marty Jones first, then Charles Cobble, then another boy with a moustache, not a heavy moustache, but definitely a moustache. They got to the lights by the pool and Charles looked over and gave me a real weird look. I didn’t know whether it was a look of ‘Don’t speak to me’ or ‘For heaven’s sake, say something!’ I just can’t describe the look; it’s bothered me ever since. Normally Charles would have said hello, but this time he said nothing. Nobody said anything, and they just kept marching single file. They turned the corner out of my sight and my second thought was that they were going up to Charles’ apartment for another pot party. I tried to put it out of my mind, but that look stayed with me. It was as if Charles was trying to plead with me with his eyes.”
Later Johnny Reyna and two of his friends drove along Twenty-seventh and spotted a stiff procession. “They were walkin’ toward Wayne’s house, Marty and Charles walkin’ ahead of Wayne,” Johnny said. “We stopped and started talkin’ to ’em and they didn’t want to say nothin’. Wayne kind of turned us off. Normally he’d come over and talk, ya know? So we drove off.”