When Hennard returned to sea, he sailed out of San Pedro, California, the main harbor for Los Angeles. He earned up to $5,000 a month, and with few expenses beyond his $90-a-week flophouse room, he banked most of it. After Jeanna divorced Dr. Hennard in 1983, George generously loaned her large amounts of money. He also paid cash for a brand-new 1987 Ford Ranger pickup with a scintillating metallic blue paint job, and financed a new Cadillac for his mother—a luxury car he obsessively tended for her.
Hennard loved being at sea so much that he spent his vacations in distant ports of the Far East and Central America, where he could satisfy his overwhelming cravings for drugs and obedient, nonwhite prostitutes.
As it had been all along, it was precisely George Hennard’s cravings that sparked his final, fatal decline. In May 1989, marijuana was found in Hennard’s shipboard cabin. He was suspended again and sent to a two-week drug treatment program in Houston. Not long after his release, his own father—a medical doctor—would tell a relative that he believed Hennard was schizophrenic. When this got back to George, it caused a final rift between father and son, who never spoke again.
On August 23, 1989, George Hennard’s seaman’s license was revoked for good. This was the darkest moment in his dark life. Though he would appeal, he would never go back to sea.
While he prepared his appeal, he worked odd jobs, from steam-cleaning to construction, never staying anywhere very long. He stayed off and on at the now- vacant Belton mansion, which his mother had won in the divorce but was trying to sell. He tried to join an Austin blues-rock band, but his heavy-handed, manic style and his habit of drifting into a different groove again doomed him. He carped profanely about the women he met and always ended up with compliant hookers. His white-hot rage at the world simmered, and his paranoia grew profoundly creepy.
When his rootless lifestyle had consumed most of his savings, Hennard moved into his divorced mother’s two-bedroom apartment in Henderson, Nevada. Their tangled lives remained sometimes affectionate, sometimes violent.
Once, Jeanna fixed her son up with a single woman who worked with her at Miss Faye’s Nail Salon in Henderson. During the short, strange courtship, Hennard took her on a macabre pilgrimage to the site of America’s bloodiest mass murder to date: James Huberty’s seventy-seven-minute lunchtime rampage at a McDonald’s restaurant in San Ysidro, California, where twenty-one people died before Huberty was killed by a police sniper in 1984 (see chapter 3).
The relationship grew tenuous soon after Hennard went on a paranoid rant about being followed by police, and it finally ended after he had a stormy argument with mother on Christmas morning in 1990. That morning, a raging Hennard stomped out of his mother’s house and sat revving his pickup’s engine just outside the living room window. His shocked girlfriend feared he was planning to gun the truck through the glass, but instead he roared in reverse out of the driveway. She never saw him again.
ALONG WITH HIS SUGGESTIVE LETTER TO NEIGHBOR JANE BUGG’S TEENAGE DAUGHTERS, GEORGE HENNARD ENCLOSED THIS ODD SNAPSHOT OF HIMSELF PLAYING HIS DRUMS IN THE BADLANDS. ON THE BACK, HE SCRAWLED, “MY NEW ‘HANGOUT’ IN THE DESERT NEAR LAS VEGAS. BEAUTIFUL PLACE AT NITE TIME!”
Courtesy of Jane Bugg
DISTRAUGHT AND DELUSIONAL
Less than two months later, Hennard made a last-ditch appeal to get his seaman’s license back. He wrote a two-page letter, claiming he’d suffered more punishment for smoking pot than the drunken captain of the ill-fated Exxon Valdez, who was suspended for only nine months. Playing every angle, Hennard also begged the U.S. Coast Guard (which regulated merchant seamen) to help him kick his drug habit by allowing him to go back to sea—because if he couldn’t work as a seaman, “I honestly do not believe I could be rehabilitated from drugs.
“Any person can tell you who has known me that I am not readily adaptable to shore life,” Hennard closed his letter. “It stinks! My home is the sea, and it is where I belong.”
Despite his mushrooming desperation, Hennard’s case wasn’t hopeless. The commander of the Coast Guard’s Marine Safety Office recommended clemency, but the final decision would take months. After eighteen agonizing months, George Hennard wasn’t going to wait much longer.
Also in February and March 1991, an increasingly distraught and deluded Hennard bought two handguns, completely legally. He paid $420 cash for a Glock 17, a lightweight Austrian combat pistol capable of firing eighteen rounds as fast as the shooter can pull the trigger. Reloading with a new seventeen-round clip takes less than two seconds. A month later, he paid $354 cash for a stainless-steel Ruger P89, a workhorse semiautomatic pistol that could fire up to sixteen 9 mm bullets before reloading.
On June 5, 1991, Hennard visited the FBI field office in Las Vegas. He told the agent that his civil rights had been violated by a secret cabal of white women who conspired to thwart his love life by spying on him, tapping his phone, and spreading lies to prospective employers. Sometimes, he said, they stood in front of his car to prevent him from driving.
But apparently not all women were wicked. For obscure reasons, Hennard eventually developed an obsession with two teenage sisters, Jill Fritz and Jana Jernigan, both pretty and both blonde, who lived with their divorced mother Jane Bugg a few doors down from the Belton mansion.
The day after going to the FBI, on June 6, he handwrote a five-page, disjointed letter to Jill and Jana. In an increasingly delusional script, he cooed sweet hallucinations to the girls as he railed against the “mostly white, treacherous female vipers of [Belton and Killeen] who tried to destroy me and my family.” Suggestively, he wondered if “the three of us can get together someday?”
“I will prevail in the Bitter End!” Hennard promised as he closed. Among the four photographs he enclosed in the letter was a self-portrait with his drums in the desert. It said: George—Grande, final solo.
Within a week of mailing the letter, Hennard was back in Texas as the caretaker of his mom’s Belton mansion. There, he spent his days compulsively washing his truck; meticulously dusting the furniture; making copious notes to himself in journals, on calendars, and with tape recorders; and videotaping some of his favorite murder programs on TV, including a documentary about Huberty’s massacre and the 1988 terrorist bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Hennard also played, again and again…
Steely Dan’s “Don’t Take Me Alive,” a hard-
rocking anthem about a killer holed up against
enemies who laugh at him and spread lies—
the killer deter mined to cling to his own
dark delusions rather than surrender.
When potential buyers toured the mansion, Hennard would stalk close behind. He kept some doors locked, including his bedroom. When he spoke to them, as he often did, he would list the home’s flaws or chide children who wandered away from their parents. The house was his. Not theirs.
But it wasn’t just about the house. When children ran after balls that strayed onto the expansive lawn at Hennard’s mansion, he chased them away, shouting curses. Young girls walking past were peppered with suggestive remarks. One friend recalled him passing a girl on the street and yelling out his truck window, “Bitch!”
Darkness descended on George Hennard. He fell even deeper into his obsessions and paranoia. In the wee hours of the night, neighbors could hear his squeaking mountain bike passing up and down the dark streets, aimless and haunting.
Hennard also played, again and again, a song that to him coruscated like St. Elmo’s fire. It was Steely Dan’s “Don’t Take Me Alive,” a hard-rocking anthem about a killer holed up against enemies who laugh at him and spread lies—the killer determined to cling to his own dark delusions rather than surrender.
Some days, he followed Jill and Jana to their jobs, or to the market, where he might tease them by popping up unexpectedly from behind a car or playing catch-me-if-you-can in the aisles, before disappearing into thin air.
And in the darkest nights, Hennard sometimes
crept beneath their bedroom window for hours, smoking cigarettes, tossing butts in a growing pile on the ground, and watching. A few days after the usually docile family shih tzu inexplicably began yelping wildly at shadows in the night, the dog dragged himself into the garage and died. He’d been poisoned.
The girls’ mother, Jane, began to have nightmares about George Hennard. In one, she saw him as a night wraith phantom, circling their house until he came crashing through the living room’s plate-glass bay window with blazing guns in each hand.
Jane awoke with a start in the electric darkness of her room. It was only a dream, she thought.
Only a dream.
“SOMETHING TERRIBLE’S GONNA HAPPEN”
Before dawn on Wednesday, October 16, 1991, George Hennard rode his creaky bike to the Leon Heights Drive-In for his customary fast-food breakfast. Most mornings, clerk Mary Mead hated to see him walk through the door. He was rude and scary, sometimes pushing other customers out of the way as he demanded service.
Sometimes, he’d spit on other customers’ cars as he left.
One recent morning, he had glared at her and sounded a warning to no one in particular. “This town had better stop messing with me and my family,” he growled, “or something terrible’s gonna happen.”
But not today. Hennard smiled and said good morning as he picked up his usual items: an orange juice, a sausage-and-biscuit sandwich, some doughnuts, and a newspaper. George’s geniality was out of character. It vexed her.
“Three thirty-seven,” she told him as she rang up his breakfast.
Hennard grubbed in his pocket, then smiled.
“I don’t think I have it,” he said. “Can I come back this afternoon and pay you?”
“Sure,” she said as he gathered his food and pedaled off.
The day before, George Hennard had celebrated his thirty-fifth birthday alone. In his desk calendar, he had marked the date with these words: “I am not an animal nor am I a number. I am a human being with feelings and emotions.” He had spent part of his big day in downtown Belton, bitterly complaining about his water bill, blaming yet another conspiracy against him. At nightfall, he had driven to the Nomad, a roadhouse, snack bar, arcade, and gas station rolled into a single rusty corrugated metal building just outside the town limits, for his birthday feast of a burger and fries.
While he ate alone at a small table, he watched the TV over the beer cooler. The evening news was replaying clips of the Senate hearings on Anita Hill’s sexual harassment charges against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. Suddenly, Hennard hurled his half-eaten burger across the room at the screen.
“You dumb bitch!” he had screamed. “Now you bastards have opened it for all the women!”
But that was yesterday, when things had been all wrong. This was another day—a day to set things right.
Hennard showered and dressed for the occasion. He buckled his freshly ironed, stonewashed jeans with a Southwestern-tooled leather belt. Over a white T-shirt that said “Ford, the heartbreak of today’s Chevy,” he buttoned up a short-sleeved, turquoise shirt whose yokes were embroidered with multicolored Aztec mazes and desert roses. He chose bright red socks from his drawer, put them on, and laced up his brown Rockport Oxfords. He wore no jewelry except his Casio quartz wristwatch with a gold face, and he pocketed his turquoise- and coral-studded jackknife.
Before Hennard put his personal destiny in motion, he ordered his belongings neatly in the big house. He threw out the birthday card his mother had sent, and put the garbage cans at the curb. Everything was laid out: the shipping boxes for his two guns, his videotapes, his Merchant Marine footlockers, his overseas photos, his journals and notes. And there was a fat folder of legal documents about his Merchant Marine troubles, which had culminated in his dismissal—exactly two years, minus one day, before.
Around 11 a.m., he wrote a note to his sister Desiree, who lived off and on at the mansion, too, and left it on the dining room table:
Desiree,
Enclosed is $100.00 to cover the Water and Electric Bill. Do not pay the phone bill! I am responsible for it. Southwestern Bell violated my Privacy Rights. Therefore they don’t get paid. Don’t let the people in this rotten town get to you like they done to me. Take care of yourself and be strong.
Love you
Brother Jo Jo
And on his desk calendar, in the square for October 16, 1991, he scribbled: “Life has become a stalemate. There is simply no hope and not a prayer.”
DURING THE LUNCH HOUR ON OCTOBER 16, 1991, AN ANGRY AND PARANOID GEORGE HENNARD CRASHED HIS FORD PICKUP THROUGH THE GLASS WINDOWS OF LUBY’S CAFETERIA IN KILLEEN, TEXAS, AND BEGAN HIS METHODICAL SLAUGHTER OF THE SHOCKED DINERS INSIDE.
Texas Department of Public Safety
SETTING THINGS RIGHT
So it wasn’t hope Hennard carried. Instead, he stuffed a pack of Bristol cigarettes and four preloaded clips of 9 mm ammunition in his pockets, along with a fistful of loose cartridges. With two semiautomatic pistols and more than a hundred rounds, he was ready.
At 11:50 a.m., Hennard backed his Ford Ranger out of his driveway in Belton and soon turned onto Sparta Road toward US-190. In less than a half hour, he’d be in Killeen to set things right.
More than 150 diners jammed the Luby’s dining room on this Wednesday lunch hour. A few were Suzanna’s friends and patients, whom she greeted warmly as she came in. One of the benefits of living in a safe, small town.
The serving line was long and the Gratias’ usual table by the restaurant’s front windows was occupied, so they claimed a table on the far side of the dining room, beside a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows. Manager Mark Kopenhaffe joined them for lunch, sitting across from Suzanna, who he bantered about politics with while keeping one eye on the unrelenting stream of hungry people who continued to spill through the front door. It was going to be a big day. One for the books.
A little after 12:30 p.m., the swollen serving line slowed almost to a stop and several tables hadn’t been bused, yet customers were still coming. Mark excused himself and went to the cashier’s counter to speed things along.
The Gratias had eaten their fill and chatted idly while waiting to thank Mark for lunch. At 12:39, mellow Muzak played above the collective hum of friendly diners and the soft clinking of silverware in the dining hall. Hanging pothos plants, potted palms, the gentleness of pastel mauve and emerald green colors, and the sheer draperies softened the feel of a corporate cafeteria, made it innocuous and homey.
So at first, the startling crash was presumed to be a busboy who had dropped a big stack of dishes, usually the worst calamity to befall most commercial eateries such as this one. But when everyone in the place wheeled around to see not a pile of broken plates but a monstrous blue pickup truck exploding through the plate-glass windows and into the carpeted dining room, smashing tables, chairs, and people in a slicing shower of glass before coming to a stop twenty feet into the crowded restaurant …well, reason twisted in upon itself.
An accident! Suzanna thought as she rose from her chair to help. Somebody lost control of his truck and crashed into the restaurant. Maybe a heart attack! Maybe he needed help!
A few Samaritans rushed toward the truck to aid the driver. One was reaching for the door handle when the driver thrust his left arm out his open driver-side window and fired a gun four times into the serving line, and fired another with his right hand out the rolled-down passenger window. And before the driver’s would-be rescuer knew what was happening, he had been shot three times. He died instantly.
“This is for the women of Belton!” the shooter yelled as he leaped from the truck, a Bristol cigarette still between his lips.
It’s a robbery! Suzanna suddenly thought. They’re going to come for our purses! She could hear the pop-pop-pop of gunfire, but her view was blocked by the truck, which sat just twenty feet away between her and the shooter. Suddenly, Al turned their table on its side and they crouched behind their meager breastwork, but Suzanna had to
watch. She had to know.
After the first burst of pandemonium, an eerie silence fell on the entire tan-colored room as George Hennard began shooting the people closest to his truck, then hunting down others. The killing was easy. People hid under their tables, cowering and trying desperately to make themselves small, invisible, but they couldn’t make themselves small enough. Isolated cries erupted with each shot, then died.
“This is for what Bell County did to me and my family!” he shouted cryptically as he fired at anyone who stood or fled. “This is payback! Was it worth it? Was it worth it?”
Suzanna saw his face for the first time less than a minute after he crashed through the window; it was intent and calm. Hennard came around the front of his truck toward her, stopping to aim point-blank at a wounded man’s head and pulling the trigger. He shot another one, then another one. Always in the head.
What’s wrong with this guy? Suzanna’s rational brain was spinning, trying to make sense of the bedlam. Like so many women who’d crossed paths with George Hennard, she was sucked into the paradox of his handsome looks and his behavior, which people often don’t associate with beauty. He’s not bad looking. What could be so wrong? I’d go out with him …
Suzanna reached for her purse lying a couple
feet away, but she realized to her horror that
her Smith & Wesson wasn’t in there. It was safely
under her passenger seat a hundred feet away,
and a lunatic killer stood between them.
Then the ghastliness of his purpose dawned on her. This wasn’t a robbery. It was a mass murder, like the one she remembered had happened at that McDonald’s in California seven years before. She had thought at the time she would have been able to shoot Huberty with her gun if she was there that day. Now here was this freak, methodically slaughtering frightened people as calmly as an altar boy lights candles, and he would kill everyone unless he was stopped.
Delivered from Evil Page 11