Body Hunter

by Patricia Springer

  More than four hundred people filled the pews of the Lamar Baptist Church in Wichita Falls for a memorial service to honor Toni. She was popular and well liked, both in New Mexico, where she was a Clayton High School homecoming queen, varsity cheerleader, and a member of the National Honor Society, and the First Baptist Church, as well as in Wichita Falls, where she graduated from Midwestern State University. MSU received a portion of the reward money collected in Toni’s name to use for student scholarships, as did West Texas State University.

  “She had a sincere love of mankind and was easily upset when others were criticized or being hurt. She loved with a spirit of loyalty and generosity all who knew her,” the Reverend Sandy Sandlin said. Sandlin prayed for protection of other potential victims.

  But public unrest was high on the heels of another brutal murder, and women decided to rely on themselves, not God and the law to protect them. Gun shops’ sales soared.

  “Many, many people are now carrying some form of self-defense, from nail files to hat pins. Can you blame them?” Joe Tom White, chapter president of the Texas Weapon Collectors Association, said.

  An unidentified nurse summed up the feeling in the North Texas community: “Everybody is scared shitless. Out buying guns. Afraid to walk to work.”

  No one knew if there would be another victim—or who it might be. Just as they had no idea who the killer or killers were.

  Four days after Toni Gibbs’s body was found in Archer County, the young hospital orderly quit his job at the Wichita Falls General Hospital.

  Chapter Four

  March 24, 1985

  Now unemployed, the former hospital orderly traveled south from Wichita Falls to Fort Worth in search of work. He checked into a Travel Lodge near downtown, a small motel full of drug dealers. Instead of finding work, he found more dope. He bought drugs, shot up, and kept shooting up.

  In Fort Worth, he was lonelier than ever. The unskilled, out-of-work laborer commandeered a car from the parking lot of the Travel Lodge and went to a club on East Lancaster Street. He sat at the bar, drank, felt sorry for himself, and tried to drown out the memories of Terry Sims and Toni Gibbs.

  Debra Taylor and Ken, her thirty-one-year-old husband of five years, had been partying Sunday night with friends at their Fort Worth home. They ate dinner, drank beer, sang songs as a friend strummed on his guitar, and had a good time. By midnight, Ken Taylor was tired. Seven-year-old Tarrah, Debra’s daughter by a first marriage, and Jennifer, age four, had been asleep for hours.

  “Come on, let’s go to the club,” Debra urged.

  “No, Debra, it’s late and I’m tired,” Ken grumbled, running a hand through his copper-colored hair.

  Debra’s brother-in-law, who lived with the couple and their two children, and all her friends declined Debra’s invitation. Angry and determined to keep the party mood going, the twenty-five-year-old housewife wasn’t about to be denied. She was ready to go out. Ready to have more fun. She told everyone at the party that she was going to bed. Then, just after midnight, she slipped away, saying nothing to anyone at the house. Debra walked to a nearby neighborhood bar on East Lancaster.

  The tall stranger who sat next to Debra at the bar was instantly attracted to the pretty, brown-haired woman with a narrow face, thinly plucked brows, and delicate features. Her broad smile exposed beautiful white teeth and emphasized her high cheekbones. Her blue denim bib overalls hugged her nicely shaped body.

  “Hi. What’s your name?” the man asked.

  “Debra, Debra Taylor.”

  The friendly stranger bought Debra a drink, talked awhile, then asked her to dance.

  Debra’s small hand was dwarfed by the man’s large palm and long fingers. He slid his arm around her small waist. Debra’s five-foot-four, one-hundred-ten-pound body was pressed firmly to the six-foot-six frame of her partner. They moved across the dance floor in unison, body rubbing against body. Her partner’s hot, stale beer breath ruffled Debra’s fine hair.

  After a couple of dances, Debra was ready to go home. Ken was probably fast asleep in their bed and she was ready to join him. Her dance partner offered her a ride.

  As the couple rounded the bar to the parking lot at the back of the building, the stranger made his move on her. He grabbed her and forced his lips onto hers as his hands groped at her body.

  “No!” Debra shouted, as she pulled away and slapped him across the face. A drink and a dance were acceptable; intimate contact was not.

  Something in the man snapped. The same fury that had filled his mind and possessed his body on two previous occasions again invaded his being. It consumed him. In his mind, power, anger, repression, frustration, killing, and sex were inextricably bound. He lashed out at the pretty, small-framed woman who had rejected him just like the others.

  His hands moved as rapidly as a flag whipping in the cool spring breeze. He struck her on one side of her face, then the other. He hurled her about, then shoved her to the cracked pavement. Debra’s head pounded against the black surface as she fell, flecks of asphalt sticking to her hair. Within seconds, the attacker’s long, thin forearm was jammed tightly against Debra Taylor’s throat. He pressed against the struggling young woman with all his might. He choked the breath from her lungs, the life from her body. Debra Taylor went limp.

  Glancing quickly around the empty parking lot, the perpetrator hastily tossed the body of his latest victim in the car he had stolen from the motel parking lot. He sped down the interstate and hurriedly took the first exit at Randall Mill Road. The area was fairly desolate with no buildings except for one apartment unit under construction.

  The man lifted Debra’s small body from the car with ease and carried it to a clump of trees about one hundred and seventy-five feet from the road. He stripped Debra of her clothing. On his way back to the car, he dropped the clothes in a neat pile about eighty feet from the body in the dense underbrush of the remote area.

  The killer returned to the confines of his motel room. He was alone with his anger and the memories of three women—all dead.

  While Debra Taylor had been gliding across the dance floor with the long-legged stranger, her friends and family believed she was asleep in her room.

  “Well, I’m ready to call it a night,” Ken Taylor announced to his guests. He went to the bedroom he shared with his wife, only to find it empty. Debra’s purse lay on the dresser and her sweater hung in the closet. It was a cool evening, she couldn’t have gone far without a sweater or her purse. Ken Taylor lay on the bed, wondering where Debra could have gone.

  The next morning, Ken Taylor awoke to find himself alone. His wife hadn’t come home. After spending most of the day checking with family and friends, finding no one had seen or heard from Debra since midnight, Ken’s concern turned to fear. His wife was missing. He phoned the police on Monday evening.

  Ken Taylor told police he couldn’t imagine where Debra had gone. It was unusual for her to leave that late at night, especially without her purse. They had made plans for the upcoming weekend—special plans, for a birthday celebration. Debra would turn twenty-six on Friday, Jennifer five on Sunday, and Tarrah eight a few days later. Debra would never miss such a significant event.

  Debra’s good friend Angela Myal agreed with Ken. It was unlike Debra not to let someone know where she was. Her friend’s mysterious disappearance frightened Angela. She decided not to sit around and wait for the police. She had to take action.

  Angela went door to door in the neighborhood, showing Debra’s picture and asking people if they had seen her. Myal hoped to find something to explain Debra’s disappearance.

  One of the many stops Angela made was to a little local bar close to the Taylors’ house.

  “Do you recognize this woman?” Myla asked the waitresses.

  The women expressed surprise at how closely Debra resembled one of their own servers, but no one remembered seeing the pretty blond mother of two at the bar.

  March 27, four days after Debra’s disappeara
nce, Ken Taylor was reading the morning edition of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. Sally Field had won the Academy Award for her performance in Places in the Heart, a movie filmed in part in North Texas. The next headline turned Ken’s uneasy feeling to anxiety as he read $50,000 POSTED IN MURDERS OF WOMEN. His distress fast forwarded to panic as he read the article, which described the murders of eight Fort Worth women within a few months prior to Debra’s disappearance.

  The Fort Worth Crime Commission, the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce, the Fort Worth Citizens Organization Against Crime, and the Rotary Club of Fort Worth had joined resources to offer the fifty-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the conviction of the perpetrator or perpetrators in the mysterious deaths. The incentive was sweetened by the addition of another fifty thousand dollars by one of the girls’ fathers.

  Ken’s stomach turned sour as he thought of Debra. Was she safe?

  Construction along the Loop 820 corridor that surrounded the cowtown city of Fort Worth was rapidly increasing. With the ascent of apartments and businesses, access roads were being cleared and paved to transport commuters to and from the city’s newest freeway. SRO Asphalt Company was one of the contractors working in the eastern portion of Tarrant County. They began the project on Monday, March 25.

  On Friday, two of the SRO workers needed a bathroom break. With no facilities nearby, they left the job at the paving site just west of Randall Mill Road and walked to a thick clump of trees about two hundred feet from the roadway to relieve themselves. As they stood concealed in the thick underbrush, they noticed something unusual. Something that hadn’t been noticed in the four days they had been working in the area.

  The two men walked through the thick foliage for a closer look. The pale figure, faceup, spread-eagled amongst the thick brush and trees, was that of a nude woman.

  The men gasped. The face of the still figure was grotesquely blackened, akin to something seen in a horror film. They rushed from the grove of trees to call for help.

  When Detective Ray Sharp of the Fort Worth Police Department arrived, the area had been taped off to preserve evidence. With no way to get a car down to the crime scene, Sharp walked to where the body had been spotted.

  She must have been led to the location or carried down here. The growth is too thick for a car to make it through, and I don’t see any car tracks, Sharp thought to himself as he trudged through the thick vegetation.

  When he reached the body, Sharp made mental notes: young white female, probably in her early twenties. He circled the corpse, observing leaves and other vegetation that had adhered to the cold, stiff remains. His soft brown hair blew gently in the southerly wind.

  There was no way of knowing how long the woman had been dead. From the amount of advanced decomposition, Sharp knew that the body had been at the secluded location for several days. Temperatures had been in the high seventies and low eighties. The body was bloated and the skin of her face and torso was discolored. Sharp drew in a deep breath and closed his eyes momentarily before he again studied the face of the victim. Her lips were swollen, exposing her front teeth and gums. Her eye sockets were misshapen, and the black color of decomposition extended into her scalp. She was unidentifiable.

  Sharp made certain that brown paper bags were slipped over the hands and forearms of the Jane Doe. It was imperative to preserve any evidence on her hands or under her nails that might help in identifying her killer.

  About fifty feet from the victim, detectives found a pile of clothes. It was not known if they belonged to the dead woman, but the shirt and blue denim overalls would be inspected for possible evidence.

  Dr. Nizam Peerwani, Tarrant County Medical Examiner, arrived at the scene. The physician made a preliminary examination of the body.

  “I think it’s a recent death,” Peerwani said in a thick East Indian accent. “I can’t make a conclusive determination until I do an autopsy or make a final identification.”

  While the body was being transported to the medical examiner’s office, detectives reviewed recent reports of missing persons. Ken Taylor’s report of his missing wife was among them.

  “Mr. Taylor, we’ve found a body out near Loop 820 and Randall Mill Road in east Fort Worth. We think it might be your wife. Can you come down to the morgue and take a look?” an officer asked Ken.

  It was the phone call Ken Taylor had dreaded receiving. He prayed on the way to meet with police that it wasn’t Debra who had been found, but he knew in his heart that something had to have happened to his wife, or she would be home.

  As Taylor was guided toward a stainless-steel table in the cold confines of the Fort Worth city morgue, his heartbeat quickened and his body began to tremble. Dread flooded him, replaced with repulsion at the sight of the hideous figure he knew was that of his beautiful wife.

  “I’m sure it’s Debra,” Taylor said, tears of sorrow and regret flowing free down his ruddy cheeks. “That’s the necklace I gave her for Christmas, and those are her wedding rings.”

  The jewelry was all of Debra that Ken recognized. He couldn’t see her sparkling green eyes, her sandy-colored hair, or her perfectly shaped lips. They were gone. The lifeless, deformed figure on the table was not the spirited wife he knew, the woman he loved. It was the mere shell of a once-vibrant woman.

  Debra Taylor would have turned twenty-six on the day her body was found in eastern Fort Worth. The next day, instead of celebrating her birthday, family members gathered at the Taylor home to plan a funeral.

  Ken held his daughters close to him. He did all he could to comfort them, but his pain was so intense that he found it difficult to suppress his own grief in front of the children.

  Later that day, surrounded by family, Ken hung up the telephone at his home.

  “That was the medical examiner’s office,” Ken said, his voice breaking. “They’ve identified Debra through dental records. It’s no surprise. I knew it was her when I saw her yesterday. She was wearing the necklace I gave her for Christmas and her wedding rings.”

  As friends and family discussed the disappearance and death of Debra, they spoke of the more than twenty women in the Fort Worth area who had been killed or were missing in the past six months. Another body, in a separate location from Debra’s, had been found the same day. None of the slayings had been resolved.

  “We’ve got an animal running loose on the streets in this town. I hope to God somebody somewhere saw something so we can stop this guy,” Ken said.

  Police refused to speculate about who Debra’s killer might be—but they had an idea. They had never heard of the two women killed in Wichita Falls and they’d never heard of Ricky Lee Green, a serial killer on the loose in north Texas who was slaying young women during that time period.

  But they knew Ken Taylor. Clinging to an old cop theory—that murder victims were usually killed by someone close to them—they were convinced Taylor had something to do with the death of his wife.

  Ken Taylor’s nightmare wasn’t over.

  Ken Taylor’s nightmare had only just begun.

  A few days later, a loud knock at the door interrupted Ken’s private thoughts of Debra.

  “We have a search warrant,” the detectives standing on his porch told Ken as he opened the front door of his Fort Worth home.

  “What for?” Ken asked, bewildered.

  There was no answer from the officers who pushed past Taylor and began sifting through his personal belongings, scrutinizing his life.

  “What are you looking for?” Taylor demanded.

  “Anything that tells us what happened to your wife,” the detective replied.

  Taylor swore he saw a sneer on the officer’s face, but why? He hadn’t done anything to Debra. He didn’t know who killed her. Two polygraphs had proven that he didn’t know who had taken his wife’s life. Yet, this was the third time the police had searched his home. What could they be looking for that they hadn’t found before?

  Taylor was baffled. He soon learned the reason for
the searches, and the accusing looks on the officers’ faces.

  “We need you to come downtown with us to answer some questions,” Taylor was told.

  “But I’ve answered all your questions. What more can I tell you?” Taylor asked.

  “We just need to clear up some facts. We’ll meet you at the station.”

  Taylor dutifully followed the officers to the Fort Worth police station where he endured yet another round of questioning, as well as a third lie detector test.

  He was tired. Weary from the nights of lost sleep over Debra’s disappearance. Spent from the ordeal of identifying her body and planning her funeral. He sat at the table in the interview room at the police station, wondering what could possibly happen next.

  “Taylor, we know you killed your wife. Why don’t you just go ahead and tell us about it?” the detective asked matter-of-factly.

  “No. No. I didn’t kill my wife. You must be crazy,” Taylor stated firmly. “I would never hurt Debra.”

  “We’ve talked to your brother-in-law and others that were at the party the night your wife disappeared. They never saw her leave the house. They tell us you were arguing.”

  “Yeah, we had an argument. She wanted to go out and I didn’t. I guess she decided to go out anyway. No one saw her leave. I don’t know where she went,” Taylor explained. His exasperation was beginning to show.

  “Her family seems to think you could have had something to do with her death,” the detective said.

  The accusation cut deep into Ken’s heart. He loved Debra’s family, had accepted Tarrah as his own child, and even agreed to his brother-in-law’s living in their house. Ken couldn’t believe his in-laws would be of the opinion that he could have anything to do with Debra’s death.

  The allegations hurt Ken, but worried him more. If the police were convinced that he had killed Debra, had they stopped looking for the real killer? And if so, would he ever be found?