Body Hunter

by Patricia Springer

  Making every effort to help find Ellen, Mrs. Blau spent hours with the police. She left disappointed when she was told, “There’s nothing to go on at this time.” Though she was assured that five men had been assigned to the case, Rima Blau wondered if enough was being done to find Ellen.

  The people closest to Ellen did the most for the despairing mother. Ellen’s friends visited with Mrs. Blau while she stood vigil and made phone calls. Subs ’N Suds’ management offered a one-thousand-dollar reward to anyone with information about Ellen, and the owner of the restaurant added an additional one thousand dollars.

  “She’s the best we ever had,” Curtis Cates, the manager, said of his valued worker after announcing the reward. “Everybody’s been a little more careful. We walk all the girls to their cars each night. I think they follow each other home as well.”

  Ellen’s cousin, Kathleen Beller, a former actress on the ABC-TV show Dynasty, called LA police for advice; they in turn called Wichita Falls police for information. LA detectives were told there were no real leads in the puzzling disappearance of Ellen Blau. The family’s frustrations mounted.

  Even with all the displays of concern, police played it by the rules. Knowing that ninety percent of all crimes with victims are committed by friends or family, they questioned everyone. Everyone close to Ellen was given a lie detector test.

  Fourteen police recruits and a borrowed helicopter diligently searched a field off Puckett Road, near where Ellen’s car had been found. They came up empty handed. Finally, police made a desperate plea to citizens to call Crime Stoppers with any information concerning the missing woman. The two thousand dollars offered by the Subs ’N Suds was combined with four thousand dollars from the Blau family as an incentive for someone to come forward.

  Tall grasses obscured the view of many of the open fields along rural Wichita County roads. The brown vegetation, dried from the scorching temperatures of the hot Texas summer, was being mowed by county road crews between the barbed-wire fence line and East Road. The driver of one of the high-seated tractors stopped and looked toward a mesquite tree not far from the fence line. His tractor motor idled roughly as he studied the indistinguishable form lying about twenty feet from the fence. The early afternoon sun shone brightly on the figure as recognition struck the driver.

  It was a body. Hardly discernible as a human form, but nonetheless a body.

  When Wichita County Sheriff’s Deputy Tom Callahan arrived on the scene, he was led through the brush and a blanket of wild flowers to a badly decomposed body lying under the willowy branches of a mesquite tree close by the wall of a stock pond. The body was nude, except for one white sock, banded at the top with two yellow stripes. Flies swarmed around the decaying corpse that had been reduced to an almost skeletal state. Coyotes and other scavengers had added to the mutilation.

  Callahan, his eyes shaded from the sun by the large brim of his Stetson hat, studied the blackish, swollen corpse. The body rested facedown on the native grass, the head turned to the left. The legs were extended and crossed at the knees. The buttocks was partially eaten away, as well as the victim’s right arm that extended beyond her head. The skull was void of hair or flesh. Time, exposure to the elements, and wild animals had made it impossible to determine in the field if the person found by the county work crew was a man or a woman. It was a ghoulish sight that made even the former military policeman Callahan cringe.

  Close by, a pair of blue jeans with one leg inside-out, tennis shoes, one sock, a bra, and a yellow-and-white T-shirt were found. Callahan looked closely at the blouse.

  What’s written on the front? Callahan asked himself. He moved closer, his western boots squishing in the mud surrounding the pond.

  “Beach party 1985,” the deputy read out loud.

  Callahan ordered a guard be posted at the scene to secure the area, which was just north of Sheppard Air Force Base. The natural barriers, hills and ponds, kept sightseers and reporters from tracking through potential evidence.

  Although the body was found outside the jurisdiction of the Wichita Falls police, county Sheriff Bill Burrow notified them that an unidentified body had been found. Missing Person’s investigators immediately thought of Ellen Blau. The three-week time frame in which Blau had been missing matched the condition of the body Sheriff Burrow described. They telephoned Janie Ball and asked her to meet them at the police station.

  “Mrs. Ball, a body has been found out in the county. We can’t make a positive identification until an autopsy is completed. That will take about ten days. We want you to take a look at this and tell us if you recognize it,” investigators told Ball, handing her a shiny object.

  Janie gasped as tears began to flow from her eyes. She held the fine gold chain in her hand. It was the necklace Ellen always wore. She clutched the emblem of the praying hands to her lips as she sobbed.

  The decayed body was shipped to the Southwest Institute of Forensic Sciences (SWIF) in Dallas for an autopsy. Wichita Falls, like many of the 254 counties in Texas, did not have their own medical examiner. SWIF was faced with the responsibility of determining the cause of death for twelve to fifteen victims a day. Toxicology tests (which showed no drugs present in Ellen Blau’s system), microscopic exams, and transcribing reports were all time consuming. Using SWIF resulted in time delays that not only affected law-enforcement personnel, but the families of victims as well.

  Finally, the report on the Wichita Falls body was complete. Through dental records, the victim was positively identified as being Ellen Blau.

  “Ellen Blau died of undetermined homicidal violence. We don’t know exactly what caused her death,” Sheriff Burrow told the press. “The precise mechanism cannot be determined. Because of the condition of the body, it is speculated that she was killed the day she disappeared.”

  Three factors were used by SWIF to determine a homicide had occurred. The remote location where the body was found; the fact that the woman’s clothes had apparently been removed by force and strewn around the field; and evident signs of a struggle. Blau’s watch had been found a long way from her body and bloodstains were also found some distance away.

  Although it was feared as soon as the body was found that it was Ellen’s, Janie Ball and the Blau family hopelessly had prayed that it would not be her. They’d held on to the false expectation that Ellen was okay and would be walking into the Ball apartment wearing the fun-loving grin she was best known for. Now they had to accept her death.

  “We won’t rest until the killer is found. We don’t feel like it’s the end at all,” Murray Blau told reporters by phone from his Shelton, Connecticut, home.

  “It’s in the hands of the police and sheriff’s department now. We feel confident they’re doing all the things that have to be done. We hope this will be brought to a hasty conclusion. I feel the good people of Wichita Falls are equally concerned.”

  There was nothing left for the Blaus to do in Wichita Falls. Ellen’s body was shipped back to Connecticut.

  Investigators had hoped for a speedy resolution to the case, but they lacked a prime suspect. More than thirty people had been interviewed, most of them polygraphed, and they were no closer to solving the case.

  Callahan and other investigators continued to work diligently. They followed up on every call from panicked citizens, grieving friends, and even weirdos.

  One man, after being interviewed, shaved his head and sent an envelope containing his hair to Callahan. One self-proclaimed Ninja warrior called with information tying Blau’s death to a Japanese warrior cult. It became a roller-coaster ride of false leads and hopeful breakthroughs.

  Then there were calls from reporters who tried to find links between Blau’s death and the murders of Sims and Gibbs. Investigators shunned the idea.

  “We think that it was a person who knew her. It wasn’t a random thing,” Callahan told the press.

  Therefore, three different agencies continued to work three separate homicides looking for three individual kille
rs.

  Part II

  Chapter Seven

  February 15, 1985

  A motorcycle slowly passed the field where Toni Gibbs’s decomposing body had been found earlier in the day. The man atop the chopper-style cycle made several passes, watching with concentrated interest the activity surrounding the crime scene. After what would be his last pass, twenty-four-year-old Danny Laughlin roared the engine and sped off, his brown, shoulder-length hair blowing behind him and a smile unmistakably covering his handsome face.

  Danny Laughlin worked as a bar-back at the Stardust Club in Wichita Falls. He didn’t take orders, mix drinks, or mingle with the patrons. Laughlin’s job was to mop up the bar and make certain that clean glasses were always within an arm’s reach of the bartenders. Occasionally he performed as a male stripper. The handsome young Laughlin had a tight body and seductive moves that female clubgoers appreciated. He also had an overzealous need for attention.

  Laughlin had drawn suspicion to himself as he walked his pet wolf in the field near where Gibbs’s brutalized body was discovered, as well as his constant motorcycle passes by the crime scene. But not until he denied to a Wichita County grand jury that he had committed the burglary of a Southwestern Bell Telephone office because, “I was in a field out near U.S. 281 and West Jentsch Road at the time,” the area where Gibbs’s body had later been found, was Laughlin considered a suspect in the murder. Police believed that if Laughlin was in that field, then he must have been there to kill the pretty young nurse.

  Witnesses’ statements seemed to support the police investigators’ theory. Laughlin had been seen in the vicinity of the murder and he seemed to have had an extraordinary curiosity concerning the homicide. In addition, Laughlin himself raised suspicions. He knew information that hadn’t been released to the press—information known only to the killer. Police were certain they had their murderer. They focused all their attention on building a case against Danny Laughlin, abandoning any further search and refusing to entertain any notion that the Gibbs’s murder could be connected to Sims and Blau.

  Laughlin spent the next six months in jail awaiting trial. He frequently wrote to his mother describing harassment by jail guards and his fear of prosecution for a murder he continued to deny.

  “They’ve taken DNA samples from me three times,” Danny complained to his mother. “They keep coming in my cell asking for hair, blood, and semen. I know I didn’t do it. If those tests match, they’ve been tampered with.”

  Wilma Hooker wept when she read her son’s letters. Trouble had always followed Danny. It began as early as kindergarten, when Danny had been kicked out for misbehaving and happened again in the fifth grade when he was confined to a mental hospital. He had only moved to Texas from Kansas City a short time before Gibbs’s murder to protect his sister, a victim of domestic violence. But the pain in Wilma’s heart knew the trouble Danny faced in Texas was worse than anything he had yet experienced. She hoped he could hold up under the strain.

  “They keep asking me to write out a confession, but I won’t. I’m getting really scared,” Laughlin wrote his mother. “The guards keep telling me the State is going to give me a lethal injection and give a lethal injection to my dog. If I’m convicted and they do execute me, I want you, sis, and Mr. Katz to be there.”

  Danny Laughlin’s spirit continued to weaken as he waited for trial in an Archer County Jail cell. He talked with other inmates about the crime. He talked to anyone who would listen.

  April 8, 1986

  Danny Laughlin strolled into the Gainsville courthouse with a legal pad and black-bound Bible tucked in his right hand. The young defendant was clean shaven, with a new short haircut, and a seemingly unconcerned grin on his face. In his white, long-sleeve shirt and neatly pressed khaki pants, Laughlin barely resembled the motorcycle-riding bar-back/dancer arrested months earlier for the death of Toni Gibbs. He walked with an air of confidence, joked with law enforcement officials, then seated himself next to his defense attorney.

  On a change of venue, two hundred potential Cook County jurors had been called for the capital murder trial. They packed into the 1910 beaux-arts–style courthouse located in the center of the town square. The impressive brick and limestone building, one of only a few Texas courthouses built in the twentieth century, featured terra-cotta ornamentation, eagle brackets, and a copper-clad dome. It was the site selected to bear the responsibility of accommodating the Laughlin trial in an unbiased manner.

  Wichita Falls District Attorney Barry Macha joined Archer County District Attorney Jack McGaughey in prosecuting Laughlin. Once a twelve-member panel had been seated, the two experienced prosecutors began laying out their case.

  “Laughlin met Miss Gibbs at the Stardust Club where he worked, and there he made sexual advances toward her,” Macha told jurors, setting up the theory that Gibbs had been killed for rejecting Laughlin’s advances.

  The lighthearted mood Laughlin had taken into court quickly turned to anger. He had told Roger Williams, his court-appointed attorney, that he hadn’t known Gibbs personally, but only by sight. The two had only spoken once, briefly in passing at the club. Now the prosecution was portraying him as a cast-off suitor. Laughlin was furious.

  Wilma Hooker sat behind her son, her outward composure masking the emotional turmoil inside. Wilma had ridden a bus from Arizona to Texas to be at her son’s trial. An unknown benefactor from nearby Olney, Texas, was paying her motel bill. It was a financial strain to be in Gainsville, but Wilma would have made any sacrifice to be there for Danny. She remembered the day she had received a phone call from a stranger in Texas notifying her that Danny had been arrested for murder. She hadn’t believed it then, and she didn’t believe it now.

  The medical examiner from the Southwest Institute of Forensic Sciences explained to jurors about the multiple contusions and bruises on the upper chest of Toni Gibbs. Dark bruises on her left thigh and the left side of her chest were also pointed out. Then, with the aid of graphic photos, the medical examiner showed jurors a one-inch-long, incised wound on the left thumb, stab wounds on Gibbs’s chest, and three stab wounds on her back.

  Jurors flinched as they stared at the color photos of a young woman’s body, ravaged not only by the rage of an out-of-control killer, but also by the ravenous appetites of wild animals. Their eyes drifted from the carnage in the pictures to the man accused of committing the crime.

  When Texas Ranger Gerth told jurors that, when questioned, Laughlin had mentioned something about an arm and a leg being eaten off the body, Laughlin’s mood descended further into the depths of despondency. “That information had not been released publicly and was knowledge only the killer would have,” Gerth stated.

  Nikkie Standifer, a Certain Teed Corporation employee and key prosecution witness, testified that she had seen Laughlin in the Archer County field where Miss Gibbs’s body was found, prior to its discovery. “It was either on February ninth or tenth,” Standifer said.

  The prosecutor reminded jurors that Gibbs’s body had not been found until February 15.

  Laughlin shook his head and mumbled under his breath in frustration. During the morning recess he stomped out of the courtroom. He didn’t like the way his trial had started. Macha was twisting the facts, spinning the truth.

  When Harry Harrison was called to the stand, Laughlin’s mood changed from despair to wrath. He loathed Harrison. Laughlin had first met the career criminal while they were both incarcerated in the Archer County jail. Laughlin’s eyes followed Harrison as he sashayed confidently to the witness chair.

  “We had just finished eating breakfast and talking about our military service,” Harrison said as he began to talk about his association with Laughlin. Harrison then dropped a courtroom bomb.

  “He said he held a knife to her [Gibbs’s] throat and held her in the missionary position. When he got through [raping her], he stabbed her and then turned her over and sodomized her. After that, he started crying and said he had found the Lord since then
and God would forgive him,” Harrison said, with a slight grin of satisfaction directed at Laughlin.

  Laughlin was infuriated. He made little effort to hide his aggravation and almost everyone in the courtroom knew he was close to losing control.

  “Have you been promised anything by the District Attorney’s office in exchange for your testimony?” Defense Attorney Roger Williams asked Harrison.

  Although Harrison denied agreeing to any such exchange of information for favors from the DA’s office, it was later learned that seventeen charges against Harrison had been expunged from his record.

  When Phil “Rocket” Guerieri testified that Laughlin had told him there was no reason to keep looking for the missing nurse, Laughlin again expressed his anger. He vigorously wrote on his yellow legal pad and underlined something so strongly that paper ripped and heads turned in his direction.

  Roger Williams turned and spoke quietly to his client, who nodded and sat back peacefully.

  The last of a jailhouse trio to testify against Laughlin was Glen Lowrance. He told jurors that Laughlin had told him in the county jail, “I know I’m guilty, but I’ve got this case beat and I’ll be out in two weeks and write to you.”

  Danny Laughlin remained silent, his head drooped. His mother sat behind him, a hot flash of resentment surging through her body. Lies, all lies, she thought. Wilma Hooker was unfaltering in her belief that Danny didn’t kill Toni Gibbs. No one could convince her he had, but it was up to Roger Williams to convince the jury of her son’s innocence.

  Danny Laughlin had been riding a wave of emotions during the first days of the trial. His initial confidence had slipped away like seaweed drawn back into the ocean. But Laughlin’s mood was elevated to a new high when Bob Estrada, a criminal defense attorney hired by a friend of Laughlin, entered the courtroom and took his seat beside his new client and Roger Williams. By the time Williams had finished questioning the first defense witness, Laughlin had resumed his self-assured attitude. His renewed confidence spread to his mother, whose mood had likewise taken a surge upward.