Body Hunter

by Patricia Springer

  Robert, a small man in stature with a big heart filled with love for his daughter, had been brought to his knees by Tina’s death. Likewise, his wife’s grief was inconsolable. Swallowed by the blackness of their loss, the Kimbrews sank into the depths of depression.

  The same feelings of depression and despair gripped Tina Kimbrew’s killer as he stood on the concrete seawall in Galveston. His personal failures plunged him into hopelessness. He thought of all the people he had disappointed and deceived. His victims. Their families. His own family.

  Exhausted from the more than four-hundred-mile trip from his North Texas home to the southern Texas coastal island, he checked into a local, low-rate motel. It had been a week since the murder of Tina Kimbrew. Fatigue embraced him. Guilt consumed him. He couldn’t sleep. He reached for the phone on the nightstand and dialed the local emergency number.

  “I’m going to kill myself,” he told the Galveston 911 operator.

  Within minutes, officers were at his door.

  “Why would you want to kill yourself?” one of the officers asked the man who sat on the wrinkled, faded bedspread of his motel room.

  “I killed someone in Wichita Falls,” the somber man said. He lowered his head, cradling it in his hands.

  “Who did you kill?” another officer asked.

  “Tina Kimbrew,” he responded. “I went to Tina’s apartment on May sixth. She was wearing a light-colored nightgown when she answered the door. I went inside to get drugs.”

  The questioning officer glanced at his partner. The young policemen knew instantly what had to be done. The man was immediately placed in protective custody.

  Within hours of hearing from the Galveston Police, Detective Steve Pruitt had secured an arrest warrant from Justice of the Peace Arthur Williams for Faryion Edward Wardrip. According to the warrant, Wardrip had said he knew Kimbrew and had gone to her apartment the day the body was discovered. Pruitt and another officer drove to the Gulf Coast city to pick up their prisoner.

  “I didn’t mean to kill her. It was an accident. She was my friend,” Wardrip said in a sad tone as he rode in the rear seat of the police car.

  “You don’t have to say anything,” Pruitt advised Wardrip. “You’ll get an attorney in Wichita Falls.”

  “I just went to get drugs. I didn’t mean to do it,” Wardrip said, as though he had an uncontrollable need to explain the murder.

  Pruitt was cautious not to ask Wardrip any direct questions about the Kimbrew murder for fear of violating his rights. Wardrip would be arraigned in magistrate court in Wichita Falls. If he was indeed their killer, Pruitt wasn’t about to mess up the case on a technicality.

  Deciding to stick to casual conversation, Pruitt asked, “Did you know Ellen Blau?”

  “Yes,” Wardrip said. “I knew Ellen.”

  Pruitt knew that Ellen Blau’s killing was one of the unsolved murders that had made young women in the Wichita Falls area fearful in the few preceding months. The Blau case was officially under the jurisdiction of the Wichita County Sheriff’s Department. Pruitt made a mental note. Call the sheriff and tell him he might want to interview Wardrip about Blau.

  Pruitt decided to avoid any further questions about Blau and didn’t ask about the Archer County case of Toni Gibbs or the Wichita Falls death of Terry Sims. Pruitt, like other interdepartmental detectives, continued to believe there was no relationship between the murders of any of the four women who had been killed in the far North Texas area. And there was certainly no reason to suspect Wardrip, who hadn’t been mentioned as a suspect.

  As the county-issued car rolled down the interstate highway, Wardrip thought to himself, I’m going to prison. But I can’t be there for the rest of my life. I just can’t. I couldn’t take it.

  He remained tight-lipped in the rear seat, his head resting on the seat back.

  “Why were you in Galveston?” Pruitt asked, interrupting Faryion’s fearful thoughts.

  “I wanted to see the Gulf of Mexico,” Wardrip replied.

  Within hours of arriving back in Wichita Falls, twenty-seven-year-old Faryion Edward Wardrip was arraigned for the murder of Tina Kimbrew. Dressed in blue jeans, secured at the waist by a leather belt with a large, oval, metal buckle, Wardrip stood beside his public defender, Christine Harris, before the magistrate court judge. The open collar of his wrinkled short-sleeve, plaid shirt revealed the top of a white T-shirt. Scuff marks marred his light-colored cowboy boots. Wardrip’s brown hair was full and unruly. The stubble of growth on his cheeks and chin made it apparent he hadn’t shaved in days. His brown mustache was as shaggy and unkempt as his hair. Wardrip looked tired. His eyelids drooped as he stood slumped before the judge.

  “Hold your hands out, palms up,” the booking officer instructed.

  “I don’t know how I got those cuts on my hands,” Wardrip said.

  Police officers carefully documented the cuts on Wardrip’s long, thin fingers and large hands.

  A witness identified the clothing Wardrip was wearing at the time of his arrest as looking like the clothes worn by a man seen going into Kimbrew’s apartment about eleven-thirty the morning of the murder. It was one of the last times Tina Kimbrew had been seen alive.

  Detective Pruitt called Tom Callahan of the Wichita Falls Sheriff’s Department and informed him of Wardrip’s confession to the murder of Tina Kimbrew and his statement that he had known Ellen Blau. It was all Pruitt could do. The Blau case was in the jurisdiction of the county sheriff. It was up to Callahan and the sheriff to follow up.

  News of the arrest of Faryion Wardrip for the murder of Tina Kimbrew spread rapidly through Wichita Falls. Three days after Wardrip’s arrest, Thomas Eugene Granger, a friend of Wardrip’s, contacted the Wichita Falls Police with astonishing news.

  “I have information about Faryion Wardrip,” Granger told them. “He had a connection with all those girls who were killed.

  “He worked at General Hospital at the time of Gibbs’s and Sims’s murders and knew them both. Wardrip also lived across the street from the Subs ’N Suds on Sheppard Access. Wardrip quit the General right after the Gibbs killing and moved away right after the girl at Subs ’N Suds was killed. He moved out on Airport Drive.

  “Wardrip had a black-handled knife with a double edge that was six inches long. He liked boot knives,” Granger said.

  Granger’s statement was placed in a file to be passed up the chain of command, but somehow the statement never became part of the official investigative file on the unsolved murders. This was partially because Wichita Falls Police and the Wichita County district attorney continued to believe that they were after more than one perpetrator. The DA’s office was still convinced that Danny Laughlin was responsible for killing Toni Gibbs. It was as though the DA and police had tunnel vision. Laughlin was their prime suspect and had failed a polygraph. Therefore, they disregarded or ignored evidence that pointed to any other person. Granger’s statement stalled in the system. No one apparently ever investigated his claim that Wardrip may have had something to do with not only Kimbrew, whom he had confessed to killing, but the murders of Sims, Gibbs, and Blau as well. Information that may have solved the murders had fallen through the cracks.

  Disturbed by the police’s apparent disinterest in Wardrip as a suspect, Granger went to work for Ray Cannedy, a Wichita Falls private investigator. Although the links between Wardrip and the unsolved murders were only circumstantial, it convinced the private investigators that Wardrip should be considered a suspect in all the killings. Granger and Cannedy took their report to the police.

  “I just went around asking people that both of us knew, where he lived, where he worked. I was basically looking into his past,” Granger told police. “I was thinking, ‘My God. This guy had the opportunity each time.’ And he killed one girl already. He was at all the sites.”

  Police dutifully took Cannedy’s and Granger’s report, but Granger could see that their suspicions were falling on deaf ears.

  Back at Canned
y’s office, Granger let off steam.

  “They looked at us like we were a bunch of idiots!” Granger shouted. “It upsets me. He’s getting away with all this stuff and no one is looking into it.”

  Granger had cause for frustration. Even after his second statement to authorities, Wardrip was disregarded as a suspect in any of the other three women’s deaths.

  Police steadfastly stood by proven police procedures as a team of officers investigated the unsolved cases. They recanvassed the areas and talked again to neighbors, acquaintances, coworkers, and family. The chief of police was confident in his officers’ abilities as he boasted of a homicide clearance rate that recorded nine out of eleven cases solved in 1985.

  The Ellen Blau murder was one of the two unsolved cases.

  Chapter Ten

  The realization of what he had done and how his family was going to take the news of his confession to murder ate away at Faryion Wardrip. He had to soften the blow. Make up some excuse for his actions.

  “Bryce, I killed her,” Wardrip told his younger brother from the Wichita Falls jail. “I had given her more than one hundred thousand dollars of drugs to sell. I went to her apartment, there were no drugs and no money. I told her I’d give her a couple of hours to get the money; then I called my connection in Mexico. He told me to take care of her, then go to Mexico. He told me I’d be okay. But he set me up and I was arrested.”

  Bryce was overwhelmed by his brother’s confession. Faryion hadn’t always been admirable, especially when he was on drugs, but Bryce couldn’t imagine that his brother could possibly be a killer.

  Although Faryion Edward Wardrip was the fourth child of nine born to Diana and George Wardrip of Marion, Indiana, he often felt as though he were an only child. He frequently had feelings of depression and loneliness. As a boy, he’d cried easily. When he’d tried to reach out for help, he’d been told it was merely a phase he would soon grow out of.

  School hadn’t offered much more than his family in the way of support. Classmates made fun of Wardrip’s hand-me-down clothing and he experienced a sense of worthlessness compared to more affluent students. Wardrip wanted to fit in, but he always felt he had come from the “wrong side of the tracks.” His father worked in a local factory; his mother was a homemaker responsible for raising the nine Wardrip children. Although there was always food on the table, clothes on their backs, and toys for their enjoyment, Faryion Wardrip wanted more. He wanted the respect of others. In his mind he failed to live up to the wealthy, macho American ideal. He felt like a failure.

  Increasing his feelings of inadequacy, Wardrip had a history of academic failure due to a learning disability. He spent the majority of his academic years in special-education classes. The lack of success in school had created in Wardrip a sense of low self-esteem, and no vision for the future. His melancholy spirit and sense of disconnection with his family grew with each passing year. He felt he was falling into an abyss of despair from which he couldn’t emerge. His frustrations were manifested in rebellious, unacceptable ways.

  At thirteen, young Wardrip was arrested for shoplifting. The juvenile court believed justice would be best served by the youthful offender picking beans in a Marion, Indiana, downtown community garden. It hadn’t seemed like much of a punishment to Wardrip, who actually enjoyed harvesting the crops each Saturday. He walked the rows of beans, stripping them from their vines with a new-found sense of accomplishment.

  Later, stealing a bicycle from a neighbor’s yard and not getting caught hadn’t taught Wardrip any lessons either. Young Wardrip thought he was indestructible. Unaccountable.

  At fourteen, Wardrip began to drink a little alcohol, smoke a little pot. As he aged, Wardrip graduated to harder, more destructive drugs. Acid took him on trips far away from the frustrations of school and family. He would argue with his father, take a hit of that day’s drug-of-choice, then argue with his father even more. It had become a vicious circle.

  Wardrip’s only school successes came in athletic venues rather than in the classroom. He was a competitive swimmer, played basketball, and ran track. However, his small sports victories didn’t make up for his great classroom failures. Feelings of inadequacies became a cloak Wardrip wore throughout the seasons.

  Wardrip’s bomb of discontent detonated at home. He and his father seemed to be at odds most of the time. The younger Wardrip’s anger, stuffed just below the surface, had grown like a snowball gaining momentum as it tumbled down a steep slope. The avalanche of emotions erupted when George Wardrip finally demanded that his oldest son move out of his house.

  Faryion Wardrip had been seventeen years old at the time. His father had paid a couple of hundred dollars for his son’s first car. When the car was missing for several days, George Wardrip demanded to know where it was.

  “My friend blew his engine in his truck so I pulled the engine out of my car and stuck it in his truck,” young Wardrip explained, wondering why his father was so irritated.

  George Wardrip was more than irritated, he was furious. It had been one more example of Faryion’s irresponsibility.

  “Go upstairs and pack your stuff. I want you out,” George Wardrip said angrily.

  His son walked up the stairs of the Wardrip home, packed his clothes in paper bags, and walked out the front door. He couldn’t believe his parents were throwing him out. None of the other Wardrip children had ever been asked to leave the family home. Tears rose in his eyes.

  “Faryion, come back,” his mother called from the front porch.

  Relief flooded her son. They were just trying to scare me. They aren’t really throwing me out, Faryion thought.

  He turned and walked happily back to the house. Relief relaxed his tense shoulders and put a bounce in his step.

  “Give me your key,” his mother said, her hand outstretched.

  “Ya’ll mean it?” the stunned teen asked.

  “Yes, we mean it,” his father said.

  Their son handed the house key to his mother, turned, and walked away. Clutching the sacks of clothes tightly, he cried like a baby. It was time for him to set his own course.

  Faryion Wardrip dropped out of high school, having only completed the tenth grade. He was restless and on his own. He spent the majority of his time taking a hit from a marijuana joint or experimenting with speed. He needed a direction to his life, a focus.

  The army seemed the key to Wardrip’s problem. He enlisted in the Indiana National Guard and was shipped off to boot camp. But instead of helping him develop a positive attitude, the discipline and structured regiment was too much for Wardrip to handle. He didn’t like drills or orders. He made it through the grueling six-week program with the aid of a few joints and a handful of black mollies. Then Wardrip was shipped back to Indiana to serve his meager commitment of one weekend a month and two weeks during the summers.

  The pledge he had taken to protect his country was all but forgotten when he stepped foot in his home state. For months he failed to show up for monthly maneuvers. Finally, the army released him with a “less than honorable” discharge.

  Wardrip bounced from job to job. He didn’t work to build a career. He worked to buy drugs.

  George Wardrip moved his family to Texas in search of work. Faryion tagged along, adrift in a sea of indecision and irresponsibility.

  While living in Wichita Falls, Wardrip met Johnna Jackson at a local club. The short, plump, dark-haired girl took an instant liking to the tall, lanky Wardrip. Within a short time they were married.

  It was a rocky union from the beginning. Wardrip couldn’t keep a steady job and Johnna was content to lounge on the sofa, watch television, and have babies. He wondered where the fun-loving girl he met in the bar had gone and when Johnna had turned into a wallflower, someone who didn’t speak until spoken to. He had encouraged her to get a job, but she didn’t want to work. Her greatest ambition was to be a mother and housewife. That would have been okay with Wardrip if the bills didn’t need to be paid. There were respon
sibilities—obligations he himself neglected in favor of an instant high. He needed Johnna to help out. He needed her to listen to him, to hear his concerns. But instead, she shut him out, barely speaking to him when he was home. When she did listen, he felt as though she never really heard what he was saying.

  The old familiar anger of his youth returned. The drugs took over his thinking. He wanted to lash out. Johnna became a convenient target.

  They fought often about his inability to keep a job, and his failure to provide for his family. He more often than not used their money for drugs, not food.

  Johnna’s mother and stepfather attempted to help. They had let the struggling couple move in with them on several occasions. Floyd Jackson had even given Faryion five thousand dollars to help them out, but within two weeks it was gone. Smoked up or shot up, Wardrip couldn’t remember. Floyd had been furious.

  “Faryion is the type of person who would climb a tree to tell a lie rather than stand on the ground to tell the truth,” Floyd told his wife. “He’s lied about almost everything and every story has come back to haunt him. It’s like when he told us he ran into a sign post; then we found out a friend had beat the hell out of him.”

  Wardrip had worked ten different jobs during Johnna’s first pregnancy. Then, trying to appease the Jacksons and regain Johnna’s trust, Wardrip had taken a job at Wichita General. He thought he was too good to be pushing a mop and quit soon after a young nurse named Toni Gibbs was found murdered in an Archer County field.

  He tried fast-food jobs, working at a Pizza Inn near Sheppard Air Force Base, then quit as suddenly as he had at Wichita General.

  During his latest unemployment streak, the Jacksons had taken Johnna and Wardrip’s two children into their home, but refused to let Faryion live with them. It had been an ugly scene. Jackson had tired of paying their rent, and buying their groceries while his son-in-law bounced from job to job. He finally put his foot down.