Don't Tell a Soul

by M. William Phelps

  Rueon and Gethry decided to go home and wait for Cherry to call.

  2

  BOBBY LEWIS WAS ON HIS way back to work. Such a common, routine task that so many perform each day. Waking up, heading off to a job, collecting that paycheck on Friday, then enjoying a weekend of rest and relaxation.

  On Saturday, June 19, 2010, the day before Rueon and Gethry Walker grew concerned that Cherry had not called or shown up at church, Bobby was driving along an area near Smith County Road, known locally as the CR 2191, in Whitehouse, a small town north of Houston and east of Dallas, Texas. It was just outside Tyler, directly west of Lake Tyler, a massive body of water shaped like a cluster of clouds.

  Bobby had the radio on. The windows rolled down. That familiar hot and heavy, wet Texas air was blowing into his face. It was a peaceful ride on a lovely day—and should have been nothing more.

  Somewhere just before three o’clock, however, Bobby Lewis’s rather predictable life took a turn into the Twilight Zone. He worked at Domino’s Pizza in Tyler. He was in Whitehouse on this afternoon to pick up a coworker before heading back into the restaurant for more deliveries.

  Passing the 15900 block of CR 2191, after pulling into a driveway and turning his car around, thinking he was lost, Bobby saw something off to the side of the road.

  What in the hell?

  He pulled over and stopped his vehicle.

  Bobby got out. There was a dirt area, “overgrown with weeds,” in a thickly settled part of town—mostly red clay, some sand, trees and forest on all sides, save for several buildings and a few homes to the southwest. It was a semisecluded area, just to the west of the famed Piney Woods section of the state. Whitehouse is small-town America: About seven thousand souls resided there in 2010. The median household income fell in the neighborhood of about $70,000 per year, with Texas, overall, coming in at about $50,000. So there was some money here in Whitehouse. Most people, 85 percent of whom the recent census termed as “white,” weren’t poor by any means.

  From his vehicle Bobby Lewis saw a charred black patch of land. After stepping out of his car, curious, he walked closer. It was probably the residue of some kids burning up an old mattress or a campfire from a keg party. Maybe even a load of trash some knucklehead had tossed out and set on fire. The charred remains spread over a small area of the sandy and red clay ground. The pile had not burned entirely, however, and the pizza man noticed that something about it beckoned a closer look.

  Bobby went in for a more personal view.

  Getting within about fifteen feet of the debris, he could clearly see that, in fact, it wasn’t a pile of trash, an old campfire or the remnant of an ordinary fire. Approaching the pile from about three yards away, he did not want to get any closer, Bobby later told police, because in that moment he realized what he was looking at.

  Anxiety throbbed as Bobby Lewis stepped back, pulled out his cell phone and, with index finger shaking, dialed 911.

  3

  SHE WAS LYING FACEDOWN ABOUT fifty feet off the side of CR 2191, where Bobby Lewis waited for police to arrive. “I knew what it was,” he said later. “So there was no need to go any closer.”

  It was a dead body (DB)—probably a female, by the look of what little clothing was left and the feminine shape of her body. It was difficult to say for certain, because the person was lying on her stomach. Still, the contour appeared to be that of a large female.

  The DB had one arm at her side pointed downward, and the other was pointed up above her head as though she was raising her hand in class to ask a question. Her legs were about a foot apart, toes pointed into the dirt. She wore black Capri pants (what was left of them), white sneakers with black oily stains and no dirt on the bottoms, indicating that she had not walked to this location on her own, but had been dumped here. (Her shoes, otherwise, would have been caked with the same red clay that was on the ground all over the place.)

  It was unclear what type of shirt she had on because it had melted to her charred skin, which had peeled and creased in some sections, spotted in others, burned entirely off in small areas. The shirt, best Bobby could tell from the pieces still intact, was green with a floral pattern—another indication that the body was female. Even more horrifying: All of her hair was gone. Her face, pushed into the ground, appeared to be nearly burned off. The entire area of her neck was burned. She was unrecognizable. Bobby did not know from looking at her how old she could be. Best estimate from him was that she was young, maybe late teens to early thirties.

  She had no name.

  No identification.

  Bobby had no idea where she had come from or who had put her here.

  Much less, why.

  He waited, staring at “the ash all around [the] body,” not touching her or anything within what was now, he realized, a crime scene.

  * * *

  Whitehouse police (sometimes referred to as “peace”) officers Joshua Brunt and David Roberson arrived at 3:03 P.M. They surveyed the scene, secured it and unspooled a roll of yellow police tape, tacking the plastic rope up around the immediate area and closing most of it off. Preserving a crime scene as quickly as possible might be the most important action any cop can take within this type of investigation.

  Outdoor crime scenes pose so many inherent problems from the onset that safeguarding the scene is as important as combing through it with a magnifying glass. It was imperative to have a scene protected from footsteps, passersby, animals, untrained cops, the elements and anything else that might contaminate the scene and its surrounding area.

  Officer Roberson, per protocol, started a crime scene log, a notebook detailing time, date, action, personnel. Soon the entire area, which had otherwise been quiet, would be teeming with cops and crime scene investigators (CSIs) and detectives and sheriffs and Texas Rangers, all looking to unravel what had happened—that is, after the most important task began: identifying the girl, contacting family members and beginning to learn “who, what, where, when and how.”

  Whitehouse Police Department (WPD) officer Rod Langinias arrived and spoke to Roberson and Brunt, who stood with Bobby Lewis, and talked about how Bobby had come across the scene. The first suspect in any case was the person who found the body.

  Bobby explained how he had pulled into that driveway, turned his car around, and there she was. He said he didn’t realize at first what he was looking at, but after getting out and surveying the scene, it hit him. She was dead. Someone had lit her body on fire.

  No, he had not touched anything.

  A sergeant arrived. After talking to Bobby Lewis, Officer Langinias asked his sergeant, “You want me to take some photos until the boys from [CSI] arrive?” Langinias mentioned that he had spotted some tire tracks in the red clay and skid marks on the road closest to where the body was located. That sort of stuff needed to be documented before it was contaminated or, even worse, destroyed.

  “Stay out of the crime scene area and wait for the crime scene people to come,” the sergeant ordered.

  “Got it,” Langinias said.

  Langinias and several other officers blocked off the road, so no one could drive down it. There was a rolled-up carpet nearby, some charred ashes just north of the body. Between the victim’s legs was a grade-A, homogenized, half-and-half Dairy Fresh creamer cup, one of those tiny plastic containers you get with your coffee at McDonald’s or, in this case, Dairy Queen. The item was used, crumpled up. It had no age to it.

  Other latent trace was visible right away, mainly those tire tracks and some carpet fibers and other small pieces of what looked to be potentially important evidence. For CSIs the best thing about red clay was that it acted as a mold. Footprints and tire tracks had left solid imprints. There was some sand around the area, too, and they wouldn’t get much from that, but the red clay was a bonus. It might not lead to finding out the identity of the woman, but it would certainly help at some point in the investigation when suspects were identified and their cars and shoes were examined.

 
; Ultimately, this was a Smith County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO) investigation, with the Tyler Police Department (TPD) and the local WPD, along with the Texas Rangers, lending assistance. In Texas everyone understands his or her role when solving crimes: to find and arrest the bad guy.

  Around 4:00 P.M., with the scene overrun by law enforcement personnel, word spread around town that something was going on near CR 2191, south of Tyler. The local media was alerted. Many would hop into their satellite trucks and little cars with the broadcast banners written in bright blues and reds on the doors and head out to the location to see what could be reported.

  SCSO detective Ron Rathbun took a call to head down and find out what he could. Rathbun was an old-school, by-the-book guy. He was on scene by 4:55 P.M. Bobby Lewis was still there, sitting, shaking his head in disbelief, ready and willing to answer any questions he could. Rathbun located him not long after arriving. Rathbun asked him where he worked.

  “Tyler,” Bobby said. “I was trying to find a coworker out here. I turned around in that driveway”—he pointed—“because I thought I had passed the address I was looking for.”

  From there, Bobby explained the rest.

  Texas Ranger Brent Davis arrived with a Bublcam Sphere 360 and the supplementary software technology needed to employ it, a sophisticated photography unit used to take aerial photos, among other uses. The local district attorney’s office (DAO) had purchased the expensive piece of equipment with more than $250,000 in drug money seized from several recent high-profile busts. The aerial images, once they came back, would give everyone a good indication of where possible evidence was located beyond the range of the naked eye. The camera had the capability to take photos with twenty different lighting levels, giving detectives a much clearer picture of minuscule pieces of evidence that could be otherwise overlooked by CSIs searching the ground. Using the Bublcam was a high-tech way to get the upper hand on a case and give it a shot of adrenaline out of the box.

  Detective Rathbun walked down to where the victim was still lying. Beyond a number of factors he noticed while studying the scene, Rathbun was interested in the idea that the victim was facedown. She wore white Ralph Lauren tennis shoes, with that familiar polo pony emblem on the sides, and that she was a black female, whose “pink panties” were showing only because the Capris she had on were nearly burned off her body. There was a subtle, almost intrinsic indication within the entire scene—if only by a cop’s intuition—that her killer had left a trail directly to his or her doorstep. Not that this was going to be an easy crime to solve—but as long as the SCSO took it one step at a time, it was going to come together.

  Rathbun noticed there was something on her shoes, so he squatted down to have a closer look.

  The shoes appeared to be very clean (maybe recently purchased), he wrote in his report. I noticed that the bottom soles appeared to have a black-colored substance on them. It was faint, almost like a film. Rathbun wrote, At one point, walking around on a surface that had black soot . . . He leaned toward [a] mechanic’s shop that had grease, oil, and other materials on the floor.

  It was an interesting calculation that opened up specific investigatory possibilities. Considering that there was red clay all over the area around the body, the residue—if it was, in fact, oil—seemed like an important clue to this intelligent, intuitive cop. It said to him, rather clearly, that she had not walked by herself onto the surface where she was lying—someone, probably driving the car whose tire tracks were left nearby, had dumped her here.

  Righting himself, Rathbun stared at the woman. She had not been there, he thought, for very long.

  Maybe a few hours at most.

  Between her legs, Rathbun observed a drinking straw contained in a wrapper from Chick-fil-A, which was left not too far from that plastic, empty, crumpled-up Dairy Fresh creamer cup. The creamer cup, especially, Rathbun surmised, had not been on the ground long. He could tell by looking at the way it sat there.

  After taking a walk around the area and seeing other pieces of garbage, Rathbun was certain the items near the body were fresh—and perhaps left by the killer. The other garbage looked weathered, as though it had been part of the landscape for some time.

  * * *

  SCSO detective James Riggle was on the Loop 323 when he took a call to head over to the Whitehouse crime scene. He arrived near four-thirty to have a look and locate Rathbun and other members of the SCSO team.

  “You’re going to be the lead on this,” one of the sergeants told Riggle after his arrival. He was then briefed on the situation.

  Riggle found Rathbun after meeting with Brent Davis to verify the Bublcam imagery was in the process of being completed. Banking on the notion that the Chick-fil-A evidence was potentially explosive, the immediate plan was to find any Chick-fil-A locations in Tyler and Whitehouse and get to the surveillance equipment inside the restaurant to have a look before they erased the tape for that day.

  Restaurants generally did not keep copies of surveillance tapes—even if it was recorded digitally—unless they were robbed or something happened. They’d record over the previous day with the next. Riggle knew the potential was there to see his victim possibly purchasing her last meal—and with any luck, which was something every murder investigation depended on, standing by her side might be a viable suspect or, at the least, someone the SCSO needed to find and speak to.

  4

  I DENTIFYING THE YOUNG WOMAN WHO had been found dead and burned, abandoned off to the side of the dirt road, near the CR 2191, became the primary task for the SCSO as Detective James Riggle took over as lead in the case. Somebody’s daughter had been murdered and dumped in a field of dirt and debris, before being lit on fire. Her family deserved to know where she was, what had happened and who was responsible. Moreover, any cop can tell you that your best chance to solve a homicide lies within the ring of people circling the victim the closest, and it pays to get to those people within a day or two of finding the body.

  Riggle and Rathbun stood studying the victim. She was about eighteen to twenty-five,” Riggle guessed. “Around two hundred forty pounds.”

  No identification.

  No tattoos.

  No noticeable scars.

  It was hot, a wet 90 degrees. Detective Riggle knew by those conditions that she had not been at the scene very long and had probably been placed there within the past twenty-four hours, at the most. Otherwise, her body would have been decomposing, bloated and rotting. Within decomposition there are five stages the body goes through: The first is considered “fresh,” whereby a body has just been found (within hours of death). The second would be a body that has begun to “bloat” and has become puffy as a chemical reaction takes place inside the organs (beginning in the intestines and colon). The third consists of “active” enzymes beginning to rot the tissue and organs and skin from within. The fourth is an “advanced state of decay,” a stage of decomposition in which the victim has been deceased for a longer period of time and her body has become a soupy mess of gruesome, foul-smelling liquids and solids. The corpse has begun literally to melt because of the bacteria escaping from the intestinal tract (sometimes clinically referred to as “putrefaction,” sped up and slowed down by extreme heat or cold). The fifth is that final “dry” corpse (usually in the form of skeletal remains) that is nothing more than bones and possibly hair and clothes. Of course, all of this depends on the elements (weather, where the body has been found, any wildlife in the area, the temperature) and even the clothing the person was wearing at the time he or she died.

  Detectives Riggle and Rathbun could tell this particular victim was still in the earliest—or “fresh”—stage and had not decomposed much at all.

  This fact would help them.

  After a local judge came to the scene and signed off on all that had been done, CSIs were allowed to turn the victim over and take a look at her face—or what was left of it. A set of “small studded” earrings were found on the victim’s ears, jewelry that cou
ld become important once they tried to identify her through flyers and pleas to the media and community.

  Riggle and a sergeant called into the SCSO and asked for a team to go through missing person reports from the local area. Maybe somebody had reported a woman missing and she fit the description of their DB. Sometimes it was that easy.

  Other times there was much more involved.

  A report went out: Young black female, 18 to 25 years old, studded ear rings, black Capri pants, white Polo tennis shoes. That should be enough information to generate a response from the public.

  Within an hour or so, Riggle and Rathbun were told by Smith County that “dispatch did not have anyone matching this description entered” into the system, but they were still waiting on word from other counties and surrounding jurisdictions. Maybe it was too early for anyone to have filed a missing person report. The woman wasn’t a child. She could have lived by herself and had not been expected to be anywhere.

  “Okay,” Riggle said. He got with Rathbun. “Chick-fil-A?”

  “Probably the best place to start.”

  They left the crime scene bound for the local Chick-fil-A restaurants in the area.

  The Chick-fil-A they had in mind was due north on the 2964, which connected with the 110 in Tyler, about ten minutes away from the crime scene. It was the closest Chick-fil-A, which seemed to be the obvious starting point.

  Riggle introduced himself to the assistant manager and explained what they needed, without going into detail. Last thing they needed was the rumor mill to begin. Facebook and Twitter could clog up investigatory time if they had to put people on monitoring those sites, not to mention tracking people down via their social media accounts.