Killer Triggers

by Joe Kenda

  Howard pointed out the clothing and boots he had worn that night. We found no sign of blood on either his clothing or his boots. We looked on all his other clothing and shoes, too. He didn’t have an extensive wardrobe, so it didn’t take all that long.

  While we were at his place, Howard also showed us his “ghetto blaster” cassette player and radio, which he said was similar to the one Eric had in his motel-room apartment—the one that we suspected was stolen on the night of Eric’s murder.

  Our suspicions about Howard remained high, especially after we talked to his mother. He had told us previously that he returned home around ten thirty p.m. on Saturday night, the night that Eric Houston died. But his mother, whom Howard apparently lived with, said her son had come home much earlier, around four p.m., and that he’d been extremely intoxicated.

  We entertained the notion that his mother might be trying to provide her son with an alibi. God bless mothers.

  At first, Howard maintained that he had come home at the later hour and he didn’t think he’d been that intoxicated. But after musing on that a bit, he admitted that the only thing he remembered for sure was that it was dark out by the time he got home.

  “I must have been extremely drunk,” he said. “I don’t remember coming home at all.”

  Of course you don’t, Howard. But why would your mother lie about that? Or, a better question, why would you lie about the time you came home?

  drunk and dangerous

  After checking out Howard’s apartment, we drove him to the Armadillo Motel and had him look over Eric’s apartment. We wanted to see if he noticed anything missing. We may also have been hoping that the visit might stir either his memory or his conscience.

  Yeah, I know, that was way too much to hope for.

  While there, Thompson did tell us that Eric’s cassette deck and his cassette radio boom box were missing from their position on top of a stereo receiver, thus explaining the dangling wires. We had previously found receipts in Eric’s motel room, indicating that he had purchased these items in local pawn shops.

  We had rounded up receipts for a Sound Design cassette deck and a Realistic portable radio cassette player, a.k.a. ghetto blaster. So if we could track down these two cheap electronic components, we might be able to find our killer.

  Over the next several weeks and months, we learned more intriguing things as we interviewed others who encountered Eric and Howard on their friends’ tour. You might not be surprised to learn that several other members of this low-rent circle of friends provided a much different reason for Howard’s exclusion from the Smirnoff-seeking mission to the liquor store on the night of Eric’s murder.

  Tommy Hart told us that he and Eric and Cleveland McIntosh left in Cleveland’s car when Howard got up from the card table to use the bathroom. They purposely left him behind because he was “too intoxicated and he was being very obnoxious.”

  Eddie Randolph and his wife, Ruth, recalled that Howard was very intoxicated and became extremely angry when the others left him behind.

  Cleveland McIntosh confirmed that he left Howard behind because he was so drunk.

  “We didn’t want to put up with him,” he said.

  Howard seemed to have quite the reputation for being belligerent and violent when drunk. We heard also that he was given to waving around his pocketknife after a few pops and talking about sticking people.

  This piqued our interest, of course, but we had many suspects to choose from in this case.

  A month and a half after the Eric Houston homicide, our detectives reinterviewed Cleveland McIntosh, who also had a reputation for nasty behavior now and then.

  We had learned that Cleve was known to hang out in a gay bar called Hide N’ Seek. We didn’t much care about his sexual preference unless it somehow played into the murder of his friend Eric.

  So we asked Cleveland if Eric was gay. He said he didn’t know one way or the other. Cleveland also volunteered that he wasn’t a homosexual himself; he just like wearing women’s clothing.

  “I’ve done it since I was a little kid,” he said. “Everyone knows about it. I don’t try to hide it.”

  In fact, he often shopped for dresses, blouses, and heels at the Goodwill store where Eric was a janitor.

  We never found any evidence that Eric was homosexual or that his sexuality played any role in his murder. It just seemed that Eric had friends of all kinds. He accepted everyone, often to his detriment.

  deadly frenemies

  The Eric Houston murder investigation was shaping up to be a suspect fest. His west-side crew was shadier than Sherwood Forest. And here we were with all the hoods and no Robin. Another difference: Most of these merry men took from the poor and kept it.

  We entered the third month and New Year with at least forty persons of interest, and the list kept growing by the day.

  The one guy we kept coming back to was Howard Thompson. Everyone we talked to seemed to have a story about Howard threatening someone with his knife, or Howard talking about hurting people, including his supposed friend Eric.

  In fact, we heard one story after another of Howard threatening or bullying Eric on the night of the murder, during their drunken stumble from one friend’s house to another.

  Cleveland McIntosh said he thought Howard could have had something to do with Eric’s killing because Howard had a very bad temper—he had once shot a guy on Conejos Street—and he was extremely angry with Eric for leaving him behind at the Randolphs’ home.

  According to Cleveland, Bob Davis told him that he’d overheard Howard talking about “doing something” to Eric on the night of the murder. After hearing that, we called in Mr. Davis. He said that drunk Howard was verbally abusive to drunk Eric at the Randolph home.

  We spoke again to Cleveland McIntosh on January 15, 1987. He offered the opinion that Howard killed Eric with his Buck knife. He also said he thought Howard’s parents would lie to protect him.

  We also had a rooftop witness who had seen an altercation between Howard and the murder victim on the day of his death. In January, we spoke with Jonathan Oldsman, who was repairing his roof around eleven a.m. on the day of Eric’s murder when Eric Houston, Howard Thompson, and Cleveland McIntosh walked up.

  Eric had his bicycle. All three appeared to be intoxicated. Howard and Eric stopped to talk. Cleveland kept on truckin’.

  Roofer Jonathan said Howard was pushing Eric, and Eric was telling him to stop. When they began to get even more boisterous, Jonathan told them to leave his property.

  We interviewed a roommate of Bob Davis, Tony Collins, on January 27, and he said that at one point during their visit, Howard pulled out his pocketknife and displayed it, demonstrating how he could stab someone.

  He added that Howard had a bad temper and was known for always “bumming money off of Eric.” He also said that during their conversations that night, Howard made loud references to “cutting” an unknown male who had upset him earlier in the day.

  Mr. Howard seemed to have been voted “most likely to take a murder rap” around the neighborhood, but we had no hard evidence against him. We didn’t even have a murder weapon. Then, in late January, more than three months after the fatal stabbing, we got a call about a man with a horse.

  A mechanical horse, but a horse nonetheless.

  The manager of the Armadillo Motel told us that a repairman had come to work on a mechanical horse kiddie ride near the motel’s lobby and discovered a butcher knife under its base.

  The butcher knife was a Magna Wonder Knife, made in Switzerland, with an eight-inch blade. We went blasting over there to pick up the knife. We were all excited, thinking we might have found the murder weapon. We weren’t like kids in a candy store, exactly. More like survivalists in an army surplus store.

  We sent the knife off to the state crime lab, which was so overloaded that it took several weeks before t
hey sent their report. The report kicked our dreams to the curb. The knife bore no traces of blood or fingerprints.

  Crap!

  Now, I know what all the amateur detectives out there are thinking: “Maybe the killer wiped it clean.”

  Sorry, Sherlocks. You can’t wipe a knife that clean unless you dip it in alcohol. Even if you can’t see it, traces of the serum will still be detectable to the forensics lab. Still, it would have been interesting to know how that knife came to be stashed under the kiddie ride.

  Just what I needed, another mystery to keep me awake at night. And another dead end in a maddening case.

  the loner who talked too much

  While we were certainly interested in Howard Thompson, other intriguing suspects kept popping up. In late January, we received a tip from an informant on yet another big talker who claimed to have knifed a guy in a very interesting location.

  The informant said he was at a party in which a man named Arthur Anaya boasted to several people that he had stabbed someone at the Armadillo Motel. That caught our attention, especially since we were familiar with Mr. Anaya and his greatest hits.

  Arthur was only about five feet, five inches tall, which was several feet shorter than his rap sheet. He had arrests dating back to 1963, when he was still a juvenile. We had hauled him in for second-degree assault, burglary, motor vehicle theft, parole violation, assault with a deadly weapon, burglary, harassment, armed robbery, riotous conduct, breach of peace, damage to private property, and several other crimes against man and nature.

  We learned that Arthur had been out of prison for about five months, which was a long run of freedom for him. Given his record, Arthur was long overdue for an incarceration.

  We arranged for his parole officer to bring him in for a chat about his alleged stabbing at the Armadillo Motel. He proved to be an expert witness, in the sense that he had developed great skill at knowing nothing about anything.

  Anaya claimed he did not know Eric Houston and had no information concerning his death, other than what he’d heard on the news. For a career criminal, he didn’t have much of an alibi. He was living with his mother in Colorado Springs at the time of Eric’s death. He couldn’t recall what he did on the night of November 8, 1986, but noted that his usual Friday and Saturday night haunt was Rustic Hills Lounge, on the far east side of town.

  When we inquired whether he had any friends who could confirm his whereabouts on the night of Eric Houston’s murder, Arthur scoffed.

  “I don’t hang around with anyone. I am a loner. I don’t have friends.”

  Well, at least that part of his story was believable.

  We showed him a photo of Eric Houston, and again he said he did not know our victim. At that point, his arrogant attitude pissed off his parole officer, who got in Arthur’s face and threatened to send him back to prison for violating his parole if he didn’t cooperate.

  Arthur then admitted that he may have known and drunk with Eric from time to time.

  “But so what? I don’t know who killed him, and if I did, I wouldn’t tell you anyways.”

  We cut him loose just to clear the air of his lies. We did run a blood comparison from samples we drew from Anaya and those taken at the crime scene, but they were inconclusive.

  Did Arthur’s hands have scars from a possible knife wound?

  I’m glad you asked. Arthur’s hands looked as if they’d been through a meat grinder. Both of them. They were heavily scarred—so heavily, in fact, that there was no telling which scars were two months old and which were ten years old.

  Slicing knife wounds tend to heal quickly as long as they aren’t fatal.

  Arthur was definitely a contender, but we had no irrefutable scientific proof of his guilt. He agreed to take a polygraph if we wanted to go that route. We then released him for lack of any proof, but we kept him on our list of potential killers.

  hitting a wall

  About seven months into the investigation of Eric Houston’s murder, we hit a wall. We thought the blood and fingerprint evidence might help us nail down Howard Thompson as our primary suspect.

  Our crime scene lab reports said two different blood types were found at the scene. One was the victim’s. The other had to be the killer’s. We had also found a set of fingerprints on the Budweiser can. They didn’t match the victim, so we thought those fingerprints might also belong to the killer.

  But when the results from the state crime lab came in, neither the blood samples nor the beer-can fingerprints belonged to Howard Thompson.

  We had wasted a lot of time, or so it seemed, while waiting for those results, but there was no rushing justice in the Rockies. There are only two crime labs run by the state of Colorado: one in Pueblo and one in Denver, and they are both extremely busy—always.

  Of course, back then we didn’t have the ability to search a nationwide fingerprint database for a match. Blood analysis was even more rudimentary. So we had nada on Howard at that point.

  Around this same time, we also had witnesses confirm that they had seen him at another house party on the night of Eric Houston’s murder. So Howard Thompson appeared to have an alibi of sorts.

  We didn’t give up on him entirely. For all we knew, he might be the killer. We just didn’t have any real proof. We had hearsay reports, from several of Eric Houston’s menagerie of friends, that Howard had been bullying our murder victim earlier on the night of the murder and may even have threatened him.

  It was all flimsy, circumstantial evidence. Not enough to file charges with or even to take to a grand jury.

  Thompson maintained his innocence, of course. He never ever would have hurt his good buddy Eric. We didn’t believe him, but we couldn’t prove otherwise. This case was driving me up a wall.

  My frustration had me talking to Eric’s ghost at night, and sometimes in daylight. I’d ask for some guidance or a break. I promised him nearly every day that I would lock up his killer if only he would send me a clue.

  We had been high on Howard as the killer, just as we had thought we found the murder weapon when the knife turned up. We were shot down time and again in this case when the science didn’t support our theories.

  The disappointment crushes you after a while. I’d sit in my desk chair and say, “Fuck, if it isn’t Howard Thompson, then who the hell is it?”

  The extreme lows and highs are what makes our work so infuriating—and so damned exciting when you finally do catch the real bad guy.

  slow torture

  Months and then several years passed without anything new to chew on in the Eric Houston case. I was the supervisor in charge, and I took our lack of progress personally.

  I held meetings on the case constantly, sometimes daily, always weekly. Whenever we had a bit of downtime from the daily murder and mayhem, I’d call in all our detectives and street cops from the near west side and talk through what we had, who we could look at, anyone we could check out or jab with a stick for information.

  Who in this giant crowd of assholes showed the most promise as a suspect?

  For the first seven months, we had liked Howard Thompson for the murder. He’d made threats. He carried a knife. We all thought he seemed like our guy, but then the crime scene evidence gave him a pass—and put us way behind on every other potential suspect.

  Arthur Anaya was certainly capable of killing Eric Houston, but all we had on him was sketchy talk from a sketchy informant. Half the people in the neighborhood were capable of stabbing someone to death. Anaya was still a suspect, but he was only in the first six rows of potential suspects that we had put together.

  This case had a curse—the curse of too many suspects. There were so many potential killers who knew Eric Houston. At one point, we had a list of more than fifty-two. We’d go out trying to nail one of them and come back with nothing but rumors and innuendos—nothing worth a search warrant, let alone
an arrest warrant.

  Every now and then, out of the blue we’d get something that gave us hope of solving this case. Those bits and pieces came in intermittent drops, like water torture.

  Our homicide team kept expanding the circle of the investigation, casting the proverbial wide net, beyond the west side to the greater metro area of Colorado Springs, hoping we’d catch something—if not our killer, at least a break. We actually did a cattle call, bringing in every one of our forty-two “individuals of interest” to get blood samples and fingerprints and any additional information they might want to cough up.

  None of the fingerprints proved a match for those gathered at the murder scene. None of the blood samples were definitive. About a quarter of them matched the general blood type of the sample that we thought came from the killer, but back then these tests were based on antigen levels. The results weren’t specific enough to bring charges. They were only good for narrowing the field, a little.

  Whenever we weren’t chasing a killer in a more pressing investigation, we’d send out the troops and have them talk to anybody and everybody who might help us with the Eric Houston case.

  We had spent many hours chasing leads. We’d talked to a mentally handicapped guy who briefly worked at Goodwill before being fired for suspected theft. He was supposedly pissed off at everyone he’d worked with.

  The only problem was that after we’d spent days tracking him down and checking him out, we learned that he’d been hired to work at Goodwill as a temporary replacement for Eric Houston, who was out sick.

  So when he claimed he did not know Eric Houston, it was because he really did not know Eric Houston.

  We also chased down a member of the custodial staff at the Armadillo Motel who had been described to us as “a wacko” and worthy of investigating. And we spent many hours running down a report that Eric may have been killed by some white males including Lewis “Blackie” Booker who lived on Conejos Street.