by Stephen Hand
WHAT YOU KNOW ABOUT FEAR . . .
. . . DOESN’T EVEN COME CLOSE!
On August 20th 1973, police were dispatched to a remote farmhouse in Travis County, Texas. Within the confines of a cryptic residence they discovered the butchered remains of 33 victims. Brandishing a chainsaw and wearing the grotesque flesh masks of his victims, the killer became forever known as ‘Leatherface’. Now for the first time, the only known survivor of the killing spree has broken the silence and come forward to tell the real story of what happened in that macabre farmhouse.
THE TEXAS
CHAINSAW MASSACRE
Pepper had tripped or fallen down in front of the van, dropping below the headlamps—where now, standing in the full glory of the makeshift floodlights, the killer notched up the revs and leant down with the chainsaw, pushing it into the fallen girl’s face. In, in, in—he hacked into her face, the cold cutting blades mincing her vocal chords and whipping out her windpipe before she could even scream.
Erin clutched her head and wept.
“Noooo!”
Outside, the insane bastard stomped like a retard in a geyser of blood and down feathers. He was swaying, shitting on the bitch’s innards with his saw, howling as her life sprayed out across the Texan dirt. But, all the while, his face was turned towards the van. While he ground and pumped and hacked and snorted, his insane screaming eyes were constantly fixed on Erin. Almost as if he was putting on a show for her, to let her know she was next.
A Black Flame Publication
First published in 2004 by BL Publishing, Games Workshop Ltd.,
Willow Road, Nottingham NG7 2WS, UK.
Distributed in the US by Simon & Schuster, 1230 Avenue of the Americas,
New York, N.Y. 10020, USA.
Copyright © 2004 New Line Cinema. All rights reserved.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and all related characters, names and indicia are trademarks and © of New Line Productions, Inc. 2004. All rights reserved.
Black Flame and the Black Flame logo are trademarks of Games Workshop Ltd., variably registered in the UK and other countries around the world. All rights reserved.
ISBN 1-84416-060-2
Printed in the UK by Bookmarque, Surrey, UK.
Dedicated to Brenda Wootton, who unbelievably got to see the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre before me.
PROLOGUE
Okay, the tape’s rolling. Just clear my throat . . .
Right, that’s better. Here we go . . . August 2003. Hewitt case.
There is something very wrong with the Lone Star State.
Its deep heart is fibrillating, only nobody wants to save the patient, least of all Texas itself. Not because no one cares, but because, like any patient with a self-negating compulsive disorder, you can’t begin to affect a cure until the sufferer first admits she’s got a problem. And Texas doesn’t have any problems—ask anyone.
She’s the biggest state outside of Alaska and her natural resources are the blood and guts of the entire country. She produces more oil than any other state and provides most of the coal burned in America’s power stations to produce electricity. She is one of the country’s leaders in farming, earning over five billion dollars from the sale of crops and vegetables, and for the sheer volume and diversity of ranching Texas remains number one. Cattle, poultry, eggs, hogs, goats, sheep, wool, mohair, leather—chances are, if you’re eating or wearing something, it probably came from somewhere within the state’s two-hundred and sixty-eight thousand square miles.
Texas isn’t just about refining raw material. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the moon in 1969, they’d traveled straight up from Houston. And last year, sixty-eight per cent of all international exports from Texas were in computer and electronic products, as well as chemicals and other industrial equipment and machinery. Texas has also invested heavily in the financial and service sectors, and has led all states in internet job creation since 1990.
The state also gave us two presidents. It was Dwight D Eisenhower from Denison, Texas, who pushed the green light on the country’s Interstate highway system. Texas itself has over seventy-seven thousand miles of road, and its airline business remains one of the healthiest and most used in America, even after 9/11.
Fighting in the face of adversity is what Texans do best. No state more than Texas is built upon the fierce tradition of liberty and independence that lies at the very core of American beliefs. Many people forget that when Sam Houston’s forces routed the Mexican soldiers at San Jacinto, Texas entered into a nine-year period as an independent nation. And much later, when General Lee had already surrendered the Confederate cause at Appomattox a month previously, the last fight of the Civil War took place at Palmito Ranch, South Texas. Even today, Texas is the only state permitted by law to fly its flag at the same height as the Stars and Stripes.
The cry, “Remember the Alamo,” is just as relevant in today’s global turmoil as it was when one hundred and ninety men stood fast against an army of five thousand and died so that you and I can be free.
When Landry’s Cowboys used to be called “America’s Team,” it was more than cheap marketing. Because to most Texans, Texas is America.
But America has got problems.
Ask some people about Texas and they’ll remember a day in Dallas 1963, when the dreams of the entire Western world were shattered by a sniper’s bullet. They’ll also remember how it was a Texan, Lyndon B. Johnson from Gillespie County, who was sworn in as president on the day of Kennedy’s assassination.
The same people might also tell you that the last time they saw pictures from Texas broadcast nightly on their TV was during the Waco siege of 1993, when a bungled joint operation by the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms resulted in the violent deaths of eighty cult members, known as Branch Davidians, and their leader, David Koresh.
The fact that Koresh just happened to set up shop in Texas might be considered unlucky, but what’s not unlucky is the way extremist Texan militia groups have regarded Waco as an example of covert martial law being imposed on free-thinking, free-willed individuals by a corrupt Washington government that is variously depicted as homosexual, Satanic, Jewish, Masonic, or all of these things combined.
These same militiamen look back to San Jacinto and tell us we should take arms to defend our freedoms against a horde of politically correct perverts entrenched on Capitol Hill. And when the FBI declares these gun-wielding toy soldiers as “domestic terrorists,” the gunmen cry back, “Remember the Alamo!”
Militia groups are not exclusive to Texas. Nor are the Ku Klux Klan, who have at least five different factions in the state. And it might be unfair to single out the death of James Byrd Jr. as being in any way unique to Texas, even though the whole world was horrified to hear of that night in 1998 when Byrd was grabbed by three white men on a road outside Jasper, then tied up and dragged to his death behind a pickup truck.
So, this is the paradox: to many people, Texas is a forward-thinking, proud and powerful state, devoutly religious and welcoming to all visitors—after all, the name originates from the Hasinai Indian word, “Tejas,” meaning “friend”—to others, the state is a symbol of all things reactionary, violent and primitive. Just as the state excels in productivity, it is also seen as excelling in macho violence, freakish subcultures, and racial hatred. The Texan redneck is renowned the world over as the ultimate stock cartoon of ill-mannered stupidity.
Another way of understanding this contradiction is to log on to the website of the Texas Justice Department and look for the Death Row page. Now, whatever the rights and wrongs of the death penalty—and I’m against—it is utterly insane to misdirect the tools and promise of the information er
a to officially and dryly present a list of Death Row Facts, including a page of Final Meal Requests.
That’s right, you can log on to the Justice Department website and see what prisoners ate prior to their appointment with the executioner. This neat table of personal menus is made available on the Internet, solely to satisfy our morbid curiosity; we want to know if the myth of the famous last meal is true. Can convicts really eat anything they want before their lethal injection?
This is what Texas is all about: myth versus reality. And this is why Texas is the perfect American state. It represents all our ideals and nightmares. It is the extreme condition of what America could or might be. It is dystopia clashing with utopia.
In some ways, the metaphor runs even deeper than this idea of Texas as America’s psyche. It could be that Texas provides the perfect model for understanding Twenty-First Century man himself. Mankind still has not made a decisive step towards civilization. Part of us still wants to fight and to hate. Part of us remains animal, only most animals don’t kill for pleasure or create a system of resource sharing that forces millions of their own kind into poverty and starvation.
So when we look at Texas, we can see who we want to be and who we really are. But we cannot aim for greatness as long as we refuse to admit our failures.
At the outset I said that there was something very wrong in the Lone Star State. From what I’ve been talking about so far you might think I was referring to some of the state’s general problems. But I’m not. What I’m talking about is the state’s refusal to acknowledge its biggest failure in recent criminal history. I’m talking about how Texas can never embrace a better future as long as it tries to hide its sordid, unpleasant past. I’m talking about the darkest, dirtiest secret deep in the heart of Texas.
At this point, I need to come clean and admit that I’m Texan and proud of it.
I was born in Travis County, a few miles outside Abilene, where I went to school and majored in journalism. I then traveled around Texas, going wherever there was work. My first two jobs were on local newspapers, both down near San Antonio. Then in 1971 I got a position with a two-bit TV news outfit in Austin. I had a great time there. The company had no money, everyone had to cover for everyone else—it was perfect for an enthusiastic young reporter like I was at the time. You see, we worked as a team and we fairly much decided everything on a day-by-day basis. And that’s how we managed to report on national as well as local news. What we didn’t have in budget we made up for in energy.
Back in the summer of 1973, there was only one real story: Nixon.
On August 15, President Richard Milhous Nixon made his second address to the nation on the Watergate scandal. The speech was good but, as we all now know, not good enough. All the same we were giving Watergate a lot of coverage. But on August 20, that changed.
One of my law enforcement sources called me in the middle of the afternoon—I’d just got back from a long lunch—and told me that a group of investigators had been dispatched to a remote farmhouse in Travis County. This, of course, was my home turf. I hurriedly scribbled down a few details, grabbed my crew, then got down there as fast as I could.
A couple of newspaper guys had arrived before us but we were the first broadcast people on the scene. We nailed our footage long before anyone else from TV or radio showed. It was a big scoop for us that night.
You might be able to remember the clip. I cringe each time I see it. I was so young and stupid then, looking back. If you recall, I was standing on the roadside trying to talk above the traffic. The road was usually empty but a lot of local rubbernecks had turned out. Anyway, what I actually said was: “Police recovered the remains of at least thirty-three murder victims at the home of Thomas Brown Hewitt, a former head-skinner at a local slaughterhouse.”
It was terrible.
We couldn’t get close because the FBI had everywhere taped off, but we did learn that multiple locations were involved. We knew there were investigators up at a nearby farmhouse and some searching a local meat plant, and we even managed to grab some film of five agents inspecting a body lying face down in water at the bottom of a creek. Of course, we couldn’t show it on air—we actually had decency rules back then. These days, they’d probably zoom the lens right up the victim’s ass.
At first, the whole picture was confused. It was clear that something horrible had happened but the full extent of the crimes was being kept under wraps. There were also rumors that something had gone badly wrong during the opening of the investigation—which would have explained why all the authorities were being tight-lipped.
The headline of the local evening newspaper that day read: HOUSE OF HORROR STUNS NATION—MASSACRE IN TEXAS. And the strap-line ran: CHAINSAW BUTCHER KILLS 33.
And that was the first even I got to hear about the chainsaw.
Late the next day the police called a press conference. The hall was packed, interest in the story was worldwide. Everyone wanted to know more about the insane chainsaw killer and his thirty-three victims. At first, it seemed as if everyone was going to get what they came for. Accompanied by a couple of men from the FBI, County Supervisor Franklin Nash came in and spelled out the basic facts:
1. Following a call from a member of the public, police went to investigate the cause of a major disturbance at an isolated farmhouse near the town of Fuller. The name of the person who called the police was being withheld.
2. Initial investigations led to the discovery of a number of dead bodies. The FBI were called out immediately and a full investigation was set in motion.
3. During the course of the investigation, two police officers were killed: Detective Adams and Officer Henderson. Both men were murdered by the sole suspect in the case.
4. The murderer was a middle-aged man named Thomas Brown Hewitt, who had been killed by police while trying to escape arrest.
5. All families of all the bereaved had been contacted.
6. There were no other suspects in the case.
7. FBI agents had found one injured survivor who, regrettably, was medically unfit to assist the police any further.
8. The case was closed.
And that was it. The most horrific crime of the twentieth century and that’s all they were prepared to give us.
I knew a couple of guys who’d been working the crime desk for over thirty years and they said they’d seen nothing like it. There were no photos, no witness statements, there wasn’t even an inquiry into the shooting of the main suspect.
I asked Nash if he could give us more information about Hewitt, or about how the two officers were killed, but he refused. He had a whole room of angry press demanding to know the name of the survivor, but all he would say was that discussing the incident further “would be bad for Texas.” Whatever the hell that meant.
It’s times like that when you realize just how dependent news is on the cooperation of the authorities. The moment they stop playing ball, you have no material. And no material means no story. It’s a lesson I’ve learned many times over the course of my career.
To most people, the classic image of a journalist is of a determined young investigator who goes out and digs up all the facts. In reality, most journalists just take what they’re given and reword it. Investigative journalism takes time, money and contacts. And in Travis County 1973, I had only one of the three vital ingredients needed to break the Hewitt case open.
I asked my editor to let me make a news special on the murders but he wasn’t interested. He said that after Watergate I was conspiracy crazy and couldn’t think straight. Maybe he was right but I couldn’t let a story this big break on my doorstep and then just disappear.
Wrong.
The Hewitt chainsaw murders were dead and buried within a month and forgotten by everyone except yours truly.
I spent two years trying to get closer to the case but I drew a complete blank. My normal contacts dried up. I couldn’t get my hands on any paperwork. I even drove out there but the cops kept the whole area
out of bounds until they’d sanitized the place. The local people wouldn’t talk either. Basically, I struck out. And, when the frustration eventually got too much, I let go.
Since then the case has received barely a mention. Occasionally, you’ll find a couple of vague paragraphs in one of the increasingly popular encyclopedias of homicide, but no one has come even close to writing the definitive version of what took place in Travis County, August 1973.
Until now.
Finally, thirty years after the murders took place, I can reveal all the facts behind the Texas chainsaw massacre, even though I suspect nobody cares anymore.
In 1981, the State of Texas leveled the farmhouse, and filled the basement with cement. The killings and the media frenzy had long stopped and the police were only too happy to close this bizarre case forever.
I quit my New York job in 1999. I’d made a New Millennium’s resolution to give up the nine-to-five grind of office politics and to try my hand at freelancing again. I’d gone freelance once before in the Eighties, but it had gone expensively wrong. This time out of the gate, however, I walked straight into a commission.
A company specializing in the production of straight-to-video DVD documentaries wanted to make a film about the Hewitt case. The CEO of the company was a crime aficionado and he actually owned a tape of my outside broadcast from that day in August 1973. He’d done some asking around, learned I had some unresolved interest in the case, and so approached me with a deal I couldn’t refuse. They wanted me to research and present the Hewitt program and would even give me book rights for a cut of the royalties.
So, over twenty years after I’d left town, I found myself back in Austin, thinking about those thirty-three dead people.
I still had good contacts there and, after all this time, the authorities were more relaxed—the case was ancient history. Also, many of the people who were involved in the Hewitt investigation had either retired or moved on. Fortunately, improvements in freedom of information over the last few decades made it easier to gain access to official documentation. Compared to the frustration I’d felt in 1973, everything seemed almost too easy, and I began to wonder why no one else had got there before me. But that was before I’d taken a closer look at the remaining evidence.