DECATUR, TEXAS

OCTOBER 2018

Sam sometimes called Texas Ranger James Holland the space cowboy, which I thought was funny, because Holland didn’t conform to my Steve Miller Band karaoke idea of that image: he was not a joker or a smoker, and he was certainly not a midnight toker. I know, because I asked him. By the time I was taking his calls at midnight, I was almost always high.

“You on that grass again?” he asked. “Why not be high on life, sister?”

“Why do you talk like a fed at Woodstock?”

The space cowboy surprised me. I never trusted him nor fooled myself into thinking he had my best interests at heart. He called once in a while to confirm an odd detail with my notes, and sometimes that detail would be the missing puzzle piece or simply corroboration.

“Did Little mention what kind of job Sarah Brown had?”

“She was in a white uniform, too short for a nurse.”

“Roger that.”

I trudged along with my research. Two weeks later, there she was on the news: Sarah Brown from New Orleans, in a waitress uniform, smudged as if she had gotten off work. Sarah, who had almost made it to the porchlight on the other side of the field.

My feelings about the space cowboy fluctuated by the day. He didn’t want me around, which made him hard to like. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by this bold enterprise. He played it straight, but it was a wild idea, and why go through the trouble? Was he an adrenaline junkie hung up on polishing the Cinco Peso iconic Texas Ranger badge?

“I would rather you accept my thank-you and go away,” he said one night.

“I want a story, not a thank-you. Are those mother-of-pearl handles on your pistol?”

I can usually distract a man by asking about his gun.

Holland replied, “I’ll quote the great General George Patton, who thrashed a reporter in public for the same question…”

We both waited out the pause. Was I supposed to set myself up for the forthcoming burn?

“What did the Great Patton say?”

“‘Son, only a pimp in a Louisiana whorehouse carries pearl-handled revolvers.’”

“So that’s a yes?”

“Ivory. 1911.”

“Roger that.”

I was a reporter who had basically been sworn to secrecy by the FBI, the DOJ, the Texas Rangers, and the LAPD about a huge story I was sitting on. No pressure. Was I doing the right thing?

They promised me the first interviews. When the story broke, it would be all over the place. I had the jump, but I also agreed to keep a sock in it, and that’s a gamble. The possibility of seeing justice done was worth both the risk and the wait, no matter how agonizing.

On September 23, 2018, the Texas Ranger jet took off from Lancaster Airport, extraditing Sam to be tried for the 1994 murder of Denise Brothers, for which he had been indicted by a grand jury in Odessa, Texas. The Wise County Detention Center would be his home, where he would await his hearing while hopefully (you never really know with a psychopath) giving a series of historic confessions.

I followed from afar as Holland methodically reached out to detectives with promising cold cases from far-flung jurisdictions that could potentially match Sam’s confessions. Many jumped on the opportunity and began scouring case files and planning their trips.

I thought Sam was gone forever, which was both a frustration and a relief. There went my primary story source. I had hundreds of hours of interviews, stacks of paintings and letters, and interviews with original detectives, DAs, living victims, family members, and his niece. I just needed a thorough interview with Holland, Angela Williamson, and Christie Palazzolo, and I would have everything I needed for the New York magazine article.

I knew LAPD Detectives Mitzi Roberts and Tim Marcia, along with DDA Beth Silverman, had been promised first crack at Sam in Wise County. They were already on their way with binders of cold cases they had long thought might be Sam’s. They were only the first in the long line of detectives and DAs who would queue up over the next month and a half. Drawing materials were stacked in the middle of the interview room table.

Some of the drawings Sam sent me were of his victims. Others were Tupac, Madonna, Condoleezza Rice (under which he wrote: MY DREAM), Toni Braxton, a drooling baby surrounded by aliens, a blue dead girl, Cleopatra, a skeleton in a soldier’s helmet. Some were on legal paper, some on blank paper, some painted on fabric. Some featured text like I OWN HER or MARTHA KNOXVILLE or even a date, but the date was when he drew them, not when he killed them.

Palazzolo and Williamson would be in Wise County for the first week, returning promptly to Quantico to launch a nationwide media campaign that included Sam’s drawings. The federal government rolled their eyes when my name came up. I talked in a kitten voice to a killer, sang him lullabies, wore fishnets. What kind of reporter does that?

I do almost only wear Capezio professional fishnets for dancers, with a reinforced toe and back seam. I’ve been wearing the same ones, different sizes, since I started tap class at the age of seven. They cost twenty-five dollars, are made of rubber, and work better than Spanx. I’ve owned my lucky set for over ten years. Also, you only ever need Aqua Net—expensive cosmetics are made in the same factories in China as the ones at Rite Aid. Don’t wear high heels on a soggy lawn. Never pay retail. Keep your good jewelry sewn into a coat lining in case you ever have to grab the coat and run. Survivors have a million tips.

Tension between law enforcement and media is a classic, and my exchanges with federal and local law enforcement officials varied widely. The tight group circling their wagons around Sam were a tough crowd. We all had personal and career stakes. We were all true believers. We all had kids and mortgages. I did the Big Daddy talk, they did the DNA. I asked the odd questions, they analyzed data to which I had no access. The FBI classically thought of the free press as a bullhorn for their scripts. I believed myself to be a witness, not a propaganda slinger. Journalists liaise between the cloistered law enforcement community and the public they’re sworn to protect and serve, whether in fishnets or fatigues. I picked at the bones they threw me for any bit of information.

Detective Tim Marcia was ready to take his first crack at Sam in Wise County, except he never got in the room. Holland told Sam the LAPD was there to talk to him. Sam faced the camera. He pounded a fist on the table, reared up, and spat.

“Those dogs. I ain’t saying shit. This is bullshit. Those lying bastards. Fucking cops. Lying whores. They think I did it so they set me up. They know I did it so they set me up. It was the Mexican Mafia killed that bitch. I can’t even pronounce her name.”

Holland shifted in his chair, the ivory handle of his pistol a few inches farther from the grandpa who turned on a dime into a cobra.

Sam demanded letters from each DA, ensuring him they wouldn’t seek death if he confessed. Los Angeles hadn’t brought one. Sam sent them scrambling and went back to his cell. Los Angeles was the centerpiece of Sam’s murderous career. If Holland lost LA, he lost double digits.

Sam sulked until Holland coaxed him back into the windowless white box with fluorescent lights, dropped ceilings, cameras in the corners, a table pushed against the wall.

“You better, brother? You okay now?”

Holland told him the LA detectives had gotten so pissed they’d gone home.

“They gone home?” Sam sounded disappointed.

Back in his cell, he asked for an eraser. The deputy thought he said a razor.

“I need an eraser because I’m trying to draw that little girl in the bathtub for them.”

In the end, Sam calmed down, or got ramped up, hard to tell. In any case, he started talking, but by that time, Holland had already told him LA had gone home.

The map of Los Angeles is an expansive puzzle, broken into jagged bites. There are intersections in South LA with a separate jurisdiction for each corner. This is not a system that works well for solving serial murders. ViCAP was a start, but without some kind of comprehensive, mandated, multijurisdictional database with federal resources allocated for support, it was hit or miss.

There is no perfect interview, but with patience, you can usually get a basic understanding of what most people are about and what they’re hiding. Psychopaths are different. Everything is out there; everything is hiding. You will always be the pinball, never the lever. If you’re any good at it, you go in knowing you’re the one being played, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get your answers. If you excel at it, you may find you have a higher score than most on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist.

Establishing the ratio of truth to lies is an electric kind of tightrope. You get a patter going: nicknames, code words, special songs, in-jokes, secrets. This shared language keeps you connected to a person essentially incapable of connection. It’s easy to get locked inside your own invention before you fully understand it. The LAPD and DA’s office didn’t share the space cowboy’s ethos.

Holland back-slapped Sam in the interview room. Holland hugged him.

No, shit? You did, man?

Who’s the fattest bitch you ever killed? Who was the ugliest?

I love you, brother.

You’re the boss. You’re in charge. None of this happens without you.

I did the same, in my way. I didn’t judge it. You can’t understand a transactional dynamic from the other room. The silences are darker than the slurs and slags.

Silverman did not share my sympathy for role-play. She’d spent too much time with autopsy photos of broken bodies and didn’t appreciate Holland’s rough rapport. She fought every day for victims dismissed because of these exact bro tropes. How do you come back from the bro zone? How do you humanize victims you’ve torn apart?

I knew the Rangers took Sam for joy rides in their trucks, to “look for victims.” They stopped at every traffic light to comment on every ass on every corner. They fed him McDonald’s pancake breakfasts.

I knew Sam a little by then. What’s the point of living a movie no one gets to see? His moment had arrived.

Did Holland and Roberts and the FBI and the rest of them really think he was going to give up a lifetime of secrets for a lousy milkshake and a plane ride? I pulled over a bucket of popcorn and waited for the inevitable drama when detective ego, cowboy ego, federal government ego, lawyer ego, and serial killer ego started playing bumper cars. I hoped the victims wouldn’t wind up under the wheels.

When I got calls from Sam from Texas, he was babbling, paranoid, lucid, elated, annoyed, confused, angry, docile. He asked after my kids’ soccer games, my dogs, my meatloaf. He told me he was going to eat my lips off my face, described murder with giggling glee. He demanded kissy noises and songs and supplications, all while I was on speaker phone with the Texas Rangers.

Night after night, I talked an agitated psychopath down from a paranoid rant. I flattered, cajoled, and calmed him. I gave him a positive self-concept, let him know he was not abandoned or alone. I shot all my own ego straight down into my reinforced fishnet heels and sang “Misty” for the Texas Rangers.

“You’re a little flat on the bridge,” Scott noted as he passed the door of my office. The man in the background on the other end laughed. It’s a tough bridge.

“Mr. Sam? I am so proud of you. You are doing amazing! You are so important. It means so much to me that you’re being honest. You’re a hero. You’re doing God’s work. I love, love, love you, mwah, mwah, mwah.”

At the end of the second day of watching the cowboy interview the monster, Silverman snapped.

“I can’t stand here and watch you talk about victims like this. You sound like a monster. These girls deserve this? Cheering him on? What about when their families have to watch this? Is this some numbers game to you?”

When Marcia, Roberts, and Silverman boarded the plane, they held a stack of Sam’s Los Angeles confessions, but Holland had done all the interviews, and he didn’t know the twists and turns of LA. In all, they had six hours of recordings, possibly seventeen murder confessions, and several drawings.

Cold cases in major urban centers are especially challenging. LAPD detectives were looking not for one murder in a small town in Georgia but between fifteen and twenty in a five-to-ten-year time frame in a city where hundreds of women were murdered with a similar MO. These were going to be difficult confessions to match with their famously strict investigative standards and few concrete, verifiable facts.

During the confessions, Holland told me, “Don’t ask Sammy about the murders right now. Keep it positive. Don’t contaminate the investigation. Trust the law, trust the FBI, trust me.”

In exchange, I got cursory, general reports.

I called Holland as I approached the donut store one Saturday morning. My children would not eat eggs because it was donut Saturday. I’d been up until 2:00 writing the night before. I was so far behind, exhausted, and I hated every ungrateful asshole with a Y chromosome I’d ever encountered.

I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. “Just thinking…”

“You? Never just anything.”

“Who else am I supposed to talk to about this?”

I’d told him the week before I planned to visit Odessa to research the Denise Brothers case and interview her family.

“You still planning to come to Texas?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“If you do come, would you want to see Sammy?”

“Of course.”

Dallas was about five hours from Odessa. I’d already booked my tickets to Dallas.

I suspected Holland would be sick to death of Sam by then. All those hours? It seemed about time for Sam to start throwing fits, wanting more, wanting better, demanding his journalist. If not, I had a long drive to Odessa.

I asked Holland how it was going.

He said, “What’s that quote? ‘People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.’ Sumpin’ like that.”

“Sorkin?”

“Orwell.”

I looked it up later. The quote is loosely associated with Orwell but generally attributed to a film reviewer, though no one can say for sure. It’s often misquoted and misattributed, but the sentiment—crystal.