WISE COUNTY LAW ENFORCEMENT CENTER, DECATUR, TEXAS

OCTOBER 2018, DAY 1

Drive about forty-five miles north of Dallas as the crow flies, and the city flattens to suburbs before opening onto rolling fields on either side of Highway 380, red-tailed hawks circling above.

Decatur, Texas, established in 1856, is the seat of Wise County, location of its sheriff’s department, home of the famed Petrified Wood Gas Station, and namesake of the “Eighter from Decatur,” a hard eight roll in craps and a song by western swing legend Bob Wills. In 1949, a Decatur mayor named Sly Hardwick put up two swell midcentury welcome signs with a picture of a hard eight.

THIS IS IT

EIGHTER FROM DECATUR

COUNTY SEAT OF WISE

SURE IT’S IN TEXAS

The day I drove to Wise County in mid-October, I only knew this from what I’d seen on the town’s website, because a freezing rain turned the world around me into a white screen.

I planned to write my article, get some heat going under the story, and be done. I went to Texas for what I thought was my last visit with Sam Little and my only glimpse of the space cowboy in his natural habitat. Sam’s future remained a mystery, dependent on the intentions of dozens of district attorneys across the country.

Denise, Rosie, Patricia, Hilda, Audrey, Laurie, Leila, Carol, Lupe, Dorothy, Melissa, Nancy, Melinda, Fredonia…

I fumbled for the windshield wipers, couldn’t find shit on the radio, settled on whatever was playing the closest thing to “Dream On,” and drove like my grandma toward Decatur with eighteen-wheelers plowing through inches of water on either side of me.

The history of the Texas Rangers was dodgy, if fascinating, and they seemed more of a concept than anything until I talked to detectives in various towns who had been helped by their multijurisdictional capabilities and access to state-of-the-art technology, air support, and serial killer whisperers. As far as I could tell, these days, the Texas Rangers were cowboy cops who rode into town at high noon with a saddlebag full of access to innovative DNA profiling technology and the ability to get your evidence pushed through fast. Public opinion split as to whether they started out as thugs or heroes, largely based on one’s ideas about the expansion of the American West. I tried to go in with none of that. Switzerland. I was a witness, not a judge.

I knew the Texas Rangers had a fancy plane. I knew they most definitely did not carry pistols with mother-of-pearl handles. I knew they had Sam. I relished the opportunity to see a world to which I wouldn’t normally be granted access.

I couldn’t make blanket assumptions based on the fact that the Ranger drove me batshit crazy, with the “no comments” and/or long nonanswers that made you forget your question in the first place. Not that it mattered. Whatever the question, the nonanswer was usually some version of, “Because I’m the best and I do what I want.”

Or, “You can’t handle the truth.” From A Few Good Men.

Holland told me he’d only be at the sheriff’s station until about five. I’d texted about the weather.

Might still be here at 6. Yell at me.

The lobby of the Marriott was empty at 6:00 p.m. exactly. I called out several times before a woman with a polo shirt and a lazy smile wandered out from the back room.

“Hello. I have a reservation. I’m late. I need a key right away, and I need the jail.”

“Mmkaaaay. We’ll get that taken care of for you right now, ma’am.”

Her long nails clacked as she entered my credit card and ID.

“Oh, and that’s the jail,” she said, indicating a one-story slumped stone building across the highway with a lower fence than my local high school. “Careful crossing the street though.”

Just got here! There in 10?

I rolled on a pair of fishnets, noticed dead moths silhouetted in the light fixtures. I shook my hair, powdered my nose, applied true-blue red, and was out the door in twelve.

Holland had told me a thing or two about his routine with Sammy. I knew he warmed him up every day, spending an hour talking about girls, football, the news, Trump, the Kavanaugh hearings, whatever was on the cover of the National Enquirer or People. Every day was exactly the same routine. Structure was key.

Holland had learned from the mistakes of a retired ranger named Phil Ryan, three-time Wise County sheriff and something of a friend. Ryan had been the linchpin of serial killer Henry Lee Lucas’s false confession debacle. Lucas had also liked to draw.

From what I’d read, Ryan was a craggy, intelligent, retired eccentric who spoke thoughtfully about the case and took responsibility for his errors. If those egregious mistakes hadn’t been made and eventually brought to light by journalist Hugh Aynesworth, there would be less scrutiny and reconsideration of the interrogation techniques that encourage confession at any cost, with few checks and balances. The most familiar of these is the Reid technique.

It is perfectly legal for sworn officers of the law in the United States to lie during the course of an interview. The Reid interrogation technique is the one you recognize from TV, and it is still popular in real life. It opens with an accusation of guilt, provides no chance for a response, and references real or imagined evidence while minimizing the seriousness of the crime through sympathy, normalization, and possible moral justifications. It has been known to elicit high numbers of false confessions from people who believe confession is in their best interest and would rather go home already.

Those white Ranger shirts had cycled through a couple of different collar styles since Lucas’s famed false confessions. Holland picked up the baton with a new set of forensic tools at his disposal amid a rapidly evolving world of law enforcement and different ideas about checkable facts. I was curious to witness the hybrid that had emerged.

My houndstooth jacket was no match for the freezing sleet. I wiped my nose on my sleeve and made a run for it across the four-lane highway, which Sam no doubt had once driven. An American flag and a Texas flag stood at either side of a sign that read:

WISE COUNTY

LAW ENFORCEMENT CENTER

DECATUR TEXAS

Don’t apologize with your body. Don’t apologize with your language. It’s one of the mental scripts I use before interviews, usually with men. I was five minutes late though. I would apologize for that.

Behind two sets of double doors stood Texas Ranger James B. Holland, Company B, straight backed, hands folded in front of him, tall hat, boots made from some endangered species he’d no doubt wrestled and skinned himself.

I waited, not some city mouse who goes and opens a door for herself.

I also knew the strangeness and possibility of that moment was as good as it was going to get for Holland and me. The glass would melt away, and we’d be just two people who, in an odd bit of synchronicity, had stumbled onto the same monster at the same time.

Different as we may have appeared, we still ran into each other at the dark end of the street. We were in good company at least. Many brilliant minds had been innovators in the field of the psychological aspects of criminal behavior and the value in eliciting an understanding of it. Some of the more celebrated of these include the original “profiler,” Dr. Thomas Bond, who gave us Jack the Ripper. William Marston and his wife, Elizabeth Holloway, invented an early prototype of the lie detector and, incidentally, created Wonder Woman. Dr. Dorothy Lewis, a pioneering forensic psychologist, believed sexually motivated serial criminals all suffered a version of dissociative identity disorder. John Douglas and Robert Ressler helped start the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit, which now houses ViCAP. Before Sam Little came along, the two special agents were credited with nailing the nation’s most prolific serial killer: Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer.

Ridgway strangled forty-nine prostitutes, manually or with ligatures. Ted Bundy suggested to Ressler that Ridgway would likely return to the bodies. The FBI should find a fresh one and stake it out. That was how they caught him.

Stephen Michaud and Hugh Aynesworth conducted a brilliant series of interviews with Bundy in which they got him to talk about his murders in the third person.

As I stepped forward, hailstones crunched under my heels. Holland opened the door and removed his hat.

I was used to the prison industrial complex, not a county jail. There was a wall of vending machines that made me crave a Dr Pepper on either side of something that looked like an ATM but was there to put money on the inmates’ books. Above it, a TV played Fox News. Living plants were scattered about, and a table with a tasteful seasonal centerpiece displayed pamphlets for meth and opioid addiction, domestic violence, an annual pancake breakfast, a hog contest. A framed cowboy painting hung over the water fountain. From behind bulletproof plexiglass, two women regarded me with bafflement.

Ranger Holland and I stood between the empty rows of plastic chairs. His eyes were shattered navy, his face Hemingway stoic. He filled me in in the most not-filling-me-in way possible.

“Look, he’s behind glass because he wants to kill you, and I’m not comfortable with that.”

The cowboy was so the guy who started sentences with “Look.”

“Fair enough.”

“Hey,” he said. “What do you talk to him about?”

He must have known the answer to this. All my calls from the prison were recorded. I wondered if he wanted to see what I’d say.

“Boxing. His life. My life. My kids. What do you talk to him about?”

“Football, boxing, life. He’s someone that you can actually carry on a conversation with. Not like a William Reece or a Shore or someone like that, with the kids and all. Reece. Pure evil. I wanted to kill him myself.”

Anthony Shore was responsible for the murder of one woman and three girls between 1986 to 2000, and he became known as the “Tourniquet Killer” because of his use of a ligature with either a toothbrush or bamboo stick to tighten or loosen it. The instrument was similar to a twitch, a tool used to control horses.

Holland told me the confessions were going great, and he’d catch me tomorrow.

“You’re not staying?” I asked.

“Me? No.”

If it had been me, I’d have stayed and watched for at least a little while. I showed the wide-eyed woman behind the glass my ID.

Holland made a shooing movement toward a green door a few feet away. “Go ahead.”

“In here?”

“Keep it upbeat,” he said with a double thumbs-up. “Okay? Up. Beat.”

I was used to metal detectors, concertina wire, four-story-tall guard towers. In Wise County, I faced a door I could apparently just open.

On the other side of the door was a wall of five windows, each with a telephone beside it and a red stool bolted to the floor. On the far right was the handicapped station, with no stool but space for a wheelchair on both sides. Except I didn’t have a wheelchair—or any chair. The phone cord didn’t reach, so I had to double over, causing my notebook and photos to spill across the linoleum. Someone made a mistake and cast Lucille Ball in Silence of the Lambs. I crouched and gathered my things as a deputy wheeled Sam to the wheelchair window. I did the hand on the glass thing. He drummed his fingernails on it, then pointed at me, pressing the LEGO-sized buttons on his phone over and over. He began to cuss and get frustrated. You don’t want that.

I wrote on my pad and held it to the glass.

Hang on. I’ll get someone.

I walked out, hollered for the deputy, grabbed a chair on my way back in. I was practically a local.

While we waited, we sat in silence and looked at each other. It was like one of those acting exercises designed to make you uncomfortable, except no one was acting. I smiled and silently prayed—any old prayer I could think of. I even made up one of my own. Sam couldn’t hurt me. He was behind glass.

I wrote in my notebook and held it to the glass.

arraignment?

He nodded.

no more milkshakes?

He laughed. Holland brought him milkshakes. Sam sometimes called me his milkshake.

I took out the McDowell family photos I’d gathered from the linoleum floor and held them to the glass one by one. Fanny and Henry. Paul, Sylvia, Jeminah.

He was shocked and delighted. I showed him photos I’d taken of the main drag and lakefront of Lorain. I didn’t show him the photos of Betty and Inez and me. He didn’t get to see those.

A deputy with forehead acne helped Sam figure out again how to enter the PIN as my beta blocker wore off.

Perv Grandpa, Three-Card Monte, Snake Monster.

He was in Perv Grandpa mode. He wanted to talk all about me and him, him and me, him and Jimmy, me and Jimmy, his new friend Detective Kelly from Cincinnati, the detectives from Miami who brought him oranges. The detectives from Kentucky who brought him BBQ. He wanted me to be sure to understand they were all so thankful to him. Everyone told him how great his art was. They wouldn’t know any of this if it hadn’t been for him.

He’d been having a ball talking about himself, expressing remorse, being right with his creator, being an artist, being a star. Sam’s genuine empathy was only for himself. He lamented that God and the world conspired to give him these desires, but what could he do?

“God gave me a twisted understanding. The basic reason for sex is life, so I got hurt or changed one way or another, and it got tangled with death. No one has the right to judge me but God.”

“You Tupac now?”

The call dropped mid joke.

A Hebrew prayer floated somewhere in the back of my memory like a half-remembered nursery rhyme.

Baruch dayan torat ehmet.

God is the one true judge.

“I’m trying to tell you something,” he yelled. I could hear him, but just barely. “I don’t get angry at girls. Unless they have a very poor disposition on life.”

Who do you get angry at? I wrote on my pad.

“Bullies,” he yelled, his eyes cartoon pinwheels.

He figured the phone out, picked up the handle, and dialed.

I held my final photo to the glass. “Do you know who this is?”

“Is it? Is that Gloria Ferry? How did you get this?”

“Inside Detective, 1954. Tell me about Denise.”

“Who?”

“Denise. Odessa.”

“It wasn’t the strangling. It was the helplessness in the face, the desperation. Let loose and cry in my arms. That’s all I wanted. Cry with me.”

“That sounds like you must have been lonely.”

“Hungry. I didn’t ask to be born liking cake.”