WISE COUNTY LAW ENFORCEMENT CENTER, DECATUR, TEXAS
OCTOBER 2018, DAY 2
At the center of the town square in Decatur, Texas, population 6,482, stands a red granite Victorian courthouse with terra-cotta ornamentation, a spire, and a bell tower.
On the surrounding streets, clusters of Victorians gave way to neat seventies brick boxes or gated communities of matching stone McMansions. The usual big-box chains and drive-throughs hugged the edges of the highway. Just a few blocks south, horses grazed in bucolic fields, turned their heads toward the wind, and tossed their manes.
My best trick in a strange town: buy something. Walk into any shop, let someone help you, and then spend money. You might leave with not just a new throw pillow but also town gossip, ghost stories, the best restaurant around, the number of someone to call if you need an emergency manicure on a Sunday.
In Decatur, the cowboy hat shop seemed a logical place to start. I’d grab some cute hats for the boys. Biggar Hat Store wasn’t exactly a store full of cute hats. It was more like Coco Chanel collided with the mayor of Deadwood an hour north of Dallas. Biggar’s was a family business that custom-made felt and straw hats by hand. They were out of my price range at that exact moment, but the one in turquoise felt is still on my birthday wish list. The guys working there were sympathetic to my plight and proud of the shop. They not only scrounged up a couple of kid hats but also gave me a tour of where they hand-made the good stuff, with brass steampunk equipment that looked like if you turned the dial the right way, you got a beautiful hat, but the wrong way, you conjured an ancient demon. A shop called 287 down the street had great jewelry, A-game throw pillows, and an owner who used to live an hour away from my house in LA.
I spend money in places I’m trying to understand not just as a conversation starter but because money is a big piece of understanding. I also know you don’t get anything for free. If you want to understand the cash value of our time on this planet, spend months on end hearing about the final breaths of prostitute after prostitute.
By the time I got to the coffee shop, I was so hungry I practically chopped and snorted the signature grilled cheese while I locked eyes with a mounted deer head in a baseball cap above the espresso machine. Whimsical hand-painted western murals covered the walls. The bearded barista could have been from Williamsburg. I did the last of my local research, counting the minutes until I’d have to cut bait on getting the Holland interview, stop reading about the Great Hanging at Gainesville in 1871, and head back to DFW.
I spent my last few minutes studying the entrance requirements for the Wise County Hog Contest on the corkboard by the bathrooms. It ran throughout the month of February and had an elaborate list of rules, including the following highlights:
*DO NOT GUT THE HOGS! WEIGHT WILL BE HOG AS A WHOLE!*
**$20 Side Pot on the Longest Cutter—Winner Takes All**
Polygraph will be given in order to receive prize money. The polygraph fee will come out of the winnings! If there is any discrepancy in the polygraph, there will be a vote between the 2 coordinators of the contest, a local game warden, and an outside party of what will be done.
NO BS!!! We don’t want to hear drama about other teams and bickering back and forth.
If you have legitimate proof a team is cheating or a possibility, please let us know, but no need to keep calling every day.
All late sign ups will be online unless you are not computer savy [sic]!!!
I hadn’t come to Decatur to ponder the relative benefits of a polygraph test for a hog contest, though that was an unexpected perk. I’d worked hard prepping the Ranger interview. I was disappointed.
He texted when I was already a mile down the road.
Have 10 minutes now.
OMW.
The second time I walked into the Wise County Law Enforcement Center, they were used to me. A woman in leggings and Reeboks led me to a conference room where Holland sat at the head of a long table, back to the door. I’d never known a detective, criminal, or gambler other than Holland who sat with their back to the door.
Holland joined the Texas Department of Public Safety in 1995, worked as a highway patrol trooper, served as a security detail for Texas governor George W. Bush during his campaign for president, and was the state criminal interdiction coordinator and El Paso Intelligence Center instructor for the DEA.
The list alone made me need an edible.
He’d told me he was the one who had made sure all that grass I smoked wasn’t soaked in gasoline.
You’re welcome, young lady.
Along the way, with all the work with the TX DPS, he’d also met Beyoncé, Chuck Norris, and Destiny’s Child before pulling on his Ranger boots in 2007.
Dazzle camouflage was used on certain battleships during both world wars, vessels painted with complex patterns of geometric shapes in contrasting colors, the art of war. By making no attempt to blend into the sea and sky around them, dazzle-painted ships strategically challenged the enemy’s ability to estimate a target’s range, speed, and direction, causing them to take a poor firing position.
While you were being dazzled by the hat, this cowboy would outdraw you, seize your narcotics, get you to confess, and then make you sell your mother up the river. The last part was just for fun.
Furthermore, he’d figured out how to get away with doing all that and still manage to be a respectable member of society. Helluva guy was what nearly everyone I talked to said about him. Holland was collecting a gallery wall of award plaques, including the 2017 Texas Department of Public Safety Officers Association Peace Officer of the Year Award and the Governor Clements Award for Career Excellence.
I thanked him for giving me some time.
“Not a problem. I find the way you think entertaining.”
That was probably true. He was anything but a boring guy. But he was a former DEA agent who talked like a square. His enjoyment of extreme sports didn’t necessarily make him a fan of “entertaining” thinkers.
Holland worked with the Texas Ranger Unsolved Crimes Investigation Program. Created in 2001, according to the Texas DPS website, “The program’s primary objective is to provide Texas law enforcement agencies with a process for investigating unsolved murders or what appear to be serial or linked criminal transactions. Since there is no statute of limitations on the offense of murder, the state has the moral and statutory obligation to pursue these cases to a successful resolution; or until no other lead is viable.”
Holland was the lead investigator or assisted the detectives on cases that screamed “psycho.” Extra credit for sexually motivated serial killers, ritual murder, strangulation, and dismemberment. The sick, sexual, gruesome, unimaginable shit that gives you nightmares is his wheelhouse. How many people do you meet in life with the same niche interests?
Some of Holland’s more notable cases include the following:
Holland closed the binder in front of him. Beyond the binder was a drawing for me from Sam. Audrey Nelson.
“Sammy said he was hoping you’d wear a black dress, so I was sure it was going to go well last night. Oh, and he wants those family pictures.”
I took the photos out of my purse and placed them on the table.
“Look, I’m sorry. I’ve been working around the clock for a month. I told you I’d talk to you, and I keep my promises. I gotta bounce soon because my kid has a game.” He pushed the drawing toward me, commenting offhandedly, “I look at these drawings or the confessions, and when we match them, I notice the same thing about them he does. The odd detail.”
Holland had grown up just west of Chicago. After he’d graduated from the University of Louisville with his master’s in business administration, he got a tech job and wound up doing some work for the governor’s Fugitive Task Force in Austin. They goaded him, telling him he should quit that boring shit and come be a trooper.
The pay was ridiculously low, but he applied for the heck of it…and didn’t get the job.
A good fight flipped his switch. He applied again, made state trooper, and asked where he could get into the worst stuff. They sent him to Houston, and that hit the spot. He’d moved to Wise County when it was time to start a family.
We talked about the possibilities and fallibilities of new forensic technologies. He walked me through the Brothers case. I asked about DNA.
“None.”
“You don’t have any on Brothers?”
“Nothing. Nothing on most of these cases. DNA degrades. There were no rape kits. Old evidence gets lost or damaged or destroyed. Without proving up these confessions, we got nothing. Brothers was a ViCAP match, not DNA.”
I was speechless—a rare occurrence. I’d assumed many of these cases had been connected to Sam through CODIS in the same way he’d been connected to the three confirmed Los Angeles cases. It was the other way around—the confessions might point to DNA, if there even was any.
Holland had gone into the first interview with a strong-looking Texas case, an indulgent major, and FBI support behind him. No one does this work alone, but he had spearheaded and implemented the effort on sheer will. Never have I been as grateful for a loquacious mansplain about how to talk to criminals. I recalibrated as he spoke. It was an entirely new approach to cold cases.
“So many investigators fail before they start. You warm people up, take your time. It’d be like sex without foreplay. How long would it take for you to tell your darkest secret?”
“Me? However long it takes to write a book about it.”
Note: the ranger does not appreciate jokes.
“Christie said you told them to set their watches for an hour and a half to get Sam to start talking. That doesn’t seem like much foreplay for serial murder.”
Holland was also so that guy who asks questions, then answers them.
“So when you’re warming him up, how does that look? Someone with this personality, you can’t force them; you can’t drive them; you can’t step on them; you can’t push them, because they’re going to push back. So you can ask, and then let it be. I gave him time. I said to him, ‘Man, secrets are cool. But they’re only really cool when you get to tell someone.’”
He leaned back, crossed one brown boot over a khaki knee, and tented his fingers in front of his chest, like he was planning a takeover of Gotham City.
“What makes you good at this?” I asked.
“Trial and error. Tenacity. Rapport. Normal interviewing techniques don’t work. I come up with a way to communicate. Why am I good at it? I don’t know. I guess it’s who I am. It’s easy with him, I don’t hate Sammy. Reece, Shore…”
Shore was sentenced to death in 2004 and executed by lethal injection on January 18, 2018.
“Did you attend his execution?”
“I was going to, but my son had a game. Couldn’t justify it. By state law, a Ranger has to be at every execution. Good friend of mine stationed in Huntsville was there. Been to over a hundred. You should talk to him. I wanted to see Shore die, if that gives you any indication of who he was. If you went to some of these scenes or met some of these perps, you’d have no issue with the death penalty.”
“What makes you think I have an issue with the death penalty?”
He tilted his head and waited for the next question.
I asked about the first confessions.
“So day one is truth, day two is pow: states, towns, numbers of victims. We left there with thirty or something!”
“Did you believe him?”
“Oh yeah, oh yeah. We’d already hit some that were dead on. I went way out into left field to keep Odessa alive.”
Ector County DA Bobby Bland told Holland he wanted absolutely everything before he would decide whether to convene a grand jury. Holland ran it up the flagpole and fast to get the evidence to a Lubbock lab for an M-Vac, or wet vacuum, a DNA collection tool that allows for more DNA to be collected, such as touch DNA or from porous surfaces. It’s a valuable tool for giving cold cases a second chance. Just not Denise’s.
“Lubbock lab, end of the day, we didn’t get shit: fingernails, panties, nothing. DA still not sold—doesn’t mean shit until we prove it up. The whole area is totally different today. I got a Texas Ranger in Odessa to find the original VCR tape of the crime scene. We found this rail—this rail he perfectly describes in the confession. The DA goes for it. I’m getting ready to head to Odessa in my own truck, and my dad is going through this chemo. He’s sitting there looking a little depressed. I said, ‘You want to come to Odessa?’ Now, that’s a shit drive. He’s a quiet guy, hasn’t been feeling well. He thinks about it, nods his head. He rides with me and waits around the corner, reading at a diner.”
Holland described watching a woman on the grand jury cry when faced with the Brothers crime scene photos and being struck for the first time by the emotional impact of the case.
“I’m black and white, logical, task oriented. By the time I meet the victims, they’re inanimate. If it’s your family member? You want the cold-hearted SOB who has a task at the end of the day. You’re doing them no service by praying with them and crying over the grave. They want the guy, or gal, who’s going to go out there and work with blinders. Who’s not affected by this horrible crime or the pain the families go through. To be effective, to continue to do what homicide investigators do, you have to wall it off.”
“How does it affect your relationships?”
“I try not to let it affect anything. I’m the garbage man. I’m the one who deals with what other people don’t want to deal with. People can read about it in generalities and know about it, but do they ever understand it? No. I don’t think you want them to. It’s not for them. Are you going to go home and tell your kids about how Sam talks about killing someone? It’s not a conversation piece, y’know. It’s not healthy.”
A silver fox of a cowboy with a pressed pink shirt and checked tie stood by the water cooler outside the windows of the conference room and gave me a hard once-over. I guessed he was the boss.
“After they indicted, I talked the whole time in the car. I got to Abilene; I couldn’t even eat. Warrant, extradition, California timeline. Let’s go. There’s the yin and yang—here’s my dad sick, and here’s Little on the horizon.” He clapped his hands together, “Okay, I really gotta go.”
I didn’t know the guy’s dad, but I know as a parent, you give so many speeches about the importance of losing gracefully. It is important. Winning is more fun. I bet it was cool for Holland’s dad to see his kid win.
“So what do you think about families seeing the recordings later? When you ask him, who’s the ugliest bitch he ever killed? Who’s the girl with the fattest ass? When you write their profession down as ho and go all ‘no shit? no way!’ and all that?”
“I think they’ll be grateful it got solved. I’m an athlete. I know how to talk like that. He wants me to talk like that. People who talk to him straight, he’s bored. Next? I tell these investigators, don’t go in there all thinking he’s doing it for the families or he has remorse. He isn’t and he doesn’t. He’s having fun.”
“He said you think I talk too much, and you prefer girls with great big knockers.”
“Got ya thinking, didn’t it? Got you a little bit mad. You’ve been sitting here the whole time waiting to bring up the great big knockers. He got ya.”
“He got me, but you said it.”
“What’s that quote about rough men?” he asked.
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf? That one?”
“Close.”
I shook hands with the watercooler silver fox on my way out.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, ma’am. Lane Akin, sheriff of Wise County.”
Hey now, I was a ma’am, not a young lady. The sheriff gave me a wink that made me blush. The ethos of the Texas Rangers probably belonged in a museum. They weren’t unsophisticated or unaware of that. They didn’t find me surprising after three minutes. They wished I wasn’t there, but I was.
Holland kicked around an iconography that essentially justified violent colonialism. Then again, I couldn’t let go of a garage-wall-length closet of pristine burlesque costumes I hadn’t looked at in fifteen years.
Some selves are a lot to let go of.