When I last wrote in this blog, I left off on the cusp of Monday May 21, 1984. The next day, Tuesday May 22nd, would be the second anniversary of my marriage to Bertha. We had planned to put off celebrating until my paycheck same on the 24th. Then we would go out to eat. The week went by without anything exceptional that I would have remarked upon had not the events of Wednesday the 23rd and Thursday the 24th.
(Friends, this really hurts to write about. But I must get it in writing, because next moth my annual parole review comes up, and I may be revoked for lack of employment. If I don’t tell what truly happened, the only story in the public forum will be the one concocted by the police and prosecutors to convict me of the heinous crime of which I am a co-victim. That is why it takes so ling for me to post episodes, the trauma being renewed stirs up PTSD, and I need a few weeks to recover.)
On the night of Wednesday May 23rd, Bertha was very tired and laid down to sleep before I left for work. Before I was quite ready, Bert asked me to check to see if her friend Debbie O’Bannon would come over to spend the night. I found Debbie and her boyfriend, Jesse Aranda lounging on the tailgate of Jesse’s truck and talking. When I asked if Debbie was coming to keep Bertha company, the consensus was that there was a possibility if Jesse didn’t spend the night with Debbie. So I passed this on to Bertha, who asked me to leave the door unlocked to allow Debbie to come in if Jesse left. Bertha did not want to have to get out of bed.
I left for work at about five minutes before eleven, trying to get there with enough time to check in and get squared away before I started my shift. I got there a few minutes before shift started at 11:30 PM and filled in my log, checked out my equipment, and asked the outgoing shift if there were any alerts. Just then a secretary came by with a stack of ledger books to place in the office of one Ed Carson in Plaza One. No one could tell me which office was Mr. Carson’s, but I am a Marine and whenever I encounter a problem, it is in my training to try my best to resolve it. So I took the books to Plaza One looking throughout the office suite for the one belonging to Mr. Carson.
The people who worked at the Methodist Church’s Dallas area medical center’s administrative office, The Deadman Medical Center, must have been exceptionally humble. Not one item of identification was on any office door, desk or wall throughout the suite. I must have spent forty minutes looking through drawers and around desks for a name tag or letterhead. Nothing!
Finally I gave up and left the books in a common area where there were a counter and sink, apparently a lunch and break area. At that time I got a radio call from my immediate supervisor, former Maj. Jim Houston, USMC, who wanted me back in the security office so he could escort the pretty nurses going off shift to their cars (there had been a few assaults in the neighborhood, and the nurses were frightened to walk through the dark parking lot alone.).
Immediately I set the alarms and attempted to lock up. It was 12:40 AM, May 24, 1984. As I tried to lock the back door of the plaza, the key that was already cracked decided to break off in the lock. Enough was protruding to grip it with my fingernails, so to avoid anyone using it to open the door, I opted to take the minute longer to extract the broken pieces. Mr. Houston met me at the emergency door to the hospital as I came around the back of the plaza and we went down to the office in the basement while he was castigating me for failure to answer the beeper.
Our beepers were small squares of plastic with a view port on top and two buttons on the face. One of those buttons, when pushed, placed the beeper in silent mode where it recorded calls but didn’t notify the wearer of the incoming call. As I moved around the office suite, I bumped into a lot of furniture. It seems that one of the corners of a desk or table must have hit the right button at the right time to place it in silent mode without my knowledge. When checked, the beeper displayed the two pages and was in silent mode.
No other events of note took place before 7:00 AM when the alarm in Plaza Two went off. Plaza Two housed a pharmacy, and management was especially worried that there would be an attempt to raid it for drugs. So we took any alarms in that plaza very seriously. It turned out that the cardiologist in the plaza had come in early and never bothered to inform us so we could shunt the alarm for him.
The shift ended and I went home, tired but expecting to get my paycheck and take my beloved out for dinner to celebrate our two years of marriage. I arrived a bit after 8:05 AM, to find the door closed only part way and not truly latched, even though it was locked. Upon entering the door I noticed the apartment was in a shambles with the contents of my wife’s purse, the closets and the trunk we used in lieu of a table all strewn about the floor. All the closet doors were open, the kitchen cabinets and drawers too.
Deborah was awake and playing in her pen that doubled as her bed until we could get our furniture. Her diaper was full but we had no more Pampers in stock. So I went to find Bertha to discuss using one of the cloth diapers until I could get my paycheck and buy new Pampers. When I entered the master bedroom, the first thing I noticed is the bed, devoid of all bedclothes, but with a huge red stain in the middle of the top part of the mattress. A pile of clothes, the ones Bert had just washed the evening before and left folded in the hamper overnight, was in the middle of the floor, and Bert’s legs were sticking out of the pile.
At this point I knew something happened to Bert, but I didn’t know if she were alive or not. So I dug out her body from the pile of clothes and pealed back the sheets she was shrouded in only to be assaulted by the sight of my beloved’s face brutally marred with many wounds and a knife protruding from her neck. My mind refused to accept the vision and assumed the knife was in her mouth. I gripped the handle lightly and flung the knife into the pile of clothes, then reached for Bert’s right carotid artery to check for a pulse. When I did, my fingers entered one of the wounds on her neck and sank to the second knuckle in her cold meat.
The world receded and I could hear the blood in my own arteries as I went into shock myself. I wanted to cry, by tears were dammed up and everything I saw seemed to be on the other side of a glass wall, like I was in a terrarium. My training kicked in and I rose to report to the local authorities. I used the terminology that I had been taught to use in a crime scene. But my shocked mind kept dredging up useless trivia to distract me from the horror I had witnessed. One of the things my mind dredged up was the memory of Krystalnacht, The Night of Broken Glass, when the Nazi Brown Shirts vandalized the homes and businesses of Jews throughout Germany and beat them in their beds, many of them to death. I couldn’t help comparing my beloved to those victems.
I trudged to the home of Debbie and Jan, Bert’s friends, to use the telephone, and called the Grand Prairie, TX police to report Bertha’s murder and get the ball rolling. I was so out of myself I cannot clearly recall what I said or did, but I know I wanted to try one more time to revive Bertha. So I returned to my apartment and Jan followed. While Jan cared for Deborah, I returned to the bedroom and cried over Bertha while gently asking her to wake. I placed my hand over her heart and prayed that God would restore its rhythm, but Bertha didn’t have enough blood left in her body for her heart to move. At some point during my prayer, Jan showed up at the door and said, “Don’t touch anything.”
I answered, “I already messed up the scene. Besides, I have to do this.” Then I finished my prayer and pleading with Bert.
Officer Richard Bender, now a full Detective, responded to the call about 8:40 AM. When Jan announced the police were here, I picked up the knife that I had thrown and carried it out to him on my palms, trying not to smear any evidence on it. I told Bender what the scene looked like when I arrived and that I was a fool to mess it up. Then I offered some conclusions, trying to keep my mind from the reality of the horror in the room. Bender ignored everything I told him unless he could spin it into testimony to use against me in court.
When the detectives, Junkin and Rhodes, showed up, Junkin told me that the police received a string of prowler calls the night before, but they don’t respond to prowler calls. If they did so, my beloved may have still been alive when I returned home. Once the detective lieutenant arrived, the investigation turned hostile toward me. The detectives asked me to come with them to “make a statement” at the police station. They claimed I was not under arrest, but I was not free to go get my paycheck to buy diapers and formula for my daughter. Remember this when I tell you about the trial.
From 9:45 AM until 4:30 PM, the detectives tag-teamed me to sweat a confession out of me. I was trained by the United States Marine Corps to withstand the torture techniques of the Communists who were our enemies at the time. So the mental torture of the police was not irresistible, in spite of the fact that I had not slept in more than thirty-six hours nor eaten in more than twenty-four hours, by the time the “questioning” was through. At one time, Detective Rhodes, a former Navy swift boat sailor from the Viet Nam war, took me into the pipe chase behind the cell block to beat a confession out of me. Realizing that my life was in danger, I stood in a non-threatening Akido stance to await whatever happened. I am not trained in Akido, but I do know how to stand and how to bluff. Rhodes took a second look at me and how big and ready I was for anything he might do, and decided to forgo the beating.
Detective Junkin tried to belittle my faith, and suggested I had voices from God telling me to kill my own wife. I told him he was sick in the head himself and ought to get help for it. I was then turned over to another detective, a devout Catholic, who tried to get me to lie based on the spiritual angle of confession. I realized, however, that the stricture against bearing false witness applies to false confessions. So the detectives finally gave up trying to shake my self discipline, and took down the statement that I had been making all along. Then they announced that they caught me in a lie and placed me under arrest.
At no time did the detectives make a serious attempt to identify the two prowlers that were reported the night before. Nor were they willing to consider the connection between the prowlers and the murder of my wife. It wasn’t until after they told me I was arrested that they allowed me to call anyone, although they did let me talk to my mother-in-law, whom they had called, to see if she could make me confess. She tried to trap me by asking me if I had raped Bertha after I killed her. I answered the underlying question, no I didn’t kill her, but the call was not recorded and my mother-in-law twisted the words in court to make it sound as though I told her I killed Bertha.
I remained in the city jail until Monday, even though it was a holiday, when they moved me to the county jail and had my first arraignment. I was appointed Mark Stoltz, who now sits on the Federal bench, to defend me. He assumed I was guilty, and when I insisted upon my innocence, he ignored my input. When he finally did tell me something about the case against me, I informed him that the primary witnesses were lying because the first wasn’t there and his wife was only parroting his story. Stoltz never investigated the truth.
In my next post, I will tell you of the trial that lasted four days and led to me spending thirty-two and a half years incarcerated for a crime that I was a co-victim of. Under Texas law, if a murder is committed during the commission of another felony, it is a capital offense to be punished by the death of the murderer. A capital crime was committed in my apartment that morning, by the State couldn’t charge me with it because it is fundamentally impossible to burglarize your own home. While I sat in the county jail, I received a three-months subscription to the Dallas Times Herald, now defunct. I counted fifty cases in that time in which people were murdered with the same modis opperendi as my beloved. I couldn’t help but wonder how many people would be alive if the police responded to prowler calls and made arrests for trespassing before the murders were committed.
Ol’ Fuzzy is not employable and was denied for disability benefits. The only thing I have is the blogs. But I don’t qualify for ads on the blogs until there is enough traffic on the blogs to interest advertisers (20,000 hits per month). If you like the scribbles I post, please help me keep it going. First, share, share, share. The more people who know about the blogs, the more who will visit them. And you can leave me a gratuity by dropping a buck or two in Ol' Fuzzy's Tip Jar. This is a PayPal account I opened on Wednesday, April 5, 2017.
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