Buried Memories (20 page)

They sat in O’Brien’s paneled office, putting the finishing touches on the search and arrest warrants. His office appeared tailored. On the walls hung numerous framed plaques and awards. It had a neat, orderly, no-nonsense look compared to Rose’s wild animal kingdom.

A secretary came in to compile the material for typing the warrants.

“You guys look tired,” she said. “I can’t believe the time you’ve put into this case.”

“Don’t worry about us,” Rose said. “A dog in the hunt don’t know he’s got fleas.”

She laughed, then said, “Do your wives keep pictures of you so they can remember what you look like?”

After she left, Rose said, “Let’s not let on we enjoy what we do. We’d stop getting sympathy.”

A moment later, the same secretary buzzed O’Brien. The sheriff’s office had forwarded a phone number with a message for Rick Rose to call Ray Bone.

Bone had been waiting at a pay phone. He immediately picked up when Rose called.

“What’s happening?” Rose said into the receiver.

“We’re still over here near my brother’s,” Bone told him, “but we’re getting ready to leave.”

“What route are you taking?” Rose asked.

“We’re picking up Highway 287 north of Mansfield, heading south.”

“If you’d come down 635, I could meet you,” Rose said.

“Nah. I’m coming down 287. It’s about thirty minutes faster.”

“Okay, can you be a little more precise about when you’ll be leaving?”

“Probably around eight or so. In just a few minutes.”

“Is Betty overhearing our conversation?”

Bone sighed. “You got that right.”

At eight-fifteen on a clear morning outside of Mansfield, Texas, the police dispatcher broadcast a 10-29, an urgent message to all officers in the area: “Be on the lookout for a red-and-white Chevrolet pickup bearing Texas license plate KJ 3409. The truck was last seen traveling southbound on Highway 287 from J. Rendon Road. Occupant is Betty Beets. There’s a warrant on her from the Athens Sheriff’s Office for murder. She’s possibly armed.”

Two Mansfield police officers, Wallace and Hostettler, moved their squad cars to the bridge on East Broad that spanned the highway. They could sit there with an expansive view of the road beneath them and wait for Betty’s truck, then notify officers on the highway. Other officers in the area headed to the same location. In less than ten minutes, Hostettler radioed that the red-and-white truck had just passed below them.

A quarter of a mile north of Willow Bend, three Mansfield police cars, with lights flashing, caught up with the truck, and surrounded it. The officers motioned the driver to the side of the road.

Bone opened the driver’s door, and an officer said, “Both of you, get out with your hands up.”

Once Ray Bone and Betty stood in the bright sunlight with their hands raised, they were told to step back toward the patrol units, one at a time. Two officers reached out and clamped handcuffs on both of them; then an officer took out his printed card to read the Miranda warning.

Before the officer began the first line, Betty blurted out, “This couldn’t have anything to do with my husband’s drowning, could it?”

The officer fought to ignore her and finished Miran-daizing them, while another officer quickly wrote the words she had spoken.

The police began searching their vehicle and discovered a high-standard, .22-caliber, two-shot derringer under the front seat, a .22-caliber, one-shot derringer under the floorboard, and three boxes of ammunition. Various bags of clothing, along with some jewelry and beer cans were also found.

The Henderson County Sheriff’s Office had told the Mansfield police, “We aren’t requesting a hold on the vehicle. Just confiscate all the weapons.”

An officer checked with the dispatcher and learned that Athens didn’t want to arrest Raymond Bone, so they unlocked his handcuffs.

Ray rubbed the circulation back into his wrists, and turned to Betty. The officers were filling out her arrest forms. During that serious moment, she showed no emotion, but occasionally glanced at Ray.

Then in the middle of the highway, Betty turned her truck over to Ray—the truck that had belonged to Jimmy Don. Ray hugged her before an officer pulled her away and led her to a squad car. They whisked her off to the Mansfield Police Department jail, where she was booked, photographed, and fingerprinted. Before being placed in a holding cell, a judge set her bond at $100,000. Then they waited for Deputy Rick Rose.

Deputy Herman Kite had been sent to Cherokee Shores when Bobby Branson decided to run off Ray Bone, in what everyone now called the “shoot-out.” Kite was in the office when the call came from Ray Bone that he and Betty would soon climb into her truck and take Highway 287.

The deputies would normally assume that Betty would come back to the lake area because of her family, but now with what they knew of Betty, her children might not be enough incentive for her to return. She could go anywhere.

Once the Mansfield police notified the sheriff’s office that Betty had been locked up, Rick Rose asked Deputy Kite to accompany him to retrieve Betty and bring her back to Henderson County.

Since the case had dragged on for two years, many of the other deputies looked skeptically at Rose as he left to collect Betty. Rose had invited a couple of the deputies to accompany him, but they gave him a “We’ll believe it when we see it” glance.

The trip to Mansfield took an hour and thirty minutes, past the southern tip of Cedar Creek Lake. They crossed miles of rolling pastureland before reaching Mansfield.

Rick Rose didn’t doubt that it would be the mean Betty who greeted them when the police unlocked her cell. He couldn’t have been more correct. At first, Betty shot him a hateful look. Her chin jutted out and her mouth clamped shut.

All the way back to Athens, her mouth stayed locked. They only saw a reaction when Betty occasionally flashed them a hostile glare.

Sheriff Charlie Fields ran the jail for Henderson County—one of his many jobs. He had long known of Betty Beets, ever since he went to inspect her husband’s boat that stormy night at the lake. Now the slick woman was locked in a cell in the county jail, a separate building from the sheriff’s office.

Fields had spent three years in the navy and he’d been told by his deputies that Betty knew swear words that he probably hadn’t heard. Fields wanted to talk with her and make sure she understood the jailhouse rules.

He had Betty brought into the interrogation quarters where he could sit at a desk with her. She came in wearing handcuffs and white jail garb, which consisted of a rough cotton shirt and drawstring pants.

Shields took the chair opposite her. She smiled as he sat down.

“Just want to lay down the ground rules, Mrs. Beets,” he said.

“Yes, sir,” she said demurely.

“We don’t allow any profanity in this jail.”

“Oh no, sir.”

“And we won’t put up with any sloppiness.”

“I always like things as neat as a pin,” she replied, quite honestly.

“Okay. Now we expect you to be cooperative here and not cause a ruckus.”

“No, sir. That’s not my way.”

He told her the time she would be expected to get up, when meals would be served, and other intricacies of jail routine.

“All right then,” he said. “I’m glad you understand how things are going to be.” He left the room after a guard took Betty back to her cell.

“How’d it go?” a deputy asked Fields as he left the jail.

Fields smiled and said, “Just fine. She’s a cute lady.”

Judge Jack Holland had great respect for Michael O’Brien. He knew him to be meticulous about legal procedures, as well as a completely honest person, so he wasn’t overly concerned with the request for an evidentiary search warrant. O’Brien had personally carried it into the judge’s spacious, carpeted office for his signature.

The judge sat back in his leather chair and read the document.

“This is good, Mike.”

“We got lucky with an informant,” O’Brien said.

“And I see you have collaborating testimony from a family member.”

“Yes. We’ve substantiated the informant’s testimony by interviewing two people. Here’s Gerald Albright’s signed affidavit,” he said, reaching across the judge’s dark mahogany desk. “He’s the man Betty told about killing and burying her husband.”

Holland perused the documents. “I think you’ve covered all your bases,” he said as he signed the warrant.

A guard unlocked Betty’s cell to again take her to one of the rooms lawyers used to converse with their clients. This time she would talk with Michael O’Brien.

O’Brien waited for Betty to be brought in. Once she entered, he said, “I’ve got this search warrant Judge Holland signed so we can look for the body of Jimmy Don Beets.”

Betty looked blankly at him, not appearing interested.

“We’re going out to your property on Cherokee Shores and you’re sure welcome to come along.”

She shook her head.

“You could help by telling us where the body is buried so we don’t have to dig up your whole yard. We’re taking a backhoe with us.”

She shook her head again, almost in an unconcerned manner.

“While we’re out there, we’re going to look for Doyle Wayne Barker’s body too. Would you like to come along?”

Betty’s blue eyes flew open, turned black, and shot daggers at O’Brien. “I want my lawyer!”

O’Brien looked into those eyes and found it easy to read Betty’s mind. She must have figured that investigators had put two and two together, he reasoned, and it now became a whole different ball game.

“You’re sure welcome to come with us if you like.”

“No!” Betty shut her lips and raised her chin. “I want my lawyer,” she hissed. “That’s all I’m sayin’.”

NINETEEN

The crowd stood anxiously on the street, restrained by the crime-scene tape the deputies had strung. By now the investigators’ reason for digging up the yard had spread throughout the multitude, and murmurings of “I knew it all along,” flowed from lips of people who hadn’t known anything.

A warm wind blew across the lake, but it offered only slight relief. When the crowd realized the investigators would soon be recovering bodies, the scene chilled them more than anything else could.

After the sun had set and the sky grew dark, the fire department brought in portable generators and lit the grounds to daylight brightness. With such visibility, the deputies worked to shroud the investigators’ activities from the onlookers. Once the deputies extracted the sleeping bag supposedly containing Jimmy Don Beets, Michael O’Brien stepped forward. With forensic expert Charles Linch at his side, O’Brien inspected the bag and saw what he believed to be human bones. When he found the skull, he knew. Another deputy encased the remains in a body bag to guard against contaminating the evidence.

Deputy Ron Shields found the proceedings anything but boring, even though his job was to sift dirt from the graves to make sure that bullets or bone fragments were not overlooked. He discovered a bullet in the dirt under Beets’s grave that had worked its way out of the rotted hole. When he revealed his find, he received high fives and pats on the back. Thanks to his diligence, another important piece of the puzzle filled a gap in the case.

After deputies had picked Jimmy Don’s grave clean, O’Brien ordered the backhoe driver to move the machine to the rear of the property. There, the machine crunched toward the eight-by-twelve-foot shed and knocked it over. It landed in one piece. A sunken spot under the shed became readily apparent in the spotlights’ glare.

O’Brien directed the deputies’ shovels toward that area. They had to dig deeper than for the first grave, since Wayne Barker did not lie atop the ground as Jimmy Don had. But having tasted success, the deputies’ enthusiasm drove them to keep shoveling.

Ben Ashley, always carrying his camera, continued flashing pictures, and O’Brien’s wife took copious notes of the proceedings. She was a probation officer, but liked to assist her husband on special cases. They had dropped off their children at their grandparents’ for the evening so she could be free. She listed every graphic detail to convince the trial jury of the premeditation of the two murders.

Four feet under the ground, deputies uncovered a flatter-looking sleeping bag, although the bag itself was identical to the first one. Four years of decomposing had obviously reduced Wayne Barker to virtually a skeleton. Some bones were still tangled by tendons, plus a wrapping of flesh in a few places. Barker’s black hair had slipped from his skull, but his own natural teeth remained in place. When the deputies lifted the bag onto a gurney, the disconnected bones gathered essentially to one end of the sleeping bag.

O’Brien again inspected the bag and turned it over to the medical examiner. After both victims were in body bags, deputies transported them to a waiting ambulance. The curious crowd parted to allow the vehicle access to the road, and onto the highway back to Dallas.

Reporters in the street roamed the area, asking questions of neighbors, and trying to find people who would admit to knowing Betty Beets.

The residents of the Cedar Creek community were relieved when reporters told them of Betty’s arrest. One woman related how she had forced her young son to take karate lessons to protect himself from Betty’s family.

“And those friends of hers that were always hanging around!” another neighbor complained. “They were the boot-stomping, cowboy-hat, pickup-truck kind of people.”

Mrs. Rosenberg, who lived down the street, said, “I walk my dog, Bubblegum, along here every night, and he about tore my arms out of their sockets trying to get over to that well. He used to sniff like crazy before I could pull him away and get on with our walk. Guess he knew something I didn’t.”

“Her arrest doesn’t surprise me one bit,” said a man who requested that his name not be used. “Betty moved into this area four years ago and look at this,” he said gesturing toward the yard. “Turned it into a killing field. The whole family’s had a history of gunfights and disturbances.”