Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (9 page)

"Huh?" Jeff asked.

"These tablets," the editor
continued. "I don't believe they came from Iberia."

Jeff shook his head and asked, "OK,
where are they from?"

The editor just sighed and pointed toward the
heavens.

"Of course," said Jeff. "I should
have known."

He then spent the next week calling
so-called authorities on UFOs for their reaction to discovery of
these tablets. Finally, a former astronaut agreed these had to be
from outer space. So his story ran with a headline: "Tablets from
Outer Space Discovered in New England?" His first paragraph
featured the astronaut as a primary source on the meaning of these
tablets. Then, the rest of the story cited the anthropologists and
their theory on Iberian origins. Anyone with half-a-brain reading
past the first paragraph would glean information of anthropological
significance and likely chuckle at the UFO link that had attracted
their attention in the first place. Jeff's point had applications
anywhere in the news business. Every editor or publisher has their
own agenda. But it is possible to compromise and finesse your
assignment so that somehow everyone is satisfied with the result,
and, most importantly, the readers receive the information they
need to carry on with their lives.

As a stimulant for
finding scoops,
The Enquirer
employed a bounty system. It paid a hundred-dollar
fee to anyone—staffer, reader or kook—who suggested an idea that
eventually became a published story, even if someone else ended up
writing it. Many staffers spent their weekends sitting in the local
library pouring through arcane medical and scientific journals,
seeking overlooked footnotes on potentially exciting breakthroughs
and discoveries that might turn into articles of public
significance. I got caught up in the frenzy for generating story
ideas, and, when I returned to Houston, I put it to work at
The Post
, listing all
sorts of ideas for local stories that might turn into something
there.

I didn't have long
to wait for that habit to pay off with what would be the strongest
story I ever reported, one that would see me nominated for a
Pulitzer Prize. That adventure began when I convinced my editors
at
The Post
to let
me research a story on old men in Texas prisons. I didn't really
know what I would find. But roaming around the geriatrics ward at
TDC's hospital behind The Walls in Huntsville, I struck up a
conversation with an addled eighty-three-year-old con named Gene
Winchester who couldn't even remember why he was there. Checking
his file a little later to get the facts, I saw that he had
received a fifty-year sentence in 1918 for murder. I did a quick
calculation and realized he'd actually been locked up for
fifty-eight years with no mention in his file of additional crimes.
I showed the discrepancy to the prison bosses and waited several
days for an explanation.

When it arrived, that explanation
revealed a more interesting problem. Winchester had killed another
inmate in 1920, and, instead of charging him in that crime, the
prison simply shipped him off to the state mental hospital in Rusk,
where he sat until 1968. He returned to TDC that year as part of a
clearance at the hospital, and the state's attorney general had
decreed he would not receive credit for the forty-eight years in
Rusk. Not only had Winchester been lost in the system for several
generations, he still had several more to serve. Although the state
had locked him up since 1918 on a fifty-year term, official records
showed he had served only ten of those years. I had exposed a
bureaucratic mess with no apparent solution that triggered cries of
outrage from legislators and penal reform advocates. It also drew a
phone call from a woman who claimed Winchester as her "Uncle
Gene"—a family icon believed to have died in prison forty years
before.

Eager to take
Winchester's story further, I buckled down and negotiated his
release by brokering a deal between the Social Security
Administration, the Board of Pardons and Paroles, and a nursing
home south of Houston. The Board agreed to release him on parole
while Social Security determined him eligible for special benefits.
The nursing home offered a room. Within a month, I was back in
Huntsville covering the release of Gene Winchester. He worried me a
bit when I asked him about his plans only to hear him say with a
sickening grin: "Goin' to find me a woman." I recognized him as a
strong and healthy specimen for his age and wondered,
What have I done
?

After arriving in Huntsville
fifty-eight years before in a horse-drawn cart, Winchester left
with me in a car driving sixty miles per hour down an interstate
highway. He had missed everything in the century, including women's
lib. But he was destined to live several more years in that home
without incident. Winning Winchester's release easily ranked as the
high point in my reporting career. Besides the satisfaction of
seeing justice properly done and helping an old man land a few
years of rest before his death, I also gleaned greater appreciation
for my powers as a journalist.

Although I didn't win the Pulitzer,
the nomination alone was an accolade that continued to impress
acquaintances even more than the awards I actually did collect in
the next couple of years to follow, inspired to new ambitions by my
experience getting an old man out of prison.

Unfortunately, however, I would
soon become more widely known for something else. Just once now, I
would enjoy walking into a bar and hearing someone say, "Yeah,
you're the guy who was nominated for the Pulitzer on that
Winchester story." Instead, I usually only hear, "Yeah, you're guy
who got messed up with that Mehaffey bitch."

TWELVE

Late 1970s

Early in 1977 I
received the assignment most responsible for placing me
professionally on a collision course with Catherine Mehaffey.
That's when
The Post
made me its criminal courthouse beat reporter, a job I had
wanted since first arriving in Houston. Although the issues and
basic elements were the same as I had seen covering courts in
Flint, the system in Houston magnified the challenge and the
adventure the way shopping in an urban mall would dwarf a trip to
the neighborhood convenience store.

On its most basic level the
physical demands of the beat were daunting. Just as in Flint, I was
responsible for reporting all the important criminal court action
in the county. While Flint's Genesee County was small enough to
conduct its business in one building among six judges, Houston's
Harris County system operated in multiple buildings with at least
thirty separate judges dispensing justice every day. That system
had just been expanded to reflect Houston's oilpatch-boomtown
atmosphere and the crimes that entailed. Besides the regularly
appointed and elected judges, the county also employed a number of
part-time, or what it called "visiting judges," to handle
additional cases and keep the treadmill rolling. As a result, it
was nearly impossible to monitor all the courts like some
omniscient chronicler of current history. Some days I would pass a
room that had served as a broom closet just one week before only to
find inside some retired judge from West Texas sitting as a visitor
while a prosecutor, defense attorney, and a defendant haggled over
a plea bargain. In addition to the courtrooms, I also had to
monitor general activities of the district attorney's office, grand
jury proceedings, and the defense attorneys who moved through the
building while also tracking broader, big picture issues of crime
and punishment.

In that era, one of the biggest
issues on my plate involved the death penalty which had just been
reinstated by the US Supreme Court after a ten-year hiatus. The
Texas Legislature had moved quickly to fashion a new capital
punishment statute designed to meet the parameters established by
the high court and put Texas back on the execution hit parade.
Those high court parameters had established crucial elements for
bringing capital charges and selecting juries. Prosecutors in the
past had enjoyed great leeway seeking death as punishment for
crimes as far ranging as rape to murder in the heat of passion
without premeditation. But the new rules required accusations of
more substantial transgressions. They limited capital crimes to
murders committed in the course of another felony, such as the
armed robber who kills the store clerk or the rapist who leaves his
victim dead. Also included were murders done for hire or the murder
of a peace officer in the line of duty. Despite those limitations,
Houston, in those days, became fertile ground for capital crimes,
and the Harris County District Attorney's office quickly
established itself as the nation's most aggressive grim
reaper.

Although Texas would not resume
executions until 1982, I caught the first wave of the tsunami
caseload in the late 1970s as Harris County began holding trials to
line them up for the gallows. I considered it my duty to try and
attend as much of every capital case as possible on my watch, but
sometimes that proved impossible. One week, for example, Harris
County had five different capital trials under way simultaneously.
I ran from courtroom to courtroom trying to keep up. Most of these
cases needed only a minimal amount of actual trial time, but each
one lasted for weeks because jury selection took so long. The
attorneys interrogated potential jurors individually at great
length to determine if they actually would have the courage to send
anyone to Death Row.

Another important issue concerned
the county's system for providing defense lawyers to impoverished
defendants, a category that covered about 90 percent of the
courthouse accused. While many jurisdictions created public
defender bureaucracies to handle that role, Harris County had its
own unique and controversial system of appointment by judges from
the ranks of the county's criminal defense bar. Often I saw judges
simply shout in a crowded courtroom for an attorney to step forward
and take a case. Another judge occasionally collected business
cards from all lawyers hanging around the courtroom, shuffled them,
and then dealt from the top of the deck to his clerk, matching an
attorney with a defendant as each case was called.

And there always were plenty of
lawyers hungry for the assignments that generated fees based on a
schedule established by the county: $250 for an appearance in
court, five hundred dollars per day for trials, and so on. Although
they belittled the fees and compared them derisively with grander
sums they bragged they could have been making on car wrecks or
divorces, they always lined up there like dock workers at the union
hall waiting for a job. Many built a substantial portion of their
practices on the foundation of daily appointments. Often they could
grab an assignment, negotiate a plea, and collect $250 before noon,
leaving the rest of the day free for those car wrecks anyhow. While
the drama of trials captures our imagination, the overwhelming
majority of criminal cases are resolved without them, often quickly
with a deal. If this plea-bargaining system did not exist, the
courts would grind to a smashing halt on the burden of the
caseload. To begin each auction, prosecutors review the quality of
evidence brought by police against an accused and weigh that
against his likely defense and other mitigating factors like his
looks or lack of a criminal background. Charged with burglary, a
defendant might be facing a maximum sentence of ten years in
prison. But the case can be disposed that morning if he agrees to
plead guilty to trespassing and takes a year in jail. Often that's
exactly what happens.

I wrote some memorable stories on
this appointment system by annually scrutinizing the total bills
paid out by the county for the past year and identifying the
lawyers milking it dry. Their services definitely were needed, but,
my stories in April 1978 and June of 1979, showed that some of them
were earning more as appointed defense attorneys than the judges
and other high ranking county officials actually on the public
payroll. The highest earners rarely handled cases that went to
trial. Moreover, my stories exposed a system in which many judges
routinely assigned cases to the same small club of private
attorneys working only in their courts, creating a de-facto public
defender system at their personal disposal. Some judges explained
their motives by touting the diligence of the lawyers working
exclusively for them and bragging about the painstaking research on
background checks before completing the rosters. Fair enough, I
said, and included that defense in my stories. But I also knew that
the most effective defense lawyers likely won that reputation by
moving cases through the courts as quickly as possible, leaving the
system open to charges it served the interest of the judges rather
than indigent defendants. I also imagined that most of their
painstaking background research likely had occurred in saloons
rather than libraries. Since I watched the system work on a daily
basis, I was confident that most of the time it accomplished its
goal of providing justice for indigents and the public, too, at a
reasonable taxpayer cost.

But anyone could recognize this system as rife
with opportunity for cronyism or abuse, and Catherine Mehaffey
would be no exception when she eventually entered my life a year
later.

THIRTEEN