The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime (6 page)

Clifford Youens, age 56, (TDCJ photo above) remains in prison. He’s no longer in Ellis II, where I interviewed him in 1989, but housed in the Alfred Hughes unit. He was denied parole in 2011. .

One further update: In 1992, Newman Braud, a.k.a. Naomi Sims, died of complications of AIDS at the age of thirty-nine. Friends told the Houston Chronicle that Braud used to say that if just one person remembered his name, he would live forever. In the final years of his life, he became active in fundraising for AIDS research. He performed until just weeks before his death.

Blues & Bad Blood — The Murder of Blues Singer John Vandiver
By Kathryn Casey

THE NIGHT OF FEBRUARY 22nd, 1985, was cold and crisp. The ranch in the pine forests of Magnolia, Texas, just forty miles north of Houston, was quiet. The horses were calm, the dogs silent. And the darkness, like a black satin comforter, concealed the horror inside the log cabin.

The television buzzed in the cabin’s main room, while five newborn dachshund puppies sucked greedily at their mother’s nipples inside a playpen in the adjoining bedroom. It was a cluttered house. In the bookcases, there were playbills from shows in Florida, Colorado, and Texas announcing “Tonight! John Vandiver!” alongside snapshots of Vandiver and his longtime, live-in lover, Debbie Davis.

Hanging on the wall over the couch was a life-size portrait of John Vandiver, his face framed by an unruly gray beard, his eyes gleaming behind wire-rimmed glasses, one thick hand clutching a microphone to his open mouth, crying out in song. On the wooden floor below the portrait was Vandiver’s lifeless, stocky body. Clothed only in an old blue robe and Jockey shorts, he was face down and encircled by blood. A few inches from his outstretched hand lay his broken glasses.

Across the room, Davis lay on her back, her bare legs extended upward and bent. She had toppled from her knees when the gunshots tore through her chest and neck. A thin line of blood beaded up from a slash across her throat. A translucent blue negligee was wrapped tightly around her upper body.

Miles away a maroon minivan barreled down a desolate country road. Inside the four occupants were tense and silent, except for the driver, Tom Mathes. He was muttering and laughing to himself. “You better get your money to me, Tom, or something might happen to you,” he said, mimicking the man how lying dead on the cabin floor. “Well, I got him. He’s the one who’s dead now.”

Four months earlier in the Wunsche Brothers Café and Saloon in Spring, Texas, there had been a reunion of the Ewing Street Times, a popular regional group that had disbanded nine years earlier. The smoky saloon pulsated with the heavy chords of country blues and the lighter strains of country rock. A congregation of the faithful filled the tables and the bar.

At center stage, John Vandiver dug deeply into the thick, low tones of the early blues he loved. His strong hands, callused from years of work on his ranch, picked authoritatively at the strings of an old Gibson F-hole guitar, which, singer B.W. Stevenson says, “Johnny could make sound real funky.” With his old friends Shake Russell, the whiskey-voiced Texas country rocker, and the bass player Michael Mashkes, a.k.a. Marcello Marconi, Vandiver joined in on songs he used to perform nightly in the Seventies.

John Vandiver spent twenty of his thirty-nine years playing on the Texas music circuit. He was one of those musicians who were always poised on the brink of success but who never quite made it. “There were people of much greater success who considered Johnny their peer,” says folk star David Bromberg, who’s recorded with the likes of Ringo Starr and Bob Dylan. Bromberg would occasionally play with Vandiver when he was in Texas. “I myself was very happy to be known as Johnny Vandiver’s guitar player.”

Over the years, Vandiver had played beside the hierarchy of Texas good-time music, including Jerry Jeff Walker and Michael Martin Murphey. He made local television appearances and recorded with Shake Russell and his country-rock band. Vandiver’s music hadn’t made him rich, but he seemed content. Besides, there were other ways to make money.

At the end of the performance, Vandiver swept his gray flannel racing cap off his head and bowed to the crowd. Out of the cap’s crown flew two tightly twisted joints, which he scrambled to recover. Standing upright again, Vandiver looked around the room, smiled sheepishly and said, “Hell, you people probably already knew that about me.”

The crowd roared with friendly recognition.

Vandiver’s musical career began in the Sixties, when music was intertwined with love, peace, and drugs. His career continued through the Seventies – the heyday of Texas music – and into the leaner, cocaine-fueled Eighties. While friends and fellow musicians like Bromberg and Walker had gone on to national prominence, Vandiver remained a local star. But he found a way to supplement his modest musical income. In his final days, Vandiver was playing two circuits: the Texas bars and music halls and the drug route from Florida to Colorado.

JOHN VANDIVER GREW UP IN DALLAS, IN A DEVOUT Church of Christ family. After high school he attended Fort Worth Christian College for two years and then transferred to Oklahoma Christian College, in Oklahoma City, on a choir scholarship. He flunked out after only one semester because he spent most of his nights and weekends playing folk and blues in the local Okie bars.

He returned to Texas and joined his first group, a jug band called the Dallas County Outpatients, which also featured Michael Murphey and Steve Fromholz. By 1966, when Vandiver was twenty-one, he was playing solo in a small Dallas coffeehouse called the Rubaiyat. It was a breeding ground for musicians who would later become the vanguard of the "Austin sound' or the progressive country-rock movement of the Seventies. “We were all about the same age and had a lot in common,” says Fromholz. “We loved good-time music and would play it anywhere, any time.”

In May 1967, Vandiver and his wife, Diana, packed their belongings into a camper and left Texas for Coral Gables, Florida, where he had a gig at a coffeehouse called the Flick. Vandiver was the opening act, comedian Gabe Kaplan who later starred in Welcome Back, Kotter with John Travolta, was next on the bill, and the Ewing Street Times, with Michael Mashkes, a wiry, longhaired bass player from Chicago, closed the show. Vandiver would soon become the lead singer of the Times.

Living was easy in Coral Gables during those years. David Crosby, Joni Mitchell, Dion and John Sebastian congregated there, along with many of Vandiver’s Texas friends, including Walker and Murphey. Vandiver and his cronies would gather after a show for a night of partying at the house he shared with other band members and their families. "If I opened the refrigerator and found it filled with beer," says Mashkes, "I knew Jerry Jeff Walker was in town. Early one morning Murphey watched a woman through our window as she stumbled down the street, and then he wrote ‘Drunken Lady of the Morning.’”

Vandiver bought into the whole scene; playing music and carousing filled his days and nights. His favorite song, Walker's "Gypsy Songman,” glorified the traveling minstrel, the lone figure onstage, living on the edge of society, unrestricted by convention. Vandiver, who smoked pot daily, eventually began selling a little grass, enough to pay for his own supply.

In 1970, Vandiver and his wife had a daughter, Joanna, but that didn't stabilize their life. He began traveling the circuit with and without his family. In 1971 he and Mashkes settled in Kansas City, Missouri, where Shake Russell joined the band. It was there that Vandiver began to rely more and more on the drug money. "Whenever money was tight,” Russell says, "John would throw a lid of pot in the trunk and sell a little before and after performances to pay expenses.”

According to one of Vandiver's former lovers: "He liked bragging that the pot money gave him more control over his life. He didn't have to knuckle under. John had this paradoxical part of him. At times he could be generous, caring. And at other times he was egotistical and almost greedy. When he talked to me about dealing, he was proud. He was proud of the independence."

By the summer of 1976, Texas was enjoying a musical renaissance, and Vandiver, who was divorced from his wife in 1973, returned with the Times to the booming music scene in Houston and Austin. Fromholz remembers it as a time when "everybody with a guitar had a band. They put on cowboy hats and called themselves musicians." For the Times it was an era of both promise and frustration; the band seemed to be perpetually on the verge of a record deal. Walker had hit it big, and Murphey made the charts with his song "Wildfire." Vandiver was surrounded by success, but it was always just beyond his grasp. In 1971 the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band had made the charts with Walker's "Mr. Bojangles;' a song the Times had been playing for over a year. Vandiver was despondent. "That should have been us,” he muttered.

The Ewing Street Times eventually recorded an album, but it was never released: "It just wasn't happening,” says Russell, who left the Times and took off for New York and Chicago with Mashkes. Vandiver moved to Houston and began booking gigs as a solo act, much the way he had started out ten years earlier in Dallas.

While Vandiver never seemed envious of his friends' good fortune, says Mashkes, "I'm sure, deep down, John thought, 'Why not me?'"

WHILE PERFORMING IN A HOUSTON club in 1979, Vandiver met Debbie Davis. They were immediately drawn to each other, although they seemed an unlikely match. Vandiver, 33, was a hardheaded blues singer, with a laid-back demeanor and a fondness for women and drugs. Davis, 26, was an attractive, gregarious computer operator from a conservative upper-middle-class Jewish family. "John was everything Debbie's mother had warned her about,” says Mashkes. “A hippie who was not Jewish and was not going to marry her."

Davis's relationship with Vandiver would be a tumultuous one, plagued by his well-known infidelity and fierce sense of privacy. But despite - and probably because of - his outlaw image, she was drawn to him and his music. "He really became her life," says Sarah Irwin, Russell's wife. “She once told me, ‘Without John, I might as well be dead.’”

Soon after they met, Davis moved in with Vandiver on the ranch, where he had been living for over a year. Six months later Vandiver bought the four-acre spread, but his timing couldn't have been worse. Texas was hit with what became known as the Oil Bust, and the area’s music scene took a downturn. "A lot of the clubs became band-oriented," says Mashkes, "and many of the places where a single performer could play closed up."

“In the best of times it would have been tough for John,” says Fromholz. “There just wasn't much work for a white boy who liked to play old black blues."

"John was disappointed with his music,” says a former lover of Vandiver's and a friend of the couple’s. “He was nearing forty, and he knew he was never going to be a famous musician." And yet "he never talked about what he could have done to change things. Instead he put his energy into the drugs. Not that the music wasn't important - it was just easier with the drugs."

And the drugs paid the bills. At one point, Vandiver had even attempted to make a down payment on the ranch with bales of marijuana. Davis's dilemma was to reconcile her aversion to drugs with the unavoidable fact that it paid for their life together on the ranch.

"Debbie liked nice things," says the friend, "and she was always coming up with ways to spend money, knowing John couldn't make enough. She didn't like his dealing, but she wanted to be supported by it."

When Davis complained about the dealing, Vandiver responded angrily to what he saw as her hypocrisy. "John would yell, point to the door and say, ‘If you don't like it, leave,’” says Irwin. "But Debbie couldn't leave. She wasn't capable of it."

No matter how it was paid for, the ranch was where Vandiver and Davis were the happiest. By 1984 they had three quarter horses, two ponies, more than twenty dogs, countless cats and Lulu and Leroy, the miniature dachshunds Davis was breeding. The ranch also became a haven for local musicians. "Sometimes they'd cook a big dinner, and we'd sit around and play,” says Mashkes. “Other times we'd take a break from the music and just be together. John was just fun to be around.”

Vandiver, who had always been handy with a hammer and saw, remodeled the four-room cabin and built corrals for the horses and a bicycle-wheel surrey for the ponies to pull. In the surrey, his belly bouncing and beard flapping, he became a common sight at local parades. He also erected a metal storage building equipped with a pulley for lifting the bales of pot, a lean-to next to the garage for bagging and an eight-foot fence to block the view from the road.

The pot was a natural. "It wasn't just financial,” says a close friend. “It was a way to compensate for a loss of self-esteem. If he couldn't be one of the big boys, he could sell them their pot.” On the career ladder of the drug world, Vandiver was a middleman, a "mule,” who made frequent trips to Miami to bring back trunks and later trucks - filled with pot, which he then sold through a network of friends in Texas and Colorado and throughout the Midwest.