To Hatred Turned (13 page)

“No, Joy,” Carol said. “I did not tape it.”

“Did you tape it the other night when we were at Denny’s?”

“We weren’t at Denny’s the other night,” Carol corrected her. “We were at JoJo’s. I asked you if you wanted me to stand up and look for a tape recorder.”

“You’re not answering my question,” Joy said sharply. “I said did you?”

“I’ve told you I didn’t,” Carol lied. “I offered you a chance to see if I was wearing one, didn’t I? Did I offer you that chance or not?”

“I don’t remember,” Joy said. “I guess you did.”

“I had on a thin silk dress,” Carol said. “It would have been real obvious.”

“Well, you had that big briefcase,” Joy pointed out.

“Well, Joy, if I put it in the briefcase and I set it there, how are you going to hear anything? Tape recorders have a little microphone thing across the top and you’ve got to be able to hear. If I was going to tape it, I would have set the tape recorder out on the table, now, wouldn’t I?”

“No, I don’t think so,” Joy said. “They put them under the tables and all that other kind of stuff now.” Besides, she added, her sister seemed to have a proclivity for taping conversations; witness the tape she claimed to have incriminating her husband.

“I taped it off the answering machine,” Carol replied quickly. And her husband knew it was running. “He wanted me to hear what you said to him. It was
his
idea to tape it.”

“Oh,” Joy said warily, “because you see you told me that it was a conversation that he had with you.”

“No,” Carol said hurriedly, “it was a conversation between you and him.”

“Then you lied to me before,” Joy said accusingly.

“No I didn’t, Joy,” Carol insisted.

“No,” Joy said firmly. Carol had told her it had been a conversation Carol had had with her husband.

“I don’t think so, Joy,” Carol said, backpedaling.

“Yeah, it really is,” Joy said with certainty. “That I do remember.”

“That’s not the conversation that’s on the tape that’s in the safe-deposit box,” Carol insisted.

“Okay,” Joy said, trying to pin down her sister. “You don’t have that tape anymore? You said that he called you and you didn’t have time to turn the tape off and you didn’t know it, but it was running? Now whether
you
knew it or not, I don’t know.”

“Joy,” Carol said as innocently as she could, “if I had that conversation with you, I don’t remember it.”

“Well, you did,” Joy asserted.

“There were a lot of things that I don’t remember at all,” Carol said. “There were three or four days there that I don’t remember anything that even went on. I had short-term memory losses. You could have stood right there and told me something, but I wouldn’t remember what it was. The tape that is in the safe-deposit box is a conversation between you and him.”

Several days later, on May 26, Mo McGowan, with evidence based in large part on Joy and Carol’s recorded conversation, arrested Joy Aylor, then thirty-nine, and charged her with capital murder in connection with the death of Rozanne Gailiunas, an accusation that carried a possible death penalty. She also was charged with two counts of solicitation of capital murder and two counts of conspiring to commit capital murder. Almost simultaneously they arrested William Wesley “Bill” Garland, forty-six, and charged him with two counts each of solicitation of capital murder and conspiracy to commit capital murder.

To test whether Joy had been telling the truth when she told Carol that she had never seen Garland, detectives deliberately walked her through the room where Garland was being processed. Neither of them showed any sign of recognizing the other. Both were quickly released on bond.

Before they arrested Joy, McGowan summoned Larry to police headquarters to break the news to him first. As bitter as the fights between the couple had been, Larry was totally unprepared for the revelation that his wife had been the alleged mastermind behind Rozanne’s murder and his own potential assassination.

“I don’t believe it,” he said in shock.

“Believe it,” said McGowan, reaching into a desk drawer and pulling out an audio cassette. The detective then asked Larry if he remembered Carol calling Joy at home on the evening before Larry was ambushed.

“Yeah,” Larry said slowly, struggling to recall the incident. “I remember now. I answered the phone and I was really surprised because Carol hardly ever called Joy. When I asked her what she wanted, Carol said she needed to talk to Joy about some concert tickets.”

“What happened then?” McGowan asked.

“I think I went out in the garage to work on my car.”

McGowan inserted the cassette into a recorder he had on his desk, explaining that it was a tape of the conversation between Joy and Carol that had been made by Carol. The detective then pushed the play button.

Larry’s jaw dropped open when he heard Carol tell Joy that “everything was all set up” for the next day.

Joy sounded very nervous and Carol asked her what was the matter.

Larry was just in the garage, Joy whispered.

“Well, get rid of him,” Carol suggested. “Send him to get some chicken or something.”

Joy giggled uncertainly. “What will he think?” she asked Carol.

“What do you care what he thinks?” Carol said. “He won’t be thinking at all tomorrow.”

While McGowan should have been happy that he was making tremendous progress in a case that he had feared just a few weeks previously might never be solved, he was worried.

Joy, he was certain, had not been the one who actually pulled the trigger on Rozanne, much less ambushed Larry. From what Carol had said and from what his own instincts told him, the detective was also pretty sure that Garland had not been the one, either. That led him back to his earlier theory that others were involved, although how many and what parts they played still were unknown.

Operating on information received from Bill and Carol Garland, McGowan sent investigators to interrogate two more men: Brian Lee Kreafle, thirty-six, the owner of an auto repair shop in nearby Garland, and Joseph Walter Thomas, forty-seven, a contractor from McAlester, Oklahoma. Kreafle subsequently was charged with soliciting the murder of and conspiring to murder Rozanne, and Thomas with soliciting the murder of and conspiring to murder Larry.

At that point, McGowan knew he had a chain of middlemen, actually
two
chains, and he was trying to work his way to the end, to the point where he could find the actual triggermen. He did not yet know how many people he had to go through, but he had obtained two more names to keep him going: Buster and Gary Matthews, two ne’er-do-well brothers from Dallas. McGowan believed they were directly involved in the Kaufman County attack. Of all the people believed to be involved so far, McGowan discovered that only the Matthews brothers had previous criminal records.

What the investigation was showing at that stage was that Joy was believed to have set in motion dual plots that resulted in the creation of parallel pyramids of contacts, one leading to Rozanne, the other to Larry. McGowan grabbed a scratch pad and made some quick notes. Joy went first to a handyman named Carl Noska, asking if he knew someone who could scare Larry. Noska gave her Bill Garland’s name. Beyond that, McGowan reckoned, Joy may have been ignorant of the other players. Apparently Garland, after being contacted by Joy, who was using the code name Mary, went to Brian Kreafle, who went to? That chain resulted in Rozanne’s death. Then, when Joy allegedly decided to have Larry killed, she went back to Garland, using Carol as an intermediary. Allegedly, Garland went to Joe Thomas, who went to the Matthews brothers.

Among the many blanks that McGowan still had to fill in was precisely how much money had changed hands. The detective was certain that each person along the chain pocketed
something
for his trouble, but he did not know how much. That, he knew, probably could not be determined until he found the last person in each chain. Since he had already questioned Joy, Carol, Bill Garland, Kreafle, and Thomas, the obvious next step was to pick up the Matthews brothers. The trouble was, they had disappeared.

Pulling the files his investigators had opened on the brothers, McGowan skimmed through them quickly, noting that the data traced a grim history of petty and not-so-petty crime. Opening Buster’s folder, McGowan read the details more slowly.

Buster James Matthews, he read, born August 17, 1942, the oldest of seven children by William and Opal Matthews. He dropped out of school in the tenth grade to join the navy, but was given an honorable discharge when he was twenty because he was needed at home to help support his family. Apparently, the way he planned to do that was not exactly mainstream. In 1967, when he was twenty-four, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison from Dallas County for robbery by assault and armed robbery. While he was serving his time, he earned his high school equivalency certificate, then went on to get a mail-order associate degree in applied science, plus a certificate in radio and TV repair.

But his newfound educational capabilities failed to put him back on a lawful path. In 1978, at age thirty-five, he was sentenced to two-to-four years, again from Dallas County, for a series of drug violations and carrying a weapon illegally.

When he was approached about the Larry Aylor assassination plot, Buster was in his mid-forties, had been married to his third wife for five years, and had a two-year-old daughter. Almost all of his employment when he was not in prison was as a roofer. The meager money he made in his job did not go far toward supporting his family, so the idea of a supplemental income intrigued him greatly.

McGowan closed the folder and opened the other one. William Gary Matthews, called Gary. Born August 9, 1951, in Dallas, some nine years younger than Buster. Like his older brother, Gary dropped out of school when he was in his early teens, but got his high school certificate and three associate degrees while an inmate in the Texas prison system, to which he was introduced when he was nineteen. His first prison term was the result of a two-year sentence from Dallas County for theft of credit cards and possession of a forged instrument, plus three years for unlawful possession of marijuana. Two years later, presumably after being paroled, he was sentenced to three years from Newton County on a charge of assault with intent to murder without malice. And in 1976, when he was twenty-five, he was sentenced to eight years from Dallas County for burglary.

Unmarried, Gary was living in a Dallas suburb with his common-law wife and their three children when Thomas allegedly made the offer to him and Buster. When he wasn’t in prison, Gary worked as a manual laborer; Thomas’s money offer attracted him also. At the time of the Kaufman County incident, Gary would have been almost thirty-five.

Both men, McGowan noted, had convictions for violent crimes. Two of Buster’s convictions involved weapons and Gary had done time for trying to kill somebody, presumably with a weapon as well. In any case, the detective figured, both men were seasoned veterans of the Texas Department of Corrections and looked like sure losers. It did not seem to bother McGowan considerably that his investigators had not been able to track down either of them for questioning, assuming that with their backgrounds they would show up sooner more likely than later, probably after committing another crime.

What caused him more concern were the blanks between Kreafle and Rozanne. How many people were in there? he wondered. Who were they? Even more important, who could tell him? He was almost certain that Joy had no idea how far the chain went beyond Garland. And Garland might not know who was involved beyond the next man down. What he had to do, the detective reminded himself, was work on Kreafle and come up with another ID.

He doubled his efforts and was gratified with the results. A few weeks later, he had something to go on. Kreafle had supplied him with a name: George Anderson Hopper, a car appraiser for a local Chevrolet dealer.

On July 20, investigators Rhonda Bonner and Ken McKenzie, the same officer who had accused Larry of being involved in Rozanne’s shooting, drove to the dealership in suburban Dallas to talk to Hopper, who at that point in the investigation was simply suspected of fitting into the chain below Kreafle.

At first the two investigators were cordial with Hopper, a polite, clean-cut man of medium height with dark, slightly wavy hair. They were there to interview him, not interrogate him or arrest him, so the talk began on an almost friendly note. When the topic turned to Rozanne Gailiunas, however, Hopper became visibly nervous and politely refused to discuss her without first talking to an attorney.

McKenzie and Bonner had no choice; they had no evidence upon which to base an arrest, not even enough to haul him down to the Public Safety Department building for more determined questioning.

Okay, they reluctantly agreed. Talk to your attorney and we’ll get back to you.

They never had the chance. A few weeks later he telephoned McKenzie and told him he did not plan to keep his promise for the next meeting. When McKenzie and Bonner went looking for him, they discovered that he, like the Matthews brothers, had disappeared. That left McGowan, who had been frustrated by the case for five years, in somewhat of a predicament; every time he neared what he hoped was the end of the chain, his suspects vanished.