Carlton Stowers - Scream at the Sky: Five Texas Murders and One Mans Crusade for Justice

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Contents

Dear Reader:

The book you are about to read is the latest bestseller from the St. Martins True Crime Library, the imprint the New York Times calls the leader in true crime! Each month, we offer you a fascinating account of the latest, most sensational crime that has captured the national attention. St. Martins is the publisher of perennial bestselling true crime author Jack Olsen, whose SALT OF THE EARTH is the true story of how one woman fought and triumphed over life-shattering violence; Joseph Wambaugh called it powerful and absorbing. Fannie Weinstein and Melinda Wilson tell the story of a beautiful honors student who was lured into the dark world of sex for hire in THE COED CALL GIRL MURDER . St. Martins is also proud to publish two-time Edgar Award-winning author Carlton Stowers, whose TO THE LAST BREATH recounts a two-year-old girls mysterious death, and the dogged investigation that led loved ones to the most unlikely murderer: her own father. The book you now hold, SCREAM AT THE SKY, is also by Carlton Stowers, and follows the forensic trail of a cold-case serial killer, and the twist that apprehended him.

St. Martins True Crime Library gives you the stories behind the headlines. Our authors take you right to the scene of the crime and into the minds of the most notorious murderers to show you what really makes them tick. St. Martins True Crime Library paperbacks are better than the most terrifying thriller, because its all true! The next time you want a crackling good read, make sure its got the St. Martins True Crime Library logo on the spineyoull be up all night!

Charles E. Spicer, Jr.

Executive Editor, St. Martins True Crime Library

For Pat

who continues to make things worthwhile

The triumph of justice is the only peace.

Robert G. Ingersoll

It is easy to utter what has been kept silent,

But impossible to recall what has been uttered.

Moralia

PROLOGUE

In historys grand scheme it cannot be measured as a great passage of time. Yet in the fifteen-year span about which you are to read, a lifetime of events, major and minor, changes large and small, occurred.

For most caught up in todays high-speed, old-millennium-to-new advances, it is difficult to think back to that winter when 1984 turned into 1985 with any degree of accurate recall. The bitter north Texas storms that rolled in on dark and ominous clouds, spilling snow and sleet, have now mingled with similar stretches of frigid weather that visited in subsequent years. Memory, though one of the remarkable miracles of life, is seldom foolproof, rarely exact.

Inasmuch as our past is a series of good, bad, and indifferent happenings, we recollect selectively and generally, leaving great spaces blank. New memories constantly crowd out old; modern sights and sounds mask those of bygone days. We remember, but seldom with the benefit of perfect recall.

The passage of time will do that. In the memory bank it all blurs.

Such is not the case of the people you will read about in these pages. There is a period in the lives of those who populate this story that is as real and vivid today as it was almost two decades ago. For them, time stopped and a series of dark and ugly snapshots were indelibly etched in their minds. No passage of years, not the most supreme of efforts, has erased the endless nightmares with which they have been forced to live out their lives.

These are people who can still remember the smell of the flowers that filled the churches and funeral home chapels, the newly turned dirt at gravesites, and the ever-lingering taste of the bilious anger directed toward whomever, whatever caused their lifelong anguish. The pain of great loss and unfounded accusations remains. So do the long years of frustration and unanswered questions.

Memories, often the sweet fountain of our treasured nostalgia, can also be the cauldron of our greatest fears and anxieties. They do not pretend to be fair. Too often, in fact, they are the reason that in the throes of our darkest sorrows, we sometimes find ourselves wanting to

scream at the sky.

THE SETTING

Wichita Falls, Texas, sits on a barren plain to the northwest of the DallasFort Worth metroplex, home to just over 100,000 residents whose civic consciousness is routinely assaulted by the good-natured jibes of friends throughout the state. Biting, windswept winters give rise to the old joke that the only thing separating it from the North Pole is a barbed wire fence. Then, in the summer, its consecutive days of 100-plusdegree heat are relentless, so much so that a 100-mile bicycle race it annually hosts is appropriately called the Hotter N Hell Hundred. The NFL Dallas Cowboys did their preseason training on the campus of its Midwestern State University for several summers before it finally occurred to management and the coaching staff alike that the brain-baking July and August temperatures were no doubt contributing factors to the recent string of miserable seasons of the once-proud Americas Team.

Despite its name, there are not even any falls in Wichita Fallsunless one counts the man-made one on the edge of downtown. Among its premier tourist attractions is a structure known as the worlds smallest skyscraper, a historical landmark that begs explanation unless you read about it in a long-ago Ripleys Believe It or Not . Back in 1919, at the height of the oil boom that visited the region, an out-of-town promoter reportedly sold $200,000 in stock to investors who believed they were buying shares in an enormous building project that would provide badly needed office space. What they werent told was that the blueprints they were shown were drawn to a scale of inches rather than feet. What resulted was a slender, four-story building one-twelfth the size expectedjust 40 feet tall with rooms measuring only 10 by 17 feet. There was not even a stairwell leading to the top three floors. The con man, legend has it, quietly stole away with the investors money, and today the eighty-three-year-old structure serves as monument to greed and folly and as a comfortable roost for pigeons.

Scamming aside, it was apparently well built. The skyscraper was among the downtown buildings that managed to survive the monstrous tornado that leveled 20 percent of the city back in 1979.

It was, historians point out, another kind of natural disaster that destroyed the citys namesake. Before a devastating flood in 1886, the nearby Wichita River featured a picturesque series of five-foot falls near where pioneers had battled Caddo, Comanche, Kiowa, and Wichita Indians for settlement rights. The falls, alas, were washed away by the flood, and it was not until a century later that city fathers decided a man-made waterfall was better than none at all.

The delay most likely resulted from the fact that people were too busy getting rich to be concerned with such matters. With oil strikes in nearby Electra and Burkburnett, Wichita Falls became the prototype of a Texas boomtown. Even today it is a city populated by numerous millionaires who had to do nothing more than endorse royalty checks from the nations leading oil companies to fund the building of their mansions.