Buried Memories (19 page)

“When was this?” Rose asked.

“Oh, gosh, three or four years ago. Then one day I went down there and was walking around Mama’s backyard, wondering, could this be true? That’s when I saw a place that had been sunken in and I thought, oh no, it’s just from the rain. It can’t be true. Then when Jimmy Don came up missing, I thought, God, it’s true. I didn’t want to believe it. I told Shirley she had to be lying to me because my mother wouldn’t do something like this—I mean someone who raised me up watching
Romper Room
? I just couldn’t believe it.”

Phyllis continued the sordid details of Barker’s death, saying she thought her mother had to be crazy to do such a thing.

“Then around Christmas time in ’83, Shirley told me about Jimmy Don. That was when . . . Shit. Someone’s at the door.”

“Why don’t you go see who it is and come back and talk to me?” Rose said. “I’ll wait.”

After a pause, Phyllis returned to the phone. “My God, it’s the Dallas Police Department!”

“They want to talk about this case,” Rose told her.

“I sure as hell don’t want to talk to them,” she said, crying hysterically.

Rose said, “Here’s what we’ve got to decide. You’re either in this deal up to your neck, or you’re going to help us. It’s a fork in the road, take it.”

He was met with muffled sobs. “Phyllis? Which fork are you taking?”

“I can’t choose.” Her voice sounded small and scared.

“Just tell the truth, Phyllis. If you don’t, if you lie to us about something, then you can be charged with conspiracy to murder.”

Phyllis cried until she was screaming.

“I know it’s your mother and it’s hard to say anything against her, but Phyllis, the truth needs to come out.”

After what seemed to Rose to be several minutes, in a resigned voice, Phyllis said, “I’ll help.”

Rick Rose couldn’t have been happier to hear that Betty’s boyfriend had been jailed for gun possession. He had wanted to talk with the man who at this point appeared to be Betty’s closest friend.

Ray Bone sat in jail for two days. When the deputies first arrested him, the judge set Bone’s bail at $5,000. The afternoon Bone went to court, Rose wrote his Probable Cause Determination and attended the hearing. The Henderson County Court determined that Bone had violated his parole, and now the court had the option of sending him back to prison. Afterward, Rose suggested that Bone accompany him back to his office to talk.

Bone sat across from Rose’s desk, looking grumpy and hateful. He had proven his disrespect for law enforcement, but Rose didn’t want revenge, he wanted Bone’s help in convicting Betty Beets.

He let Bone stew a little longer before he began speaking. It would be easy to send him back to prison for violating his parole, but that wouldn’t be fruitful. Nor was it Rose’s way to threaten him, but since Rose was six-feet-two, 250 pounds, with broad shoulders, he found that physical threats weren’t necessary.

Rose began, “You know, Ray, you’re a felon and you’ve got this weapon.” Rose paused for emphasis. “What are we going to do about that?” he said, knowing he’d get more cooperation if the criminal thought he was part of the decision-making process.

Bone shifted uneasily in his chair. “This all is shit. I didn’t know that damn gun was there. I borrowed the truck from a friend. Gun was his.”

“Whatever,” Rose said. “It still remains that you had a gun in your possession.”

Ray nodded briefly, but sat frowning.

“What do you think is going to happen now?” Rose asked.

“I reckon it looks like I’m going back to the pen.”

“Yeah. Probably does,” Rose said without emotion.

Rose waited through the silence, but Bone didn’t offer any suggestion. His meanness was legend and whatever he did would be for his own survival. Bone gave the appearance of cooperation, but at the same time Rose knew that the man hated his guts.

“Tell you what, maybe we could do this,” Rose said. “How about if you call me every once in a while and let me know what Betty’s up to?”

Ray nodded.

“Just fill me in on where she is. What she’s doing. That sort of thing.”

“Yeah,” Ray said. “I can do that.”

“Then it’s a plan,” Rose said, standing up. At that point, he shocked Ray by saying, “You’re free to go.”

Ray’s eyes widened in disbelief.

“I’ve worked it out with the DA. You’re free on your own recognizance.”

Rose watched Ray heave a heavy sigh, then get up and plod out of his office. He knew that Ray would probably tell Betty what he was doing, and Betty would probably reply, “No problem. I understand where you’re coming from.”

Rose put in a call to Mike O’Brien, to update him on the case’s progress.

Rose brought him up to speed, then said, “This is too easy. Someone tells my informant what Betty did, Crime Stoppers gets a call a few weeks later about Phyllis, who spills her guts and confirms everything we’ve heard. Now Ray Bone is calling and letting us know what Betty’s up to. When are we going to run into a roadblock? Where’s that brick wall that will stop us when we’re literally skimming over the waves? I’ve never had a case go so smoothly.”

“But up ’til now, it’s sat for two years with absolutely nothing happening,” O’Brien reminded him.

“Yeah, but I know luck when I see it,” Rose replied. “This is like Hansel and Gretel; all we have to do now is follow the bread crumbs.”

Prompted by self-preservation and his desire not to return to the penitentiary, Ray Bone diligently kept in touch with Rick Rose. Bone told him that Betty had been notified by the juvenile authorities that they released her son Bobby to his sister Faye Lane.

Ray reported that since Betty had been burned out of her trailer, he would soon take her to a small house his brother owned on the outskirts of Mansfield, Texas, a community thirty miles southwest of Dallas.

Rose knew the area. The house was probably out in the country, amid gently sloping fields of green cotton. Betty needed the peace and quiet after all she’s been through, Rose thought sarcastically.

Bone had called Rose when they first arrived at the Mansfield house and said they’d be there until they decided where they’d live.

The Police and Fire Department Pension Board held their meeting on the first Thursday in June. Their agenda included considering whether or not to award a pension to Jimmy Don Beets’s widow. Betty’s lawyer saw to it that the board received a copy of the March document pronouncing Jimmy Don “legally deceased.”

The board had no access to the case Rose and O’Brien were putting together, and for tactical reasons the investigators didn’t want that information made public yet. So after a brief discussion, the board voted unanimously to award Betty Lou Beets a lump sum of $15,852 for back payments and $792 a month, every month, for the rest of her life. They’d mail the first payment next week, on Monday.

EIGHTEEN

The acrid smell of the scorched trailer burned their nostrils as Rick Rose and Michael O’Brien approached it. They knew they’d come out covered with soot and smelling like smoke after their investigation, but like two kids told they could open a box of candy, they weren’t about to miss the opportunity to examine Betty’s belongings. Any additional information on her became essential now that they were whisker close to making a case against her. With the fire marshal policing the place, they could be reasonably assured that the evidence had not been tampered with.

Many times after Rose had heard of Betty’s involvement, he had driven by the trailer, watching the comings and goings of Betty, her family, and her friends. He had never stopped, but he made sure the wishing well and shed were there to substantiate the information his informant and Phyllis gave him.

O’Brien held a notepad to sketch details he’d use in obtaining the evidentiary search warrant. “I’m making sure I include everything the judge will want.”

“Good idea,” Rose said, “since Judge Holland only goes by the letter of the law.”

“I think we’re okay unless the judge wants to meet any of the upstanding citizens who gave us the information,” O’Brien joked.

As they entered the still smoky trailer, they nodded to the fireman guarding the front door. They had heard the stories about guns being hidden underneath drawers and inside closets. If that much had been hidden, what more would there be to find?

Rose began sorting through a stack of old letters and newspapers he found in the kitchen. The letter on top was black with ashes.

“Is there nothing you won’t touch?” O’Brien asked.

“Nothing,” Rose assured him.

One by one he lifted each piece of paper, unfolding it, emptying out envelopes, and reading everything.

“Now this is really nice of Betty. Sweet gal.” O’Brien looked over his shoulder. “A list of her guns? Do you have a rabbit’s foot in your pocket or something?”

Rose counted. “Nineteen guns. A woman’s got to protect herself, for Heaven’s sake.” Before he read the description of each gun, he noticed one of them had a red line drawn through it. “This is interesting. Our friend’s marked one of them for us. A .38 pistol.”

“Sounds familiar,” O’Brien said. “Could be one of those confiscated from her youngest son after the shoot-out, but I bet there’s a more definite reason why she ruled through it.”

“I’ve seen this happen over and over in my investigations,” Rose said. “There’s a certain element in any case that’s consistent with the mind. The subconscious is stronger than the conscious mind. It works like a computer. When you submit information to the hard drive, it’s there. An expert can find it. Betty consciously listed her weapons, then from the hard drive memory of her own brain, her subconscious, she scratched it out. She knew it was a weapon that could later cause her problems.”

“That’s eerie.”

“Not really,” Rose said. “It’s about people.”

O’Brien went to scrutinize the rest of the trailer, then came back and said, “This will break your heart, but there aren’t any more stacks of junk in the back rooms. Looks like the fire took everything there.”

“I’m almost finished,” Rose assured him. “Oh wait, here’s something. Betty’s power of attorney.”

“Who’d be foolish enough to sign over power to Betty?”

“Well, posthumously Mr. Beets did.”

“Figures. Did she use it?” O’Brien asked.

“I don’t know. Maybe Betty will tell us.” Rose continued to finger the stack of papers with gritty fingers the color of the ashes.

“Here’s a bill of sale for a boat, $3,250. That’s a tidy little sum. Says it’s for a nineteen-foot Glastron.”

“That’s the empty boat we saw after he ‘disappeared, ’ ” O’Brien said. “So that’s how she sold it. Convinced someone she was the owner and transferred the title. Completely illegal, but actually pretty clever.”

They both stood quietly. Then O’Brien said, “Are you thinking the same thing I’m thinking?”

“Yeah, where’s Betty?” Rose said.

“She could be five states away from here. She’s probably been feeling cocky getting away with two murders.”

“And two almost murders. I found out that Billy York Lane died three years ago of a heart attack.”

“Probably brought on by Betty shooting him a couple times.”

“It took me a week to find Threlkeld,” O’Brien said. “Everybody swore Betty had killed him. He’s living in Little Rock. I gave him a call, and he told me when he was leaving her back in ’79, she tried to run him down with her car. Said he wasn’t worried because he felt he could jump out of the way in time. I dropped in that little piece about her shooting her second husband, which happened right before she met Threlkeld. He had no idea that she had shot Lane, so the guy feels lucky to be alive.”

“Let’s draw up the warrant and get that gal locked up.”

Legal issues were Mike O’Brien’s specialty. When he prepared the Evidentiary Search Warrant for Judge Jack Holland’s signature, he relied heavily on the informant’s statement outlining Betty’s revelation to Gerald Albright when they were in the motel.

Rose requested that the informant’s name remain confidential. He did this for Becker’s protection as well to keep his identity a secret for any possible future information.

In addition to Betty’s arrest warrant, O’Brien drew up one on Shirley Thompson. He added facts from the signed affidavit the Dallas police had secured from Phyllis Coleman. Now if everything went as expected, Shirley would be arrested right after Betty.

Deputy Ron Shields, a rookie at the Henderson County Sheriff’s Office, had expected to be assigned the less glamorous assignments, but hadn’t considered he’d also be handed the dull and boring ones.

He had read about Jimmy Don Beets’s disappearance two years before, but considered it no big deal until June fifth when Rick Rose asked him to stake out Betty’s trailer.

“There’s a possibility that someone might try to break in there tonight,” Rose told him. “We can’t let that happen. There’s too much evidence at stake.”

Rose didn’t confide that Shields would be guarding two graves. He only said, “Just watch the house. If Betty Beets shows up, call me. I’ll let you know if anything goes down at this end.”

At three
P.M.
, Shields drove his green Chevrolet sedan out to Cherokee Shores. He used his own car, equipped with a police radio, because it wouldn’t stick out like a police car. He parked up the street at a vacant lot and waited.

At five, another deputy brought him a cold drink. An hour later, Rose called and said they were putting together a search warrant. Around six, another deputy showed up with Shields’s dinner. Occasionally, other deputies checked on him until midnight. After that, he sat for eight hours straight fighting off sleep.

Finally, he went home and managed to crawl into bed. A few hours later, his wife woke him, telling him Rose was on the phone.

“Get back out to Betty’s house by five,” Rose said. “We’ll need you.”

At seven-thirty on Friday morning, Rick Rose and Michael O’Brien had been up for seventy-two hours straight while they orchestrated Betty’s arrest. They hadn’t been to bed since the night before Rose spoke with Phyllis Coleman.