To Hatred Turned (14 page)

13

His first name was George, but no one ever called him that. His middle name was Anderson, but no one called him that, either. To everyone who fell within his sphere, and that was a considerable number of people since he was by nature a gregarious fellow, he was known simply as “Andy.”

“Andy Hopper,” he’d say, proffering a friendly fist, “pleased to meet you.” And he meant it; he meant it sincerely, honestly, and without reservation. In the eyes of his parents, his friends, his coworkers, and most especially the petite, shy blonde who became his wife, the person who probably knew him better than anyone else in the world, Andy Hopper was a paragon of amiability, a happy-go-lucky, friendly fellow who liked almost everyone and who, in turn, was universally liked and admired.

From the day he was born, October 6, 1955, the second of four children and the first son of hardworking, God-fearing parents who lived in a respectable, neat neighborhood in Houston, Texas, he was something special. He was a golden baby who grew into a young adult with a golden future, limited only by the extent of his own imagination. Andy Hopper was one of those people about whom others said—speaking in awe and envy and eventually in great sadness—“he could have been anything he wanted to be.” And what he wanted to be, at least in his late teenage years, was a fundamentalist preacher.

He had grown up in a stern Christian home, a home where the parents lived by the austere tenets of the Assembly of God faith, a creed whose followers went to services on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights and sometimes, for good measure, on Sunday nights as well. True believers in the faith did not, among other things, drink alcohol, smoke tobacco, use drugs, indulge in premarital or extramarital sex, or willfully treat others badly. These were all principles that Andy would later, in one way or another, break repeatedly. But as a youth he followed them zealously, as he had been taught to do. As did his parents and his siblings and friends.

In the fall of 1974, just weeks before his nineteenth birthday, he enrolled in the Southwest Bible College, a small Assembly of God school in Waxahachie, in north-central Texas, not far from Dallas. His announced intention was to engage in a course of study that would lead to his ordination as a minister. There was nothing—absolutely nothing—in his background that would indicate he was not of ministerial caliber. He was bright, cheerful, and eager to learn; he got along well with everyone, and he was well rounded. At Sam Houston High School he had been a member of the thespian society, played on the golf team, and was popular with the other students, particularly the blushing, giggling girls. Not only was he personable, he was also strikingly good looking. In his senior year he was a runner-up for the class’s Most Handsome title.

For social purposes, college was simply a continuation of high school. He was quickly accepted by his fellow students, especially the coeds, who regarded him as the top catch in the freshman class. He could have had his choice among the female students, but the one he picked was a slim young woman barely five feet tall, a fellow freshman from the Texas Panhandle named Rebecca “Becky” Thompson.

Like Andy, Becky had been brought up in an Assembly of God home, attending services two or three times a week, obeying the strict creed to the letter, and seldom socializing outside the circles of the local church. Her father owned a shop that specialized in repairing automobile radiators, while Andy’s father was a department manager for a major Houston automobile dealership who later opened his own body shop. As teenagers, both Andy and Becky were ambitious, adventurous, hard-working, responsible, and anxious to experience what the outside world had to offer. Becky pushed herself through high school in Pampa on a demanding schedule, finishing a year early just so she could get out of West Texas and see what the rest of the world was like. The boundary of that world, however, extended no more than a few hundred miles; it ended in Waxahachie, where her path crossed with Andy’s.

Soon after the two met, they became sweethearts. Eight months later, on April 19, 1975, they were married. She was eighteen; he was a year older. When they decided to wed, they also decided to drop out of college and to try to make a go of it on their own. Since both of them had been brought up in homes where prayer was preferred and pleasure was deferred, they were anxious to see what they had been missing.

After they were married, they moved to Dallas, which was the closest large city. Settling in a rented house, Andy went to work as manager at an upscale men’s shoe store while Becky stayed home to tend to the house, as was expected of women in her faith. But selling shoes proved tedious for Andy, who also was homesick for his family and his old friends. Six months after moving to Dallas, they loaded their belongings into a U-Haul and pointed the vehicle south, toward Houston, where Andy had been promised a job as an appraiser in the body shop of an automobile dealership. He had an edge in getting the job because both his father and an uncle were well known and well respected in the business, but once he began working, he carved out his own reputation.

Quickly, he became recognized as a competent and reliable worker with a special flair for organization. He had not been working at the new job very long when he had a better offer, that of manager of a body shop for a Ford dealership in the heart of downtown. It was a tremendous compliment to his talent and potential ability. At the age of twenty-one, he was the youngest manager for a major automotive dealer in all of Houston, perhaps in all of Texas.

While almost everyone who knew Andy thought of him as a Godfearing, hardworking young up-and-comer, cracks were beginning to develop in his persona. Very unusual cracks.

In the spring of 1976, when Andy was twenty and not yet married for a year, a twenty-three-year-old woman named Frances Ferguson was cleaning a vacant unit in a small apartment complex she managed when a strange event occurred. She was in the bedroom of the unit, vacuuming the carpet, when she saw a movement out of the corner of her eye. Looking up, she saw a man, a youth actually, since she estimated he was even younger than she, standing silently in the doorway, watching her intently.

“May I help…” she started to say when she looked more closely. The youth’s trousers were unzipped and his penis was exposed.

Ferguson’s first thought was for the safety of her toddler, who she had left playing on the floor of the empty living room. Brushing past the youth—who made no attempt to stop her—she scooped up her son and ran out the door. Once she was safely in the courtyard, she stopped and turned to face the apartment. The young man, his pants by then zippered, was standing nonchalantly in the doorway, calmly leaning against the door jamb and staring back at her, smiling pleasantly as though nothing untoward had happened.

“If you’re through, you can leave now,” Ferguson said, feeling a growing anger. Swept up by a wave of outrage, she ran to her own apartment and pulled a pistol out of her dresser drawer. Depositing her child in his crib, she ran into the parking lot, where the young man was trying unsuccessfully to start his car. Calmly, she leaned across the trunk and leveled the pistol at his back. Sensing her presence, he turned and stared down the barrel.

“You want to come back and try that now?” she asked coldly.

Terror flashed in the youth’s eyes. “Don’t shoot me, lady!” he screamed and scrambled out of the car. As she watched with leveled pistol, he ran down the street and around the corner, abandoning his vehicle. Later, when police showed up in response to the manager’s call, they traced the license number and discovered the car was registered to George Anderson Hopper.

At that time, the crime that had been alleged was not officially a serious matter, especially in Houston, which has one of the highest incidences of violent crime in the country. As far as police were concerned, it was a Class C misdemeanor, which meant that it was a finable offense and not even punishable by a jail term. To atone for a Class C misdemeanor, it was necessary only to mail in a designated monetary penalty, which in this case was $102.50, including court costs. The charge, according to court records, was criminal trespass. Why it was that rather than indecent exposure was never explained.

Some four months later, on August 1, 1976, Becky gave birth to a girl. She and Andy named the baby Ginny.

In that period, things were going well both socially and professionally for Becky and Andy. In the beginning, their life together, as it had for each of them when they were growing up, revolved primarily around the church. The people they mingled with, confided in, and called their friends were, for the most part, fellow members of the Assembly of God. Some of them, such as Buddy Wright and Randy Cain, were people Andy had grown up with. And others, such as Debbie Hosak, Randy Cain’s girlfriend, were friends of friends. But there were others in their circle as well. Following his instincts as an irrepressible extrovert, Andy ventured outward socially and drew the shy and retiring Becky along with him. Typical among these new friends were Ken Swarts, who worked at the dealership with Andy, and his wife, Connie.

The Swartses and the Hoppers soon became close friends, and with that friendship came an introduction into a world radically different from the one in which Andy and Becky had been raised. Within a very short time, Andy and Becky began asserting their independence from the church. While their life, in one way, still centered around the faith, they also were discovering for the first time a certain freedom from the church and its strict canons.

It was 1978. Becky and Andy had been married for three years and their daughter, Ginny, was two. The incident at the apartment house was two years in the past, presumably forgotten. By 1978, however, the man who once wanted to be a minister and his devout young wife had come to realize that they didn’t
have
to go to services twice a week anymore; not even once a week, in fact, if they didn’t feel like it. They could drink; they could smoke tobacco; they could live, it seemed, as others lived. Together, along with some of their closest friends from the church, Buddy Wright, Randy Cain, and Debbie Hosak, they began to stray from the church’s strict teachings.

Among other things Andy and Becky discovered in this period was drugs. Their favorite was a particularly potent form of homemade methamphetamine known on the street as “crystal” or “crank.” At first, especially for Becky, crystal was a wonder drug, opening up entire new vistas both for her and her husband. One of its main benefits, Becky would say later, was that it gave her tremendous surges of raw energy. It made her, an ardent homemaker, want to dig out an old toothbrush and go through the house methodically cleaning the baseboards.

At this time, Andy was successful in keeping his social and business lives separate. During the day, he built a reputation as a popular and efficient manager in a business in which men his age simply were not given so much responsibility. Remarkably, he was not only handling the job, he was excelling at it. When he took over the shop, it had been in total disarray, but within months the young man, still barely in his twenties, had totally reorganized the operation and had it running as smoothly as a new LTD. The dealer was so impressed with Andy’s performance that he rewarded him by putting him in charge of a new and larger operation in suburban Houston. But by then Andy was getting restless and, arguably, more dissolute.

Sometime earlier, Randy Cain had come to Andy seeking guidance in his romance. Randy, who was a couple of years younger than Andy, looked upon the older man almost as a brother. And, in a brotherly fashion, he asked for advice. His girlfriend, Debbie, a willowy brunette, was beginning to give him the cold shoulder. She had been the first girl he had ever slept with, he said, and he had experienced a feeling toward her that he thought was true love. But lately the attraction was ebbing on both sides. For one thing, he confessed, Debbie no longer wanted to have sexual relations with him.

“Why do you think that is?” Andy asked politely.

“She says she just doesn’t like to have sex anymore,” Randy replied. “She says she just can’t stand the thought of being intimate with men.”

“Bullshit,” Andy said bluntly.

Randy was shocked. “What do you mean?” he asked.

“It isn’t
men
she doesn’t like,” Andy replied. “It’s you. She just doesn’t want to sleep with
you
anymore.”

Randy was disbelieving.

“It’s true,” Andy said as kindly as he could, anxious not to hurt his friend’s feelings. “And I can prove it to you.”

“How’s that?” Randy asked skeptically.

“I’ll bet you ten dollars I can get her to go to bed with me,” Andy said.

Randy studied his friend. He knew in his heart that his relationship with Debbie was on the verge of collapse and it appeared there was no way it could be rescued. At the same time, he didn’t want to believe that he was personally unattractive. Yet Andy’s arrogance made him uncomfortable. He thought about it for a few seconds. “You’ve got a bet,” he said.

A few weeks later, Andy telephoned his friend. “Tonight’s the night,” he said. “Becky’s out of town and Debbie’s coming over. Drive by any time you want and you’ll see her car parked outside.”

Three times that night and early the next morning, Randy cruised by Andy’s house. Each time, even at 3
A
.
M
., Debbie’s car was parked outside.

Years later, when Randy related this story from the witness stand, tears welled up in his eyes.