To Hatred Turned (16 page)

I’m using the money, he reminded himself. I’m going to have to replace it or the people who put up the cash are going to come looking for
me
, never mind the woman they want eliminated. The problem was, he did not have the money to replace what he had used. That left him no alternative. I’m going to have to kill the woman, he told himself.

One night in late September, he drove by the house yet again. It was the first time he had been there in the evening and the darkness gave him added confidence. Parking his car several doors down, he slowly walked by the residence. There were no lights on inside. In his pocket, Andy had a suction cup and a glass cutter. If no one was home, he planned to force his way in and wait for her to arrive. In the movies he had seen how a burglar could put a suction cup against a windowpane, then use it to keep the glass from falling and breaking when it was cut. That was the movies. In practice it did not work out that way, at least not for him.

Quietly he slipped into Rozanne’s backyard and stealthily approached the rear door. He was not surprised when he found it locked. Nervously, he produced the suction cup, wet the surface with his tongue, and clamped it onto a window near the door. When he started to etch the surface with the cutter, however, he ran into trouble. Instead of cutting neatly, as he expected it to do, the pane shattered. To him, it sounded like a whole wall of glass coming down. Frightened, he pocketed the suction cup and left at a near run.

For several days after that, Andy deliberately stayed away from that part of town. Then, in the early afternoon of Tuesday, October 4, 1983, he had to go appraise a damaged car at a location not far from 804 Loganwood Drive. Unable to resist the temptation, he detoured down the street and cruised slowly past the house. This time, the woman’s brown Cadillac was in the driveway. She’s home! he thought. This is the time!

He drove hurriedly to the in-town condominium of a friend, Terry Harmon. He had met Harmon through his work and the two had gotten to know each other well. Generously, Harmon had given Andy a key to his condo, saying Andy could use his desk to prepare written appraisals so he would not have to drive all the way back to Garland simply to take care of paperwork. Andy knew his friend had a pistol and he knew where he kept it.

Letting himself into the empty dwelling, Andy moved quickly to Harmon’s desk, removed the a tiny .25 caliber automatic that Harmon kept there, along with some extra bullets, and slipped them into his pocket. As quietly and as quickly as he entered, he left.

From Harmon’s condo, Andy drove to a nearby supermarket where he bought a pair of yellow latex gloves and a small coil of rope. Then he went next door to a florist shop where he bought a potted plant. Finally, before leaving the strip center, he stopped and hurriedly removed a set of license plates from a parked car, which he put on his own car. Then he headed back to Richardson.

Shaking with anxiety, he drove past Rozanne’s house, noting with an uneasy satisfaction that her car was still there. Parking well away from Rozanne’s house, Andy got out of his car, palmed the pistol in his left hand, hiding it with the flowerpot. The rope and gloves were in his pocket. He walked quickly to the door and rang the bell. Within a few seconds Rozanne answered. Her dark hair hung loosely around her shoulders and she was clad in a dark robe.

She saw the plant in his hand, smiled, and opened the door wider. Moving quickly, Andy swung open the screen door, transferred the plant to the other hand, and gripped the pistol by the butt. Pointing it at her, he ordered her to step aside as he moved in rapidly behind her. Rozanne’s expression, at first puzzled, dissolved into terror when she realized what was happening.

Once inside, Andy glanced quickly around the living room and was tremendously relieved to see no one else was there. “Where’s the bedroom?” he asked nervously.

Tears were building in Rozanne’s eyes. “Why are you doing this?” she stammered.

“Shut up,” he replied brusquely, setting the flowerpot on the floor. “Where’s the bedroom?”

She pointed down a hall, which opened off the living room.

“Let’s go,” he said, pointing with the pistol.

A few feet down the hall, he looked through an open door and saw a young boy asleep on a bed. Quietly, he closed the door. Moving more discreetly, he shoved Rozanne into the master bedroom and softly closed that door as well. Looking around, he noted that the room had a cluttered, disorderly look. An ironing board was set up in front of the closet and several dresses were strewn about. On the wall, hanging slightly askew, were two prints, one of a nude man, and one of a nude woman.

Swiveling his gaze back to Rozanne, he barked a sharp command: “Take off your robe.”

Rozanne sobbed heavily; tears rolled down her cheeks. “Please,” she stammered.

“I told you to shut up,” he growled.

Still crying, she took off the robe. She wore nothing underneath.

“Get on the bed,” Andy demanded, pointing with the gun at the four-poster that sat in a corner of the room, carefully made with pale yellow sheets decorated with a cheerful flower pattern in green and red. “On your stomach.”

Nearly hysterical, Rozanne did as she was told. Roughly, Andy grabbed her right wrist and tied it to the right bedpost with the rope he had brought along. Then he tied her left hand to the left post and her two ankles to the foot posts. When he finished, she was nude and spread-eagled.

Succumbing to a sudden urge, he kneeled on the bed and tried to pull his penis from his pants, intending to enter her from the rear. He ejaculated prematurely, however, spurting semen over his hand. Cursing softly, he climbed off the bed and went into the bathroom that opened off the master bedroom. He wiped his hand with toilet tissue, flushed it, and went back into the bedroom, where Rozanne was crying and trying to free herself.

Grabbing a stocking from a nearby chair, Andy again knelt on the bed and twisted the nylon around her throat. Making a makeshift noose, he began to tighten it, but the stocking had too much stretch. Quickly, he reached over and grabbed the sash from the robe. Roughly, he looped it around her neck. He was strangling her with that when Rozanne managed to free her left hand and began trying to swing at him.

Panicking, Andy pulled the pistol from his pocket, where he had put it once he had her tied up, and clamped a pillow over her head. Without thinking, he fired twice through the pillow. Rozanne jerked and lay still.

(Prosecutors would imply later that Andy, in an attempt to make sure she died, then stuffed tissue paper down her throat to restrict her breathing. Although paramedics did indeed find tissue lodged in her throat, Andy denied putting it there.)

His heart beating wildly, Andy leaped off the bed and ran out the door. On the way down the hall, he looked quickly in the boy’s room and saw that he was still sleeping soundly. Being careful not to make any more noise than he had already, Andy slipped out the door, walked briskly to his car, and drove away.

A few minutes later, he stopped at a do-it-yourself car wash where he carefully vacuumed the interior of his car. He removed the stolen plates and replaced his own, dumping the stolen ones in a convenient trash can. Then he shredded the information about Rozanne that had been given to him and threw that into the can on top of the stolen plates. Still shaking, he drove unsteadily away.

Andy then returned to Garland and tried to resume a normal life. When he went back to collect the other half of the money, the body shop owner told him that the woman had not been killed outright but had died two days later, on October 6—Andy’s twenty-eighth birthday.

No one would mention Rozanne’s name or the incident to him for almost three years.

16

After the attack, Andy retreated into himself, becoming something of a hermit. It was an existence that was totally uncharacteristic for the normally ebullient car appraiser, and it puzzled Becky greatly. Naturally, Andy was unable to explain to his wife
why
he was in such a mood. Since he could not tell his wife what was troubling him, Andy had to let her assume the worst. And she did. She had already made up her mind to take the children to Pampa, but the length of her stay was open-ended, depending on how Andy reacted to her absence. Her determination to go was only strengthened by Andy’s melancholia.

She left Dallas on October 12, less than a week after Rozanne died, unaware of the entire situation. By the time she left, her attitude had hardened and she had resolved that she was not coming back. But she had not counted on Andy’s persistence, either. He telephoned her daily, begging her to return. She finally relented after he promised to see a marriage counselor.

After she came back on Christmas Day 1983, Andy gave up his own business and went to work as an office manager for a car appraisal firm while Becky took a job with a floral-design company. It was a move of necessity more than desire; with two growing girls and the debt Andy had built trying to get his own company started, they needed the money.

While the financial situation caused some tension, this was basically a time of healing for Andy and Becky. He kept his promise about seeing the counselor, and for awhile their marriage seemed to have a new life. He became attentive to her and the girls and plunged into his new job with enthusiasm. No matter what his other faults, Andy was a devoted father.

But not even the girls were enough to make Andy change. As the weeks wore on, he slipped back into his wild ways, taking drugs and having brief liaisons. He had at least one short liaison with a young married mother who worked at an insurance company, although she later admitted that she was the one who initiated the affair. Apparently, there were others as well. Andy’s drug-dealing friend, James Lee Carver, swore that Andy was a womanizer of considerable magnitude who used to brag about his conquests and flaunt his women until Carver told him to quit bringing them around his shop because his wife and Becky were friends. According to Carver, Andy once telephoned him and boasted that he was calling from another woman’s bed.

Then, barely five months after Becky had returned, Andy had his first brush with the law since the indecent-exposure incident in Houston in 1976. That peculiar second episode began when an insurance company employee named Glenn Johnston entered Andy’s life.

In May 1984, Johnston went to police officers in Richardson to complain that a man who apparently had stolen his wallet while he was shopping for a birthday card for a relative had traced him through identification in the billfold and was trying to extort more money from him. Later, the story would prove more complicated, but what Johnston initially told investigators was that the pickpocket, after a week-long series of telephone calls demanding money, said he was going to leave the $200 to $300 worth of traveler’s checks that had been in the wallet hidden in a stack of bricks at a construction site. Johnston was to go to the site, remove the checks, make them out to “G. Hopper,” sign them, and return them to the hiding place, where the extortionist could pick them up at his convenience. If Johnston did not do as he was told, the man allegedly told him, harm would come to his wife and children.

Richardson Detective Ken Roberts planned a trap for Andy. After getting Johnston’s agreement to cooperate, Roberts told the insurance man to do as the caller had suggested in every respect except for signing the traveler’s checks. Instead, in case the man was watching him, Johnston was only to
pretend
to be signing them. There would be officers at each end of the road leading to the construction site and when the man came to pick up the checks, they would close the net. Roberts and a female detective named Melody Accord would be in one unmarked vehicle, and another officer, Ken McKenzie, would be in another.

When the time for the transaction rolled around, Johnston did as he had been told. And when a man came to pick up the checks, the police moved in. Roberts blocked one end of the street with his car while he and Accord crouched behind the vehicle with drawn pistols. McKenzie, in his unmarked truck, drove the extortionist toward Roberts and Accord—like a hammer to an anvil.

To a certain extent the plan worked. A man came to pick up the checks and McKenzie moved in. The man jumped in his car and drove away from the approaching policeman, toward Roberts and Accord. But when he got to their vehicle, rather than stopping at the roadblock, he swerved around the police car, drove down the sidewalk, and sped down the street. McKenzie allegedly gave chase.

McKenzie later testified that he chased the extortionist for quite a distance, sometimes at speeds approaching eighty mph. The man, he said, was driving recklessly and was endangering innocent bystanders. At one point, according to McKenzie, he pulled up alongside the extortionist, but before he could make a move, the man swerved his car into the detective’s path, forcing the policeman to drop back. A few minutes later, McKenzie lost the other vehicle. During the chase, however, he said he had gotten close enough to get the license number of the other car, and he traced it to Andy. At Andy’s trial, the defense would challenge some of the details of McKenzie’s description of the chase.

That evening, McKenzie and several other officers went to Andy’s house and arrested him in front of his wife and children, dragging him away in handcuffs. The next morning, Becky borrowed $77 from drug dealer James Carver to post Andy’s bond.

Curiously, no charges were ever filed against Andy in connection with the incident, either by Johnston, the extortion target, or by the police.