Texas-based Crime Writer Pens 2nd Novel

Steven Long, a Texas-based true-crime author, longtime journalist, and fearless animal activist has covered some of the most important criminal cases of the last two decades.

Now, he's taken his talent for narrative writing to the pages of fiction with the The Sauceda Trilogy. Best known for his true-crime bestsellers Out of Control, Every Woman's Nightmare, and Death Without Dignity, which won a 1987 Gavel Award from the State Bar of Texas, he majestically spins fact-based fiction.

Below is an excerpt from Sauceda, the second of three books in Long's trilogy. It is the tale of three generations of the wealthy Patchcock family in a narrative certain to leave readers asking for more. You're in for a treat:

Excerpt from Chapter Six

Monsignor Juan Antonio Francis Xavier Villarreal was also disturbed by the drunkenness, cursing, and even fistfights that had broken out in Bean’s tiny courthouse and barroom. His wagon was as handsomely equipped as Patchcock’s, perhaps even more so. The floor of the Conestoga was covered by a Persian rug. Silver candlestick held tall tapers next to the kneeler by his bed. A Pullman chair reclined next to a table for reading the Holy Scriptures prior to saying the divine office as was his priestly duty at certain hours of the day. On the table next to his well thumbed Roman Breviary sat a copy of Mark Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper, a novel released by the popular American author the year before, but which had only now reached his rectory. Villarreal felt no guilt at reading the American humorist. He believed all priests must have a heart filled with laughs and songs as well as Psalms.

The monsignor wondered if the Baptist preacher who had joined the trip read Twain, or was he as dour as he had found so many of the sect? The man seemed pleasant enough to be sure, yet he appeared to be rough hewn and unlettered. Perhaps he didn’t read at all. The priest looked across the wagon floor at the chamber pot making sure it was empty for the night. It was. He had no intention adding to its contents so shortly after dusk and decided to put on his greatcoat and pee behind the wagon. He drew the strings open at the back and eased his great girth down onto the snow-covered sand. The bite of cold was refreshing to him as he climbed down the steps. As Villarreal stood wetting a wagon wheel he looked toward the river and saw lantern light and wondered who could be foolish enough to leave the comfort of camp to sit in the snow while the flakes continued to fall – even if there was the raucous sound of inebriates breaking the quiet of a cold winter night.

The moon was full over Langtry as Villarreal shook off the final drop of urine and tucked his manhood back into the front flap of his winter underwear expertly buttoning as he did so. He looked away from the man and at the lighted windows of Bean’s courtroom and bar then turned back to the man sitting by the river with a glowing lantern.  He then looked at Patchcock’s wagon, the candle and lantern glow from inside creating the unmistakable silhouette on the white canvass of two figures in the rhythm of making love. The priest looked away, but then looked back, stealing a furtive glance at the act forbidden to him. It was something he had never witnessed, and believed he would never have the opportunity to see. The temptation was powerful as he felt himself becoming aroused and cursed his weakness as he ran toward the river to get away from the mortal sin he was without absolute doubt committing. It was a sin that could banish him to hell and he needed the rush of cold air on his face to rid himself of the cursed sight he had just witnessed.

Halfway to the river he bent down and scooped up snow, brushing it on his face to chill himself.

“Hail Mary, full of grace,” he recited, “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus, Holy Mary, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.”

Loathing his frailties, Villarreal cursed himself. Returning to the Holy Mother’s loving bosom had always saved him from lust and it did so again as the fever left him as soon as it had come. He looked toward the river, again watching the figure with the lantern. The man raised both arms in the air as if giving praise, and then he heard the faint singing of a Protestant hymn vaguely familiar to him in the crisp clear early night air.

“Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me,” the preacher intoned toward the night sky.

Villarreal turned his back to the man, now knowing it was the Baptist preacher.

How different they are, he thought as he took the first step back toward the camp. No Catholic priest would be demonstrative in such a way. 

“I once was lost, but now I’m found,” the Baptist continued. “Was blind, but now I seeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.”

The song became a scream as Villarreal whirled to see a giant figure tower above the man, and then lift him from the ground into the air. The creature’s bare white canine teeth sparkled with their whiteness in the moonlight as the wifwolf then went for the man’s neck, instantly cutting off all sound, and then came away dripping with blood falling white upon the snow. Terrified, yet mesmerized, the priest stood motionless, then backed toward the camp as the giant beast again raised the flailing man toward his lips this time ripping away the throat and then holding the hair and flinging the body until it was separated from the head. The creature held the head in triumph as Villarreal watched horrified remembering the revulsion he had felt the first time he saw Caravaggio’s Medusa in the Uffizi in Florence.

Now instead of a Baptist preacher singing, the priest heard the howl of a wolf pierce the night sky as he bolted toward the wagon of Patchcock and Margot, then even in his fright thought better of the idea and burst through the doors of the judge’s bar.

“Holy Mother of God,” the priest shouted. “The Baptist is dead from a monster that has beheaded him. Holy Mother of God. Come with me, I must pray over him.”

Sauceda is available now from Amazon.

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A Colorful Little Tale of Halloween Poison

by Deborah Blum

I grew up on a dead-end street in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where remnants of swampy forest surrounded the old wood-frame homes. Live oaks lined the streets. Spanish moss dripped from their branches. Snakes coiled under the ancient azaleas that edged the yards.

It was, in fact, the perfect setting for a haunted Halloween night. And there was this one house, you know, where the yard was so dense with bush and tree that it could barely be seen through its thicket of shadow. To trick-or-treat, you walked up the dark sidewalk toward a faint glow on the front porch, just the one lit window. The air hummed with passing insects and the porch creaked like Dracula’s coffin under your feet, the slow, dry eek of old wood.

Reader, you had to beware on Halloween night. Just a block over lived a maniacal dentist who liked to dress up like a werewolf on October 31 and fill his front hall with clouds of drifting fog created by dropping dry ice (super-chilled chunks of carbon dioxide) into water. Bwa-ha-ha, he would chortle as he opened the door, as the chilly wisps of fog drifted out around him.

But this silent house, dressed in darkness, was so much scarier. We children would gather in front of the gate, unable to walk alone through those prowling shadows. The crowd would form on the sidewalk: tiny pillowcase ghosts and jeweled princesses, small pirates and glittery fairies. When someone decided we’d achieved a safe number, we’d start edging toward the green door at the top of the porch steps. Whispering about what the old man who lived there would hand out – what dangerous treats might wait for us there.

This was the 1960s and even then, people told stories, warned their children, about the psychopaths out there who might drop poisoned candy into one’s hands. In the long history of the holiday, truthfully, this has almost never happened. But the very nature of Halloween – the witch at the door, the monster in the closet – lends itself to such ideas. Wasn’t there a crazy woman on Long Island in 1964, after all, who handed out arsenic to trick-or-treaters she thought too old for the candy hunt?

It hardly mattered that as Snopes points out, she didn’t kill anyone. And her deliberate poisoning attempt seems to be an odd exception to the general goodwill of the holiday. The psychopath at the door is an urban myth. Most of the poisonous Halloween stories turn out to be mistakes or far more personal tragedies. The worst is that of a Texas father who murdered his eight-year-old son in 1974 for insurance money.

He did so by putting cyanide into into the fruit-flavored sugar inside a Pixie Stick, one of the child’s favorites. In an attempt to make the death seem like a random poisoning, the father – Ronald Clark O’Bryan – also gave cyanide-laced candy to his daughter and three other children in his Deer Park neighborhood. These other lethal treats were collected by police as (fortunately) the children hadn’t touched them.

O’Bryan – nicknamed The Candyman by the Texas media – was executed by lethal injection ten years after his son’s death. But people remembered. And they forgot that the worst outbreak of Halloween candy poisoning had nothing to do suspected killers. The biggest poison outbreak – linked to Halloween of 1950 – was simply caused by orange food coloring used by candy manufacturers.

Scores of children across the country fell ill with severe diarrhea and welting rashes after eating candy and popcorn balls tinted by the FDA approved Orange Dye No. 1 ( also known as FD&C Orange No. 1, Acid Orange 20, and Orange 1). The “FD&C” indicates that the dye is used in food, drugs and cosmetics. Throughout the first half of the 20th century, Orange 1 was used primarily in candy, cookies, cakes, carbonated beverages, and meat-products such as hot dogs.

As federal investigators would discover upon investigation, the dye was also a rash-inducing occupational health hazard. Orange 1 belonged to a group of seven dyes first approved by the federal government in the year 1906, the first year that this country began regulating food safety. All seven of these dyes were coal-tar dyes, derived originally from the hydrocarbon byproducts of processed coal. Orange 1, for instance, contained benzene, today one of our better known toxic compounds.

But at that Halloween moment in 1950, no one had thought much about colored food. In fact, officials at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration suddenly realized that no one had really taken a good look at these turn-of-the-century food dyes for almost 50 years. The FDA promptly launched an investigation that found that, yes, Orange 1 was definitely poisonous: an oral dose of one gram of the dye per one kilogram of food killed two out of five mice in a day. A 20-week-experiment mixing the dye into rat food killed three of eight test rats.

The researchers also found that manufacturers were tossing the dye into candy corn and sugary little pumpkins with surprising enthusiasm. According to a 1954 article in The New York Times, one piece of candy was 1,500 parts per million pure Orange 1. Two years later, in 1956, the FDA delisted Orange 1 as well as Orange 2 (used to deepen the color of oranges) and Red Dye No. 32. Twelve other food colorings have been delisted since that time. This doesn’t reassure everyone; consumer advocates still worry over the health effects of food coloring.

But – take at least this reassurance: it’s been a long time since we saw children falling ill across the country because they indulged in an extra handful of candy corn, not realizing that its cheerful orange was a signal for trouble. We’re mostly smart enough to realize that regulating food safety offers more protection than worrying about the crazy man behind the door.

Which brings me back to my friends and I hesitating at that shadowy gate on a Halloween night in Louisiana. Let me tell you what happened, Halloween after Halloween. Slowly, we inched down the sidewalk, creaked up the steps, quavered at the door. Slowly, the door pulled open and the slightly tottering elderly man opened the screen to drop glossy red apples into our bags.

Every year it added an extra thrill to the night. But, reader, you had to beware on Halloween night. I’m almost positive they were just bright fall apples. But our parents wouldn’t let us eat them.

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Failure to Test is a Failure of Justice

by Diane Dimond

The evidence had been there all along. It had been sitting on a shelf inside a cold storage facility at the Houston Police Department for 12 years. After a determined detective tracked it down and sent it off to the lab for testing the state of Texas realized it had a found a serial rapist. The criminal’s name is Roland Ali Westbrooks and his story highlights why every state in the union should make testing of backlogged rape kits a top priority.

For more than two decades law enforcement has had the ability to take even the tiniest specks of evidence from a rape victim – bodily fluids, stray hairs, fingernail scrapings – and match the DNA findings to information stored in a national data base called CODIS. Every time a rape kit is processed the DNA print is supposed to be entered into CODIS. And the reason for this is simple: Rapists rape repeatedly. They hardly ever have just one victim.

One study on serial offenders puts the average number of a rapist’s victims at seven while another study puts it at 11. To put this in perspective, realize that if we get just one of these perps off the street we’ve prevented several future crimes. Every year in America there are roughly 200 thousand reported rapes and it is not just women who are attacked. 10% of all rape victims are men.

The first time we know Roland Ali Westbrooks struck was in August 1995. It was a nighttime home invasion and his victim was a complete stranger, a teenager girl alone in her bedroom. Houston police say as he put a pillow over the 16 year olds face he threatened to kill her if she screamed. The girl reported the attack immediately and submitted to a complete rape examination.

Like tens of thousands of other rape kits nationwide her evidence package was never processed and no one was ever arrested for her brutal assault. After a cold case detective re-opened the teen’s case earlier this year and ordered the DNA in her kit to finally be processed, her rapist was identified as Ronald Westbrooks. The good news was that he was already in jail! The bad news was that Westbrooks was in prison because he had been convicted of another rape – a crime that occurred in 1997 – two years after the attack on the teenager. That attack might never have taken place if the 16 year olds rape kit had been tested in a timely fashion. Police suspect Westbrooks left more victims and are investigating that now.

To be sure states have made some progress in winnowing down their backlog of rape kits. When I first wrote about this topic in 2008 there were 400,000 bundles of untested evidence. Today, the best estimates put the national number at about 180 thousand. But that’s still way too many.

Sometimes lab work isn’t necessary as police have already gotten a confession or the victim withdraws the complaint. But in too many other cases it becomes a matter of indifference, inconvenience or finances. Each test costs about $1,500.

In most jurisdictions it is still up to the discretion of the investigating detective whether to order up a full lab analysis of a rape kit. Usually the victim is never told whether her evidence has been processed or relegated to some shelf to gather dust I can think of no other crime where police have definitive evidence of a crime and fail to process it. I think it is unconscionable.

Information from these kits, entered into CODIS, would likely mean numerous outstanding sex crimes could be solved. The perpetrator could be identified, taken off the streets or slapped with a longer prison sentence if they are already behind bars like Roland Westbrooks. More importantly, victims could finally feel a sense of justice.

It’s already happening in Texas. The popular Texas-based blog Grits for Breakfast reports that when “Tarrant County tested their entire backlog they identified five serial rapists by matching the results to CODIS.” Imagine – five dangerous criminals were scooped up just by testing evidence that was already there!

May I be so blunt as to ask, “What the heck are we waiting for?” And don’t tell me it’s a matter of money. The money spent on processing these kits would be far less than what we would have to pay out to investigate and prosecute these rapists’ future crimes.

I call for a nationwide initiative to examine every relevant kit. Let’s get every state to dedicate one group of lab technicians to examine the most recent kits so as to stop currently active rapists. A second group should examine the oldest kits with an eye on the ones that might come up against a statute of limitations problem. Let’s get that information into CODIS and see how many more perps we can get off the streets.

The perfect tool is already sitting there if we would just use it! Anybody with me?

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Out of the Closet

by Diane Fanning

Just when I thought law enforcement had forgotten Tommy Lynn Sells, along comes a former deputy with Missouri's Cape Girardeau County Sheriff’s Department asking about a long forgotten body. And once again, Sells' name was dropped as a possible suspect. I thought by now he’d been considered in every single cold case that remained open in his home state in the 1980s and 1990s. Apparently not.

Back when Sells was arrested, on January 2, 2000, investigators across the country dusted off files of cold cases eager to see if Sells was a possible perpetrator. After 48 Hours aired the show about the serial killer, Texas Rangers Johnny Allen and Coy Smith came into their offices to discover hundreds of requests from detectives all across the country wanting to know if Sells could have been in the right place at the right time to commit an unsolved murder in their jurisdiction.

The inquiries and interview requests continued to flood into Texas up to Sells' trial in September 2000, when he was convicted of the murder and sexual assault of Katie Harris and the attempted murder of Krystal Surles in Del Rio, Texas. Sells was sentenced to death.

Some law enforcement agencies no longer wanted to waste resources on looking at Sells—after all, unlike some states, Texas is very serious about the enforcement of their death penalty. Other investigators, though, who hungered to find closure for family members and satisfaction in their quest for justice, continued travelling to Texas to question Sells.

I fielded a lot of requests for information, too. I heard from detectives, family members, prosecutors, defense attorneys, private investigators, and some from uninvolved but curious true-crime buffs. Among the latter group, I received hundreds of emails about the Darlie Routier case. Although she sits on Death Row for the murder of her two sons, many people still believe in her innocence. They wanted to know if Tommy Lynn Sells was in the Dallas area at the time of that crime. While there may be doubts about Darlie’s guilt, Sells had an ironclad alibi—he sat behind bars in a West Virginia prison. There was no way he was responsible for killing those two boys.

This summer, though, as Sells approaches the eighth anniversary of his death sentence, interest in the Death Row inmate seemed to have died down. The only question most people still asked was: Have they killed him yet?

Until this month in the boot heel of Missouri, that is. Renewed interest in a 1981 homicide case raised his name again. The remains of an unknown white male, aged 20 to 40 and ranging from 5-feet-nine to five-feet-eleven inches tall, were found in a wooded area on April 6, 1981. The corpse was clothed in green pants, a short-sleeved khaki shirt (above) and a pair of black loafers adorned with a buckle. His skull, however, was missing.

Two years and one week later, a mushroom hunter found the missing head in a nearby creek. In the area, there were only three missing men who fit the description of the victim. A comparison of dental records discovered no match to any of them. So, the remains and the clothing moldered away in a basement closet archive at the Southeast Missouri State University for the next two decades. Forgotten by all but one man.

Now he’s come forward, resurrecting the case, looking for justice. Will the authorities be able to tie it to Tommy Lynn Sells? The odds are stacked against them. In 1979 and 1980, when Sells wasn’t on the road, he was in Missouri. In 1981, though, his home base was Little Rock, Arkansas and he was just 17 years old. He has confessed to committing homicide at that young age but he never mentioned this case.

If not Sells, will they be able to identify anyone as the killer? Will they even be able to give the victim a name? It sounds unlikely after 27 years but scientists make a habit of transforming the impossible into the routine every day.

Forensic Science is an amazing and rapidly expanding field. What seemed like fantasy five years ago is now common forensic investigative technique in labs across the country. Who knows what microscopic trace evidence is nestled in the folds of his shirt or on the buckle of his shoe (above), waiting for a diligent individual to uncover.

One day, the unknown man in green pants may find justice after all.

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Polygamy Revisited

by Kathryn Casey

“It’s not like being born in the U.S. It’s like being born in another country,” says Joseph, who more than a decade ago fled a polygamous town in Utah. “I think of my life like being caught up in the Holocaust.”

The recent raid in Eldorado, Texas, of the FLDS (Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints) compound, in which more than 400 children were removed from their homes and taken into CPS custody, brought back strange memories. Eighteen years ago, Ladies’ Home Journal sent me to the side-by-side polygamous enclaves of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona. The reason: to report on a sensational adoption battle over the six children – four girls and two boys – of Brenda Thornton, a woman who died of breast cancer. On one side were the children's biological aunts, Thornton’s two sisters, and on the other polygamist Vaughn Fischer and his first wife, Sharane.

For those of you unfamiliar with the way polygamy works, a man legally marries a first wife and then joins with subsequent women into “spiritual marriages.” Six weeks before her death, Brenda Thornton had entered into such a “spiritual marriage” with Vaughn Fischer, becoming his third wife. Before dying, she signed papers to allow him to adopt her children from a previous marriage. Although Thornton’s sisters fought hard, they were outmatched monetarily by the Fischers, whose battle was financed by their church. In the end, Vaughn and Sharane were given the right to adopt Brenda Thornton’s children by the Utah Supreme Court.

I’ve never forgotten my days in Hildale and Colorado City. They were desolate, windblown and unfriendly places. There were no restaurants or hotels, because the folks there didn’t want strangers visiting. Some men had more than a dozen wives. In a main house, they lived with their first, second, perhaps even a third wife, and their combined children, while around the perimeters of their properties other wives and children lived in small cottages. In the Fischer household, a schedule posted on the refrigerator tracked which nights Vaughn slept with which wife.

There’s so much I remember, but especially the children. It was summer, and in the more than ninety-degree heat, boys played basketball in long pants and long-sleeved shirts and the girls were dressed in handmade, cotton, pioneer-looking dresses, despite the heat wearing slacks underneath to ensure modesty. And the children were everywhere, swarms of them on swings and in playgrounds, laughing and smiling. But they scattered whenever I approached like tumbleweed in a dust storm. I was an outsider, and they’d been taught from birth to stay away from outsiders. Outsiders wouldn’t understand their lifestyle, their culture. Outsiders were the enemy.

Recently, watching the news coverage of Eldorado, I thought about the children of polygamy yet again. Much attention has been given, as it should be, to the abuse of the young girls, married off at tender ages to men decades older, at times their biological relatives. I wondered, too, about a subject that has gotten less press: what it's like for the boys. To find out, I made a few telephone calls. Eventually, I connected with a man in his thirties who grew up in polygamous households until the age of nineteen. He agreed to talk. For our purposes, I’ll call him Joseph.

KC: When you look back on your life, what do you most remember?

Joseph: The way we were all indoctrinated, brainwashed. The mind control used on us. When I went to the Holocaust museum in Washington a few years ago, I realized they were many of the techniques used by the Nazis--sleep and food deprivation, emotional, psychological, and sexual abuse.

KC: Was this type of abuse prevalent in the community?

Joseph: I can only speak to the house I grew up in. The father was in complete control, and there was abuse at every level. We had no one to go to, no one to complain to.

KC: What did they use to control you?

Joseph: He distorted our sense of reality. We suffered horrible punishment if we didn’t do what we were told. The father was a brutal dictator. From early ages, we were told that if we didn’t do what he wanted, including the incestuous behavior, we would never get to heaven.

KC: What happened when you began coming of age?

Joseph: From the time we’re kids on, boys and girls are told that we’re not to have normal relationships. Talking to a girl is a no-no. God doesn’t like boys to talk to girls. It’s not allowed.

KC: What made you decide to leave?

Joseph: For polygamy, they want to keep the girls. By the time we’re teenagers, the leaders have decided which of the boys they’ll keep and which they’ll get rid of. They keep the ones who do what they’re told. Boys who aren’t chosen are forced out.

KC: How?

Joseph: They put a lot of pressure on, a lot of abuse.

KC: What we’re talking about is that there aren’t normally five or ten women to every man. To get the percentage of women to men high enough for polygamy, the leaders have to drive out some of the boys?

Joseph: Yes. They begin harassing the boys they don’t want at a young age, so eventually the boys just give up and leave, even though it’s the only home they’ve ever known. They have to leave their parents, brothers and sisters behind. I dropped out of school young, because they made it so hard for me.

KC: Do you hear from your siblings?

Joseph: No. I’m the only one who left. But when you’re born into it, you don’t know any better. Our mom was a child bride, married off at sixteen.

KC: What do you think about what’s going on in Eldorado, Texas?

Joseph: I’m behind Texas, because of the abuse I’ve suffered. I’m glad they’re doing what they’re doing there.

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