Kiss of the She-Devil (43 page)

During what some might call the financial heydays of World War II, some say nearly a quarter-million soldiers filed their way through the Fort Wolters base, with another forty thousand during the Vietnam War. After that last copter and soldier left, however, Mineral Wells felt the hit immediately. All that military money vanished seemingly overnight. Add to that, too, the collapse of the cottage industry of the Baker Hotel, an icon in Mineral Wells since the 1940s and 1950s. As the years progressed, Mineral Wells fell more in line with that familiar poverty-stricken, jobless brand that has become small-town America, a burg ravaged by the horrors of what meth and ice can do: robberies, burglaries, auto thefts, and rapes. Not a trade-off, necessarily, for a low murder rate, but it was a fact the locals—many of whom were born and raised in Mineral Wells—could not and would not ever deny.

“Still,” one local told me, “Mineral Wells sometimes gets thrown that way”—being a bad place to live—“but it’s really not. Probably just like anywhere else, we have the same problems other communities have. We’re average people.”

The Baker Hotel was a resort, a bona fide destination for many tourists and Hollywood celebrities and curiosity seekers from all over the world. The likes of Marilyn Monroe and FDR visited. Everyone came in search of some of that old “crazy water” said to be tapped in Mineral Wells springs. The town had been founded on a certain type of mineral water that sprung up, which was thought to have some sort of a therapeutic value. It was said to be the cure for everything from arthritis to insanity, hence the “crazy water” name. As a result, the town became somewhat of a miracle, curing destination. Everybody wanted what was in that water. The Baker Hotel, a rather large landmark in town—now run-down and about to fall in on its own building blocks—became the go-to hot spot. There in the center of town stood a high-rise establishment, with the top floor dedicated to mineral baths.

“People came from all over to soak in the baths and then profess it was a cure for anything they had,” said one local. “So back in the ’50s and early ’60s, this was a booming town.”

Throughout that time the economy was great; the military was rocking and rolling. The Baker Hotel became like a little Las Vegas, and all was copasetic in town. But then that military base closed and the bottom fell out. No sooner did the Baker Hotel implode.

Still, the one fact that MWPD officers and locals would acknowledge all day long was that, despite the downturns throughout the years, Mineral Wells had “one of the lowest, if not the lowest, murder rates in the state.”

Indeed, murder was not a call the MWPD got all that frequently.

Randy Hunter and the other MWPD officers who arrived on scene to back him up weren’t in the house all that long. When Hunter and the other police officers emerged, Rick Cruz heard additional sirens—other cops and an ambulance heading toward the scene. It all seemed real now to the Cruzes. Something had happened. Something terrible. Something sinister and maybe even deadly.

Officer Hunter must have found something inside the house, Rick Cruz surmised, looking on.

Hunter came out and walked over to Rick and Kathy as more cops and an emergency medical technician (EMT) van pulled up. “I’ll need that gun, Mr. Cruz.”

Rick handed it over. “What’s going on?”

The officer didn’t say anything.

“What is it?” Rick asked.

The cop said nothing.

Then again, he didn’t have to. The look on his face—and all of the arriving officers and emergency medical technicians—said it all. What had started hours earlier as a “maybe” was now something much more serious. Someone had been shot. No doubt about it. And by the look of it, Rick and Kathy Cruz knew while standing there in Bob Something’s driveway, sizing up the scene as it unfolded in front of them, the cop was in no hurry to help the victim out.

By now, the MWPD believed there were possibly two victims inside what was an absolute dump of a house on Twentieth Street. Inside, police had found a male and a female. Or a mother and her son, as it turned out. That first responding officer, Randy Hunter, knew the man was dead; as it turned out, the woman was alive—just barely. The MWPD had no idea what happened: how, why, when, or by whom. They only inferred that a gun was somehow involved. Hunter and his team of responding officers did a cursory search of the house, where they had found the one man—presumably Bob Something—unresponsive, lying on a bed, cold to the touch, dead as roadkill.

As Hunter walked into that second bedroom, and the arm fell off the bed, he heard a groan. And it scared him.

What in the hell?
Hunter thought.

Not another DB.

There was an elderly woman awake in her bed in that adjacent room, buried under a mound of covers. The room was a complete mess. “Junked out,” said one law enforcement source. There were empty Happy Meal boxes all over the place. She had been watching television, actually. And when Hunter approached, weapon drawn, ready and expecting to find her dead, too, she looked at him quizzically and wondered what in the world was going on. It was obvious she had been underfed and was perhaps suffering from malnutrition and some form of dementia.

“Out of it,” one cop told me later. She was totally oblivious to the fact that the man—her son!—in the room next to her was dead. “Once she got some fluids in her, though, she bounced back quickly and was—she let us know—totally surprised that the cops were in her house.”

One report had the old woman sitting up in bed at one point, saying,
“Is there anything wrong, Officer?”
as Hunter dug her out of the covers she was buried under and realized she was alive.

The responding officers were smart not to touch or meddle with the crime scene. It’s amazing how many first responders muck up what can be a slippery slope when walking into a crime scene involving a potential murder victim. It’s those first responders, most forensic scientists will agree, that can make or break a case depending on how they go about closing off and securing a scene. In this case the MWPD had trained its officers properly—apparently. There was a protocol, and it was followed.

Thirty-five-year-old MWPD detective Brian Boetz was at home, already done for the day, enjoying his life outside work, when he took the call.

“We have what appears to be a double homicide . . . out on Twentieth Street,” dispatch said.

“Got it. On my way.”

One murder in Mineral Wells on a Wednesday evening was beyond rare. But
two
? That got Boetz’s attention mighty quick. He didn’t waste much time hopping up out of his chair, grabbing his weapon and radio, firing up his black Yukon SUV, and kicking stone and dust from his driveway as a siren blared as Boetz found himself heading toward a possible double-homicide scene.

Inside the house Randy Hunter had made sure that the old woman was taken out by EMTs and brought directly to a hospital.

It took Detective Boetz about fifteen minutes to get to the scene. He stepped out of his Yukon, saw Richard and Kathy Cruz standing, looking rather puzzled, and headed into the house. No sooner had Boetz arrived, did his captain, Mike McAllester, pull up.

Boetz was a Texas transplant. He, his mother, grandfather, and grandmother had moved to Mineral Wells from Denver, Colorado, when Boetz was twelve. “My dad lives somewhere in Oregon, I think,” the detective told me. “I don’t know for sure. I don’t keep in touch with him.”

Taking a look at the house from outside as they headed in, Boetz and McAllester easily determined that no one had been taking care of the place. They’d seen worse, sure. But this house was nothing more than a run-down, dirty, substandard, ranch-style box of decaying wood. It had been nearly overcome by aggressive, vinelike vegetation, with paint peeling off like confetti in droves.

The EMTs were gone by the time Boetz and McAllester arrived. A cursory review of the neighborhood and it was clear that they were looking at a cookie-cutter series of similar single-family ranch homes on postage-stamp sects of land. This was part of suburbia in Mineral Wells. Most homes were kept up as best they could be under the conditions of the economic times, and there was not much drive to fix up a community that had been falling to the ills of the drug culture for years. Drugs had a way of working themselves into the nicer communities, once the suburban partiers move on from weed and booze and into the heavier stuff, like heroin, crack, and meth. There was no defining line much anymore, separating the “hood” from the “burbs,” unless one was talking exclusive areas of the town. Drugs were everywhere today.

“The town of Mineral Wells is definitely in decay,” one visitor to the neighborhood told me, “and none of the homes in that neighborhood will be in
Better Homes and Gardens.
”

An understatement.

“We entered through a back door”—after reaching in through what was a windowpane of smashed-out glass with a bit of blood surrounding it, and unlatching the lock—“and found a victim deceased and an elderly female subject still alive in her bed,” Randy Hunter explained to Boetz as they got together inside and talked.

“No kidding?”

“Yeah. . . .”

“So it’s not a double?” Boetz asked. He was confused at first. Dispatch had called in potentially two homicides. Could there be another victim besides the old woman, who had been taken to the hospital?

“No, just the one,” Hunter said. He pointed to the room where the body had been discovered.

“Thanks.”

The old woman, Hunter further explained to Boetz, was unmindful of what had happened inside the home. She had no idea someone had been shot and killed.

Better yet, her son.

“There’s one deceased person inside and one being attended to [at the hospital],” Boetz explained to his boss, Mike McAllester.

It was 8:23
P.M.
Boetz had a look around the house before heading into the bedroom with the DB. It appeared that the old woman had lived inside her room and was being
kept
—for lack of a better term—by someone, probably her son, Boetz surmised.

The deceased victim was naked, lying on a bed, half his body covered with blankets (as if he was sleeping), a pillow or some sort of laundry bag over what was left of his face. He had been shot, apparently point-blank, several times; the right side of his jaw had been blown nearly off his face. His cheek was nothing more than ripped, torn, and bloodied flesh.

“Looks like the elderly lady has been neglected,” Boetz said. Interestingly enough, there was a lock on the outside of the old woman’s door. Whoever was supposedly taking care of her had essentially locked her inside her room. It was clear she hardly—if ever—left that room.

Boetz asked Sergeant Bard Belz, who had just arrived, to position himself at the front door of the residence. “Keep a log of anybody coming and going from the crime scene.”

“Will do,” Belz said.

Boetz asked Officer Gary Lively to do the same at the back door. “Don’t let anyone in.”

“No problem, Detective.”

Boetz and McAllester took a moment to look around the house. A basic ranch, the front door opened into a small living room, which was “just messy . . . in somewhat disarray,” Boetz recalled. There were mattresses on the floor; pillows and blankets and garbage were strewn all over, as if several people had been living in the house and sleeping anywhere they could find an open space. There was a desk with a computer and chair. “Stacked up on top of a stand, where the TV was on, was a bunch of videotapes. . . .” There was some other furniture spread throughout the room, sparse as it was, but it was old and decrepit, like the inside of the home itself. And there was a lone fan, Boetz took note of, “noisy and running,” sitting on a table. This gave the inside of the house a rather eerie, creepy feel, as though the fan was the only living thing left.

Taking a right out of the living room, Boetz stared down a short hallway that went into the kitchen on the right and a sitting room (bedroom) on the left. In the kitchen there were dishes and pots and pans stacked everywhere: on counters, in the sink, on the table.

Disgusting. No other way to put it.

Heading toward the back inside the kitchen, Boetz studied the door. One of the panes had been smashed and there was some blood on the glass and door itself. Not a lot, but enough to get a sample. On the floor below were several bits and pieces of broken glass.

Boetz and McAllester walked into the bedroom where the DB waited for them. The pillow—or, as Boetz realized now, “laundry bag”—was still covering the man’s face. The idea, Boetz knew, was to “back up for a moment and look at the big picture of what could have happened here.” Any good cop will agree: The scene will speak to him if he doesn’t stand in its way and interrupt the process.

Looking around, Boetz pointed to the wall. There seemed to be a few pictures missing. The corners of the photos or pictures were still attached to the wall by tape and staples, but the bodies of the pictures were gone. Boetz could tell by the grime and dust marking an outline of where the pictures hung that someone had removed them recently. The walls were a putrid tan color, like coffee ice cream, and smudged with filth and dirt and grease. There was a bureau to the left of the victim, a stereo on top of it. The bed itself was a mattress on the floor. The striped laundry bag covered the victim’s face and upper chest area; a floral blanket, with flowery patterns of pink and green and white and yellow, covered the man from the belly button down.

“Gunshot wound on his left bicep,” Boetz said out loud, noticing the wound.

“Have you looked underneath the pillow?”

“I haven’t removed it, no,” Boetz responded.

Both investigators had been told by then that the entire area had been searched, around and inside the house, and “no other persons had been found.” The only wound visible to Boetz and McAllester was on the victim’s left bicep. It was clear that he had been shot in the arm.

Boetz had Detective Penny Judd come into the room and photograph the wound on the man’s bicep.