From South Carolina to Texas…
…the crazed 25 year-old drove with the eyes of technology following him the entire way. He drove his father’s car. His roommate drove the other family ride. Their long trek would end in a sleepy Texas town in the middle of Crockett County.
The elderly couple obviously didn’t see anything coming. They left church on Sunday night after inviting a fellow member of the congregation to dinner later in the week. That night their home’s alarm alerted deputies. When dispatchers called the house, somone identified himself as the home’s owner. Everything was fine, he said. Everything was not fine. That large home’s lot, surrounded by foothills trees and the winding water of the Saluda River, had changed immeasurabley. The home owners were non-smokers, but cigarette butts where everywhere. The woman of the house was a fine housekeeper, but there was mud all over the place. Their two cars were gone and so were they.
It was what some have already called an aged Brady Bunch house. The husband and wife both had children by a previous marriage. He was a Forestry Service scientist. She was a retired school teacher. Her children seemed to pose no threat to their upper middle class low mountain lifestyle. His son…some have said he had a problem with his mind…may have posed the greatest threat of all.
By Tuesday morning investigators were already whispering about the worst. The cars were gone. The son was gone. The couple was gone. Deputies went through what has become a familiar process. They entered the cars’ tags into the National Crime Information Center computers. They did the same with the couple’s credit and ATM cards. Smart and sane criminals find these investigatory tools mere annoyances. The man skating across Highway 67 in southwest Texas ultimately found those tools to be means to his end.
If film is a good indicator, the Texas Rangers are not a group with which to be trifled. The Bad Son must not have realized this as he apparently used his dad’s ATM card as he crossed the Lone Star State. Technology can be a real bitch when you’re a man on the run. In times gone by, he might have been a dark man on a horse, spotted by a saloon owner as he mistakenly showed his face…just for the want of a quick shot of whiskey. The Bad Son didn’t bed down on the Texas plains or ride in on his dark horse. He might as well have taped his wanted poster to his chest as he punched in the family ATM code and drew out his last allowance.
When the Rangers pulled in behind the car he must have already decided what he was going to do. Texas must have seemed like as good a place as any to die. There was no High Noon shoot out. He just shot himself in his damned head leaving his roommate…a younger kid at 21…to throw out his hands to hand cuffs and end up in the county lock up. Some folks from far away are calling Ozona, TX a sleepy little town where a New York-born detective from South Carolina is now trying to solve a mystery. His best clue is on a slab in the morgue.
The chief suspect is dead. His buddy may or may not be talking. Thing is…that couple is gone. Bloodhounds are finding more on which to urinate than to track the trail of the missing people. A person familiar with the South can probably imagine the trail the Bad Son took. Back roads through Upstate South Carolina, maybe down to I-20 through Georgia, to Birmingham…maybe then down to Pascagoula, MS, across the Mississippi River, through Louisiana…though Houston…and San Antonio. Never made it to El Paso. If that couple is dead, they could be anywhere. Mountain roads are plenty. The Mississippi River is deep and full of ancient, angry catfish. The Gulf of Mexico is where the dead things end up, and currents along the coast can drag things for hundreds of miles. Sometimes people just disappear. And unless not-so-insane buddy is trying to save his ass, the good half-siblings in South Carolina may spend the rest of their lives wondering.
Stories that stretch from the foothills of Upper South Carolina to towns that only Texans know about fascinate me. What I’ve just jotted down is what I have heard around the newsroom in the last couple of days. Though I would usually be chin-deep in incident reports and bloodhound musk, I am sadly so faraway from this story that I can only ruminate about it from my messy desk. I was away when the story began and decency dictates that my able colleague (a fantastic reporter who knows more about cops than I do) finish what he started.
I must be a sick man to be fascinated by such madness. My desire to cover and report such stories must be the product of mad synapses. I’ve discovered that everyone has a chink in their anti-professional-desire armor. Some of my colleagues want to tell good stories. Some want to change the world. Some want to see their face on TV. I want to find the sickest most depraved madmen that walk among us. They are everywhere, even if they haven’t yet fully realized the depths of their insanity. And though I’m just about as balanced as the next guy, my desire to find these jokers has to put me somewhere in their category.
