Houston Chronicle



Houston Chronicle

March 2, 1986 | | |The notorious past

From `death scream' killers to poetic robbers to presidential assassins, dark deeds dot state's past

Author: EVAN MOORE; Staff

They dealt in robbery, larceny, death and duplicity, and they carved their way into the lore of the state, if not its heart.

The grotesque, the violent and the strange, they left indelible memories in their wake. Headless corpses, corpseless heads, bodies hacked into chunks and left neatly and ominously stacked in a refrigerator, bandits who wrote poems about their exploits, con men who conned even themselves, gunmen who spouted prosaic justification for their killings, killers who killed for money, killers who killed for sex and killers who killed for the pure joy of killing.

All in all, from 19th-century gunfighters to the assassin who shot John F. Kennedy, from Bonnie and Clyde to the more recent - and more aberrant - serial killers, Texas has hosted or spawned a number of individuals we would have been better off without.

One of those was Crawford "Cherokee Bill" Goldsby.

Goldsby, born a Texan in 1876, enjoyed a short career in which he killed 13 men, not a remarkable or even excessive number by the standards of the time.

But Goldsby had a unique approach. Whenever he killed a man, it was said, he made a gobbling noise like a turkey, a yowl he called the "Cherokee Indian death scream."

Goldsby teamed with an outlaw gang and began roaming the Indian territories, robbing, raiding and killing on the slightest provocation. His downfall came when "Hanging Judge" Isaac C. Parker of Fort Smith, Ark., put a $1,300 price on Goldsby's head, prompting two Arkansas farmers to overpower him and turn him in in 1895.

Goldsby chalked up his 13th victim, a guard, in an unsuccessful escape attempt and was walked to the gallows in 1896. Cryptic to the end, he dismissed any other last words with the single comment, "I came here to die, not to make a speech."

And, there were others: Belle Starr, an unfortunately ugly woman with a penchant for outlaws; John Wesley Hardin, who characterized his violent life and 27 wanton murders as a fight against "injustice and misrule of the people who had subjugated the South"; Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch; Sam Bass, and numerous other sociopaths who, despite later romantic depictions on the silver screen, were roundly disliked by the society which had to live with them.

There was, for example, William P. "Wild Bill" Longley, a native of Evergreen, Texas, who expressed a deep devotion to the "Old South" and exhibited it by indiscriminately shooting blacks for the least of excuses whenever he had the opportunity. He carved 40 notches in his gun, at least 30 of those for black men, before he was hanged in 1878.

"I deserve this fate. It is the debt I owe for a long and reckless life," said Longley, 28. "So long everybody," and a crowd of 4,000 cheered.

For the next few decades, spectacular crime took a back seat to the emergence of the automobile, flappers, prohibition and the stock market crash. In 1930, however, a small time hoodlum met a 19-year-old Dallas waitress with a bent toward poetry and formed a duo that would gain national notoriety.

Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker may have been more legend than fact, but they robbed enough gas stations and banks and fired enough bullets and killed enough people to secure themselves a place in history. Using the pseudonyms "The Texas Rattlesnake" and "Suicide Sal," they joined with Texas badmen Raymond Hamilton, Joe Palmer and others to create the Barrow gang.

And they met a violent end. Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, after chasing the pair and their various cohorts across the South and Midwest for five months, finally arranged an ambush near Arcadia, La., and, on April 23, 1934, Bonnie and Clyde were killed.

Bonnie, however, had left a requiem - albeit in limerick form. In the last stanza of one of her last poems she had written:

"Some day they will go down together,

And they will bury them side by side.

To a few it means grief;

To the law it's relief;

But it is death to Bonnie and Clyde."

Death was less romantic in the mysterious and grisly Rogers case.

Indeed, it was a strange union maintained in the house at 1815 Driscoll in Houston. Elderly Fred and Edwina Rogers and their 43-year-old son, Charles Frederick Rogers, all lived there - but no one ever saw Charles Frederick.

In fact, Charles Frederick Rogers, who had served in the Navy and worked as a seismologist until he quit without explanation in 1957, lived as a recluse in his parents' attic. He left the house before dawn every day and returned after dark, though he apparently had no job. Neighbors had never seen him and did not know he was there. He ate his meals in his room, did not speak and his only communication with the world were notes his parents shoved under the attic door.

On the night of June 23, 1965, police were called to the home by a relative who had become concerned when the Rogerses did not answer the phone or come to the door. In the downstairs bedroom, officers found blood. More blood was found in the bathroom, in the lavatory and commode, behind the tub, on the floor. Still more blood was smeared on doors and walls leading into the kitchen.

The trail ended at the refrigerator. When police opened the door they found the dismembered bodies of Fred and Edwina Rogers stacked neatly on the shelves. The heads had been severed at the neckline. The chest sections were split open and the spines sawed in two. They had been cut apart at the ankles, knees, hips, shoulders, wrists and elbows. Fred Rogers' eyes had been crudely gouged out of their sockets.

And Charles Frederick Rogers was gone.

He simply disappeared. Police believe he may have applied for an overseas welding job the day after the bodies were discovered, but did not accept it. A relative speculated he could be in the Big Thicket, where he was known to camp alone for weeks, living off the land, but he was not found there. There were reports of a man fitting his description crossing the border into Canada, but they could not be confirmed.

In 1975, Rogers was declared legally dead. His inheritance was dispersed and his life officially ended. But no one was sure. No body was ever found.

If alive, he would be 63 years old.

Charles Joseph Whitman would be 44.

On Aug. 1, 1966, however, Whitman rode to the top of the administration tower at the University of Texas in Austin. He carried a pecan-sized tumor in his brain. In a case, he had a 6-millimeter Remington rifle and a four power scope.

Whitman, a UT architecture student from Lake Worth, Fla., had already killed his mother and his wife, leaving their bodies at home with a note saying he wanted to save them embarrassment over what he was about to do.

Inside the tower Whitman killed three more people, then stepped onto the 231-foot-high deck and sighted the weapon on a pregnant woman on the street below. The woman was to live, but the shot killed her unborn baby. The next shot killed her husband.

And Whitman kept firing. For 94 minutes he sniped from the tower, wielding the rifle with an accuracy that left 31 wounded and 16 dead. The 17th to die that day was Whitman. Two Austin policemen worked their way to the top of the tower, leaped onto the deck and killed him.

The top level of the tower was closed to the general public that day and has remained closed ever since.

Again it was August - Aug. 8, 1973 - when Elmer Wayne Henley shot Dean Corll and set the stage for one of the country's most gruesome revelations.

Dean Arnold Corll, 33 when he died, was to become known as one of the nation's more prolific multiple murderers, but, to investigators who were called to the modest frame home in Pasadena that night, he was only a body surrounded by confusion.

Henley told police a bizarre tale of sex, torture and murder, spanning more than three years. During that time, he said, he and a cohort, David Owen Brooks, had procured boys for Corll, usually appealing to runaway street children with offers of drugs, alcohol and parties at Corll's home.

Once there, however, the boys were tied to a plywood "torture board" and homosexually raped and killed.

On the night of Aug. 8, however, Henley had erred. He had brought both another boy and a girl and the presence of the girl, he said, enraged Corll. He and his companions passed out after sniffing glue and, when he awoke, he found the other youths bound and Corll standing over him with a pistol.

Henley told police he convinced Corll he would kill the other youths if Corll would give him the gun, but that he shot Corll instead. Then, he and Brooks led investigators to the bodies.

Buried in the dirt floor of a southwest Houston boat shed were 17 bodies. Another six were found buried in a beach near High Island. Still more were found in east Texas until the count reached 27.

Today, investigators agree they will never be sure how many boys Corll may have killed. Henley, now 29, is serving a life sentence in Huntsville. Brooks, 30, is serving 99 years.

And, in the Harris County Morgue, the remains of five of Corll's victims are still being held, still unidentified.

Again, in 1982, August proved a month for macabre revelations. Coral Eugene Watts, a 31-year-old mechanic, admitted the slayings of 12 Houston women and one woman in Michigan. Later, he indicated there were at least nine more and prosecutors speculated he had killed more than 40.

Watts' compulsion was baffling. Although all his victims were women, unlike many other multiple murderers, he did not sexually violate them. He rarely robbed them. His only gratification from the acts, it appeared, was the pure joy of strangling them.

He told of wandering the streets on his days off, searching for victims. Once he had selected one, he would stalk her for hours, waiting for the right time to kill her.

In only one case did he fail to kill. On May 23, 1982, he had broken into an apartment and was in the process of drowning a woman there when her roommate walked in. Watts, who had already killed one woman that day, fled, but was caught by police.

As damning as Watts' confessions might seem, they could not be used against him. Because prosecutors had no physical evidence linking Watts to any of the killings, only his confessions proved him guilty and Watts would not confess without the promise of immunity.

He was jailed on a 60-year term for aggravated burglary of the apartment.

And, almost as chilling as Watts' confessions was the revelation that Michigan police had warned Houston officers of their suspicions that Watts was a murderer when he moved here in 1981.

Houston police argued that they could not keep Watts under constant surveillance without violating his civil rights. For months, however, Watts had obviously been able to move about freely enough to kill 12 women without being apprehended.

For pure fantasy, however, the case of Ernest and Margaret Medders must be the best.

The Medderses proved that lots of money - even the mere "promise "of lots of money - could open just about any door, including one to the White House.

Ernest Medders, a semi-literate mechanic's helper, and his wife, Margaret, came to Muenster, Texas, from Memphis in 1966, bearing cash, smiles and the belief that Ernest was legal heir to $6 billion from the famed Spindletop oil fortune.

Their cash had come from an Indiana order of nuns, the Poor Sisters of St. Francis Seraph of Perpetual Adoration, who had loaned them almost $2 million after Ernest bequeathed the order $10 million in his will. The belief in the inheritance came from assurances that Medders was a direct descendant of the original owner of Spindletop. The smiles came naturally.

The Medderses purchased a 1,400-acre ranch, built a 28-room house and quickly began buying their way into Texas society. They purchased five railroad cars - complete with bar and band car - to bring guests back and forth from Dallas. Medders began raising registered cattle and Appaloosa horses and built the state's largest, privately owned stock show barn.

They entertained lavishly. In addition to the train, the Medderses used helicopters to ferry their guests in. They hired orchestras, even Guy Lombardo, for their events and they invited the right people.

Those included Lyndon B. Johnson, then president, who reciprocated. The Medderses dined in the White House and flew home on Air Force One.

And they spent more and more. By October 1966, they had worked their way through more than $3 million. More than $1.1 borrowed after the loan from the poor sisters was used up. They owed Neiman Marcus $330,624.

But they didn't have a dime. In April 1967 Medders admitted in federal bankruptcy court that he had not received a penny from the "inheritance" - and he . Margaret then began a series of travels in which she ran up charges in the thousands at various hotels and other businesses.

She was convicted of skipping a bill of more than $10,000 from a Dallas hotel, served a short sentence and was returned to Tennessee, where she faced other counts of obtaining credit under false pretenses.

Copyright 1986 Houston Chronicle

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