I received a complaint from the neighbors around a house that was giving off a very strong odor. When I checked the location I could hear dogs barking inside the house and could see feces leaking out from around the door.

I obtained a search warrant for the house and returned and broke open the front door. What I found was almost unbelivable. The house was full of large breed dogs and the smell and gas was so bad you could not breathe. The floor was covered to the depth of four inches with simi-liquid dog excrement. There was no place for the dogs to get out of this feces so the dogs were covered head to toe. Without you being there to see and smell this there is no way to explain just how bad this situation was.

The fire department was contacted and requested to bring Scott Air Packs so that we could enter the house to remove the dogs as it was impossible to breathe because the methane, ammonia gas and flies were so thick.

About the time we finished removing the dogs (13) the owner arrived. She was a 69 year woman who lived in the next county and only came out once a day to feed the dogs. She said she did not have any other place to keep them so she locked them in this house that she leased.

This was a nice brick home but it would never be livable again so it had to be burned. The fleas were so thick that you could see them jumping around in the grass outside the house.

She got off with just a $1000 fine.

I live out in the country 25 miles from the Sheriff's Office in a farming area. About 200 yards from my house under a yard light near the cattle pens was a tank of anhydrous ammonia. This ammonia is a gas that is injected into the ground by farmers as a fertilizer. It is also a prime ingredient in the manufacture of amphetamine so the theft of anhydrous ammonia from the farmers ammonia tanks was an ongoing problem.

One night around midnight my wife happened to wake up and notice car lights coming toward our house. Our residence is located at the end of a dead end road. Our nearest neighbor is one and a half miles back up the road so when we see a car coming down the road we know it is coming to our house. She watched the vehicle pull in toward our house and stop at the anhydrous tank. Several people jumped out and started fooling with the ammonia tank. She woke me and told me what was going on.

I jerked on my clothes and phoned the sheriff's office to start another deputy toward my location as I watched them filling their containers. When they had finished and loaded everything back in their pickup I backed out of the garage and turned on my overhead lights and the chase was on.

They of course left at a high rate of speed with me in pursuit. I radioed ahead and let the other officers know that I was coming to meet them. They were going straight toward the sheriff's office so help was not going to be a problem. About tem miles before they reached the county seat the highway patrol put out spike strips that took out both tires on the left side. This only slowed them down a little and caused a lot of smoke. When they reached town they turned down the street toward the sheriff's office. Just two blocks from the jail they stopped and bailed out. By this time there were several deputies at the scene and all three subjects were quickly run down and cuffed for the two block ride to the jail.

The next day they sent word from the jail telling me how sorry they were and that they would never have stolen the ammonia if they had know it belonged to the sheriff.

Another case while I was still a deputy was an arsenic poisoning of a wealthly contract plumber. The case report was well over a 1000 pages long but I will try to summerize the high points to a few paragraphs.

The sheriff received word that this person had died under suspicious circumstances and I was assigined to investigate. I learned that this was the third time that he had been in the hospitial for some strange ailment. The doctors finally discovered that he had an elevated level of arsenic in his system. It is so rare to die from arsenic poisoning that doctors ofen times do not check for heavy metels in the blood. He kept telling the doctors that his wife and his secretary were killing him but he was in such bad shape that it was assumed that he was out of his head

I set out to discover how he could have ingested enough arsenic to kill him. Not suspecting at that time that he had been murdered.

He had an office behind his home that his secretary-bookkeeper and several employes worked from. After interviewing everyone and taking samples from the trash of his last meal to be tested I was no closer to the truth than when I had arrived.

The first big break came when it was discovered that his teenage daughter had brought a young man home to spent the night with her while her parents were at the hospital just a couple of days before her dad died.

This infomation was recieved from the boys mother who lived out of state and had just heard about the arsenic posioning. She stated that her son had got up the next morning and went to the fridge to find something to eat. The only thing he could find was a bottle of cranapple juice. He took a big drink of this and was immediately very sick. She said he threw up on the kitchem floor. I advised her to take him to the doctor have him checked for arsenic. (He had a dangerous level of arsenic in his system.)

I went straight to the residence and found that there was no cranapple juice in the refridgerater. The wife told me that it had been thrown out as her husband was the only one in the family that drank cranapple juice.

The family had a pit near the house that they used as a trash dump. I spent the morning knee deep in several months worth of garbage looking for the cranapple bottle. It was not there.

The wife and secretary started worrying that it looked suspicious that the bottle was not in the pit and they made a stupid mistake. They returned the bottle to the pit.
The next day the secretary called and told me that they had found the bottle in the pit. I knew this was not true as I had searched the pit high and low.

When I arrived to take possession of the bottle it contained one or two ounces of a clear liquid, plainly not cranapple juice. It was obvious that it had been washed out.

When we received the results of the test back from the lab it was determined that there was still enough arsenic in the bottle to kill a horse. The first two times they tried to kill him they did not use enough arsenic so the third time they made sure it was enough.

By this time law enforcement knew that the bookkeeper and the wife were both guilty but still not enough evidence to charge anyone.

Several months later I received a call from the manager of a storage facility. He stated that he had opened one of his units for lack of payment and had discovered papers with the dead plumbers name on them. He said he recognized the name from reading press reports about the murder.

I called the Texas Ranger to help and we loaded all the sacks and boxes from the unit to take back to the sheriff's office to go though. The manager stated that the unit had been rented by a female who had paid cash.

The name was fake but later on he picked out the bookkeeper from a lineup as the one who had rented the unit.

Most of the boxes contained only business papers but lo and behold in the last box was a bottle of arsenic rat poison.

This was enough to finally charge the bookkeeper. She was tried and convicted but the wife got away with murder....so far.

One final note. The bookeeper was convicted of 1st degree murder, but when all the facts came out about the plumbers life, the jury decided he needed to be killed and only gave her a sentence of ten years probation.

#11

After receiving information about a woman that was reported to have a large quantity of cocaine in her home a search warrant was obtained for the residence.
Upon running the warrant, it was found that this person was the babysitter for several families in the area and there were six toddlers running around the house, all of whom were wet and dirty. The woman pointed out the dope right away and of course said she was just holding it for someone.
We were in the process of calling mothers to come and get their kids when we started hearing a muffled sound coming from somewhere in the house. After a search we found a baby in a small closet with the door closed. The baby was in a car seat on the floor of the closet and was completely covered by a thick quilt. When a baby started crying she would just bury them in the closet. It worked really good because even with the baby crying it was hard to find.

When the mothers started arriving they were all disbelieving and mad at us. They said that this woman was a wonderful babysitter and that she was always asking for more diapers so they were sure she changed them often. (she did have another closet stacked full of new diapers) Evidently she changed and cleaned them up just before the mothers came to pick them up in the evenings. The mother’s just would not believe anything bad about this woman. They had to have a sitter and sitters are terribly hard to find in a small town so guess who they blamed for all their troubles.
Just one more notch in the cog toward early retirement.

#10
This is a story about a man who was obsessed with the idea of killing his wife. His wife had obtained a protective order against him which is almost useless except for the fact that it gives law enforcement the right to arrest the person when they violate the order.

The police in our neighboring county where the subject lived had around the clock patrols on the wife’s home and had caught him trying to get to the house twice. Both times he had been armed with a pistol. This man owned his own business and had enough money to make bail so he was right back on the street each time he was arrested.

It’s a catch 22 situation where you know someone is going to commit a murder, but are unable to arrest him for anything but the violation of the protective order and the unlawful carrying of a weapon (which are only misdemeanors) until the murder is attempted or actually happens.

After these episodes they were able to get a warrant that would send him to a mental institution for thirty days for evaluation. When his lawyer informed him of this he decided to run. He dyed his black hair blonde and got a friend to drive him out of town. He was headed out of state but the friend got cold feet and only took him across the county line. At the first town they came to he made him get out. This is where we come into the case.

The police received a tip that he had gotten a ride into our county and notified us to be on the lookout for him. This went out over the sheriff’s department radio so everyone in that community with a scanner (which is almost everyone) knew we were looking for someone. I had not been in the area but a few minutes when a woman flagged me down and pointed out an abandon house that had the screen propped open and the window broken out. She said he might be in there. I thanked her but I was sure that window had been broken for some time, but for appearance sake I circled by in front of the house and than came around the block to the back and got out to take a look. I walked up to the back window and stuck my head in not expecting anything. To my great surprise there he was on the other side of the room looking out the window in the direction in which he had seen me heading and he was holding a large pistol in his right hand. He had not heard me approach because of all the traffic on the highway so I was able to cover him with my pistol. I then ordered him to drop his gun. Upon hearing that he swung around to the point to where he almost had the pistol pointing at me but not quite enough to where I felt I had to shoot him. It was enough however to where I could see the hole in that pistol barrel that looked as big as a shotgun. It took several tense seconds before he made up his mind he wasn’t going to win this battle and he dropped his gun. I think my gun may have looked mighty big to him too. After I had him cuffed I retrieved his pistol and it was not nearly as big or bad looking as it was when he was holding it.

I transported him to our jail and while he was locked up he offered to hire one of the other inmates to kill his wife (did I say he was obsessed). After learning of this we arranged for him to meet with a hit man who was of course a cop. He made a deal with this hit man to kill her for the sum of ten thousand dollars which was all caught on tape. This solicitation of a murder is how we finally managed to get him in the pen for a nice long stretch.