A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop (10 page)

After choir practice, instead of making the forty-minute drive home, Kent often bunked with one or another of his co-workers.

If law enforcement types are a subculture, the officers Kent hung out with were a subculture within a subculture, mainly rogue cops, christened “gypsy cops,” who lived by their beepers. They camped out in apartments supplied free of rent in exchange for acting as “courtesy officers,” unofficial security on an apartment complex’s grounds. They came and went, rootless, often moving every six months to a year, their doors open to fellow
cops who needed a place to bed down. Few of his coworkers knew Officer J.K. McGowen had a home, a wife, and two children.

Soon after arriving at Westside, Kent put in for a transfer to another division at the station, the one that patrolled Richmond Avenue, the city’s densest concentration of clubs and singles’ bars. It was to Houston what the West End was to Dallas, or Rush Street to Chicago. “McGowen wanted to cash in on the uniform, get himself some road runners, groupies,” says a fellow officer. “The kind of women who are turned on by the uniform.”

McGowen admitted as much to another officer, recounting his sexual exploits in the era of AIDS: “I want to be where the pussy is. All these women want me to wear condoms. I don’t wear condoms. One finally forced me to wear a condom and it broke on her. So that was a joke on her.”

When he saw a woman or women on the street or in a restaurant, his contempt for them shone even clearer. He was known to point to a woman waiting for a bus and announce, “She’s a whore.” When asked how he could tell, he’d maintain, “I just know.” One night at a restaurant with a friend, he motioned toward three women in business suits enjoying a cocktail and laughing, possibly co-workers winding down after a rough day at the office. “Look at them,” he sneered. “Tramps.”

Not long after Kent joined Westside, he began dropping over unannounced at the house of Michelle’s sister Pam, who lived within the district. There, he’d come up with war stories from the street, like the morning he crowed about arresting a man for speeding, throwing him over the hot hood of his car, then pulling him off, but not before the metal had blistered the skin on his palms. Sometimes he showed up with prisoners in the back of his squad car and declared, “I just want you to see what kind of scum I’m picking up in your neighborhood.”
Other times he brought along crime-scene photos of dead bodies at murder sites.

“Blood-and-guts horror stories,” says Pam. “He was going to kill this person, he’d threaten Michelle. He’d threaten to kill himself. He just thrived on threats and mayhem.”

Then he began showing up with women. “He would bring female officers with him that he was supposedly having affairs with,” says Pam. “To my house, and he’s married to my sister. When I’d tell Michelle, he’d convince her that I was the one lying. Kent had a way of talking, drawing things out of you, your deepest, darkest secrets. He’d come off as your best friend. Then turn around and use it against you.”

To Pam’s then husband, Mike, Kent gloated about new business ventures he planned. “He could never tell you much about it, but there was always some kind of a new business and it was always going to bring in big bucks, usually thirty thousand dollars a month,” says Pam. “Once he said he was going to act as a middleman for a South American rancher who wanted to buy U.S. cattle. Another time he was going to be an expert hunting guide, flying all over the earth. Pretty soon the story changed and he was on to something else.”

The marriage, as it had from the beginning, continued to be troubled. Michelle repeatedly confided in family members that Kent threatened to walk out on her, taking the children with him, using his parents’ money as leverage, to hire lawyers who’d claim she was a bad mother.

When Kent and Michelle sought counseling through Bill and Carolyn’s church, a charismatic Christian church, the minister, who usually tried to keep marriages together, took the unusual step of calling Michelle’s mother. Without explaining, he simply advised her to get Michelle away from Kent. “The situation,” he said, “is terribly dangerous.”

“We tried,” says Pam. “Mom talked to her. I talked to her. But it was hopeless.”

At H.P.D., Kent McGowen’s dramatic episodes were to become legendary. Some co-workers would later describe him as acting not unlike a mischievous child who never took responsibility for his actions, yet always wanted to be the center of attention. When a fellow officer or a supervisor crossed him, vindictiveness was added to Kent McGowen’s growing jacket. “If he got pissed at you for something, he’d threaten to go to Internal Affairs on some trumped-up charge,” says one co-worker. “Pretty soon a lot of us just tried to stay away from Kent.”

His supervisors also grew weary of Officer J.K. McGowen. He was a malcontent, complaining bitterly about H.P.D. management and squawking when ordered to drive an older squad car. Often, when assigned to a car he didn’t like, Kent grumbled at the sergeant, then returned moments later to say the car’s mirror was broken and the car was unsafe. “I figured he broke the mirror so he didn’t have to drive it,” says one sergeant. As far as the supervisors at Westside were concerned, Kent McGowen was a thorn in their sides, more trouble than he was worth. “When you supervise people, you’re expecting them to go out and be police officers,” says another sergeant. “You’re not expecting them to horse around, ask for districts where there are women, or, as McGowen referred to it, ‘pussy.’”

The next year, 1988, the seeds of distrust McGowen had sown at H.P.D. grew. By the time he tendered his resignation, few of his fellow officers at Westside would be saddened by his departure. Kent McGowen was fated to carry his jacket with him until the day he finally walked out the door.

“There’s a phase police officers go through,” explains Greg Riede, Ph.D., head of H.P.D.’s psychology department. “It’s called adolescence. It usually covers their first year or two. During this period, new officers develop an us-and-them mentality. ‘Us’ includes people in law enforcement; ‘them’ means everyone else. They live and breathe law enforcement. Their only friends are other officers. Everything they talk about pertains to ‘the job.’ But most officers—the good ones—pass through adolescence and mature. They see people as people again, good and bad. They no longer like to talk about what they do, simply because people react differently to them once they find out that they’re police officers. So at their kids’ softball games, they don’t volunteer the information.

“There are some, however, who never make it through adolescence. They get stuck there. Their view of the world is skewed. They see anyone besides their fellow officers and their families as the enemy, and often themselves as the only ones who can right the wrongs.
When that happens, they react less carefully, they’re more prone to be rigid. We try to weed those officers out. On the street, they can be dangerous.”

Kent McGowen’s real problems at H.P.D. began on April 21, 1988, with a ten-year-old boy he found walking the streets late at night. His mother, the youngster claimed, had thrown him out of the house. When the woman insisted that, rather than being abandoned, the boy—whom she described as a chronic runaway—had sneaked out, McGowen didn’t believe her. He seemed to view himself as the boy’s savior, going so far as to suggest he take the child home to live with Michelle and their children, an offer that recalled the plots of various TV police dramas, but one that violated H.P.D. policy.

The case was referred to Children’s Protective Services, and Kent—if he had followed the rules—should have been out of it. But in the month that followed, he repeatedly interjected himself into the situation, infuriating the mother. Many of the officers at Westside remember McGowen being preoccupied with the case, talking about it constantly.

“McGowen was always the crusader,” says an H.P.D. sergeant who ordered him to stay away from the youngster. “You could never tell him anything.”

The mother finally filed a complaint with Kent’s supervisors. When that didn’t solve the problem, she retained a lawyer and threatened to file a restraining order, barring him from coming anywhere near her son. Only then did Kent McGowen back away.

Not everyone viewed McGowen’s actions with cynicism. A woman who claimed to be the boy’s guardian wrote a letter to H.P.D. a month later, “commending Officer McGowen for his caring attitude toward the boy.” Also in May, Kent received a commendation from headquarters, which read, “Officer’s average [arrests] for the
month of April was 50 percent above the average total crime for officers in eighteen districts.”

But by the summer, Kent McGowen, who never seemed able to remain above the fray for long, was again embroiled in controversy.

It actually began the previous December, when Officer Sara Williams, a tall, attractive, high-strung blonde, attended a birthday party for a fellow H.P.D. officer. Most everyone drank—many, including Williams, too much. “It was cops acting like high school kids,” says one officer in attendance. “You tend to get caught up in it. Things can get a little crazy.” A wild affair, it went well into the night, degenerating until, in the early-morning hours, a drunken officer unholstered his gun and discharged it toward the stars, the blast echoing through the night air. Someone called Internal Affairs.

It had been a rough night for Williams. Not only was she dazed from a bellyful of alcohol, but her boyfriend—another officer—had locked himself in the bathroom with another woman cop. When the investigating lieutenant made his way to her, Williams mouthed off. That earned her a fifteen-day suspension.

Williams’ round of bad luck continued that spring as her boyfriend dumped her. “He was on a pedestal with the other guys at the station, and law enforcement is still a man’s world,” recalls an officer. “He was very attractive, very charismatic; he always had a beautiful woman at his elbow. When he dropped her, she was considered dead meat.”

“Dead meat” sentenced Williams to isolation by her ex-boyfriend’s horde of admirers. No longer did they drive by to check on her when she wrote a ticket or made an arrest. Her list of friends at the substation dwindled, along with a hefty portion of her self-respect. “Sara was an emotional wreck,” says a friend.

It was in May that Kent McGowen stopped Williams and asked if he could talk with her about his troubles
with the young boy. She agreed. “Most cops won’t talk to other guys about emotional stuff,” explains a woman officer. “It’s not odd for them to seek out a female officer to confide in about stuff at home or anything kind of soft. They don’t want to let down their guard. It’s important to keep up the machismo.”

At her apartment that night, McGowen told her about the ten-year-old he’d befriended and how the system got in the way.

“Sara was impressed that he was so caring about a little kid,” says Williams’ then-best friend. “She was lonely and tired of being ostracized by the others.”

A few nights later, Kent and Sara, who was nine years older than McGowen, shared a quiet dinner and a few drinks. They finished the night in Williams’ bed.

Afterward, Williams maintained their liaison was a lapse in judgment, and that from the beginning she felt a relationship with McGowen would be a mistake. Who tried to break it off with whom would later be the source of much argument. For her part, Williams contended she told McGowen early on that he was too young for her and she wasn’t interested. McGowen insisted he was the one who dumped Williams, sneering at the memory of a woman he called “plain crazy.”

For days their feud interrupted H.P.D.’s radio waves as they bumped each other through the night on their MDTs, the mobile data terminals in their squad cars.

The tension erupted later that summer when a group of Westside cops clustered at choir practice. Guns holstered, beer flowing, at the end of a dead-end street, they told war stories and ribbed each other, whispering gossip and belittling their bosses. McGowen had another woman on his arm. Sara brought an old boyfriend, also a cop.

Williams later told H.P.D. investigators that as the others partied, McGowen pulled her to the side and issued
a threat: “He told me I was going to regret breaking off with him. He said he’d ruin my life.”

In the early hours of the following morning, July 13, Williams showed up at Kent McGowen’s apartment, according to her, in an effort to end the hostilities between them. As Williams described that night, Kent was furious, screaming at her about bringing her old boyfriend to choir practice. He ordered her to leave; she refused.

McGowen called the substation and a sergeant came to the scene and ordered Williams from the apartment.

Two days later, Kent McGowen filed a formal report. In it he portrayed Williams’ behavior as “abnormal” and maintained that he’d observed her to act in “a hostile and irrational manner.” Kent said Williams, not he, had monopolized the MDT, that she became “verbally abusive” toward him, and that she “threatened to blow out my squad car windows.” That she warned, “That’s it, motherfucker, you’ll regret this.”

He claimed that at choir practice she’d held a cocked, loaded gun to her head and threatened to commit suicide, that she’d stalked him, and that she’d shown up at his apartment that night begging him to make love to her. He described her as “intoxicated and belligerent.”