A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop (2 page)

By the time Assistant D.A.s Don Smyth and Edward Porter arrived, Susan White, a forty-two-year-old former mortgage broker, was being barreled through the night in the back of an ambulance, one paramedic pounding on her chest as another forced oxygen into her lungs.

Outside, in the backseat of a squad car, White’s son, Jason, watched. Seventeen, but small for his age, he’d awakened to the shrill scream of the burglar alarm. Moments later, the pop of gunfire and two uniformed deputies rousted him from bed and pulled him down the stairs and past his mother’s darkened bedroom, where
another deputy stood above the outline of her thin body covered by a bloody sheet. Despite the summer heat, the boy shivered, his eyes saucer-wide.

Smyth, a wiry man with a ruddy complexion, glanced at the boy, then cornered the detective in charge. “Who’s the shooter?” he asked.

The detective pointed to a uniformed deputy in his late twenties who stood jawing with a cache of others. “Kent McGowen,” the detective said. “He was with two other deputies, serving a retaliation warrant. She’d threatened a police informant. The deputies told her they had a warrant, but the woman wouldn’t open up. They broke down the door. She pulled a gun. McGowen shot her.”

It all seemed simple enough, but … “Retaliation?” Smyth repeated. Something didn’t smell right. He eyed the house and figured it was worth a quarter million, easy. Retaliation, making verbal threats against a police informant, was a third-rate felony, with a bond of $2,000. Where was the urgency? The woman wasn’t a flight risk. Why would they break down a door in the high-rent district in the middle of the night to serve a warrant on a trash-heap charge like retaliation?

Smyth pulled Porter to the side. “Cover it like a blanket,” he whispered.

Porter nodded and Smyth guessed his gut was acting up, too. They were a team. Smyth was chief of the D.A.’s Civil Rights unit. Porter worked under him. It was department policy: When a cop shot a civilian, someone from Civil Rights made the scene. They’d done a lot of these investigations together, too many, and too often in the middle of the night.

While Porter, a balding man with a round face and brown eyes that appeared perpetually skeptical behind half-moon glasses, interviewed witnesses, Smyth analyzed the scene. On a pad he sketched the layout of the house, noting the back door splintered off its hinges and
a black shoe print where someone had kicked it in. He found no signs of a struggle in the kitchen or the den.

In the living room, Smyth noted blood smears on the plush pale gray carpeting and torn, bloody gauze discarded in the adrenaline-pumping flush of attempting to save a life.
Is she dead or alive?
the prosecutor wondered.

Smyth made his way past the crime-scene officers into the bedroom. It was a jumble: clothes strewn on the floor; scribbled-on yellow legal pads piled on the desk; a half-empty Burger King drink cup sweating on the headboard; black-and-white photos scattered on the dresser—modeling-type photos of an attractive, tall, blond, athletic woman in her early forties. He noted the name printed across the bottom—
SUSAN WHITE
—the shooting victim.

Next Smyth inspected the waterbed, awash in blood; a fine, deep crimson spray fanned the wall behind it. White must have been in bed when McGowen pulled the trigger, sending a bullet careening through her profile. Another sliced through her chest. A third shattered her right arm.

Moments later, Smyth met on the front lawn with Porter, McGowen, and an attorney supplied by the policemen’s union.

“Is he willing to tell us what happened?” Smyth asked. He sensed the young cop wanted to talk. He’d been pacing the front lawn, recounting his story for nearly everyone on the scene. Twice Smyth ordered the other deputies to contain McGowen. “Put him in a squad car and tell him to shut up,” he’d cautioned. He wanted McGowen quiet, thinking about what had happened, collecting his thoughts.

“He’s ready,” McGowen’s attorney answered.

Smyth had conducted hundreds of walk-throughs in his nearly a decade of investigating cops. But this time he looked at Kent McGowen and did something he’d never done before: He pulled out a tape recorder and
switched it on. His instincts whispered,
Cross every
t,
dot every
i.

The walk-through began at the front door, McGowen detailing for Smyth, Porter, and the others how he’d knocked and ordered the woman to open up. The woman was a major turd, he charged. Her son was involved with big-time gun dealers who trafficked in automatic weapons. McGowen had arrested the kid two nights earlier, using a C.I., a confidential informant. It was the C.I. White had threatened to kill.

“We needed to get her off the street,” McGowen said, nodding confidently at Smyth and the others. They were, after all, part of the same club—law enforcement, the good guys. This Susan White, he disdainfully implied, was one of
them,
one of the
bad
guys.

Like so much else about the scene, the jowly young deputy’s demeanor rang wrong to Smyth. McGowen grinned, bragging, relishing his story, as if he’d saved a school bus full of kids or captured the head of an international drug cartel. Suddenly, McGowen said something that propelled Smyth’s curiosity into overdrive: Susan White called 911 when the deputies kicked down her door.

What kind of a criminal calls the cops for help?
Smyth wondered.

Just then word came over the radio: Susan White was DOA, dead on arrival at the emergency room.
No reason to dispatch anyone to the hospital,
Smyth decided when he heard the news.
She won’t be talking, except …

After the walk-through, Smyth made a hasty exit for his car, pausing only to confer with Porter on the street.

“I’m going downtown,” he said with a knowing glance. “I’m going to get that tape.”

Porter understood Smyth’s urgency. The 911 dispatchers were housed in the county jail, the sheriff’s department domain. It would be easy for anyone to erase Susan White’s call. Smyth couldn’t let that happen. He
needed to know what White had said moments before McGowen pulled the trigger. If his instincts were right, the tape could be important; it could be evidence of murder.

E.L. Doctorow once said: “Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.”

Real life is more mysterious. Though we labor for our futures, in truth we have control only so long as chance and fate allow us that illusion. We make our plans at the mercy of our physiology, our environment, and the wills of others. We drive in the dark without headlights, not knowing if the road is washed out ahead, just past the next bend.

That final summer, 1992, was the valley of Susan White’s life. All she held dear dissolved around her, like beams of light once a lamp is extinguished. What thoughts flashed through her mind that final night while she was alone and frightened? Her life had begun with such promise. Who could have predicted it would end with her cowering in the darkness as three bullets rang from the barrel of a 10-mm police special?

She was born Susan Diane Harrison on October 8, 1949, the third daughter and fourth child of O.L. and William (W.A.) Harrison’s five children. Her parents had met in grade school in Winnsboro, a one-stop-sign town southeast of Monroe in northern Louisiana. They married in 1939, the year W.A. returned from a prewar stint in the Army. Earl was the first of the children, followed by Gloria, Kay, Susan, and, finally, Sandra.

“I remember when Susie was a baby she almost died of pneumonia,” oldest sister Gloria explains, her soft Louisiana accent rolling smoothly off her tongue. “Wheeeee, it was scary. Momma and me, we didn’t know if she’d make it.”

The Harrisons were simple, proud people, Baptists and sharecroppers, who worked the cotton fields, often resettling from farm to farm. As would be expected, they eked out a hardscrabble existence, but, their children insist, a happy one.

“Momma loved her kids. If there was a shortage of food, we would eat and Momma wouldn’t,” Gloria maintains. “We didn’t have a lot of possessions, but we always had a lot of love.”

Even as age claimed their youth, the Harrisons made a handsome couple. W.A. stood nearly six feet, hair brushed to the side, his face rugged and worn, his body stooped yet strong. Before the passing decades settled her bones, O.L. was five-foot-eight, a gregarious and athletic woman with a natural elegance who loved playing basketball with her children.

Of all the children, Susan seemed special. A happy child, as a toddler she danced and cooed each time she heard “Good night, Irene,” or Hank Williams singing, “Why don’t you love me like you used to do?” on the
radio. “There was always a little bit of something about Susie that sparkled,” her father recalls.

All the girls inherited their parents’ tall stature. In addition, Susan inherited her mother’s slim figure, fine features, and blue eyes, and O.L. doted on her, twisting her soft, dark blond hair around her fingers to form a tumble of curls. When Susan was two, the family moved to nearby Bastrop, where W.A. secured a better-paying city job, sweeping streets. O.L. continued working the cotton fields with Gloria and Earl until she was able to hire on at the Bastrop paper mill. The family rented a home in town, their fortunes bettering.

Still, their possessions were meager. At night, all four girls slept in the same bed, a crowded if comforting accommodation. When Susan awoke with a charley horse, there was always a Harrison sister willing to massage her muscles until the cramping subsided. And when a group of bullies chased Sandra on the playground, it was Susan who threatened them with the flat side of a board unless they left her baby sister alone.

Although tight-knit, the Harrison sisters weren’t immune to girlish rivalries or sibling one-upmanship. The family labeled it “picking at” one another. “We’d get into hair pulling and Susie had the hardest head, she just wouldn’t let go,” recalls her second sister, Kay. “Even then, she just was so darn determined.”

Long summer afternoons were spent playing Mother May I, Kick the Can, and Red Light, saving milk-bottle tops to get a discounted ticket at the local movie house, or staging a beauty pageant with cousins and friends, the most often recounted of which included a guest appearance by “Miss Arizona”—W.A. dressed in one of O.L.’s Sunday dresses.

“Daddy made a right pretty girl,” laughs Sandra. “I think we even let him win.”

Yet as close as they were, Susan always seemed somehow apart, different. While the others were content with
their place in the world, from an early age Susan felt frustrated. When they lived in a two-bedroom shotgun house outside Bastrop, she was the sister who took a spoon to the backyard, breaking into the hard brown dirt, plunging again and again, determined to dig a swimming pool like the ones rich folks had in their backyards. She gave up only when her hand ached from the effort.

“I always settled for what was happening right now. Susie was the one who wanted more out of life,” Kay recalls sadly, as if this need of her younger sister’s lay at the root of the tragedy that awaited her. “Susie never seemed satisfied with things as they were. She always had dreams of someplace better.”

When Susan entered her teenage years in 1962, the country was in the throes of a revolution, the
Leave It to Beaver
era of the fifties dissolving in the consciousness-raising sixties. The Beatles unseated Elvis and thinness became the national obsession, Twiggy its idol. The Harrison girls were no exception as they scrupulously dieted, then riled each other with taunts about who was the slimmest.

At eighteen, oldest sister Gloria married Al Hamilton, a solid family man and former soldier from Wisconsin who worked in management at a paper mill. He began the family’s migration to Baker, an hour’s drive northwest of New Orleans. Kay married a few years later and followed Gloria and Al south.

By then the Harrisons and their two youngest daughters, Susan and Sandra, lived in Monroe, where W.A. worked for a local carbon company. Susan attended Neville High School. She was a good student with an infectious laugh and the type of outgoing personality that fostered quick friendships. She’d moved up in social circles, her friends the daughters of the mayor and the school principal. She attended dances for what O.L. describes as “nice young people” at the local recreation
center, and though her dream of having one in her backyard never materialized, she signed on as a lifeguard at the neighborhood pool. Then, suddenly, Susan changed. To Gloria, it was “normal teenage rebellion.” The good student had little time for studies, instead hanging out with a crowd of whom her parents disapproved. There were arguments, family tensions, and for a short time Susan left to live with Gloria and Al.

Finally, in her senior year of high school, the phone rang at the Harrisons’ house. The principal informed O.L. that Susan had run off to elope with her boyfriend. “Daddy got in the car and drove to Arkansas to get her,” Gloria recounts. “Momma and Daddy didn’t approve of the boy, and when he got her home, Susie was still single, and mad.”