A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop (26 page)

But that was the future. Right now, he judged he had one priority, to avoid Susan White. He couldn’t forget the grief on her face at the sting, or the sound of her frantic voice rising and falling outside the substation door. Her words on the telephone earlier that day nibbled away at him. Informant—she’d talked of an informant. She knew he’d been the snitch who set up the sting. He was sure of it.

Avoiding Susan presented another problem—could he risk driving to Amy’s house, just a few blocks from Amber Forest? He wanted to see his girlfriend, he needed to see her to tell her what had happened, but he hated to risk crossing paths with Susan.

Just then, out of the corner of his eye, Shaffer saw the black Mitsubishi Eclipse with the two teenagers who’d cornered him at the amusement park, the ones who’d pulled a gun on Amy at the video store.

“Hell,” he muttered.

The driver spotted Shaffer. A nervous smile edged across his face, his young eyes cold, as he held up his hand to the car window, his fingers mimicking a firing gun.

A fist of fear clutched Mike’s chest. He swung hastily into the turn lane and wrenched a U-turn in front of three lanes of screeching cars with horns blaring.

“This is out of control,” he mumbled as he pulled away, watching his rearview mirror. “Out of control.”

By late that afternoon, anger had consumed Shaffer’s fear. McGowen had dragged him into this mess, he reasoned, so McGowen owed him, and that meant the deputy had to find a way to make his troubles disappear.

“I paged McGowen. When he called me back, I told him everyone knew I was the snitch, that Jason and his mom had figured it out. I said he’d botched it, the whole sting, the gun, the copies of the money. McGowen sounded ticked that I’d called, said I was imagining things,” says Shaffer years later, still seething at the memory. “I told him some guys were threatening me. I told him about the Mitsubishi and the guy with the gun. He didn’t even seem interested. I told him he needed to protect me in case that guy tracked me down.

“I told him again that the cops had botched the sting and that Susan and Jason knew I was the snitch, and that wasn’t supposed to have happened.”

With that, Shaffer hesitates, his anger building. “Then I told him Jason’s mom had called my mom and my aunt, how she said, ‘Informants get killed in Houston.’ All of a sudden, McGowen seemed
real
interested,” he recalls. “McGowen said, ‘That woman threatened your life. She can’t do that. I’m going to get a warrant and arrest her.’ I didn’t know what to think. The guy was a cop,
he
was supposed to know what he was doing. But I didn’t want him making anymore shit out of my life.”

McGowen arrived at the substation that night and heard more bad news. Not only did he have a nervous C.I., but Coons informed him that Susan White had leveled serious charges against him, claiming he’d sexually harassed her and that the sting operation and Jason’s arrest were orchestrated to strike back at her. Furious, McGowen denied that he even knew the woman.

To McGowen’s relief, Coons said he believed him, and that White was undoubtedly no more than a troubled mother lying to protect her son.

Then, McGowen relayed his own afternoon’s conversation—with Shaffer, repeating White’s statement that “informants get killed in Houston.” Shaffer interpreted her words as a threat on his life, McGowen maintained, backing up the danger his C.I. found himself in with the story of the unrelated black Mitsubishi.

“I want to get a warrant for her arrest,” McGowen said. “Retaliation.”

Although Susan White had just made serious charges against McGowen, Coons didn’t hesitate. “Do it,” he said.

Once the Cypresswood substation’s van arrived at the downtown jail, Jason was unloaded into a web of tunnels that connected the jail to Houston’s aging criminal courts building. Jailers made no concessions for a
seventeen-year-old from a privileged background as the demeaning and dehumanizing process of booking began. They confiscated his clothing and beat his shoes against a bench to be sure they didn’t hide any weapons. From there he was taken to the showers, his body cavities searched, before they issued him an orange jailhouse jumper. Then it was on to Booking, where he was fingerprinted and photographed. Afterward, he was taken to appear before a magistrate, who again informed him of his rights. Hours later, he reached a holding cell.

“You have to get me out of here,” he cried to his mother over the telephone throughout that afternoon. “I’m afraid.”

“I’m trying, baby,” she said, her always hoarse voice crackling and worn. “Just hang in there. I’m working on it. Jason, McGowen came after you to get to me.”

For the first time, Susan told Jason what she’d told so many others, that McGowen had repeatedly harassed her throughout the summer, and that he’d threatened to hurt Jason if she rebuffed him.

“And he used Mike to do it?” Jason said, remembering his mother’s phone conversations that summer. He’d heard her complaining to friends that some man kept pushing her to have sex with him. He’d never connected the fear in his mother’s voice to McGowen.

“It looks that way,” Susan said. “It looks like Mike turned on you. When I get you out of there, you need to stay away from Mike Shaffer. You can’t trust him. Not ever again. And you need to clean up your act, Jason.”

“Yeah,” Jason said. “When I get out …”

Mike Shaffer swallowed his fear that afternoon and drove to Amy’s house. “Mike was scared,” Amy says, recalling that day. “He kept talking about Jason and how he’d figured it out. He figured once everyone knew he’d snitched on a friend, he’d be in trouble with all his pards.”

As Shaffer drove home, he saw Susan in his rearview mirror, flashing her lights and motioning for him to pull over. She parked behind him as he reluctantly pulled to the side of the road.

When she walked up beside his car, he barely recognized her. He guessed she hadn’t slept since before the sting went down. Exhaustion drooped her shoulders and circled her eyes.

“Mike, this cop, McGowen, has been harassing me all summer. He’s using Jason to get to me,” she said. “If you know anything that can help, I would do
anything
to get Jason out of jail.”

Ray, driving down the street on his way to Susan’s house, saw Mike in his car, Susan kneeling on the grass and pleading with the teenager through the window. He parked behind Susan and headed toward her, just in time to hear Susan begging, “You can’t do this, turn against Jason. How could you do this to Jason?”

Susan stood up and Shaffer drove hastily away.

“What’s going on?” Valentine asked.

“Well, Mike did it,” she said. “He’s the one McGowen used to get my baby.”

That night, Susan White tossed sleeplessly as thoughts of Jason reeled through her mind. Unable to rest, she hung on the telephone, hoping to find someone to help her free her son. She called C.J. Harper, who advised her to get her boy an attorney and let the situation run its course. She called an old friend, Philip Riviera, told him about McGowen, and cried.

“This McGowen’s joy is stalking me and my kid,” she said. “He’s just looking for anything to cause him problems.”

“Do you want me to talk to him?” Riviera offered. “No. I’m just going to keep to myself and keep Jason away from him,” she said.

Riviera, who ran an oil-field drilling company and occasionally had to bail out a worker, went over the ins and outs of bondsmen with Susan.

“Have you got enough money to post bond?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “I scraped it together. But this McGowen, he really scares me.”

“Just keep your door locked,” Riviera advised her. “And don’t open it. Not for anybody.”

McGowen also spent much of that night on the telephone. Relieved of his regular patrol in order to concentrate on securing a warrant for Susan’s arrest, he sat at a desk at the substation making phone calls. The first number he dialed connected him with the assistant district attorney on duty for intake that night, Jean Spradling-Hughes, who listened intently as McGowen detailed the sting and Susan White’s involvement.

Hughes had never heard of Deputy Kent McGowen before that night. She didn’t know his jacket and had no reason to question what he told her. When he called, he had all the credibility she gave any police officer inquiring about a warrant. She’d found, over the nearly seven years she’d worked as an A.D.A., that most officers were truthful, but then again, she
had
been disappointed. “On a few, very rare occasions,” says Hughes, a fortyish woman with light brown hair cropped short. “But you have to give them the benefit of the doubt. There has to be a presumption that officers are telling the truth. A lot of times they literally call from the scene, tell you what happened, and say will you accept charges. I’m sitting at a desk downtown. I have to rely on what they tell me.”

What she later recalled McGowen telling her that night would bear little resemblance to the truth.

“He implied he was on a special gangs-and-guns task force at the sheriff’s department,” Hughes says, recounting
the conversation. “That he’d been working with the ATF on tracking down gunrunners selling automatic weapons. I asked him if he knew other A.D.A.s who’d worked with the gang task force and he claimed he did. He was still angry, complaining that Connie Spence hadn’t taken gun charges against the woman’s son. He described Susan and Jason as part of a group dealing in guns, implying that they were automatic weapons. He told me about the sting. He described Jason as the head turd in this gunrunning band and said they’d had to go out to the house on other occasions because of neighbors complaining of gunfire and that there were shootings there. He said this woman threatened his C.I. and he said Susan White was a serious threat, she’d threatened to have his confidential informant killed by sunset.

“The call seemed S.O.P., standard operating procedure,” she continues. “Nothing gave me any pause, except one thing: McGowen indicated he’d worked with the gang task force, but when I asked him if he’d called the A.D.A. who worked with the task force to look into charges, he said he knew Casey O’Brien. Then he asked me if he could reach him at the same number he’d used to call me in the intake unit. It seemed to me that he should have known Casey’s phone number. But then, that wasn’t enough to worry me.”

Hughes had taken very few retaliation charges over her years as an A.D.A. It had been her experience that in most cases, threats like the one Susan White had uttered were made in the heat of the moment and quickly forgotten. But as she listened to McGowen’s litany of stories about the mother and son and their involvement with drugs and guns, she felt this one deserved serious consideration.

“Have
you
talked to your C.I.’s mother to confirm these allegations?” Hughes asked pointedly.

“No,” McGowen admitted.

“Well, you need to hear her say Susan White threatened
her son and that she’s worried about it,” Hughes advised him. “Talk to the C.I.’s mother, and if she verifies what he’s told you and that she believes the woman is serious, call me back and we’ll get you your warrant.”

When McGowen hung up, the idea of a warrant for Susan White’s arrest must have dangled before him like the golden ring on a carousel, so magical it could solve all his problems.

If he’d truly harassed her all summer, if he’d threatened her safety and Jason’s as she’d claimed, the warrant held the power to make his threats real.

But by Susan’s actions, she’d raised the stakes. She’d made charges against him to his lieutenant. True, Coons didn’t believe her, but McGowen must have feared what could happen if she filed an official complaint with the department, charging him with sexual harassment. It was possible some higher-ups at the sheriff’s department wouldn’t share his lieutenant’s belief in him. What if they believed
her?

Susan White could cost him his badge and with it his power.

Did McGowen marvel at the irony of what had just happened? Unknowingly, in her frustration, with her hasty words, Susan had handed him what he needed most, a way to discredit her. If she followed through on her threat to file a formal complaint against him, a retaliation charge on her record could go a long way toward tipping his superiors’ judgment in his favor.

Did he consider what other opportunities a warrant for White’s arrest offered: a way to show her he was the one in charge, a way to exact revenge?

By Sunday night, the building tropical depression in the Gulf gathered intensity. Winds up to 140 miles per hour had earned it a name, Hurricane Andrew. Born off the coast of Africa, it became the first named Atlantic storm of 1992. More than a million people fled and four died when it lashed across the Bahamas, before ricocheting back into the Gulf of Mexico, where it eyed the Texas-Louisiana coastline.

Days earlier, Houstonians, well familiar with the destruction of such a giant storm, flooded stores, hoarding dwindling supplies of bottled water, batteries, and canned goods. Now they waited. Where would Andrew hit? When? Television weathercasters displayed maps ranking probabilities, judging its most likely assault on southern Florida early the following morning. Yet they cautioned against Houstonians abandoning their vigilance. After all, hurricanes had been known to suddenly switch course. They could be as unpredictable as they could be deadly.