A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop (30 page)

“Guess he started something big this time,” someone speculated.

They all nodded in agreement.

Just then a TV-news photographer pulled up in front and ran from his van, his camera capturing the scene for the morning news.

“Do you know what’s going on?” one of the neighbors asked.

“Heard it on the radio. Said a deputy’s shot someone, a woman,” the photographer answered. “Know anything about it?”

The neighbor shrugged. “I always figured it’d be the boy who ended up getting it someday. Not the mother.”

While Ruggiero ran down what he knew about the situation for Coons and Leithner, Smyth and Porter circled the house. The call had woken Smyth, a short, ruddycomplected man, from a sound sleep. Nicknamed “Whispering Don” for his hushed manner of speech, an effective tool for making juries listen more closely, he was used to being called out of his bed and away from his wife and three children in the middle of the night. “It comes with the territory,” he’d say. “My wife knew when the pager went off, I was gone.”

Porter, a round man with thinning dark hair, a bemused smile, and brown eyes that peered over half glasses, lived alone. He’d been married once and had got
divorced while he worked as a public defender in Florida. “I decided I’d rather prosecute criminals than defend them,” he says, explaining the career change. He’d returned to his hometown of Houston for a job with the D.A.’s office a few years earlier. With his notebook open as he sized up the scene of the shooting, it would have been difficult to visualize him in the sixties, when his hair brushed his shoulders and he marched in antiwar rallies.

“Who’s that?” Smyth asked Ruggiero, pointing at Jason, whose eyes were as round as quarters as he sat shivering in the backseat of a squad car.

Ruggiero shrugged. “The woman’s kid.”

“What was the charge on the warrant?”

“Retaliation,” Ruggiero explained somewhat sheepishly.

Something didn’t smell right to Smyth. Why serve a third-class felony warrant in the middle of the night? He glanced up at the house. Impressive. The woman didn’t look like a flight risk.

Remembering Jason, he shifted his gaze to the car. Smyth sized up the kid one more time. He looked thirteen or fourteen, at the most. He looked scared.

Inside the squad car, Jason shivered in the heat. He watched the activity, pieced together clues. First he saw a deputy take away Kent McGowen’s gun and remove and count the bullets. Then he saw his mother on a stretcher. McGowen had shot his mother. A ball of anger grew in his chest until he fantasized about the feel of McGowen’s gun in his hands as he pulled the trigger and watched him fall. In that moment, Jason hated Kent McGowen more than anyone he’d encountered in his short life; enough to kill him.

Watching the look of utter hatred on the boy’s face as he stared at McGowen, Smyth shook his head.
What the hell happened here?
he wondered. Everything at the scene felt wrong to him, but he’d been an A.D.A. long enough
to know that things often weren’t as they first seemed. Maybe his instincts were wrong. Maybe it would turn out that the young deputy had had no choice but to shoot.

“Cover it like a blanket,” Smyth whispered to Porter, who nodded knowingly. Smyth guessed his gut wasn’t the only one acting up. With that, Porter and Smyth parted, Porter to question witnesses, Smyth to assess the crime scene.

On a yellow legal pad, Smyth sketched the scene, noting the back door splintered off its frame and a black shoe print where someone had kicked it in. Once inside the house, he inspected the kitchen and the den, finding no signs of a struggle. He stepped over the medics’ debris and bloodstains in the front foyer.
The place is a mess,
he thought.

Shopping bags and packed moving crates littered the floor, and towers of spent fast-food containers cluttered tables and counters.

In Susan’s bedroom, Smyth found what he was looking for, the scene of the shooting. A Burger King drink cup sweated on the waterbed’s headboard; the telephone sat on the bed, atop a black quilt covered in a jaunty geometric pattern of triangles. He had to look carefully to see the coat of thick, wet blood saturating the sheets.

Smyth surveyed the room. Like the rest of the house, it was disheveled. On the nearby dresser he noticed a stack of black-and-white photos, like those in a model’s portfolio; they were of an attractive woman, middle-aged, with the name Susan White printed on each.

That’s her,
Smyth thought.
That’s the woman.

Porter stood at the doorway. “We’re ready for the walk-through,” he said.

Smyth nodded, walked toward him, then opened his briefcase and pulled out a tape recorder. He’d been
bringing one to shooting scenes for years, but he’d never before done what he intended to do now.

“Is he willing to tell us what happened?” Smyth asked Greenwood.

The question was a formality. Greenwood and McGowen both knew that if McGowen didn’t talk he’d face criminal charges and be suspended without pay for the duration of the investigation. Officers almost always cooperated. Plus, Smyth had seen McGowen circling the front yard, talking to whoever was willing to listen, despite his sergeant’s continual admonitions to stay quiet in a squad car. It was obvious the deputy was eager to tell his story.

“He’s ready,” Greenwood answered.

“Let’s go, then,” Smyth ordered, clicking on the tape recorder.

That action immediately caught Greenwood’s eye. He’d once worked for Smyth in the D.A.’s office. He knew tape-recording statements wasn’t his old boss’ standard procedure. Yet he’d talked to McGowen. The young deputy wanted to do the walk-through. He said he had no reason not to.

He has a warrant,
Greenwood thought.
It looks all right.

The walk-through began at the front door, McGowen telling how he’d gotten the warrant for White’s arrest after she threatened his C.I., a kid named Mike Shaffer.

Smyth watched the jowly young cop carefully as he rambled, recounting the events that had led to the shooting. According to McGowen, the kid in the car was a bigtime gunrunner, dealing in guns for gangs. After detailing the sting operation, he turned to Porter, who regarded him above his crescent-shaped glasses and smiled.

“You know, the morning of the sting I talked to some stupid A.D.A. who wouldn’t take charges on the kid,” said McGowen. “She didn’t know the law and wouldn’t charge him with engaging in organized crime activity,” he scoffed, smirking at the woman’s stupidity.

Porter just smiled at McGowen. He wanted him to keep on talking.

Meanwhile, Smyth’s instincts were on full alert.

This guy’s proud of shooting that woman,
he thought.
He’s delighted.

This was something Smyth had never seen before. Even seasoned officers forced to fire their weapons on career criminals were depressed and uncertain after having to shoot.

His bearing arrogant, McGowen surveyed White’s house as if he owned it, gesturing to show how they’d broken down the back door, talking repeatedly of automatic weapons and drugs.

“She threatened my C.I. We needed to get this woman off the street,” McGowen boasted, nodding at Smyth and Porter as if they were part of his club, the inner circle of law enforcement.

Then McGowen mentioned the telephone and White’s call to 911.

She called the cops?
Smyth marveled at this information.
This major player in a gun ring called the cops to help her? There’s something wrong here.

Moments later, an officer Smyth didn’t recognize approached them.

“The woman’s dead,” he said. “Just came in over the radio.”

Smyth and Porter exchanged wary glances. The stakes had just multiplied. If McGowen’s shooting of Susan White wasn’t justified, they were looking at murder.

Saying nothing, they continued the walk-through, but there was an electricity between the two A.D.A.s. Each knew what the other was thinking: One of them had to get downtown to the sheriff’s department to retrieve a copy of the tape of Susan White’s 911 call before something happened to it, before it mysteriously disappeared.

Later, Smyth and Porter walked toward their cars.

“The kid says his mom told him McGowen sexually
harassed her,” Porter reported, free for the first time to fill Smyth in on what he’d learned from his interview with the boy. “He didn’t ever see it, but said he was hitting on her.”

“How old’s that kid?”

“Seventeen.”

“He’s a little guy. I’d have made him for fourteen—tops,” Smyth said. “I’m going to call ahead and tell them to freeze that 911 tape. This thing smells and I don’t want it to get lost. You go to the hospital and check on the position of her wounds.”

“After that, I’m going to track down the warrant and check the probable cause,” added Porter.

Smyth agreed. Just then the two prosecutors heard someone call out. They turned to see Kent McGowen running toward them, flashing a warm smile.

“Thank you, Mr. Smyth, Mr. Porter,” the deputy gushed. “Thank you for coming out to this totally justifiable shooting.”

Homicide Detective Bruce Johnson arrived on the scene ninety minutes after the shooting. His partner, Chuck Leithner, who’d arrived an hour earlier, filled him in, describing it as an open-and-shut case: The deputy had a warrant, the woman didn’t open the door, she had a gun, and Kent McGowen shot Susan White in self-defense. But after surveying the scene, asking questions, and, more important, watching Kent McGowen, Johnson, who’d worked crime scenes for two decades, soon came to a vastly different conclusion.

McGowen’s demeanor pricked at him.
Cocky, he
thought.

When Malloy and Morong relayed what McGowen had told them, Johnson became even more suspicious. Though McGowen had led the deputies to believe they’d be entering a dangerous situation, one fraught with mean desperadoes and the possibility of a heavy-duty arsenal, the crime-scene unit found nothing but the .25 “peashooter” the woman had kept near her bed.

“Hell, there are women all over town with those toy guns under their pillows,” growled Johnson. “Doesn’t look to me like any big gunrunning scene.”

As Johnson questioned other deputies, he asked pointed questions about McGowen. The words his peers used to describe the young officer didn’t help settle the knot of suspicion in the detective’s gut: They called him a know-it-all; some said they didn’t trust him and that he had a way of stretching the truth.

Some said he lied.

Something else troubled Johnson. Morong and Malloy said McGowen hadn’t cleared the house the way officers and deputies were taught, carefully inspecting each room to be sure it was safe to enter. Instead the kid made a beeline for the woman’s bedroom. “He came in, his weapon drawn, and he was after her,” recounts Johnson. “Now, how’d he know where she was? If he seriously thought the house was full of guns, how did he know he was safe to chase her down?

“You get that feeling as an investigator,” Johnson concludes. “I figured we had a problem here. I thought it was dirty.”

A few hours after the shooting, McGowen was ordered back to the Cypresswood substation to make a statement. A’Laine Harrison, who’d never crossed paths with McGowen before, was called in to record it.

Harrison had been a clerk in Homicide for seven years. She’d taken countless statements from officers after shootings, most of them nervous and worried, wondering how their actions would be viewed by the D.A.’s office.

McGowen displayed none of the usual angst. He reveled in the moment, delighted to be the center of attention.

“He showed less concern than if he’d killed a dog,” says Harrison.

She felt sickened by the deputy’s attitude and escaped outside for a cigarette. In the dark, facing the street, she became aware of the door opening and Kent McGowen standing beside her, lighting his own cigarette.

“He had this look of self-satisfaction on his face,” recalls Harrison. “He didn’t talk about the shooting. He told me his daddy was rich, that he had a trust fund he’d inherit when he turned thirty-five. That someday he’d be a big rancher and raise cattle. I kept thinking,
Something’s wrong here.”

Inside the substation, Harrison admitted her suspicions to one of the detectives.

“Well, she had a gun. She was going to kill him,” the man insisted, incredulous that Harrison could second-guess a deputy with a warrant.

“I don’t care,” Harrison replied. “This isn’t right. I can feel it.”

Jason would remember seeing McGowen that morning as the teenager sat in a hard-backed chair against a wall outside Coons’ office. He looked up and found McGowen smiling at him. “It was this big, shit-eating grin,” says Jason, his voice mirroring the hate visible on his face. “This look like,
I won. I got you.”

Every few minutes Jason asked what had happened, where was his mother? No one answered him until about 2
A.M.,
when his mother’s closest friend, Jean Morris, and her daughter, Sharon, arrived at the substation. Jason had given her name as a contact, and the women had been called in, without being told what had happened.