A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop (4 page)

Not long after her first marriage ended, Susan wed again, briefly, to a man who worked in a Baton Rouge industrial plant. The marriage lasted less than a year, but they parted friends.

Single again, she rented a small apartment not far from Gloria’s home. Jason was rarely there. Susan talked often of her disappointment, and that she dreamed of one day having her son with her and of being married to a man of means, a man who loved her.

At a party in her apartment complex in the mid-eighties,
Susan met such a man, and she told her friends that he was just what she’d waited for. Ron White was handsome, smart; an engineer, he made a good salary. And he appeared to be captivated by her.

“Susie fell hard for him,” Gloria remembers. “Al and I never felt right about him. He was the kind of guy who didn’t look you in the eye. But when they were together, Ron hung on Susie like he was crazy about her. In the beginning, I thought things would be all right, that Susie’s life had finally straightened out.”

Why do men and women so often replace one bad marriage with another? Is it simply human nature to crave familiar pain, unconsciously reasoning,
Better the misery I know?
Or is it a way of fulfilling the preordained designs of fate, as if, before our births, God drew a personal life line for each of us, His all-knowing hand writing, “Destined to be disappointed in love,” in red across a healthy sampling of pages in His holy ledger?

Could it be an eternal optimism, this belief that despite a history of unsuccessful relationships, this time, this
one
time, love would surely bring happiness?

“Susie talked about Ron’s success,” remembers Sandra. “I thought he was strange, a little quiet. But Susie liked him, and as long as she was happy and he wasn’t hurting her, that was enough for me.”

Ron White had a thick crop of salt-and-pepper hair, his fortysomething face ruggedly attractive. Seven years
older than Susan and with two grown children, he flashed a wry smile and had a manner of focusing on a woman so intently that it seemed no one else mattered. He drove a Porsche and worked for Texaco as a project manager, overseeing plant installations.

To his credit, Ron White was honest with Susan. He told her early on that he was married, in the midst of a divorce from his second wife.

“Doesn’t Ron remind you of Al?” Susan dreamily asked Gloria one afternoon.

“I don’t know,” Gloria said, unwilling to voice her misgivings.

White lived in Houston, but when he met Susan, he was supervising the building of a new plant in Baton Rouge. She introduced him to her family, and they spent every available moment together after they both finished work for the day and on the weekends when he didn’t return home to Houston. Before long, Susan labeled him the answer to her prayers, the man who would finally make up for her past pain. Ron understood how she felt about Jason, she said, that he was her son and that she wanted him with her.

Less than a year later, as White cleaned up the loose ends on his Baton Rouge assignment, Susan made plans to move to Houston with him. “I’m really in love with him,” she told her mother. “We want to be together.”

“I knew she was hoping they’d get married,” says Sandra.

Yet one more failure awaited Susan in Baton Rouge. Just before she left, she was arrested for forging a prescription for amphetamines and Valium. Ron and Gloria checked her into another hospital, and she went before a judge, swearing she was cured of her addictions. He gave her probation but stripped her of her nurse’s license.

On moving day, Susan had little to pack. She’d accumulated few possessions in her thirty-five years.
When she loaded up her old car for the six-hour drive to Houston, it included only clothing and personal items, a rolltop desk, and one antique table. But to Susan, it didn’t seem to matter.

“She was happy as a lark,” remembers Sandra. It was a new start. Susan was leaving not only Louisiana behind but the failure and unrealized dreams that haunted her there.

It was in Houston’s far northern suburbs that Susan and Ron rented a two-bedroom apartment on Wunderlich Road as they waited for his divorce to become final. Houstonians know it as the FM 1960 area, after its main thoroughfare.

Decades earlier, this northern rim of Houston had been called Jackrabbit Run—its wild, thick pine forests deemed by inside-the-loop Houstonians as fit for only frogs, lizards, rabbits, and armadillos. But by the time Susan and Ron arrived, much of the forest had toppled in favor of roads, strip centers, and fashionable, walled-in subdivisions of two-story brick houses on small yards, many surrounding pristine golf courses and ostentatious country clubs. Families dominated the culture. Saturdays were traditionally spent cheering at Little League and soccer fields. A row of churches lined Klein Church Road, and restaurants stocked an abundance of high chairs.

Susan settled in and adjusted easily to her new life with Ron. In the beginning it must have been all she’d hoped for. They took a romantic, two-week business trip to Scotland and England, where they roomed in ancient castles and dined in posh restaurants, lingering to snap a photo, arm in arm, in front of Loch Ness. They splurged on furniture, matching Rolex watches, all the things Susan wanted but could never before afford. It wasn’t unusual to find her flooring Ron’s Porsche on
quiet, suburban side streets. “I bet she drove ninety miles per hour, minimum,” laughs Sandra. “She was on top of the world.”

For the first time in her life, Susan belonged to a country club, Northgate Forest. It boasted a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a clubhouse with three-story windows that framed the verdant thirty-six-hole golf course and the half-a-million-dollar-and-up estates that surrounded it. Susan, already a good tennis player, took up Ron’s game of golf.

To Susan, Northgate was a symbol of her newfound wealth, her entrance into the upper classes. But her past left her unprepared for the social mores she’d encounter. “She just wasn’t country-club material,” says one member. “When she’d sign up for the ladies’ league, no one wanted to golf with her. We formed teams and the loser, whoever had an empty slot, got stuck with Susan. She was loud, laughed too much, and she would say anything that came into her head. She told you more than you wanted to know about her personal life. She
really
wasn’t country-club material.”

In early 1986, Ron’s divorce became final and they applied for a marriage license. Perhaps she sensed he was reluctant to legalize their relationship, or maybe it was just an example of her playful nature, but on March 29, as he rounded the curve at the fifteenth hole, she had a justice of the peace waiting. In shorts and golf shirts, a clutch of lace pinned to her visor, Susan and Ron repeated their vows. Afterward, they toasted with champagne, his golfing buddies made an arch of clubs for the newlyweds to walk under, and then Ron left to finish his round.

“Ron looked surprised,” remembers Sandra, the maid of honor and the only family member to attend. “But he went along with it. I guess he was happy about it. With Ron you never could tell.”

Two months later, in early June, Ron and Susan drew
up a postnuptial agreement in which Susan conceded she had no claim to his property, principally his retirement and employee stock accounts, certificates of deposit, and money markets. The document included future earnings and stipulated that in the event of one of their deaths, their separate possessions would be passed on to their individual children. Of course, the agreement also protected Susan’s property, but then, she had little to speak of.

Still, Susan appeared happy, and, their friends say, so did Ron. Unencumbered by children or other demands, with Ron’s money to foot the bills, they partied with friends and played golf at the country club. Susan became a not-uncommon sight in her bikini at the club pool, where she tanned her body a deep chestnut and gossiped with young mothers who brought their children to swim. At night, she and Ron frequented the restaurants up and down FM 1960, occasionally stopping in to listen to the music and eat dinner at Resa’s, the piano bar attached to Del Frisco’s. They rarely mingled with the high-rolling crowd of aging baby boomers who frequented the restaurant. “When Susan was with Ron, they basically kept to themselves,” remembers one friend. “They didn’t need anyone else.”

Then something happened that changed everything, something neither Susan nor Ron could have anticipated—L.J. sent twelve-year-old Jason to Houston to live with his mother.

“Nancy and I couldn’t handle Jason anymore, not that I didn’t want him,” L.J. insists. “He was always in trouble, at school and at home. He was uncontrollable. We’d done all we could, counselors, everything. Jason said he wanted to live with his momma and Susan said, ‘Give me Jason.’ One day I just said, ‘Fine, if that’s what y’all want, go ahead.’”

Susan couldn’t believe her good fortune. She’d tried unsuccessfully for five years to have custody of her son,
and suddenly L.J. handed the boy to her. She crowed to her friends and family about her happiness. Things couldn’t have worked out better, as far as Susan was concerned.

The apartment suddenly too small, the newlyweds bought a tan brick, two-story house on Valley Bend in Oak Creek Village, a quiet, twenty-five-year-old subdivision, and she enrolled Jason at the neighborhood middle school.

To Susan, her son seemed perfect. He was small for his age, slightly built, with a thick shock of medium brown hair, finely shaped, handsome features, and a warm olive complexion that resembled his father’s.

“I just can’t believe my luck,” she told one friend. “My beautiful baby has come home to me.”

Oak Creek Village, the subdivision where the Whites settled, was white-collar and conservative. Most families voted Republican, attended church on Sundays, and assumed their children would go to college. Neighbors knew each other well enough to nod to as they took their evening walks, but only a smattering formed close friendships, instead abiding by Robert Frost’s “Good fences make good neighbors.”

As in much of middle America, lives were orderly. Husbands and wives kissed each other good-bye in the morning before driving off in their late-model cars, mainly Japanese and American-made sedans, to their respective offices. Children waited at the corner for the yellow school bus marked Spring Independent School District. In late afternoon, the same bus brought them home. Status equaled the bottom line on one’s bank accounts, the size of one’s house, the stickers on one’s cars, and the talents of one’s children, whether realized on the soccer field or in the classroom.

In this world, Susan White was as miscast as Dolly Parton portraying June Cleaver.

While her conservative neighbors clipped coupons for weekly trips to the local grocery stores, Susan, suddenly with a positive checkbook balance, phoned in orders to the convenience store a mile from her house. The prices were inflated, the selection limited, yet it offered what Susan deemed a great advantage, home delivery—for an additional fee.

“We were all flabbergasted,” clucks one neighbor. “Couldn’t she get in the car and drive to Kroger?”

While others jogged for their health, Susan chainsmoked, a cigarette continually dangling between her long, thin fingers. Ron White tended to keep to himself, but Susan, who often said she’d never met a stranger who didn’t become a friend, disdained the cordial-but-distant doctrine. It wasn’t unusual for her to corner a neighbor who was out to pick up the mail, or to rap on a door asking to borrow bread for Jason’s lunch. More often than not, she was attired, not in the typical suburban uniform of khaki slacks and cotton shirt, but in a too-tight T-shirt and shorts cut high enough to showcase her legs.

As her neighbors exchanged chin-wags about the odd new woman on the block, Susan appeared unaware of her growing notoriety. She crowed to Gloria about the friends she’d made in Houston, emphasizing how nicely they all treated her. Yet perhaps in the quiet moments when alone, not worried about impressing family or friends, Susan felt very differently, the daughter of sharecroppers adrift in an upper-middle-class world.

The only neighbors to truly befriend Susan were Tom and Lorene Roy, a retired petroleum engineer and his wife, who lived directly across the street. The Roys’ house, a white two-story with wrought-iron trim, recalled their Louisiana roots, a shared heritage that made them believe they’d found a kindred soul in Susan.

“At first, she struck me as a real upright lady. She had this husky voice and a Louisiana accent,” recalls Tom Roy, a large man who favors worn coveralls for the endless puttering he indulges in around the house. “When she was really dressed up, she looked gorgeous. But I believe it would be fair to say that she threw it around a little bit, too. She was looking for attention. Ron? I think he wanted to give her that attention, but he was never able to find the way to do it.”

When Tom Roy happened upon Susan in the front yard or getting in or out of the car in the driveway, they teased each other, laughing good-naturedly.

“You and me are going to go upstairs someday,” Roy said with a quick wink.

“I’m going to tell your wife,” Susan answered with a coy smile.