A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop (42 page)

At just after two on a summer afternoon in 1996, Kent McGowen and I were the only customers in a rundown coffee shop eight miles from the house where he’d shot and killed Susan White. His trial was a distant memory. It had ended two years earlier with a conviction, a decision that was by then hotly contested in the appeals courts.

“I’ve got a new business. I’m going to make thirty-thousand a month,” he bragged, lighting a long, white cigarette. This was a leaner McGowen than the man I’d met at the trial, keyed up and edgy.

Although McGowen remained out of jail on the murder charge, it had been a bad year for him. In the fall of 1995, Michelle called 9-1-1. McGowen had kicked down her door and allegedly hit her with a telephone. By the time the case came up for trial, they were a couple again, and she refused to testify. Belinda Hill and Edward Porter pursued the case. McGowen pleaded no contest and was sentenced to the two weeks he spent in the jail before he made bail.

“I have never laid a hand on her or any woman,” he said. “They’re all liars.” McGowen referred to Porter and Hill, who had also found a way to ensure he’d never again be a cop. In the course of the murder investigation, they discovered he’d lied on a county health insurance form, tampering with a government document In a plea bargain, Porter dropped the charges in exchange for McGowen relinquishing his TCLEOSE license.

For the first forty-five minutes of our conversation, McGowen lambasted Michelle, his parents, nearly everyone close to him. He condemned the press, saying he’d been treated unfairly. “They’re all against me,” he said. “All lies,

“Here, take this,” McGowen said, pushing a folder across the table. Inside were evaluations from his tenure with H.P.D., describing him as good at his job. “I left there on good terms,” he said. “1 could have had five hundred people up on that stand at the trial to testify on my behalf.”

“So, why didn’t you?” I asked.

Mumbling, McGowen suggested his attorneys were against mounting a defense.

Months earlier McGowen had called me in a similar mood, challenging me to talk to his friends. He faxed a list of names and phone numbers. I called them all. Some hung up on me. Others failed to return my phone calls. One stood me up at a restaurant. Only three talked about McGowen. “The first, a former supervisor at the jail, maintained Kent was a good employee. Another, a deputy sheriff, said he believed Kent was innocent. But as we talked he described Kent as seething when he’d heard White had gone to Coons with allegations of sexual harassment.

The third, a man McGowen had gone into business with, at first defended him, then called again weeks later. By then, the business had failed, and McGowen filed a complaint with the Texas Employment Commission, claiming he was entitled to unpaid commissions. His friend said McGowen had never sold a single contract. “I can see how he did that to that woman, manipulated the system to get to her,” the friend said.

That afternoon as we sat together in the restaurant, McGowen built to a fever pitch, charging jurors at his trial were inattentive. “I’ve met with federal prosecutors about Ed Porter. We’ve got a lot of shit against him,” McGowen whispered, looking about the room as if someone might overhear. “The F.B.I, said this was the cleanest shooting they’d ever investigated.”

“No they didn’t, Kent,” I said. McGowen’s father had said something similar months earlier, and I’d called the agency and learned they’d never even investigated the case. “They didn’t tell you that,” McGowen said, sneering. “They t don’t talk to anyone.”

“Yes, they do,” I said.

I then listed the “tips” McGowen had given me in the past, frantic phone calls, when his voice sounded tight and strung out. He’d alleged the officers who’d testified against him had affairs with Susan White. He claimed she once pummeled the principal of Jason’s school. He claimed his defense team has evidence Susan and Jason had an incestuous relationship. All were lies.

“Nothing you told me checked out, Kent,” I said.

Called a liar, McGowen smirked, then launched another verbal barrage.

When it came to the killing, McGowen told me nothing more than he’d said in court: he didn’t know Susan White; they’d had no relationship; she’d lied about him in an attempt to discredit him, to seek revenge when he arrested Jason; she pulled a gun on Mm, and he shot in self-defense. “It’s as plain as that,” he said. I must have looked skeptical, because he said to me, as we parted, “Do your homework. I’m telling the truth.”

The following week, we met again, at the same restaurant. Again, 1 told him that much of what he’d told me wasn’t true. Again, he seemed unconcerned. But he said to me, “So, what do you think?

I told him that I found flaws with his version of the killing.

“I don’t know why you’re so convinced I murdered her,” he said.

“If you’re telling the truth, there are some things that just don’t jibe, Kent.”

My research had uncovered a chain of actions on Susan’s part that made no sense, if Kent McGowen was telling the truth. First there were her words to Alan Jefferies, in May, a month after McGowen had begun patrolling her neighborhood, that a new deputy she called “Mac” was watching out for her. “She wasn’t afraid of you then,” I said, “But a month later, she was.”

It was in late June that she told Helen Bazata a deputy named Kent McGowen was stopping her on the street, asking her out. Bazata sensed Susan was worried.

Over the next two months, Susan White confided in many that she was afraid of Kent McGowen, culminating in her words to Ray Valentine, “Maybe you’ll believe me when I’m dead and Kent McGowen has killed me.”

All of this happened before McGowen arrested Jason, before Susan White had any motive to seek revenge.

“You’re wrong about me,” McGowen said, as we parted that day.

I said nothing, just turned around and walked away. What I didn’t yet know was that Kent McGowen had already confessed to someone else.

Her name was Summer Edwards, a voluptuous, free-spirited artist, and a single mom. They’d met a month before his trial, introduced by her mother. “His parents were bible thumpers,” she says. “Mom thought Kent was a great guy.”

The first night, they talked on the telephone for hours. When he mentioned the shooting, Edwards was frightened. “But he was nice, funny and entertaining. He was charming,” she says. “I didn’t have any reason not to believe him, when he said it was self-defense.”

The relationship lasted six months. As he had been with Michelle and others after her, McGowen was an ardent lover. He brought flowers, wrote passionate notes, cleaned her house and cared for her young daughter. He told her he loved her the first night they spent together. On the third, he proposed. “There was this strong, physical attraction,” she says.

He told her the trial was a formality. He’d be acquitted. When it began, he begged her not to attend. She’d find out later, he had another girlfriend in the gallery.

Throughout the two weeks of the trial, McGowen called her every night. “If that had been me, I would have gone nuts, being up for murder,” she says. Kent was calm, but Summer wondered how much of his bravado came out of a pill bottle. “He was on heavy-duty anti-depressants and sleeping pills,” she says.

Her mother called her to tell her of the guilty verdict. “I couldn’t believe it,” she says. “I still thought he was innocent.”

The following night, Kent insisted it was a miscarriage of justice his attorneys would rectify. “He brought champagne,” she remembers. “Here he’d been convicted of murder, and we celebrated.”

Not long after, their relationship began to tailspin. McGowen ignored her for days, then turned up at her apartment. “He acted really strange,” she says. “I hadn’t seen him behave like this before. It didn’t make sense to me.”

Later, she’d decide, that McGowen was “unraveling.”

At her apartment one night, when he’d mixed wine with prescription drugs, she found him in the bedroom, hitting his head with his fists and rocking back and forth, murmuring, over and over again, “That fucking bitch.”

“Are you talking about Susan White?” Summer asked.

“Yup.”

“Did you mean to kill that woman?” she asked.

“Yup,” he said. “She needed to be killed.”

“Why?”

“Because she was fucking with me. She was threatening to call my wife, and she’d already called my boss.”

“I was amazed that he would kill someone over a job,” she’d later say. “1 was scared, but still in denial.

Other conversations about White followed. Although she couldn’t later reconstruct what gave her that impression, she came to believe that he’d had a fling with White that had gone sour. Yet, he never showed remorse for the killing, instead portraying himself as the victim. “He regretted what the shooting had done to his life,” she says. “Kent often joked about killing people. Sometimes he referred to himself as a psycho.”

Their relationship deteriorated, and one night, after an argument, she called his mother and blurted out, “Your son is guilty as hell. He confessed to me.”

After that, Summer thought about what Kent McGowen was capable of and that she might be the only one who knew what had happened between McGowen and White. Her testimony could help put him behind bars.

Fearing for her life, Summer moved in with her mother. Susan complained a month before her death that someone was calling her house and hanging up. Now the telephone at Summer’s mother’s house rang. When her mother answered, no one was there.

One afternoon, the phone rang and Summer heard McGowen’s voice. When she took the telephone from her mother, McGowen asked, “Who have you been talking to?”

“No one,” she said.

“I’ll shut you up,” he told her.

That was when Summer Edwards called Belinda Hill.

The years passed. Susan’s mother called me at times, usually late in the evenings, hoping to hear 1 knew Kent McGowen would soon be on his way to prison. I had no such reassurance for her.

As the last millennium ended, the case of Texas V. Joseph Kenton McGowen hung open, like the case file in Edward Porter’s desk drawer. Changes occurred all around him. Belinda Hill became a district judge, and Vic Wisner, an eighteen-year veteran with the D.A.’s office, took her place. The one constant remained Porter. No matter how much time passed, he gave no hint of retreating. “We’re not dropping this case,” he said. “If we have to, we’ll be back in court.”

The word finally came down in late 2001: The 14th Court of Appeals ruled McGowen was entitled to a new trial.

This time when I called Porter’s assistant, Rhonda Watson, she had news. “The McGowen trial will start in March,” she said. “Edward says he’s ready.”

The courtroom on the morning of Tuesday, March 19, 2002, buzzed with energy. It had been eight years since McGowen sat at a defense table in front of a panel of twelve jurors charged with determining whether he had murdered Susan White. Edward Porter with Vic Wisner represented the state. Judge Mary Lou Keel sat behind the bench. A former assistant district attorney in the appellate branch, Keel watched Argus-eyed, as Porter and Kent’s new defense attorney, Dan Cogdell, made their opening remarks.

Cogdell had been a surprise.

For more than a year, McGowen had bragged that he’d nabbed Dick DeGuerin, Houston’s top criminal defense attorney. That hadn’t happened. But Cogdell, a protege of Houston’s legendary Richard “Racehorse” Haynes, wasn’t far down the “A” list.

Such courtroom prowess didn’t come cheap; Cogdell’s fee hovered in the low six figures. McGowen’s parents were in financial straights, and the money came from a wealthy relative.

“We will put on testimony showing that Susan White told Kent McGowen’s supervisor he had arrested Jason because she refused his advances,” Porter began that morning. “We will prove Kent McGowen lied to get the warrant, and that he then murdered her.”

When Cogdell claimed the floor, he followed in the footsteps of Brian Benken and Clint Greenwood in the first trial, attacking White. “Susan White was arrogant,” he charged. “She saw no wrong when it came to Jason. That’s what led to her death.”

Kent McGowen, said Cogdell, was a cop doing his job. Susan White pointed a gun at him, just as he’d claimed. To prove it, Cogdell had a video, one of Susan White bowling, holding the ball in her right hand. “Kent McGowen told the truth,” he said. In front of the jury Porter showed no hint of concern, but that evening, he considered what Cogdell said he had, a video that would damage a key element of proof that Kent was lying. Yet, by the following morning, Porter was smiling. A few hours on the Internet had supplied what he needed.

For the most part, the days were a replay of the first trial, with a few exceptions. This time Summer Edwards took the stand, testifying to McGowen’s confessions. Cogdell came down hard on her, but never shook her testimony.

When Deputy Al Kelly took the stand, he got to say what he’d been barred from telling the first jury, McGowen’s last words to him the day before the shooting: “If I get the opportunity, 1 ought to kill that fucking bitch.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise in the prosecution’s case was Deputy Jeff Copeland. By the second trial, he’d been seasoned on the streets and no longer saw McGowen as a hero. Copeland testified that McGowen had come into the jail and played the 9-1-1 tape for friends. The judge ruled against allowing him to tell the rest of the story, for he was now willing to say McGowen had indeed bragged about picking up the mounted brass from the killing, a hunting trophy he said he’d earned by killing a human being.

Another crucial bit of evidence was placed before the jury during Copeland’s testimony as at the first trial: the order of the shots, the first to Susan White’s face, evidence she was turned away from him at the time of the killing.

Throughout the prosecutors’ witnesses, Cogdell waged war, jumping from his chair, objecting. At one point, he put Vic Wisner on the stand, without the jury present, charging the assistant DA suborned perjury by putting Mike Shaffer on the stand, when he knew Shaffer had testified differently at each juncture.

“That was just Shaffer,” says Wisner. “He testified as he remembered the events at that moment in time.”