A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop (5 page)

“Go ahead,” he challenged, knowing his wife understood he was just “cutting up like an old man will do.”

Most women in the neighborhood worked, and Susan was no exception. She’d lost her nurse’s license after the forged-prescription incident in Baton Rouge, so with the help of Jean Morris, the agent who sold them the Valley Bend house, Susan enrolled in real-estate school and signed on with a nearby Century 21 office. In her mustard-colored blazer, she showed houses and took prospective buyers on house-hunting expeditions. She was relatively good at it, and working brought in the commissions she now needed to pay for Jason’s expenses.

If the neighborhood women shunned her company, Jean and others at the office became her new friends. After work they stopped for drinks and talked over the happenings of the day. Spread among her marriage, work, the country club, and friends, Susan’s days were hectic, and now that she had Jason, she wasn’t quite sure what to do with him. In the best of circumstances, adjusting an adolescent to a new state, city, and home with
a mother he’d rarely seen and a stepfather he barely knew would have been difficult. With a mother distracted by the demands of a new marriage, the situation spelled disaster.

Acutely aware of her dilemma, Susan told friends she felt like she was in the middle of a tug-of-war, pulled in one direction by Ron, who wanted to live the life he’d been accustomed to, and in another by Jason, who needed his mother. It soon became obvious that it was Ron who had won the contest. “I can’t let this ruin my marriage,” Susan told one co-worker. “I’ve got to put Ron first.”

“It wasn’t that she ignored me,” Jason insists, maintaining he understood the conflict in his mother’s life. “She did all she could, took me places, she wanted us all to be a family. But me and Ron, we just never got along. It just didn’t work.”

As a result, it was Jason whom neighbors gossiped about over shopping carts at the local grocery store, or standing in line waiting for a teller at the bank. He was alone, often late into the night, they said. One neighbor noticed the boy walking the darkened streets well after midnight. Tom Roy sometimes found the twelve-year-old sitting alone, smoking a cigarette on the curb at 4:30 when he and Lorene took their morning walk.

“It was a sad situation. I think Susan meant well, but she just didn’t have much time for the boy,” Roy says. “Sometimes we’d bring him home and feed him. We took him shopping with us, tried to help out. He always had this dog with him, a mutt, part golden retriever. He took that dog everywhere, like it was his only friend. Then the dog died and he was all alone.”

When the Roys and others approached him on the street, Jason responded politely, peppering the conversation with “yes, ma’am” and “no, sir.” Yet the boy made few friends in his new neighborhood; instead, he
took to playing with children half his age, a situation that prompted more gossip.

“We all pretty much felt sorry for Jason. He seemed lonely. He told all of us his father didn’t want him anymore, he had a new wife and son,” recalls Kim Millikan, who lived with her family next door. “We thought the boy was redeemable, but then, after many incidents, we decided he wasn’t.”

The incidents are still legend on Valley Bend, like the time he convinced their then preschool daughters to dig tunnels, burying themselves under a pile of soil delivered for the garden. “By the time we realized what was going on, one of them could have died,” remembers Kim. “Jason was a real Eddie Haskell kind of kid. He’d say, ‘You make the best cookies’; then he’d get my daughters to do something they shouldn’t.”

Occasionally one neighbor or another made his way to the Whites’ house to voice a complaint. It rarely resulted in satisfaction for the complaining party.

“If Ron answered the door, he’d just say, ‘You need to talk to Susan,’” says Kim. “If Susan was there, she’d get this blank look on her face and then deny that Jason could have done anything wrong. You could tell Susan loved the boy, but she couldn’t see he was in trouble. She always defended him. Nothing was ever his fault. It was always ‘Poor Jason. Poor Jason.’”

Susan eased her conscience by making sure Jason never wanted for anything. She bought him new clothes, a bike, and, say neighbors, padded his adolescent palms with cash. “We’d take him to the mall and Jason would have twenty-dollar bills stuffed in his wallet, once more than a hundred dollars,” remembers Tom Roy. “I’d say, ‘Jason, where do you get all that money?’ He alleged that his grandmother had sent it to him, but we knew that wasn’t true. It came from Susan.”

It was the “jewelry incident” that convinced the neighbors Jason was “beyond redemption.” One afternoon
a neighborhood woman returned from work to discover her home ransacked and her husband’s gold chain missing. Her five-year-old daughter and her housekeeper said Jason had pushed his way into the house and rifled through the drawers. Irate, the woman stormed down the block to the Whites’ house and knocked on the door. Jason answered, wearing the chain around his neck. Furious, she yanked it off. Despite the woman’s having the evidence in hand, she had to be mistaken, Susan maintained.

“Jason would never do anything like that,” she insisted.

As time passed, the White house became a magnet for disenfranchised neighborhood teens, mostly boys who wore baggy pants, enormous T-shirts, one earring, and backward baseball hats. The older ones drove dilapidated cars, the radios blaring. “The boys were always into something. Susan and Ron were always at work. Those kids would stand up on the roof, calling out obscenities at the little ones in the neighborhood,” remembers Roy. “They took a can of hair spray and fired it into a lit match, causing an explosion. They egged folks walking down the street. Once a shed burned down, and neighbors figured Jason and his pals probably did it. Typical teenage stuff, but worse.”

Friends say that Ron, too, found his stepson a constant irritant, and Jason made it clear he returned his disdain. They had heated arguments over everything from Jason’s friends to the way he kept his room. Jason retaliated, including one day spiking Ron’s coffee with antifreeze.

“He didn’t really drink it,” said Gloria, whom Susan later told about the incident. “But Ron was absolutely furious. He chased Jason all over the house.”

“I never much wanted to be around Ron,” Jason says. “He kept his distance and so did I. He was an old man. All he wanted to do was golf and eat out at restaurants.
I asked her, ‘Why’d you marry him?’ My mom said she loved him and he could afford to make a home for us.”

Jason’s problems weren’t confined to his relationship with the neighbors and his stepfather. As in Louisiana, they spilled over into school, where he disrupted his classes and pulled pranks that made him as common a topic of conversation in the teachers’ lounge as on Valley Bend.

Susan spent afternoon after afternoon arguing with counselors and teachers. Although she gave him little of her time, she was fiercely loyal to her son. As always, she denied Jason could be guilty of any of the accusations leveled against him. When counselors talked of emotional and behavioral problems and suggested discipline and counseling, Susan, as unconcerned as if they’d mentioned an occasional tardiness for classes, replied that she didn’t believe in pushing the boy.

“He’s just going through a stage,” she maintained at parent-teacher conferences. “You’ll see. It’s just teenageboy stuff.”

Before long, and over Susan’s angry protests, Jason was transferred to the Wunsche School, the district’s last resort for kids with physical, mental, emotional, or behavioral problems. “When counseling and regular school don’t work, they’re sent to Wunsche,” explains one former teacher. “Jason was there for emotional and behavioral reasons. He may have been fifteen, but emotionally he hadn’t matured. He was physically small for his age and he still acted like a little kid. He had bad judgment, and he was a follower. If one of his friends told Jason to rob a bank, he’d do it, without even asking why.”

Once Jason was enrolled in Wunsche, his separation from the neighborhood became complete. While other children waited for school buses on the corner, a smaller bus equipped with a wheelchair ramp to accommodate
the school’s special population pulled up in front of the White household early each morning. Jason was nearly always late, and Calvin Edgin, the driver, grew used to seeing Susan, still dressed in her worn brown terry-cloth robe, wave to him from the front door.

“Jason’ll be there in a minute,” she’d shout.

Moments later, she’d reappear with a Styrofoam cup of coffee for Edgin. “She was really friendly, always up,” he says. “And she was always talking about Jason and how he was really such a good boy. She said people just didn’t understand him and all he’d been through.”

Edgin listened sympathetically, but he knew another Jason, a teenage troublemaker who made fun of the boy with cerebral palsy who rode the bus.

“You could see Jason going downhill. He hung around with some rough-looking characters. They’d be waiting for him when we drove up after school. I can’t remember how many times I saw Susan coming up to school,” he says. “When I did, I knew Jason was in trouble, again.”

When Susan’s family visited, she told them none of her son’s problems, instead putting on a things-couldn’t-be-better facade. She bragged about Jason’s grades and acted as if everything were fine at home, as if no tension existed. For the first time, she was able to splurge on her family, and she did so with abandon. She sent her parents on a trip to the West Coast to visit her uncle, their first plane ride. She bought her mother clothes. When O.L. refused them, Susan insisted, often hiding sweaters or jewelry in her mother’s suitcase. “Once, when we were all visiting, Susie announced, ‘Today, we’re all going to get a new pair of shoes,’” remembers Kay. “She took us shopping and bought a pair for each of us. Susie was just that way. She used to say, ‘I’m just like my daddy, I’ve got money stashed away and nobody knows I’ve got it.’”

Her sisters would later judge it was in 1989 that they
first realized everything wasn’t ideal in Susan’s new marriage. At the time, Ron worked in Port Arthur, Texas, on an extended assignment, overseeing the building of a new plant, just as he had in Baton Rouge years earlier when he and Susan met. Neighbors remember Susan felt uncomfortable about being at home alone. “I can’t say how many times she called the police, claiming someone was trying to break in,” recalls Tom Roy. “If they weren’t there over something Jason had done, they were there because she got scared in the middle of the night.”

Then, one weekend when Ron made the trip home, Susan found photographs in his pocket, photographs of another woman. “It devastated her,” says Sandra. “Ron called me day and night for weeks after that. He begged, ‘Tell Susan that I love her.’ I’d said, ‘Susie, just give him another chance. If you love him, the two of you can work it out.’”

It was the third marriage for each of them, and perhaps Ron was as frightened as Susan at the prospect of yet another failure. Or perhaps he truly loved her. Whatever the reason, that fall, Ron White capitulated about many things, including rescinding the postnuptial agreement that had barred Susan from ever claiming any of his assets, and writing a new will, in which he listed Jason as one of his heirs.

Shortly thereafter, Ron White left his high-salary job at Texaco and signed on with a small, oil-contracting concern. Susan told friends it was an opportunity so potentially lucrative, he couldn’t refuse to accept the offer. They moved to Korea in the fall of 1989, just as Susan celebrated her fortieth birthday, for what was supposed to be a one-year assignment. Millikan and others on Valley Bend sighed in relief, grateful that, at least for a while, Jason would no longer interrupt their quiet neighborhood. But just a few months later, they returned. “It was like, thank God he’s gone, and then Jason was back
again,” remembers Millikan. “None of us could believe it.”

Susan’s sisters were never quite sure why Susan, Ron, and Jason returned from overseas so much sooner than expected, except that Susan had detested Korea and fallen ill. Once back in Houston, Ron again looked for a new job. Susan introduced him to a former real-estate client, a highly placed executive with Brown & Root, the engineering and construction giant. The company had an opening, and Ron secured a slot as a project manager.

In the summer of 1991, Susan left real estate and signed on as a broker with First Union, a small, three-broker office that specialized in mortgage loans.

This might have been the best time of Susan’s life. With money rolling in, she splurged on a white BMW convertible with leather seats. She became a common sight barreling through the streets of Oak Creek, the BMW’s top down, her long blond hair whipping in the breeze, her skin burnished to a dark tan from visits to a nearby tanning salon. She and Ron sold the Valley Bend house and bought a brand-new one on Amber Forest, in a tony section of Olde Oaks, a more prestigious subdivision that butted up to Oak Creek Village on the east.

The house was a two-story, rose-colored brick fortress, on a street populated by upper-level managers and professional couples and their families. It had leaded-glass windows in the stately double front doors, a marble-floored entry, a game room and a gym, a black marble floor-to-ceiling fireplace in the living room, and a cedar-shingle roof that glistened silver in the harsh Houston sun. Despite her decidedly nontraditional nature, Susan decorated like an Ethan Allen brochure: a deep-shine polished Chippendale dining room set, a cherry bedroom suite with a four-poster bed under an oil painting of an ancient sailing ship tossed on an angry sea. Copper pots hung over a kitchen counter, and rows of crystal goblets lined the china cabinet.

“She wanted more than she had on Valley Bend,” says Millikan. “And we were glad to be rid of the problems with Jason on the street. The only thing I heard in the neighborhood was people wishing they’d moved farther away.”

Susan had come a long way from the shotgun houses of her youth. “The house I grew up in would fit in our living room,” she bragged to one friend. “I always knew that someday I’d have a house like this one.”