A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop (6 page)

That Thanksgiving, Susan’s parents, Sandra, and Kay came to visit. “It was a wonderful time,” says Sandra. “Susan was so excited about the house, about everything. I don’t ever remember seeing her so happy.”

They used Susan’s new video camera to record the event. In the tape, she traveled through the house narrating in her gravelly voice; at one point, in a scene that would later smack of high irony, she playfully chased a reclusive Ron.

“You hiding from me?” she quipped.

Never much of a cook, Susan ordered a prepared turkey dinner with all the fixings from a local grocery store. Yet before they had time to claim it, a boom reverberated through the neighborhood, shaking the house. They rushed outside to find the home directly next door engulfed in flames.

O.L. called 911, but by the time a fire truck arrived, there was little left to do but wet down the cedar-shingle roofs on the surrounding houses to keep the fire from spreading. Susan watched in horror as greedy flames devoured her neighbor’s home, tears streaming down her cheeks. “She sobbed like a baby,” remembers Kay. “She was so afraid that the fire would jump over to her house and they’d lose all their beautiful things.”

The fire never did reach Susan’s beloved home, but something else happened that day, something Susan didn’t even notice at the time, something that would
prove more deadly to the world she’d so carefully constructed.

“I think it was a while after the fire,” Kay muses. “The phone rang, and I saw Ron pick it up. He gave me kind of a funny look and turned away. He whispered real soft, like he didn’t want me to hear, and all I could think was,
Oh, no. Not a girlfriend.”

Life doesn’t happen in earth-shattering events or great revelations. It builds in moments, fleeting thoughts, and forgotten deeds; in a series of installments, each separate yet connected. Mysteriously, minor decisions become life-shaping; a mere acquaintance alters destiny. Life is a kaleidoscope, its pieces tumbling haphazardly, forming one pattern that merges seamlessly into another, until a twist of the bezel casts an unanticipated design, an unforeseen possibility, a final resolution.

In early 1992, Susan White’s world shifted, undetectably at first, then at such speed that it sent her reeling.

A nineteen-year-old drifter with dark hair and earnest eyes, Michael Todd Shaffer moved into her life that winter, gradually, innocuously. Shaffer would later discount the part he played in Susan White’s death, but as providence would have it, he became one of the central elements necessary to seal her fate.

“It was just talk,” he maintains. “We were just a bunch of punks trying to act bad.”

Jason met Shaffer in 1991, through mutual friends, and they quickly became as thick as brothers. He was a sullen young man, two years older than Jason. Like Jason’s, his childhood was marked by uncertainty and trauma. When he was eight, his parents separated, and of their three sons, Michael took the breakup the hardest. “He was the youngest and he had the toughest time adjusting,” reports Shaffer’s mother, Jeannie Jaques. “He was a great kid, but by adolescence we were having one crisis after the other with him. He just shrugged things off, never accepted any responsibility.”

Michael dropped out of school at fifteen and moved to Houston, where he took on a nomadic lifestyle, at times living in run-down rented houses with his two older brothers, Bobby and Myron, both auto mechanics. Other times, he migrated among the homes of his latest best friends. He cultivated connections with cars and money, with kids who lived in big houses. By the summer of 1991, Michael drifted in and out of the Whites’ house on Valley Bend, staying with Jason whenever it was convenient. Susan liked him. He was older than Jason and, she judged, therefore more solid. “She’d ask me to keep an eye on Jason,” Shaffer recalls. “She’d say she didn’t worry about him when we were together. When Jason was with me, he didn’t have a curfew.”

It is possible Susan didn’t know, distracted as she was by the ups and downs of her marriage. Or maybe it was easier not to know. But during those late nights when her son caroused with Shaffer, they did more than pop wheelies in Michael’s old white Pinto in the deserted cemetery near the house, trip neighbors’ car alarms, or slam golf balls into the Dumpster parked in the front yard of the burned-out house next door.

When Susan and Ron were out of the way and Jason and Michael had the run of the house, word spread, cars
lined the street, every light shone into the night like a beacon calling to bored or displaced teenagers looking for a few hours of a good time. Loud music, louder laughter. Some brought liquor raided from their parents’ cabinets; others bought six-packs at the local convenience store from clerks who looked the other way. A few supplied drugs.

“Jason and Mike liked to brag about being bad and they did what the crowd did,” says one of the throng of teenagers who hung out together that year. “We were almost always high on something, mostly pot or acid. It was a blast. Nobody talked much about anything past the next weekend.”

As on Valley Bend, the patience of the neighbors on Amber Forest wore thin. On weekends, calls flooded the Cypresswood substation, the sheriff’s department nearby headquarters. “There’s another party at 3407 Amber Forest,” one neighbor or another would complain. “Nobody can sleep.”

A squad car responded, but before it arrived, neighbors watched in frustration as lights flickered off and all became quiet, teenagers disappearing from the house like ants abandoning an injured hill.

In January 1992, Michael Shaffer moved into the Whites’ home on Amber Forest, settling his few possessions into a vacant second-floor bedroom. His girlfriend, Amy, an airy fifteen-year-old with long blond hair and wide-set blue eyes, an unwed mother of an infant son, became a regular. She and Jason were old friends. They rode the Wunsche bus together to school in the mornings.

“Jason was easy to make friends with. He thought everybody was fine. He even tried to pick me up when I was pregnant,” she relates with a childish giggle. “I was, like, ‘You’re crazy.’ He’d walk up to girls and say, ‘Hey, baby, what’s up?’”

It would be months before Michael Shaffer’s role in
the events leading to Susan White’s death would become clear. Yet, looking back, his mother would remember her youngest son’s childhood and speculate on why he so readily capitulated to a cop and betrayed his best friend: “In the final divorce decree, his dad got the house, but I was fighting him. He got a court order, forcing me to vacate the property. I refused. It was my house and I wasn’t leaving. But the police pulled up in a squad car and threw our stuff on the curb. I screamed at them and they handcuffed me and dragged me off to jail. I’ll never forget the look on Mike’s face. He’d watched the whole thing. He was just a little kid, and he looked like he was in shock. After that, Michael was always uncomfortable around cops, really anyone in authority. You could just see it in his eyes. Whenever he talked to a cop, he just froze up, went back into his little-boy world. He was scared to death of them.”

Just weeks after Mike Shaffer took up residence in Susan’s world, a brown envelope arrived at her office at First Union Mortgage, marked “Personal” and postmarked January 28, 1992. Inside, someone had tucked seventeen photos of her husband’s car in a hotel parking lot and a letter typed all in caps:

“Susan literally screamed,” remembers one coworker. “I didn’t know what could have happened. She ran out of her office, threw the letter on my desk, and started shaking and crying. She kept saying over and over, ‘I can’t believe he’s doing this to me. I can’t believe he’s doing this to me.’ After that, she spent hours staring at the letter and the photos.”

Ron’s office romance had begun the previous October. “He was the typical flirt, very charming,” says Sherri Brandt, tall, auburn-haired, ten years younger than Susan, and the mother of a young daughter. “I resisted and resisted. Finally, I guess it was a month or so after we met, I gave in.”

Giving in meant lunchtime liaisons at the Hilton, stolen hours when their respective spouses believed they were at work. To Sherri, Ron was an ardent suitor. He brought flowers, catered to her. “He was still living with Susan, but he’d call me all the time,” she recalls. “He’d check on me constantly, driving by my house and, after I moved out, my apartment. People at the office picked up on it pretty quickly. And once the gossip starts, it’s like cancer. It spreads.”

Friends say Susan confronted Ron about the affair and he denied it, blaming the letter on someone’s overactive imagination. But from that day on, Susan became a different person. Looking back on her life, she must have
viewed Ron’s possible infidelity as her final betrayal, the last in a series of deceptions perpetrated by those she loved. Her first marriage had ended in disappointment and violence. Again she’d staked her future on a man who turned his back on her.
Why me?
she must have wondered.
Why is this happening to me?

“Susan became obsessed with finding out whether or not Ron was telling the truth and what the other woman was like,” says Cindy Doerre, one of her co-workers at First Union. “She became obsessed with getting Ron back.”

The marriage teetering, Ron left in mid-February to visit his stepmother and father in South Carolina. The older man had heart problems. With Ron’s whereabouts temporarily accounted for, Susan reconsidered her husband’s claim of innocence. Unconvinced, she turned investigator, running the license number of the truck in the Avenger’s photos on a computer available to the public at the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles. The name that popped up was “Sherri Brandt,” just as the letter had indicated. Distraught, Susan burst into Ron’s office at Brown & Root at five one evening. In a frenzy, she confronted Sherri, slapped her, and threatened her with a soda bottle.

“Susan lost it,” recounts Sherri. “She was shrieking, calling me names, ‘a fucking bitch.’ I grabbed my car keys and made a break for the door.”

Susan called Sandra in Baton Rouge, confiding in her about the letter and what she’d discovered. “I can’t believe he did this to me,” she kept insisting, her voice thick with emotion. “When we went to his company Christmas party, everyone there knew—everyone but me.”

This time, Ron didn’t call begging Sandra to intervene to save his marriage. Instead, when he returned from South Carolina after Valentine’s Day, he ignored a dozen red roses Susan had bought and was displaying on the
coffee table, hoping to make him jealous. “Susie said he didn’t even react,” says Sandra. “He acted like they weren’t even there.”

However, Susan did receive one Valentine, a card covered with flowers that read, “To Mom, from the both of us,” signed by Jason and Mike. “I felt sorry for her. She was going through hell and she was really cool,” remembers Shaffer. “She talked to me like I was an adult, and I liked that. She told me her problems, and I guess I was one of the few who listened.”

Adding to Susan’s woes were Jason’s continuing brushes with trouble. In January, showing off, he had picked a fight with a teenager twice his size. As they tangled on the ground, a crowd of friends urged them on, until Michael Shaffer saw blood streaming from Jason’s face. Shaffer and others wrestled the two apart, and Jason ended up in the emergency room, Susan hovering over him.

“My beautiful baby,” she had cried. “What have they done to my beautiful baby?”

In the fray, Jason’s adversary had bitten off a patch of skin from the tip of his nose, leaving a jagged cut that required stitches.

A police officer was assigned to the case, but no charges were ever filed. Yet for months after, the investigating deputy grew used to picking up his phone and hearing Susan White’s raspy Louisiana drawl.

“She wanted to talk about the kid,” he recalls. “It was like I was her friend, someone she could confide in. She was worried about him. She wanted me to tell her what to do, but when I said she had to lay down the law for the kid, get him away from the bad element he was hanging with, she’d just hem and haw.”

That spring, Susan White’s life slowly fractured and cracked, then crumbled beneath her. Soon it became commonplace for Shaffer to find her in the kitchen or the den when he returned late after a night with friends.
In one hand she held a glass of white wine, in the other a cigarette, trancelike, watching thin puffs of smoke evaporate around her. Forty-two years old, nearing the end of her third marriage, she cut a solitary figure.