A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop (7 page)

At such moments, Ron, undoubtedly, filled her thoughts.

Once she was angry enough to greet him at the door with a broom. “She swung it at him and hit him in the head,” says Shaffer. Another time, she threw his clothes onto the front lawn and insisted he leave.

Before long, she was begging him to stay.

During that spring, Ron continued to insist he didn’t want a divorce. Still, Susan began a crusade to discover if he was, in fact, unfaithful. Like two cops staking out a suspect, Susan and Jean Morris, the real-estate friend who’d sold them the house on Valley Bend and who’d helped get her into the business, spent night after night waiting silently in the parking lot at Ron’s office, watching as one after another of his co-workers left for home. When he appeared in his Porsche, they eased out behind him, tailing him through the heavy Houston traffic, eager to see if he drove directly home or to the small apartment Sherri had rented after she’d left her husband, saying simply that she needed space to assess the marriage.

“We never saw him do anything,” recalls Jean, a quiet woman with a thin, nasal voice, who favors high heels and business suits with slim skirts. “We never really caught him doing anything.”

Yet Susan was far from convinced. Theorizing that the letter could be Ron’s awkward way of manipulating her into a divorce, in late March she hired a handwriting expert to determine if either Ron or Sherri had written her address on the envelope in which the Avenger’s letter arrived. As examples of their handwriting, she supplied the expert with a note Ron had written, plus eleven
pink phone-message slips from the office, messages Sherri had taken.

“Susie wanted to know if Ron was helping Sherri do this to her,” says Jean. “She was convinced the letter didn’t come from a third party.”

When the report came back, it concluded that it was Sherri who had written the address on the envelope. “It is my opinion as a certified graphologist that the writer of exemplars 1–11 [the phone messages] also wrote the suspect questioned document [the Avenger’s envelope].”

Years later, Sherri would deny that she was responsible for the letter and photos: “Susan thought I sent them, but I didn’t. I believe a couple of girls—very vindictive—who knew about Ron and me did it.”

In the midst of so much turmoil, Susan asked for and was given a psychological disability leave from First Union Mortgage, based on the finding from a psychiatrist who said she suffered from depression. He prescribed lithium, which seemed to take the edge off her sadness. She packed up the few things she’d moved into the office and told Cindy Doerre that someday she’d be back—after she and Ron had worked things out.

But to Doerre, Susan didn’t look well. “She wasn’t the same person, not happy-go-lucky, the person who didn’t let little things bother her. She told me to watch out for men, that none of them were to be trusted. Sometimes she just rambled on about how I shouldn’t trust anyone.”

It was Jason who again threw his mother’s life into further chaos that spring. For months Susan had ignored him as she’d tried to piece her marriage together. Calvin Edgin, the school-bus driver, grew used to pulling up in front of the White house, only to have Jason inform him that he wouldn’t be going to school that day. “I hated
to leave him behind, but I had to,” remembers Edgin. “I couldn’t force him to go.”

When he did climb on board, Jason was a constant irritant, teasing the other students, especially the handicapped kids. He’d bring a bowl of cereal on the bus or a massive black boom box he cranked up until rap music pounded the van’s frame. With his pierced earlobe and its small gold hoop earring, a baseball cap pulled solidly over his forehead, Jason resembled a cross between a bewildered third grader and a street thug, juvenile yet frightening.

Then, on the morning of Tuesday, April 7, Edgin pulled to the curb in front of the Amber Forest house and Jason ran toward him. Edgin hit the air brakes, the door popped open, and he found himself staring into the barrel of a gun, Jason laughing maniacally behind it.

“Jason, what’re you doing?” the driver demanded. “Are you going to school today?”

“No,” Jason said, “I’m not.”

“Then you’d better get off the bus.”

As if nothing unusual were taking place, Jason obeyed. “Okay,” he answered before simply walking away.

Edgin sped off. At school, he turned the case over to an investigator. Jason was charged with reckless conduct, a misdemeanor.

Yet Susan still refused to believe her son was responsible.

Years before Paducah, Kentucky, Littleton, Colorado, and the late-nineties outbreak of school-yard violence that bloodied playgrounds across the nation, Susan, oblivious to the danger, shifted the blame to the bus driver. “We’ve always been so nice to Calvin,” she told a friend. “How could he do this? I thought he liked Jason.”

To the attorney she hired to represent Jason, she argued against any punishment for her son, describing the
gun as nearly a toy, a BB gun. Her protestations, however, weren’t enough to stop the wheels of justice from bearing down on the teenager, as a court hearing was set for July.

After Jason’s arrest, Susan called Gloria complaining that he was being treated unfairly. “It wasn’t even a real gun,” she repeated, writing off the entire incident as just another example of boys being boys. “He was just fooling around.”

Gloria, who for too long had felt Susan didn’t give Jason the discipline he needed, cautioned her sister that not taking Jason’s actions seriously would prove a mistake. “You’ve got to sit on him some,” she said. “You’ve got to get that kid under control.”

Furious, Susan defended Jason. “You just don’t understand!” she told Gloria, seething.

Despite the problems at home, Susan soon left for South Carolina to care for Ron’s father while his stepmother underwent a minor operation. Her luck took another bad turn there, as a head cold she’d left Houston with developed pneumonia-type symptoms. Doctors diagnosed Legionnaires’ disease.

She ended up in a hospital, part of it with a tube in her chest for a collapsed lung. Dr. Ronald Littlefield, the cardiologist in charge of her care, had seen only a handful of Legionnaires’ cases in his career. He was never sure how Susan had contracted it—in the office, at home, or maybe even on the airplane. Susan fought high fevers and a dry, shattered cough; she was disoriented and had difficulty breathing.

In mid-April, Ron called Sandra and asked her to come to Houston. “He told me about Susan being in the hospital in South Carolina and how he had to go up there to get her. He wanted someone to stay with Jason.” A fourth-grade teacher, Sandra had the week off, so she
and O.L. drove to Houston to help out. It was a long week for them. The strange house in the big city made them both nervous. Every night there were reports on the television news about murders and rapes. At the time, a string of criminals roamed the better neighborhoods of the city. “Home-invasion robbers,” reporters labeled them. Dressed as police officers, they flashed badges and ordered their victims to open the door. Once inside, they bound and gagged their helpless prey, then robbed them.

Jason’s actions that week didn’t ease their fears. Twice the seventeen-year-old sneaked out at night, propping up pillows and covering them with a blanket to fool them into believing he was in bed. A phone call from a teenage girl in the middle of the night sent Sandra in search of Jason. “She said he’d walked off with her money,” says Sandra. “I told the girl he was in bed, but when I got up there, Jason was gone.”

Sandra waited for her nephew when he climbed through an unlocked window just before daybreak the following morning. “Jason was real calm about it,” she remembers. “He actually laughed.”

His aunt, however, didn’t find it funny when she discovered he was palming brass knuckles.

“What do you need those for?” Sandra asked.

“For protection,” he said, as if it were the most reasonable explanation in the world coming from a teenager who lived in a quiet, affluent suburb.

Sandra confiscated the weapon, but a short time later, she found Jason staring out the front window, as if fearing someone had followed him.

By the time Ron returned with Susan on Saturday, April 18, the day before Easter, Sandra and O.L. were eager to escape Jason’s pranks and the big city and head home. Susan appeared thin and pale, but in good spirits. As
Ron unpacked the car, she rattled on about his parents, the hospital, and the drive back. Suddenly the phone rang. Susan answered only to hear the line click off. Glaring at Ron, she hit the Call Return code on the phone,
^*
69. It rang.

Sherri Brandt answered.

“Susan looked like she’d been slapped,” says Sandra.

The atmosphere in the house on Amber Forest remained tense that spring. Ron moved in and out during a series of splits and reconciliations. Distraught, with time on her hands now that she wasn’t working, Susan—accompanied by Jean—followed him to Sherri’s apartment, taking pictures as he arrived and left. One such afternoon, she banged on the door as they hovered in the dark. When Sherri finally opened the door sometime later, she discovered a note from Susan.
He’s not serious about you,
it read.
He’ll do to you what he’s doing to me.

Other times, the phone rang at Sherri’s apartment or at the office. “It’s Susan,” a voice on the other end said. “I just thought we should talk.” Sherri slammed down the receiver, rattled by the phone call and wondering what would happen next.

“Susan was desperate. She was fighting to save her marriage,” says Jean Morris. “She wanted Ron. She loved Ron.”

Near the end of May, Susan was hospitalized again, a recurrence of the Legionnaires’ disease that had plagued her earlier. Her doctor checked her into Houston Northwest Hospital, where he inserted a main intravenous line into her chest to pump in antibiotics and fluids. Through it all, Susan sat alone, day after day. Finally, she asked her doctor to call Ron. “Tell him I’m really sick and that he needs to come and see me,” she begged.

The doctor did as his patient requested, but Ron
didn’t respond the way Susan had hoped. Instead he called Sandra.

“Susan’s in the hospital,” he said. “You need to come take care of her. I’m washing my hands of her, Jason, of the whole thing.”

A frightened Sandra called the hospital.

“I’m all right,” Susan told her sister. “I’m getting better. I didn’t mean to scare you or Momma. I just wanted Ron to worry about me.”

By the end of May 1992, Susan White’s life had entered a nether land; everything she’d held dear slipped through her fingers. She was forty-two years old, her health failing her. Jason, “her beautiful baby,” fluttered in and out of trouble. Even Gloria, the big sister she’d always admired, said he was headed down a path that could only lead to further unhappiness. Ron, her husband, the man who’d rescued her from a life of near poverty, didn’t want her anymore. He was finished with her. What had he told Sandra? “I’m washing my hands of her.”

Searching for something to hold onto, Susan grasped for help wherever she could. She joined the Baptist church near her home. After one service, she paused to talk to the pastor, who gave her a book on Jesus’ love.

At night she called Sandra, recounting her problems, her disappointments. Yet when Sandra urged Susan to move home to Louisiana, Susan, perhaps embarrassed by yet another failure, said no. “I’ve got friends here. Jason has friends here,” she insisted. “Houston is our home.”

“It’s such a big city,” Sandra said. “Are you safe there?”

“I’ve got friends in the police department,” Susan assured her. “They’ll look out for me.”

Later, when Susan lay dead, slain by a deputy sheriff,
Sandra would look back and wonder whom Susan had been talking about.

Could it have been McGowen, the deputy who killed her?

Ron would later tell Sandra something else, that one night before he moved out late that spring, he awoke to find Susan gone. He drove through the quiet streets of Olde Oaks until he found her BMW parked near the country club, its lights off, and next to a deputy sheriff’s car with someone inside. Their windows were rolled down and they were talking. Ron turned around and drove home.

Others would remember how Susan had stopped deputies’ cars as they patrolled her neighborhood, offering the uniformed officers a cup of her dark Louisiana coffee with chicory and explaining that her husband had left her and that she was now a single mother, alone in the world.

“Mrs. White asked me to look out for her and Jason,” recalls one such deputy she cornered during his regular patrol through Olde Oaks. “She said she was scared being alone in that big house at night. I didn’t think anything special about it. She just seemed like a woman who was having a rough time.”

Did Susan stop McGowen, perhaps with a similar request?

It was in April that Joseph Kent McGowen was first assigned to patrol Olde Oaks. In May, Susan stood outside Resa’s piano bar talking to Alan Jefferies, while he sipped a clear glass of white wine on his break and lazily watched the occasional car slip by through the Houston night.

In Ron’s absence, Susan had begun frequenting the club, often coming alone, claiming a stool at the piano,
drinking splits of champagne, and striking up conversations with anyone who would listen.

“She was a needy kind of person,” Jefferies recalls. “She kind of clung to whoever she could. She’d dominate the conversation. She always wanted me to sing a James Taylor song, ‘I’ve seen fire and I’ve seen rain.’”

Usually, Susan left Resa’s alone, but occasionally she’d strike up a conversation with a man and they’d leave together. After one such night, she confided in Jean that she’d accompanied a stranger home and awoke the next morning in his bed. “I told her she was crazy, the world was different than when she’d been single before,” Jean says. “It wasn’t safe to pick up a man at a bar. There were too many diseases, too many crazies out there.”

Yet on this particular night, the night she stood outside the restaurant talking to Jefferies, Resa’s had been quiet, and Susan was alone.

“You know why I like that James Taylor song?” she asked Jefferies as she lingered on the sidewalk, in front of a jovial mural of a bevy of the bar’s regulars.