A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop (9 page)

Yet those early days of the marriage offered little comfort or security. Kent spent most of his day at the base, working, and Michelle was left alone. When he returned, he’d sometimes fly into jealous rages. After one such argument, just months after the wedding, Michelle called her mother, who mailed her a one-way ticket home to Houston. Michelle fled one afternoon while Kent was at work.

“We thought it was finally over,” says Pam. “This time for good.”

At home, Michelle moved in with her parents and, on July 1, filed for a divorce to end her three-month marriage.
Yet a few weeks later, Kent appeared at the Morgans’ front door, crying. Not long after, Michelle’s mother returned from work and found a note: “I’ve gone to Montana. I’ve just got to try one more time.” The next thing the Morgans heard, Michelle was pregnant.

Kent and Michelle would eventually have four children together. “Each one was conceived during a reconciliation,” says Pam. “They went back and forth and back and forth.”

By the fall, Kent had soured on the Air Force. Some say he disliked being away from home; others, that he found it difficult to follow orders. Poring over volumes of military programs, Kent analyzed the system and discovered the Palace Chase Program, an obscure procedure intended to allow soon-to-be-released personnel to leave early by volunteering to continue on in the Air National Guard.

Although three years remained on his enlistment, Kent applied and was accepted into the program, his only commitment to work one weekend a month at Ellington Air Force Base, a small, rarely used facility southeast of Houston. Just fourteen months after entering basic training, in March 1984, Kent and Michelle returned to Texas, leaving him free to pursue his dream.

Less than two months later, he applied at the Houston Police Department.

Law enforcement in Houston, as it is in much of Texas, is a maze of overlapping agencies. School districts, airports, transit authorities, hospitals—each employs its own police force, fully empowered to carry guns and make arrests. Constables, originally intended to serve civil warrants, and the sheriff’s department, once little more than the authority that maintained the local jails, have also mushroomed over the decades into a complicated network of districts and precincts to patrol the
fringes of the county, those areas that fall outside the city limits.

Of them all, in law enforcement circles, H.P.D. was considered
the
place to work.

“The department’s big enough for advancement,” explains one ex-cop. “Plus, the pay’s better, the facilities are better, and you’ve got the backup departments like forensics, homicide, sex crimes, et cetera. For a cop, it’s the top of the ladder. None of the other agencies measure up. Plus, it’s the city, it’s where all the action is.”

From the beginning, H.P.D.’s siren call lured Kent.

Once he’d applied, a series of steps clicked into place that would lead, if successful, to the badge he so coveted. Physical and psychological testing, medical examinations. It was H.P.D.’s polygraph that, at least temporarily, thwarted his dream. During it, Kent admitted he’d smoked marijuana within the previous year, an automatic flag requiring his rejection, since a regulation at the time held that no applicant could have used any illegal drug within one year of employment. Kent was told to wait out the year before reapplying.

Ironically, another entry on the polygraph test went almost unnoticed. If considered, it might have indicated much of what Kent McGowen was really about and predicted what kind of a cop he would become. The remark that would be so telling noted that McGowen openly admitted being prejudiced against blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women—everyone but white men.

While marijuana use quickly ruled out Kent’s immediate hiring at H.P.D., prejudice against the majority of people he would interact with on Houston’s highly diverse streets was not considered important enough to disqualify him. The report dismissed the importance of McGowen’s startling confession with the conclusion that “applicant stated he could work with any race or sex without letting prejudices interfere.”s

Once H.P.D. had rejected him for a year, Kent McGowen searched for alternate avenues to his goal of a career in law enforcement. He first applied to a handful of small departments, all of which turned him down. Not to be denied, he bypassed the traditional route of hiring on in a department before entering training. Instead, in July 1984, McGowen enrolled at the Criminal Justice Center at the University of Houston-Downtown, a kind of adult education program for would-be policemen.

That summer, Kent McGowen took courses in everything from firearms to the use of a baton, and completed the fourteen weeks and 560 hours of required training (little more than a third of the fifteen hundred hours demanded by the state for those wanting to become licensed hairdressers). In August, he became eligible for certification by T.C.L.E.O.S.E., the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement Officer Standards and Education.

The following January, 1985, Kent entered the ranks of licensed police officers, albeit in another roundabout fashion—as a reserve officer, an unpaid volunteer for the Waller County Sheriff’s Department, the agency that oversaw the bucolic ranching community north of Houston that included Bill and Carolyn McGowen’s sprawling new cattle ranch.

They called it the Deuteronomy 28 Ranch, a spread reminiscent of J.R.’s Southfork on
Dallas.
The name referred to a biblical verse in the Book of Deuteronomy, one that promises believers “blessed shall you be … shall be the offspring of your body … shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.” For the enemies of God’s chosen, it promised they will “be defeated before you.”

In a setting befitting an oil tycoon, white picket fences and a stately, tree-shaded driveway led to the ranch’s main house, where Bill and Carolyn lived, and the swimming
pool, the tennis court. At night, lights shone softly into the towering trees.

To his new neighbors, Bill McGowen would occasionally hint that he had influence and access, including a friendship with then Vice President, soon to be President, George Bush, stemming from their shared beginnings in the Midland oil patch.

Meanwhile, the ranch took on the aura of a compound as Kent, Michelle, and their son, Joseph, moved into a mobile home on the property. A similar trailer housed Kent’s cousin “Bubba,” the son of Bill McGowen’s deceased brother, and his family.

Bill McGowen soon bailed out of the oil business in favor of life as a gentleman rancher, giving his enterprise the grandiose title of McGowen Land and Cattle Company. By then the spiral had taken a downward turn, leaving the domestic oil industry in disarray and small independents like the McGowens drowning in a sea of cheap, imported oil.

For the most part, Kent worked on the ranch during the day, feeding the cattle and making repairs. A few nights a week, he patrolled as a reserve deputy with the Waller County Sheriff’s Department, his real love. Deputies McGowen worked with there would later remember little about him. Some described him as a good or adequate officer, young and untested. Another would say that even then Kent McGowen appeared to have ambivalent reasons for wearing a badge. “Kent was looking for ladies,” he’d say. “He used the badge more to impress women than to serve and protect the public.”

In April, as the time when Kent would become eligible to reapply at H.P.D. drew near, an innocuous evening jog down a country road resulted in an injury that again postponed his dream. At 6
P.M.
on April 14, 1985, twenty-seven-year-old Bubba and twenty-year-old Kent told their wives to hold dinner and went out for a run. The woman whose car bore down on them in the twilight
never even put on her brakes as she barreled into Bubba head-on and deflected Kent into thick foliage on the side of the road. Bubba died; Kent broke his collarbone. When arrested, the driver claimed she thought her car had hit a mailbox.

Kent collected a settlement for his injuries and bought himself a Rolex diver’s watch, stainless steel and gold with a navy blue face. It didn’t quite measure up to the gold Rolex that Bill McGowen wore, but it was a start. Later, he would sometimes brag that H.P.D. had awarded him the watch as a commendation for police work well done, the heroic saving of a life. “I knew police departments don’t give out Rolex watches,” says Michelle’s sister Pam. “But there was no sense in pushing it. When you disagreed with something Kent said, he just got more determined to convince you that it was true.”

Later that summer, Kent McGowen again applied for an officer’s position with the Houston Police Department. He listed his present employment as vice president of McGowen Land and Cattle Company, and for references he used an aunt and two friends of Michelle’s mother, people who barely knew him. In September, the call came in; Kent McGowen had been accepted as a cadet in H.P.D.’s October 1985 academy class, number 132. He’d made it. It all lay before him: the badge, the gun, the busy city streets, the power.

A classmate at the academy who described himself as a friend of Kent’s would later sum up what he saw in the young recruit: “He liked to talk about ‘the job,’ police work. He was a rebel—someone I was afraid to be. He didn’t like foreigners, Asians, Hispanics, blacks, anyone who wasn’t a fellow officer. He reminded me of Dirty Harry, the way he felt like it was up to him to right all the wrongs of the world. He lived and breathed law enforcement.”

In March 1986, just before his twenty-first birthday,
Kent McGowen swore to “faithfully execute the duties of the office of regular officer of the City of Houston, Texas, and to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States, and this state and city.” With that, he became one of the more than four thousand H.P.D. officers in the city charged with keeping peace and enforcing the laws.

“When you’re the new kid at H.P.D., everyone gives you the benefit of the doubt,” explains one veteran officer. “But officers, by nature and experience, are skeptical. We watch. If things don’t look right, pretty soon we’re comparing notes. Word gets around, like ‘Watch out for so-and-so. He’s not to be trusted.’ Once that happens, a cop gets a jacket, a reputation. And that’s something that stays with him for as long as he’s at the department.”

At H.P.D., Kent redesigned himself as Officer J.K. McGowen and for the first year appeared to be in the honeymoon phase of his employment. The officers who worked with him at the time remember nothing significantly noteworthy about the young, dark-haired, boyish-looking cop with the broad smile. His partner, Sergeant R. Montalvo, would later write a recommendation for Kent: “I worked with him on a professional basis in patrol for a little over a year … I know J.K. McGowen to be a fine, above standard police officer.”

Yet others, including one officer he’d been through the academy with, would notice an aggressiveness in Kent and a penchant for living on the edge. “He wanted to do things his way, not necessarily the way things were supposed to be done, kind of a John Wayne type,” remembers the officer.

At the time, Kent and Michelle were back together after a breakup, living in a rented house in Tomball, another of the small towns north of Houston. “It was strange. He didn’t talk highly of his wife,” remembers
one officer. “But every time I talked to him, he was back with her. It was one of those on-again, off-again things.”

Kent and Michelle’s second child, Kenton Layne McGowen, had been born that February.

That summer, Kent and his partner, Montalvo, were commended for helping a volunteer officer. The man, who was policing a downtown festival on horseback, collapsed and fell, seriously injuring his spine. Kent and Montalvo gave him CPR, keeping him alive until the ambulance arrived.

In January 1987, another letter was placed in J.K. McGowen’s file, a thank-you for assistance given a woman whose car was burglarized. Yet a month later, in February, McGowen’s H.P.D. evaluation was less than stellar: two Very Goods and three Satisfactories. “That’s not an endorsement, more like a shrug that the guy hasn’t gotten in any serious trouble,” maintains one sergeant. His August evaluation was a mirror of the first, and later that month, McGowen was transferred to the Westside Service Center, a substation in far west Houston. He was to work evenings, 3
P.M.
to 11
P.M.,
in Neighborhood Services, a patrol division. It was at Westside that his fellow officers gave J.K. McGowen his first “jacket,” a reputation as a braggart and a compulsive liar, as a man who disdained women, as someone not to be trusted.

“It was little stuff at first,” says one Westside officer. “Kent was always bragging about his past, saying he’d spent four years in the Air Force, that he had a college diploma. We added up the years. [At twenty-two] there was no way he could have done all that.”

“It was one of those things you tend to ignore,” says another officer. “It’s like, if they’re not bothering you, you just figure it’s bullshit and go on.”

Yet as his time at Westside continued, other aspects
of Kent’s personality came to light. His co-workers grew weary of the young officer bragging about his million-dollar trust fund—which he by then claimed he’d inherit at twenty-six—boasting that one day he wouldn’t need a career at H.P.D., that while they might have to struggle, he’d be rich. Most troubling was the way McGowen took credit for himself that belonged to other officers. “We’d hear about a high-speed chase or a shoot-out in the district,” remembers one officer. “By that night, Kent was claiming he’d been there, that he was the one who caught the bad guy. We knew it wasn’t true. Usually we let it slide, but talk started up around the station that Kent McGowen didn’t seem to know the difference between telling the truth and telling a lie.”

Though still married and living with Michelle, McGowen spent little time at home those years at H.P.D. When the evening shift turned in its cars at 11
P.M.,
a handful of officers, stressed from eight hours patrolling Houston’s hectic streets, headed to “choir practice”— clandestine meetings on deserted dead-end streets. They drank and told tales from the job. Kent relished the camaraderie, rubbing elbows with his fellow officers, an opportunity to brag about his “exploits” and his father’s money.