Evil Eyes (8 page)

Over time, Suzi decided she wanted her best friend back in her life. She also decided she wanted to move again—to California. Through a mutual friend, Suzi let Keri know of her desires; however, Keri wanted nothing to do with her. Suzi decided to stay put. She also continued to party with Karen as her sidekick and landed a job at a nearby Kroger grocery store as a grocery clerk.

On September 13, 1981, less than fifteen minutes after Elizabeth Montgomery collapsed into the arms of her fiancé on Marinette Drive, and less than two-and-a-half miles away, Suzi Wolf walked into a Safeway grocery store. She and Karen had been to a party that evening at the Falls Apartments, off Bellaire Boulevard and Corporate Drive. They had arrived at the party at 9:00
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. and returned home at approximately 1:15
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. Suzi drove her ex-boyfriend Bogh’s car to and from the party. Bogh had lent it to her because he did not feel like hanging out. When Suzi and Karen arrived at their apartment, Karen was ready to call it a night. Suzi, on the other hand, still had some energy left. She told Karen that she was going to spend the night with ex-boyfriend Bogh, but

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first she wanted some Blue Bell vanilla ice cream. She drove to the Safeway grocery store on the 8700 block of Bellaire Boulevard, which was closer than her Kroger’s. Unbeknownst to her, a man in a brown Grand Prix followed her to Safeway. He watched Suzi as she entered the

store.

He waited.

He remained calm, even though he had just murdered another woman.

Suzi Wolf exited Safeway just after 1:40
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. with her half gallon of ice cream. She also purchased a half gallon of milk, a package of doughnuts, and a pack of Benson & Hedges cigarettes, all for just $5.11. She opened the door to her 1974 tan-and-brown Oldsmobile Cutlass, sat down inside, fired up the engine, and drove home to her apartment. Suzi parked her car in the south parking lot and stepped out of her vehicle and into the large phalanx of apartments. She walked approximately 125 feet from where she had parked the car up to the concrete sidewalk that led to her front door. As she reached for her keys, the man who had been following her sneaked up behind her and stabbed her in the arm and chest. He stabbed her nine times with a single-edge knife, possibly a butcher knife. The majority of wounds were in the left breast area. Apparently, Wolf’s attacker got down on his knees and straddled her as he continued to stab. He stabbed her with such force that one of the deathblows was six-and-a-half inches deep.

As quickly as he had appeared, he was gone into the night.

Wolf’s upstairs neighbor Chuck Christopher had heard a scream and stepped out onto his overhanging balcony to inspect. He saw Wolf’s still body sprawled out with her lower half across the sidewalk and her torso in the grass with a white man standing over her. Christopher dashed

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downstairs to help. He noticed the white man standing inside a wooden patio area.

“I saw his hair pop up,” Christopher recalled. “His hair was standing on end. He looked kinda like Dagwood,” the comic-strip character. He described the white man as between the ages of twenty and thirty, with straight blond hair and a moustache. The man had no shirt on and was wearing cutoff denim shorts.

Christopher also stated that the white man took off running once he was spotted. The man even looked back at Christopher and made eye contact. “He looked at me and I looked at him,” he remembered. Christopher, however, did not see the fleeing man holding a knife or weapon of any kind.

At 2:00
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., early on Sunday, Keri Murphy was awoken from a deep sleep by the ringing of her telephone. It was the Houston Police Department. They wanted family contact information for her best friend. Murphy sprinted out of bed and over to Suzi’s apartment, where she saw her best friend’s dead body on the sidewalk. “Suzi was there on the ground, lying with her shirt open and the melting ice cream. There was a box of Oreo cookies next to the ice cream.” According to the police report, the undisturbed brown grocery bag sat upright twenty to twenty-five feet away from Wolf’s corpse.

Murphy described the murder scene of her friend as something very different from what television dramas por-tray. “No one was controlling the scene. I was able to kneel down to Suzi and hold her for at least ten minutes. I touched the grocery bag she had been carrying. No one stopped me. No one was too concerned about what was going on.”

Murphy recalled that the police brought in giant klieg lights to spotlight the murder scene. The lights shone on

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Wolf’s exposed chest. “Her blouse was open and her breasts were exposed. I didn’t really think much about it because I was used to seeing Suzi walk around naked all the time. It was no big deal.”

Suzi’s dead body lay motionless in her H.I.S. Chic blue jeans. She wore a short-sleeved white Andrea blouse, a long-sleeved Gardenia brown shirt, a pair of black Playboy bikini panties, a pair of size-5 beige pants, and a pair of brown Wild Pair strapped heels on her feet. Her right arm was bent at the elbow and her hand appeared as if it were resting on her right hip. She was clutching her set of keys in that same hand.

Suzi Wolf’s body was eventually claimed by her family and flown back to Michigan, where she was buried. Murphy chose not to return to her home state for the fu-neral. She felt she would cause too much of a disruption amongst Suzi’s family if she were to return, since she and Suzi had been fighting.

September 13, 1981, the day that Elizabeth Ann Montgomery and Suzi Wolf were murdered, also just so happened to be Coral Watts’s last day at Welltech.

As the murders began in Houston, most officials failed to take notice. The reason being: the big mayoral campaign season was in high gear. Mayor Jim McConn was running for reelection against Harris County sheriff Jack Heard and city controller Kathy Whitmire. The race was a contentious one. Most people did not want McConn back in office due to some allegedly shady business dealing and “insider deals,” according to Richard Murray in his book
Power in the City: Mayoral Elections and Patterns of Influence in Houston, Texas.

That left Heard and Whitmire.

The contenders split the police ranks down the middle. The Patrolman’s Union, or the rank-and-file street beat cops, supported Whitmire, while the Policeman’s Association backed Sheriff Heard. The division was a dis-traction. Many officials believed that the Houston Police Department lost its focus during the 1981 to 1982 mayoral campaign and took its collective eye off its number one responsibility: the safety of its citizens.

One Houston police officer, however, did not lose sight of his major objective. Detective Doug Bostock had been doing his best to locate and track Watts. Bostock received

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information that Watts was spotted in Houston wearing a Metropolitan Transit Authority, or Metro, work uniform. Watts got a new job as a mechanic working on the city’s buses. He had the pre-graveyard shift from 7:00
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. to 3:00
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. As a result, Watts moved from his apartment on Eagle Lake to the Idylwood Apartments on Houston’s seedier southeast side at the 6600 block of Sylvan Road, near the Gulf Freeway and Wayside Drive. It was not unusual for Watts to work twelve-hour shifts with Metro.

Watts did well enough that he was able to purchase a second vehicle. On October 21, 1981, he paid $1,960 in cash for a 1976 blue Dodge van from the Fair Deal Auto Sales car lot, located on the 2000 block of Broadway Street. According to one of the Fair Deal employees, Watts definitely made an impulse buy. He apparently came to the car lot, spotted the van, and told the salesman that he wanted it and would be right back. He returned four hours later with the cash in hand. He drove the van off the parking lot soon thereafter.

On November 2, 1981, Kathy Whitmire and Sheriff Jack Heard won the runoff spots for the mayoral election. Mayor Jim McConn would not be reinstated into office. The rift between the Houston Police Department’s rank-and-file and management became even more strained. The focus of the police department continued to drift away from its citizenry as each side looked to score deals from the next prospective mayor.

Meanwhile, Detective Bostock continued to pursue the ever-elusive Watts. He sent a team of surveillance officers to the address provided on Watts’s Metro application, but

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it turned out to belong to Garland Silcox, Watts’s friend who let Watts use his address as a mail drop-off. Bostock also circulated more photographs of Watts to area police officers.

On November 19, 1981, Bostock was finally able to track down Watts. The detective and two police officers headed over to the bus barn where Watts worked on Milby Street, where they were able to attach a tracking device to Watts’s Pontiac Grand Prix.

The following morning the Houston Police Department communication specialists were able to track Watts’s location. The car was located at the 6600 block of Sylvan Road at the Idylwood Apartments. Bostock went out to the complex to confirm.

Unfortunately, the modern spy technology would prove to be unsuccessful. Watts discovered the tracking device and took his car to a garage to have it removed. Once again he had eluded the authorities. It would be several months before Houston authorities were able to catch up with him.

A few days later, in December 1981, Kathy Whitmire was named the new mayor of Houston. The rank-and-file police officers were ecstatic. Their candidate had won. They were more excited because they believed Whitmire’s election afforded them certain political capital. Namely, a new police chief.

From January 1982 to March 1982, Interim Chief John Bales took over the reins of police chief. His tenure was short-lived.

Mayor Whitmire selected Lee P. Brown, who had just served as the commissioner of public safety for the city of Atlanta, Georgia, to step in as the official police chief.

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While in Atlanta, Brown oversaw the city’s police, fire, corrections, and civil defense departments. He also helped ease the city during the infamous “Atlanta Child Murders” by alleged serial killer Wayne Williams. Brown became Houston’s first black police chief.

One of Chief Brown’s main objectives was to right the ship known as HPD that had gone astray. He noted that several divisions were severely understaffed and those that had enough people were not being paid enough. Officers and detectives were not receiving overtime pay; therefore, fewer investigations were under-taken and more crime continued on unabated and uninterrupted. Poor pay opportunities led to less appli-cants for positions; which led to lower-quality employees; which led to much poorer protection of the citizenry.

Fertile ground for a streetwise serial killer.

Fertile ground for a new mayor and police chief to step in and make a difference.

Phyllis Ellen Tamm—or Ellen, as she was commonly known by her friends and family, since her mother was also named Phyllis—was a tough cookie. Five years earlier, she left a relationship with a man in Memphis, Tennessee, that she felt was going nowhere. She packed her bags and headed southwest for Houston, Texas.

When Ellen arrived in Houston, she quickly found a place on the 4800 block of Montrose, two blocks south of Highway 59 and five blocks north of Bissonnet Street in the Montrose area that
Texas Monthly
dubbed “the strangest neighborhood in Texas.”

Twenty-seven-year-old Ellen Tamm never had a short-age of dates. She actually was dating several men at one time. One of her male companions, John Eugene Hill, was actually more of a “brother-sister” relationship, since he was a self-proclaimed homosexual. Hill and Tamm had been close friends for four years. They shared their most intimate secrets with one another, but they did not have a sexual relationship. Tamm often vented with Hill about her man problems and the stress of her work situation. Tamm had another man in her life, with the last name of Elbert, from Memphis. Tamm’s relationship with

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Elbert was considered quite shaky. Indeed, Hill later reported that Tamm often confided in him all of the problems she and Elbert were going through.

Yet another man in Tamm’s life was Nash Baker from Houston. They dated on and off for the past four years, but they were not having a sexual relationship.

Tamm allegedly “dated” another homosexual, Randy Rudy. Again, their relationship was strictly platonic.

Since her love life was less than stellar, one of Tamm’s goals in Houston was to advance her career as an art director. She started out doing freelance work for various advertising agencies around the city. It was not long before she landed a steady job as a senior art director for Rives Smith Baldwin Carlberg advertising agency.

Ellen’s boss and the ad agency’s creative business manager, Peggy Oehmig, thought the world of Tamm. “She was competent . . . very organized, very conscien-tious, never late . . . even a little pushy at times.”

According to police reports, Tamm was not very satisfied with her job. She informed her coworker Diane Ver-gouven that she was not happy. She had made several unsuccessful attempts to get transferred to the company’s New York office. She was also in the process of taking job interviews with other advertising agencies in Houston.

Tamm’s love life was not in much better shape. According to Hill, Tamm returned to Memphis to spend time with Elbert for the Christmas holidays. One week later, she met Hill in New York, where she complained that her relationship with Elbert was on its last breath. She informed Hill that Elbert yelled at her because he believed she was constantly harassing him. Tamm also told Hill that she had not had sex in a long time, but she was okay with that.