If You Only Knew (38 page)

CHAPTER 2

HE WAS ON HIS
way back to work. Such a common, routine task that millions—perhaps billions—of people throughout the world submit to each day. Waking up, heading off to a job, collecting that paycheck on Friday, and enjoying a weekend of rest and relaxation.

On Saturday, June 19, 2010, Bobby Lewis was driving along an area near Smith County Road, known locally as the CR 2191, in Whitehouse. This is a small town north of Houston, east of Dallas, just outside Tyler, directly west of Lake Tyler, a rather massive body of water shaped like a herd of clouds.

Bobby had the radio on. The windows rolled down. That familiar hot, heavy, and wet Texas air was blowing into Bobby's face as he drove. By all accounts, it was a peaceful ride on a lovely day—and should have been nothing more than that.

Somewhere just before three o'clock on that afternoon, however, Bobby's rather predictable life took a turn into the Twilight Zone. He worked at Domino's Pizza in Tyler. He was in Whitehouse this afternoon to pick up a coworker before heading back into the restaurant for more deliveries.

Passing the 15900 block of CR 2191, after pulling into a driveway and turning his car around, thinking he was lost, Bobby saw something off to the side of the road.

So he pulled over and stopped his vehicle.

Bobby got out. There was a dirt area, “overgrown with weeds,” in what was a thickly settled part of town, mostly red clay, some sand, trees and forest on all sides, save for several buildings and a few homes to the southwest, including a driveway in which Bobby had just turned around. It was a semisecluded area, just to the west of that famed Piney Woods section of the state. Whitehouse is small-town America, or very close to it: About seven thousand souls resided there in 2010. The medium household income fell in the neighborhood of about seventy thousand dollars per year, with Texas, overall, coming in at about fifty thousand. So there was some money here in Whitehouse. Most people, eighty-five percent of whom the recent census termed as “white,” weren't poor by any means.

From his vehicle, Bobby Lewis saw a black, charred patch of land. After stepping out of his car, curious, he walked closer. It was probably some kids burning up an old mattress or a campfire for a keg party that got a little out of hand and had been left unattended. Maybe even a load of trash some knuckleheaded litterer had tossed out and set on fire. The charred remains spread over a small area of the sandy and red clay ground. The pile had not burned entirely, however, and there was something different about it, the pizza man noticed, that beckoned a closer look.

Bobby Lewis went in for a more personal view.

Getting within about fifteen feet of the debris, Bobby could clearly see that, in fact, it wasn't a pile of trash, an old campfire, or other remnants of furniture or household items that had been lit on fire and abandoned, after all. Bobby Lewis was looking at something entirely different.

Approaching the pile from about three yards away, Bobby did not want to get any closer, he later told police, because it was in that moment when he realized what, in fact, he was looking at.

A bit of anxiety throbbed as Bobby stepped back, pulled out his cell phone, and, with index finger shaking, dialed 911.

CHAPTER 3

SHE WAS LYING FACEDOWN
about fifty feet off the side of CR 2191, where pizza deliveryman Bobby Lewis now stood and waited for police to arrive. As Bobby had approached the pile of charred debris and stood about five yards away, “I already knew what it was,” he said later. “So there was no need to go any closer.”

It
was a dead body (DB)—probably a female, by the look of what little clothing was left and the feminine shape of her body. It was difficult to say for certain because the person was lying on her stomach. Still, the contour appeared to be that of a large female.

The DB had one arm at her side pointed downward, the other pointed up above her head slightly, as though she was raising her hand in class to ask a question. Her legs were spaced apart about a foot, toes pointed into the dirt. She wore black Capri pants (what was left of them from the fire), white sneakers—with black oily stains and (notably) zero dirt on the bottoms, indicating to anyone interested in that sort of forensic-based information that she had not walked to this location on her own, but had been dumped here. (Otherwise, her tennis shoes would have been caked with the same red clay from on the ground, all over the place.)

It was unclear what type of shirt she had on, because it had melted to her terribly charred skin, which had peeled and creased in some sections, spotted in others, burned entirely off in small sections, blistered and gruesome. The shirt, best Bobby could tell from the small pieces still intact, was green with a floral pattern—another indication that the body was female. Even more horrifying: all of her hair was gone; her face, pushed into the ground, appeared to be nearly burned off. Notably, the entire area of her neck was burned. She was unrecognizable. In fact, Bobby did not know from looking at her how old she possibly could be. Best estimate from him was that she was young, maybe late teens to early thirties.

But again, that was an educated guess by a man who had been out delivering pizza and picking up a coworker.

She had no name.

No identification.

No idea where she had come from or who had put her here.

Better yet, why.

The only certainty was that she had not gotten to this place on her own and she was not leaving on her own.

Bobby waited, staring at “the ash all around [the] body,” not touching her or touching anything within what was now, it made sense to him, a crime scene.

* * *

Two Whitehouse police (sometimes referred to as “peace”) officers, Joshua Brunt and David Roberson, arrived on scene to speak with Bobby Lewis at 3:03
P.M.
They surveyed the scene, secured it, and unspooled a roll of yellow police tape, tacking the plastic rope up around the immediate area, closing most of it off. Preserving a crime scene as quick as possible might be the most important action any cop can take within this type of investigation.

Outdoor crime scenes pose so many inherent problems from the onset that safeguarding the scene is as important as combing through it with a magnifying glass. There can be no dispute that to have a scene protected from footsteps, passersby, animals, untrained cops, the elements—and anything else that might contaminate the scene and surrounding area—was as imperative this early on as to who was responsible for the crime.

Officer Roberson, per protocol, started a crime scene log, a notebook detailing everything going on at the scene: time, date, action, and personnel. Soon, the entire area, which had otherwise been barren, quiet, and uninhabited except for the neighborhood youngsters and critters, would be teeming with cops and crime scene investigators (CSIs) and detectives and sheriffs and Texas Rangers. All of these law enforcement members would be looking to assist in trying to unravel what had happened here—that is, after the most important task of the moment began: identifying the girl, contacting family members, and beginning to learn who, what, where, when, and how.

Whitehouse police officer Rod Langinias arrived and spoke to Roberson and Brunt, all of whom stood with Bobby Lewis, who was a bit shaken up after being told he had stumbled upon a potential murder scene, and talked about how Bobby had come across the scene. The first suspect in any such case was the person that found the body.

Bobby explained how he had pulled into that driveway, turned his car around, and then—
bam!
—there she was. He said he didn't realize at first what he was looking at, but after getting out and surveying the scene, well, it hit him. She was dead. Someone had lit her body on fire.

No, he had not touched anything, Bobby Lewis told them.

A sergeant arrived, someone with authority who could take control. After talking to Bobby Lewis, Officer Langinias asked his sergeant, “You want me to take some photos until the boys from [CSI] arrive?” Langinias then mentioned that he had spotted some tire tracks in the red clay and skid marks on the road closest to where the body was located. That sort of stuff was important and needed to be documented before it was contaminated or, even worse, destroyed.

“Stay out of the crime scene area and wait for the crime scene people to come,” the sergeant ordered.

“Got it,” Langinias said.

Langinias and several other officers blocked off the road, so no one could drive down it, toward the scene. There was a rolled-up carpet nearby, some charred ashes just north of the body. In between the victim's legs was a Dairy Fresh Grade A Homogenized half & half creamer cup, one of those tiny plastic things you get with your coffee at McDonald's or, in this case, Dairy Queen, it appeared. The item was used, crumpled up, and just sitting there. It had no age to it, as though it had sat out in the elements for more than, say, a day or more.

Other latent trace was visible right away, mainly those tire tracks and some carpet fibers and other small pieces of what looked to be potentially important evidence. Best thing about red clay was that, for CSIs, it acted as a mold. Footprints and tire tracks had dug into the clay and left solid imprints. There was some sand around the area, too, and they wouldn't get much in the form of molds from that, but the red clay was a bonus. It might not lead to finding out the identity of the woman, but it would certainly help at some point in the investigation when suspects were located and their cars and shoes were looked at.

Ultimately, this was a Smith County Sheriff's Office (SCSO) investigation, with the Tyler Police Department (TPD) and the local Whitehouse Police Department (WPD), along with the Texas Rangers acting assistance. Takes a village, they say. In Texas, everyone understands his or her role when solving crimes: to find and arrest the bad guy. You don't find a lot of hubris and ego and pissing contests going on when crimes as serious as the one they faced here were involved.

Around 4:00
P.M.
, with the scene secure and now overrun by all sorts of law enforcement personnel, word spread quickly around town that something was going on near CR 2191, just south of Tyler. The local media was alerted, of course. Many would hop into their satellite trucks and little cars with the broadcast banners written in bright blues and reds on the doors and head out to the location to see what could be reported.

SCSO detective Ron Rathbun took a call to head down and find out what he could. Rathbun was one of those old-school, by-the-book guys. He was on scene by 4:55. Pizza man Bobby Lewis was still there, sitting, shaking his head in disbelief, ready and willing to answer any questions he could. Rathbun located him not long after arriving and being briefed about the facts.

“Tyler,” Bobby Lewis said after Rathbun asked where he worked. “I was trying to find a coworker out here. I turned around in that driveway”—he pointed—“because I thought I had passed the address I was looking for.”

From there, Bobby explained the rest of what he knew.

Meanwhile, Texas Ranger Brent Davis arrived with a Bublcam Sphere 360 and the supplementary software technology needed to employ it, a sophisticated photography unit used to take aerial photos, among other things. The local district attorney's office had purchased the expensive piece of equipment with more than a quarter million in drug money seized from several recent high-profile busts. The aerial images, once they came back, would give everyone a good indication of where possible evidence was located beyond the range of the naked eye. The camera had the capability to take photos with twenty different lighting levels, giving detectives a much clearer picture of those minuscule pieces of evidence that could be otherwise overlooked by CSIs searching the scene on the ground. No doubt about it, using the Bublcam was a high-tech way to get the upper hand on a case and give it a great shot of adrenaline out of the box.

Detective Rathbun walked down to where the victim was still lying in the same place she had been found. No one had moved her. Beyond a number of interesting factors he noticed immediately while studying the scene, Rathbun was interested in the idea that the victim was facedown, wearing white Ralph Lauren tennis shoes with that familiar polo pony emblem on the sides. The deceased was a black female, whose “pink panties” were showing through her pants only because the Capris she had on were nearly burned all the way off her body. There was a subtle, almost inherent indication within the entire scene—if only by a cop's intuition—that her killer had left a trail directly to his or her doorstep, and that all the SCSO needed to do was put the puzzle pieces together, step back, and take a look at the picture before them. Not that this was going to be an easy crime to solve by any standards—that was a trap inexperienced cops fell into when they went down that road. However, as long as the SCSO took this one step at a time, followed each crumb left behind, this one was going to come together.

There was something on her shoes, Rathbun noticed. He took note after squatting down to have a closer look.

The shoes appeared to be very clean (maybe recently purchased),
he wrote in his report of this moment.
I noticed that the bottom soles of the shoes appeared to have a black-colored substance on them.
It was faint, almost like a film. But Rathbun thought she had been,
At one point, walking around on a surface that had black soot....
He immediately leaned toward a “mechanic's shop” which would have “grease, oil, and other materials on the floor.”

It was an interesting calculation that opened up specific investigatory possibilities. Considering there was that red clay all over the area around the body, the residue—if it was, in fact, oil—seemed like an important clue to this intelligent, intuitive cop. It said to him, rather clearly, that she had not walked onto the surface where she was lying by herself—someone, probably driving the car whose tire tracks were left nearby, had purposely dumped her here.

Righting himself, Rathbun stared at the woman. She had not been there, he thought, for very long.

Half a day or so.

Between her legs, Rathbun observed a drinking straw, which was contained in a wrapper marked
Chic-fil-A,
left not too far from that plastic, empty, crumpled up Dairy Fresh creamer cup. The creamer cup, especially, Rathbun surmised, had not been on the ground long. He could tell by looking at the way it had just sat there.

After taking a walk around the area and seeing other pieces of garbage, Rathbun was certain these items near the body were fresh—and perhaps left by the killer. The other garbage looked weathered, and appeared to have been part of the landscape for some time.

* * *

Detective James Riggle of the SCSO was on the Loop 323 when he took a call to head over to the Whitehouse crime scene. He arrived near 4:30
P.M.
to have a look at the scene himself and to locate Rathbun and other members of the SCSO team convening on the site.

“You're going to be the lead on this,” one of the sergeants told Riggle after his arrival. He was then briefed on the entire situation.

Riggle soon found Rathbun after meeting with Brent Davis to verify the Bublcam imagery was in the process of being completed. Banking on the notion that the Chic-fil-A evidence was potentially explosive, the immediate plan was to find any Chic-fil-A locations in Tyler and Whitehouse and get to the surveillance equipment inside the restaurant to have a look before they erased the tape for that day and several preceding it. Restaurants generally never kept copies of surveillance tapes—even when recorded digitally—unless they were robbed or something happened. They'd record over the previous day with the next. Riggle knew the potential was there to see his victim possibly purchasing her last meal—and with any luck, which was something every murder investigation depended on, standing by her side might be a viable suspect or, at the least, someone the SCSO needed to find and speak to immediately.