Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir (7 page)

Their saga offered another intriguing twist
with the involvement of a woman named Constance Haines. The mother
of eleven children, Haines had pleaded guilty to charges of helping
them with the robbery and murder. She was scheduled for sentencing
the following day, giving me my first look at an authentic bad
girl.

Looking back, it's hard to
understand my naiveté as I watched Simmons and Moran standing there
in shackles and handcuffs. I'm glad they were white like me because
that allowed me to experience my epiphany without any hint of
racial prejudice. I'm not sure exactly what I had expected before
entering that courtroom for my first look at authentic killers.
Perhaps, in the back of my mind I had envisioned someone sad and
defeated by life, someone who never had a break, forced into
violence by circumstances beyond their control. If so, that picture
vanished in a heartbeat when I looked into the eyes of Simmons and
Moran. Not only did those eyes communicate a lack of concern about
their situation, but they also burned with contempt and hatred for
everyone in that room. They were shackled and still I felt
threatened. My mind formed only one thought: I hope I never meet
those guys on the street. Can society rehabilitate a rabid dog? All
you can do is destroy it, or, in the case of Simmons and Moran,
lock them away in a hole. And that is exactly what Freeman
prescribed in his speech sending them to the state's highest
security prison in Marquette on the Upper Peninsula.

"A judge can send you to prison but
only the Almighty can send you to hell," thundered the judge,
introducing me to what would become a weekly dose of Freemanisms
delivered to whatever poor slobs appeared before him on his
sentencing day. He enjoyed seating his sentencing targets in the
jury box in progressing order of the prison times they would
receive. On any occasion he might have half-a-dozen convicted
felons awaiting their fates with those last in line realizing the
sentences were growing harsher as the judge came closer to their
seats on the bench. During the next two years, I repeatedly would
hear Freeman tell felons things like, "I wish we had the death
penalty in Michigan," or, "You are the lowest form of
life"—comments that would constitute judicial abuse outlawed in
later years. But Freeman drank his fill before higher courts took
exception to such behavior. One time a felon cracked during a
particularly aggressive lecture, pushed the court stenographer to
the floor, and leaped onto the bench hoping to strangle his honor
in his black robe. Deputies pulled him off and I had a great story.
Of course, I couldn't write it until I stopped laughing.

Professionally,
The Flint
Journal
proved the perfect stop for me
straight out of school. The city was big and complicated enough to
humble me into a rookie more willing to learn than dictate demands
like a prima donna. And the veteran journalists working there
provided plenty of education on asking the tough questions while
developing a skeptical view of the world.

As the courts
reporter for
The Journal
between 1969 and 1971, I presided over a colorful
cast of characters who provided a thorough education on criminology
and our legal system. Besides Freeman, the county bench included
five other judges with their own eccentricities. The county
prosecutor, Robert F. Leonard, was a firebrand in his own right
with Democratic Party political ambitions well beyond that office
at the time. Later on in the 1980s, he would be convicted himself
for embezzling federal law enforcement grant funds. In the 1970s,
however, he ranked as the ringmaster for action that ran the gamut
from administrative battles with county government to his crusade
for a special grand jury to investigate corruption in both county
and city government—a crusade that bore fruit and made my time in
Flint even more exciting with bribery indictments pending against
Flint's mayor and the county's top elected officer by the time I
left in 1971.

Besides the judges, the
prosecutors, and the criminals, Flint's courthouse community also
boasted an intriguing array of defense attorneys eager to teach me
their points of view. In the process I learned to get along with
all kinds of folks, even dangerous characters like Simmons or
Moran. But I also learned to maintain a skeptical eye while
listening to anyone's version of the truth, just taking notes and
saying nothing in a state of absolute detachment. For me, they were
a story. For them, I was their soapbox. Life as a reporter became
just a never-ending parade of symbiotic relationships.

My typical workday began at the
courthouse, where I would make rounds looking for news. I
maintained a diary on the dockets and knew in advance about trial
dates and such. I became a part of the infrastructure there,
visiting the secretaries of each of the judges, chatting with
Leonard, sitting through trials, or joking with the defense
attorneys. I gathered research on two levels, one for that day's
breaking news and another for enterprise or feature stories I might
craft when time allowed. About three every afternoon I would gather
my notes and walk the four blocks back to The Journal offices where
I would hunker down at my desk and hammer out the stories of the
day on my manual typewriter for the evening deadline. Sometimes,
when an important story broke during the day, I would find a phone
at the courthouse and call a rewrite reporter in the newsroom so he
could combine my news from the scene with necessary background from
our files to develop a finished product superior to what I might
eventually deliver after waiting all day.

I didn't realize how much of a
professional I had become until my father paid a visit the summer
of 1971. He had always scoffed at my journalistic ambitions,
viewing them as a self-indulgent crapshoot when compared with the
hard work of real men who fix lawnmowers. Or, maybe he just felt
jealous that I had chosen my own way in a world alien to him rather
than accepting my legacy as heir to his lawnmower repair empire. At
any rate, I didn't know what to expect when he tagged along on my
beat, following me every step of the way as I moved through the
back stairwells like an invisible ghost from courtroom to
courtroom.

We attended a Donald R. Freeman
sentencing session—always a treat for the uninitiated—and for once
that judge was at a loss for words. Freeman invited his featured
felon-of-the-day to beg for mercy before sentence was passed. We
listened intently as the prisoner sought leniency because the night
before, in his cell, he recounted: "An angel of the Lord appeared
and said, 'Tyrone, straighten yourself up.'" Freeman closed his
eyes, shook his head and simply replied: "Sixty years." Before the
judge left the bench, I grabbed my dad and escorted him into the
hallway, around a corner, and through a side door where we emerged
into Freeman's private chambers, employing a maneuver I repeated
almost every day without even thinking about it. My dad was even
more surprised when Freeman joined us without a word, as if we were
part of his furniture.

While we sat and talked with the
judge, I watched my dad's expression and actually felt satisfaction
beaming as he realized I had become my own man. In later years, as
a father myself, I've often thought that must have been a great
moment for him to actually live a day in the life of his grown
child. It's something I'd like to do with my own daughters. A
bring-your-dad-to-work-day might give all dads a chance to start
seeing their offspring as people, rather than the kids they only
recall.

When I began my
tenure in Flint I had expected to be there only a short time while
waiting for my draft date. But a funny thing happened on the way to
Vietnam. Richard Nixon instituted a draft lottery, and just days
after passing a pre-induction physical exam in Detroit my birth
date came up roses at number 343. Essentially that meant I would
not be drafted unless the Viet Cong managed to mount an invasion of
California. Suddenly, the whole world opened wide. I no longer had
to plan my life around a two-year hitch in the Army. So I reviewed
my options. Although I loved my job, I focused on a reality of my
existence. Michigan's winters are cold, dark, and long. And my
professional ambitions went beyond
The
Flint Journal
. So I sent letters to the
editors of every newspaper in the Sun Belt.
The Houston Post
was the first to
call.

NINE

Early 1970s

Before I left
Flint, an assistant prosecutor there had warned me I'd find guys in
Houston who could chew up Simmons and Moran before breakfast then
spit them out for lunch because they just weren't mean enough to
make a good meal. I didn't realize then that list of Houston's
toughest "guys" eventually would include a five-foot-three-inch,
green-eyed blonde. But I was still nearly a decade away from
hooking up with Catherine when I arrived in December of 1971 in
Houston for the next level of post-graduate education in journalism
and crime reporting. While any murder in Flint rated a story
for
The Journal
,
the two Houston papers had to prioritize. They did not have enough
room to cover all, so each murder story needed its own
"man-bites-dog" element to justify the space.

I had my first taste of the fast
lane when I reported for duty in the fourth floor press room at the
Houston Police Department's 61 Reisner Street headquarters. Before
noon I had lost about $25 in a poker game that was interrupted by
the killing of a bank president who had tried to stop a robbery
with his personal sidearm only to die in a hail of gunfire as he
chased the robbers down the street.

The morning
delivery
Post
had
hired me specifically to become one of its night police beat
reporters. New hires usually covered the cops for about a year
before promotion to assignments with less gore and more reasonable
hours. After my daytime orientation, I began working the night
shift of six-to-two, Sunday through Wednesday. I filed stories
directly from a community press room in the police station using a
Western Union-style teletype machine.

Houston's economy
was large enough to support two daily papers, and I welcomed the
challenge of a true competitive situation with the rival
afternoon
Houston
Chronicle
.
The
Post
was owned by the venerable Hobby
family, then headed by the matriarch, Oveta Culp Hobby. She was the
widow of a former Texas governor and had distinguished herself as
well heading the Women's Army Corps during World War II. Her son,
William P. Hobby Jr., served as editor of
The Post
but had divided his time just
then running what would be a successful campaign to win election as
Texas Lieutenant Governor, a position he would hold from 1973 until
1991. To her credit, Mrs. Hobby was a hands-on, news junkie type of
executive with a penchant for popping into the newsroom just to see
what might be going on.
The Post
served as a flagship for a family media empire
that also included ownership of the local NBC radio and television
affiliates. Although those electronic outlets generated greater
revenues, the daily paper ranked as her professional love. A true
matriarch, she considered its stories the diary for her town and
its reporters part of her family. She seemed less concerned with
how much money the paper made than with how it was
done.

My city editor was
an easygoing fellow named Jim Holley who had supervised the
reporting six years earlier on a series of articles that won the
paper its only Pulitzer Prize. That saga still ranks among the most
exciting of the Pulitzer Prize archives as
The Post
uncovered a web of corruption
in the neighboring City of Pasadena, an industrial enclave along
the Houston Ship Channel. At one point the paper hired a bodyguard
for the reporter who eventually claimed the national investigative
prize under Holley's supervision.

As the night
police reporter for
The
Post
, I shared the police station press
room with my counterpart from the
Chronicle
, a reporter my same age
named Tim Fleck. He later would earn fame as a local political
commentator in the 1990s. But back in those days we occupied the
lowest link on the food chain at our respective publications. We
usually played several games of chess each night while waiting for
news to break by monitoring the six individual radio speakers that
broadcast conversations between police cruisers and central
dispatch. Once an hour we would walk the halls visiting detectives
in the homicide and robbery divisions to ferret out stories from
them. Back in those days, reporters enjoyed an amicable
relationship with cops, and we were usually welcome in their
offices. Often we served as witnesses on confessions, and I
sometimes participated in lineups when detectives needed extras to
fill the slots around the usual suspects. On one occasion a witness
actually picked me as the perpetrator in some case only to hear the
detective sigh: "Unfortunately he has an iron-clad
alibi."

We also had extracurricular duties
for the dean of the police reporting community, a colorful TV
reporter named Jack Cato. His Mustang fastback was packed with
police monitors that covered every channel, and he often just
cruised the streets like a news cabbie rushing to a scene for film
before anyone could haul away the body. In addition, he also owned
a soda machine on the fourth floor of the police station and
assigned me to keep it full or refund money to cops who lost their
change when it didn't work. He benefited from a remarkable
relationship with all the cops, and you could always hear him
coming down the hall: "Hey, how's the family? Have a cigar? Had
that baby yet?" Cato's political savvy paid off later when he was
elected in the 1990s to serve as Harris County Treasurer, a
position he held until his death in 2006.