by Peter Elkind
At this cowboy high school, Genene Jones was not popular. Part of the problem was her appearance: Genene was painfully plain. Her soft, doughy face was dominated by hard features—a large, bent nose and intense hazel eyes that flashed her emotions. Her mousy brown hair was blown into an inflated bouffant. And at five feet four, she was thirty pounds overweight and graceless. Genene didn’t walk down a hallway; she rushed. Everything was frantic. “A lot of the guys would make fun of her, say she plays on the football team,” recalled a classmate.
Genene’s personality was even less graceful; she was often bossy and obnoxious. During study hall, she checked out books in the high school library. When others weren’t working the way she thought they should, Genene told them what to do. When they refused to follow her directions, she glared at them angrily. “She thought at one point she ran the library,” said Marjorie Johnson, then the head librarian. Genene was different from most of the other kids—more serious and less tolerant of teenage games. She worked an assortment of odd jobs after school, even scrubbing restaurant floors for spending money. She often showed up at Marshall smelling greasy, looking exhausted and unkempt. Sometimes she fell asleep in the library.
Members of the school staff regarded her as a minor troublemaker; when someone spiked the punch at the school Christmas party, Genene was a natural suspect. But she also elicited pity. When Genene found a sympathetic ear, she blamed circumstances for her lot: Other kids had ostracized her because of her father’s reputation as a gambler; her parents favored her sister. “She was carrying a load of grudge because her life wasn’t very good,” said Marjorie Johnson. “She was not a very attractive girl, and that bothered her. The boys weren’t asking her for dates. She wasn’t getting any attention. She was desperate to be important.”
It was in quest of attention that Genene first displayed a genius for the art of lying. Some of her tales were innocent adolescent fibs. She informed her best friend, Linda Rosenbush, that she was a distant cousin of Mickey Dolenz—a member of the pop music group the Monkees—and that he often phoned her to chat. Other fabrications were downright ugly. She told classmates that her parents—who had four children by choice—never loved her enough to adopt her legally. Genene always served up her stories with conviction; it took her friends a while to learn that their classmate and the truth were not always in accord. “Genene lied all the time—about anything, everything,” said Linda Rosenbush. “To her, lying was just like talking.”
The youth of America were soon to stage a challenge to the nation’s dearest values, but the class of 1968 at John Marshall stood on the outer cusp of the rebellion. The only cause that inspired protest was the high school’s strict dress code: Sideburns had to be short, shirttails had to be in, girls were not allowed to jiggle, and boys had to wear belts. The typical Marshall student dissipated his energies much as his parents had—driving, drinking, and dating.
The kids cruised a strip in northeast San Antonio called Austin Highway, where they could stop at a drive-in barbecue joint, the Bun ‘N’ Barrel, for a sandwich, soda, and fries. Three dollars bought an evening’s entertainment; two dollars went for the gas. The rite-of-passage Saturday-night beer bust often took place in someone’s vacant field. Fifteen or twenty kids would pull their pickups into a circle, crank up the radios, build themselves a bonfire, and dive into a stack of six-packs. Genene relished such events, for they provided her with an audience. Her father let her drive his blue El Camino, and Genene loved to shock the boys by daring them to drag race. She drove fast and often won when they took up her challenge.
To teachers at Marshall, Genene Jones was an enigma. Clearly bright, she was uninspired in the classroom. She muddled through most of her courses, with a rare failure in bookkeeping. One of her top grades, a 90, came in home management—home nursing. She dabbled in extracurricular activities, such as Future Teachers of America, but seemed to have no clear ambition. She told her close friends that she just wanted a bunch of children.
As Genene began her senior year, her father was feeling poorly. In truth, Dick Jones had not been the same since Travis’s death. He had lost his appetite for work, and the family had stopped taking vacations. In October 1967, he entered Scott and White Hospital in Temple for tests. Doctors informed Jones he was suffering from terminal cancer. After briefly weighing his options, he refused all medical therapy and went home. With his fate clearly in sight, Dick Jones summoned a priest and was finally baptized a Catholic.
By late November, he could no longer climb down the stairs from his bedroom. Relatives had to carry him down on a chair for a bittersweet Christmas with the family. The powerful man who had survived three bullets to the chest was withering away. Soon he could barely speak. Then he was unable to swallow food or liquid; Gladys dampened her husband’s palate by placing wet rags in his mouth. She was there at the end, at 1:30 A.M. on January 3, 1968. Dick Jones was fifty-six.
The gambler’s house had its second ghost.
Two
When her father died, Genene Jones told a visitor many years later, “the world went dark.” Yet it was only days after he was buried that Genene, then seventeen, began to talk about getting married. She was in love with a high school dropout named Jimmy DeLany, and she wanted to tie the knot on Valentine’s Day—six weeks after her father’s death.
Gladys Jones was horrified. The tortured deaths of her son and husband had already turned her life upside down. After thirty-four years as the supportive partner, she was suddenly in charge. Gladys delegated the daily operations of Dick Jones Outdoor Advertising to Wiley, twenty-two, who didn’t really want the task. But she could not delegate Genene. Her daughter seemed oblivious of the toll the twin tragedies had taken. It was no time for a wedding.
Hoping to scotch the idea altogether, Gladys told Genene she wanted her at least to finish high school before getting married. Genene recognized that she had no choice; at her age, she required her mother’s written blessing to wed. But Genene insisted on going through with the wedding later—as soon after graduation as possible. Gladys Jones had spent her entire lifetime around liquor. Caught in a vise of responsibility and grief, she began drinking heavily. Alcohol and Genene’s badgering sparked mother-daughter quarrels of fresh bitterness and intensity. Genene told friends that her mother had accused her of stealing money. She declared that Gladys had never truly loved her. With her father no longer alive, marriage seemed a happy refuge.
Genene’s choice for a mate was as misguided as her timing. At the tender age of nineteen, James Harvey DeLany, Jr., had all the makings of a loser. Born in San Antonio, DeLany had met Genene two years earlier at Marshall High School; he became her first serious boyfriend. DeLany’s mother had died when he was young. He was raised by his father, who owned an icehouse—Texas parlance for a convenience store—where the principal commodity was cold beer.
The kinship between Genene Jones and Jimmy DeLany was built on motor oil and alienation. Homely and overweight, Jimmy had dropped out of school midway through his senior year. He traveled with a rowdy, boozing crowd. His sole passion was cars. He worked sporadically at gas stations, spent his free time tinkering with engines, and, like Genene, loved to hot-rod about town. He raced a souped-up ’56 Chevy.
In the month of June 1968, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy was assassinated and James Earl Ray, the murderer of Martin Luther King, was apprehended at London’s Heathrow Airport. San Antonio was abuzz with the news that Princess Grace would visit Hemisfair ’68, the city’s world’s fair. A CBS television documentary, titled Hunger in America, juxtaposed scenes of bacchanalia at Hemisfair with pictures of malnourished children in San Antonio’s West Side barrio. And the new Bexar County Hospital was near completion.
June represented a watershed for Genene Jones as well. Its first day marked her graduation from John Marshall High School. After finishing with an academic average of 78.61—197th in a class of 274—Genene marched into the evening ceremony to the strains of “Pomp and Circumsta
nce.” Fourteen days later, on June 15, she was married.
The wedding of Genene Jones and Jimmy DeLany took place with all the cheer and festivity that the mother of the bride could muster. In the weeks preceding, friends and relatives had feted Genene with parties and bridal showers. Lisa was the matron of honor, and Linda Rosenbush one of the bridesmaids. The ceremony took place on a sunny Saturday, at St. Gregory’s Catholic Church. Presiding was Monsignor Michael Holden, the priest who, eight years earlier, had harbored the Brambles’ stolen safe. The wedding reception, held at the Oak Hills Party House on the family property, was just as Dick Jones would have had it—lavish and loud. There was champagne everywhere, and more than a hundred guests danced to an eight-piece band. But a cloud shadowed the celebration: Gladys had made it known that she considered the groom a disaster.
After honeymooning in Corpus Christi, on the Gulf Coast of Texas, the newlyweds moved into a guest cottage on the Jones estate. Despite Genene’s battles with her mother, the offer of free rent was too attractive to resist. Gladys, who had bankrolled both the wedding and the honeymoon trip, gamely tried to help her new son-in-law find a clean job. Jimmy preferred to work as a mechanic. But it soon became evident that his affection for the automobile outstripped both his diligence and his ability. “Jimmy was not responsible,” said Steve Seubert, an usher at the wedding. “He worked just enough to get some cash so he could ride around and drink and work on his cars.” As a mechanic, he had a reputation for clumsiness. “We had a joke,” recalled Seubert. “You could probably give Jimmy an anvil and he’d break it.”
Genene Jones DeLany began married life as a housewife, and for a few months all went well. The DeLanys socialized with other couples from high school; they spent nights out eating barbecue, drinking beer, and playing cards—occasionally strip poker. But Jimmy’s sporadic work habits soon prompted fights about money. Auto parts seemed to gobble up whatever cash he made, yet DeLany got angry when he learned that Genene was sneaking out to race his cars. Friends listened uncomfortably as the couple squabbled in their presence. Genene belittled her husband publicly, sending him into tantrums. Fearing the Vietnam War draft—and also hoping to better his life—DeLany enlisted in the navy seven months after getting married. He returned home from boot camp in San Diego to discover what others had known: His wife was fooling around.
After her husband’s departure, Genene had occupied herself much as she had in high school: cruising and hanging out, usually with old friends from Marshall. While more motivated graduates attended college or found jobs, Genene spent her time at burger joints and drive-ins. It did not take her long to become bored. Genene soon told her closest female friends that she was sharing her marriage bed with other men. The revelations of the sailor’s wife were not those of tortured anguish; Genene was boasting of her conquests, in the language of a men’s locker room. No one knew precisely how much of Genene’s talk was fiction, but at least some of it reflected fact. Friends who recalled specific liaisons said Genene was aggressive in her pursuit of men. The extramarital couplings—and her blunt talk about them afterward—seemed to bolster her self-esteem.
Genene’s misguided search for affection knew no bounds of loyalty. One of her partners was Bill Myers, a married man who was buddies with Jimmy; his wife, Collene, was Genene’s friend. Bill had known Jimmy since high school, and the two possessed the bond of shared misdeeds. On one occasion, they told their wives they were going hunting; they headed instead for the border town of Laredo and spent the weekend in Mexican cathouses. Myers, visiting the cottage on the Jones property one day, found himself in bed with Genene. According to Myers, she told him she was a nymphomaniac. He later described his involvement as though it were a charitable act. “She was reaching out,” Myers said. “She wanted someone to know her and like her and love her.”
The benevolence ended suddenly when Collene pulled up outside. In a search for her missing husband, she innocently walked through the door. With only a moment’s warning, Genene threw on a bathrobe and raced out of the bedroom to greet Collene. She explained her heavy sweat by telling her friend she was sick with cramps. And no, Genene said through manufactured tears of pain, she hadn’t seen Bill. Myers was hiding in the closet.
It was far from the only lie that Genene told her naive friend. She vividly recalled being stabbed during an altercation at her father’s club; she even showed Collene a scar. On another occasion, Genene confided that she had been sexually traumatized by a childhood experience; she claimed to have been raped at the age of sixteen. Collene remained unaware of the lies for years. But she had other cause to feel uneasy around Genene. Collene had allowed her friend to baby-sit for her infant daughter. One day, after Collene picked up the baby, her mother discovered a photograph in the child’s diaper bag. It was a snapshot of Genene in the nude.
Perhaps out of deference to his own sins, Jimmy overlooked his wife’s infidelities and returned to duty with the navy. Genene remained behind, though no longer with her mother. In accordance with a plan he had devised to ensure his family’s financial security, Dick Jones before his death had purchased a tract of land on Rochelle Road, in a remote neighborhood in far northwest Bexar County. Intent on privacy in her golden years, Gladys built herself a shrine to seclusion on the site: a home with no exterior windows. Set far back from the street, it was composed of one wall and three extra-large trailers forming the sides of a square. A roof covered the entire structure, creating a giant interior room as big as a dance floor. Brightened only with artificial light, the place gave visitors the sensation of stepping into a nightclub. In May 1969, after moving into the new house, Gladys sold the eight-acre Jones homestead on Fredricksburg Road, raising enough money to pay off her bills and live out her days. Wiley Jones, married now and still running the sign business, moved a trailer home onto an adjacent tract on Rochelle Road. Displaced from the family cottage, Genene took an apartment of her own.
But it did not signal independence. Genene visited her mother frequently, often to ask for money; there always seemed to be an emergency for which she desperately needed cash. Gladys implored her daughter to find a career; she was eager to see Genene self-reliant. In 1970, with her mother footing the bill, Genene enrolled in Mim’s Classic Beauty College, to train as a beautician. By the time she finished, Jimmy was stationed at the U.S. Naval Air Station in Albany, Georgia. Genene left San Antonio for the first time, to join him there. DeLany’s inability to hold a job carried over into uniform. He found himself in disciplinary trouble, and on September 29, 1971, after less than three years on his four-year hitch were up, the navy discharged him. Genene was happy at her husband’s freedom, whatever the circumstances. She was five months pregnant.
Genene had longed for a baby even in high school. When Jimmy’s seed did not find quick purchase, the DeLanys impatiently had visited a doctor, who assured them that everything was in working order. On January 29, 1972, in Albany, Genene gave birth to a son. In tribute to her dead father, she and her husband named the child Richard Edward DeLany.
The new arrival did nothing to calm the couple’s tempestuous relationship. Both held jobs in Georgia, Jimmy as a mechanic and Genene as a beautician. But child care and automobiles left them perpetually short of money. While struggling to pay the utility bills, the DeLanys went into debt to buy a spanking-new Chevy Nova. Jimmy made matters worse by tearing the car apart to make “improvements”; instead of going faster, the Chevy spent weeks up on blocks. The couple’s fascination with speed led them into trouble at every turn. During the spring after Edward’s birth, Genene and Jimmy had joined friends for a Sunday afternoon of water skiing behind a two-hundred-horsepower racing boat. The DeLanys were passengers as the boat sped down Kinchafoonee Creek, near Albany. Approaching a bend, their craft knifed into a smaller boat going the other way. The second vessel sank, and a fifteen-year-old boy aboard it drowned. Genene escaped unharmed; Jimmy was hospitalized with a broken rib and cuts to the head.
DeLany’s wounds wer
e still healing when he returned from work one afternoon in May to find his wife and baby missing. DeLany checked the closet; a suitcase and clothes were gone. After four years of marital turmoil, Genene had taken four-month-old Edward and flown home to San Antonio. She had not left a note.
On August 10, 1972, Genene filed for divorce. In court papers, she claimed that her husband was “a man of violent and ungovernable temper and passion,” who had been guilty of “unconscionable brutality and physical cruelty” and on several occasions “struck her with great force.” Genene won a court order barring her husband, who had returned to San Antonio, from going near her or their son. Two months later, it wasn’t necessary; the couple had reconciled, and the judge dismissed the suit. Genene later said Jimmy had promised to act more responsibly.
After spending the separation with her family, Genene moved back in with her husband, this time in their own house. She went to work at the Methodist Hospital beauty parlor; he found another job as a mechanic. But the peace did not last long. In February 1974, Jimmy blew yet another job, and Genene moved into her own apartment. She filed divorce papers a month later. The marriage came to its legal end on June 3, 1974. Jimmy got the hot Chevy Nova; Genene received the Dodge Super Bee, child support starting at $25 a week, and permission to drop “DeLany” from her name.
At the age of twenty-three, Genene was suddenly a single mother. Although DeLany had fought in court for weekly visitation rights, he displayed little interest in his son. He would promise to take Edward somewhere; the boy would await the visit eagerly, but his father would never show up. Soon DeLany stopped paying child support. Genene won a contempt citation against her ex-husband, but Jimmy simply ignored it. Genene seemed to feel guilty that her son lacked a father. She tried to compensate with discipline; when Edward misbehaved, Genene sent him to fetch a belt.
