Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir

by Gary Taylor

  Carpenter said, "She thinks you've hurt her and used her."

  I thought about my next move, then said: "What if I tell her I've been to Special Crimes, and I've given you a detailed recording, and if anything happens to me, you have it."

  Stricklin stroked his chin in thought and said: "In one sense, there's nothing wrong with that. What I do see is that I'd like to know what her next move is going to be."

  Carpenter predicted: "She'll go underground."

  Just then, Stricklin's secretary entered the room and said that Jim Strong had come to the office and urgently needed to see me. Stricklin told her to have him wait a few minutes.

  "Here's what I want to do," I said. "I want to call her from this office and record the call. I will tell her I am not going back to Strong's house until she has gone. I will tell her I am giving her nothing, I owe her nothing. I will tell her this is it, the end of our brief relationship, and that I have given a statement to Special Crimes that could be used if anything should happen to me."

  Stricklin nodded affirmation and then offered a warning: "You know, we think she stalked Tedesco."

  What an interesting word, I thought. I envisioned a lioness on the Serengeti Plains trailing a herd of zebra. It was the first time I ever had heard anyone use the word stalking in regard to human behavior. But I considered it right on the mark. Of course, within a decade the phrase would enter our daily vocabularies as lawmen and legislators worked nationwide to hammer out statutes making such conduct illegal. In the late 1970s, however, stalking prevention fell to the targets—people like Tedesco and me.

  "Let me ask another question before we do this, OK?" Stricklin asked.

  "Sure."

  "Has she ever indicated anything yet about possibly being pregnant?"

  "Of course. She says she's missing a period."

  Stricklin and Carpenter traded glances, and I could tell by their expressions my cavalier attitude had left them confused. I let their expressions hang a few seconds and then offered my explanation.

  "That wouldn't concern me," I said. "I've had a vasectomy, but I never told her. She wanted to handle our birth control so what else did she need to know?"

  For the first time since I began covering either one of them, I enjoyed watching both Stricklin and Carpenter laughing out loud.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  November 27, 1979

  While Carpenter prepared the telephone for taping conversations, Stricklin ushered Strong into his office where I brought him up to date. He told us he had come over from the courts building because Catherine was frantic to find me. He said she had come to the press room and enlisted his help. After Stricklin's receptionist told him I had gone inside Special Crimes, Strong had reported back to Catherine with that news.

  "She is freaking out," he said. "I told her you were probably over here working on some story, interviewing the lawmen, but she's sure it's something about her."

  "It's always about her, isn't it, at least in her mind," I said. "I guess it's a good thing there's nothing going on in the courts today since we're both busy covering Mehaffey. She's a beat unto herself."

  "So, what are you doing over here?"

  "Taking out a life insurance policy," I said. He skewered his face in confusion so I explained.

  "I gave Stricklin a statement on our relationship. Now I'm going to call her and tape record a conversation where I tell her I'm not going home until she's gone. And if anything happens to me, Don has my statement. If nothing happens to me, nothing happens to her."

  "If you were talking about anyone other than Catherine Mehaffey, I'd accuse you of being melodramatic. But more importantly, now it looks like I'm the one who will need to get the rest of her stuff out of my house?"

  I shrugged my shoulders, and Strong pondered for a moment while Stricklin looked on. Suddenly Strong volunteered: "I need to call her, too, and tape it, so I can make a record. This could get ugly."

  Before I could reply, Stricklin jumped into the conversation and said, "That might give us a chance to see what she's thinking. She might talk to Jim more openly. Once you tell her you've been up here, Gary, she's going to clam up. And I can send somebody over to your house with you, Jim, to watch while she gathers her things. Is there much left to move from there?"

  I shook my head, recalling only a few clothes and that Sony television she loved so much. But this plan for a tag team approach to Catherine caught me by surprise. Texas law always has allowed individuals to tape their own telephone conversations without informing the other party. Beyond the legal side, however, the practice always raised eyebrows and left the one making the tapes looking like a worm. Personally, I had no qualms about tape recording a conversation with someone who might threaten my life. After telling her about my statement to Special Crimes, I figured she would assume I was taping her anyway. And, if she asked, I would acknowledge.

  But Strong's conversation would raise this maneuver to a new level. I figured Stricklin and Carpenter were hoping she'd crack and say something they could use against her. The more I thought about this prospect, however, the more sense it made. I knew I hadn't given Stricklin anything in my statement that could be used directly against her, unless I met a violent end. But I certainly needed to take her emotional temperature so I could brace for the worst. And if that led to her arrest for something she might say, we'd all be better off. I dialed her office, and she came to the phone.

  "Where are you?" she asked.

  "Special Crimes," I said, striving to sound firm and resolved, without giving her a chance to protest. "I have given them a statement. And now I want you to understand that we are through. I am not going back to Strong's house until you are gone. We'll have no further communication. Nothing more will happen unless you do something to cause it."

  Obviously suspecting a recorder was running, Catherine responded with icy diplomacy designed to depict me as a rat.

  "So you are up with the boys at Special Crimes making some tapes," she said. "And this is how it ends. Well, that's fine, Gary. You do whatever you think is best."

  "I'm hanging up now, Catherine. This will be the last time we speak."

  I hung up the phone and looked at Stricklin. He held up one finger for about a minute, then pointed at Strong, who dialed her office number again. What happened next would stun everyone in that room, including the hard-nosed crime dog, Jerry Carpenter. While her conversation with me seemed like a speech to the United Nations, the phone call from Strong would generate comparisons with scenes from a horror show. In fact, his recording soon would be known around the courthouse as the Exorcist Tape.

  "Jim, Jim, I'm so scared," Catherine said as soon as she heard his voice. She seemed to be panting and filled with anxiety. "Why is he doing this to me?"

  "Catherine, I think you've scared him. He's not used to being around your kind of violence."

  Catherine rambled in her panic-stricken tone for a while until she talked herself into a higher level of frenzy, one marked by a succinct change in tone. She grew angry and finally bellowed with a sound reminiscent of Linda Blair's possessed ego from the movie The Exorcist. Then she started shrieking.

  "I've done nothing wrong. Can't you stop him, Jim? He's gone insane. I've got to get away. I haven't done anything. I'm so trapped. He must take it all back. It has to start now. I can't bear it. He's doing it now, he's hurting me."

  Strong winced as she raised the volume and screamed: "He got everything he wanted. He fucked my brains out. I'm not a dog. I'm so scared, Jim. I don't know what's happening. I'm starting to hate him. My God, we cannot live here another day. I've never killed anybody in my life. He's panicking. He can't do this to me in Houston. I have to live here, Jim. Couldn't he keep quiet? I'm scared. I've got to stop him."

  She took a breath, then continued: "I do have hostility, tremendous hostility. He's got to call me. He's got to come here. He needs to beg for my mercy before this is over."

  Beg for her mercy? I wondered if I had heard correct
ly, and even Carpenter looked stunned.

  She continued, "I've never killed anyone but, Jim, he has done so much…"

  "Catherine," Jim cut her off. "You need to be careful. If anything happens to him, now—if he gets hit by a bus—they will come looking for you. You need to make sure nothing happens to him."

  "A bus? How can I stop it if he's hit by a bus?" she screamed in her demon voice. "He fucked my brains out and then threw me away. He's got to take it all back. He's got to beg for my mercy."

  "Calm down, Catherine, calm down. We have to pick up the pieces now."

  Almost as suddenly as the hysterics had come, however, she transitioned back to the sympathy-seeking waif. Listening live, I thought I might be witnessing a true split personality in action. But Strong wouldn't cave to her begging about staying longer at his house. They made arrangements to meet there one last time and finally ended the call. Listening to a replay then, I thought I might break a sweat, her voice sounding so surreal and indescribable. Stricklin made a couple of copies for us to keep and placed the original in his file.

  "I would advise you guys to continue taping her calls," he said. "There will be more and you need to keep a record. Do you have a tape recorder at the house?"

  We laughed. I did not own one, preferring to take notes in a pad with a pen. But Strong worked for a radio news service. He had recorders beside all his phones, ready to tape on a moment's notice for feeds to radio station broadcasts.

  When Strong and I returned to the press room, our media roommates were suspicious. They thought we'd been out on a scoop. Instead, I locked the door that never had been locked and said, "It might be best if we keep this locked for a while."

  Sandy furrowed her brows, and I could see we needed to provide more details. So Jim took his copy of the Exorcist Tape and popped it into his player. He only shared a portion, the part where she screamed, "He has to beg for my mercy." Then he shut it down.

  "Oh…my…God," Sandy said, shaking her head. "Taylor, Taylor, what are we going to do with you?"

  "Keep the door locked," I said.

  "And," said Strong, "if you think that tape is bad, you ought to see the suitcase."

  A couple of the other reporters started laughing.

  "Love on the rocks," sang one, trying his best Sinatra to even more laughter.

  "That's what happens as the world turns," giggled another of my sympathetic colleagues.

  Then they all went back to work. They had given my story the five minutes of attention it deserved. But now it was time to dig up something for the next newscast or tomorrow's paper. I made arrangements to spend the night with Edd Blackwood, the court coordinator from Judge Routt's court. His wife was a Houston police officer, and I knew Catherine would not even know where he lived. Then I called Cindy to warn her.

  "Gary, I need to tell you something," she said. "Al and I have made up. He's back in the house here."

  Clearly, I decided, I would have to do something about the telephone-shooting Uncle Al living with my kids again. But at that particular moment, he ranked lower on my schedule. And just when I thought this day couldn't grow any more complicated, Strong called from his house, where he had gone with an investigator to oversee a peaceful transfer of property to Catherine.

  "You know that television she loves so much?" Strong asked me.

  "Yes."

  "It was stolen property. They ran a serial number or something before she got here and it came back as hot. No wonder she wanted to get over here so quick."

  "Where is it now?"

  "They took it away and told her they had to process it. Man, was she pissed. They didn't arrest her yet, but I'm sure that's coming soon."

  I hung up the phone and laid my head on my desk, unsure whether I should laugh, cry, or get into my two-hundred-dollar car with my grocery sack of laundry and drive west on Interstate-10 as far as it would run.

  THIRTY-NINE

  November 29, 1979

  "There they go," Strong was saying as we sat on stools in a diner in the 500 block of Fannin Street staring through the large plate glass window toward the 609 Fannin Building directly across the street. It was about three in the afternoon and the air was bitter cold outside for Houston, even in November. The wind was blowing. And up the sidewalk on the other side of Fannin walked four men in suits looking very uncomfortable after a frosty, five-block stroll from the courthouse down the street. A raiding party from the district attorney's office, they were led by Don Stricklin, chief of Special Crimes. And they were headed for the law offices of Lloyd Oliver where Catherine Mehaffey also practiced her craft. Stricklin had tipped me about this mission, and I wanted to see for myself. I couldn't believe it was happening. They had enjoyed confiscating that stolen Sony TV so much, they now wanted to see if Catherine had any additional stolen property in her office.

  Catherine and Oliver did not have a formal partnership. I never really knew the particulars of their arrangement. They shared a secretary named Rita but that seemed about the extent of it. Lloyd was a fairly successful attorney fond of the Yuppie nightlife and his Corvette. He treated Catherine much like an eccentric younger sister, and I always had the impression he handled her carefully. I doubted they had had any kind of sexual relationship, or he likely would have been in line with me outside Special Crimes seeking help from Stricklin. I even thought it likely he would let it slide if she didn't pay her rent. He might have been trying to stay out of her life and troubles, but now they were both poised to rain straight down on his head, if only for a couple of days. I would have loved to have seen the look on his mustachioed face when Stricklin and his gang stormed into his office looking for stolen goods. They found nothing.

  But the raid capped an active couple of emotion-packed days for me. Although technically out of my life, Catherine had kept me so busy I hadn't even had time to mope about Uncle Al, Cindy, and the reconciliation that had derailed my reconciliation. No, Catherine had been calling all hours of the day and night to harangue, harass, and sometimes even make me feel guilty about her current state of affairs. Of course, every time I even hinted to Strong that I might feel even a twinge of sympathy, he would turn on his recorder and play back a portion of the Exorcist Tape. He had grown particularly fond of her voice threatening that "someday he's going to look around, and he'll see me standing there. And he's going to wish he'd never done this to me." And always he finished up with the chorus: "He's got to beg for my mercy."

  The day before, Catherine had asked me to refer her to a psychiatrist, noting that I had done that for Cindy so I should do it for her. I asked Stricklin if he wanted to suggest a name and Chuck Rosenthal came up with one. The next thing I knew, Rosenthal's psychiatrist had checked Catherine into a hospital. Strong and I wondered how outraged she would become after learning that a Special Crimes psychiatrist had ordered the treatment. But Lloyd had come to her rescue, checking her out of the place after just a couple hours. Obviously aware of my visit to Special Crimes, he apparently felt my battle with Catherine was getting too close to his practice. Then, after Stricklin's subsequent raid on his office, Lloyd decided to bring Catherine along for peace talks that night during a surprise visit to our house.

  "I can't have Special Crimes destroying my law office," he said forcefully, as Catherine sat quietly beside him on Strong's couch. Strong excused himself, went to a bedroom, and returned wearing a bicycle helmet.

  "In case I'm hit in the head tonight," he said, pointing to the helmet as he sat down in a chair. Lloyd grunted, Catherine winced, and I stifled a grin.

  "How can we put an end to this?" Lloyd asked.

  "Just leave us alone," I said. "It's done as far as I'm concerned. I can't help because she had a stolen TV."

  "It wasn't stolen," Catherine snarled. "It's the finest electronic device known to man, and now the stooges from Special Crimes have had their hands all over it."