by Jack Olsen
The murders and such—
We take them as week-end diversion.
Some blamed an inconsistent and woolly Texas penal code, some the lingering effects of the frontier tradition, some the public’s insistence on private weaponry. Most Houstonians were too enmeshed in business to waste time theorizing about the minor matter of murder. Since a mere three hundred or so were killed each year, and most of them black, the mass of citizenry went its way unperturbed, and newspaper editorials on the subject served mainly for the wrapping of fish. “Public indifference to the homicide toll lets murder stalk the community unhindered—and with implied public acceptance,” the Houston Post trumpeted in a 1967 editorial that might have been written in the days of Billy the Kid and the James gang. “The public is silent. There is no outcry against murder. And silence gives consent.”
Houston’s city fathers believed that the best government is the least government, and the embarrassing murder rate had never become a priority item. Houston was growing so fast that all its municipal services continually trailed its practical needs, and the city struggled along with twenty-two hundred policemen, about half the number needed to secure so large and hectic a metropolis. The harassed policemen were underpaid; most of them were forced to hold outside jobs that occupy time and attention, and as one of them put it, “Everybody owes the credit union.” Not surprisingly, there was difficulty in recruiting, and the force remained permanently understaffed, while major crime rates rose year after year. Millions of dollars of federal cash were available to ameliorate such urban predicaments, but Police Chief Herman Short* scorned the handout. “I get sick and tired of people acting like that all you have to do to solve a problem is throw a bunch of federal money at it,” the chief declared. An archconservative who was politically close to Governor George Wallace of Alabama, Herman Short looked with suspicion on any federal assistance, and in the meantime his police department bungled the job. In 1973, Houston led American cities in number of suspects shot and killed by policemen, a figure generally reflective of poor discipline and attitude. Chief Short was fond of making bellicose statements (“When someone pulls a pistol on a policeman, he’d better be ready to die!”), which the less astute of his officers interpreted, at times of stress, as a mandate to fire at anything that moves or dissents. Human life was never the city’s most precious commodity.
Short was proud of his anti-riot procedures, his special unit for ferreting out subversives and radicals, his armory of machine guns and bulletproof war wagons and other hardware, but his department had hardly any community relations programs and was woefully deficient in that most basic of all police services: the cop on the beat. “We have so few men in uniform,” said a police official, “that a lot of crimes go undetected or uninvestigated.” Houston policemen had such morale-shattering case loads that some of them shunned their work altogether, a not unusual human reaction. Around police headquarters, a game was made of getting away early, slipping off to run a personal errand or shoot a round of golf, and otherwise beating the system that paid so little and demanded so much. It was not a matter of the men corrupting the system. No one can put his heart into a hopeless task day after day, and the job of policing Houston’s 1.3 million people with twenty-two hundred men was plainly hopeless.
Every Houston policeman developed a built-in inclination to avoid difficult situations, to iron out malfeasances painlessly, to do anything to avoid the dreaded paper work and the unbearable court appearances. Even the best detectives, the ones who head promotion lists and have the proudest records, were forced to take refuge in technicalities. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but we don’t search for runaways.” “Your husband beat you up? Well, come on in and sign a complaint.” The bare minimum of the law was enforced. A fuming lieutenant ordered his men to make no fewer than two arrests a day; patrolling a hundred and eighty square miles of turbulent southwest Houston with twenty cars, they had spent most of their time enjoying the scenery. They had given up.
The homicide division, traditionally the elite corps of any department, had to handle fifty-six different classifications of crime, including all offenses against the person where greed is not the motive. “The cases that the rest of the guys won’t work, they lump on us,” said a fatigued detective.
Dedicated homicide officers were soon driven to ulcers and headaches. Most of the forty-two investigators in the division had long since produced a deliberate slowdown. “We disregard hundreds of crimes,” said one. “There’s enough murders alone to keep us occupied, without touching any of the other fifty-five classifications that come under our jurisdiction. We leave those cases to the men in uniform, or we just ignore them. You know how we handle a wife-beating? We tell the woman to file charges, then we send the husband a letter and tell him to come in and post bond. We never go out and arrest them; we’d be doing nothing else.”
Said another homicide detective, “Our division works only murders, period, and not every murder, either. We just say, ‘Well how much time are we gonna spend on this murder? If society hasn’t suffered a great loss, why, let’s go home and call it a day.’” Most such cases were secretly termed “misdemeanor murders,” and most of them were black.
On a typical morning, a jovial homicide lieutenant summoned one of his men. “Come on in here, I’ve got a real fine murder case for you.”
“Another one?” the detective said.
The lieutenant said, “Now I want you to get your ass out there and knock on doors and ring some telephones! I don’t want you fuckin’ around here in the office, y’understand?” He winked broadly at a visitor.
“Boss,” the detective said, “I ain’t prejudiced, but is it white or nigger?”
“It’s white, and you get to work now, heah?”
The detective picked up the folder, grumbling good-naturedly. He would examine the bones of the case and make a quick judgment on how much time he should allot—maybe an hour, maybe a day, perhaps two or three, but almost never longer. A few of the youngest homicide detectives, unblooded and raw, chased clues in their off-hours, but they soon slowed down. “They come in here ready to solve our whole backlog,” said an old-timer, “but they get over it. That eager-beaver business, it’s not a terminal disease.”
Only one type of homicide was consistently accorded the full treatment, with the crime lab dusting for latent prints, two or three teams of detectives interrogating neighbors and friends of the victim, staff meetings with the lieutenants and captain on strategies, and hyperextended investigations. The murder of a prominent Houstonian, or a wealthy one, brought enthusiastic police attention. “We’d never let a uniformed patrolman work a murder involving important people,” said a veteran of the homicide division. “That’s rule number one, two and three.”
Rule number four was that in certain neighborhoods of Houston, the ones lacking in “important” people, one could cut corners, and murder might go undetected, let alone unsolved, for years.
Or forever.
*Doubleday and Company, 1971.
*Who announced his resignation at the end of 1973.
The View from the Heights
JUST TO THE NORTHWEST OF DOWNTOWN is a tired old neighborhood called The Heights, not quite a slum except for a few blocks, but plainly too afflicted with civic arteriosclerosis to resist slum-hood much longer. At night, when other parts of Houston sparkle and hum, The Heights is dark and silent under its canopy of gnarled and twisted trees, the streetlights at each corner blotted by leaves. The rare pedestrian walks in blackness, crossing under the soft blue glow of a light and then passing back into darkness, stepping into potholes and picking up the gray-white clammy mud of old shell streets, rutted and patched.
The Heights is futuristic Houston’s doddering relation. It was christened in the late 1800’s, an unsophisticated era before developers learned the sales appeal of names like Tall Timbers and Post Oak and Kashmere Gardens. The neighborhood towered a dizzying seventy-five feet in altitude, twenty-three feet above the b
acterial swamps of the rest of Houston, and its rarefied air was thought to rejuvenate the lungs and purify the soul. In yellow-fever epidemics, thousands of frightened citizens grabbed their belongings and hiked to The Heights, and from these original tent villages with their howling babies and jaundiced adults a pastoral community slowly arose. Real-estate promoters saw the potential in the 1890’s, and one of them, Daniel Denton Cooley, ancestor of Houston’s renowned heart surgeon, stimulated interest by erecting the neighborhood’s first mansion, an eight-bedroom house with every modern convenience, including ruby-red windows to discourage flies. The Cooley home was on the fanciest street in all of Texas: Heights Boulevard, designed as a showpiece by the developers, with fifteen-foot sidewalks, two paved thoroughfares of thirty feet each, and a green esplanade in the middle, planted in shrubs and trees and measuring sixty feet across. Wolves prowled at night and Mrs. Cooley kept her children upstairs for safety.
Through the years the area filled with the steady middle class, and by the time the city of Houston annexed the prosperous suburb in 1918 it measured six and a half square miles of solid bourgeoisie. Most of the houses were simple bungalows, set on stilts or pier-and-beam foundations against the moisture. On the avenues, there were a few edifices to rival Cooley’s: stately homes with gables and parapets and spacious upper-story screened porches, houses with massive oaken doors and laminated pillars and ceilings forty feet high, built on lots nearly two hundred feet deep and as wide as the owner’s ambitions.
With lavish assistance from nature, the industrious burghers landscaped in magnolia and Confederate jasmine, oleander and hibiscus and Heavenly Blue morning-glories, fragile day lilies of pink and garnet and lollipop yellow, lush green banana trees and oaks, Chinese tallows and jack pines. Some of the trees grew topcoats of sinuous vines and others dripped Spanish moss nearly to the ground. Heavy rain and dazzling sun alternated, and the puddles of the neighborhood gave life to whole universes with every shower of summer. Shallow drainage ditches were dug in place of sidewalks, and there were hardly any walkways. By such simple methods, the area kept itself relatively dry, at least compared to the rest of the sodden town, and as green as the bowling lawns of Surrey.
Man-made tropical parks require immense care, constant effort with pruning hooks and trowels and shovels, and when they begin to fade, they fade fast. The Heights remained stable until World War II, but America’s new mobility was too much for the staid old neighborhood. Younger generations that might have been content to remain in the musty homes of their childhood, living off patriarchal indulgence and later inheriting the places for themselves, now were swept away by the swirls and currents of war and postwar. In the early 1950’s, when cities were still short on housing and Houston had become the mecca for every failed rancher and displaced cowpoke in Texas and Oklahoma and Louisiana, homes in The Heights began to be split into floor-through apartments, and split again into individual rooms. Land in the fractionating neighborhood dropped in price, cheap labor was plentiful, and small factories and foundries and machine shops began to appear, unburdened by zoning laws. The dominant examples of new get-rich architecture were prefabricated sheds, cheap and simple and easy to erect, good for turning a quick dollar but an effrontery to the eye in their unseemly coats of robin’s-egg blue and Day-Glow orange, as though flash and color could make up for designed tawdriness. Cottage industries proliferated; junk stores thrived on the stream of objets d’art pouring from the crumbling mansions. Hand-lettered signs appeared in windows, SEWING, NEEDLEWORK, WASHING, and there were handy-Andy repair shops with greasy machinery propped among the shrubs and the roses on the lawns. The area around Yale Street, once a center of commerce in The Heights, was infiltrated by Army-Navy stores, loan shops, fresh vegetable stands, storefront churches (JESUS SAVES AND SATISFIES), ma-and-pa groceries and hamburger joints and pizza parlors and every kind of small, underfinanced business except taverns, which remained banned under an old law.
Now the people who once had heard nothing louder than the clip-clop of the milkman’s morning horse began to hear the raucous bawling of Diesel horns as railroads transported the commerce of the Gulf Coast megalopolis along the edges of The Heights. Cross-country freights hauled sulphur and liquefied gas in jumbo tank cars; gray Cotton Belt cars were loaded with rice for the north and west, while whole trains of Kansas and Oklahoma wheat and sorghum and milo rumbled into the port of Houston in ninety-ton covered hoppers, shaking the earth and savaging sleep. Spur tracks reached out from the Southern Pacific and the Katy on the southern edge of The Heights and citizens’ ears were assaulted daily by the locomotives’ crossing signals, repeated at each corner, as creaking boxcars were eased onto the new factory sidings. Trains rode over and under most of the rest of Houston, on bridges and through tunnels, but they crossed The Heights at grade level, and the flashing barriers were lowered so often that residents took to driving around them, cheating death. Most of them succeeded.
By the 1970’s, The Heights had become a broken collection of mini-neighborhoods and subneighborhoods with no over-all character of its own and no common cause except suspicion of outsiders. On the fringe were shabbily decadent areas, displaced Appalachias, where one could imagine retarded children or senile aunts locked away in attic crawls, muttering in the shadows. Spotted about the shady overgrown streets, there were still a few antique mansions, with turrets slightly askew and windows cracked and weeds hip-high over abandoned formal gardens, their gazebos rotting and their trellises splintering, but proud homes nonetheless, held together with twine and occasional dippings into capital by bent and withered figures who detested tax collectors and spouted senile curses at trespassers.
Whole blocks of The Heights were stubbornly kept neat and clean, garnished with flowers, lawns carefully manicured, houses repainted every three or four years, but even in the middle of these prideful areas one saw occasional falling-down bungalows out of Erskine Caldwell, slanting porches strewn with abandoned refrigerators and washing machines, muddy front yards scarred by tire tracks, and no blade of grass to hide the damage, gray, weathered, slatternly houses inhabited by the poor. Bony children played with chrome shopping carts “on loan” from the supermarkets. Families adjourned to the front steps on Sunday afternoon, lacking the funds to attend the refrigerated sports events at the Astrodome, and drank beer and listened to country-and-western music. Withered ladies perambulated along the streets, sheltering their heads from the sun with fragile umbrellas that were hastily lowered when the wind came up. The rolling stock of the neighborhood was six—and eight-year-old Mustangs and Corvairs and Ramblers, and the fondest hope of any teen-ager was to get a ten-speed bike for Christmas, or a nearly junked Corvette or motorcycle to overhaul. If it could be made to run, that was an unexpected bonus.
For the most part, the foodstuffs of these people tended to be the traditional starches and greens of the rural South. Women bore many children quickly, and thickened about the middle; men were reminiscent of the vaudeville line, “I used to have a four-inch chest expansion, but that’s all behind me now.” The staples were potatoes, white bread, baking soda biscuits, grits, rice, beans of all types from wax to red, and sometimes the cheaper cuts of meat, all washed down with six-packs of cold beer, iced tea supersaturated with sugar, or canned soda pop. The desserts and snacks were chemicalized confections like Hostess Twinkies, Oreo cookies, cupcakes and fried pies, chocolate doughnuts, potato chips, gooey candies and pralines. The residents followed their protruding stomachs to the grave, blissfully untutored in disciplines like diet and nutrition. “You can’t expect these people to bother with things like that,” an understanding journalist explained. “They’re too busy coping with what they can see and hear, what they can feel with their hands. They don’t extrapolate, they don’t philosophize. Life is tough enough without throwing in intangibles like body ecology, pollution, without worrying about clean air and how much protein you ate for breakfast. Things like that are for River Oaks, not The Heights. So the place en
ds up with tired blood, a complete lack of vitality. What the hell, the people don’t get their name in the papers except when they die, and then it’s just a half inch of type, if the funeral director remembers to phone it in before the first edition. No newsmakers live here, no wealthy, no civic leaders, no socialites. It’s a sad, tired place. The rest of Houston kind of forgot about it.”
In recent years the soporific neighborhood has shown a stirring of interest in certain social matters, such as the thickening cloud of blacks and Chicanos on the borders. “A subject like that attracts their attention,” says Craig Washington, a civil rights leader. “The white people in The Heights are the ones who weren’t affluent enough to flee, and they’re beginning to feel trapped. They’d get out in a second if they could, but they don’t have enough money, so instead they start worrying about law and order.”
Traditionally crime was never a problem in The Heights, earlier because of the close-knit community life, later because there was so little to steal. Burglars might reside there, but they committed their misdeeds in Houston’s mushrooming suburbias or in the business sections. A few years back, a fey lunatic called The Heights Phantom stalked the dark streets, but only a few timid ladies took him seriously when he appeared naked at their doors and then ran off cackling into the shadows. After his arrest, no one could make a positive identification. “The girls couldn’t remember anything above the waist,” said a bemused detective. “They wanted a nude showup!” The Phantom was released and told to pull himself together.
Such were the grave crime problems of The Heights, shielded from larceny and burglary by its own austerity, and fully dedicated to the mythic principles embodied in the supercharged political phrase: “law and order.” The real crime rate was negligible; there was almost no murder, in sharp contrast to the rest of Houston, and Richard Nixon’s Silent Majority, a chimera in some parts of the country, was dominant.
