Faces of Evil Page 20

  Chris was gentle and charming and when I got up to go, he suddenly drew me into a big hug and said, “I thought I would never find my big sister. Thank you so much for helping me find my Sissy!”

  Doing age progression can be pretty tricky but on the long drive home I reflected that, were Tina and Chris the only people I was ever going to be able to help in my entire career…then it would all be worth it.

  However, my work for Tina turned out to be only the first difficult age progression on which I worked. My next one was also tricky.

  The summer of 1964 had been hot and lazy in Houston, Texas. The year before, there had been 120 murders reported and though the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas a few months before had shaken the country to its core, there was still a soft patina of innocence that overlay American life in general. The Vietnam War was only just beginning to intensify and the race riots and other violent changes that would take place in society throughout the sixties and seventies had not yet reached a fever pitch. Barry Goldwater was poised to take the Republican nomination for president and President Lyndon Johnson was already portraying him as a reckless hawk.

  The Beatles had come to town and gone, but the “British Invasion” of rock groups had yet to hit our shores in waves. Music of the day was sedate; crooners like Sam Cooke, Perry Como and Rick Nelson as well as instrumentalists like Al Hirt and Henry Mancini were selling millions of record albums. Cigarette advertisements lit up the air waves and magazine pages. The sporty Ford Mustang was introduced and shouldered its way through the muscle cars of the day like the GTO and Thunderbird. A mouthy unknown boxer by the name of Cassius Clay TKO’d Sonny Liston for the heavyweight championship of the world. Julie Andrews won an Oscar for playing a British nanny in Mary Poppins and on TV, Gomer Pyle, USMC made soldiering something to laugh at.

  Most people were not yet desensitized to violence; bad things seemed to happen to people who lived somewhere else. People were far more scared of Russian Communists and the atomic bomb than they were of getting murdered. Some contemplated building bomb shelters in their back yards while they never thought to lock their own front doors.

  So when Thomas Martinez worked in his small northeast Houston store near 10 P.M. on the night of July 19, 1964, he thought nothing of letting his little boy, Tommy—ten years old at the time—hang out with him. Mr. Martinez, his brother James, an employee and Tommy were all in the store together when a man walked in and bought a soda. Suddenly, fire truck sirens blew past the building and James Martinez and the store employee ran outside to see what was going on.

  At that moment, the man pulled out a pistol. Yanking young Tommy in front of him, he held the pistol to Tommy’s head and demanded money.

  Terrified for his son, Martinez immediately opened the cash register and gave all the cash to the robber. “Please don’t hurt my son,” pleaded Martinez. “I’ll give you anything you want. Just don’t hurt him.”

  The robber shoved Tommy behind the counter and demanded, “Give me more.” Martinez pulled out his wallet and handed it over.

  Without a word, the robber shot Thomas Martinez in the chest and fled the store.

  Sweating and moaning, Martinez slumped onto the chair behind the cash register. “Carla,” he whispered (his wife’s name), “Carla…”

  And as his sobbing child looked on, Thomas Martinez died.

  The Martinez murder made the front page of the Houston Chronicle. According to reports, investigating officers later realized that the so-called “fire” that had drawn area fire fighters had been a false alarm, called in by the robber to distract the employee and brother of Thomas Martinez. They found the car of a man named Ora David Lott nearby and traced the vehicle’s ownership through a pawn ticket, but by the time police got to his home, he’d already left town.

  The FBI issued a warrant for Lott’s arrest, but four years later, when Lott still had not been found, the warrant was dropped. At the time this was routine procedure for the FBI, but for reasons that have never been explained—most likely a bureaucratic snafu—the murder and robbery charges against Lott were also dropped.

  In 1972, Lott was arrested for beating up a girlfriend in Florida. The girlfriend told Florida police that Lott was wanted for murder in Texas. But when investigators contacted the Houston Police Department, they found that the charges had been dropped. Lott slipped through the dragnet once again.

  When the mistake was discovered Lott was reindicted, but it was too late.

  He was long gone.

  A full generation later, violence permeated American culture. The first bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City had occurred. Pop star Michael Jackson had been accused of molesting a twelve-year-old boy. On TV, Beavis and Butthead made delinquent degeneration cool. Clint Eastwood dealt with a psychopathic assassin in In the Line of Fire and in the real Washington, D.C., Bill Clinton presided over a scandal-plagued White House.

  The Vietnam War was long over, but it seemed as if the war had somehow moved to the streets instead. Gang violence had exploded. Just the year before, Houston had dealt with a staggering 500 murders. As for me, I was struggling to juggle more than 300 cases a year as my children entered preadolescence, leaving me exhausted and frazzled.

  Meanwhile across town, a young man who had never gotten over witnessing the murder of his daddy on a hot July night thirty years before was still grieving, still angry. One day, still upset that the HPD had allowed the killer of his father to go free, he picked up the phone and called the Houston Police Department’s homicide division, asking what had become of the investigation into his father’s murder.

  When Detective C.P. “Abby” Abbondanolo pulled out the yellowed, typewritten report on the Martinez case, he was intrigued. Young and handsome, he’d been only two years old in 1964, but he was moved that the victim’s son still yearned for justice and he decided to do what he could to help. The first thing he needed to find out, if possible, was whether Ora Lott was still alive. To that end, he and assisting detectives combed through death records all over the country, but could find no evidence that Lott had died.

  That’s when he called me.

  “Lois,” he asked, “If I were to bring you a photo of a man who was thirty-three years old and ask you to make him look sixty-three, could you do it?”

  While he was telling me about the case, I became as fascinated as he was and decided to pry apart my stacked-up schedule to see if I could find a slot to do the drawing for Abby.

  Abby came over to see me with Tommy Martinez. Forty years old, Tommy had a stocky build and a pleasant smile. As we shook hands and talked, I could see the anxiety in his eyes and I completely understood his drive to find his father’s killer.

  “Don’t worry,” I assured him. “I just did an age progression of thirty years for a sister looking for her two brothers who’d been separated from her when they were babies. Believe me, this will be easy in comparison!” Peering at Lott’s mug shot, I added, “Basically, when you are doing the aging of an adult, you have to demonstrate the effects of gravity through the years on the face. I’m not going to promise that I’ll produce a dead-on portrait, but I’ll see what I can do, okay?”

  Relief etched his face. However, after Tommy Martinez left I stared out my office windows at the glaring summer sunshine and wondered how on earth I was going to fit this project in when I was hard at work on a slew of others: the murder of an east Texas college kid, the shooting of a highway trooper, the murder of an old woman by a vicious group of bank robbers, a rape survivor who couldn’t drive and needed me to do the sketch in her un-airconditioned home—(you can’t let sweat drip off your chin onto the pastels because it degrades their tones)—and a horrific murder case in Kansas that I was scheduled to do a drawing for within the week.

  As if that wasn’t enough scribbled throughout my appointment book, I had also promised to produce a painting for an upcoming charity auction.

  Now I’d claimed that I could do a thirty-year age
progression when I knew full well most forensic artists would have turned it down.

  “Oh, yeah, you idiot,” I muttered to myself. Feigning a singsong voice, I mimicked, “It’ll be easy in comparison!”

  To get it all done I decided I would have to do everything in bits and pieces, including the charity-auction painting and the age progression for Abby. Crammed in between witness appointments and a trip to Kansas, I’d snatch a half-hour here to work on the painting, fifteen minutes there on the Ora Lott age-progression. At least that was what I told myself.

  Since beginning is the hardest part of any age progression, I started by poring over photographs of World War II veterans that I found and juxtaposed next to their military photographs from the war. That gave me a good idea as to how most men age over a generation.

  I finally finished the age progression sketch the day before the charity auction. My painting sold for a nice sum to an organization that benefits literacy programs in the area and I got to have a night on the town in a sequined dress and satin shoes.

  Meanwhile, Abby worked on the Martinez case. After displaying the sketch on the evening news, Abby requested help from the public. Detectives J.R. Dees and John Bertolini of the Gulf Coast Violent Offenders Task Force were watching the broadcast. They immediately volunteered to help.

  Since they knew Lott was a veteran, the detectives checked to see if he had been drawing any veteran’s benefits and when they found that he had not been, they figured he had changed his name to evade capture through the years. However, they also knew that Lott had family in the Louisiana area, so they searched veteran’s hospital records there. They were able to turn up a man with a name that was almost identical to Lott’s and whose social security and date of birth were also very close. From that, they got an address.

  With help from the U.S. Marshals and armed with copies of my sketch, the two men knocked on the door of the man they believed to be Ora David Lott.

  An old man, large in size as Lott had been described, answered the door. “And he was a mirror image to your drawing,” a jubilant Abby later told me.

  “Are you Ora David Lott?” asked Detective Dees.

  The man scowled and answered, “No, I am not.”

  Dees held up my sketch and showed it to the man.

  With that, Lott shrugged, stepped back and allowed the law enforcement officers to enter his home. As they slipped on the handcuffs, one of the marshals asked Lott if he knew why he was being arrested.

  “I know I did something wrong thirty years ago,” he said.

  When we talked, Detective Dees said that, even though he had personally been responsible for the arrest of many violent felons pursued by the task force, he had never caught one who had been free for so long.

  “It’s an indescribable feeling,” he said. “Knowing that you have been able not only to catch a violent criminal, but also to help a family that has been living with this unresolved pain for the past thirty years.”

  Abby was even more excited. “I’ve been on the force for thirteen years,” he said, “and back in 1983, I caught a baby they threw out of a burning window.” With a satisfied wink and a nod, he added, “I’d put this one right on up there.”

  As for Tommy Martinez, he told newspaper reporters, “I’m looking forward to looking my father’s murderer in the eyes the way he did mine thirty years ago.”

  At the trial Ora David Lott pled guilty to murder, but because of his advanced years, the amount of time since the crime had been committed and the fact that there was no record of his having committed any other crimes during the time he was free, the court was lenient. He was given a ten-year sentence, but adjudication was deferred and he was placed in community supervision. After fulfilling his sentencing requirements, Ora Lott was discharged and the case dismissed with no conviction on his record.

  I know that Tommy Martinez and his family were disappointed that Lott’s punishment wasn’t more harsh, but I am certain that Tommy was still able to find some measure of peace, once he knew that his father’s killer had been held accountable for his crime.

  As for me, I was thrilled and gratified that my work had helped to solve a thirty-year-old case, but although I didn’t know it then, it had been a romp in the park compared to what was waiting for me in Newton, Kansas.

  It was one of those cases that would keep me lying awake for many long nights.

  Chapter Eleven:

  “Look Mommy! It’s a Picture of Daddy!”

  There is something my Houston friends don’t usually realize about me, and that is that I have what I like to call my “split personality.” Although I’ve chosen to live, work and raise my family in a major metropolitan area, and enjoy many aspects of big-city life down on the Gulf Coast of Texas…the truth is that my heart will always be firmly planted in the flatlands of Kansas. Deep inside, I’ll always be a small-town girl, and I’ll always have a real and abiding love and respect for people who come from the country.

  It’s hard to explain to outsiders the love I have for my home state, but you have to understand that there’s something hypnotic about the minimalist scenery and the wide-open spaces, the night sky arching overhead, sugar-frosted with stars. It gives you time to think, to ponder the unimaginable wonders of the universe and to realize, finally, who and what you really are.

  Kansas is populated by some of the most genteel, sensitive, and thoughtful people I’ve ever known, generous of spirit and kind of heart. Small rural towns in Kansas still possess the essence of innocence personified by the old TV show, The Andy Griffith Show—where good-hearted Sheriff Andy Taylor, his fumbling but well-intentioned deputy, Barney Fife, his little boy Opie and that great lady, Aunt Bee—go about their lives in Mayberry, a place where people never lock their doors and the most heart-wrenching crime occurs when Opie shoots a bird with his BB gun.

  For these reasons and many more, I always cherish my visits to family back home in Kansas. They all love me, of course, but there is an aspect of my life that they, too, don’t fully realize and that is the unstoppable flood of crime that flows through my office day after day after day. The human suffering that I must confront every day at work is something that—thank God—my loved ones never have to see. I wouldn’t want them to.

  As the summer started I was exhausted from the hundreds of cases I’d done sketches for and really looking forward to our annual Herbert family reunion that had always been held at my Grandma Andrews’s house. She lived on 150 acres near Urbana, Missouri. Every year, my husband Sid and the kids and I drove to Wichita, Kansas where my mom, dad and younger brother, Brent, and his family lived. My sister and her family would come in from Wakeeney, Kansas, and we’d all troop together to Grandma’s house.

  The trips to Kansas were always my sanctuary from the crime horrors of my daily life. It was always good to pick up the newspaper there and read about things like the local stock show or county fair, rather than the latest murders.

  However, lounging around at my brother’s house the day before our trek to the family reunion, I was shocked when I picked up a copy of the Wichita Eagle to read the brutal headline, Suspect, Break Sought in the Newton Killing.

  Beneath the headline were two very typically unsatisfactory Identikit sketches that looked like something that had been put together with a toy Etch-a-Sketch. A paragraph or two below that was a small photograph of a pretty blond lady with a big, beautiful smile, frozen forever at the age of thirty-six.

  Newton, Kansas, a small, predominantly Mennonite community, is located about five miles outside of Wichita. Their population now hovers near 17,000, but in 1994 was even lower. The Mennonites are similar in their belief system to the Pennsylvania Amish, only they do make use of modern conveniences. Still, it’s a conservative, strict religion. The church emphasizes community, family and strong commitment to social issues and voluntary service. The Mennonites’ is a religion of peace, known for conscientious objection to war. Some of the community’s members withhold the portion of the
ir income taxes that would go for military purposes.

  At that time, Newton was a town of working dads and stay-at-home moms, where life revolved around the churches and schools. People didn’t lock their doors and, until May 20, 1994, people weren’t savagely murdered there in their own homes.

  On that day, lovely Sarah Rinehart brought her six-year-old daughter, Jordan, and her daughter’s five-year-old friend, Ashley, home from a kindergarten field trip and settled them down with bowls of chocolate ice cream in front of the television set to watch cartoons.

  Suddenly there was a knock at the front door and when Sarah opened it, the quiet world of Newton, Kansas was forevermore exploded.

  A man shoved his way into the house, forced Sarah and the girls to the back of the house, where he herded the children into Jordan’s room, then dragged Sarah down the hall to her bedroom, threw her onto the bed, hog-tied her by her wrists and ankles, gagged her, and ripped her panties off.

  At this point, Jordan, who was frightened, ran back to her mother’s room, opened the door and saw her mother bound and gagged on the bed. She could tell that her mother was trying, desperately, to say something to her, maybe something like, Get out! Run!

  Paralyzed with terror, Jordan stood stock-still, her mother’s ravaged face forever burned into her mind.

  “Get back in your room!” screamed the man. He yanked Jordan up bodily, then stuffed her and Ashley into a closet.

  “Stay here or I’ll kill you,” he snarled.

  Then, while the little girls listened in horror, he bludgeoned Sarah Rinehart to death. The blows were so loud that Jordan thought her mother had been shot.

  The girls were rescued, later, by an uncle, but three weeks after that terrible day, when I was visiting my family, the murderer was still at large.

  In the tumultuous weeks that had followed the Sarah Rinehart killing, the traumatized community, with help from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, had raised a $10,000 reward for information leading to the capture of the killer and police had released those pitiful Identikit sketches.