A Mystery Solved

Rural Denton County reminds me more of New England than of Texas. The streets have a curious history of being repeatedly washed away and sloppily repaved--they rise like an elongated mound of pebbled blacktop barely wide enough for two cars to pass, both cars tilted sideways. One time we found ourselves head to head with a "doolie", a farm pickup truck with two tires on each rear axle, and we had to pull over to the side to let him pass--our two right tires were completely off the pavement.

In the fall, large elms and oaks blot the sun into jigsaw-patterned shadows on the road. A small wooden bridge spanning the creek was finally washed away in a "gullywasher"--a large flash flood rose over ten years ago, taking a car off the bridge into the woods and drowning the driver. A month or two later when I drove by there was a sign which read "My Dad Died Here". It made me reflect that it was a lonely place to die.

The numerous short, straightly-arranged post oak groves led some people to say "Oh, you live out in the 'sticks'..." I'm not sure if there is an intentional reference to the river Styx in mythology, but that is the way the term is often applied--as though one in this area lives at the edge of the world. And even though it's not far from the main drag, turning onto this road makes you feel as though you might be at the end of the earth. It is very quiet.

My brother-in-law, Greg, and his family live in a single-level ranchhouse nestled along this road--they love the solitary feeling of being surrounded by the trees and spreading land--and I don't blame them. They live on 25 acres, with a large red barn full of spiders and mice off to the side of the property. A freshly dug farm pond sits along the northernmost border of the lot. At night you can walk out and see thousands of stars that you can't see in the city--choked out by the blaring lights.

Greg is not really fit for country living, particularly because he is afraid of all animals, great and small. One of the funniest memories of my life is trying to help him round up cows which had gotten in with a neighbor's herd. I could tell that Greg didn't want anything to do with touching the cows, which at first made me laugh--I mean, did he expect them to follow him home like the Pied Piper of Hamlin? So, the farmer who wanted us to collect our cows just dropped a couple of feed cubes into a tray and shook them loudly and then the whole herd immediately ran in our direction--Greg's eyes swelled with fear and I laughed and laughed. We moved the cattle into a pen and let them out one by one, keeping our cows in the pen, roping them, and then "walking" them home. They didn't want to move, so we somehow got the bright idea of tying the other end of the rope to a truck bumper to give them a tug. Luckily, we didn't pull the cow's head off, although I believe we got close. Eventually, we untied the cow and she, tired of our idiocy, just took off running down the road--guess I didn't realize that a cow could outrun a person--and jumped the fence into her own pasture. We stood, mud-soaked and embarrassed, near the guillo-truck.

One autumn day a few years ago, Greg pulled out onto the rural street in front of his house. After getting ten seconds down the road, nearly to the edge of his property line, he spotted a man slumped over in the ditch near a fence. Terrified, he hopped out of his truck and discovered, to his horror, a worker hired by his next-door neighbor--he had been out working in the area for a few weeks now. The top of his head was sheared off, much like the top of a jack-o-lantern. His brain had come out of his skull and was laying next to him on the ground, along with a thick chunk of bone. The loud droning of the still-running gas-powered trimmer permeated the air. Unthinking, and seemingly in slow-motion, Greg reached down and flipped the switch to turn it off.

There was clearly nothing to be done for the man. His body was still warm when Greg touched him on the arm.

Almost immediately, another car pulled up and a man got out. He held his hand over his mouth in astonishment at the sight. Greg could bring himself to say nothing, but dialed the police on his cell phone, and then his wife, just a few hundred yards away.

The men conjectured that the worker could have fallen and had an accident--perhaps he had injured himself with the trimmer, or cut himself on a piece of metal on the ground. They didn't try to solve the mystery at the time--they were anxious to get away from the grisly scene.

A few weeks later, the police released a report with the conclusion that the worker had been shot from a distance with a high-powered rifle.

Obviously, everyone felt a sadness for the loss of the worker, and then fear set in. Someone was stalking these remote woods with a high-powered rifle, and it was pretty scary. From the site of the murder, one could see a fishing spot where I would take my young son. Sitting by the pond and aware of the shooting, I could envision someone watching us through a rifle scope. The police had no leads, no ideas--not even a traceable bullet fragment.

The worker, a poor man who lived with his parents and was driven to work every day, was briefly mnourned but seemingly forgotten a little too easily. Years started to tick by with no resolution.

Last week, one of the infamous D.C. snipers admitted that, before their well-publicized shooting spree in Washington D.C. and Maryland, they committed a practice run in rural Denton County, killing a worker on the side of the road.

Case closed.