Bruceville – Eddy, Tx – When the dude started squirting his old lady down with the accelerant liquid – gasoline – she turned her head away.
“I couldn’t stand to watch it.”
The smell – well, that was a familiar sensation.
She trails the fingertips of her right hand down the button line of her blouse’s bodice.
“My ex old man tortured me with burning plastic,” she recalls. “I know the smell.” Prior to her break with the man and his rival club, the one she can no longer associate with – her ex-family – she was owned, as property.
She alleges she – the slave he lay down with at night – somehow provoked him to the extent that he set a roll of plastic film ablaze and let the burning material drip on her bared chest.
If you ask where, she will tell you it’s in this prairie city on Interstate 35, south of Waco, astraddle the McLennan – Falls County line – at a single-family tract house with a garage attached by a dog-run breezeway.
The County Line splits the little prairie town at its southern extremity; she’s not sure in which county she beheld this event from hell.
It’s the place where a 1%’er chapter of the Cossacks MC at one time attended church after their anomalous beginnings by a Nomad founder.
“At the time, it was the only place I could hang out – where I was allowed to hang out.”
Ask who, and she will just smile and leer at you sideways, from the corners of her eyes. Her expression says it all. Quoth John Dryden, it could be the bell tolls for thee.
When is no challenge for a stepper. You see, an outlaw couple from a black and gold club just up and disappeared, never to be seen or heard from again, first herself, and then himself – poof!
Gone. Any credible investigator of fact would be totally reluctant to even think of going any further about the business of preparing an affidavit of probable cause to which he must swear by oath or affirmation.
Let’s get into what. It’s called murder – capital murder – and this alleged murder by fire set intentionally – arson – is particularly gruesome, the kind of inescapable execution prison cliques such as the Aryan Brotherhood and their Texas cousins, the Aryan Circle, reserve for thieves, rats, rapos, pedophiles, spies, and traitors. It’s right up there with the redneck lynching, the Roman crucifixion, the medieval poisoning, or the various permutations of bombing by stealth.
Naturally, just like any other mob, the standard of proof of these transgressions is, to this clique – well, nearly nonexistent.
That ought to satisfy the age-old question, how.
In a world of total chickenshit, on a list of depredations so totally foul, it shares the top of the list with a select number of ways to send a message.
The all-important complication is the complete lack of corpus delicti – that is, the body of the crime.
The mere allegation of a double homicide, the first perpetrated by the victim of a second killing designed to completely eliminate the problem, is hardly sufficient, even to compel an investigation, under current legal standards and practices.
But it’s in the details, the only source of proof available, as legally insufficient as it may be. Her recall is very detailed.
“She didn’t say a word. She knew it was too late.”
The man squirted the gasoline out of a plastic squeeze ketchup bottle, doused the chick, his old lady, who had stolen his drugs and did them with other dudes, his rivals – and then ran her head about it.
“He still owed money for the dope.”
It was the stinging rebuke of disloyalty that triggered the tipping point, she says. “She was saying, ‘Look, here’s just how bad this mo________er really is. I did this, and here I am. See?'”
She strikes a pose, one foot pointed at the pavement, toe down, the other firmly planted, her arms extended, palms up, as if to begin an acrobatic series of steps in some whirling and derisive dance.
“When he told her, she didn’t say a thing. She just waited for it to happen…I turned my head away. I couldn’t watch. He made sure. He kept squirting her with the gasoline.”
But that wasn’t enough to escape the hellish vision.
“She screamed and screamed, until she couldn’t scream any more.”
Maybe the screams told her something – woman to burning woman. Maybe she was able to – like – ratiocinate the meaning of the language of terror and death.
“It was like she set it up; she did it to make sure, to get out of this – life of hers – to end it all.” Her eyes are focussed on a point just north of the toes of her shoes. Her voice goes away, far and wee. She breaks the spell by stabbing with her eyes, lamping her interlocutor with her vision.
Why did she remain at the scene of the murder? Why didn’t she run away?
“They were between me and the door, the door that led to the breezeway. I was with my back to the roll up door of the garage…You never forget the sound of some things.”
So, she stood transfixed, until the hellish moment passed into eternity.
It was a sound some other people heard, but never remarked. It is her belief, though she could not see. Her eyes cut to the side, squinting into the past, peering at something unseen.
“There was someone on the other side of the door; they never said anything.”
The end of the story is completely macabre, but it is so totally predictable. “Then they killed him. That eliminated the problem.”
Question: Why would this man, this murderer who had just signed his own death warrant, leave a witness to tell the tale?
Perhaps such an act is not nearly as significant if there is no one to share the horror of the memory, the stink of burning flesh and hair, the final screams of agony.
Perhaps.
In popular usage, corpus delicti also refers to the actual physical object upon which a crime has been committed. In a case of arson, it would be a ruined building; in a murder case, the victim’s corpse. – Merriam Webster
WHAT IS THE LEGAL RULE ABOUT CORPUS DELICTI AND EVIDENCE BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT? https://www.greghillassociates.com/what-is-the-corpus-delicti-rule-about-sufficient-evidence.html
According to the confidential of this interview, the flames did not involve the structure in any significant way.
As to the story in its beginning, middle and end:
So mote it be.
As to its true significance, “¿Quien sabe?”
- The Legendary
A little background music:
Former Arson Cop: 2012 Trailer Blaze Was Murder, The Chosen Weapon – Fire
DA Abel Reyna’s Decision To End A Fireman’s Career – In Extreme Prejudice