A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop Read Online Free PDF Page A

Baton Rouge assignment, Susan made plans to move to Houston with him. “I’m really in love with him,” she told her mother. “We want to be together.”
    “I knew she was hoping they’d get married,” says Sandra.
    Yet one more failure awaited Susan in Baton Rouge. Just before she left, she was arrested for forging a prescription for amphetamines and Valium. Ron and Gloria checked her into another hospital, and she went before a judge, swearing she was cured of her addictions. He gave her probation but stripped her of her nurse’s license.
    On moving day, Susan had little to pack. She’d accumulated few possessions in her thirty-five years.When she loaded up her old car for the six-hour drive to Houston, it included only clothing and personal items, a rolltop desk, and one antique table. But to Susan, it didn’t seem to matter.
    “She was happy as a lark,” remembers Sandra. It was a new start. Susan was leaving not only Louisiana behind but the failure and unrealized dreams that haunted her there.
    It was in Houston’s far northern suburbs that Susan and Ron rented a two-bedroom apartment on Wunderlich Road as they waited for his divorce to become final. Houstonians know it as the FM 1960 area, after its main thoroughfare.
    Decades earlier, this northern rim of Houston had been called Jackrabbit Run—its wild, thick pine forests deemed by inside-the-loop Houstonians as fit for only frogs, lizards, rabbits, and armadillos. But by the time Susan and Ron arrived, much of the forest had toppled in favor of roads, strip centers, and fashionable, walled-in subdivisions of two-story brick houses on small yards, many surrounding pristine golf courses and ostentatious country clubs. Families dominated the culture. Saturdays were traditionally spent cheering at Little League and soccer fields. A row of churches lined Klein Church Road, and restaurants stocked an abundance of high chairs.
    Susan settled in and adjusted easily to her new life with Ron. In the beginning it must have been all she’d hoped for. They took a romantic, two-week business trip to Scotland and England, where they roomed in ancient castles and dined in posh restaurants, lingering to snap a photo, arm in arm, in front of Loch Ness. They splurged on furniture, matching Rolex watches, all the things Susan wanted but could never before afford. It wasn’t unusual to find her flooring Ron’s Porsche onquiet, suburban side streets. “I bet she drove ninety miles per hour, minimum,” laughs Sandra. “She was on top of the world.”
    For the first time in her life, Susan belonged to a country club, Northgate Forest. It boasted a swimming pool, tennis courts, and a clubhouse with three-story windows that framed the verdant thirty-six-hole golf course and the half-a-million-dollar-and-up estates that surrounded it. Susan, already a good tennis player, took up Ron’s game of golf.
    To Susan, Northgate was a symbol of her newfound wealth, her entrance into the upper classes. But her past left her unprepared for the social mores she’d encounter. “She just wasn’t country-club material,” says one member. “When she’d sign up for the ladies’ league, no one wanted to golf with her. We formed teams and the loser, whoever had an empty slot, got stuck with Susan. She was loud, laughed too much, and she would say anything that came into her head. She told you more than you wanted to know about her personal life. She
really
wasn’t country-club material.”
    In early 1986, Ron’s divorce became final and they applied for a marriage license. Perhaps she sensed he was reluctant to legalize their relationship, or maybe it was just an example of her playful nature, but on March 29, as he rounded the curve at the fifteenth hole, she had a justice of the peace waiting. In shorts and golf shirts, a clutch of lace pinned to her visor, Susan and Ron repeated their vows. Afterward, they toasted with champagne, his golfing buddies made an arch of clubs for the