Free Evil Eyes by Corey Mitchell Page A

police brought in giant klieg lights to spotlight the murder scene. The lights shone on

    80 Corey Mitchell

    Wolf’s exposed chest. “Her blouse was open and her breasts were exposed. I didn’t really think much about it because I was used to seeing Suzi walk around naked all the time. It was no big deal.”
    Suzi’s dead body lay motionless in her H.I.S. Chic blue jeans. She wore a short-sleeved white Andrea blouse, a long-sleeved Gardenia brown shirt, a pair of black Playboy bikini panties, a pair of size-5 beige pants, and a pair of brown Wild Pair strapped heels on her feet. Her right arm was bent at the elbow and her hand appeared as if it were resting on her right hip. She was clutching her set of keys in that same hand.
    Suzi Wolf’s body was eventually claimed by her family and flown back to Michigan, where she was buried. Murphy chose not to return to her home state for the fu-neral. She felt she would cause too much of a disruption amongst Suzi’s family if she were to return, since she and Suzi had been fighting.

    September 13, 1981, the day that Elizabeth Ann Montgomery and Suzi Wolf were murdered, also just so happened to be Coral Watts’s last day at Welltech.

CHAPTER 10

    As the murders began in Houston, most officials failed to take notice. The reason being: the big mayoral campaign season was in high gear. Mayor Jim McConn was running for reelection against Harris County sheriff Jack Heard and city controller Kathy Whitmire. The race was a contentious one. Most people did not want McConn back in office due to some allegedly shady business dealing and “insider deals,” according to Richard Murray in his book Power in the City: Mayoral Elections and Patterns of Influence in Houston, Texas.
    That left Heard and Whitmire.
    The contenders split the police ranks down the middle. The Patrolman’s Union, or the rank-and-file street beat cops, supported Whitmire, while the Policeman’s Association backed Sheriff Heard. The division was a dis-traction. Many officials believed that the Houston Police Department lost its focus during the 1981 to 1982 mayoral campaign and took its collective eye off its number one responsibility: the safety of its citizens.
    One Houston police officer, however, did not lose sight of his major objective. Detective Doug Bostock had been doing his best to locate and track Watts. Bostock received

    82 Corey Mitchell

    information that Watts was spotted in Houston wearing a Metropolitan Transit Authority, or Metro, work uniform. Watts got a new job as a mechanic working on the city’s buses. He had the pre-graveyard shift from 7:00 P . M . to 3:00 A . M . As a result, Watts moved from his apartment on Eagle Lake to the Idylwood Apartments on Houston’s seedier southeast side at the 6600 block of Sylvan Road, near the Gulf Freeway and Wayside Drive. It was not unusual for Watts to work twelve-hour shifts with Metro.
    Watts did well enough that he was able to purchase a second vehicle. On October 21, 1981, he paid $1,960 in cash for a 1976 blue Dodge van from the Fair Deal Auto Sales car lot, located on the 2000 block of Broadway Street. According to one of the Fair Deal employees, Watts definitely made an impulse buy. He apparently came to the car lot, spotted the van, and told the salesman that he wanted it and would be right back. He returned four hours later with the cash in hand. He drove the van off the parking lot soon thereafter.

    On November 2, 1981, Kathy Whitmire and Sheriff Jack Heard won the runoff spots for the mayoral election. Mayor Jim McConn would not be reinstated into office. The rift between the Houston Police Department’s rank-and-file and management became even more strained. The focus of the police department continued to drift away from its citizenry as each side looked to score deals from the next prospective mayor.

    Meanwhile, Detective Bostock continued to pursue the ever-elusive Watts. He sent a team of surveillance officers to the address