Free Evil Eyes by Corey Mitchell Page B

provided on Watts’s Metro application, but

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    it turned out to belong to Garland Silcox, Watts’s friend who let Watts use his address as a mail drop-off. Bostock also circulated more photographs of Watts to area police officers.
    On November 19, 1981, Bostock was finally able to track down Watts. The detective and two police officers headed over to the bus barn where Watts worked on Milby Street, where they were able to attach a tracking device to Watts’s Pontiac Grand Prix.
    The following morning the Houston Police Department communication specialists were able to track Watts’s location. The car was located at the 6600 block of Sylvan Road at the Idylwood Apartments. Bostock went out to the complex to confirm.
    Unfortunately, the modern spy technology would prove to be unsuccessful. Watts discovered the tracking device and took his car to a garage to have it removed. Once again he had eluded the authorities. It would be several months before Houston authorities were able to catch up with him.

    A few days later, in December 1981, Kathy Whitmire was named the new mayor of Houston. The rank-and-file police officers were ecstatic. Their candidate had won. They were more excited because they believed Whitmire’s election afforded them certain political capital. Namely, a new police chief.
    From January 1982 to March 1982, Interim Chief John Bales took over the reins of police chief. His tenure was short-lived.
    Mayor Whitmire selected Lee P. Brown, who had just served as the commissioner of public safety for the city of Atlanta, Georgia, to step in as the official police chief.

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    While in Atlanta, Brown oversaw the city’s police, fire, corrections, and civil defense departments. He also helped ease the city during the infamous “Atlanta Child Murders” by alleged serial killer Wayne Williams. Brown became Houston’s first black police chief.
    One of Chief Brown’s main objectives was to right the ship known as HPD that had gone astray. He noted that several divisions were severely understaffed and those that had enough people were not being paid enough. Officers and detectives were not receiving overtime pay; therefore, fewer investigations were under-taken and more crime continued on unabated and uninterrupted. Poor pay opportunities led to less appli-cants for positions; which led to lower-quality employees; which led to much poorer protection of the citizenry.
    Fertile ground for a streetwise serial killer.
    Fertile ground for a new mayor and police chief to step in and make a difference.

CHAPTER 11

    Phyllis Ellen Tamm—or Ellen, as she was commonly known by her friends and family, since her mother was also named Phyllis—was a tough cookie. Five years earlier, she left a relationship with a man in Memphis, Tennessee, that she felt was going nowhere. She packed her bags and headed southwest for Houston, Texas.
    When Ellen arrived in Houston, she quickly found a place on the 4800 block of Montrose, two blocks south of Highway 59 and five blocks north of Bissonnet Street in the Montrose area that Texas Monthly dubbed “the strangest neighborhood in Texas.”
    Twenty-seven-year-old Ellen Tamm never had a short-age of dates. She actually was dating several men at one time. One of her male companions, John Eugene Hill, was actually more of a “brother-sister” relationship, since he was a self-proclaimed homosexual. Hill and Tamm had been close friends for four years. They shared their most intimate secrets with one another, but they did not have a sexual relationship. Tamm often vented with Hill about her man problems and the stress of her work situation. Tamm had another man in her life, with the last name of Elbert, from Memphis. Tamm’s relationship with

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    Elbert was considered quite shaky. Indeed, Hill later reported that Tamm often confided in him all of the problems she and Elbert were going through.
    Yet another man in Tamm’s life was Nash Baker