Free A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop by Kathryn Casey Page B

parents and, on July 1, filed for a divorce to end her three-month marriage.Yet a few weeks later, Kent appeared at the Morgans’ front door, crying. Not long after, Michelle’s mother returned from work and found a note: “I’ve gone to Montana. I’ve just got to try one more time.” The next thing the Morgans heard, Michelle was pregnant.
    Kent and Michelle would eventually have four children together. “Each one was conceived during a reconciliation,” says Pam. “They went back and forth and back and forth.”
    By the fall, Kent had soured on the Air Force. Some say he disliked being away from home; others, that he found it difficult to follow orders. Poring over volumes of military programs, Kent analyzed the system and discovered the Palace Chase Program, an obscure procedure intended to allow soon-to-be-released personnel to leave early by volunteering to continue on in the Air National Guard.
    Although three years remained on his enlistment, Kent applied and was accepted into the program, his only commitment to work one weekend a month at Ellington Air Force Base, a small, rarely used facility southeast of Houston. Just fourteen months after entering basic training, in March 1984, Kent and Michelle returned to Texas, leaving him free to pursue his dream.
    Less than two months later, he applied at the Houston Police Department.
    Law enforcement in Houston, as it is in much of Texas, is a maze of overlapping agencies. School districts, airports, transit authorities, hospitals—each employs its own police force, fully empowered to carry guns and make arrests. Constables, originally intended to serve civil warrants, and the sheriff’s department, once little more than the authority that maintained the local jails, have also mushroomed over the decades into a complicated network of districts and precincts to patrol thefringes of the county, those areas that fall outside the city limits.
    Of them all, in law enforcement circles, H.P.D. was considered
the
place to work.
    “The department’s big enough for advancement,” explains one ex-cop. “Plus, the pay’s better, the facilities are better, and you’ve got the backup departments like forensics, homicide, sex crimes, et cetera. For a cop, it’s the top of the ladder. None of the other agencies measure up. Plus, it’s the city, it’s where all the action is.”
    From the beginning, H.P.D.’s siren call lured Kent.
    Once he’d applied, a series of steps clicked into place that would lead, if successful, to the badge he so coveted. Physical and psychological testing, medical examinations. It was H.P.D.’s polygraph that, at least temporarily, thwarted his dream. During it, Kent admitted he’d smoked marijuana within the previous year, an automatic flag requiring his rejection, since a regulation at the time held that no applicant could have used any illegal drug within one year of employment. Kent was told to wait out the year before reapplying.
    Ironically, another entry on the polygraph test went almost unnoticed. If considered, it might have indicated much of what Kent McGowen was really about and predicted what kind of a cop he would become. The remark that would be so telling noted that McGowen openly admitted being prejudiced against blacks, Hispanics, Asians, women—everyone but white men.
    While marijuana use quickly ruled out Kent’s immediate hiring at H.P.D., prejudice against the majority of people he would interact with on Houston’s highly diverse streets was not considered important enough to disqualify him. The report dismissed the importance of McGowen’s startling confession with the conclusion that “applicant stated he could work with any race or sex without letting prejudices interfere.”s
    Once H.P.D. had rejected him for a year, Kent McGowen searched for alternate avenues to his goal of a career in law enforcement. He first applied to a handful of small departments, all of which turned him down. Not to be denied, he bypassed