Free Luggage By Kroger: A True Crime Memoir by Gary Taylor

trap. Before
leaving the library, he and his sidekicks taped together
chalkboards and textbooks to build what became known as their
"Trojan Horse" to shield them as they and the hostages walked
through the door and down a ramp to the armored car. When the hoses
failed to topple the horse, the shooting began. Within minutes, two
of the hostages lay dead beside Carrasco and Dominguez. And Cuevas
would spend the next seventeen years fighting the death penalty,
with the state's top criminal appellate lawyer, Will Gray, winning
appeals for Cuevas on three convictions before Cuevas finally
received a lethal injection in 1991. I did not know it then, but
Gray was destined to play an important role in my relationship
later with Catherine Mehaffey.

    My previous work developing the
prison beat paid off the morning after the siege when I got an
exclusive interview with the system's bedraggled director, Jim
Estelle. With most of the deadline work completed just after the
shootout and unable to sleep, I had wandered over to The Walls from
our offsite motel room sanctuary to find the prison grounds
deserted, the tents emptied, and the grass littered with coffee
cups and other debris. Concluding no one was around, I prepared to
leave when a car drove by. Estelle sat behind the wheel, all alone,
and he spotted me. He pointed a finger toward his office window and
nodded. While he parked his car, I entered the administration
building that stood just a few hundred yards from the last night's
carnage. We talked for two hours about the event, the burdens of
responsibility, the realities of crime and punishment, and the myth
of rehabilitation. When we were done, I had a page one story. And
Estelle had the rest of his life to punish himself for all the
tragic things that went wrong.

    I wish I could say I nailed the best story
from the Carrasco siege with my interview of Estelle, but another
reporter trumped that the next day. He cornered the local justice
of peace who had authority in that rural area to declare the cause
of death for Carrasco and Dominguez. His decision:
Suicide.
    "Suicide?"

    "Yep, suicide," said his honor.
"Everybody knows it's just plain suicide to go up against the Texas
Rangers."

    ELEVEN
    Mid-1970s

    As a general
assignments reporter at The Post during the 1970s, I polished a reputation for
versatility. I showed I could handle soft features, hard-breaking
news and investigative challenges. The paper sent me to spend a
weekend in a Texas nudist camp. I covered a Ku Klux Klan rally. I
sat with blind children at a circus. I attended an underwater
wedding held in a tank on the front lawn of a church where a
skin-diving minister married a skin-diving couple who wrote their
"I dos" on an underwater slate. I stood in line for the
movie Jaws and
wrote a feature about the people willing to wait to see a movie. I
covered explosions. Every day was a new adventure. I joined a
prison inmate as he left The Walls after serving a sentence for
marijuana possession and experienced his first three days of
freedom with him. I won a statewide enterprise reporting award for
work on a series of stories exposing the use of electric cattle
prods by a local police department to extract
confessions.

    In late 1975 I
received an unexpected phone call from a recruiter for the weekly
tabloid scandal sheet, The National
Enquirer . He said he had read one of
my Post features
about the tactics of bill collectors headlined "Wolf at the Door"
and thought that I might be Enquirer material. Still a bit confused over whether I
wanted to be " Enquirer material," I nevertheless joined him for breakfast. As a
result I used four weeks of vacation in January 1976 living in the
Lantana, Florida, Holiday Inn and earning about three times
my Houston Post salary on a "tryout" with The
Enquirer to sample the tabloid
experience.

    My sojourn
at The Enquirer proved to be one of the most interesting escapades in my
journalism career. It also served to invigorate my