I recently posted this image of "GUS' BARBEQUE" on Facebook and got nearly 90 responses. Those responses and comments triggered a number of my own memories
In October of 1973 I had been pulled out of patrol to become the first Division Crime Analyst for the DPD. To provide an office space for me, Watch Commander’s Lt. Wayne Posey put me in the office right across the hall from him. His office was the first one on the right with you entered the door to 511, mine was on the left. It had been the Sector Sergeants’ office before Posey kicked them out… and they were not happy about it. But since I reported directly to Deputy Chief Bob Dixon no one made a fuss to me.
It wasn’t long after I started tracking the six major crimes groups in the Centrla Patrol District that I tumbled to a rapist with a penchant for using ‘cop jargon’, even going so far as to claim to be a Dallas Police Officer.
Tom Comvington was working a special assingment for Chief Dixon on downtown thefts, so Tom began spending a lot of time in my office where I maps on my walls with stick-on dots at the location of various crimes.
I began to look for this rapist’s M.O. Given the time between his offences in the Central Division, I considered he was probably working in the other patrol division territories. In stead of only receiving the rape offense reports, I asked to get and did receive copies of all sexual assault offences for the entire city.
The then three known cases of the newly tagged “Friendly Burglar Rapist” (FBR) in Central Division became ten when I located the same rape M.O. in Northwest and Northeast Patrol Divisions. The plotting and plodding chase was on. I was joined in that effort by Tom Covington.
Sometime in the 1974/5 time-frame Captain A.J. Brown was transferred to a new position and his old office on the second floor of 106 S. Harwood came vacant. Chief Dixon secured that office for me and Tom. The office was big enough to contain wall space for my maps, file cabinets and two desks, one for me and one for Tom. That office was located directly over the west entrance and steps to 106. S. Harwood.
NOTE: There were 3 of us (Jim Brian, Tom Covington and myslef) working undercover on capturing a vehicle burglar at a downtown hotel parking garage. Owing to the penchant southerners have to name and call boys by their first and middle name... for fun Tom started calling Jim, 'Jim Bob' and Jim called Tom, 'Tom Bob'... and because we all thought 'Bob Bob' was too much, I became, 'Billy Bob'.
From that office’s two large windows, we could watch people coming and going from the Harwood street entrance. At noon any number of folks could be seen Jaywalking directly across the street to Gus’ Barbeque at 107 S. Harwood... and back. Of course many of us went to the corner to cross 'legally.'
All ready a favorite it became our standard place for breakfast and lunch, along with ‘sending out’ or ‘going to’ Henderson’s for chicken.
It was an empty, greasy, brown paper bag from Henderson’s that became the holder of the our infamous ‘new method for predicting the FBR’s next offense’. Here are (for us) the hilarious details of: "The Map of the Stars" & “R.O. Dixon - the FBI and Chicken Bones” pages 255-258 of One Step from Murder, the Friendly Burglar Rapist, 2023 Updated Edition.
The Map of the Stars
WE WERE VERY serious about what we were doing however strange it seemed to others. We didn’t claim to be ‘detectives’, what we did however was never give up on trying to predict his movements and then interdict the FBR. That tenacity on our part seemed to unnerve certain of our fellow officers. Whether it was luck or good deductions on our part, the other thing that bothered our peers was that we were predicting, with some regularity the when and where of the FBR’s next hit.
Here are a couple of examples of how seriously our expertise was taken within the department... and conversely how seriously we took ourselves.
Our office and our maps were often the butt of jokes and conversation. At one point we had created a pin map in the office—trying to visually demonstrate the FBR’s activity—and wove thread (in chronological order) from one (pin) offense to another. The resulting form looked something like a strange-legged star.
One of the so-called detectives from one of the investigative bureaus “happened” by our office, came in and took one look at our strange, to him, maps and said, “I gotta take a picture of this.” A few minutes later he came back with a camera and snapped a photo. No doubt he and his bureau buddies were having a good laugh and sharing, once developed, his new-found funny photo with detectives in other bureaus.
We tried every idea we could come up with to look at the FBR offenses from any and every angle. Some of our ideas were screwy, half-baked, far-out and a few pure genius. We looked at tides, moon phases, moon cycles, menses cycles—any kind of cycle that might help us understand his seeming monthly pattern. We rejected nothing in looking at who the FBR was, how he’d been able to do all he had done without getting caught. In fact no idea was too small a bone to be fleshed out or too big of a bone to be gnawed clean.
Little did we know, though we suspected it, we were still not getting all the data; many of his break-ins, went unnoticed by absent or sleeping tenants while a number of his rape and attempt rapes went unreported.
We did serious work with the data we did have.
Now, for how seriously we took ourselves.
R.O. Dixon – the FBI and Chicken Bones
Sometime early August 1976
Tom, ever the practical joker and a man who enjoys a good story and a good laugh, saved his lunch sack one day (we’d taken some fried chicken back to the office that particular day). Tom saved the sack of gnawed-clean chicken bones. A day or so later Tom demonstrated his chicken-bone-mojo-prediction method to my guffaws.
Always wanting to improve upon our methodology, we picked up some nuts and bolts, some old square nails that had been there for centuries, matches, etc., and with a single chicken bone put them in that same old greasy brown paper lunch sack.
On some pretext we got Dixon up to the office… told him we’d come up with a new deal on how to predict the FBR’s crimes. Of course Dixon was all ears. He fell for anything; bless his heart, he fell for us…
Years later, after Dixon had retired from Dallas and had become the Chief of Police for University Park, Tom took a visiting police VIP from Luxembourg to see him. They got to talking about our FBR case and were going through our methodology again, Dixon shook his head and looked at Tom and said, “I’ll never understand how you guys did that… your system.”
… we got Dixon up to the office… told him we had this new prediction method. I got a map down and laid it flat across one of our desks. Tom shook that sack and dumped its contents out onto a map.
Tom and I are pointing and interpreting and talking and describing what we saw: “the nail points to that apartment complex, and the screws over here, that must be... that’s gotta be the street he was on...” then Tom pointed to the bone and said, “and that’s where he had chicken for lunch”.
Dixon, didn’t say a word, he just turned and walked out… We, of course, died laughing, not at our chief, at ourselves.
Not long after our ‘demonstration’ an FBI agent called on Chief Dixon, no doubt sent down from the Chief’s office to visit with Dixon.
The demarcation between federal law enforcement and local law enforcement is a bright line. This is primarily because of jurisdiction, statutes, case law and policy (make that political) processes, and other factors such as training and experience.
In the 1970’s the most often encountered contact between local law enforcement (now referred to as LEO’s, law enforcement officers) by the Fed’s, which in particular included the FBI, was when someone at the local level ‘screwed up’.
Claims of civil rights abuses by cops was a frequent complaint of the arrested. Some factor above ninety-nine percent of these claims were unfounded (had no factual basis to pursue), but the investigation of these claims required the FBI to question the veracity and integrity of cops. This did not sit well with either the street cop or the administrators of them, each of whom were subjected to the FBI’s intense scrutiny.
It was for these reasons that our boss, Deputy Chief Robert O. Dixon, who at one time had been in command of the department’s own Internal Affairs’ investigators, was not a fan of having any FBI presence in his office.
On this particular day, R.O. was sitting at his desk in his office, wearing his Chief’s uniform and smoking his pipe as a suited FBI agent was sitting across from him. The issue at hand does not matter now, but for whatever reason Bob Dixon wanted this guy out of his hair. At some point the subject of the FBR came up and Bob was recounting our efforts to successfully predict when the FBR was going to strike again. Knowing Bob, a light bulb must have gone off on how he could get this Agent out of his office.
Tom remembers picking up the phone and hearing Dixon say, “there’s an FBI agent here and he’s really wanting to see how you predict this rapist’s next hit,” course he’d filled him in on the rapist… “show him what you showed me the other day, on the desk.” “Gotcha Chief,” Tom said with a smile. Tom said later he could almost see Dixon’s ‘wink-wink’ through the phone line. Tom turned to me and said “Dixon’s sending up an FBI Agent to see our FBR predictions methodology and wants us to show him the one we showed him the other day, on the desk”.
Five or six minutes later the FBI Agent was knocking on our door frame. We exchanged names. He looked around the office, saw the maps on the walls with all they ‘crime dots’ and the map with the strings running back and forth, like a web, between red-headed map pins. He said he was interested in seeing our prediction methodology that the Chief had told him about.
Tom pulled himself up out of his chair with a solemnity, that only those that know him would see as pure straight-faced-Buster Keaton, bordering on Keystone Cop. “Bob,” Tom said to me, “Get down the prediction map and spread it on the desk.” As if I hadn’t a clue as to what was about to happen, I got one of our folding maps of the city, marked off with the seven areas where the FBR was hitting, and spread it out over one of the empty desks.
Tom sauntered over to one of our filing cabinets and opened the appropriate drawer and pulled out a grease-stained brown sandwich sack. As I finished flattening out the map Tom carefully brought the sack over to the table. He had his right hand under the sack and with his left hand he was choking the neck of the sack together. He shook the sack three times, turned the sack over and dumped its contents on the map. Out poured six square and rusty hundred year-old nails, two buttons, three bottle caps, two unshelled peanuts, a nub of a worn pencil, a couple of paper clips and a chicken bone. The items scattered out over the map, just like all the other times.
The eyes of the FBI Agent widened.
Nonplused, Tom said, “Uh huh, yeah, there’s the nail pointin’ to where he’s gonna hit and these two screws... that’s the roads he’s gonna travel to get there, that bottle cap, that’s his car in the parking lot,” Tom paused a beat or two then pointed, “and that bone, shows where he had chicken for lunch…”
The highly trained FBI Special Agent was not impressed with our analytical procedures… Without a word the agent turned and left our office, we never saw him again.
It’s unknown if he heard us, all the way down the hall where he was surely waiting on an elevator, but our laugher did bring in a few of our cohorts to see why we seemed to be the only ones in the cop-shop having any fun. And every time we saw Chief Dixon, he’d get a grin on his face and thanked us for getting the FBI guy out of his hair.
You can see the full story of our three year effort to capture the Friendly Burglar Rapist in my True Crime book: One Step from Murder, the Friendly Burglar Rapist. (Click on Image Below)
Comments