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Posted on Sun, Mar. 17, 2002 |
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Dead reckoning
Even the children who love him admit that there are plenty of people who might have contemplated killing Windsor Denman Thomason.
The rotund former Marine sergeant barked orders at everyone, occasionally bootlegged liquor from Mexico, laughed as he ejected deadbeat tenants from his trailer park and regularly spent time behind bars in the Tarrant County Jail.
For decades, Jack, as he was called, vexed the police, his lawyer, his ex-wife and even his own children with his foolish hustles.
Then he vanished, though just when is hard to pinpoint.
His children realized sometime in early 1992 that none of them had actually talked to their dad in months. Though his new wife passed along messages, they grew suspicious. Never had he gone so long without calling to bum a few dollars.
Today, 10 years after his six grown children last saw their father, Jack's disappearance remains a riddle, mired in allegations of fraud, arson, forgery and murder.
As is typical in missing-persons cases, especially when the person is an adult without personal wealth or political clout, family members think that local law enforcement has done little to solve the mystery. Jack's children cite angles that were never pursued, witnesses who weren't thoroughly questioned and investigators' seeming lack of interest in the case.
The Tarrant County Sheriff's Department dropped the ball in the case more than once. At one time, an investigator declared Jack alive without seeing him and closed the case without telling the man's children. And while investigators searched Jack's house, they've never searched his wife's property in East Texas though police have suspected her in his disappearance for years.
The detectives insist that they've worked hard on the case, but don't have enough evidence to bring charges against anyone or even to prove that a crime has occurred.
Jack's children still suspect his wife, Amanda Lee Jones Brower Crawford Thomason, who appears to have benefited financially from his disappearance. That her explanations for his absence always leaned toward the fantastic - work trips to faraway places, gang connections, flight from federal agents, exotic diseases - only increased the children's suspicions.
"I don't know what happened to him," said Annecia Wickersham, one of Jack's five daughters. "Best case? He's off living a life that he doesn't want anyone to know where he is. Worst case? He's very sick somewhere or dead."
To bolster their case, Jack's children point to statements police gathered from witnesses who say his body might be buried behind his house.
Amanda declined to be interviewed for this article. However, her one comment to the `Star-Telegram reiterated what she has long insisted to law enforcement: Jack left of his own volition and his children fabricated tall tales about their father.
"Ask his kids," she said. "His children knew that he was leaving. He told them he was."
Jack's longtime attorney, Brantley Pringle, thinks that the old schemer tried to fake his own death to get insurance money but that something went wrong.
"I think he planned to disappear," Pringle said. "Jack could kind of land on his feet, but maybe he didn't this time."
One thing is sure, though: Nearly everyone involved, including Pringle, agrees that Jack is dead after this much time, and local investigators think he was very likely killed.
One government agency even arbitrarily assigned him a death date: Sept. 15, 1992.
His story
Jack Thomason's skill at hustling grew out of a boyhood need to care for himself when nobody else would.
His parents fought. His mother drank. Too many nights, young Jack, not yet old enough to drive, would show up at his aunt's door with his mother in tow. He had found her on the street and needed a place where he could, as his cousin Betty Martin put it, douse her throat in black coffee.
The world was fighting World War II then, and Jack looked overseas with longing. He wanted to be a Marine, the toughest of the tough. Martin and her husband, Odis, speculate that Jack was attracted to the Marine Corps because it offered stability, purpose. Even the brutal life of an infantryman was more attractive than the battles he witnessed at home in Tarrant County.
Born on April Fool's Day in 1927, he was only 16 when he enlisted on Aug. 7, 1943, using a birth certificate his mother helped him falsify.
About the time he was to leave for boot camp, he became smitten with Carolene Montgomery, a skinny 14-year-old girl from Joplin, Texas. After joining the Marines, he wrote her letters for three years, and they married in 1946.
Military life suited Jack. It turned the scrawny recruit into a burly soldier, able to hold his own in combat as a rifleman and knife thrower. But seeing so much action before he was 25 - first in World War II's Pacific theater, then in the Korean War - also made him cold and distant.
"Grandma always said that daddy was the sweetest boy, you know, during the Depression," said his oldest daughter, Casey Lester. "But she said the Marines changed him. He became what the Marines wanted him to become."
Young Jack and Carolene had six children - five daughters and one son - in between his posts abroad. But the marriage was volatile, and in their loneliness they turned to others. They fought often, especially over money and infidelity.
They developed a pattern of fighting, fleeing and reconciling.
The marriage, stunningly, survived the episode in 1966 when Carolene's lover died at Jack's hands. As the family tells it, Jack caught his wife at her lover's house and that Jack carried a deer rifle into the room. They wrestled, and the gun went off. A Tarrant County grand jury declined to indict Jack.
Finally, in 1972, Carolene left for good, complaining about Jack's constant cheating.
Three months after their divorce was finalized, though, they wed again. The reason was vintage Jack, said his second daughter, Jackie Gerhardt.
In the divorce settlement, Jack had agreed to pay $300 a month in alimony to Carolene until she remarried or died. He soon decided that the terms were not to his liking. He plotted to marry her again so he could keep that money. As before, Carolene was won over by Jack's pleas for forgiveness.
One year later, he again filed for divorce - this time under more favorable financial terms.
As Jack grew older, he never lost the look and demeanor of a Marine sergeant. Tall and big-bellied, Jack had an impish smile, enhanced by a bottom lip that he considered too fat - a physical trait passed along to several of his children. He demanded to be in charge and could be overbearing. Yet he was a smooth talker who could charm an acquaintance out of his last dollar.
Jack never had much money, but he always had a scheme to acquire it, sometimes by working hard, sometimes by skirting the law.
Jack's longtime lawyer, Pringle, described his client as "a guy who was constantly engaged in outsmarting himself."
Pringle guesses that Jack first hired him in the '60s, to defend him in one of many tangles with the Tarrant County court system. In 1982, for example, Jack got mad at the Water Department and diverted water for his trailer park around the meter. When he was busted, the Water Department not only demanded the lost fees but also pressed theft charges, Pringle said.
Jack received a little income from his Marine Corps pension, Social Security and a retirement check from Braniff International Airlines. In addition, he made extra money trading things. He often trucked items to Grand Prairie's Traders Village, and a nearly constant junk sale went on in his yard - clothes, knickknacks, motorcycle helmets and guns.
His greatest possession was a mobile-home park in Rendon crammed full of trailers with exposed metal and missing windowpanes. Transients willing to accept the grim conditions provided Jack a little rental income.
Jack's only son, Jim, said his father relished running his trailer park, particularly harassing the down-and-out tenants who failed to pay the rent. Sometimes, Jack's efforts would lead to fights, and he would find himself in the Tarrant County Jail again.
Yet Jack could show his soft heart at odd times. Often, when someone freed him from jail, Jack would bail out another prisoner with him.
"He'd say, `You need a job?' and he'd put them to work," his daughter Casey said.
And even as Jack fussed and fought with his tenants, he would occasionally throw them a party that included a fish fry, beer and Cokes for all.
After his second divorce from Carolene, Jack entered into a succession of marriages.
Amanda Gladys Crawford became his fourth bride on June 19, 1989.
Amanda and Jack had lived together for years before their visit to the Ellis County justice of the peace, but Jack's children said they still didn't know much about her. It didn't take long for communication between Jack's children and his new bride to deteriorate.
His daughters began to question if Jack and Amanda's marriage was legal. They later saw the marriage license but speculated that it might have been forged. They referred to Amanda not as their father's wife but as "the woman living at the house."
The children say it wasn't just their relationship with Amanda that had soured. They charge that the honeymoon was over at Jack's house, too.
"Every time you would go over there, dad would say Amanda was trying to poison him," said his son, Jim Thomason.
Jim acknowledges that he dismissed his father's warnings.
"I thought, `Well, there are probably a lot of people that would like to poison you.' "
Her story
Amanda collected the 31 tiny cards from the burial flower sprays and tucked them away in a envelope adorned with two red roses.
On each card was the signature of someone who had sent flowers to try to comfort her, a mother grieving over the sudden death of her 11-year-old son.
The 1972 death of Dale Wayne Jones in the small East Texas town of Buffalo was neither Amanda's first sorrow nor her last. Mishaps followed Amanda like the dark refrain of a country song.
Six of her 11 children are dead, as are three of her ex-husbands. Two of the five living children have served time in state prison.
Perhaps all these misfortunes were coincidental, the commonplace tragedies of a poor 70-year-old woman's life. But to Jack's children, these events - in addition to Amanda's tendency to change her first, middle and last names - hint that she was a woman with something to hide.
Amanda, with her dark, curly hair and high cheekbones, must have been quite a beauty in 1950 when she wed Teddy T. Jones, a trucker, at age 18.
Ten years into their marriage, they buried two babies on the same day. On July 26, 1960, Amanda and Teddy purchased 21-inch wood coffins for their newborn twin girl and boy, Roger Dale and Donna Gayle, at San Jacinto Memorial Park in Harris County.
Not long after, the Joneses moved to Colleyville. There, they lost another baby at birth. William Lee Jones was buried in Colleyville's Bluebonnet Hills Memorial Park in 1962.
Death followed the Joneses when they left Tarrant County in 1969 to settle on 30 acres just north of Buffalo in Freestone County.
Their 11-year-old, Dale, died instantly on Aug. 12, 1972, when he swerved his bike into oncoming traffic near the family home on Texas 75.
Only five months later, on Jan. 6, 1973, another son, Teddy Jr., 15, died in nearly the same spot when he got out of a parked car and tried to cross the highway. He was hit by a car driven by Wortham Police Chief Buford Owens.
The police chief had been en route to the Jones house to give the family an escort to the hospital because of another sick child, according to the local paper, `The Fairfield Recorder.' The article does not indicate why Teddy Jr., who died at the scene, jumped out of the parked car.
Police in Fairfield say they never had any reason to think that all the deaths were anything but sad coincidences.
In 1978, Teddy and Amanda, who had endured so much together, divorced. Teddy Sr. has since died, as have Donald Crawford and Donald Brower, her next two husbands.
Through many of her early tragedies, she wasn't known as Amanda. To everyone who knew her then, she was Gladys.
Over the past 20 years, Amanda has used at least 10 combinations of names on legal documents. Though she was married at least four times, it's not just her last name that changed. Birth records indicate that she was born Gladys Ruth Lee in 1932 in Stonewall County. But sometime in the 1980s, she began to go by Amanda.
In the following years, she routinely switchedfrom Amanda to Gladys on legal documents.
Pringle, who became her attorney after she married Jack, simply shrugged when asked to explain her name changes and said that he didn't know his client well enough to guess.
When she married Jack, she signed the marriage certificate Amanda Gladys Crawford. Until much later, no one in Jack's family knew her by any name but Amanda.
Occasionally, after she married Jack, Amanda called his first wife, Carolene, usually to complain about Jack's difficult and demanding ways.
In one of the those conversations, Amanda told Carolene that she wasn't after Jack's money.
"She said, `I just want your kids to know that I don't want nothing he's got,' " Carolene recalled.
Carolene said she laughed into the telephone and said, "Well, Amanda, if you don't want nothing he's got, you must love him a helluva lot, cause I wouldn't put up with him."
The disappearance
Three days after Christmas, 1991, Jack fifth daughter pulled out her children's white five-year dime-store diary and wrote two seemingly innocuous sentences.
"We visited Grandpa Jack and Amanda," wrote the daughter, Tina Cassata. "She gave ya'll a bunch of toy cars with `pullback action.' "
The family would later seize upon the diary entry. It documented the last date - Dec. 28, 1991 - that any of Jack's children can say for sure that they saw their father.
Soon after, whenever the Thomason daughters would get together, they talked about only one topic: Daddy.
He had been looking bad. His bad knees and degenerative arthritis caused him to walk with a limp. The mouth cancer that had been removed from his ample lower lip had left a long scar. Typical of former Marine sergeants, Jack had always dressed immaculately. Shortly before his disappearance, though, his clothes often looked soiled, as if he had spilled food on himself.
His house had deteriorated, too. Though the front yard had always been filled with junk from his frequent yard sales, he had been very careful about keeping up appearances indoors. Frequently, his daughters had detected the smell of cat urine, and the kitchen looked so filthy that one daughter forbade her children to eat at the house.
A few months after Christmas, Tina tried to see her dad again.
Visiting her daddy was never easy. He often sold junk in Grand Prairie on the weekends, so his children were forced to go there if they wanted to talk with him. And he occasionally left the state to work odd jobs.
But Tina decided to try her luck on his 65th birthday, April 1, 1992. She went to Jack and Amanda's house holding a single red rose and a card.
Amanda let her in the house and asked, "Is that a real rose?"
Tina recalled that when she nodded, Amanda replied, "Well, I don't know if he'll be back to enjoy it."
About the same time, Amanda gave Jack's son, Jim, a call. She told him that his dad left him an old boat at Eagle Mountain Lake in his will and suggested that he come get it.
"I said, `He'll want it back, knowing Dad,' " Jim recalled.
What struck Jim was Amanda's reply.
"I don't remember her exact words," he said, "but she left me with the impression that if I waited for him to speak with me that I wasn't going to get the boat."
When Jack's children got together, they realized that Amanda's explanations for her husband's whereabouts seemed inconsistent, and some were, in their view, unlikely.
Amanda told Jim that his father was on vacation in Las Vegas. Another time, she told Jim that his father was living with another woman in South Texas, was dying of AIDS and was visiting Mexico for treatment.
Amanda told one daughter that Jack was hiding from gangsters after witnessing a killing. In yet another story, Jack was on the lam from the FBI because he had done the killing.
But it was a call Amanda made to Jack's second daughter, Jackie Gerhardt, that finally unnerved the siblings.
Amanda said Jack was running guns to Mexico. While there, he was going to bribe an official to make out his death certificate. Then, Amanda was to sell off his assets, collect on his insurance policy and meet him in Mexico.
Jackie said she called her oldest sister, Casey Lester, to tell her about Amanda's call. Casey's jaw dropped.
"One question eventually entered my mind: Why on Earth would you plan a crime and then tell your in-laws, especially in a family as big as ours?" Casey said. "The only conclusion I could come to was that they didn't want his kids to start questioning daddy's death and cause trouble."
Then, Casey added, "That led me to think that this could be an ideal way to cover a murder - hoping that fear of sending daddy to prison would stop our curiosity."
By the end of May 1992, Casey was convinced that something terrible had happened to her father. She called Amanda and demanded to speak to him.
"I told her all that I wanted was a 15-second phone call from daddy, saying, `I'm alive. Back off!' " Casey said.
Amanda said Jack didn't want to speak with her.
Casey felt the anger burn on her cheeks. "I said, `He's missing, and you're covering up his death.' "
Jennifer Autrey, (817) 390-7126 jautrey@star-telegram.com
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