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Posted on Mon, Mar. 18, 2002 |
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Dead reckoning
The missing-person report was six months overdue.
For months, the children of Windsor "Jack" Thomason of Rendon had been demanding that his fourth wife, Amanda, explain where he was.
None of his six children had seen their father since Christmas 1991, although Amanda had passed along messages.
As Amanda's excuses for his absence grew stranger - he suffered from exotic diseases, he was on the lam from gangsters or law enforcement - the children became increasingly suspicious that their dad might be a victim of foul play.
Amanda, they said, scoffed at their concerns and said Jack simply didn't want to talk to his nagging children.
Finally, his oldest daughter, Casey Lester, demanded that Amanda put Jack on the phone or she would go to the police.
On June 9, 1992, nearly six months after any of Jack's children had last seen him, Casey marched into the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department and filed a missing-person report.
She sat down at the desk of Sheriff's Detective Harvey Lantrip, who has since retired. Casey thought she was in luck because Lantrip knew her father and seemed sympathetic, at least at first.
Lantrip chuckled about her father, Casey recalled, saying he knew that Jack was a man who tried to handle his problems with his fists. Lantrip turned to his computer, scrolled through some files and said there was no evidence that any law enforcement agency was looking for Jack.
"Your dad has not even had a traffic ticket in years," Casey said Lantrip told her.
Sheriff's detectives started a preliminary investigation. Amanda Thomason, who declined to be interviewed for this report, agreed to allow her and Jack's house to be searched, but detectives found only an old gun hidden in a wall.
Lantrip began to wonder if the children were simply stirring up trouble for Amanda.
"We did everything except drain that old pond behind her house," Lantrip said in a recent interview.
After the house was searched, Lantrip scolded Casey.
"Why don't you leave that poor woman alone?" Casey recalled Lantrip saying. "He just doesn't want to see you. He's tired of you kids asking for things."
Amanda soon produced evidence that Lantrip was right.
On Sept. 8, 1992, Lantrip got a phone call, according to notes in the Sheriff's Department case file.
Amanda had proof in her hand that Jack was alive. Jack had sent her a letter from Oklahoma, she said. Amanda also told Lantrip that her husband had written two additional letters that she hadn't yet received, the case notes say.
Two days later, Amanda called the Sheriff's Department to say she had met with her husband in Oklahoma City.
She told Lantrip that Jack looked as if he had lost 40 pounds and that he needed new clothes.
She added that she had received the two additional letters Jack had mailed her and that she hadn't opened them but had taken them to her lawyer, Brantley Pringle. Pringle said in a recent interview that because the events occurred so many years ago, he doesn't remember handling the letters.
The Sheriff's Department took the letters to the Tarrant County Medical Examiner's Office for handwriting analysis.
When the medical examiner's office determined on Sept. 20, 1992, that the handwriting in the letters was Jack's, that was good enough for the Sheriff's Department.
Case closed.
"Good Lord, if the man wanted to get his money elsewhere and run off, that was fine with us," Lantrip said.
As time passed, more evidence emerged that Jack was still alive. In fact, it was a particularly busy time for the missing man.
On July 10, 1992, Jack and his ex-wife Carolene sold a house in Forest Hill that they jointly owned. His signature appeared on all the required documents, even though Carolene never saw him during the transactions. Carolene said real estate brokers told her that Jack had given Amanda power of attorney and that her presence would suffice.
On April 29, 1993, Jack sold his house to Amanda and his trailer park to her youngest daughter, Melonie Jones. The deed transaction was crude. It appeared as if Jack had handled it himself, without a lawyer, but it was notarized by a Kennedale woman, Tylene Leach.
Amanda showed it to Pringle, and he remembers telling her, "Well, I wouldn't have done it that way, but I said I thought it was probably legal."
About the same time, Jack sold a piece of property in Pelican Bay to the notary's granddaughter, county records show.
More business transactions followed.
In 1994, Jack's driver's license was renewed - by mail, the Sheriff's Department found. In 1995, without his children knowing, Jack changed his pension payments from a Burleson bank to a new account at the First National Bank in Whitney, a small town in Central Texas.
Everything seemed to point to Jack actively living out his old age but doing so without having anything to do with his children.
As time passed, though, Amanda began to confide in Pringle, telling him that she hadn't seen her husband in a while either. However, she didn't seem worried, and neither was Pringle. He suspected that it was the latest in Jack's history of trying to make an easy buck, perhaps through an insurance scam.
"He might disappear, have the money paid to her, and then come back and claim the insurance benefit later," Pringle said.
Moreover, Amanda seemed to have her own goofy proof of Jack's existence, at least for a while.
Pringle said Amanda told him that although she didn't see her husband, he came around and left his clothes to be cleaned. She would wash them, she said, then put them in an abandoned car in the trailer park for him to pick up.
This went on for quite some time, Pringle said, until Amanda said she found a trailer park resident wearing one of Jack's shirts.
"She didn't know if he had happened on to Windsor or got his clothes cleaned for nothing," Pringle said. "It's hard to believe she could be so stupid."
Maybe she wasn't.
As she proclaimed her innocence to her lawyer, Amanda and two of her children became entangled in circumstances that fed Jack's children's theories.
They were particularly unsettled by the 1993 arrest of Amanda's son, Jimmy Dean Jones, who lived at Jack's trailer park, in connection with the assault of his sister Melonie and another woman with a shovel. Though Jimmy Jones successfully completed deferred adjudication and served no prison time, Jack's daughters believed that he could hurt their father.
"I think people around him were capable of hitting him in the head and killing him," said Annecia Wickersham, Jack's third daughter.
Equally mysterious was a blaze at Amanda's old home in the East Texas town of Buffalo.
On Feb. 22, 1999, the cabin, which Amanda received in the divorce settlement from her first marriage, caught fire in the middle of the day and was a total loss. The Freestone County Sheriff's Department deemed the fire suspicious, and the investigation is ongoing, Sgt. Isaac Durham said.
A couple of years before the fire, three of the Thomason girls had snuck onto the property and looked for clues in their father's disappearance.
In the cabin, they found furniture they recognized as their father's and some of his old trash cans, identifiable because of the "T" he had painted on them. They found lime dumped around the property and an old well. The daughters immediately speculated that the lime could have been used to mask the stench of a decaying body, and the well was more than big enough to hold one.
The women implored detectives with the Tarrant County Sheriff's Department to search the property, but they never did.
When they heard that the old log cabin had burned to the ground, the Thomason children feared that some answer to their father's disappearance might have gone up in flames along with it.
Then the children heard about some odd comments supposedly made by Amanda and a woman who police believe is Amanda's daughter. However, the Sheriff's Department didn't take formal statements from two witnesses in Rendon until 2000, almost a decade after Jack disappeared, though one of Jack's daughters told Lantrip about one of them in 1992.
On a steamy Texas afternoon in summer 1992, Gayle Jennings was sitting with her husband in the Bar T lounge, sipping on a beer. In walked a woman in her mid-20s with short, fuzzy, strawberry-colored hair who weighed about 150 pounds.
The woman walked to the bar and ordered a drink. Then she started making statements about "ol' man Thomason," Jennings told sheriff's detectives in a signed statement.
"Mother put him in the tank," the woman said to the small group sitting at the bar.
Jennings told the Star-Telegram that the woman was pacing, too nervous to sit down and drink her beer. The woman kept looking at the door and saying she had to leave town.
A few minutes later, a man opened the Bar T door and told the woman: "You better come out here. Your mama's waiting in the car," Jennings recalled.
The woman left. Detective Mike Utley, the sheriff's detective who is now handling the case, said he believes that the woman was Amanda's daughter, Melonie Jones. Jones, who is now in prison for two DWIs, declined to be interviewed for this report and has not cooperated in the sheriff's investigation, Utley said.
However, one of Jack's daughters, Jackie Gerhardt, recalls that Lantrip told her that he asked Melonie Jones in 1992 if she had made the statements in the Bar T lounge. Lantrip said Melonie told him she had been kidding.
A year or two later, Amanda supposedly made her own statement that Jack was dead.
In spring 1994 or 1995, Amanda crossed Rendon Road and went to a garage sale held by her neighbor Joyce Knight. They began a casual conversation, and Knight asked Amanda where her husband was.
In a statement to Sheriff's Department investigators on May 19, 2000, Knight wrote down the words Amanda said to her that day - words that would stick in her mind almost half a decade later:
"She said he had been killed, his body was cut up and he was thrown in a septic tank."
Jennifer Autrey, (817) 390-7126 jautrey@star-telegram.com
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