Arsenic poisoning murder of Texas Millionaire
(murder depicted in Award-Winning True Crime"Fighting the Devil" Amazon Barnes&Noble Smashwords
Texas Ranger talks about the murder investigation -
A secretary poisoned her
boss over a period of time ... her and the wife were doing it.... It was an
arsenic poisoning case.
Sheriff Bogard called me
...he said, "I've got something here ... the hospital called me and said
there's a man that died in Wichita Falls from arsenic poisoning and he's from
Clay County.
We went out to the
murdered man's ranch in Clay County and talked to the secretary and the wife
...the murdered man had made three visits to the hospital in Wichita
Falls and nobody in the world ever snapped on that arsenic poisoning. But we
went through the records and they knew about it two or three weeks before he
died, you know? Every time the wife and secretary would visit Sternadel in the
hospital, he'd have a relapse. He'd get sicker and sicker. I think they were
giving it (arsenic) to him in the hospital. So he finally died. He died of acute
arsenic poisoning.
Well, we went out one
day, this was kind of funny. We went out and talked to the grieving widow and
we're talking...
said do you mind if we search out here and see if we can find
any arsenic or anything? She said no, you just search to you little heart's
content. We got a consent to search so we went out.
Most of the people living
in the country throw all their garbage and trash in a pit. Well, Bogard...
[says] since I'm the sheriff of this county and you're assisting, you need to get
in that pit and dig around (laughter). I said yeah, I kind of figured that's
why you brought me along you know. So I jumped in the pit... being like I was.
And I found an Ocean Spray Cranapple jug... had the cap on it. And it had about
oh... a quarter inch of water in it. I said you know all the cranapple juice I
ever saw was kind of a different color. Somebody washed this out. So we just
seized that and we sent to forensic. The Institute of Forensic Science in
Dallas did the autopsy... And that water in that bottle contained enough
arsenic to kill half the people in Jolly. And I said my god, Bogard, do you
know what we've found? We have found the smoking cranapple jug (laughter). And
of course we had a little humor there. And I said by god, this is a bad deal.
They, they poisoned him and killed him. He was worth several million
dollars.....
We worked on this case
and uh we never could come up with the arsenic and that was one of the key
things... we didn't have enough evidence to indict either one of them (the
secretary or the wife).
So the case rocked
along... we waited two years. And uh Jake got a call one day from a storage
locker out there on the Seymour highway. He said I just got a locker out here
that hadn't paid their rent. And uh I opened the door and there's a bunch of
articles in here from a lady in Holiday. And the, the secretary's name was
Debbie Baker. And the lady that rented the locker used a fictitious name but
she used her righteous address in Holiday, the real Debbie Baker's address. That
was a clue. I said oh, I smell a rat here, Bogard.
So we got a search
warrant. We went back in there and we inventoried everything in that storage
locker. And we found a little bottle of Cowley's Rat and Mouse Poison, which
contains arsenic. And it had about three quarters of it gone. And I kind of
laughed... this will help us. This is a smoking Cowley's arsenic poison bottle.
And that's what got her indicted.
And the funny thing about this... because uh
she had completely forgotten to pay the rent on this thing. That's what got us
in there. And somehow this guy that owned the locker had called his attorney
which was an associate of her attorney. And I guess they got to talking about
it. Said they got a damn deal out here that's got Debbie Baker's stuff in it.
So he hot foots it and calls Debbie Baker who was living in San Marcos and he
said have you rented something... a storage locker? And she said uhhhh,
oh my god. She picked up the phone in San Marcos and calls the storage locker
and I'm sitting in there with him. And she said I'll send you an express money
order right now. He said oh, Mrs. Jones...I'm afraid it's too late. The
officers are here and they're inventorying this stuff. She just panics. Well
she hangs up the phone and I said who was that? He said that's the lady whose
name is on this thing. And I said oh... we got her now. We got a subpoena for
the phone records and that call from her home in San Marcos was the one that
tied... the tie that binds... went right back to that storage locker. That's
her. That was enough to get her indicted.
And the jury... they did the old flim flam. We
didn't have enough to indict the wife but we had enough to indict the
secretary. And they had mismanaged a bunch of money. I subpoenaed records for a
year from the bank. They had to go back and get all these checks and stuff. And
we went through all that and we found out all this stuff you know.
The defense played it great here. They made it
look like Debbie Baker was just a helper and the wife was the one that did the
murder. The widow got all the money and everything. And the jury came back and
gave her ten years probation for homicide. And of course we all liked to have
died. I said oh Lord, ten years probation for a murder... oh... Jesus...
But she got probation and she rocked along
there for about four or five years and she quit paying her fees. You know
you've got to pay a fee to the clerk and all this kind of stuff. Well she just
quit. So they just went down there and revoked her probation and yanked her
back into court. Said hey, you've gotta serve ten years in the penitentiary.
She is down in prison right now. She just
failed her first parole. She won't get out until 2012. So it took a long time.
But I've still got everything in that file. I've got four volumes about that
thick (he indicated the size), and every statement we took from the 75
recorded statements on this. Everything that I had was in there and ... there
were four copies made: one for the DA, one for me, one for Lubbock, and one for
Yates' Sheriff's Office. But I got one of the original ones.
If Debbie Baker ever decides she's tired of
taking this load by herself. She might just tell what the widow did on this...
so we're back in business. (laughter) And I've got it all in there. There's no
statue of limitations on homicide. I'm still waiting on the grieving widow.
Excerpt from 2008 Oral History
Interview with Texas Ranger Bill Gerth
©2009 Texas Ranger Hall of Fame and Museum.
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