A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop (8 page)

“Why?” he answered.

“Because it’s about me,” she claimed.

When Jefferies raised his eyebrows skeptically, she continued.

“I’m the Suzanne in it,” she said, chuckling. “James Taylor and I were in a drug rehab together once, years ago, in my wilder days.”

Jefferies laughed along with her. He felt sure she’d made the story up. A lot of people, after a few drinks, tried to impress him. He didn’t mind. Then, as Susan turned to go, he cautioned her, “You’ve had a bit to drink; you’d better be careful driving.”

“Oh, it’s okay,” she answered, flashing her broad smile. “I’m friends with all the deputies in the neighborhood. There’s a new one on at night. Mac. He looks out for me. He’ll make sure I get home.”

With that, Susan spun on her heels and headed into the darkened parking lot, toward the white BMW.

Later, Jefferies would remember Susan’s words: “There’s a new one on at night. Mac. He looks out for me.”

Mac? McGowen?

McGowen fit the description; he worked nights and had been transferred in only weeks earlier.

If it was Kent McGowen, Susan White didn’t yet understand whom she’d befriended. In his uniform, his navy blue shirt meticulously pressed, his badge shining, he must have appeared responsible and strong, someone she could trust. How could she have known that, though just in his late twenties, Kent McGowen had amassed a checkered past in law enforcement, that he’d jumped from one police agency to another under a cloud of suspicion? How could she know what lay ahead, or how powerless she would be to stop it?

“Most people don’t understand about cops, about how really vulnerable they are to a bad one,” a veteran detective explains one afternoon over a BLT in a Denny’s restaurant. A hulking bulldog of a man, he devours half the sandwich in a determined bite, dropping bits of lettuce slathered in mayo onto the plate.

“People think they have power, that if they’re in the right they’ll be able to prove it. The truth is, eventually they probably will,” he says, shrugging noncommittally and licking an errant crumb of bacon from his thumb. “Eventually they’ll hire a lawyer and get in front of a jury. But in the meantime, if a cop has it out for you and if he doesn’t much care about breaking a few rules or telling a few lies … well, you’re in deep shit. I mean deep shit. Because I can get in my car right now. I can pull over the next car I see. I can walk up to that car and order the person inside to get out. I can slap a pair of handcuffs on him and run him downtown. I can make up a charge, speeding, running a stop sign, resisting arrest,
and book him. And who’s the D.A. and judge going to believe? A cop or some Joe off the street?

“The majority of cops would never do that. They don’t get off on harassing people. For them it’s a job, a way to put food on their tables, maybe help people out a little if they’re lucky. But it’s the other cops, the ones not in it for the weekly paycheck or to do the occasional good turn. For those cops it’s the rush they get from wearing the badge, carrying the gun, talking the talk, living the life. To them, being a cop is more important than love or hate or sex, more intoxicating than booze.”

Susan White was fifteen when Joseph Kenton McGowen was born in Midland, Texas, on April 3, 1965. His father, Bill McGowen, a nervous yet imposing man with a proud bearing, worked for an oil company. Kent was his first child, but the third for his wife, Carolyn, a stocky woman with a helmet of dark hair, who had two sons from a previous marriage. It was a difficult pregnancy, Carolyn forced to spend the last two months in bed. “Kent was the most beautiful baby,” recalls his father. “The most beautiful, the most ideal little boy.”

A year later, the McGowens’ only daughter, Melissa, was born.

From Midland the family relocated to Shreveport, Louisiana, then to Conroe, Texas, a small town north of Houston, when Kent reached the fifth grade. In 1972, Bill McGowen struck out on his own as an independent oilman. “I consulted for different people,” says McGowen. “I built and sold my own companies.”

A risky business, it offered great rewards to the successful, especially by the late seventies and early eighties, when the price of a barrel of oil catapulted to $38. Houston enjoyed an unprecedented boom. The four-star restaurant at La Colombe d’Or, a small hotel in the city’s trendy Montrose section, offered the oilman’s lunch,
seven courses for that day’s price of a barrel of crude. Oil was king and the McGowens prospered.

Still, theirs was a volatile union. Friends characterize the McGowens as strong-willed, dominant personalities who sometimes clashed. In the eighties, they split, divorcing for four years, only to later remarry. “But we always loved each other,” says Bill earnestly, furrowing his heavy brow for emphasis. “We were always a family.”

Yet from the time Kent was a young boy, a dark cloud hung over the McGowen household—the suicide of Kent’s uncle, Bill McGowen’s brother. “Bill never really got over it,” says one family friend. “He always fretted about why it happened and what could have prevented it. He always worried that Kent would do the same thing.”

Those who knew the family say from the beginning the ties between Bill McGowen and Kent, his only biological son, were strong. “Bill believes Kent walks on water,” maintains a friend. “No matter what he does, he believes Kent is justified.”

When Bill McGowen talks of a young, school-age Kent, that admiration is palpable: “If you could say perfect, I guess Kent was. He never gave us any trouble. He was studious, interested in hunting and fishing, average, no—above-average intelligence, very very intelligent. Kent was born an anointed baby.”

Anointed as in chosen by God. The McGowens were born-again Christians, believing in the laying on of hands and speaking in tongues, in a literal interpretation of the Bible. “When Kent was a police officer, people would stop him in the street,” Bill McGowen contends. “They’d say, ‘I can see Jesus in you.’ Kent was an exceptional police officer, an exceptional young man.”

Yet others describe a very different Kent McGowen: a troubled teenager with a fascination for guns; a controlling and manipulative young man who displayed no
compunction about twisting the truth to fit his own purposes; a man drawn to violence, especially toward women.

“I met Kent while he was in high school, when he and Michelle began dating,” recalls Pam Jones, Michelle’s sister. “He seemed really nice at first; then everything went wild.”

Kent met Michelle Morgan when she was sixteen years old, in drivers’ education classes at Robert E. Lee High School in Houston. At the time, the McGowens owned a fashionable town house in the Galleria area, a decidedly urban neighborhood of glittery stores and restaurants and expensive condos and homes.

Michelle was a year ahead of Kent in school and six months older. The youngest of three sisters, she’s described by friends as a quiet, shy girl with long dark hair and a ready smile.

Classmates describe Kent as a loner of sorts. He was small for his age, his dark hair often falling over his eyes. What his classmates recalled most was the way he flaunted his family’s wealth, like the day he drove his birthday present—a shiny, new, black Jeep—into the school parking lot after Easter break. Whenever the opportunity arose, Kent bragged of a trust fund he claimed his parents had set aside for him, boasting one day he’d be rich, never having to work. Over the years, his estimate of its value mushroomed from hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. As time passed and the money didn’t come his way, the age at which he claimed he would gain control of that vast sum also increased, from twenty-one to twenty-five to thirty and beyond.

“He was a big talker … he made it sound like he was living the glamorous life,” says Pam. “Michelle liked that, but at the same time, she would have been satisfied
with the vine-covered cottage, kids, and a yard. The original Mommy-Daddy set.”

Later, Bill McGowen would shake his head in denial that Kent could ever be a problem, blaming any teenage changes in his son on his relationship with Michelle. “We never had any trouble until they started dating,” he maintains.

Perhaps the most telling explanation of Kent’s future relationships with women came from someone who grew to know him well over the years. “Kent idolized his father; he wanted to be like him, to make a lot of money,” she says. “I’ve always felt it had something to do with his parents’ divorce, but ever since I’ve known him, Kent has acted like he hated women.”

Throughout high school, Kent’s relationship with Michelle took on a pattern of love and disdain. At times he was affectionate and thoughtful, leaving small notes professing his devotion to her. At other times he became violently angry.

“I guess the first time Kent threatened suicide that I know of was at sixteen,” says Pam. “Michelle was going out with girlfriends and Kent showed up at our house. He had a knife in his hand and he threatened to use it on himself. My ex-husband took the knife away. It was so odd. He didn’t want Michelle, but he didn’t want anyone else to have her. Even going out with girlfriends made him jealous.”

Kent blamed the Morgan family, especially Michelle’s parents, for their arguments, charging that they plotted to keep them apart. During a split, Kent sent Michelle bitter letters, letters in which he called her family “devil worshipers.”

Over the years, Pam saw many examples of Kent McGowen’s fits of anger. He’d sometimes arrive at her house with his Jeep crowded with guns and rifles. On
more than one occasion after an argument with Michelle, Kent stood on the front lawn holding a knife to his throat or a gun to his head. It ended with Pam’s husband taking the knife or gun away, and a frightened Michelle agreeing to take Kent back.

“Every time they would break up over some terrible fight, we would think,
God, please let this be the end,”
recalls Pam.

It was at a Halloween costume party at Pam’s house, in the early years of their relationship, that someone snapped a photo of the young couple. In it Kent McGowen, dressed in camouflage fatigues and cap, an ammunition belt slung across his hips, cradles her ample waist. Michelle, her body wrapped around Kent, her hand confidently resting on her left hip, wears a black leotard and stockings, a bow tie at the neck, with slender white ears jutting upward, anchored to her softly curled brown hair.

Kent and Michelle: hunter and rabbit.

In 1982, his junior year, Kent dropped out of high school, to the great consternation of his father. Bill McGowen, a University of Texas grad who’d hoped Kent would follow in his footsteps, would later blame Robert E. Lee High School and its teachers for his son’s disinterest. “The teachers weren’t teaching,” he charges. “They were more interested in getting through the day. Kent was tight with Michelle and she’d already graduated. And we took his Jeep away and he kind of rebelled. Maybe he was just bored in school.”

Others say Kent never really had an interest in school. “He had no desire to go to college,” says a friend. “All he ever wanted to be from the get-go was a cop. He was in love with the idea of that badge.”

During the fall, he enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. Yet even in the service, Kent allowed his fascination with law enforcement to rule his choices. In January 1983, he began basic training at Lackland Air Force Base in San
Antonio, followed by classes leading to certification as a security specialist.

Back in Houston, the Morgan family initially hoped Kent’s absence would end his relationship with Michelle. They’d grown frightened of Kent and the influence he had over her. But on April 9, 1983, the two eighteen-year-olds married. Rather than as a happy occasion, the Morgan family viewed the ceremony as a reason to grieve.

“Right before she went down the aisle, Michelle turned to me and said, ‘This is a mistake,’” says Pam. “We told her she shouldn’t go through with it, but she went ahead and married him. No one can understand what it’s like trying to get away from Kent.”

After the wedding, Kent and Michelle left for Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, where Kent joined the 342nd Missile Squadron as a nuclear security specialist. The following month, he completed a correspondence course through Lyndon Baines Johnson High School in Austin, Texas, to earn a high school diploma. Bill McGowen flew to Montana that spring and stayed at the small apartment the newlyweds had rented not far from the base. When he discovered they were sleeping on a mattress on the floor, he had a brand-new bed delivered.