They Were Graveyard Dead: Cases That Stay With You Forever: Texas True Crime, #2

By Brian Foster

Book two in a true crime series, written by a twenty-three-year veteran of the Houston Police Department Homicide Division. These are the cases that have stuck with the investigators who worked them for years, if not for decades. Some are a matter of pride, others are just maddening and frustrating as sin for the investigating detectives. Some were cleared quickly, others have kept investigators up at night for years. One case in this book took thirty-one years to clear. These true crime cases are written in short story form¿fast-moving and almost conversational in nature, with crimes spanning Oklahoma, Texas, and the good-old-boy Dixie South. With a few exceptions, the real names of the investigators have been used and the cities listed are correct. Contributions and screw-ups by both prosecutors and cops have also been noted. Welcome to the most interesting, human, and brutal side of life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian Foster
• Release date: Nov 7, 2017
• ISBN: 9781540142740

Book preview

They Were Graveyard Dead

©2017 Brian R. Foster

Interior design by Lindsey Cousins

Edited by Diane Krause

All Rights Reserved

No portion of this publication may not be reproduced, duplicated, printed, or copied either electronically, by photocopy, manually, or in any manner yet known or to be invented at some future date. Reproduction is allowed only with written approval of the holder of the copyright, except for brief quotations used in a book review.

ISBN: 978-0-9837073-7-0

These are true crime stories from multiple police agencies. Most names of the officers are correct, as are the cities. Some investigators chose to go unnamed. A few prosecutors were named if they did an exceptional job. I did not use the real names of the criminals or victims. The victims’ families have had enough grief. The criminals do not deserve any notoriety.

I want to thank the following people for their input and help in collecting stories for this book.

M. D. Beale

John Bright

Bob Delony

Scott Dobyanski

James Ebdon

James Foster

John Hurt

Brian Jackson

Tom Murray

Earl Musick

Jake Pearson

Mike Sampson

Frank Scoggins

James Scoggins

Dan Silva

Brian Jackson

Anonymous

Other books by Brian R. Foster

Homicidal Humor

More Homicidal Humor

The Clot Thickens

Blood Trails Across Texas

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the memory of Texas Ranger Adolfo Al Cuellar. His people skills and his ability to put folks at ease allowed him to glean every bit of information possible from people, and was amazing. He took his time and listened to what people had to say. He mentored multiple young officers and taught them the tactics he’d learned over the years. His captain once said of him, Al’s like a locomotive—when he gets on a track he stays on it and keeps going. He was a quality man and will be missed.

It's Hard to Get Good Help

This is a story about armed robbery and homicide. The names of all four suspects and three murder victims have been changed. Three of the defendants in this capital murder are still walking among us (unless they have died and I haven’t heard about it). One of the victims may well have needed a promotion just to be considered a human being. One murder suspect pleaded guilty and received a life sentence, while the three other suspects were convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death. The police work in this case was done by the book and carried out under constant supervision by one of three heavy-hitting Harris County criminal prosecutors. The case was overturned on appeal even though the procedures followed were under the letter of the law at the time of the investigation.

You will see that this investigation makes for an interesting case study. It makes one reflect upon things like loyalty, the friends we choose, who the really tough guys are, and just who holds up under pressure.

Two crooks I knew skirted the edges of this matter, although they were not directly linked to this crime. One of those crooks was a man we will call Tommy Tish, though his real last name was something close to that. The other was George Edward Keys, also known as Peter Keys, or P. K., and both were very tough men who would not buckle under pressure. I think they probably had something else going on that they were more interested in. I’m not entirely sure why they did not get involved in this deal, and may have shied away from a slug who sets his boss up. From what I knew of Keys and Tish they were unlikely to either back, or associate with, such snakes as the primary players in this case. Incidentally, Tish and Keys were associates of another contract killer who murdered a federal judge in El Paso. Both men were put in front of a federal grand jury in that murder. They appeared before a state grand jury in this case.

The four suspects convicted in this murder case were all wannabe bad guys, and none too smart. The case supported the adage it is hard to get good help and that loyalty is nothing more than a word in the dictionary.

Don Fallon was a pretty darn successful Houston dirt bag. He wanted everybody to think he was a gangster, a Mafia member, and a no-good. He had a criminal history but nothing outstanding. It is thought he had made his real money in the illicit drug market, as narcotics search warrants had been run on his house in the past. Fallon associated with some very bad people and he owned some expensive north side Houston commercial real estate which he leased out. His other business ventures included a pawn shop, and his criminal record included dealing in stolen property. He also lived in a very exclusive neighborhood with his wife and children.

Fallon employed a beefy-looking man named Ashton Wilks as his full-time bodyguard. He referred to Wilks as My Lieutenant around the other low-life people he associated with. Whenever Fallon was out and about, Wilks would normally be somewhere in the background. The bodyguard was none too bright, and unfortunately for Fallon, fell in love with Fallon’s wife, Patricia.

Over time, Wilks developed ambitions of his own. He wanted to play the gangster routine too, and swagger around like his boss. He also didn’t like the way Fallon treated his wife, Patricia. However, Wilks talked too much, and both he and Fallon ultimately learned how hard it really is to find good help.

This case covered multiple jurisdictions and involved a bunch of good police work. It was also helped along by three very capable assistant district attorneys and detectives from both the Houston Police Department’s Robbery and Homicide Divisions. The good guys played by the rules and the crooks caught some serious breaks down the road. The one real plus, however, was that a dirt bag named Don Fallon was no longer a threat to society.

Ashton Wilks hatched a plot to rob his boss, and also rob a jewelry store located inside a building Fallon owned. Wilks enlisted two young men to help him pull off the job. The jewelry store space was leased (at least on paper) to a woman named Georgia Bernard. While there was some speculation the jewelry business was used by Fallon to launder money, that was never proved. The two men Wilks hired—Allen Davis and Michael Mick Kaslo—were in their twenties had come to the big city from Shiner, Texas to seek their fortunes. They hung out at some rough clubs, which is where Wilks met them. Allen Davis’ roommate, Robert Avalos, wandered into the case and bought himself a capital murder charge as well.

Wilks set up a home invasion at Fallon’s house for a Monday morning. Davis and Kaslo hit the house, bound Fallon’s hands with duct tape, wrapped his head with gauze, and then put duct tape over his eyes. Once Fallon was bound and blindfolded, Wilks entered the home and directed the ransacking of the house. While all this was going on, a friend of Don Fallon’s happened to stop by at an inopportune time. That friend was a medical doctor named David Fritz Fisher who liked to rub shoulders with tough guy types. Fisher had a medical practice near Fallon’s house, and on this particular day, he would never live to regret stopping in unannounced. He too was bound and had his eyes taped over. However, he knew Ashton Wilks by face and name, having seen him around the clubs, always in Fallon’s company. One of the two hostages got mouthy, and one of the hired hands fired a bullet into the couch where Fisher and Fallon were seated, to prove they weren’t kidding. The three robbers gathered up their hostages and proceeded over to the jewelry store on Longpoint Road. Davis and Kaslo loaded the two hostages into Fallon’s white Mercedes and drove to Georgia’s Jewelry.

The two hired guns went inside and held the place up. They bound the proprietor’s hands and covered her eyes with gauze and then duct tape, as they had done with their other two hostages. Once she was secured Fallon and Fisher were brought into the store.

The crooks were bagging up jewelry when Fallon heard Wilks speak. Fallon called out, I know that’s you Ashton—ultimately sealing their fate. The robbery team hadn’t planned on any of them being made. Not sure what to do, they bagged up over two hundred thousand in jewelry and left the store with all three hostages in tow. The three suspects loaded their hostages into two cars and took them over to Davis’ apartment where they discussed their options. During this time, Davis’ roommate, Robert Avalos, wandered in. The group filled him in, and he joined in as a co-conspirator.

The police got involved in this case when friends and family members of Georgia Bernard discovered the store locked up and the bulk of the display cases had been emptied. Detectives M. D. Beale and Walter Burkham were assigned to investigate.

The store was somewhat ransacked and Don Fallon’s right-hand man had been seen and identified as the person who locked up the store and left in Fallon’s (the landlord’s) car. A check of Fallon’s house found his wife Patricia inside a ransacked house. All she could determine to be missing was a bank bag her husband kept ten thousand dollars in, and his car. There were scraps of duct tape found on the floors in both the family home and the jewelry store.

While M. D. and Walter were at the house, Wilks called Patricia Fallon to check on her. She alerted M. D., who insisted on speaking with Wilks. M. D. demanded Wilks come over to the Fallon house to be interviewed. He did so, and was arrested as a material witness. By this time, informants throughout the north side of Houston were reporting that Wilks was going around telling everyone who would listen that he had taken over all of Don Fallon’s action. Wilks was interviewed and placed in the city jail. He was checked out of jail and interviewed multiple times that evening. On his second day in captivity, Wilks proved not to be the tough guy he tried to make himself out to be, providing Robbery Detective Earl Musick with a rather self-serving statement. Conveniently, Wilks had been present about a year prior when Earl and others had run a narcotics search warrant. Wilks was willing to help. He confessed to having a limited role in the robbery of his boss and the jewelry store.

Earl Musick was, at that time, assigned to the Special Crimes Section of the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. Another investigator named Jerry Carpenter who was assigned to Special Crimes joined in. The district attorney’s office and the Houston Police Department Homicide Division was also brought in. They knew this was going to be a case that had to be worked right, and it continued to grow in scope and severity.

Wilks said he could point out the last location he had seen Fallon, the doctor and Georgia Bernard. He led investigators to an apartment in a complex off Wirt Road. There, the cops spoke to management and determined that two men named Allen Davis and Robert Avalos lived there. According to management, the two men kept to themselves and were never any problem, and Davis had a sister named Debbie that lived in a different apartment in the same complex.

Earl Musick and a police lieutenant were on scene and attempting to get someone to answer the door of Davis’ apartment when they heard what they thought to be a stereo crank up, but abruptly turned off. Fearing for the safety of the hostages, they entered the apartment with a pass key they’d obtained from the management. They found the apartment vacant and strips of duct tape with human hair attached to it in a garbage can. As they searched the place, Robert Avalos wandered in from a night of partying with friends. Avalos was taken into custody but said he had no idea what the cops were talking about. He was taken into the Central Police Station and booked in connection with the robbery and kidnapping.

Debbie Davis, the sister of the suspect Allen Davis, was located and interviewed. She said her brother and a friend named Mick Kaslo had taken off for Fort Collins, Colorado, and gave investigators the name of the persons the two men had gone to visit. Warrants were obtained for Davis and Kaslo and they were both arrested without incident. The Harris County District Attorney called in a marker and got a private plane owner to fly two Robbery detectives and an assistant district attorney to Colorado where they took custody of both suspects and returned them to Texas. The crooks were cooperative and gave full confessions. Davis even went as far as to admit that he and Kaslo had run cocaine as far north as Colorado for Don Fallon. They too had been in Fallon’s employment in the past and turned to bite the hand that fed them.

After a couple of around-the-clock days without sleep, Earl headed home for a couple of hours’ rest. He asked Carl Kent from Homicide to check Avalos out of jail and see if the man could, or would, give him a statement about the missing people and the jewelry store robbery. Three hours later Carl called and woke Earl to tell him Avalos had confessed to his involvement in a triple kidnapping and capital murder. Avalos had further agreed to take the cops to the murder and burial site.

Carl loaded up Avalos and headed west on Interstate 10, to a farm of just under 100 acres owned by the family of the suspect Davis. Earl and Jerry Carpenter met up and headed to the farm as well. When you get a suspect willing to help, and incriminate himself and others, you don’t want to give him a chance to stop and reconsider things. Wilks had left the handling of the hostages to Davis and Kaslo. When Avalos joined the ranks, they opted to kill all three people and dispose of their remains on the Davis property. The loot from the robbery was still at their apartment. According to Avalos, they loaded up the hijacked Mercedes and drove the hostages out to the Davis farm. The three men (crooks) dug a deep grave, stood the three bound hostages beside it, then shot all three multiple times. Their victims fell into the hole, but the wounded Fallon jumped up and tried to climb out of the grave. He was shot once more in the back of the head and was dead. During autopsies, the final count of rounds indicated Fallon was shot ten times, Georgia Bernard was shot a total of thirteen times, and Doctor David Fisher was shot eleven times.

After the shooting was over the bodies were covered with lime and buried. One of the shooters drove Fallon’s car back and forth over the common grave to pack the earth down, then brush was cut and placed over the burial site to camouflage it.

It was several days from the murder of the three people until the police excavated the three bodies. The weather was cool but the cadavers were getting ripe enough that all parties around the grave site had cigars clamped in their teeth to ward off the funk produced by the rotting flesh. The stolen loot and two of the handguns used in the murder were buried inside a hay barn on the property. The stolen Mercedes car was taken to a remote site in that county and torched. The three young killers then headed back to Houston by way of Hallettsville. Just on the edge of Houston, they stopped by the side of the road and threw the last of the murder weapons into a stock pond.

After the jewelry and two murder weapons were recovered from the farm, the suspect Avalos was returned to Houston by the same route the suspects had taken, and he pointed out the pond into which the third handgun had been thrown. A dive team was called in, and in short order pumped out the stock pond and recovered the last of the murder weapons.

An entire team of investigators, including Houston Homicide, Robbery, the Special Crimes Unit of the Harris County District Attorney’s Office, and officers from the Shiner area worked the crime scene. They dug up the bodies, guns and jewelry. The evidence buried under a hay barn floor would have been difficult to locate had they not been led to it by Avalos. Days of report writing and scene diagrams followed. Cataloging all the evidence was a major league task in and of itself.

The one loose end in this case was Don Fallon’s widow. She had legal representation almost from the start. She was put before a grand jury and about the best information she would give was that Wilks had told her of his plans to do her husband in, but that she had never told anyone about it. She skated on any criminal liability. In fact, all parties concerned would have gotten away with their crimes had they simply kept their mouths shut. This is the difference in dealing with professionals or truly tough men, and wannabe bad guys.

Avalos pled guilty and accepted a life sentence, and testified against the other three men. All the others involved had jury trials and were sentenced to death. They all sat on death row for between three and four years until a supreme court case ruled that they should have had independent legal representation or at least legal warnings. Without the confessions, they were released, as the state felt they could not get convictions without them, and the evidence obtained—though legal at the time of their arrest—was no longer admissible under current rules. Consequently, three capital murderers skipped out of prison with no chance of being retried.

Like I mentioned earlier, this case was a classic example of several things. First, it is hard to get good help. Second, true loyalty is a scarce commodity. Third, there are very few tough guys who can hold up under pressure. If as a group, the four persons (crooks) involved in this venture had hung tight with a story of I don’t know anything about what you’re talking about, they would have gotten away with murder, quite literally. Even if their partners in crime testified against them, co-conspirator testimony alone is not enough to convict in Texas. It needs to be substantiated.

The good Doctor Fisher liked to hang around tough guys and thugs, and that got him killed. His only known crime was guilt by association with persons of low moral character. He allegedly was fond of cocaine and was thought to have stopped by to see if Fallon had a snort he might part with that day, a little lunchtime pick-me-up. The woman running the jewelry story was not guilty of anything as far as anyone could ever determine, and was a real and true victim.

Epilogue

Several decades after this case was settled by the appeals court and three men walked off scot-free from death row, Ashton Wilks reappeared in the state of Colorado. I was told this by both M. D. Beale and Earl Musick. Earl is a now a lawyer practicing in Houston, and writes for a police-related periodical about past crimes and criminals with which he has been involved. Wilks was charged with the abduction of a twenty-six-year-old female who he allegedly held captive for four months in his home. He was helped in this episode by a teenage runaway that he let hide out on his place in Gateway, Colorado, near Grand Junction. Wilks was charged with first-degree kidnapping, sexual assault, false imprisonment, and harboring a juvenile.

Based on the facts I have seen about the case, the reclusive Wilks, along with the juvenile, abducted the woman after making her pass out by having her inhale a diesel engine cleaner. She said she was either kept chained to a bed or had her legs chained together throughout her captivity. She went on to say he treated her like a pet of some sort and that he would force her to have sex with him whenever she did something he did not like. Wilks is now balding and sports a mustache and long goatee beard, resembling an aging hippie—or a balding male goat. His last known address was the Mesa County Detention Facility.

From a Good Family

John Cates was a product of the good-old-boy Dixie South. His family was both old and established (and rather well-to-do) with holdings mostly east of the Mississippi River. Among them, some practiced law and others were in the timber industry, but farming was a sideline common to them all, along with oil and banking. One close family member even owned two funeral homes in both the black and white communities.

This member of the Cates family, however, was not interested in dollar signs. John had a high intellect and a bad habit of placing himself in dangerous situations. In other words, he was an adrenaline junkie. John had a fondness for sour mash whiskey, but adrenaline trumped it every time. After obtaining two degrees in English, our man of interest took his first police job. He was trained at the state police academy (as was every cop in the state) and then became a small-town policeman in his predominantly blue-collar home town. Sometime later he moved to an adjoining sheriff’s department, and after a couple of fatal shootings he had a chance meeting with a Houston Police Department recruiter and afterward submitted an application with HPD. John was a great candidate—almost six feet tall, physically fit, well-educated, would not drink on duty, and was no part of a thief. HPD accepted him in short order.

Through the years, John had dated a few women who were attracted to dangerous men—the kind of women who keep large cats and creatures that are never supposed to be pets. John ultimately found what he originally sought, which was plenty of action, for he was a hunter of both dangerous men and situations.

A supervisor, Glen Moss, with whom I was well acquainted, told me he had been an evaluator during John’s last phase of field training. During this phase, the evaluator was not supposed to give input or advice, but strictly observe and grade the rookie’s performance. During the evaluation period, they rode the night shift from ten at night until six in the morning. Glen reported that the street smarts exhibited by the young officer were unreal and darned near smacked of clairvoyance. John could spot drugs and concealed weapons like they were flagrant traffic violations. Glen said that it was as if John had X-ray vision. One instance that particularly stuck out with Glen was their arrest of a wanted man who was a career criminal. It was after midnight in a park setting near North Main and the North Freeway. The two officers were stopped at a red light when John said, Well now, I think we have ourselves a thief over there. When Glen asked where specifically, John indicated a car parked beneath some trees. They pulled up and lit up the car with a spot light. The car’s solo occupant was a fifty-plus-year-old white male. The car was a Chevrolet two-door with paper dealer plates, indicating it came from a car lot on Yale Street.

When questioned, the driver, embarrassed, said he and his wife had gotten into a heated argument that evening and he had left to let things cool off. Unfortunately, he had stormed off without his wallet, so his