Sentimental bad guy in jail.
12/06/2008
I got a call from one of my favorite patrol officers; he had a situation and wanted to run it by one of the detectives.
There are some officers that have a knack for investigating and some that don’t. He is one of those officers that will go above and beyond to figure things out. I passed the call to one of the senior detectives and the activity started.
It turns out the information he had was correct: there was a murder of a former Austin area girl in another state. It was a brutal murder; the bad guy took off and was thought to be in California. The information the officer got was the murderer was here in Austin. First we had to verify the information on the murder. That happened quickly, yes, the information matched up. That is easy to do with a few searches and a few phone calls. My detectives got in contact with the detectives from the other state. A couple of phone calls back and forth to clarify and verify information.
There was some coordinating with other law enforcement agencies and a plan was put into place to go get the bad guy. Unfortunately I left the office just as that plan was coming together. Normally I would have worked through and done support work, but budget is the word used most often these days. I headed home, knowing that some of the best people were on the case.
I got into the office on Thursday morning and found out the bad guy was now in jail. He was found quickly, without an incident. The bad guy was cooperative; he made a full confession the night before. The detectives from out of state were on an airplane heading to Austin. Once they arrived, I got them to the office and we started with the follow up work. There was evidence to be collected, co-ordination of follow-ups and they wanted to talk to the bad guy another time. More details were figured out from that conversation and then the bad guy was taken back to jail in Austin. He will spend the weekend in jail here and then be extradited back to face trial in the other state.
When I was leaving Thursday night, the out of state detectives were heading to the victims family’s house. I got them directions there and back to the hotel. They were exhausted from a full day, no sleep the night before, a long flight, an interview and little food. They wanted to make sure they were able to talk with the family. It didn’t matter how tired they were. It had to be done before they headed back on Friday morning.
It was true; the bad guy had fled to California after the crime. Once he got there, he figured he would get caught and he would be spending a long time in prison. He decided to head to Texas to say goodbye to some of his friends and family before he ended up in prison.
