The Chronicle only mentions these specific murders yet it's an interesting article on the proceedure and limitations with the Houston Homicide Division during that time.
The text below is from this link:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/4735818.htmlLongtime Houston Police Department homicide investigator Jim Binford is headed for retirement. His colleagues refer to him as a "walking history lesson."
One of the most bizarre cases veteran homicide investigator Jim Binford ever encountered in more than 30 years of investigating murders in Houston involved a woman who strangled her elderly mother nearly two decades ago and stuffed the body in a freezer, only to return in a few days to retrieve a jade and platinum cocktail ring. But the body was frozen solid and the ring would not come lose. So she snapped the finger off.
When Binford discovered the body buried under frosty packages of Polish sausages, he gravely addressed reporters at the scene. "This is one of the most cold-blooded crimes I've ever seen," he said with a straight face.
"It was the classic case where if you didn't laugh, you'd have to cry, and you can't let them see you cry," Binford recalled this week as he prepared to retire Friday.
"A good homicide detective has to have a dark sense of humor — it's a defense mechanism that makes us able to get through the day," he explained. "This job is a continuous fight to not let cynicism ooze out of your every pore."
Dubbed "a legend" and "Mr. Homicide" by younger detectives, Sgt. Binford, 59, is a silver-haired, fifth-generation lawman who carries a sawed-off shotgun named "Bertha."
At 26, he was the youngest homicide detective in the history of the force when he joined the elite "murder squad" in 1974 — only four years after graduating from Houston's Police Academy. For many of his colleagues and friends in Houston's law enforcement community, his retirement heralds "the end of an era."
"He's one of the few very experienced detectives left," said Lt. Murray Smith of HPD homicide. "Besides, he's a walking history lesson."
Over his long career, Binford has taken generations of "baby detectives" under his wing, including Richard W. Holland, captain of HPD's criminal intelligence division, who partnered with Binford as a rookie homicide investigator in 1980.
"To a lot of people for a long time, Binford has been the face of the Houston homicide division," said Holland, who commanded that division from 1994 to 2004. "In many ways, he's had the kind of career that all policemen wish they'd had."
As Binford puts it himself in his warm Texas drawl, he has witnessed the Houston homicide division's transition "from the gumshoe days to the technology age."
Despite the advent of DNA testing, databases, search engines and electronic court records, Binford is still a firm believer that the detective's greatest asset is old-fashioned people skills.
"It's like your grandmother always told you," he says. "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. That good-bad-cop really doesn't work."
A good homicide investigator has to be able earn the trust of people from all walks of life, he says, "whether it's the grieving widow who found out her husband was killed 15 minutes ago at the Stop and Go, or the killer who's lying to you and you know he's lying to you, but you've got to keep him talking."
Usually, he says, the reason they killed comes down to one of three things: "Money, sex and drugs. You can write that in stone."
ASSEMBLY-LINE PROBES
Another constant throughout Binford's decades with HPD has been the overwhelming caseload the Bayou City's homicide detectives carry.
"It's nothing for someone to have 20 to 25 active murder cases going back years," Binford said. In a big city like Houston, "it's always been assembly-line investigations. It's not like TV, where we'll get this one case and stay on it for six months. You might get six days."
Last year, Houston police reported 379 slayings, a 13.5 percent rise attributed to the influx of nearly 150,000 new residents, many of them Hurricane Katrina evacuees. But before his retirement this week, Binford was one of the last working detectives who remembers life as a homicide investigator during a crime wave in the late '70s and early '80s, when the number of murders in Houston peaked at 701 in 1981.
"Those were the busy days," Binford says. He believes the explosion of violent crime at the time was caused by deteriorating economic conditions in the North during the so-called "rust bucket," which sent a huge influx of unemployed workers to Houston.
"They thought (Houston) was the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and discovered it wasn't quite that," Binford says.
One weekend, five detectives investigated 18 murders, he recalls. "By Tuesday, five more people had died of wounds they received that same bloody weekend."
Police were so overwhelmed — and low on supplies — that homicide investigators were told they could only take two Polaroid pictures at any scene, and some detectives resorted to "borrowing" fingerprint powder from other divisions, said Binford's longtime partner Steve Clappart, now an investigator with the Harris County District Attorney's Office.
"We didn't get overtime back then, but yet you'd still come in because you are on the hunt," he said. "You did it for love and no other reason. It was always to get the truth and a little bit of justice."
YOUNGER CRIMINALS
But if the number of murders in Houston is fewer today, Binford is saddened to observe younger criminals, more vicious crimes, more stranger-on-stranger violence and the rise of gangs.
"The young Jim Binford would see murders where the victim was shot one to three times," he said. "Now people are often shot 12 or 15 times. And I see lots of children on the streets flashing gang symbols — 10, 11 or 12 (years old). You can see in their eyes. They're doomed. They're cooked. It's sad."
The son of a sheriff's deputy and grandson of a U.S. marshal, Binford is not sorry his family tradition of carrying a badge ends with him. Binford's daughter is a teacher. His son works as an environmental scientist.
"I am glad that my children are breaking with my heritage, not because of the dangers — I've been shot, stabbed, beat on, fallen off roofs — but because of what I have learned about my brothers and sisters on the big blue ball," he said. "Nothing surprises me any more about what people do to each other, for each other and against each other."
Witnessing human beings at their worst every day for more than 30 years takes its toll, Binford admits.
"Many's the time you come home from work and change in the garage because you've been in a place so odorous with decayed bodies that you don't want that smell in your house," he says.
CASES NEVER CLOSED
For years, haunted by cases he never closed, Binford kept a desk drawer in his office freighted with photos of victims and crime scenes, and he fielded phone calls from agonized families years and even decades after their loved ones died. He still mourns dozens of his colleagues killed in the line of duty and remembers with chilling clarity lying in the grimy parking lot of a beer joint with a pool of blood spreading under him after a fellow officer accidentally put a bullet in his back during a shootout with kidnappers in 1995.
Still, Binford loved his job. Maybe too much, he admitted recently, his clear blue eyes full.
"I'd like to believe I'm not burned up and grizzled," he says. "I'm a guy that has got to ride in the front seat of the roller coaster for 37 years, and I would do it again in a heartbeat."
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A few of Sgt. Jim Binford's most high-profile cases over the years:
• "The Black Widow of the Heights," 1985: Thrice-widowed Jo Ann Reed was sentenced to 12 years in prison in 1986 for hiring an illegal immigrant to murder her husband, Hoyt Van Reed, 49. Juan Antonio Tijerina shot Reed in the left temple as he was drinking coffee in a mobile home behind the Stardust Lounge owned by his 51-year-old wife.
• Larry Vernon Roberts, 15-year-old murderer and rapist, 1983: Roberts received two life sentences — the first for killing a Houston man who walked into his home after Roberts had raped the man's wife and the second for raping a 49-year-old woman at knife point and forcing her to drive to a bank and withdraw $500.
• Jamaican Organized Crime Task Force, 1988 : Binford served on a federal task force of state and local law enforcement officials formed to combat the growing Jamaican organized crime problem in Houston. The HPD blamed at least 30 killings in Houston the previous three to four years on the Jamaican gangs, which trafficked in cocaine and marijuana smuggled across the Mexican border and employed local youths as dealers.
• The "Orchard Apartments" Serial Killer, 1979 : No one was ever arrested in the brutal killings at the Orchard Apartments complex in the 5900 block of Glenmont. Mary Calcutta, 27, was found stabbed to death, her throat slashed, two weeks after her neighbor Alys Rankin, 33, was stabbed and decapitated in her apartment.
• Internal HPD probe of Della Apartment Hotel Raid, 1981 : Binford was assigned to investigate the conduct of 13 HPD officers accused of terrorizing and beating black residents in the Della Apartment Hotel on Lyons following a drinking spree. The department ended up firing seven of the officers and suspending another six.
Source: Houston Chronicle and Houston Post archives.
Topic: The Orchard Apartments Murders | August 1979 (Read 12349 times)
