Don’t dismiss this op/ed piece as some whack-job conspiracy theory, there are plenty of those. The dynamics of 9/11 makes one thing clear, there was a successful conspiracy to bring down the twin towers and attack our seat of Government. That attack, ten years ago, was the most successful attack on the United States to date. It required planning, preparation, secrecy…it was, in every way, by definition, a conspiracy. Does that mean our government conspired to somehow let it happen? No, I don’t believe that. Does that mean that some in our government knew it could happen? Without question, they have admitted as much. Here is a piece I wrote last year on the 9th anniversary of 9/11. Questions that are serious and remain in the forefront of my mind in this terrible day.

Hindsight is 20/20 or so the saying goes. In our collective minds to make sense of things that seemingly make no sense it is easy to think “conspiracy”, however, it is just as easy and perhaps easier to believe the official report. Our desire for an “official report” of any catastrophe shows our need for answers as to how something so horrible can happen. There are many, many conspiracy theories about 9/11. From the collapse of the towers, to allegations of bombs being involved to reports on one blog that “airplanes never really hit the towers” followed by “the hijackers are alive and well in the middle east.”

To understand how something like 9/11 happens, you have to dissect it asking real questions but keeping in mind that any unproven theory is just that, a theory. What is abundantly clear on researching the disaster of 9/11 is that U.S. law enforcement agencies did not track down every lead, did not follow up on every report and may have missed significant incidents that pointed to specific culprits in the most devastating attack on this country since Pearl Harbor. The FBI and CIA admitted as much in the final 9/11 report before Congress. At the very least, a horrible lack of communication and cooperation contributed to the success of the terror mission on the United States but there may be more…much more.

This journalist decided on the ninth anniversary of 9/11 to ask questions. If for no one else, than for myself. I am sharing with you what I have found through investigation and research. You can take it with a grain of salt, check it out for yourself, discount it or believe it but there are lingering questions about that day that still give me pause for concern. I have been covering news for 35 years. I have been an eyewitness to major events that have impacted public conscience. I have reported and written about them. What I am sharing is my take on that day in September, 2001 based on my life experiences and professional abilities as advanced or limited as they may be.

An event such as 9/11 requires motivation. There is no doubt in my mind that the terrorists who stand accused of this attack were and are motivated by a deep hatred of this country, our culture and us in general. For the terrorists, extremists with a deep faith in Islam and jihad, no motivation was needed to attack “the great Satan.” Finding people that were or are willing to sacrifice everything for a chance at such an attack is not difficult to understand in places like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. It’s important to remember that the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 were martyrs, assured that there deaths would actually be a passage into an after-life of unparalleled beauty and comfort, things that they could not find on this earth. It is just as important, and cannot be understated, that martyrdom is a means to an end but is not, in and of itself, an end.

My suggestion is that the 9/11 terrorists, guilty of 9/11 without question, were only one part of a bigger, well financed and intricate plot on the United States. Bringing this thought down to it’s most basic level is this. Who or what stands to gain the most from a terror attack on the United States? A terror attack committed by Egyptians and Saudi Arabians, all of whom shared a deep and very public faith in Islam? Saddam Hussein? The Taliban in Afghanistan? The Saudi Royal Family? Pakistan? Anyone of those entities or nations would have been foolish, in fact stupid, to have had any known role in the terrorist attack on the United States. Anyone of those entities, regardless of how they truly feel about us, our culture or are very existence thrive or have thrived off of our investments, money, love of drugs, our oil consumption, illegal drug consumption…whatever. The United States may be a convenient enemy of many foreign state’s but we remain a great customer of there goods.

The likely answer as to who stood the most to gain and who is most likely involved on a level that would shock the living hell out of most people is not that hard to understand, academically. Israel, our closest ally and most hated nation, in the middle east clearly gained more from 9/11 than any other political entity outside the United States itself. The Jews and Muslims have hated each other since the beginning of time. That deep-seated hatred is nowhere more evident than in the middle east itself, the State of Israel in particular where the very existence of the country is always threatened.

Don’t assume that this journalist makes this suggestion lightly or has an axe to grind. Neither is the case. I have always admired the ability of the Israeli’s to provide for themselves, protect themselves and to ensure their survival…ironically…these traits likely led to their clandestine support of the 9/11 terrorists. It’s hard for most people to envision a world where the Jewish State could utilize Islamic extremists to attack the United States to further their own goals. To better grasp the enormity of this or how it would be possible, you have to understand that the Mossad, Israel’s top-secret intelligence agency, is regarded as the best in the world. The best at what? Whatever suits Israels needs.

The Mossad is broken down into different  departments although it’s exact set-up is largely unknown. Global Security experts believe the Mossad has 8 departments broken down as follows. The Collections Department is the largest, with responsibility for espionage operations, with offices abroad under both diplomatic and unofficial cover. The department consists of a number of desks which are responsible for specific geographical regions, directing case officers based at “stations” around the world, and the agents they control. The Political Action and Liaison Department conducts political activities and liaison with friendly foreign intelligence services and with nations with which Israel does not have normal diplomatic relations. In larger stations, such as Paris, Mossad customarily had under embassy cover two regional controllers: one to serve the Collections Department and the other the Political Action and Liaison Department. There is, of course, a Research Department responsible for intelligence production, including daily situation reports, weekly summaries and detailed monthly reports. The Department is organized into 15 geographically specialized sections or “desks”, including the USA, Canada and Western Europe, Latin America, Former Soviet Union, China, Africa, the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iran. A “nuclear” desk is focused on special weapons related issues.

The most sinister of Mossad’s departments and the two most likely to have played a role in the 9/11 terror attacks on the United States are the Special Operations Division also known as Metsada which conducts highly sensitive assassination, sabotage, paramilitary, and psychological warfare projects. Equally dirty is the LAP (Lohamah Psichlogit) Department which is responsible for psychological warfare, propaganda and deception operations.

Israel clearly had the motivation for 9/11. Always threatened by it’s neighbors a frequent recipient of terrorism itself, the State of Israel has a history of self preservation on a scale equaled perhaps only by our own. With the worlds acceptance of Muslims growing in Europe and the United States over the past decades, Israel, no doubt, has been feeling even more isolated by its impossible stance against Islam based on it’s own deeply religious convictions. U.S. envoys went to Tel Aviv during the first Gulf War to beg the Israeli’s for restraint as Iraqi Scud Missiles fell on Israeli soil. The concern then, and now, that any attack by Israel on any Muslim nation would unleash a horrendous holy war that would lead to world war three. The Israeli’s obliged but became more weary of the United States alliance with Saudi Arabia in the war against Iraq. Israel, for years, had protested the United States sale of advanced fighter jets to the Saudi Royal Family. This world alignment, with the United States allying with Islamic countries against extremists threatened Israel or so they thought.

The motivation for 9/11 is so clear and obvious to me, it’s almost impossible to understand how anyone could have missed it. On the surface, the United States and Israel are the closest of allies. We always have been. That fact makes the suggestion of Israeli involvement impossible for some to swallow. It is only with a clear understanding of Israels self preservation instincts, the Gulf War and the growth of Muslim acceptance in the west that makes it obvious.

For anyone to think that a terrorist organization, housed in the caves of Afghanistan, carried out an orchestrated, major, intricate and successful attack on the United States is, on it’s face, crazy. There are likely only three intelligence agencies in the world who could have helped to orchestrate such events. The CIA, the Mossad and the British Secret Intelligence Service. Of those three, only the Mossad had the motivation. Many countries could have provided terrorist funding to carry out the attacks but only Israel had the motivation. Of all the nations on the earth, only one had both motivation and the ability to fund terror operations, the State of Israel.

No, I am not suggesting the Israeli’s approached Osama Bin Laden through any traditional means, yet the Mossad is more than capable, through a front organization on a level of secrecy that is still unknown to most of us to make this happen. The clandestine activities of the Mossad are well known in intelligence circles and it’s penchant for attacking Israel’s enemies is unparalleled. Remember the LAP (Lohamah Psichlogit) Department which is responsible for psychological warfare, propaganda and deception operations? They are more than capable of helping any rogue terrorist organization carry out it’s goals with complete anonymity as to the real source of the help. The Israeli art of deception in this underground world is unmatched.

9/11 served Israels purposes. The American people still believe they were attacked by Islamic radicals which is obviously true but the reason for the attacks was rooted in Tel Aviv not just the mountains of Afghanistan. The Mossad could never carry out an attack on an Israeli ally but it could damn sure provide technical expertise and money for the terrorists who would. Take note, President Obama has been strangely cold toward Israel and it’s leaders. Is it possible that he is aware of what really happened on 9/11 and cannot stomach our two-faced, deadly but very necessary ally in the Gulf region? Why does it seem there is less emphasis on catching Bin Laden? Could it be because U.S. military and intelligence sources now know the truth and Bin Laden and his band of terrorists are not that much of a threat after all?

This story continues to unfold and I am not the only one suggesting the Israeli-Al Quaida connection. Former Italian President Francesco Cossiga, who revealed the existence of Operation Gladio, has told Italy’s oldest and most widely read newspaper that the 9-11 terrorist attacks were run by the CIA and Mossad, and that this was common knowledge among global intelligence agencies. In what translates awkwardly into English, Cossiga told the newspaper Corriere della Sera: “All the [intelligence services] of America and Europe…know well that the disastrous attack has been planned and realized from the Mossad, with the aid of the Zionist world in order to put under accusation the Arabic countries and in order to induce the western powers to take part … in Iraq [and] Afghanistan.”

Cossiga was elected president of the Italian Senate in July 1983 before winning a landslide election to become president of the country in 1985, and he remained until 1992. Cossiga’s tendency to be outspoken upset the Italian political establishment, and he was forced to resign after revealing the existence of, and his part in setting up, Operation Gladio. This was a rogue intelligence network under NATO auspices that carried out bombings across Europe in the 1960s, 1970s and ’80s. Gladio’s specialty was to carry out what they termed “false flag” operations—terror attacks that were blamed on their domestic and geopolitical opposition.

In March 2001, Gladio agent Vincenzo Vinciguerra stated, in sworn testimony, “You had to attack civilians, the people, women, children, innocent people, unknown people far removed from any political game. The reason was quite simple: to force … the public to turn to the state to ask for greater security.”

Cossiga first expressed his doubts about 9-11 in 2001, and is quoted by 9-11 researcher Webster Tarpley saying “The mastermind of the attack must have been a sophisticated mind, provided with ample means not only to recruit fanatic kamikazes, but also highly specialized personnel. I add one thing: it could not be accomplished without infiltrations in the radar and flight security personnel.” Coming from a widely respected former head of state, Cossiga’s assertion that the 9-11 attacks were an inside job and that this is common knowledge among global intelligence agencies is illuminating. It is one more eye-opening confirmation that has not been mentioned by America’s propaganda machine in print or on TV. Nevertheless, because of his experience and status in the world, Cossiga cannot be discounted as a crackpot.

The connection between Israel and the 9/11 terrorists is hard to ignore when the leader of a sovereign nation, Italy, also a U.S. ally is on the record saying it happened. Then, of course, there is 9/11 itself. “The dancing Israeli’s” celebrating the attacks in Manhattan…

Mossad
The Institute for Intelligence and Special Tasks
ha-Mossad le-Modiin ule-Tafkidim Meyuhadim

Mossad [Hebrew for “institution”] has responsibility for human intelligence collection, covert action, and counterterrorism. Its focus is on Arab nations and organizations throughout the world. Mossad also is responsible for the clandestine movement of Jewish refugees out of Syria, Iran, and Ethiopia. Mossad agents are active in the former communist countries, in the West, and at the UN.

Mossad is headquartered in Tel Aviv. The staff of Mossad was estimated during the late 1980s to number between 1,500 to 2,000 personnel, with more recent estimates placing the staff at an estimated 1,200 personnel. The identity of the director of Mossad was traditionally a state secret, or at least not widely publicized, but, in March 1996, the Government announced the appointment of Major General Danny Yatom as the replacement for Shabtai Shavit, who resigned in early 1996. Danny Yatom resigned on February 24, 1998, following the release of the Ciechanover Commission report which dealt with the failed attempt to assassinate Khalid Meshaal, a top Hamas political leader, and thus found faults with his performance as head of Mossad. Yatom was replace in early March 1998 by Efraim Halevy, then Israel’s representative to the European Union. Halevy, as a Mossad agent, had previously worked behind the scenes to help negotiate the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan.

Formerly known as the Central Institute for Coordination and the Central Institute for Intelligence and Security, Mossad was formed on 01 April 1951. Mossad was established by then Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, who gave as Mossad’s primary directive: “For our state which since its creation has been under siege by its enemies. Intelligence constitutes the first line of defence…we must learn well how to recognise what is going on around us.”

Mossad has a total of eight departments, though some details of the internal organization of the agency remain obscure.

• Collections Department is the largest, with responsibility for espionage operations, with offices abroad under both diplomatic and unofficial cover. The department consists of a number of desks which are responsible for specific geographical regions, directing case officers based at “stations” around the world, and the agents they control.
• Political Action and Liaison Department conducts political activities and liaison with friendly foreign intelligence services and with nations with which Israel does not have normal diplomatic relations. In larger stations, such as Paris, Mossad customarily had under embassy cover two regional controllers: one to serve the Collections Department and the other the Political Action and Liaison Department.
• Special Operations Division, also known as Metsada, conducts highly sensitive assassination, sabotage, paramilitary, and psychological warfare projects.
• LAP (Lohamah Psichlogit)Department is responsible for psychological warfare, propaganda and deception operations.
• Research Department is responsible for intelligence production, including daily situation reports, weekly summaries and detailed monthly reports. The Department is organized into 15 geographically specialized sections or “desks”, including the USA, Canada and Western Europe, Latin America, Former Soviet Union, China, Africa, the Maghreb (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Syria, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Iran. A “nuclear” desk is focused on special weapons related issues.

Israel’s most celebrated spy, Eli Cohen, was recruited by Mossad during the 1960s to infiltrate the top echelons of the Syrian government. Cohen radioed information to Israel for two years before he was discovered and publicly hanged in Damascus Square. Another Mossad agent, Wolfgang Lotz, established himself in Cairo, became acquainted with high-ranking Egyptian military and police officers, and obtained information on missile sites and on German scientists working on the Egyptian rocket program. In 1962 and 1963, in a successful effort to intimidate the Germans, several key scientists in that program were targets of assassination attempts. Mossad also succeeded in seizing eight missile boats under construction for Israel in France, but which had been embargoed by French president Charles de Gaulle in December 1968.

In 1960, Mossad carried out one of its most celebrated operations, the kidnapping of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann from Argentina. Another kidnapping, in 1986, brought to Israel for prosecution the nuclear technician, Mordechai Vanunu, who had revealed details of the Israeli nuclear weapons program to a London newspaper. During the 1970s, Mossad assassinated several Arabs connected with the Black September terrorist group. Mossad inflicted a severe blow on the PLO in April 1988, when an assassination team invaded a well-guarded residence in Tunis to murder Arafat’s deputy, Abu Jihad, considered to be the principal PLO planner of military and terrorist operations against Israel. Gerald Bull, a Canadian scientist who developed the famed “Super Gun” for Iraq was killed by the Mossad at his Brussels apartment in March 1990, effectively halting the development of the Supergun project.

Egyptian security services reported the discovery of a total of seven Israeli espionage networks during 1996, which is a significant increase compared to the 20 similar networks discovered in the previous 15 years.

And Mossad’s record has also been blemished by a few embarrasing failures. In Lillehammer, Norway, on 07 January 1974, Mossad agents mistakenly killed Ahmad Boushiki, an Algerian waiter carrying a Moroccan passport, whom they mistook for PLO security head Ali Ahmad Salameh, believed to have masterminded the 1972 massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics [Salameh was killed in a 1979 car-bomb explosion in Lebanon]. Following the attack, the Mossad agents were arrested and tried before a Norwegian court. Five Israeli agents were convicted and served short jail sentences, though Israel denied responsibility for the murder. In February 1996, the Israeli government agreed to compensate the family of Ahmad Boushiki.

On 15 November 1995, Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an Israeli citizen. Following the controversy over the failure of intelligence to protect Rabin, and the embarrassment over the mistaken assassination of a Swedish national, the Director Geneneral of Mossad, known only as ‘S’, was forced into retirement. On 24 March 1996, Prime Minister Shimon Peres appointed Major General Danny Yatom as the new Director General of Mossad, the first Director of Mossad to ever be publically identified.

On 24 September 1997, Mossad operatives attempted to assassinate Khalid Meshaal, a top political leader of the Palestinian group Hamas. The assassins entered Jordan on fake Canadian, and injected Meshaal with a poison. Jordan was able to wring a number of concessions out of Israel in the aftermath of the fiasco, including the release of the founder of Hamas, Shaykh Ahmad Yasin, from an Israeli jail.

Ephraim Halevy, a nephew of the late Sir Isaiah Berlin [who helped to negotiate a peace deal with Jordan], became the new head of Mossad after two bungled operations led to the arrests of agents in Switzerland and Jordan. Mossad scaled down overseas assassinations after the bungled operations in the late 1990s. But by 2002 Prime Minister Ariel Sharon decided to remove Halevy, after the two clashed repeatedly about what strategy to adopt against Palestinian violence

In October 2002 General Meir Dagan, who served in the Israeli Army with Ariel Sharon, and assisted him during his election campaign, was confirmed as head of Mossad. Dagan led an undercover commando unit that tracked and killed Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip. Sharon wanted Mossad to go back to the undercover and special operations for which it was renowned.

This commentary has been abbreviated - the full article is available at:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/000/456zfygd.asp

Radical Islam is not yet a great idea, but it is a dangerous one. And on September 11, it arose.

On September 11, American foreign policy acquired seriousness. It also acquired a new organizing principle: We  have an enemy, radical Islam; it is a global opponent of worldwide reach, armed with an idea, and with the tactics,  weapons, and ruthlessness necessary to take on the world's hegemony; and its defeat is our supreme national  objective, as overriding a necessity as were the defeats of fascism and Soviet communism.

That organizing principle was enunciated by President Bush in his historic address to Congress. From that day forth, American foreign policy would define itself -- and define friend and foe -- according to who was with us or against us in the war on terrorism. This is the self-proclaimed Bush doctrine -- the Truman doctrine with radical Islam replacing Soviet communism.

THE NEW WORLD ORDER

The post-September 11 realignments in the international system have been swift and tectonic. Within days, two  Great Powers that had confusedly fumbled their way through the period of unchallenged American hegemony in the 1990s began to move dramatically. A third, while not altering its commitments, mollified its militancy. The  movement was all in one direction: toward alignment with the United States. The three powers in question -- India,  Russia, and China -- have one thing in common: They all border Islam, and all face their own radical Islamic  challenges.

First to embrace the United States was India, a rising superpower, nuclear-armed, economically vibrant,  democratic, and soon to be the world's most populous state. For half a century since Nehru's declaration of  nonalignment, India had defined itself internationally in opposition to the United States.  September 11 made the transition instantaneous. India, facing its own Taliban-related  terrorism in Kashmir, immediately invited the United States to use not just its airspace but its military bases for the campaign in Afghanistan. The Nehru era had ended in a flash. Nonalignment was dead. India had openly  declared itself ready to join Pax Americana.

The transformation of Russian foreign policy has been more subtle but, in the long run, perhaps even more far-reaching. It was symbolized by the announcement on October 17 that after 37 years Russia was closing its massive listening post at Lourdes, Cuba. Lourdes was one of the last remaining symbols both of Soviet global ambitions and of reflexive anti-Americanism.

The third and most reluctant player in the realignment game is China. China is the least directly threatened by radical Islam.  It has no Chechnya or Kashmir. But it does have simmering Islamic discontent in its western provinces.  It is sympathetic to any attempt to tame radical Islam because of the long-term threat it poses to  Chinese unity. At the just completed Shanghai Summit, China was noticeably more accommodating than usual to the United States. It is still no ally, and still sees us, correctly, as standing in the way of its aspirations to hegemony in the western  Pacific.  China's posture of sympathetic neutrality is thus a passive plus: It means that not a single Great Power on the planet lies on the wrong side of the new divide. This is historically unprecedented. Call it hyper-unipolarity. And for the United States, it is potentially a great gain.

With Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa on the sidelines, the one region still in play -- indeed the prize in the new Great Game -- is the Islamic world. It is obviously divided on the question of jihad against the infidel.  Bin Laden still speaks for a minority. The religious parties in Pakistan, for example, in the past decade never got more  than 5 percent of the vote combined.  But bin Ladenism clearly has support in the Islamic "street."  True, the street  has long been overrated.  During the Gulf War, it was utterly silent and utterly passive. Nonetheless, after five years  of ceaseless agitation through Al Jazeera, and after yet another decade of failed repressive governance, the street is more radicalized and more potentially mobilizable. For now, the corrupt ruling Arab elites have largely lined up with the United States, at least on paper.  But their holding power against the radical Islamic challenge is not absolute. The war on terrorism, and in particular the Afghan war, will be decisive in determining in whose camp the Islamic world will end up: -- that of the United States, the West, Russia, India -- or Osama bin Laden's.

THE WAR

The asymmetry is almost comical. The whole world against one man.  If in the end the United States, backed by every Great Power, cannot succeed in defeating some cave dwellers in the most backward country on earth, then the entire structure of world stability, which rests ultimately on the pacifying deterrent effect of American power, will  be fatally threatened.

Which is why so much hinges on the success of the war on terrorism.  Initially, success need not be defined globally. No one expects a quick victory over an entrenched and shadowy worldwide network. Success does,  however, mean demonstrating that the United States has the will and power to enforce the Bush doctrine that governments will be held accountable for the terrorists they harbour. Success therefore requires making an example of the Taliban. Getting Osama is not the immediate goal. Everyone understands that it is hard, even for a superpower, to go on a cave-to-cave manhunt.

After September 11, the world awaited the show of American might. If that show fails, then the list of countries lining up on the other side of the new divide will grow. This is particularly true of the Arab world with its small, fragile states. Weaker states invariably seek to join coalitions of the strong.  For obvious reasons of safety, they go with those who appear to be the winners.  Great Powers, on the other hand, tend to support coalitions of the weak  as a way to create equilibrium.

The Arab states played both sides against the middle during the Cold War, often abruptly changing sides (e.g., Egypt during the '60s and '70s). They lined up with the United States against Iraq at the peak of American unipolarity at the beginning of the 1990s.  But with subsequent American weakness and irresolution, in the face both of post-Gulf War Iraqi defiance and of repeated terrorist attacks that garnered the most feckless American military responses, respect for American power declined. Inevitably, the pro-American coalition fell apart.

The current pro-American coalition will fall apart even more quickly if the Taliban prove a match for the United  States. Contrary to the current delusion that the Islamic states will respond to American demonstrations of solicitousness and sensitivity (such as a halt in the fighting during Ramadan), they are waiting to see the success of American power before irrevocably committing themselves. The future of Islamic and Arab allegiance will depend on whether the Taliban are brought to grief.

The assumption after September 11 was that an aroused America will win. If we demonstrate that we cannot win,  no coalition with moderate Arabs will long survive. But much more depends on our success than just the allegiance of that last piece of the geopolitical puzzle, the Islamic world. The entire new world alignment is at stake.

States line up with more powerful states not out of love but out of fear. And respect. The fear of radical Islam has created a new, almost unprecedented coalition of interests among the Great Powers. But that coalition of fear is held together also by respect for American power and its ability to provide safety under the American umbrella.

Should we succeed in the war on terrorism, first in Afghanistan, we will be cementing the New World Order -- the expansion of the American sphere of peace to include Russia and India (with a more neutral China) -- just now beginning to take shape. Should we fail, it will be sauve qui peut. Other countries -- and not just our new allies but even our old allies in Europe -- will seek their separate peace. If the guarantor of world peace for the last half century cannot succeed in a war of self-defence against Afghanistan(!), then the whole post-World War II structure -- open borders, open trade, open seas, open societies -- will begin to unravel.

The first President Bush sought to establish a New World Order. He failed, in part because he allowed himself to lose a war he had just won. The second President Bush never sought a New World Order. It was handed to him on Sept. 11. To maintain it, however, he has a war to win.

Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

'Mein Kampf' Extracts To Be Sold in Germany

FRANKFURT, Germany -- (DER SPIEGEL) - A British publisher plans to sell excerpts from Hitler's "Mein Kampf" in Germany, claiming he wants to demystify the infamous book. But the controversial move could provoke a legal dispute with the Bavarian government, which owns the copyright and refuses reprint permission.

Is it permissible to sit in a cafe and read Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf?" British publisher Peter McGee, 51, has no doubt. "Of course it is. It's long overdue that a broad public should get the opportunity to deal with the original text." And because McGee is so sure he's right, he plans to serialize extracts of the book in three small 15-page brochures with an initial print run of 100,000 copies each. The front cover features a photo of Hitler with a black bar obscuring his eyes and a headline that translates to "The unreadable book."

The plans could trigger opposition from Bavarian civil servants, though. Contrary to common belief, "Mein Kampf" is not banned in Germany. But the state of Bavaria, which seized Hitler's assets after his death, owns the copyright to his infamous treatise and has so far consistently prohibited efforts to reprint it.McGee likes a fight and is no stranger to scandal. In 2009, he published reprints of vintage Nazi newspapers like Der Angriff and Völkischer Beobachter with print runs of up to 300,000, delivered alongside comments from historians.

Confiscated By Police

The move caused a minor uproar in Germany, with the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung warning of an "embellishment of horror" and the Central Council of Jews in Germany labelling the reprints potential "blueprints for budding Nazis." The row escalated and the Bavarian government, which also owns the copyright to the two newspapers, dispatched police throughout the nation to seize the republished copies. The Bavarian Finance Ministry takes a similarly strict view of the planned publication of "Mein Kampf." It declared: "Permission to publish volumes isn't granted in Germany or abroad." It added that Bavaria would use "all means at its disposal" to fight copyright infringements. Their aim was to prevent the spread of National Socialist propaganda and to send a "clear signal" of opposition to its content, it continued.

McGee regards that as nonsense. "Mein Kampf is an extremely bad book, it is badly written, has awkward language and no internal logic," he says. "The thoughts are strewn across the whole book." But he adds that one can only recognize its insanity if one confronts the text. In McGee's edition, each page contains a column of original text alongside critical commentary. "We're aware of the dark power of this book but it stems from the fact that no one has read it. The aura of being forbidden accounts for its myth," said the publisher.

Double Provocation

McGee wants to destroy the myth and plans to put the extracts on sale in Germany beginning next Thursday. It's not just an ethical provocation, but a judicial one as well. A book copyright expires 70 years after the death of an author. In Hitler's case, that won't be until 2015. McGee's publishing company Albertas didn't even speak to the Bavarian finance ministry before going ahead with the project. "Given how they reacted last time, it didn't seem to make much sense," he said. But he has secured the services of Berlin lawyer Ulrich Michel, who regards the publication of excerpts as lawful.

The Central Council of Jews, meanwhile, is taking a far more relaxed view of the publication than it did with the Nazi newspapers in 2009. Dieter Graumann, the president of the council, said he hoped that the reprints would "demystify" the book. "I'm an Internet junkie myself," said Grauman. "Everyone can already find the book on the Web." But Internet readers are left alone with the inhuman original text because Web versions of "Mein Kampf" are often just uploaded without any accompanying notes from historians.

YOUNG GERMANS COME TO GRIPS WITH GRISLY PAST



Robert Albrecht is a young German from a town just outside Munich better known, here in the United States, as the site of a botched military raid to rescue Israeli’s during the 1972 Olympics, Furstenfeldbruck. I met Robert years ago on an Adriatic Beach in Italy. He was there on "holiday" from his studies with some friends. At 15, I was amazed at his command of the Americanized version of the English language, his dedication to his studies and his intellect. Robert was a smart young man. I think he was fascinated by this American soldier, at the time on NATO’s front lines of Europe’s Iron Curtain. It was a friendship that endured over the years but made easier with Facebook and the internet. I have reconnected with Robert for the first time in 30 years and after catching up on what we’ve been doing since our initial meeting decades ago…our talk turned to my fascination with how Germans cope with the legacy of the second world war.

I spent two years in Europe in fact I lived in an old Luftwaffe barracks at Aviano Air Base in Italy. The sense of history can be overwhelming. There were still bombed out buildings in the Italian countryside and on occasion, the explosives experts from the base would be called to some farmers field to take care of some unexploded bomb left over from the great war. I can still remember, vividly, my visit to Dachau, the concentration camp outside Munich in 1983. In front of this young airman stood a whipping table and crop used to beat prisoners. I recall walking down a trail passed gas chambers that, somehow, were never used at Dachau. At the end of the walk…a crematorium and lush, well manicured grounds that are a mass grave for thousands of unknown victims. It was then and is today frozen in my mind that evil does indeed exist even though it’s hard to fully comprehend.

I can still remember, vividly, my visit to Dachau, the concentration camp outside Munich in 1983. In front of this young airman stood a whipping table and crop used to beat prisoners.

I asked Robert about German culture and history. "We learn about Hitler and how he was able to take over our country," Robert told me. "We learn it from a very young age up until we go to a university," Robert said meaning that Germans get a steady diet of history over and over and over again. I suppose that’s a good thing, after all, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it…right? Do you ever resent it, being told over and over, I asked? "No", Robert said, "it’s an important part of our history and something we should not forget."

German television stations show documentaries routinely that show the liberation of the death camps. RAI, the Italian State Television network, shows them in Italy as well…a lesson…so it’s never forgotten. The graphic images are difficult to watch and are shown with such regularity you wonder whether the impact, over time, has been lost. The memories of the second world war ran deep in Europe when I was there. I recall visiting the beaches on the Adriatic Sea in the summer, beautiful resorts teeming with tourists from all over Europe…except for one. At Jesolo, there were not many Germans and it was noticeable. I asked an Italian why no Germans and he recanted the story about Germans lining up civilians during the war and machine gunning them down…memories not forgotten…grandparents lost and Germans, almost 40 years later, persona non grata.

Robert spent some time trying to help this American wrap his brain around the enormous consequences and legacy of the second world war…here’s what he says…

Young Robert Albrecht at age 15 in an Italian hotel in 1982 (left) the flag of the German Republic (right).

In Berlin, the former seat of Nazi Germany, there was a scandal a few years ago that had nothing to do with modern Germany and everything to do with the nation’s Nazi past. The brouhaha is over how May 8, 1945, the day Nazi Germany capitulated, should be remembered. Local officials of a wealthy Berlin district just passed a motion stating that victims of Nazi oppression are not the only ones who should be memorialized and honored. Regular German soldiers and civilians who were killed as well as women who were raped by the advancing Soviet army, too, should be remembered, they declared.

The resolution has provoked harsh criticism, especially after one lawyer and local politician said that in some matters, he can’t help but agree with one of the nation’s neo-Nazi parties. Critics charge that lumping all victims together, and going so far as to turn war criminals into victims, dangerously blurs the question of guilt and responsibility for the war. The message of the debate is clear: For us Germans, whether we like it or not, the past is always present. One only has to take a look at a German bookshop these days. The shelves are overflowing with new publications on every imaginable aspect of the Nazi period. Newspapers and TV channels are running dozens of documentaries on World War II. The conflict cost about 60 million lives and obviously it still haunts us.

Probably the most important reason for this ongoing presence of the Nazi past is quite personal. The former Wehrmacht soldiers who fought in the war are now almost all in their eighties. Still, almost every single German family harbors a complicated personal war history, some more bitter than others. Part of mine, for instance, is that my Austrian grandfather committed suicide in the spring of 1945. He had been a simple tailor, churning out Nazi uniforms, but never putting one on himself or fighting. Still, he had been a Nazi party member and feared revenge from the advancing Soviet troops.

Munich today with the Bavarian Alps in the background.

As a teenager in the 1980′s, I stumbled upon a box of family photos containing a portrait of a handsome, dark-haired young man in a black jacket with skulls on the collar, the uniform of Hitler’s elite SS division. My grandmother revealed to me that the man in the photo was Willy, her beloved little brother. Willy joined the illegal Austrian branch of the Nazi party in the 1930s, and was then imprisoned. He escaped and went to Germany, where he joined the SS. He served at the Dachau concentration camp and my grandmother remembered how he returned home for a holiday saying he had seen terrible things which he could not talk about but which made him despise National Socialism. Willy then volunteered for the eastern front and was shot in 1941, during the first week of the Russian campaign.

My grandfather, recruited late in the war, served as an anti-aircraft gunner in southwest Germany and was lucky not to have been on duty on the day in early 1945 when Allied bombers attacked the dam his unit was protecting. Several of his fellow soldiers died. He was 16 years old at the time. My wife still recalls her grandparents telling a harrowing tale of fleeing from advancing Soviet troops in 1945. They were only children, but leaving behind their homes and everything they knew was a traumatic experience that deeply influenced their personalities and lives. Of course, we got away lightly compared to the fate of Jewish-German families, but still, the war lingers in almost every German home.

Nevertheless, the way the war and the Nazi years are talked about in Germany has changed radically in the past 60 years. Right after the war, there was a deafening silence. "Don’t mention the war," was the basic mantra, which the British comedian John Cleese brilliantly satirized in the 1970s classic BBC TV comedy "Fawlty Towers". In West Germany, the vast majority of Nazi judges, scientists and bureaucrats simply stayed in office. When Chancellor Konrad Adenauer was asked in early 1955 if there should be an official event marking the 10th anniversary of the liberation from the Nazis he answered, tellingly: "You don’t celebrate your defeats."

My grandfather, recruited late in the war, served as an anti-aircraft gunner in southwest Germany and was lucky not to have been on duty on the day in early 1945 when Allied bombers attacked the dam his unit was protecting.

Beginning in  the 1960s and through my teen years, did rebellious teenagers like me start to question their parents and grandparents: What were you doing between 1933 and 1945? What did you know about the killing of the Jews? We did not accept the collective amnesia regarding the Nazi crimes. We also refused to buy the popular legend of an evil demon called Hitler who single-handedly seduced and betrayed an innocent German people who knew nothing about the atrocities the Wehrmacht and the SS committed.

In the 1970s, young teachers introduced the Nazi period into the school curriculum and historians began more intensely documenting and researching the rise of the Nazis. The American TV series "Holocaust" also had a strong impact. Then, on May 8, 1985, President Richard von Weizsaecker — once a Wehrmacht officer — gave a historical speech to the German parliament in which he declared the day the "Deutsche Reich" submitted to an unconditional capitulation a "Tag der Befreiung," a "day of liberation" for Germans.

This was especially resonant considering Weizsaecker’s own family war story. His father Ernst served as Nazi deputy foreign secretary and in 1942 signed deportation orders that sent about 6,000 French Jews to extermination camps. In his speech, Weizsaecker Jr. remembered Jews, but also other groups, like Gypsies, homosexuals, communists and the handicapped, who were persecuted and killed because they were different or had dissenting political opinions.

Beginning in  the 1960s and through my teen years, did rebellious teenagers like me start to question their parents and grandparents: What were you doing between 1933 and 1945?

By the 1980s, recognition of Nazi crimes and the acceptance of the German duty to critically remember them had finally attained broad consensus. This was my coming of age. Now it is commonplace. Just the other day, Wladimir Kaminer, a Jew from Moscow who came to Berlin 15 years ago and who is now a German citizen and very successful writer, told me. "Your defeat in World War II has helped you build up a true democracy. The Germans are hopeless now when it comes to anything militaristic and totalitarian. The Russians, on the other hand, still can’t even recognize the victims of Stalinism. That’s because even though he was a dictator, he won the war against evil Nazi-Germany and you don’t accuse a winner. That’s why you have a lot more racists and right-wing extremists in Russia than in Germany."

Respected British historian Ian Kershaw — who wrote what I believe is the best Hitler biography — recently praised the Germans for having done much more to come to terms with their fascist past than the Austrians, Italians or Japanese. This is encouraging to hear, though it does not offer an excuse to indulge in complacency. In the last few years, books on the Allied bombing campaign and the brutal expulsion of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia in 1945 have focused on how Germans suffered during the war. Leftists have warned that this shift could lead to a moral levelling and suppression of the fact that it was Nazi Germany which, after all, began the war and that their goal was to enslave Europe and ultimately achieve world supremacy.

And unfortunately, on the fringes of German society — particularly in the impoverished former East Germany — anti-Semitism and neo-Nazism still exist and at the moment seem to be thriving. Last year, neo-Nazi parties won parliamentary seats in two German states and party heads have unabashedly declared their desire to win federal representation in 2006 elections. It is hard to understand how such self-declared nationalists can actually defend Hitler — a fanatic who transformed Germany into an immoral police state and ultimately brought the nation to its knees and forced it to bear decades of occupation. Still, they do and this shows that even now, the debate on the Nazi period is not always terribly rational.

German boys, conscripts during second world war.

And calm rationality is what is desperately needed on all sides when it comes to confronting Germany’s Nazi past. Unfortunately, such even-temperedness is often sorely lacking. Whenever a right-wing extremist provokes controversy — like last month, when a prominent Neo-Nazi called the Allied attacks on Dresden in February 1945 a "Holocaust of bombs" — German politicians immediately start to moralize in grand style instead of discussing and analyzing the historical facts.

The truth is that after the Dresden air attacks, even British Prime Minister Winston Churchill looked at the rubble and ordered a review of what he called the "bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing terror, though under other pretexts". There are other good arguments to support the conclusion that the relentless bombing of German cities did, indeed, conflict with international law and therefore can be judged a war crime. Of course, one must not leave out the bombing attacks perpetrated by the German Luftwaffe against Guernica, Warsaw, Rotterdam or Belgrade, which were also war crimes.

But out of fear they might nurture nationalistic ideas or be misunderstood and criticized by the foreign media, German politicians continue to evade a detailed discussion of the historical facts. Instead, they prefer to loudly lament the popularity of neo-Nazis who dare to insult Holocaust victims. Again, emotionalism and moralizing beat out rationalism. As a boy I loved to play in bombed out villas in Furstenfelbruck and even today when I look out of my kitchen window I can still see a house with a bombed-out back wing where tiles from blasted-out bathrooms still stick on the wall. This house is certainly an anomaly, as most of Bavaria has been rebuilt. But it will take many more years until all traces of the past completely disappear.

In the 1970s, young teachers introduced the Nazi period into the school curriculum and historians began more intensely documenting and researching the rise of the Nazis. The American TV series "Holocaust" also had a strong impact.

Meanwhile, my 11-year-old son has started to ask me about the Nazis. While we were living in London, his schoolmates sometimes greeted him mockingly with a "Heil Hitler." Although he was born many  years after the "Fuehrer" shot himself in his bunker, he, too, can’t escape history. That is not something I regret.

And something I am grateful for is the internet and social networking that lets old friends reunite and visit and talk as if over a cup of coffee or mug of beer. The digital age has made the world a much smaller place and I suspect for the better because after spending some time with an old friend and listening to him share some very personal anecdotes over history I can begin to better understand it.

There have been 96,452,545 riders on the Racer, which was there the day the park opened, and remains the king of all rides. Kings Island is the place where people went with their moms and dads when they were young. Then it became the place they take their kids. This will be the 41st year people will walk through the gates and down International Street, and then make a decision: left toward the Racer, straight ahead, past the Eiffel Tower and to the Beast, or a right, with the kids, toward Little Bill’s Giggle Coaster. Evel rides again: Knievel’s career peaks at Kings Island.

The longest successful jump of Evel Knievel’s career happened on Oct. 25, 1975, when he soared over 14 buses at Kings Island. He had one longer jump, but he crashed. The Kings Island jump aired on ABC’s “Wide World of Sports,” and gave the show its highest-ever ratings. More than half the people watching TV when he jumped were watching him. But the drama of the Kings Island jump really begins the year before, in London, when Evel tried to jump over 13 buses, landed a touch short, bounced hard, went over the handle bars, broke his pelvis and landed in a heap at the bottom of the ramp.

Medical crews put Evel on a stretcher, but then he climbed off, grabbed a microphone, and said: “Ladies and gentlemen of this wonderful country, I’ve got to tell you that you are the last people in the world who will see me jump. Because I will never, ever, ever jump again. I am through.” Hah! Evel Knievel wasn’t done. This great American sports hero would not finish his career in England. He would jump again at Kings Island, and this time he would jump over 14 American buses. And he nailed it. The rear wheel of his Harley-Davidson touched down, then the front, and then he slowed and stopped. Then he retired again. But this time he kind of meant it.

He tried a few more jumps – 10 vans in Worcester, Mass., seven buses in Seattle – but they were all far shorter. Kings Island was really the end.

A new amusement park with more room and less mud

Coney Island, the historic amusement park, opened in 1886, on a former apple orchard nestled along the banks of the Ohio River. It was still running in 1962, when Ralph Wachs took it over. His son, Gary, then in his mid-20s, went into the business, too. The park was successful, but had run out of room to grow, and the river kept climbing over the banks. In 1964, the entire park was under 14 feet of water. “I cannot tell you what the flooding was like back then,” said Gary, now 75. “I feel like I spent the entire 1960s shoveling mud. Words cannot describe.”

Gary dreamed of a new park, off the river, with plenty of room to grow. Those dreams led him to Taft Broadcasting for backing, and Warren County for land. He would build his dream. They started building Kings Island, and closed Coney Island at the end of the season in 1971. (It would open again.) “Taft put up the dough, and we put up the expertise,” Gary said. “We needed land, and we bought it in Warren County. People thought it was too far out, but we knew they would come.”

In May 1972, Kings Island opened with some old rides from Coney Island, and some new ones, plus a new pricing structure: one-price admissions. “We opened at 6 bucks and people were going crazy,” Wachs said. “They couldn’t conceive of the pay-one-price concept.” It rained a lot when the park first opened, but Wachs would stand by the exit as people were leaving, and he knew they loved it. There were 2 million visitors the first year. “Kings Island made money from the first hour it was open,” Wachs said. “It made people happy, it was wholesome and they liked it. That’s a good business.”

History repeats itself: A lifetime at the park

Tiffany Noth, 32, has been coming to Kings Island from her home in Liberty, Ind., for as long as she can remember. “Since I was 4 years old, and every year since,” Noth said. When she was a kid, she delivered newspapers to earn money for a season pass. And now that she has children of her own, she gets to keep going. She and her husband have a 7-year-old daughter and a 4-year-old son. “They talk about it all winter long, I don’t know where they get it,” Noth said, laughing. “This winter I had to laminate the park map.”

One of the things Noth likes about the park is it’s reliability, and the fact that it is family-friendly. “You don’t have to worry about exposing your kids to something you didn’t want to,” Noth said. “And that is so rare.” This year, she will be at Kings Island on opening day. And now she has something new to be excited about. Her daughter grew over the winter. “Savannah is tall like her father, she’ll be able to go on the Racer this year and the Vortex,” Noth said. “We can share those memories now.”

The Brady Bunch comes for a ride: Poor Jan

The Brady family, plus Alice, came to Kings Island as way to give a little spark to the show in season 5, and to promote Kings Island. The show was entitled “The Cincinnati Kids,” and it was very, very Brady. First, Mr. Brady says he has a big announcement. “You know those plans I’ve been working on for weeks?” Mr. Brady asks. “Well, Mr. Phillips is sending me to submit them.” “That’s the big surprise?” Carol says, disappointed. “There is one small detail,” Mike says, pausing for increased drama. “The plans are for an amusement park, and I thought you would all like to go with me.”

At Kings Island, bedlam ensues. Bobby and Cindy eat too much food. Greg falls for a pretty girl and tries to impress her by throwing a football. Peter has to dress up as an animal so Greg can take the girl to lunch. Marcia and Jan buy a poster for “little Nancy,” whom Jan babysits for. Then Jan asks Mr. Brady if she can use one of his two canisters, which hold the architectural drawings. He resists, but finally says yes, and puts all of the plans into one canister while she puts her poster in the other. Uh oh!

That’s right, the canisters get mixed up. Mr. Brady only has a Yogi Bear poster for his big presentation, and boy is he ever embarrassed. Jan loses her canister and then everybody splits up to search for it. Finally, Jan finds the canister on a canoe and the whole family, Pony Express style, races the plans back to Mr. Brady just as he is about to lose the job. Later that day, he learns his firm gets the job and Mr. Phillips tells him the family should stay for a few extra days. Whew!

The start of something big for Warren County, Ohio’s playground

Kings Island has meant many things to many people, but to Warren County, it meant change. Now, Warren County is restaurants and hotels and golf courses and major attractions, but not one of that was true in 1972. Forty years ago, the county was agriculture and small communities. Now, it refers to itself as: “Ohio’s Largest Playground!” and tourism is the county’s biggest industry.

The Warren County Convention & Visitors Bureau cites the county’s 7.8 million annual visitors, and the “$863 million in direct economic impact (tourism) brought to the county.” And it all began with Kings Island. “I really couldn’t see where else it started but Kings Island,” said Phil Smith, president and CEO of the Convention & Visitors Bureau. “It starts with them.”

A Partridge family gig, then love blooms at KI

The Partridge family had a gig at Kings Island. The Partridges were actually there before the Bradys, but in truth, their episode was not as memorable. It went like this: Keith, who wore really tight pants, falls for a grown up woman who was an executive at Kings Island. She kept calling him Ken by accident. Finally, he works up the nerve and goes to her office and suggests they walk around the park together. But she says she cannot, because she has plans. Keith looks sad, but then, get this, Danny twirls around in the chair in front of her desk.

That’s right, Danny fell in love with her, too. And he is the one the woman has plans with. So Danny insists they go together, all three of them to check out the park. Danny, you see, knows Keith gets sick on rides. Oh, boy, does he ever. Neither Keith or Danny gets the “girl,” but everybody seems to love Kings Island.

The Bush team knew it had to respond to the stories. Campaign spokesman Dan Bartlett explained that the reason Bush stopped flying in 1972 was that he was in Alabama and his family doctor wasn’t available to give him a physical. When it was pointed out that only a military physician could perform a pilot’s flight physical, Bartlett’s story shifted. He said the Guard was phasing out the F-102 on which Bush had trained, and therefore Bush had opted out of flying altogether. Reporters countered that the plane continued to fly at Ellington Air Force Base until 1974. The Bush campaign tweaked the explanation yet again, saying that the Air National Guard in Alabama didn’t have the F-102, so he saw no reason to maintain his flight status during his transfer.

These shifting explanations only intensified the scrutiny and led to questions about what else could have caused Bush’s loss of flight status. One possible answer was offered much later, in 2004, by a woman named Janet Linke. After Bush left for Alabama, her husband, Jan Peter Linke, was transferred to Houston to replace him on the F-102, which apparently still needed pilots, despite the phaseout. While the Linkes were there, Bush’s former commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, allegedly told them that Bush had stopped flying because he became afraid to land the plane. “He was mucking up bad, Killian told us,” Janet said to a Florida newspaper. (Jan Peter died in a car accident in 1973.)

But by the time Linke went public with her allegation, the press had already abandoned the Bush National Guard story for the Dan Rather controversy. Also ignored was some possible corroborating evidence: an Associated Press investigation uncovered Bush’s original flight logs, which showed that after flying for hundreds of hours on the F-102, Bush suddenly began flying a two-seat T-33 training jet and spent more time in a flight simulator in the months preceding his departure for Alabama. The logs also showed instances of his having to make multiple passes at the landing strip.

The White House said that Bush was trying to rack up required flight hours in advance of his absence in Alabama. But the flight entries in question precede Bush’s application for a transfer to Alabama.

The landing issue remains mired in ambiguous records and the selective memory of people who were there. What’s clear, however, is that Bush’s superiors made it unusually easy for him to quit flying and leave Houston. They first attempted to sign him up for a postal unit in Alabama that met once a month. (The commander of the outfit told Bush he couldn’t guarantee that the group would even exist in three months but added, “We’re glad to have you!”) When Bush was informed that he couldn’t fulfill his duty by doing that, he sent a letter requesting “equivalent duty” with the 187th Tactical Reconnaissance Group, at Dannelly Air Base, in Montgomery. The unit commander, in official memos, said Bush could start by attending two drills in September 1972. He didn’t show up for the drills.

When Bush lost his flight status, in August 1972, the official military protocol of the Texas Air National Guard was to open an internal investigation and review why the pilot didn’t show up for his physical. It says so on Bush’s own documents. That never happened.

Bush’s go-to expert on his military record, Albert Lloyd, said a report wasn’t necessary because Bush’s commanders knew he had stopped flying to go to work in Alabama—proof only that the Air National Guard blew off the rules when it came to Bush. When I mentioned this to Lloyd in 2008, he growled that “pilots hate paperwork.”

Throughout 2000, the Bush campaign sought to settle the matter of his time in Alabama, but it struggled to provide reporters with anyone who could remember seeing him there. While Bush managed to find two ex-girlfriends who would vouch for him, neither saw him in uniform, and both said that they knew of his duty only because he told them.

One man from the Montgomery unit remembered seeing Bush, but he was a political supporter in Georgia who had his details mangled, recalling Bush sightings months before Bush claims to have served there. A $50,000 reward by a nonprofit group called Texans for Truth seeking anyone who could prove Bush fulfilled his Guard duty in Alabama was never collected (nor was cartoonist Garry Trudeau’s $10,000 reward for the same information). No paper records exist in the National Guard archives in Texas or Alabama that corroborate Bush’s service in Montgomery, and the personnel officer in Alabama at the time said it was up to his counterparts in Texas to keep track of Bush. Judging by his military files, they didn’t.

Bush moved back to Houston after the November 1972 election, which Red Blount lost badly. During the holidays, he visited his parents’ house in D.C. and, after drinking with his brother Marvin, drove his car into a neighbor’s garbage can. His father demanded to see him in the den, where the younger Bush challenged his father to go “mano a mano.” The showdown, part of Bush family lore, was defused when Jeb Bush announced that George had been accepted to Harvard Business School (though he had applied only to prove to his father that he could get in, George declared indignantly).

The next month, the elder Bush was named head of the Republican National Committee. According to George W. Bush’s official time line, this was also the month that his father enlisted him in volunteer work at a nonprofit poverty program for youths in Houston’s Third Ward. It was called Project PULL (Professionals United Leadership League), and his father was an honorary board member.

In 2004 Knight Ridder newspapers interviewed several people who had worked at PULL while Bush was there. One of them, Althia Turner, fearful of telling what she knew, agreed to an interview only after a call to her pastor. She said Bush had come to the program because he had been in “trouble,” a fact she learned as the secretary to John White, the program’s founder, who died in 1988. “We didn’t know what kind of trouble he’d been in, only that he’d done something that required him to put in the time,” she said, later adding that Bush had to sign in and out of PULL offices so White could keep a tally of his hours.

Regardless of the motives behind Bush’s volunteer work, however, there is a problem with this time line. His military file shows that he didn’t return to the National Guard base in Houston until May 1973, four months after he’d supposedly started working for PULL, in January. His commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Killian, signed off on a May 2, 1973, report that said Bush hadn’t been seen for a full year: “Lt. Bush has not been observed at this unit during the period of the report. . . . He cleared this base on 15 May 1972.”

Under pressure in 2004 to explain the gap, the White House produced as evidence of Bush’s service a military dental exam from January 6, 1973—in Montgomery, not Houston. It also released a computerized summary of his pay records from the period (discovered in a Denver repository after the Bush campaign had previously declared them lost in a fire), and the dates showed that Bush was paid for attending drills in Alabama in January and again in April of 1973.

Apparently, while he was volunteering in the Third Ward in Houston, he was also pulling Guard duty six hundred miles away, in Montgomery—or at least getting paid for it—despite the fact that his home base, Ellington, was right across town.

Compounding the mystery, one of Bush’s ex-girlfriends, Nee Bear, who worked on the Blount campaign and later moved to Houston and dated Bush in the summer of 1973, said she never saw him in Alabama after the election. She claims she would have been aware had he returned. “We would have all known about it,” said Bear. “We all kept in touch.”

In 2004 White House spokesman Scott McClellan very carefully answered questions about this period with the time-blurring catchall statement, “He does remember serving in Alabama and Texas. During that entire time, he was a member of the Texas Air National Guard.”

Here’s what we can say for sure. In the spring of 1972, Ellington Air Force Base was becoming a hub for pilot training. Bush could reasonably argue, as he did, that fewer planes were available for him to fly, and he opted against training on the next generation fighter, the F-101.

That explanation, however, doesn’t negate the other evidence but rather dovetails with it: as the Vietnam War wound down and Bush became less and less focused on flying (his annual performance review turned distinctly lackluster in 1972, and Bear said Bush was “terribly adrift” when she first met him in Alabama), an opportunity to duck out presented itself and he took it. There were ten other pilots who dropped out that same year—all much older men who had more than two decades’ worth of experience. That Bush’s commanders let the young pilot bow out early and arranged the paperwork accordingly wasn’t necessarily nefarious, but just the way things worked in the loosely regulated fiefdom of the Texas Air National Guard in 1972, especially for a son of wealth and power like Bush. Pilots didn’t like paperwork—and neither did National Guard commanders who coveted political influence in Texas.

This story, taken as a whole, isn’t particularly damning; it was typical for young men of Bush’s social standing. But it fundamentally undermines an element of Bush’s political identity: the “badass” jet pilot for whom flying was a “lifetime pursuit,” as he once put it. And because of Bush’s stonewalling on the issue, the power of the unanswered questions about this period of his life would take on a life of their own.

Case in point: a story that seemed to tie together all the questions hanging over Bush’s Guard service appeared in the controversial book Fortunate Son, by J. H. Hatfield, during the 2000 campaign. In the book, Hatfield made the incendiary claim that Bush had been arrested in 1972 for cocaine possession but had had his record expunged through his father’s political influence with a state judge in exchange for community service at PULL. (The book also claimed the arrest file was stowed in a safe in Harriet Miers’s law office in Dallas.)

This story did a lot of work: it explained why Bush stopped flying, why he lit out for Alabama, and why he ended up at PULL when he got back to Houston. Within days of the book’s publication, however, a newspaper discovered that Hatfield had served five years in prison for hiring a hit man to kill a former colleague. The publisher, St. Martin’s Press, quickly pulled the book from the shelves, and, under pressure to reveal his sources, Hatfield claimed that Karl Rove himself had confirmed the story during a fishing trip. Rove denied all such claims. A small publisher in New York later reissued the book, offering as evidence of Hatfield’s honesty some phone records showing a two-minute call to Rove’s home before the original publication.

A year later, Hatfield died of a drug overdose in an apparent suicide. Hatfield’s defenders came to believe he’d been set up by Rove as the dupe messenger who could be easily destroyed. And with that, the Bush Guard story officially took on the dark aspects of a conspiracy: a puzzle in which the missing pieces became the story.

THE 2004 ELECTION

By 2004 Dan Rather was the lowest rated of the three network evening-news anchors. He had, over the years, established himself as a reliable bogeyman for the Republican party—and for George W. Bush in particular. That spring, he and Mary Mapes broke the story that U.S. soldiers had tortured prisoners at Abu Ghraib, seriously tarnishing Bush’s war in Iraq. And Mapes had yet another story in the pipeline: ever since the Air Force vet had dropped off Bush’s military file at CBS News in Dallas, in 1999, she had been accumulating documents and interviewing retired Guard employees, building a case that Bush had received preferential treatment and possibly gone AWOL.

But Mapes wasn’t the only one who had continued to develop the National Guard story. One of the journalists working the story throughout Bush’s ascent from governor to president was Jim Moore, the KHOU TV reporter who’d originally asked Bush about his service during the gubernatorial debate in 1994. Now, ten years later, Moore published everything he’d found in a book called Bush’s War for Reelection. Among other things, the book publicized the claims of Bill Burkett, a grizzled lieutenant colonel in the Texas National Guard who said that in 1997 he had overheard Bush advisers Joe Allbaugh and Dan Bartlett asking Bush’s top Guard appointee in Texas to dispose of “embarrassments” in Bush’s file. (Allbaugh and Bartlett deny this.) Burkett also said he later saw some of Bush’s military records in a trash can.

Under media scrutiny, Burkett, a yellow-dog Democrat, changed important details of his story, and Bush aides easily dismissed him as a disgruntled Bush hater, who was angry over medical bills the National Guard refused to pay. But he had just enough of his facts straight to make his claim plausible. For one, the papers he said were destroyed were the same ones that reporters found to be missing, including performance reviews and pay records from Bush’s later years in the Guard.

And Allbaugh and Bartlett had indeed been assigned to manage the National Guard story. Bartlett, who began working for Karl Rove when he was 23, became Bush’s liaison to the Texas National Guard during the year Burkett said the files were scrubbed, and he later assisted Harriet Miers in her firm’s examination of Bush’s military file in the lead-up to the presidential run.

The current archivist of the Texas National Guard, James Shive, told me that he personally examined Bush’s file in 1992, before Bush ran for office, and found nothing damning in it. He did say, however, that Bush’s file had “unusual” gaps in it, referring in particular to an annotated history of his time in the Guard, typed up in the early seventies, that didn’t record Bush’s loss of flight status or any subsequent reassignment. But a scrubbing incident by state officials as late as 1997, he said, wasn’t plausible. Instead, Shive questioned whether anything negative would have been inserted into Bush’s record to begin with, given the political influence of his father in the early seventies.

Burkett’s allegations nonetheless spurred probes by several news organizations. In February 2004 he was invited on MSNBC, where he was asked by Chris Matthews whether he was willing to testify under oath that Bush’s aides discussed destroying his military records. Burkett’s reply was tricky: “I’m swearing to you on camera, and I’m swearing to the American people. And God is my pilot on this. And I have sworn this all along.”

The scrutiny on Bush’s past increased. Later that month, under pressure from Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press, the president told the host he would release his entire military file, including pay records. But the release of pay dates from a computer database only spurred more questions: Why didn’t the pay records from 1973 match Bush’s official biography?

At first, White House spokesman Scott McClellan dismissed the attacks as attempts to stir up old news, pointing out that the Democratic National Committee had launched a special investigation called “Operation Fortunate Son,” which he noted was “the name of a book by an ex-convict that was widely discredited in the 2000 campaign.”

But McClellan had no idea what he was talking about. While trying to field press queries, he had asked Dan Bartlett, who had a thick notebook dedicated to the Guard issue, if he could study the book to help defend the president’s record. “He said, ‘No, I think you’ve got everything you need,’ ” recalled McClellan. “I didn’t have all the facts. I would have preferred to look at the records myself, but I was denied access. So most of what I had was either what I was told by Dan or what the president confirmed in the presence of Dan.” Bartlett, he said, “probably remembers better than the president.” McClellan explained that a tight lid had been kept on the Bush National Guard issue, with access limited to Rove, Miers, and Bartlett. “It raises questions when you’re not open and candid about things,” McClellan said, “and this is something that has been closely held for a long time.”

(When I asked Bartlett about this, he explained that the notebook “wasn’t a formal dossier. It was a mixture of crib notes I’d taken over the years. It made sense to me, but not to other people.”)

Bush and his inner circle didn’t want to help the press expand on the Guard issue; they wanted it to go away. So when the Associated Press sought additional documents, the Pentagon denied the news agency for several months. The AP was forced to sue both the U.S. Department of Defense and the Air Force for access. Even then, the White House pushed back: in a phone conversation with the AP’s Washington bureau, Bartlett questioned the political leanings of the AP’s lawyer, David Schulz, detailing his Democratic campaign contributions. “Why in the world is the AP using a liberal lawyer?” Bartlett asked, according to Schulz. Bartlett then suggested the AP was letting Senator Kerry off the hook. “It was all-out war against the AP,” recalled Schulz.

But the AP’s efforts ultimately unearthed Bush’s flight logs, which prompted new questions about the abrupt end of his flying career. John Solomon, the editor who headed the AP’s investigation and later became the executive editor of the Washington Times, said, “There was one big question left unanswered. He had been flying in a regular fighter jet for quite some time and scoring well, then this abrupt shift, and suddenly he dropped back to the trainer’s plane, which experts told us was very unusual. That was one of those unresolved questions.”

But before those questions would have their day, another report would blow them off the map.

In August 2004 the Guard story suddenly became vitally important to Senator Kerry’s campaign because of the blistering attacks on his Vietnam service by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. A related book, Unfit for Command, co-written by John O’Neill and conservative writer Jerome Corsi, questioned whether Kerry’s Purple Hearts and Bronze and Silver Stars were legitimate, calling him “a liar and a fraud.” After two weeks of attacks, Kerry was desperate to strike back. At a campaign meeting on his wife’s farm in Pennsylvania, he tapped a member of his finance committee whom he believed could help him retaliate: Ben Barnes.

Kerry knew that in a private fund-raising speech earlier that year, Barnes had told how he visited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington one night and grew ashamed at having helped sons of privilege into the Guard while others died in their places. He knew that in the same speech, Barnes had recounted for the first time since the Littwin deposition how he’d personally helped Bush avoid Vietnam at the request of Sid Adger.

After the campaign meeting, Kerry grabbed Barnes’s arm. “You’ve got to help me,” he said. “What are we going to do about this?”

That’s when Barnes agreed, five years after Mapes began trying to persuade him, to finally tell his story on 60 Minutes. Two weeks later, Mapes finagled a meeting with Bill Burkett to acquire what looked like another bombshell scoop: a set of never-before-seen memos about Bush’s Guard career that seemed to fill in the blanks. They were said to be from the personal files of Bush’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Jerry Killian, dating from the spring of 1972 to the late summer of 1973. One of them, a typed letter labeled “CYA” (Cover Your Ass), from August 1973, had Killian describing the political pressure he was under from Buck Staudt to “sugarcoat” one of Bush’s performance reviews even though there was no evidence that Bush had fulfilled his duty. “I’m having trouble running interference and doing my job,” the letter said. “Staudt is pushing to sugarcoat it. Bush wasn’t here during rating period, and I don’t have any feedback from the 187th in Alabama. I will not rate. Austin is not happy today either.”

Over several days of questioning, Burkett told Mapes he’d gotten the documents from a former Guard colleague named George Conn, who had previously vouched for Burkett’s credibility in press reports. But Mapes never found Conn to corroborate the story. And document analysts hired by CBS were conflicted over the authenticity of the documents, unable to confirm Xerox copies with 100 percent accuracy. There were other niggling issues: Staudt, who allegedly pressured Bush’s commanding officer in 1973, was no longer the head of the Guard at the time (later Mapes would argue that Staudt still wielded influence, even after he retired).

Solomon, the AP editor, told Mapes that new documents were about to emerge from the AP’s lawsuit, but CBS was under competitive pressure to air its report as soon as possible. USA Today, after courting Burkett for three years, was on the verge of also obtaining the four controversial memos said to be produced by Killian.

The morning before the broadcast was scheduled to air, CBS showed the memos to the White House for a response. Dan Bartlett was the network’s contact. Before Bartlett was interviewed, he emailed copies of the memos to Albert Lloyd, Bush’s longtime National Guard expert. In an interview in 2008, Lloyd told me he immediately recognized them as forgeries: “I looked at them and I said, ‘Don’t do a damned thing with these, because these are fake.’ ”

Bartlett, however, appears to have ignored Lloyd’s assessment. When asked by CBS whether he doubted the authenticity of the memos, Bartlett replied, “I’m not saying that at all,” adding that he only questioned the timing of their release. His interpretation of the memos, in fact, was that they “reaffirm what we’ve said all along.”

And so, on September 8, Rather’s report aired on the Wednesday edition of 60 
Minutes.

The first person to publicly question the memos was an Air Force officer in Montgomery named Paul Boley, who posted on the conservative online forum Free Republic under the handle TankerKC. Boley’s comment popped up while the program was still going on.

But the man officially credited with inspiring a fusillade of blog attacks was Harry MacDougald, known on message boards as Buckhead, a GOP lawyer in Atlanta who missed the segment but downloaded the Killian documents from the CBS website later that night. He specifically claimed that the memos used proportional spacing and superscripts that didn’t exist on typewriters of the early seventies.

A conspiracy theory has since arisen that Bartlett, knowing in advance that the documents were forgeries—and, in some fevered imaginations, knowing his boss Karl Rove was the source of them—tipped off right-wing surrogates to attack the documents.

When I asked Lloyd why Bartlett ignored his assessment, he said, “I guess he was trying to set Rather up for getting mauled.”

Bartlett told me that the online attacks began “before I started any outreach” to the press. He added that Bush himself didn’t learn of the Killian memos until after the segment had already aired, because Bartlett felt the documents didn’t show anything revelatory. He initially dismissed them as “old news.”

In any case, MacDougald’s arguments about the documents turned out to be inaccurate. He acknowledged as much in an interview with me in 2008. And in a speech given that same year, Mike Missal, a lawyer for the firm that CBS hired to investigate its own report, said, “It’s ironic that the blogs were actually wrong. . . . We actually did find typewriters that did have the superscript, did have proportional spacing. And on the fonts, given that these are copies, it’s really hard to say, but there were some typewriters that looked like they could have some similar fonts there. So the initial concerns didn’t seem as though they would hold up.”

Nevertheless, the controversy exploded in the press, catalyzed by a report in the Washington Post that aggregated all the criticism from the blogosphere and laid it at the doorstep of Rather and CBS. Bartlett coordinated with several former Guardsmen, including Killian’s son, to follow suit and attack the CBS report.

Rather was forced to respond, giving newspaper interviews defending the report and eventually addressing the controversy directly on the evening news, offering up new interviews and evidence meant to buttress his initial claims (most famously, he interviewed Killian’s former secretary, who said the content of the memos was accurate but the memos themselves were fake).

The day after the CBS broadcast, USA Today published the exact same memos in a news report. But instead of going on defense, as CBS did, the newspaper responded to criticisms by getting Burkett to reveal himself and explain how he had come by the documents. The explanation was like something out of a Carl Hiaasen novel: Burkett said he’d received a call from a woman named Lucy Ramirez, who saw him on MSNBC. They arranged a secret handoff of documents at a cattle show in Houston. A man in a cowboy hat gave Burkett a manila envelope. The instructions, claimed Burkett, were to copy the memos inside and burn the originals so there would be no DNA evidence to identify the true source. USA Today scoured the country for a “Lucy Ramirez” fitting Burkett’s description (he said she’d called him from a Holiday Inn), but no such person was ever found.

While trying to sort fact from fiction, CBS kept defending its report. After twelve days of intense pummeling by conservatives, the network finally gave up the ghost and forced a frantic and exhausted Rather to apologize. The president of CBS, Les Moonves, promised Rather he’d survive the fallout. A special panel was established to investigate errors in the story, but before the panel report was completed, Bush won reelection. The Swift Boaters had waylaid Kerry, but Democrats were never able to return to the Guard story as a legitimate line of attack against Bush. “After the Rather thing happened, [it was] pretty tough to carry the story politically,” said Jason Miner, who was an opposition researcher for the DNC tasked with bringing Bush’s Guard record to the press’s attention. “Who’s going to stand up there?”

Walter V. Robinson, the Boston Globe reporter whose 2000 investigation had triggered much of the subsequent reporting, agreed. “The CBS story, and the furor that caused, buried the story so deeply that you couldn’t possibly disinter it in 2004,” he told me. “Inevitably, the only candidate who ended up with a serious credibility problem about his military service was John Kerry, who had absolutely nothing to hide or be ashamed of. To me, in a close election—and it was a close election—who knows, that could have been the difference.”

THE LEGACY

When the panel report finally came out in January 2005, it did not determine whether the documents were real, but it did blame Mapes and three other CBS producers for failing to properly vet them. CBS fired Mapes and asked the three others to resign. All three threatened to sue and were subsequently paid settlements to stay quiet about the story.

Rather was spared (a humiliating forensic examination revealed his virtual absence from the reporting process), but he agreed to resign from the CBS Evening News in the spring. Mapes went home to Dallas and began writing her book-length defense.

But the CBS episode wasn’t quite the end of the Guard story. There was a bizarre postscript: the failed nomination of Harriet Miers to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2005. One year after the fateful 60 Minutes segment aired, two FBI agents paid a visit to the Manhattan apartment of Larry Littwin, the former Lottery Commission executive director. If he were cleared to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the agents asked, what might he say about Miers’s involvement with GTECH during her time as chair of the commission? According to Jerome Corsi, who had resurfaced, post-Kerry, as one of Miers’s fiercest critics, what Littwin proposed to allege was quite a lot: that more than $160,000 in legal fees Miers collected from Bush in the nineties were a de facto payoff for maintaining the quid pro quo agreement with Ben Barnes and GTECH.

Regardless of the legitimacy of these allegations, White House officials were paying attention, in part because they were coming from the right. Miers’s nomination was already in deep trouble by the time Littwin emerged. But Corsi remains convinced to this day that the threat of Littwin’s testimony was the last straw for Miers. According to him, it was the GTECH deal, and not the CBS memos, that could have been the real smoking gun against Bush. “The day after they validated that Littwin was going to be called to the Senate Judiciary Committee, that’s when she pulled her nomination,” Corsi told me.

In 2007 Rather filed his own lawsuit, implicating Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone and CBS president Les Moonves in a vast corporate cover-up to make the Guard story go away, placate the Bush White House, and put a troublesome newsman out to pasture. He asked for $70 million. The money, however, was largely symbolic. More than anything, Rather hoped the lawsuit would finally prove that he had been unfairly hung out to dry.

When it was dismissed, in 2009, he was devastated. He maintains a smoldering anger for CBS News. But Rather says he remains “optimistic” that somebody, somewhere, will one day come forward and reveal the truth of what happened. “They’re out there,” he says. “Let’s set the record straight.”

Here it is, on a coat hook in midtown Manhattan: the Army-issue green shirt, with “CBS NEWS” written in white letters on the ID tag, that Dan Rather wore in 1966 while hunkered down in rice paddies along the Cambodian border. It would be one of the legendary network anchor’s most famous assignments: dispatching dramatic reports on the Vietnam conflict for millions of Americans sitting down to the evening news. In 16mm films you can see him, young and square-jawed, hair thick and black, barking into a microphone and recoiling from machine guns that rat-a-tat-tat behind him.

“It’s a little tighter than it used to be,” says Rather, considering the shirt now.

He’s sitting under a still-life painting of a fishing rod and tackle in his modest, somewhat shabby little office on Forty-second Street, a place hidden at the far end of a long hallway where you’d least expect to find the former anchor. His lower lip bulges, as if swollen from a punch to the mouth, with a pinch of tobacco, a vestigial habit from his teenage years working on Texas oil rigs. Craggy, gray-haired, and in need of hearing aids, Rather is still animated by his glory days, the details of which have long since solidified into a personal mythology. It’s the epic story of the hustling correspondent from Wharton who reported the death of President John F. Kennedy as a young CBS correspondent, who brought Vietnam into American living rooms, who stood 
toe-to-toe with Richard Nixon during Watergate, and who nudged aside Walter Cronkite to become one of the most trusted and iconic voices of his day.

By all rights, Rather, who turns 81 this year, should be enjoying a few victory laps at the close of a remarkable career. And he would be, except for one report that he will never forget, because no one will ever let him: the botched 60 Minutes segment in 2004 on George W. Bush’s Texas Air National Guard service. The report, which lasted fifteen minutes, forever damaged Rather’s reputation and ended his network TV career after forty years. Its claims were potentially explosive—that Bush had received preferential treatment to enter the National Guard in 1968 in order to avoid the Vietnam draft and that he had then shirked his duty without repercussion. As evidence, Rather produced six documents that described the alleged political pressure Bush’s commanding officer was under to “sugarcoat” possibly embarrassing moments in Bush’s record, specifically his failure to show up for a flight physical and his loss of flight status. In a presidential campaign that had become a referendum on who had the credibility to take control of the quagmire in Iraq, Rather’s report could have seriously damaged Bush’s reelection effort. But he went at the king—and he missed.

Almost as soon as the broadcast aired, a swarm of right-wing blogs assailed Rather’s documents, claiming their typeface and spacing was inconsistent with any known typewriter of the early seventies. Within days CBS was reeling as Bush allies accused Rather and his longtime producer, Mary Mapes, of using forgeries to tip a presidential election in favor of the Democrats. Twelve days after the story aired, CBS backed down, forced Rather to apologize, and established a special panel to investigate what went wrong. Forty-three days later, Bush was reelected, beating Senator John Kerry by a two-point margin in the pivotal swing state of Ohio. By the time Mapes and three other producers were ousted by CBS, the Bush National Guard story was dead and buried, with Rather’s reputation as the tombstone.

Eight years later, Bush is back in Texas, keeping a low profile and building his presidential library. Rather is still a newsman, hosting a program called Dan Rather Reports on HDNet, a niche cable and satellite channel. But he is also a man who cannot stop reliving his worst moment. This month he will publish Rather Outspoken: My Life in News, his fourth memoir but the first since his downfall. Not surprisingly, he uses the book to defend the details of his report, sharpening his ax for Bush, as well as former colleagues at CBS and its parent company at the time, Viacom, whom Rather believes caved under political pressure from the Bush White House.

“The story we reported has never been denied by George W. Bush, by anyone in his close circles, including his family,” says Rather. “They have never denied the bulwark of the story, the spine of the story, the thrust of the story.” (In fact, Bush officials have indeed denied it, repeatedly. In a conversation I had with former White House director of communications Dan Bartlett in 2007, he told me, “We believe the story is inaccurate, both the general thrust of it and the questionable sources they used.”)

Rather tried making his case in a 2007 lawsuit against his former bosses, but it was thrown out of court two years later. Nonetheless, he remains convinced that he did nothing wrong. “I believed at the time that the documents were genuine,” Rather says, “and I’ve never ceased believing that they are genuine.”

This is nearly impossible to know. The documents were Xerox copies, which in forensics is a dead end—nothing can be proved, or disproved, without an original. Since the report, Rather has hired lawyers and private investigators to get to the bottom of the mystery, to no avail. Strangely, he has made only one attempt to contact the man who initially gave the documents to CBS, the former Guardsman and West Texas rancher Bill Burkett, who, after initially lying about where he got them, told a dubious tale of receiving them from shadowy characters at a cattle show in Houston—and then went stone silent. Burkett refused to talk to Rather.

But the CBS documents that seem destined to haunt Rather are, and have always been, a red herring. The real story, assembled here for the first time in a single narrative, featuring new witnesses and never-reported details, is far more complex than what Rather and Mapes rushed onto the air in 2004. At the time, so much rancorous political gamesmanship surrounded Bush’s military history that it was impossible to report clearly (and Rather’s flawed report effectively ended further investigations). But with Bush out of office, this is no longer a problem. I’ve been reporting this story since it first broke, and today there is more cooperation and willingness to speak on the record than ever before. The picture that emerges is remarkable. Beyond the haze of elaborately revised fictions from both the political left and the political right is a bizarre account that has remained, until now, the great untold story of modern Texas politics. For 36 years, it made its way through the swamps of state government as it led up to the collision between two powerful Texans on the national stage.

And by the time it was over, no one—not Dan Rather, not George W. Bush—would be left unbloodied.

THE BEGINNING

It was the 1988 presidential campaign of Bush’s father that first raised the issue of a privileged son from Texas getting special access to the National Guard—only the privileged son wasn’t a Bush. Michael Dukakis, the elder Bush’s opponent, had recently chosen Senator Lloyd Bentsen, of Houston, as his running mate. One Sunday morning in August of that year, George H. W. Bush’s campaign co-chairman, New Hampshire governor John Sununu, went on TV to attack Bentsen for allegedly helping his son, Lloyd Bentsen III, enter the Texas Air National Guard in 1968. “Someone called Senator Bentsen to point out to him that this special slot, which was rare, came open,” said Sununu, and Bentsen “ran to get his son to fill that.”

This was the first presidential election in which candidates’ Vietnam-era decisions were resonating among the electorate. The question of who did what in the sixties, when an unpopular war divided the nation, had become a litmus test. (Incidentally, this was also the year that Dan Rather established himself as a Bush family enemy by needling then–vice president Bush with questions about his role in the Iran-Contra affair in an infamous live interview on CBS.) With Democrats attacking the elder Bush’s own running mate, Dan Quayle, for joining the Indiana National Guard during Vietnam, Sununu’s claim was a natural counteroffensive. But it boomeranged. It turned out that George W. Bush, at the time a senior staff member in his father’s campaign, had served in the same Houston unit as Lloyd Bentsen III and was recruited the same year by the same man, Colonel Walter “Buck” Staudt. That unit, the 147th Fighter Interceptor Group, tasked with defending the Gulf Coast, was well-known as a “champagne unit” because it housed not only Bentsen and Bush but a number of other sons of the Texas elite, such as John Connally III, son of the former Texas governor and Nixon treasury secretary; Al Hill, the grandson of oil tycoon H. L. Hunt; and several members of the Dallas Cowboys.

Sununu’s attacks died after Bentsen and Staudt denied the allegations, but the issue had been introduced, and the timing and circumstances of Bush’s entry into the Guard were enough to raise eyebrows. In February 1968, three months before Bush graduated from Yale, the Tet offensive left more than five hundred U.S. soldiers dead in a single week. That same month, Walter Cronkite famously declared the Vietnam War “mired in stalemate” just as President Lyndon Johnson canceled draft deferments for most graduate students. Days before he would become subject to the draft, Bush, whose father was then a U.S. congressman from Houston, won a coveted slot as a pilot in the 147th.

Bush maintains he simply interviewed with Staudt and was accepted on the spot. That may be true, but it would be hard to argue that there weren’t more-qualified candidates: Bush received the lowest acceptable score on his pilot aptitude test.

In 1988 Staudt, by most accounts a bullying, cigar-chomping autocrat, told reporters that there had been no “hanky-panky” involved in getting Bush and Bentsen into the Guard, and he repeated that defense in 2000. But suspicion was not unwarranted. There was a long list of men trying to get into the Texas National Guard. And several months after Bush entered, Staudt paid a visit to Washington, D.C., and lobbied the elder Bush for funding for Ellington Air Force Base, in Houston, making sure to update him on how well his son was doing.

Control over entry into the National Guard was a hotly fought-over lever of power in Texas. Staudt had considerable influence in Houston, but in a state still dominated by Democrats, the ultimate gatekeeper was his commanding officer and internal rival, Brigadier General James Rose. A Democrat, Rose was a handsome and sophisticated political operator who’d managed to become head of the Texas Air National Guard despite never having been a pilot. Rose had a close political bond with the man who would sit at the center of the Guard story: Ben Barnes, then the Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives.

A fair-haired wunderkind who’d been elected a state representative while still in college, Barnes was widely considered a potential future governor and perhaps even a presidential contender. He was a protégé of President Johnson’s and counted him as a close friend. And he had learned from his mentor the art of collecting political chits as a way of life. Barnes has said he regularly fielded requests for entry into the National Guard, and after assessing the trade-in value of the favor, he would pass them on to Rose to sign off on.

Barnes knew how to work the press too: he was a regular source for the man who was then the CBS White House correspondent, Dan Rather.

Barnes would travel a rocky road after the Johnson era. He was elected lieutenant governor in 1968, but several years later, the Sharpstown stock-fraud scandal erupted, taking down much of the state’s Democratic power structure. Though Barnes was never charged, the scandal effectively ended his political career (and that of Governor Preston Smith and House Speaker Gus Mutscher). Out of office, he evolved into the kind of omnipresent backroom figure everyone either loves or hates, a charming and cunning wheeler-dealer with a huge grin, a firm handshake, and a finger in every pot. “Ugly as a cedar post,” says Houston lawyer Dick DeGuerin, “but he shakes your hand and you know your hand’s been shook.”

It was on Rather’s infamous 60 Minutes segment, in 2004, that Barnes first publicly recounted how he had called General Rose on behalf of George W. Bush in the spring of 1968. Barnes claimed he had received a call from Sid Adger, an oilman in Houston who was a close friend of the elder Bush’s. As it happened, both of Adger’s sons were also in the Air National Guard in Houston, under Staudt’s command. Barnes told me that in the late seventies, while he and Adger served on the board of Texas International Airlines, Adger personally thanked him for helping Bush. “We both knew I had done him that favor,” he said.

Barnes’s story has never been corroborated because both Rose and Adger were dead by the time he first told it publicly. The elder Bush has said he doesn’t recall asking Adger for help, and the younger Bush has denied knowledge of it. But during the 1988 campaign, Rose and his son Mark happened to be watching television together when a report came on about the Bush-Quayle campaign’s attacks on Bentsen. According to Mark Rose, who has never spoken about it on the record before now, his father admitted to him that he’d helped both Bush and Bentsen into the Guard.

“My dad looked at me and said, ‘I signed off on Bentsen’s son going into the Guard, and I signed off on Bush’s son going into the Guard,” said Rose, a former Austin city councilman who is now an energy executive living in Bastrop.

He added, “[George W. Bush] can’t say, ‘I didn’t have any help.’ Staudt didn’t work that way. My dad didn’t work that way.”

Bush’s onetime expert and advocate on his National Guard service, a former personnel officer named Albert Lloyd, agreed with Rose. In an interview conducted shortly before his death, in March, he said that General Rose, who was Lloyd’s direct boss in the sixties, had to have been aware of whose son he was admitting to the Guard—and that Ben Barnes was the likely broker.

GOVERNOR BUSH

None of this, however, was being reported in 1988, and after the elder Bush won the White House, the story died down. No one thought much about George W. Bush’s military records until he decided to run for governor in 1994 against the incumbent, Democrat Ann Richards. The first mention came from a TV reporter for Houston station KHOU named Jim Moore. During a debate in October, Moore asked Bush whether he’d received preferential treatment to get into the National Guard in 1968. Bush replied that most Guard assignments were for only six months and nobody else wanted to spend the extra time it took to train on a jet fighter. “My father, just like my commanding officer said, had nothing to do with getting me in that unit,” he said.

Governor Richards knew there was more to it than that. She had privately asked Barnes about the rumor that he had helped Bush get into the Guard, and Barnes told her that he had. Robert Spellings, who was Barnes’s chief of staff in the late sixties (his future wife, Margaret Spellings, would later become Bush’s Secretary of Education), also told Richards he recalled getting Bush in. But Spellings didn’t remember exactly how it was done and advised Barnes against going public, because Barnes had no real evidence. Richards, who had opposed the Vietnam War, didn’t push it.

But after Bush won the election, Barnes’s story spiked in political value. What was to unfold in Texas over the next five years was a political power struggle, at the center of which was Barnes and his claim about Bush’s military history. It began, of all places, at the Texas Lottery Commission.

Barnes was the chief lobbyist for the corporation under contract to operate the lottery in Texas, a multinational gaming services and technology company called GTECH. He and a partner had cut a sweetheart deal in 1992, when the state launched the lottery, to collect 4 percent of GTECH’s Texas revenue in exchange for maintaining the massive state contract, which was worth about $150 million annually. The deal made him enormously influential as a fundraiser for Democrats. In the mid-nineties, he bought a house on Nantucket and befriended the Kennedy family and John Kerry. To maintain his power and influence, Barnes just needed to protect the GTECH contract.

But when Bush took office, Barnes became a target. Bush’s political architect, Karl Rove, and his chief of staff, Joe Allbaugh, took a keen interest in the lottery’s machinations, requesting that minutes from lottery meetings and weekly reports be sent to them regularly. “The Bushes were paranoid about the lottery,” says George Kuempel, who covered the agency for the Dallas Morning News. “Rove wanted to f— Barnes.”

Bush appointed his own lawyer, Harriet Miers, as chair of the Texas Lottery Commission. As soon as she arrived, Miers began studying the possibility of opening the GTECH contract to new bidders. Suddenly, Barnes needed all the leverage he could get, and one thing he had was the story about how Bush got into the Guard.

About two years after Bush took power in Austin, the Lottery Commission became embroiled in a controversy that finally caused this tension to spill out into the open. A press leak in late 1996 revealed that the Lottery Commission’s executive director, a Democratic appointee named Nora Linares, was carrying on an extramarital affair with a GTECH consultant—a major conflict of interest that provided the perfect opportunity for the Bush camp to sweep Democrats from the lottery. Miers promptly fired Linares.

And that is when a mysterious document began circulating in Austin that would serve as the Rosetta stone of the Bush National Guard controversy. The document, a single-page letter written by an anonymous author and addressed to a U.S. attorney, described an alleged secret deal struck between George W. Bush and Ben Barnes in which Barnes agreed to withhold the story of getting the governor into the Guard in exchange for Bush’s securing the GTECH contract against competing bidders.

The memo fingered a Bush aide named Reggie Bashur as the one who brokered the alleged quid pro quo: “Bashur was sent to talk to Barnes who agreed never to confirm the story and the Governor talked to [Miers] two days later and she then agreed to support letting GTech keep the contract without a bid.” And indeed, the previous summer, Miers had renewed the GTECH contract without a bid, against the wishes of state Republicans.

The memo also claimed that Bush had lied to Jim Moore when he said in the 1994 debate that he’d received no help securing a slot in the Guard. According to the memo, Barnes’s former assistant Nick Krajl had personally called General Rose on Bush’s behalf. “At this time I can’t release my name,” the memo’s author wrote, “but at the proper time I will come forward and show this story to be true.”

Initially, no one could figure out who wrote the memo. But in early 1997 Linares brought a lawsuit against GTECH for allegedly helping engineer her ouster, and her lawyer, Charles Soechting, the former chairman of the Texas Democratic party, decided to investigate the memo’s origins. He tracked it to a copy center in Austin, subpoenaed the tape from the center’s security camera, and invited some local political figures and the senior captain of the Texas Rangers to identify the man who appeared to be faxing it. Though the man wore an L.A. Lakers cap and dark glasses, witnesses all agreed it was Tom Duffy, the chief of staff for Democrat John Sharp, the state comptroller.

“Everyone in the room, in unison, started laughing and said, ‘Duffy!’ ” recalled Soechting. “Everybody knew he had one thing in life he does, and that’s take care of John.”

But why would Sharp have had the memo sent? A possible motive became clearer in hindsight: Sharp was preparing to run for lieutenant governor in 1998 against Rick Perry, who would have Bush at the top of the ballot to help him out. Sharp had also been a longtime critic of state-sponsored gaming, the establishment of which had put him directly at odds with Barnes. It would be a three-birds-with-one-stone political hit.

In an interview, Sharp told me he had nothing to do with the memo—and implicated Duffy as acting independently. “When I asked about it, he said he’s not interested in talking about it and appreciated it if I wouldn’t ask about it again,” Sharp said. “I take that to mean I’d better not ask him about it again.”

Duffy declined comment, but he was in an unusually compromised position at the time: his girlfriend was a top executive at the Texas Lottery Commission and a close ally of Linares’s.

In any case, everyone mentioned in the memo denies the story it tells. Barnes calls it “a lot of malarkey” and argues that because Rove was actively trying to get rid of him, Rove must not have feared any story that Barnes could reveal in retaliation.

Soon after, Barnes was implicated in an elaborate GTECH kickback scheme in New Jersey, where the company had another lottery contract. These allegations were eventually retracted, and the federal prosecutor who brought them was forced to issue an apology, but Barnes agreed to part ways with the company not long after. His exit package was an eye-popping $23 million. To many observers in Texas, it looked more like a payoff than a buyout. As one former Bush aide told me, “It didn’t smell right to anyone who was paying attention.”

The following year, yet another turn in the GTECH story fanned the theory that Barnes had engineered a deal to cover up Bush’s Guard history. Following Linares’s departure, the lottery commissioners decided to open up the bidding. To signal a fresh start, they hired a complete outsider as their new executive director—Larry Littwin, a short, unassuming New Yorker who had rarely set foot in Texas. He began by launching a complex investigation into illegal GTECH contributions to Texas lawmakers. But only five months after he took the post, Miers decided he’d gone rogue, stirring up paranoia among legislators from whom Bush needed cooperation on other matters and angering GTECH executives. Miers fired him without explanation, and the bidding was shut down, with GTECH retaining its contract.

Like Linares before him, Littwin sued GTECH for allegedly exerting political influence over the state agency to get him fired. To prove it, Littwin’s lawyers also focused on the alleged Barnes-Bush handshake deal described in the anonymous memo from 1996.

Legitimate or not, the timing of the Littwin suit was conspicuously poor for Bush: in 1998 he was running for reelection and laying the groundwork for a presidential run, polishing up his résumé and shaping the contours of his life into a political memoir. That year Bush’s campaign paid Miers $19,000 to examine his Guard record for “vulnerabilities,” according to a Newsweek report from July 2000. The central problem that Miers identified: “rumors that Bush had help from his father in getting into the National Guard in 1968.”

For Bush, the most irksome version of the rumor had it that his father had personally asked Barnes for help. In order to put the matter to rest, Bush sent his 1998 campaign manager (and future Secretary of Commerce), Don Evans, to talk to Barnes, who later told me, “I got the impression they were very worried.” Barnes reassured Evans, telling him that he’d never spoken to the elder Bush directly about his son. Subsequently, Barnes received a solicitous letter, signed by Bush, which is now framed in Barnes’s office: “Dear Ben, Don Evans reported your conversation. Thank you for your candor and for killing the rumor about you and Dad ever discussing my status. Like you, he never remembered any conversation. I appreciate your help.”

About a year later, after resisting a subpoena for several weeks in the Littwin case, Barnes was forced to give what would become his official version of the story: that Sid Adger, the Houston oilman and friend of the elder Bush’s, had called Barnes on behalf of Bush and asked if he could help get his son into the Guard. Soon after, GTECH settled with Littwin, paying him $300,000 and demanding that Barnes’s deposition be destroyed and that Littwin never talk about it again.

THE 2000 ELECTION

With the presidential campaign about to begin, it was now open season on the Guard story, which had still never drawn a sustained national investigation. Two TV producers pursued Barnes for his first on-air interview: Mary Mapes, Rather’s 60 Minutes producer at CBS, and David Bloom, the NBC correspondent who later died in Iraq. Mapes courted Barnes for months. Bloom spent two weeks in Austin, including a night drinking at Barnes’s estate, trying to cajole him into appearing on NBC.

Barnes basked in the attention but had no intention of elevating his court admission to a political attack. When I asked Barnes why a Democratic fund-raiser with a damaging story about the Republican presidential nominee wouldn’t help his party in the close 2000 election, he said that Al Gore didn’t ask him for help. But Barnes’s friends say he was just hedging his bets: if he told his story and Bush won the presidency, Barnes would have a powerful political enemy in the White House. (And not for the first time: Barnes believes to this day that Richard Nixon was responsible for a politically motivated investigation that led to the Sharpstown scandal and his downfall.)

But apart from Barnes, Littwin’s lawyers had inadvertently opened a second and more controversial chapter of the Bush Guard story. As part of their research, they obtained the most thorough and least redacted copy of Bush’s military file that anyone had yet seen. They obtained it not from the Texas National Guard archives, which were then controlled by a Bush appointee, but from the National Guard headquarters, in Arlington, Virginia.

Littwin’s Dallas lawyers recruited a local Air Force veteran to interpret the file. He was a Bush antagonist still agitated by medical issues from his service, but he was an expert in the military jargon of the time. “I was stunned at what I saw,” explained the man, who requested anonymity for fear of retribution. “It was full of inconsistencies.” As compensation, the man asked Littwin’s lawyers if he could keep a photocopy of Bush’s record, then made an appointment to go see someone at the Dallas bureau of CBS News. That person was Mary Mapes.

It would take her four years of obsessive pursuit—“myopic zeal,” as the special CBS panel would later describe it—to get a story on the air, but this was the exact moment when Rather’s destiny was set in motion.

A few days later, the Air Force veteran decided to contact a Boston Globe reporter named Walter V. Robinson, who was covering the Guard story. Robinson immediately flew to Texas and spent several days studying Bush’s military records. What followed was a painstaking investigation by the Boston Globe, unrivaled in its detail, which put the Bush campaign on the defensive and inspired other reporters to focus on Bush’s “lost year.”

After training at Moody Air Force Base, in Georgia—from which a military aircraft once ferried him to Washington for a date with Tricia Nixon—Bush was assigned in 1970 to flying duty as a pilot of the F-102 jet fighter at Ellington Air Force Base, in Houston. He had an apartment at the Chateau Dijon complex, an enclave of affluence where he played volleyball, barbecued, drank beer, and chased girls among the city’s oil-industry elite. He drove a Triumph sports car, his buzz cut and flight jacket obscuring his Andover-to-Yale background. An aide who worked with Bush in later years recalled his simply saying, “I was a badass back then.”

But after receiving relatively high marks as a pilot of the F-102, Bush suddenly stopped flying in the spring of 1972. Despite the declaration in his 1999 memoir, A Charge to Keep, that he flew jets for “several years” starting in 1970, his flying career actually ended two years later. That was the year he left Houston to work on the long-shot Senate bid of Winton “Red” Blount, a candidate from Alabama whose campaign manager, Jimmy Allison, was an old Bush family friend. Bush had committed to continuing his Guard service with a unit based in Montgomery, but nobody from that unit remembered seeing him, including the commander of the base. As the Globe story reported, Bush’s next documented duty in the National Guard was a year later, back in Houston. It seemed that not only had Bush avoided Vietnam by entering the Guard, but he may have simply disappeared for a spell, failing to fulfill his duty to fly planes for a full six years.

The Globe story whipped the national media into a frenzy. The gaps that it revealed in Bush’s record—and his campaign’s inconsistent and sometimes discredited explanations for those gaps—prompted persistent questions about whether he had gone AWOL or even deserted the military for a time. In particular, reporters zeroed in on a document showing that Bush had lost his flight status in August 1972 for failing to take a flight physical, a serious offense.

As it happened, another pilot listed on the same document also lost his right to fly for the same reason and at around the same time. That name was initially redacted on copies of Bush’s military record released by the Texas National Guard, even though a dozen other names on the document were not. When a clean copy turned up, the name that had been blacked out was revealed to be that of James R. Bath, a close pal of Bush’s who would later become a business adviser to the bin Laden family in Texas as well as Bush’s business partner in his failed oil venture, Arbusto Energy.

Bath declined to comment on his loss of flight status, but his military file shows that, like Bush, he didn’t fly again for the National Guard after 1972 and was discharged one year later. Many investigative reporters, fed stories by Texas Democrats, became convinced, even obsessively so, that some specific incident had occurred to precipitate this unusual coincidence. Soon every major media outlet in the country was circling around the gaps in Bush’s record.

MORE CLICK HERE

The data set (and the resulting map) is a companion piece to Mother Jones' January/February 2012 article that tells the story of when Gov. Rick Perry posthumously pardoned exonerated inmate Timothy Cole. Signed into law in 2009, the Timothy Cole Act increased financial compensation for Texas exonerees from $50,000 to $80,000 for each year they were wrongfully imprisoned. In September, the Tribune visualized the more than $42 million that has been spent to compensate exonerees who spent more than 700 years behind bars. The Tribune also visualized the 238 executions that have taken place on Perry's watch.

Texas Governor Rick Perry said, to wild applause, during a debate that he “sleeps well at night” presiding over executions. Really? Either Perry has no conscience or he is a bald faced liar. Kerry Max Cook, who had three death row sentences overturned, sent me this today:

“ …It shall be the primary duty of all prosecuting attorneys, including any special prosecutors, not to convict, but to see that justice is done. They shall not suppress facts or secrete witnesses capable of establishing the innocence of the accused (Preamble to the Texas State Penal Code, Article 2.01)….”

There is definitely something broken – – and broken badly – – when the Texas County and District Attorney Association section of the State Bar of Texas awards and sanctions rogue prosecutors by unabashedly nominating them “Prosecutors of the Year.” My name is Kerry Max Cook. I am the author of a memoir called CHASING JUSTICE: My story of freeing myself after two decades on Death row for a crime I didn’t commit.

What do Williamson County’s Ken Anderson and Smith County’s Jack Skeen share in common? Both were awarded “Prosecutor of the Year” by the County and District Attorneys section of the Texas State Bar. And both were later appointed to District Judgeships by Gov. Rick Perry. When a Tyler Judge in Smith County moved my case to Williamson County in 1992 for the first of what would become a series of retrials in the ‘90’s, then-District Attorney Jack Skeen sent me back to death row a second time. In fact, of all the things you can say Jack Skeen and Ken Anderson have in common, the one thing they don’t is that Jack Skeen is not facing a Court of Inquiry and Ken Anderson is.

If anyone really sat down and took the time to wade through all the documented Jack Skeen and David Dobbs misconduct in my case, I think you would be shocked at how bad it really was. It would make the machinations of John Bradley look like Cinderella. But that won’t happen. You see, in Texas we have what I like to call Sak’s Fifth Avenue justice for the Ken Andersons and Jack Skeens, and Walk-Mart justice for the Michael Mortons and Kerry Cooks.

Take my case for example. Here you have one of our largest newspapers in Texas, the Dallas Morning News, from 1980 until 1992 writing an award-winning series of investigative stories on my persecution that began with Inmate was Railroaded, Testimony in Cook case called mostly false, Convicted Man Called Innocent, Key Evidence in Cook Case Suppressed, Wrong Man on Death row, Psychologist Views on Inmate Disputed, Conclusions Wrong, Experts Say, Police Didn’t Pursue Leads in ’77 Killing: Tyler Inquiry called Sloppy, and many more. These headlines were published across the state of Texas. The man responsible who caused those torrid headlines to be written was 1977-78 Smith County district attorney A.D. Clark, III.

Fourteen years later, Jack Skeen (A.D. Clark, III’s first-cousin) used the exact same “fraudulent” case A.D. Clark, III first built to convict me and then pushed it until he got a second conviction and death sentence at a third trial in 1994 with a Williamson County jury. * These Dallas Morning News investigative headlines had already splashed across Texas long before Jack Skeen received his “Prosecutor of the Year” award in 1997. In addition, by this time, Jack Skeen and David Dobbs had already sent me back to death row once more and they were on their way to do it again in a fourth trial after the conviction they obtained in my third trial with the use of the very same “fraudulent evidence (See Tex. Ct. Crim. Apps. Nov. 6th. 1996 Opinion)” that A.D. Clark, III used originally. The County and District Attorney’s Association knew all of this when they nominated Jack Skeen “Prosecutor of the Year” in 1997.

Today, it is so ironic that former Smith County Chief Felony prosecutor David Dobbs makes these kind of public comments to explain the misconduct in my case calling the egregious nature of the documented prosecutorial misconduct anything but that: “No question there were some things that were done to Mr. Cook in 1978 that were unfair and happened before we got the case.” If what happened to me and all my losses weren’t so profound, I could laugh at David Dobbs hubris. For Dobbs, it is just one in a long plethora of lies played out on an audience that doesn’t know any better but to believe him. The facts of my case show those comments to be gross manipulation. Simply put, David Dobbs you wouldn’t know the truth if it walked up and introduced itself to you. I know the words of Article 2.01 of the Texas Penal Code were words meant to have meaning, serve as a moral compass. Given what I’ve gone through as a victim of Smith County Justice, now going on thirty-five years, I am not so sure I can ever believe in those words again.

The motions filed in Smith County can be read here.

If Kerry Max Cook’s case was one and one only on the landscape of criminal justice, it might be easier to understand as a simple mistake…but it’s not. Smith County Texas (Tyler) is well known for denying justice, framing people and, in some cases, locking up innocent people. Kerry Max Cook is not the first person to be framed in Tyler and he wasn’t the last. More on Kerry’s case in a minute but first, some perspective. Last summer in TEXAS MONTHLY, Michael Hall wrote about the “Mineola Swingers Case.” The details stunned people. The case so magnificent in it’s lurid details, it was hard to believe. That’s because the case in Smith County was hard to believe, impossible to believe because it did not happen.

At a pre-trial hearing in Smith County last year, in June, six of the seven so-called Mineola Swingers Club defendants—accused of unbelievable acts of child sexual abuse—pled guilty to “injury to a child” (a felony) in exchange for their freedom. They’ve all been in jail or prison since 2007, though two had their sentences overturned. The remaining defendant—whose conviction is still intact—will remain in prison. Hall wrote that he had rarely seen the wheels of justice grind up so many innocent people—and I’m not just talking about these seven defendants. I’m also talking about the children who became witnesses against them, plus the family members of everyone involved in this sordid mess. As long-time Tyler attorney Bobby Mims, who is also a vice-president of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, told me in my first story on the cases, “In my thirty years of practice, I’ve never seen anything like it—an absolute, honest-to-God frame-up.” This is not the first time Smith County has “framed” people but more on Kerry Max Cook in a minute.

You have to understand the Mineola case and how Smith County grinds up innocent people in the tough on crime monster that cares nothing about justice. To recap, from 2005 to 2008, four Tyler children–three siblings and their aunt—all aged 4 through 7, made allegations that in 2004 seven adults, including their parents, had forced them to attend a sex kindergarten in a trailer park, where they learned to play sex games, and then took them to a swingers club in nearby Mineola, where they performed sex acts on stage in front of crowds of as many as 30 adults, who videotaped the shows. The stories told by the kids were wildly inconsistent and sometimes outright bizarre: adults casting spells, wearing witch outfits, and sacrificing chickens; one child said she had flown around on a broomstick. Every single child initially denied to social workers knowing anything about a sex kindergarten or club; it was only after multiple interviews that they started making outrageous allegations. But there was nothing to back them up: no adult witnesses and no physical evidence—no DNA, no fingerprints, not even any videotapes.

In fact, Wood County, where Mineola is located, did its own investigation, back in 2005, when just one child was talking about a sex club. Investigators (including an FBI agent), found absolutely no evidence to back up her accusations. This didn’t stop the criminal justice machinery of Smith County. A Texas Ranger got involved and before long he was helping interview the other kids. In 2007 arrests were made; the public was outraged that a sex kindergarten and a sex club would operate under their noses. Three of the adults went to trial in 2008 and their juries, made of good country people who want nothing more than to protect their children, found them guilty in a matter of minutes. A fourth defendant was found guilty last summer.

Hall opines, and I agree that it’s unfathomable that so many good people could allow and encourage these prosecutions to go forward. What happened to the lawyerly skepticism of Judge Jack Skeen and DA Bingham and the other men and women in his office?

*Why didn’t they look closer at the kids’ weird, implausible stories?

*Why didn’t they look closer at the foster mother of three of them, a woman named Margie Cantrell who moved to Mineola from California in 2004 and who has a history of manipulating her foster kids? (One of her California kids characterized her to me as “the puppet master” and said, “She brainwashes the kids to believe the stories she makes up.”)

*Why didn’t they give serious credence to the fact that not one of the seven defendants would testify against the others in exchange for a lesser sentence?

If they had done just one of these three, much less all of them, they would have realized the obvious: Nothing happened. There was no crime. There was no sex kindergarten and there were no child-sex shows at a swinger’s club. Ultimately, I can’t help but believe that Bingham knows this. Let’s put it this way: If he really believed these people put on live sex shows with children, would he really be setting them free now? Hall said that he always thought there would be justice. But there sometimes is no justice in “tough on crime” Texas. In the summer of 2009, the Texas Attorney General sent two lawyers to help investigate the case after Bingham tried to recuse his office from further prosecutions. But the AG’s office didn’t do anything. Then in the spring of 2010 two of the defendants had their verdicts thrown out by the 14^th Court of Appeals in Houston—a process which saw the DA in neighboring Wood County file an extraordinary amicus brief in which he officially called into question everything the Smith County DA had done. “[N]o evidence was found to corroborate the stories told by the children,” he wrote.

But that was it. No cooler or wiser heads stepped in to actually free these people. In fact, those two defendants whose cases were overturned were going to be folded in with the remaining defendants (two of whom are grandparents of two of the children) into one mass trial in June. It is these six who pled guilty.

Why would they do this if they aren’t guilty? Well, innocent people plead guilty all the time. They confess to crimes they didn’t commit (about a quarter of the DNA exonerations involve some form of false confession) and they plead guilty to crimes they didn’t commit. They especially do it when they are certain they will be found guilty, no matter what they do or how good their attorneys are. In these cases we’ve already seen four different juries vote guilty—in the time it takes to watch a movie. These defendants know the realities. They can go to prison for life—or they can go home. They don’t have a whole lot to lose by pleading guilty. Their lives have already been ruined—they’ll always be known for these allegations anyway. So, Patrick “Booger Red“ Kelly told his mother that he was taking the plea. “I don’t like it at all,” she told me. “But he’s screwed here. Despite all anybody can do, he’s never going to be found ‘not guilty’ in Tyler.  He’s at the end of his rope. He told me, ‘Mama, I’m tired. I’m in here for something I haven’t done. I want to go home.’”

Back up now to 1977. Since 1977, Kerry Max Cook has been unjustly, and wrongly, punished for the horrific rape and murder of Linda Jo Edwards. Mr. Cook did not commit this crime. It is of no matter that the last 13 of those 35 years have been spent on “the outside;” for Mr. Cook, the bars may be gone but he remains imprisoned. The victim of the most well-documented and notorious instance of prosecutorial misconduct in the annals of Texas jurisprudence. Cook now seeks, once and for all, to clear his name. Mr. Cook, of course, is not the only victim in this case — and because of Smith County’s decades-long persecution of an innocent man, Linda Jo Edwards’ true killer has never been punished. The “investigation” into Ms. Edwards’ murder was so badly executed and managed that no confidence can be placed in the work that both led up to and followed Mr. Cook’s wrongful conviction. This ineptitude fueled the prosecutorial misconduct and makes the harassment of Mr. Cook all the more reprehensible.

This is the system Kerry Max Cook and the Innocence Project are up against. The fight won’t be easy. Mr. Cook is factually and actually innocent of the 1977 rape and murder of Ms. Edwards and requests further DNA testing to verify and corroborate the other powerful evidence of his innocence.’ While” previous DNA testing has already provided exculpatory evidence and established overwhelming proof of Mr. Cook’s innocence, there is a substantial volume of additional un-tested evidence that will further corroborate Mr. Cook’s innocence. Given the negligence and degree of incompetence with which the investigation into Ms. Edwards’ murder was handled, no conf,rdence can be placed in Mr. Cook’s arrest and indictment, or his prosecution and convictions. Solely for the purpose that justice may be (finally) served, Mr. Cook respectfully requests that the Court order the forensic DNA testing of additional biological evidence that remains in the possession of the State of Texas. A survivor of three full trials, and nearly a fourth, Mr. Cook does not embark down this path lightly. But 35 years is a long time and, indeed, ‘Justice delayed is justice denied.”

NOW: THE BACKGROUND STORY: THE RAPE AND MURDER OF LINDA JO EDWARDS

Ms. Edwards was raped and murdered in her apartment around Midnight on June 9,1971. Ms. Edwards had been involved in an extramarital affair with James Mayfield that had ended approximately three weeks before she was raped and murdered. In addition to being married and
over twenty years her elder, Mr. Mayfield was also her former boss. Just weeks prior to Ms. Edwards’ murder, Mr. Mayfield left his wife of many years and moved into an apartment with Ms. Edwards.la V/hen Mr. Mayfield moved back in with his wife and daughter about a week later,ls Ms. Edwards was so distraught she attempted to end her life.l6 As a direct result of this

” Esparza v. Stqte, 282 S.W.3d 913, 922 (Tex.Crim.App. 2009); Blacklock v. State, 235 S,W.3d 231, 233
(Tex.Crim.App.2007).
t2 TEX. CODE CRrM. PRoc. ANN., arart.64.03(b).
tt Id., at art. 64.04.
ta See Cook,940 S.W.2d at 624.
rs Mr. Mayfield testified that upon returning to his wife on her birthd ay, ly’ray 19, 197’7 — approximately three weeks
before the murder — he agreed to end his sexual relationship with Ms. Edwards. See 1994 Trial Tr. vol. XXIV,
1228:18-1229:5. A true and correct copy of an excerpt of Mr. Mayflreld’s 1994 trial testimony is attached hereto as
MOTION FoR PoST-CoNvIcTIoN FORENSIC DNA TESTING
DAL 78,823,437v16 February 27, 2012

suicide attempt Mr. Mayfield’s affair with Ms. Edwards became public and he was asked to resign as Dean of Library Services at then, Texas Eastern University, now UT-Tyler.l7 In the hours before her murder, Ms. Edwards informed Mr. Mayfield that she intended to date other men, which infuriated him.18 Ms. Edwards would not live to see another day. Ms. Edwards was found dead in her apartment by her roommate, Paula Rudolph.le The night of her rape and murder, Ms. Rudolph had seen a man in Ms. Edward’s bedroom who she initiatly said she believed to be Mr. Mayfield, who, at the time was Ms. Rudolph’s boss and immediate supervisor.2o Ms. Rudolph later changed her story and said the person she saw was Mr. Cook, even though the description she gave police exactly matched Mayfield and in no way resembled Mr. Cook.2l Ms. Rudolph’s initial identification of Mayfield is corroborated by

Exhibit 2.
t6 See id
t7 See id
It Dr. Andrew Szatka, a friend and colleague of Ms, Edwards, was one of the last people to see her alive the evening
of June 9,1977. Mr. Szarka testified at Mr. Cook’s 1994 trial that when he visited with Ms. Edwards the night
before her body was found “she said she was going to date other men, that she [Linda Jo EdwørdsJ hød told Jim
Møyjieltl fhst uwl he was very upset;' See 1994 Trial Tr. vol. XXVII, 2159:10-2159:24 (emphasis added). Dr.
Szarka further testified that, according to Ms. Edwards, this conversation between she and Mr. Mayfield had
occurred the day she was murdered. Id. A true and correct copy of an excerpt of Dr. Szarka's 1994 trial testimony is
attached hereto as Exhibit 3.
te See Cook,940 S.W.2d at625.
20dòee Ia.
2r As to Ms. Rudolph's effofts to distance herself from her initial statement to police, in dissenting from the 1987
opinion of the Court of Criminal Appeals affirming Mr. Cook's original conviction, Judge Clinton stated as follows:
"[f]aced with that statement, the prosecution ønd Rudolph fashioned her direct testimony to elaborate on these
moves and observations in such a manner as to demonstrate her impression that the figure is Dean Mayf,reld.” Cook
v. State, 7 4l S,W.2d 928, 948-949 (Tex. Crim. App. 1987) (emphasis added). A true and correct copy of Cook v.
State,741 S.W.2d 928,948-949 (Tex. Crim. App. 1987). Judge Clinton also noted that “[t]he fact of the matter is
that she had described Mayfietd’from the shoulders up’ almost perfectly)’ Id. at949, fn. 5 (emphasis added).
MOTION FOR POST-CONVICTION FORENSIC DNA TESTING
DAL 78,823,437v16 February 27, 2012

separate statements she made to a close friend,zz and to the manager of the apartment complex where the crime occurred.23 Mr. Cook was not the person Ms. Rudolph saw in Ms. Edwards’ bedroom, and the statements Ms. Rudolph gave to the police, as well as what she told other
people, established this beyond any doubt.

B. The Investieation of Ms. Edwardst Murder was from the Outset. Despite the mountains of evidence that was collected in this case, from the crime scene and otherwise, there is not a single piece of physical evidence that puts Mr. Cook inside Ms. Edwards’ apartment the night of her rape and murder. The following list, which sadly is not exhaustive, provides but a few illustrative examples of the scope and depth of investigators’ incompetence:24 Certain blood evidence was never submitted for testing because one of the lead investigators (Doug Collard) ass-rlmed it was all from the same person since “ü was all the same general color;”¿’ Collard also testif,red that he could age Jingerprints wíthín ø runge of hours despite his belief and understanding that there was no scientific basis for this

22 lmmediately after she discovered Ms. Edwards’ body, Ms. Rudolph called her close friend Olene Harned and
asked that Ms. Harned come to the apartment right away. See 1994 Trial Tr, vol. XXVIII, 2194:16-2198:18. A true
and corect copy of an excerpt of Ms. Harned’s 1994 trial testimony is attached hereto as Exhibit 4. Ms. Harned
testif,red that on June 10, 1977 and over the course of the next few days, she and Ms. Rudolph discussed the crime,
and Ms. Rudolph repeatedly stated to Ms. Harned that she thought Mr. Mayfreld was the man she saw in her
apartment just after Ms. Edwards was raped and murdered . See id. aI2l98:03-2198:23 .
23 During Mr. Cook’s 1994 retrial, Doris Carpenter, who was the manager of the complex where Ms. Edwards was
raped and murdered, testified that, within days of the crime, Ms. Rudolph stated that she was not scared when she
came home the evening of June 9,1977 because, as to the man she conffonted in Ms. Edwards’ bedroom, “I knew
him. .l¡ wøs Mayfield. He was in and out all the time.” 1994Trial Tr. vol. XXIX,2570:15-2572:21. (emphasis
added). A true and correct copy of an excerpt of Ms, Carpenter’s 7994 testimony is attached hereto as Exhibit 5.
2a See David Hanners, Clues Not Pursued in Slaying: Tyler Police I4tork ‘sloppily Done,’ DALLAS MORNING NEws,
July 3, 1988 for a discussion of the incompetence with which the investigation was handled. A true and correct
copy of is attached hereto as Exhibit 6.
25 See 1992 Trial Tr, vol. II, 122:3-7 . A true and correct copy of an excerpt of Mr. Collard’s testimony is attached
hereto as Exhibit 7. Mr. Collard later conceded that this assumption was effoneous, but it was too late to remedy as
he failed to properly preserve and retain the blood evidence from the crime scene. See id. at 122:l’8-ll.

conclusion;26 Police failed to locate the knife used in Ms. Edwards’s murder despite the fact that it was later found, not by investigators, but by the father of the víctim’s roommate in the closet,a mere five feet from the victím’s body; A critical piece of evidence was located 15 years after the crime by the jurors (again, not by investigators) during deliberations in Mr. Cook’s 1992 retrial — Ms. Edwards’s “missing” stocking, that had in fact been in the State’s possession since the date of the murder.28

This shocking incompetence more than warrants DNA testing of the biological evidence that actually was collected in this case, much of which has still never been analyzedby a DNA laboratory. Notably, prior to locating the missing stocking, which had actually been sealed in an evidence bag and in the State’s possession the entire time, the prosecution advanced an inflammatory (and wholly unsupported) theory that the victim’s body parts were removed during the murder and carried from the scene in that very stocking. This position was asserted despite any proof that any body parts had been removed. The absurdity of the State’s argument became obvious and undeniable when this particular theory was completely debunked by the jury’s 1992 discovery. The presence of the stocking in the victim’s jeans further underscores the extent to which the investigation into Ms. Edwards’ murder was mishandled and ineptly executed by the authorities. Not only did the investigators’ incompetence fuel the prosecutorial misconduct discussed

26 Crilically, based on his alleged ability to “age” fingerprints, on February 26, 1989 a formal complaint was filed
against Mr. Collard with the International Association for Identification (“IAI”), which Mr. Collard agreed on crossexamination
during Mr. Cook’s 1992 retrial was “the premier organization that fingerprint experts belong to . . .” In
his response to the complaint filed with the IAI, Mr. Collard repeatedly stated that his “opinion” about the age of a
fingerprint could not be supporled in any positive or scientific way. Mr. Collard also conceded that it was a mistake
for him to have openly offered this opinion in the first instance.
27 See 1992 Trial Tr. vol. II, 73:7;75:13 A true and conect copy of this excerpt is attached hereto as Exhibit 8.
28 See Defendant’s Motion for Mistrial Granted and Court’s Questioning of Jurors Re: Stocking. A true and correct
copy is attached hereto as Exhibit 9.

below, but it further supports Mr. Cook’s application for additional DNA testing of relevant and exculpatory biological evidence

THE TEXAS COURT OF CRIMINAL APPEALS EXPOSES SMITH COUNTY’S MISCONDUCT

1. Mr. Cook is wrongfully convicted. Mr. Cook’s first trial resulted in a conviction, which was subsequently vacated and remanded by the United States Supreme Court,2e and then reversed and remanded by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.30 Following a hung jury, Mr. Cook’s second trial ended in a mistrial.3l Mr. Cook’s third trial ayear later resulted in another conviction, which was reversed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals.3′ In revetsing the conviction following the third trial, the Court of Criminal Appeals wrote, “Prosecutorial and police misconduct has tainted this entire matter from the outset.”33 The court found this misconduct to have completely undermined confidence in the outcome of the trials in this case.
The Court of Criminal Appeals identif,red numerous areas of prosecutorial and police misconduct, including suppression of highly exculpatory evidence. The suppressed evidence not only undermined the State’s demonstrably false claim that Mr. Cook committed this rape and
murder, it also indicated that it was likely committed by other persons. That suppressed evidence included, but was not limited to, the following:

2e See Cookv. Texas,488 U.S. 807 (1988).
30 See Cookv. State,821 S.V/.2d 600 (Tex. Crim. App. l99l).
3r The ¡ury was deadlocked six to six. Half of the jury believed Mr. Cook to be not guilty even though the State had
relied on the perjured testimony and prosecutorial misconduct later identifred and condemned by the Courl of
Criminal Appeals.
32 Cookv. Støte,940 S.V/.2d 623 (Tex. Crim. App. 1996).
tt Id, at627.

Actual death threats against Ms. Edwards by another person; namely, the mentally unstable daughter of the manied man with whom Ms. Edwards had had an affair;34 The Smith County District Attorney’s Office withheld from Mr. Cook’s counsel the secret deal made with Smith County Jail inmate Edward Scott “Shyster” Jackson in order to induce him to falsely testiiy that Mr. Cook had confessed to the murder.3s
Jackson later admitted that he had lied at Mr. Cook’s trial in order to receive the benefit offered by the District Attorney’s Office;36 The District Attorney’s Office had failed to reveal that it possessed evidence that Mr. Cook and Ms. Edwards knew each other;37

The State also withheld prior inconsistent statements by a prosecution witness, and put before the jury false testimony concerning the alleged timing of fingerprints found at Ms. Edwards’ apartment;38 and,  Finally, in what was described as unprofessional and improper conduct, the Court found that an Assistant District Attorney, who assisted the elected District Attorney in prosecuting this case, attempted to interview Mr. Cook without the knowledge or presence of his counsel.3e Despite this egregious, deliberate and repeated misconduct, the Court of Criminal Appeals reluctantly allowed the State the option of trying Mr. Cook a fourlh time.aO Two judges argued that the prosecutorial misconduct in this case was so pervasive and serious that a retrial was prohibited. Specifically, these two judges pointed out that, “[t]he record and history of this case support appellant’s contention that the State’s misconduct has destroyed its ability to ensure a

to Id. ar6zs.
3tThe Smith County prosecutors falsely denied that they had made a deal with this inmate, See Cook,940 S.W.2d at
626.
tu Id, at626.
37 Id.
3t Id.
‘o Id.
oo Id. at627-628.

fair trial worthy of confidence in its result.”4l These judges further stated, “Fourteen years after the fact, there are no apparent means of eliminating the taint of the state’s misconduct such that appellant can be restored to the position he would have been in had the evidence not been suppressed and turned over to appellant at the time of his hrst trial when the state was ordered to do so by the trial judge.”a2 2. Mr. Cook’s fourth trial and the prosecution’s plea agreement. Despite this humiliating public rebuke by the Court of Criminal Appeals, the Smith
County District Attorney’s Office vowed it would not stop until Mr. Cook was convicted and executed and moved forward towards a fourth trial. Just prior to the beginning of Mr. Cook’s fourth trial, however, the District Attorney, in an attempt to avoid a not guilty verdict, offered Mr. Cook a deal to plead guilty to murder and be sentenced to his back time and be released.
Mr. Cook steadfastly refused to accept and even discuss any disposition whereby he would have to falsely state that he committed this offense. The State then, in a highly unusual move, offered a disposition that involved Mr. Cook entering a no contest, Alford-like plea, without any judicial
confession or admission of guilt, and receiving a sentence of time served.a3 Mr. Cook reluctantly accepted this offer from the prosecution. He had been through three jury trials, all of which were replete with prosecutorial and police misconduct, perjured testimony from State’s witnesses and unscrupulous and dishonest tactics by State agents designed to re-convict and execute him at all costs. As noted by the concuning judges on the

at Id. at638
o’ Id. at638-639
o’ Since l97l ,}y’rr. Cook has maintained his innocence. Nothing about the no contest plea altered the fact that Mr.
Cook has never waivered in his position. It is notewofihy that he was willing to take his chances in a fourth death
penalty trial rather than falsely state he committed this crime.

Court of Criminal Appeals, Mr. Cook’s ability to defend himself had been essentially destroyed by the State’s persistent and intolerable misconduct. More specifically, those concurring judges stated as follows: In the instant case, the State’s misconduct has ripened with the passage of years into a situation where the State cannot demonstrate that a lair trial, free of the taint of misconduct, will ever be possible. Under these circumstances, appellant’s retrial serves no purpose but to subject him to continuing mental, emotional and financial hardships. Retrial under these circumstances would violate the most fundamental and compelling notions of fundamental fairness essential to the rule of law
embodied in both the Texas Constitution and the United States Constitution. Havíng irreparøbly crippled appellant’s ability to defend himself, ønd íts own ubility to uncover the trutlt, I do not believe the State shoultl be permitted to ubuse íts power by aguin forcing appellønt to defend hímself øgainst these øccuscttions.

Such abuse of State power is precisely what our federal and state constitutional rule of law, in general, and due process and due course of law, in particular were intended to prohibit.aa Accordingly, rather than risk being subjected once again to this type of prosecutorial misconduct,
designed to achieve a conviction and death sentence at any cost and by any means, legal or otherwise, Mr. Cook accepted the State’s offer. D. The Discoverv Of Exculnatorv DNA ence Establishes That Mr. Cook Would Not Have Been Convicted Of Ms. Edwards’s Murder. 1. Forensic testing provides powerful evidence of Mr. Cook’s innocence.

As a result of the extraordinary plea agreement noted above (and discussed in greater detail below), Mr. Cook’s fourth trial was not held. And less than two months later, following the discovery and testing of biological evidence located in Ms. Edwards’ panties, additional evidence of Mr. Cook’s innocence (this time biological) was revealed. At the time of the rape and murder, Ms. Edwards’ panties had been cut off of her body by the person who sexually

oa Id. at639 (emphasis added).

assaulted and murdered her and were on the floor next to her body. Although many years had passed with no DNA testing having been performed on these panties (or other existing biological evidence in the State’s possession for that matter), in the week prior to the fourth trial the panties were sent by the State to the Texas Department of Public Safety Crime Laboratory for DNA testing.a5 As noted and discussed in greater detail herein, Mr. Mayfield previously testified under oath that his sexual relationship with Ms. Edwards ended several weeks earlier and he had not had sex with her on the day of her death, or at any time in the days or weeks leading up to her rape and murder.a6 Therefore, the existence of his DNA on her panties would have provided scientific support pointing to Mr. Mayfield as the person who sexually assaulted and murdered Ms. Edwards that day.

On February 11, 1999, less than one week after the semen was discovered, Mr. Cook provided his DNA sample for comparative analysis. It was only after Mr. Cook entered his plea of no contest that the State submitted Mr. Mayfield’s blood sample for testing on March 18, 1999. Not surprisingly, Mr. Mayfield did not provide this sample voluntarily — he only did so after being so ordered by the Court. The significance of this DNA testing was based on the State’s allegation and argument that the person who murdered Ms. Edwards also sexually assaulted her. It was the alleged sexual assault that allowed the State to pursue the case as a capital murder case and prrsue a death sentence against Mr. Cook. When the DNA testing on the panties was reported, it showed that the semen stain on Ms. Edward’s panties møtched James MuyJïeld and díd not match Mr.

o’ A true and corect copy of the Texas Department of Public Safety Garland Laboratory’s preliminary report
confirming the presence of semen on the panties, dated February 5,7999, is attached hereto as Exhibit 10.
ou See supra, note 15.

Cook.aT The significance of this DNA match to Mr. Mayfield cannot be overstated. Mr. Ma¡zfreld had the motive and opportunity to commit the offense.o8 He was seen at the apartment by the victim’s roommate at the time of the offense and he had made incriminating statements
concerning what had occurred.4e Fortunately, however, the Texas Legislature’s subsequent enactment of Chapter 64 provides this Court with independent tools to fuither the ends of justice. The scene when Ms. Edwards’ body was found was very bloody, as she had been bludgeoned and stabbed numerous times.

It is undisputed that the Tyler Police Department did a sloppy job of investigating and processing the crime scene. Indeed, the Tyler Police Department and Smith County prosecutors failed to submit for DNA or even basic serology testing numerous items of additional biological
evidence, such as blood and hair evidence, that could be highly probative of the actual perpetrator’s identity. Performing DNA testing on this additional evidence will further confirm beyond any shadow of a doubt that Mr. Cook would not have been convicted of Ms. Edwards’ rape and murder and that he is actually innocent of this crime. The fact that the DNA testing previously performed exculpates Mr. Cook and inculpates Mr. Mayfield is powerful evidence that further DNA testing will lead to the same result.

ot A true and correct copy of the Texas Department of Public Safety Garland Laboratory’s repoft analyzing the DNA
results from the semen on the panties, dated April 8, 1999, is attached hereto as Exhibit 11.
a8 See Cook,940 S.V/.2d at631.
on Dr, Gary Miers, a colleague and former close friend of Mr. Mayfield, testified in 1992 that Mr. Mayheld was
“distressed” the day after Ms. Edwards’ rape and murder because “Ms. Rudolph had identified him at the scene.”
See 1992 Trial Tr. 102:7 -17 . Dr. Miers also testifîed that following Ms. Edwards’ rape and murder Mr. Mayfield
approached him and “asked me for assistance in taking a polygraph test.” Id. at l0l:13-102:17. A true and conect
copy of an excerpt of Mr. Miers L992trial testimony is attached hereto as Exhibit 12.

Dean Corll


The Sex...Sadism and Slaughter of Houston's notorious "Candy Man"

The Party

It was truly bad judgment that Wayne Henley used when he
decided to bring his good friend Rhonda to Dean Corll's house,
considering that Wayne was genuinely concerned about the young woman's
safety. He did not understand the danger to which he had exposed himself
and his friends by taking them there.

But bring her he did — without the approval of Dean Corll.

Dean
Corll was an electrician for Houston Power and Light, but most of
Henley's friends knew him as the Candy Man, so named because he had
labored for years in the candy manufacturing plant that he and his
mother had once owned. Corll was famous for giving away candy to the
kids.

Elmer Wayne Henley and his friend Tim Kerley
had left the Corll's house in the Pasadena suburb of Houston in the
early morning hours of August 8, 1973 in order to meet Rhonda. Earlier
in the evening, Henley had been to Rhonda's house when he heard her
father, who was drunk at the time, yelling at her. Knowing that Rhonda
was very afraid of her father that night, Wayne promised to come back
for her.

With the face of a child and the body of a
woman, tiny Rhonda Williams was suffering from some severe emotional and
physical traumas. Her mother had died when she was very young and her
father was an intimidating man. Then her first love, a boy named Frank
Aguirre, disappeared suddenly. Recently, she had sprained her foot in an
accident. While she painfully convalesced, her relationship with her
father became increasingly strained and he banned many of her friends
from visiting the house. Wayne was the only one of her friends that her
father liked.

That night, frightened by her father's
anger after he had too much to drink, she packed an overnight bag and
decided to get away from the house until he sobered up. Wayne left Tim
at a laundromat nearby and went to the house to get Rhonda. She was too
afraid to unlock her bedroom door to let Wayne in, so he came to the
window to escort her from the house. The two of them then met Tim Kerley
at the laundromat.

Wayne told Rhonda that they were
going to Corll's house. She didn't want to go there, but finally agreed.
Tim gave her a beer to drink.

The three teenagers
reached Corll's house around 3 a.m.. Rhonda did not realize that Corll
was infuriated that the two boys had brought a female to the house, but
she knew that something was wrong. Henley was able to take the edge off
Corll's anger and the small party started back up again. While Corll
smoked pot and drank beer, the boys drank some moonshine that Wayne's
dad had given him. Rhonda joined them in smoking some pot and fell
asleep while sitting against the wall.

Hours later
Henley awakened to Corll handcuffing his wrists. His ankles had already
been bound together. From much previous experience, Henley understood
that torture and painful death were imminent. Looking around him, he saw
that Tim had been stripped and both of his friends had been bound with
rope. Electrical tape sealed their lips.

" I'm gonna kill you all!" Corll shrieked, according to Henley. "But first I'm gonna have my fun."

Henley
pleaded with Corll: He would help Corll torture Tim. Corll could
assault Tim and he would rape Rhonda. Then they would kill Tim and
Rhonda together.

After threatening Henley with a .22
caliber pistol and a knife, Corll relented and took off the handcuffs
and ropes. Corll told Henley that if he did not do something to Rhonda
that he, too, would be a victim.

Corll then took
Rhonda and Tim into one of the bedrooms where he had a long "torture"
board. Rhonda's and Tim's hands were handcuffed to the board and their
feet were tied with rope. Henley had convinced Corll to remove the tape
from their mouths.

"Cut off her clothes!" Corll told him and gave him the large knife.

Henley
whispered in Rhonda's ear his promise that he would not let anything
happen to her. She asked him not to cut off the shirt she was wearing
because it belonged to a friend, so he cut off her pants, whispering an
apology as he did so.

Corll tried to rape Tim, but
the young man fought him as best he could. Henley got up to go to the
bathroom and when he returned, he picked up the gun that Corll had left
on the nightstand.

Corll's face was flushed with rage
when he saw the gun pointed at him. "Kill me, Wayne," he challenged.
"Kill me!" Henley backed away as Corll charged at him. "You won't do
it!" Corll sneered at the terrified teenager.

The Story

Around 8:30 a.m. that Wednesday morning, the Pasadena, TX,
police department got a telephone call from a hysterical Wayne Henley.
Patrolman A.B. Jamison raced over to the address, 2020 Lamar Drive, a
green and white frame house. Three teenagers, two boys and a girl stood
in front of the house.

Dean Corll's home

One
of the boys, a timid, slender young man with light brown hair and a
skimpy goatee came forward and identified himself as Wayne Henley. He
motioned the cop inside where Corll's body lay on the floor.

Corll
had been a large muscular man over six feet tall and weighing
approximately 200 pounds. His dark brown hair, graying at the temples,
was styled in little waves. His identification showed his name as Dean
Arnold Corll, a 33-year-old electrician for Houston Power and Light.
Corll had been shot six times with bullets lodging in the chest,
shoulder and head. His body was taken to the morgue, while the three
teenagers were taken to the police station for questioning.

At
this point, detectives had arrived to examine the sparsely furnished
crime scene — one of the more interesting ones they had witnessed in
some time. Of particular scrutiny was the bedroom, which appeared to
have been rigged up for a special purpose.

Plastic
sheeting covered the carpet to protect it from dripping blood. The
bedding on the one single bed was all tangled and disarrayed. Most
sinister was the large thick plywood board with several sets of
handcuffs, ropes and cords attached to it. On the floor was a
bayonet-like knife, a huge dildo, binding tape, glass tubes and
petroleum jelly.

In a shed in the backyard was a plywood box with air holes cut into it and some strands of human hair inside.

Neighbors
said that the house had belonged to Dean Corll's father Arnold, also an
electrician, who had let his son take over the house when he had moved
away. Son Dean had taken care of the house and had done nothing to
arouse the suspicions of his neighbors in the quiet middle-class
neighborhood.

At police headquarters, detectives got
quite an earful from the two teenage boys. Earlier Tim Kerley said that
Henley told him, "If you weren't a friend of mine, I could have gotten
fifteen hundred dollars for you."

Henley told police
that Corll was a homosexual and pedophile that paid him to procure
victims, which Corll later murdered and buried in a boat shed.

Detectives
took this "revelation" cautiously, as they would from any youth who
claimed that the man he killed was really a criminal. When Dean Corll's
father and stepmother talked to the police, a different story emerged.
They said that the story the teenagers had told police was a lie and
that Dean had never been a homosexual or a violent person. In fact, Dean
loved kids and had always been generous to young people. These
teenagers, had taken advantage of their son's hospitality and then,
crazed by drugs, had murdered him in his own home.

Had
the police not found the implements of sexual torture in Corll's home,
they would have been more likely to assume that the parents' version of
events was the correct one. As it was, the police were more interested
in hearing the confession of Elmer Wayne Hensley and just who this Dean
Corll really was — sexual psychopath or the victim of vicious,
drugged-up youths.

Victim or Victimizer?

Dean Corll

As
police dug into Dean Corll's reputation and past, early returns
suggested that the 33-year-old man was the victim not the monster that
Henley made him out to be. This sentiment was summed up in comments like
this:

All my friends knew him,
and my friends' folks knew
him, and they never thought anything [bad] about him...
They always thought Dean
was a good dude. He'd
help me; he'd help them, anything.

Then
an old girlfriend, Betty Hawkins, a divorcee with two small boys, came
forward. She had known and dated Dean for five years or so, and said
only good things about him:

Dean was one of the
kindest men I ever knew. If he had something and someone needed it, he'd
give it to them. So far as I know, he didn't have any special hobby,
unless it was helping other people. That guy must have gone through 15
TV's in the last five years. Every time I turned around, his TV would be
gone. Somebody would come up and say they needed one and he'd give it
to them.

He made me feel like I was somebody,
and the biggest majority of men seemed to want to make me feel so much
lower than them, and all they wanted was to take me to bed. In five
years, Dean and I never really had sex. Sometimes we would hug and kiss.
There were times that we came close, but we never did it. He believed
that you should be married. There aren't very many like that.

He'd
say things like, 'You know I been thinking lately I ought to settle
down and get married.' But all of sudden, he would change his mind. And
later he'd say he couldn't afford to get married. And I'd say, 'Well I
can work, you know.' But he'd say, 'No way. If we got married, you
wouldn't work. Definitely not."

Then some
information started to leak out that suggested a different picture. A
teenaged homosexual who called himself "Guy" claimed that Corll made a
sexual pass at him in a public men's room. "I just wasn't interested at
all," Guy said. "We became extremely close friends." He said that Corll
was extremely gentle and kind to him, but he had in his house a bedroom
that was off limits to Guy. "I'll never take you in there," Corll told
him.

Guy claimed that Corll was very critical of
openly gay bars and bathhouses. There was a barrier that Dean had set up
between himself and an overtly gay lifestyle

He
was sort of like a cloud of mystique; he was just there. Seemed like he
had another life he would go to and I was not a part of it, and I never
wanted to infiltrate his other domain. He seemed to set up a barrier and
wanted me to stay on one side. The other aspects of his life were
taboo. I knew he had a friend named Wayne, but every time I'd bring up
his friends, he'd more or less just cut them off... he never wanted me
to meet them.

Corll was afflicted by the
anxieties that gave rise to the adage, "nobody loves you when you're old
and gay." In sub-culture that, perhaps, intensifies the angst of Western culture in general, puts a premium on youth and looks, Guy saw Corll as less than self-confident:

He
felt like an outcast, especially age-wise. He was hypersensitive about
his age, how he looked, if he was young looking, if he had maybe
something a little bit wrong with his hair. He'd always want
compliments, or he'd want constructive criticism.

At
times he would be totally childlike and rambunctious and crazy. He
wanted to be in with the youthful crowd; he'd show it by his actions.
Someone who is around 35, you don't want to see him wading in a pond.
You don't want him taking off his shoes, rolling up his pant legs and go
skipping down the street.

The Candy Man

Corll spoke to him of getting away from Houston and going
some place where nobody knew him — like Mexico or South America. Never
in all the time they knew each, did Guy see any signs of violence.

Dean
Corll was born December 24, 1939, in Fort Wayne, Indiana to Arnold
& Mary Corll. The marriage of Arnold and Mary was not a happy one
and when Dean was six, the parents divorced, leaving Mary to raise Dean
and a second son, Stanley.

Arnold & Mary made a
second go at their marriage and moved to Houston in 1950. A clash of
personalities caused the two to separate again. In 1953, Mary found a
new mate, a salesman named West, who lived with his daughter from a
previous marriage.

At this time in his young life,
Dean was diagnosed with a heart murmur, which put a damper on any
athletic endeavors. Dean studied music instead and became a trombone
player in his high school band. His grades were middle-of-the-road in
school, but he was always neat and well behaved.

In
the late 1950s, Mary started making pecan candies. Dean helped gather
pecans and delivered the candy for his mother. Author John K. Gurwell in
his book Mass Murder in Houston, says of Dean:

This
was the central, recurring theme in all descriptions of Dean Corll
through the years — he did what he was told to do, everything he was
asked to do and he was always polite. He was very understanding and very
affectionate, especially with children. He never questioned his mother.

Dean
helped his mother in the candy business from the time he graduated high
school in 1958 until 1960, when he went to Indianapolis to take care of
his widowed grandmother.

When Dean came back to
Houston in 1962, Mary had set up a candy production facility in her home
and turned her garage into a candy store. Dean became second in command
in his mother's candy business and lived in an apartment over the
garage. He made candy at night, while during the day he brought in a
regular salary with Houston Lighting and Power.

Dean Corll in military uniform

In
1964, Dean was drafted, but was released from the Army a year later on a
hardship discharge. He went back to help his mother keep the candy
business alive. Mary, in the meantime, had decided to divorce her
husband and needed her son's help all the more. Dean stayed on good
terms with his father, who had remarried and lived in the house on Lamar
Drive.

The candy company moved to West 22nd street
near Helms Elementary School in the Heights area of Houston. Dean
invited all the local kids in for free candy and became known as the
Candy Man.

Mary found yet another new husband, a
merchant seaman, but this union split asunder in 1968 after a few short
years. The candy factory was closed and Mary moved to Colorado where she
began another candy business.

With the candy store
out of his life, Dean turned to the other family business, the
electrician's trade. He was training in that discipline when he was
killed.

The secret life that Dean carried on without
the knowledge of either parents or stepparents nonetheless had taken a
toll on Dean. His family saw the signs of emotional distress without
realizing the causes. Mary said that Dean had been very depressed a few
days before his death and talked of being in trouble. He also spoke of
suicide, but then he seemed to snap out of his black mood and planned to
visit her in Colorado. There was even talk of marriage to Betty
Hawkins. Dean's father and stepmother were also aware of his moodiness
and concerned that there were people at Dean's home that were behaving
suspiciously. They were frankly concerned that Dean had fallen under the
control of someone dangerous.

Wayne & David

The possibility that closet homosexual Dean Corll had
become a victim of unscrupulous young druggies or others who might have
taken advantage of Corll's generosity was investigated. However,
investigation showed that the only really close friends that Dean had
were Elmer Wayne Henley and David Brooks, neither of whom, at least on
the surface, seemed likely candidates for victimizing the older man.

Wayne
Henley was a pimply-faced, young school dropout with a drinking
problem. He was the product of a very broken home and undertook the
financial support of his mother and three brothers. Working during the
day and the evening, there was little or no time for education. He had
tried to enlist in the army, but was prevented because he had dropped
out of junior high school and lacked sufficient education to be
inducted.

His friend David Brooks introduced Wayne to
Dean Corll in 1970. It was, at least at the start and probably at the
end of the relationship, a monetary relationship primarily. Corll
offered Wayne money — allegedly several hundred dollars — to procure
young men for him.

David Brooks was born in Beaumont,
Texas in 1955. Like Wayne Henley and Dean Corll, he was the product of a
broken home. His parents were divorced in the early 1960s when David
was only five years old. He spent part of his time in Houston with his
father and the rest of the time with his mother in Beaumont.

Wayne Henley (left), David Brooks (right)

Despite
the divorce of his parents, David had a promising beginning as a
student, making excellent grades in elementary school. Then in junior
high, his grades plummeted. Around this time, he became associated with
Dean Corll, who paid him for his sexual favors. Corll had such a grip on
the young man that he dropped out of high school shortly after he
started so that he could spend all of his free time with Corll.

David,
Wayne and Dean were frequently together, staying at Dean's house,
riding around in his van and meeting other teenage boys at the various
places that they congregated.

Author Jack Olsen in his book The Man with the Candy, described the situation:

Corll
and the two boys made an unlikely trio; by the early 1970's, he was in
his thirties, the boys in their mid-teens. They seemed to have nothing
in common... 

To most of the
people in The Heights, the odd trio was seen only as a hawk is sometimes
seen in the woods: in quick silhouette, or as a subliminal shadow,
swiftly past. Individually, Corll, Henley and Brooks maintained low
profiles; they were regarded as losers, ciphers in the teen-age society.
As a threesome, the old mathematical precept applied: multiples of zero
are zero.

Runaways?

Certainly not all parents know for sure that their children
did not run away, but could instead be the victims of foul play. Often
parents are oblivious to the tensions, unhappiness or external pressures
that lead a youngster to leave home. However, there are many situations
in which parents are close enough to what is going on in their
children's lives and have a good enough relationship with their children
to know for sure that they did not run away. Often this firm belief on
the part of the parents is buttressed by other factors: when the
youngster disappeared, there was no evidence of planning. The youngster
had not taken any clothes or treasured belongings or money. There were
no major arguments, punishments, or troubles at school that could cause
desperation. The youngster disappeared under circumstances that do not
correspond with behaviors of a runaway. For example, the young person
may have vanished on the way to the swimming pool or a movie or after
getting into a strange car. The list of circumstances that argue against
a kid being a runaway is lengthy.

Why is it then
that police departments all over the globe persist in assuming that
missing teenagers are runaways, unless evidence of foul play is
documented? Yes, kids do run away. In fact, many kids run away, not just
to avoid responsibility for something they have done, or because real
or perceived environmental conditions at home or school are intolerable,
or they think their parents don't care or don't love them, but
sometimes they are running to something or someplace they believe is
more exciting, more tolerant, more fun....

Yet, the
history of serial murder is haunted by hundreds of cases of missing
youngsters and adults, who the authorities have decided have chosen to
runaway. Why? Some of the reasons are likely that the missing persons
sections of police departments are frankly not staffed with the upwardly
mobile officers and they are frequently understaffed and
under-budgeted. Very few police departments are interested in expending
limited resources when it is not crystal clear that a crime has been
committed. Not unless, it is a high-profile case like the recent Chandra
Levy case where there is a scandal involving a congressman and parents
who were not about to let the police bury the case in a file cabinet.

In
so many, many cases of serial murder — the Atlanta child murders, the
Moors murders in Britain, and the crimes of Ted Bundy, Jeff Dahmer and
John Wayne Gacy to name a few well-known cases — the list of victims is
far longer than it would have been if the police had simply spent more
effort separating out suspicious disappearances of young people from
probable runaways.

The First Victims

Such was the case in Houston in the early 1970's. Houston
was growing rapidly and there were simply not enough police per capita
to keep the crime rate under control. Missing persons was a real
afterthought, especially if the person missing was a kid from a rundown
neighborhood. Such a neighborhood was The Heights, an old area of the
city that boomed in the late 1800's, but was tired and decrepit after
World War II.

Dean Corll's early victims

A
huge tragedy began quietly in The Heights on May 29, 1971. 13-year-old
David Hilligiest and his 16-year-old friend Gregory Malley Winkle did
not come home from a trip to the neighborhood swimming pool. According
to author Jack Olsen, the Hilligiests were told by police that:

Times
had changed. Boys were running away from the best of homes nowadays,
and said he would have to list David in the runaway classification. No,
there would be no official search for the child, but if he were spotted
during school hours, he would be stopped and questioned. That was all
the law allowed. A runaway was not a criminal.

The
boys' parents put forth a Herculean effort to track down what happened
to the kids. That night, Mrs. Winkel got a very strange phone call from
Malley just before midnight. When she asked where he was, there was a
long pause.

"We're in Freeport, Mother," her son told her. "I called to let you know where I was."

She
was very angry that he had gone some 60 miles away from Houston and
asked him what he was doing and who was with him. He told her he was
just with a bunch of boys swimming, but that they would bring him home
later. The next day, she heard that Malley and David had been seen in a
white van, but none of his friends knew what had happened to the boys.

The
Hilligiests drove to Freeport to search for the boys, distributed
flyers, offered a reward, and even hired a private detective with their
very meager funds, but to no avail.

One of David's
friends, Wayne Henley, dropped by the Hilligiest home with an offer to
help pass out the posters that the parents had printed up. The younger
Henley boys played with David's younger brothers.

A
few months later, on August 17, 17-year-old Ruben Watson was given some
money by his grandmother to go to a movie and told his mother he would
see her when she got home from work at 7:30 p.m., but he never made it.

Ten
months later on March 24, 1972, Rhonda's boyfriend, Frank Aguirre,
finished his shift at the Long John Silver's restaurant and told his
mother he would be home by 10 p.m. He also called Rhonda and said he was
on his way to her house. She waited outside, but he didn't come. She
walked down to the corner and noticed that Frank's car was gone. Rhonda
went back home and continued to wait, but he never showed up. Instead,
he disappeared.

Months later when Rhonda and some of
her friends were hanging out at Long John Silver's after school, Wayne
Henley came into the restaurant looking for Rhonda. He pulled her aside
and told her to stop thinking that Frank would ever return. Wayne told
her that Frank had gotten into some trouble with Mafia-type people and
they had taken him. Wayne told her that he couldn't say any more than
that because he was afraid of those people and he was putting himself in
danger for speaking to her about Frank. Then Wayne left the restaurant
and got into Dean Corll's van.

Without a Trace

Four friends from the same neighborhood had vanished
without a trace. Their families and friends knew that they weren't
runaways, but the police? That was another matter. They were considered
runaways and that was the end of police involvement.

But
that was not the end of it for families in The Heights. On May 21,
1972, 16-year-old Johnny Delome vanished along with his friend
17-year-old Billy Baulch. Three days after they disappeared, Mr. Baulch
got a letter from Madisonville, Texas, 70 miles out of Houston:

Dear
Mom and Dad, I am sorry to do this, But Johnny and I found a better Job
working for a trucker loading and unloading from Houston to Washington
and we'll be back in three to four Weeks. After a week I will send money
to help You and Mom out. Love, Billy.

The
Baulches were not relieved when they read the letter. While the address
on the envelope was in Billy's handwriting, the note itself was either
made to look like Billy's handwriting or Billy had written it under
duress. But, more sinister than that was that Mr. Baulch, who drove a
truck for a living, realized that there was no job like what was
described in the note.

Johnny's family also received a
similar letter which they believed was in Johnny's handwriting, but the
spelling was so perfect that they knew he had not composed it
unassisted.

The police were no help, so the Baulches
tried to run down clues on their own. As they trawled through suspicious
incidents in their son's past, they remembered David Brooks had given
Billy some dope, which they reported to the police. They also recalled
Dean Corll, Brooks' companion, who used to have Billy and other
neighborhood kids in his home on a continuous basis.

When Mrs. Baulch asked Billy what he and the other boys do for hours at the home of Dean Corll, Billy told her:

We
play the stereo and watch TV, and Dean shows us things. Once he showed
us his handcuffs. We were there with a couple of other boys, David
Brooks and somebody else, and they got to playing around with the
handcuffs and put them on one of the boys, and then Dean couldn't find
the key. He like never found the key to take them off.

When
Billy's father heard about that, he was very displeased. "It's not
normal for a man that old to be playing games with little boys."

The
Baulches went looking for the candy man. When they found him, Dean
Corll was polite and respectful, but he said he had no idea where Billy
or Johnny had gone.

Almost unbelievably, variations
of this story played out for over one more year until August of 1973.
But still, no one understood the magnitude of the tragedy that had
unfolded. That is, until Wayne Henley took the police to the boat shed.

The Boat Shed

Wayne Henley claimed that Corll had murdered several boys
and buried three of them in a boat shed several miles south of Houston.
In late afternoon, he guided police and some prison "trusties" to a
street named "Silver Bell" and a marina with a business called
"Southwest Boat Storage." Dean Corll's stall was Number 11. Author John
K. Gurwell describes the scene:

The stall had no
windows, and the officers moved slowly as they accustomed their eyes to
the gloom of the deep interior. Two faded carpets covered the earthen
floor, stretching from the entrance back 12 feet. One was green, the
other blue. Inside the doors on the left stood a huge, empty appliance
carton. A half-stripped car body, covered by a sheet of canvas, sat in
the right-rear area of the stall...behind the barrel in the corner was a
plastic bag and inside this was an empty lime bag.

"Trusties" excavate the area

In
the blazing August heat, the "trusties" that police had brought along
for the digging, reached a layer of lime. The sweat poured off the
prisoners as they dug through the white layer of lime. A few inches
later, detectives saw some plastic sheet, which held the naked body of a
boy about 13.

Police dig near the boat shed

"It's
my fault," Wayne whined to the detectives. "I can't help but feel
guilty, like I done killed those boys myself. I caused them to be dead. I
led them straight to Dean."

Wayne Henley hides his face

Below
the first body was a skeleton. Then when they dug to the right of the
first grave, the bodies of two additional teenagers were found. One had
been shot and the other strangled.

The owner of the
boat storage facility, Mrs. Meynier told the police what a nice person
Dean Corll seemed to be. He had rented the shed for almost three years
and visited it several times a week. While she did not know what was in
the shed, Corll told her it was almost filled and wanted to rent
additional space.

While the bodies were being
uncovered, the news media had gotten wind of the discovery and had
descended in force. By midnight, the bodies of eight victims had been
recovered. Jack Olsen captured the horror of the police in a phrase:
"They had all seen death, but none had encountered the wholesale
transfiguration of rollicking boys into reeking sacks of carrion.

By
the end of the first day, the Hilligiests and Mrs. Winkle and several
other parents understood why they had never seen their boys alive again.

Confession

The next day, with eight bodies on their hands, police
wanted to talk to Wayne Henley again. Wayne said that he had not
participated in the torture or the murders, but he was a witness to the
atrocities that Corll committed. When he heard that David Brooks had
made a statement, it encouraged Wayne to confess his complete
involvement.

Between the confessions of David Brooks
and Wayne Henley, a terrible tale unfolded of treachery, torture,
mutilation and murder. Wayne finally admitted that he had taken part in
the sadism and murder, as well as the procurement of new victims.

Prospective
victims had to be young and good looking. Corll, Henley and Brooks
would recruit them individually or as a trio. They planned regular
parties with alcohol and marijuana. What was so astonishing was that
Henley and Brooks recruited their friends, childhood friends of many
years, knowing full well that these friends would be tortured and
murdered. Some of the boys had been castrated; another's penis had been
chewed; some had been beaten or kicked to death.

By
the end of the second day of the investigation, the body count had risen
to 17. Both Henley and Brooks were told to make a list of every boy
that they remembered as a victim. Henley, who never stopped talking,
told police that several boys were buried near Lake Sam Rayburn and on
the High Island beach. A trip was planned immediately to those sites.
Several bodies were discovered fairly soon, but since it was late in the
day, further digging had to wait until the following day.

Over
the coming days, 17 bodies were found in the boat shed and before the
investigation was completed, the bodies of 27 boys had been unearthed —
making the serial murder case the largest in U.S. history, beating the
existing record of Juan Corona's 25 victims.

As the
digging and discovery of bodies wound down, the evidence against Henley
and Brooks increased. The future of the two young men did not appear
bright.

Brooks (seated left) and Henley (seated right) rest during the search for bodies.

Justice

Elmer Henley heading to court.

Wayne
Henley delivered justice to Dean Corll on August 8, 1973, when he shot
him in self-defense. Wayne and David Brooks had been planning to kill
Corll because they were afraid of him and afraid that he had gone crazy.
They had always considered themselves potential victims and worried
that they might not see it coming fast enough to escape. Also, Dean had
been acting very strangely and they feared that his increased need for
new victims and intensified savagery with the latest victims posed a
threat to their collective security.

Despite their
confessions of murdering and torturing a number of victims, neither
Henley nor Brooks were likely candidates for the newly defined Texas
guidelines on capital punishment. The Legislature did not provide that
murder committed during just any felony could be punishable by death —
only kidnapping, robbery, burglary, forcible rape and arson.

In
1974, Wayne Henley was convicted of murder in the deaths of six boys
and was sentenced to six consecutive 99-year terms. In 1975, David
Brooks was convicted of murder in the death of one 15-year-old boy and
was sentenced to life.

Every three years by law, they
come up for a parole hearing, but each time it is rejected. Mr. &
Mrs. Walter Scott, whose son was murdered in the serial murder case,
attends each parole review to ensure that the parole board does not
forget their crimes, which topped the list of the worst crimes in the
past 100 years in Houston history.

One of Henley's paintings

Wayne
Henley has taken up art in prison and paints flowers and other
nonviolent subjects. The offering of his paintings and other personal
items on e-Bay has caused a stir of protest in the city of Houston and
elsewhere. Unlike some states, Texas does not have a "Son of Sam" law
that prevents criminals from profiting from books, paintings, etc. that
become popular because of criminal notoriety.

Another Henley painting

Tornadoes Nationwide and in Indiana

» On average, 1,200 tornadoes cause 70 fatalities and 1,500 injuries nationwide each year, according to the National Weather Service.

» Indiana has had 1,235 tornadoes, with 316 fatalities and more than 5,200 injuries, from July 3, 1950, to Oct. 26, 2010, according to data compiled by the Tornado History Project.

State's deadliest tornadoes

» On April 11, 1965, the Palm Sunday tornadoes blew through Indiana, killing 137 Hoosiers.

» More than 20 tornadoes hit 39 counties in Indiana on April 3, 1974. The largest tornado outbreak in Indiana history, it killed nearly 50 people and injured 800 others.

» One of the deadliest tornadoes in U.S. history hit Indiana in 1925. The Tri-State Tornado started in Missouri and roared across Illinois and Indiana, killing 695 people in the three states and injuring more than 2,000.

Indiana tornado: Baby found alone in Ind. field after storms

Update: 11:20 a.m.

A baby girl found alone in a field in Indiana after Friday's massive, tornado-spawning storms is being treated in a Kentucky hospital.

A spokeswoman for the hospital in Salem, Ind., where the girl was first taken said Saturday that authorities were still trying to figure out how she ended up in the field alone. St. Vincent Salem Hospital spokeswoman Melissa Richardson says the child's family is from New Pekin, Ind., about 10 miles south of where the child was found.

Richardson says the girl is in critical condition at Kosair Children's Hospital in Louisville, Ky. She says she can't release the name of the girl or her family.

Update: 11:18 a.m.

HENRYVILLE, Ind. — A string of violent storms demolished small towns in Indiana and cut off rural communities in Kentucky as an early season tornado outbreak killed more than 30 people, and the death toll rose as daylight broke on Saturday's search for survivors.

Massive thunderstorms, predicted by forecasters for days, threw off dozens of tornadoes as they raced Friday from the Gulf Coast to the Great Lakes. Twisters crushed blocks of homes, knocked out cellphones and landlines, ripped power lines from broken poles and tossed cars, school buses and tractor-trailers onto roads made impassable by debris.

Weather that put millions of people at risk killed at least 34 in four states — Alabama, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio — but both the scale of the devastation and the breadth of the storms made an immediate assessment of the havoc's full extent all but impossible.

In Kentucky, the National Guard and state police headed out to search wreckage for an unknown number of missing. In Indiana, authorities searched dark county roads connecting rural communities that officials said "are completely gone."

In Henryville, the birthplace of Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Colonel Harland Sanders, volunteers pushed shopping carts full of water and food down littered streets, handing supplies to anyone in need. Hundreds of firefighters and police zipped around town, where few recognizable structures remained; all of Henryville's schools were destroyed. Wind had blown out the windows of the Henryville Community Presbyterian Church and gutted the building.

"It's all gone," said Andy Bell, who was guarding a friend's demolished service garage, not far from where a school bus stuck out from the side of a restaurant and a parking lot where a small classroom chair jutted from a car window.

"It was beautiful," he said, looking around at the town of about 2,000 north of Louisville, Ky. "And now it's just gone. I mean, gone."

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels spoke to reporters Saturday outside what was left of Henryville High School. He marveled that all the students were safe and credited preparation and people heeding warnings to take shelter for saving lives.

"Yet all things that mere mortals can do aren't enough sometimes," he said.

Daniels said he wanted residents to know "we love you, and we're with you. We're going to do everything we can to get you back on your feet in business, in your homes, and bear with us."

A baby was found in a field in Salem, about 10 miles north of New Pekin, where her family lives, said Melissa Richardson, spokeswoman at St. Vincent Salem Hospital, where the little girl was initially taken.

The child was in critical condition Saturday at a hospital in Louisville, Ky., and authorities were still trying to figure out how she ended up alone in the field, Richardson said. She said she couldn't identify the child or her family.

Friday's tornado outbreak came two days after an earlier round of storms killed 13 people in the Midwest and South, and forecasters at the National Weather Service's Storm Prediction Center had said the day would be one of a handful this year that warranted its highest risk level. By 10 p.m., the weather service had issued 269 tornado warnings. Only 189 warnings were issued in all of February.

"We knew this was coming. We were watching the weather like everyone else," said Clark County, Ind., Sheriff Danny Rodden. "This was the worst case scenario. There's no way you can prepare for something like this."

Fourteen people were reported killed in Indiana, including four in Chelsea, where a man, woman and their 4-year-old great-grandchild died in one house. Tony Williams, owner of the Chelsea General Store, said the child and mother were huddled in a basement when the storm hit and sucked the 4-year-old out her hands. The mother survived, but her 70-year-old grandparents were upstairs; both died.

"They found them in the field, back behind the house," Williams said.

Two people died further north in Holton, where it appeared a tornado cut a diagonal swath down the town's tiny main drag, demolishing a cinderblock gas station but leaving a tiny white church intact down the road.

"We are going to continue to hit every county road that we know of that there are homes on and search those homes," said Indiana State Police Sgt. Jerry Goodin. "We have whole communities and whole neighborhoods that are completely gone. We've had a terrible, terrible tragedy here."

Sixteen people were reported dead in Kentucky, where National Guard troops, Kentucky State Police troopers and rescue workers were still searching counties east and south of Lexington.

In West Liberty, Ky., Stephen Burton heard the twister coming and pulled his 23-year-old daughter to safety, just before the tornado destroyed the second story of the family's home.

"I held onto her and made it to the center of the house, next to a closet," Burton said. "I just held onto her, and I felt like I was getting sand-blasted on my back."

Endre Samu, public affairs officer for the Kentucky State Police in Morehead, said three people died in West Liberty and at least 75 were injured. With the hospital damaged in the storm, some patients were being transferred to area hospitals, he said.

"All of the downtown area was just devastated," Samu said.

Tornadoes were reported in at least six Ohio cities and towns, including the village of Moscow, where a council member found dead in her home was one of at least three people killed in the state. Several dozen homes were damaged, some stripped down to their foundations, and the Clermont County commissioners called a state of emergency for the first time in 15 years.

One person was reported dead Saturday in Alabama. Emergency Management Agency spokeswoman Yasamie August said an apparent tornado that hit Jackson Gap injured two others as well. She didn't have more details.

Update: 10 a.m.

Surveying the damage in and around Henryville this morning, Gov. Mitch Daniels praised the efforts of local officials and promised help for those left homeless.

"It does appear that people did have warning,'' Daniels told reporters in Henryville, noting that the local high school had gone through tornado drills that paid off Friday afternoon. "But sometimes all things that mere mortals can do aren't enough."

Asked what he would tell the people whose homes were damaged and destroyed Friday afternoon, Daniels briefly appeared to choke up before replying, "We love you. We're with you."

-- Star report

From Saturday's Indianapolis Star: Indiana tornado destroys Marysville, Ind.

The Louisville Courier-Journal staff

At least 27 people were killed in Southern Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio on Friday when a series of fierce storms carved a path of destruction through the Midwest.

The National Weather Service estimated there could have been 10 or more tornadoes touch down in Indiana and Kentucky.

Kentucky declared a state of emergency, and Indiana officials said they were discussing that late Friday night. The weather service planned to survey parts of the Ohio today to determine the extent of the damage.

In Marysville, 10 miles north of Charlestown along Ind. 3, most of the several dozen homes that make up the town were destroyed.

"Marysville is completely gone," Clark County Sheriff's Maj. Chuck Adams said.

The Marysville water tower stood in stark contrast to the flattened structures around it. In some cases, bare concrete slabs were the only sign that a home had existed.

Leon Gilbert counted himself as one of the more fortunate residents as he arrived home from work to find the back wall of his home missing and the roof partially collapsed.

"It's just a bad deal . . . but the main thing is everybody's alive," Gilbert said.

"We knew this was coming. We were watching the weather like everyone else," Clark County Sheriff Danny Rodden said. "This was the worst-case scenario. There's no way you can prepare for something like this."

In this video on YouTube, a motorist captured a funnel cloud touching down in Borden, Ind., which is in Clark County about 25 miles northwest of Louisville.

In the town of Chelsea in Jefferson County, Ind., first responders found a 4-year-old boy and his great-grandparents lying on the ground 50 feet from where the elderly couple's home was blown off its foundation and thrown more than 100 feet.

All three died of multiple blunt-force injuries, according to David Bell, the county's emergency management director.

A man who lived nearby also was killed when the storm slammed into his home, Jefferson County Sheriff John Wallace said.

"All of this happened in less than 30 seconds," said Cory Thomas, a Hanover volunteer firefighter, who videotaped a funnel cloud while sitting in a fire truck.

At least three children were taken to Kosair Children's Hospital in Louisville, Ky., with storm-related injuries. A 2-year-old girl was flown to the hospital after being found in a field in Washington County, near Salem, said Cis Gruebbel, Kosair's chief nursing officer.

Sheriff Rodden confirmed one storm-related death in the Henryville area in Clark County. Crews were still searching homes on the numerous country roads in the area. Homes were being marked with check marks to indicate they had been searched.

The Henryville school complex sustained extensive damage as children were supposed to be dismissed from school. Teachers and staff kept many inside in bathrooms, hoping to protect them from the storm.

Indiana State Police Sgt. Jerry Goodin said no students were reported missing or injured.

The school's roof had been torn off, segments of a wall knocked down and windows blown out. At least a half-dozen vehicles in the school's parking lot had been crushed by falling debris.

The storm cut a wide swath from the high school across Henryville, destroying homes and businesses in its path. Hail driven by storm winds riddled the sides of several buildings like gunfire, leaving holes in siding and breaking windows.

Officials also said three people died in Scott County, and two in Holton in Ripley County.