(This article ran in Rolling Stone in March 1988. Please be advised: It's about two brutal murders and the scenes depicted are graphic.)
The night of February 22nd, 1985, was cold and crisp. The ranch in the pine forests of Magnolia, Texas, just forty miles north of Houston, was quiet. The horses were calm, the dogs silent. And the darkness, like a black satin comforter, concealed the horror inside the log cabin.
The television buzzed in the cabin’s main room, while five newborn dachshund puppies sucked greedily at their mother’s nipples inside a playpen in the adjoining bedroom. It was a cluttered house. In the bookcases there were playbills from shows in Florida, Colorado, and Texas announcing “Tonight! John Vandiver!” alongside snapshots of Vandiver and his longtime, live-in lover, Debbie Davis.
Hanging on the wall over the couch was a life-size portrait of John Vandiver, his face framed by an unruly gray beard, his eyes gleaming behind wire-rimmed glasses, one thick hand clutching a microphone to his open mouth, crying out in song. On the wooden floor below the portrait was Vandiver’s lifeless, stocky body. Clothed only in an old blue robe and Jockey shorts, he was face down and encircled by blood. A few inches from his outstretched hand lay his broken glasses.
Across the room, Davis lay on her back, her bare legs extended upward and bent. She had toppled from her knees when the gunshots tore through her chest and neck. A thin line of blood beaded up from a slash across her throat. A translucent blue negligee was wrapped tightly around her upper body.
Miles away a maroon minivan barreled down a desolate country road. Inside the four occupants were tense and silent, except for the driver, Tom Mathes. He was muttering and laughing to himself. “You better get your money to me, Tom, or something might happen to you,” he said, mimicking the man how lying dead on the cabin floor. “Well, I got him. He’s the one who’s dead now.”
Four months earlier in the Wunsche Brothers Café and Saloon in Spring, Texas, there had been a reunion of the Ewing Street Times, a popular regional group that had disbanded nine years earlier. The smoky saloon pulsated with the heavy chords of country blues and the lighter strains of country rock. A congregation of the faithful filled the tables and the bar.
At center stage, John Vandiver dug deeply into the thick, low tones of the early blues he loved. His strong hands, callused from years of work on his ranch, picked authoritatively at the strings of an old Gibson F-hole guitar, which, singer B.W. Stevenson says, “Johnny could make sound real funky.” With his old friends Shake Russell, the whiskey-voiced Texas country rocker, and the bass player Michael Mashkes, a.k.a. Marcello Marconi, Vandiver joined in on songs he used to perform nightly in the Seventies.
John Vandiver spent twenty of his thirty-nine years playing on the Texas music circuit. He was one of those musicians who were always poised on the brink of success but who never quite made it. “There were people of much greater success who considered Johnny their peer,” says folk star David Bromberg, who’s recorded with the likes of Ringo Starr and Bob Dylan. Bromberg would occasionally play with Vandiver when he was in Texas. “I myself was very happy to be known as Johnny Vandiver’s guitar player.”
Over the years, Vandiver had played beside the hierarchy of Texas good-time music, including Jerry Jeff Walker and Michael Martin Murphey. He made local television appearances and recorded with Shake Russell and his country-rock band. Vandiver’s music hadn’t made him rich, but he seemed content. Besides, there were other ways to make money.
At the end of the performance, Vandiver swept his gray flannel racing cap off his head and bowed to the crowd. Out of the cap’s crown flew two tightly twisted joints, which he scrambled to recover. Standing upright again, Vandiver looked around the room, smiled sheepishly and said, “Hell, you people probably already knew that about me.”
The crowd roared with friendly recognition.
Vandiver’s musical career began in the Sixties, when music was intertwined with love, peace, and drugs. His career continued through the Seventies – the heyday of Texas music – and into the leaner, cocaine-fueled Eighties. While friends and fellow musicians like Bromberg and Walker had gone on to national prominence, Vandiver remained a local star. But he found a way to supplement his modest musical income. In his final days, Vandiver was playing two circuits: the Texas bars and music halls and the drug route from Florida to Colorado.
JOHN VANDIVER GREW UP IN DALLAS, IN A DEVOUT Church of Christ family. After high school he attended Fort Worth Christian College for two years and then transferred to Oklahoma Christian College, in Oklahoma City, on a choir scholarship. He flunked out after only one semester because he spent most of his nights and weekends playing folk and blues in the local Okie bars.
He returned to Texas and joined his first group, a jug band called the Dallas County Outpatients, which also featured Michael Murphey and Steve Fromholz. By 1966, when Vandiver was twenty-one, he was playing solo in a small Dallas coffeehouse called the Rubaiyat. It was a breeding ground for musicians who would later become the vanguard of the "Austin sound' or the progressive country-rock movement of the Seventies. “We were all about the same age and had a lot in common,” says Fromholz. “We loved good-time music and would play it anywhere, any time.”
In May 1967, Vandiver and his wife, Diana, packed their belongings into a camper and left Texas for Coral Gables, Florida, where he had a gig at a coffeehouse called the Flick. Vandiver was the opening act, comedian Gabe Kaplan was next on the bill, and the Ewing Street Times, with Michael Mashkes, a wiry, longhaired bass player from Chicago, closed the show. Vandiver would soon become the lead singer of the Times.
Living was easy in Coral Gables during those years. David Crosby, Joni Mitchell, Dion and John Sebastian congregated there, along with many of Vandiver’s Texas friends, including Walker and Murphey. Vandiver and his cronies would gather after a show for a night of partying at the house he shared with other band members and their families. "If I opened the refrigerator and found it filled with beer," says Mashkes, "I knew Jerry Jeff [Walker} was in town. Early one morning Murphey watched a woman through our window as she stumbled down the street, and then he wrote ‘Drunken Lady of the Morning.’”
Vandiver bought into the whole scene; playing music and carousing filled his days and nights. His favorite song, Walker's "Gypsy Songman,” glorified the traveling minstrel, the lone figure onstage, living on the edge of society, unrestricted by convention. Vandiver, who smoked pot daily, eventually began selling a little grass, enough to pay for his own supply.
In 1970, Vandiver and his wife had a daughter, Joanna, but that didn't stabilize their life. He began traveling the circuit with and without his family. In 1971 he and Mashkes settled in Kansas City, Missouri, where Shake Russell joined the band. It was there that Vandiver began to rely more and more on the drug money. "Whenever money was tight,” Russell says, "John would throw a lid of pot in the trunk and sell a little before and after performances to pay expenses."
According to one of Vandiver's former lovers, "He liked bragging that the pot money gave him more control over his life. He didn't have to knuckle under. John had this paradoxical part of him. At times he could be generous, caring. And at other times he was egotistical and almost greedy. When he talked to me about dealing, he was proud. He was proud of the independence."
By the summer of 1976, Texas was enjoying a musical renaissance, and Vandiver, who was divorced from his wife in 1973, returned with the Times to the booming music scene in Houston and Austin. Fromholz remembers it as a time when "everybody with a guitar had a band. They put on cowboy hats and called themselves musicians." For the Times it was an era of both promise and frustration; the band seemed to be perpetually on the verge of a record deal. Walker had hit it big, and Murphey made the charts with his song "Wildfire." Vandiver was surrounded by success, but it was always just beyond his grasp. In 1971 the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band had made the charts with Walker's "Mr. Bojangles;' a song the Times had been playing for over a year. Vandiver was despondent. "That should have been us,” he muttered.
The Ewing Street Times eventually recorded an album, but it was never released: "It just wasn't happening,” says Russell, who left the Times and took off for New York and Chicago with Mashkes. Vandiver moved to Houston and began booking gigs as a solo act, much the way he had started out ten years earlier in Dallas.
While Vandiver never seemed envious of his friends' good fortune, says Mashkes, "I'm sure, deep down, John thought, 'Why not me?' "
WHILE PERFORMING IN A HOUSTON club in 1979, Vandiver met Debbie Davis. They were immediately drawn to each other, although they seemed an unlikely match. Vandiver, 33, was a hardheaded blues singer, with a laid-back demeanor and a fondness for women and drugs. Davis, 26, was an attractive, gregarious computer operator from a conservative upper-middle-class Jewish family. "John was everything Debbie's mother had warned her about,” says Mashkes. “A hippie who was not Jewish and was not going to marry her."
Davis's relationship with Vandiver would be a tumultuous one, plagued by his well-known infidelity and fierce sense of privacy. But despite - and probably because of - his outlaw image, she was drawn to him and his music. "He really became her life;" says Sarah Irwin, Russell's wife.”She once told me, ‘Without John, I might as well be dead.’”
Soon after they met, Davis moved in with Vandiver on the ranch, where he had been living for over a year. Six months later Vandiver bought the four-acre spread, but his timing couldn't have been worse. Texas was hit with what became known as the Oil Bust, and the area’s music scene took a downturn. "A lot of the clubs became band-oriented," says Mashkes, "and many of the places where a single performer could play closed up."
“In the best of times it would have been tough for John,” says Fromholz. “There just wasn't much work for a white boy who liked to play old black blues."
"John was disappointed with his music,” says a former lover of Vandiver's and a friend of the couple’s. “He was nearing forty, and he knew he was never going to be a famous musician." And yet "he never talked about what he could have done to change things. Instead he put his energy into the drugs. Not that the music wasn't important - it was just easier with the drugs."
And the drugs paid the bills. At one point, Vandiver had even attempted to make a down payment on the ranch with bales of marijuana. Davis's dilemma was to reconcile her aversion to drugs with the unavoidable fact that it paid for their life together on the ranch.
"Debbie liked nice things;" says the friend, "and she was always coming up with ways to spend money, knowing John couldn't make enough. She didn't like his dealing, but she wanted to be supported by it."
When Davis complained about the dealing, Vandiver responded angrily to what he saw as her hypocrisy. "John would yell, point to the door and say, ‘If you don't like it, leave,’” says Irwin. "But Debbie couldn't leave. She wasn't capable of it."
No matter how it was paid for, the ranch was where Vandiver and Davis were the happiest. By 1984 they had three quarter horses, two ponies, more than twenty dogs, countless cats and Lulu and Leroy, the miniature dachshunds Davis was breeding. The ranch also became a haven for local musicians. "Sometimes they'd cook a big dinner, and we'd sit around and play,” says Mashkes. “Other times we'd take a break from the music and just be together. John was just fun to be around.”
Vandiver, who had always been handy with a hammer and saw, remodeled the four-room cabin and built corrals for the horses and a bicycle-wheel surrey for the ponies to pull. In the surrey, his belly bouncing and beard flapping, he became a common sight at local parades. He also erected a metal storage building equipped with a pulley for lifting the bales of pot, a lean-to next to the garage for bagging and an eight foot fence to block the view from the road.
The pot was a natural. "It wasn't just financial,” says a close friend. “It was a way to compensate for a loss of self-esteem. If he couldn't be one of the big boys, he could sell them their pot.” On the career ladder of the drug world, Vandiver was a middleman, a "mule,” who made frequent trips to Miami to bring back trunks and later trucks - filled with pot, which he then sold through a network of friends in Texas and Colorado and throughout the Midwest.
"In our circle of friends everybody knew what John was doing,” says Mashkes, who along with Russell had followed Vandiver to Houston. “It all seemed pretty innocent. Everybody had a lot of good pot and, later, a lot of cheap cocaine."
But there was one shadowy figure in Vandiver's life who made his friends uneasy – an apprentice mechanic named Tom Mathes. He was a short, slight man in his late twenties, with small, piercing dark eyes, long, thinning brown hair and a sullen manner. They met in Houston in 1982, when Vandiver hired Mathes to work on his Triumph TR3. Vandiver was taken with Mathes and soon brought him into his drug business. Russell attributes their friendship to the fact that "they were both grease monkeys. I immediately didn't like Mathes. He didn't have friendly vibes at all!”
A bit of a drifter and a job hopper who had followed an army buddy to Houston, Mathes turned out to be a bad business risk. He was often unable to pay for the pot Vandiver fronted him, and he'd have to work off his debts by repairing Vandiver's collection of old Triumphs.
Russell remembers that in 1984 he "hadn't seen Mathes on the ranch more than one time in the past year and a half." Russell assumed, mistakenly, that "Mathes was history."
IN LATE 1983 A CHRONIC PROBLEM WITH VANDIVER'S right hand, carpal-tunnel syndrome, flared up. By the end of a performance, he would be nursing a sore, partially paralyzed hand. "He said the hands were a no man's land," says Fromholz. "Johnny was afraid he wouldn't be able to play again."
Around the same time, Vandiver's source of marijuana dried up as a result of a government crackdown. With his pot money shut off, he started dealing cocaine, which was more easily transported and immensely more lucrative. At first, the amounts of cocaine he handled were moderate - just enough to "supply his regular customers,” says Mashkes. According to his friends, Vandiver himself never acquired a taste for the rich man's high. In fact, he had often warned his friends against cocaine, saying, “It takes the r out of friend.” Friends like Ewing Street Times drummer Billy Bucher would later say that John's failure to heed his own advice "probably cost him his life."
The following spring, in May 1984, Vandiver put his music career on hold while he underwent surgery on his hand. He also developed a persistent back problem that threatened to require surgery. It was a dismal summer. Spending most of it flat on his back, he was unable to make the rounds to his supplier and his dealers. The ranch became overgrown, and the animals were barely cared for. When his hand finally healed that fall, Vandiver was able to perform again, but he seemed more interested in renewing his cocaine trade.
“We used to talk about his music," says a friend. "But suddenly all John wanted to talk about was how he was going to make more and more money selling drugs."
Around the same time, Tom Mathes began pressuring Vandiver to cut him in on the more profitable cocaine market. But Vandiver, perhaps wary of Mathes's history of inconsistent payments, held back for months, restricting Mathes to a marijuana-only arrangement. Mathes, who was making no more than $200 a week crating goods for a freight company, must have found that infuriating.
By December 1984, Vandiver's life seemed to be back on track and under control. He was playing again, and Davis was handling his bookings. He was even considering marriage and having children, something Davis had wanted for many years. "It was as if Debbie had finally passed the test,” says a close friend, "and John had decided this was it."
There was just one conflict that Davis couldn't seem to resolve: Vandiver's drug dealing. Since the music gigs brought in only between $200 and $400 a night, most of their income clearly came from cocaine. He was careful to conduct his business from pay phones and deal only with people he considered friends, but the large quantities of cocaine and marijuana stored in the cabin and outbuildings, as well as the thousands of dollars buried in canisters in the garage and the woods, made Davis feel as though she were living on a volcano.
TOM MATHES WAS THE DRUG connection Davis felt the most apprehensive about. Once, when Mathes had no place to stay, Vandiver let him sleep on the couch in the living room, an arrangement that irritated Davis. She told friends that she found Mathes repulsive and complained that "John's drug friends drive me crazy."
Mathes began regularly referring to her as "John's bitch." He told friends, "I wish I didn't have to see her every time I go over there to do business."
By the end of 1984, Mathes was doing more and more business with Vandiver. Through an old army buddy, Chuck Blair, Mathes had received a $12,000 loan. "Tom told me that John Vandiver was going to make an investment, a large investment,” Blair later testified. “And after all these years of knowing John, he was finally going to let Tom invest along with him." Mathes agreed to repay the borrowed $12,000 twofold, plus a $10,000 commission to Blair for setting up the deal.
During this same period, Vandiver told Shake Russell that he was working up to bigger things. "It's going to be quite a run this time - cocaine to Colorado,” Vandiver said with a laugh. “For a while, I'll be a thousandaire." Vandiver saw the profits as a quick way to get straight: to pay for the still-pending back surgery and to square $37,000 in back taxes with the IRS. Always the outlaw, he had never filed a tax return during all his years as a professional musician.
Perhaps because "neither of them really liked the cocaine or the people it attracted,” says Russell, "John's plans changed. He wanted to make a big enough killing to get out of the business. He was talking about buying a sailboat and sailing around the world, stopping in ports to play his music.”
The cocaine, after all, was merely a way for him to make easy money. If John Vandiver ever envisioned himself as an old man, it's doubtful that he would have pictured a retired drug dealer. He would have been more likely to have seen himself as Russell did: "John would have been sitting on his front porch, playing his guitar."
But it was another story altogether for Tom Mathes. Positioning himself for what he saw as his future as a drug kingpin, Mathes moved from a rundown Houston apartment complex into a three-bedroom Spanish-style ranch house in a quiet, middle-class neighborhood. He also started putting together his own little organization. He hired Cecil Covington, a thirty-year-old car detailer with a black belt in karate, “to watch my back.” Covington’s salary was paid with cash and all the cocaine he could pack up his nose. Covington accompanied Mathes on twice-weekly coke runs to Florida and selling trips throughout the Midwest. According to Covington, Mathes said, "A year from now we'll both be millionaires."
On January 6th, 1985, Mathes threw himself a thirtieth-birthday party for more than 200 people in a local hotel bar called the Brass Key. Dennis Holland, Covington's top karate student, met Mathes that night and remembers the party as "a blowout."
"He had a live band, plenty of booze, and the drugs were flowing freely,” says Holland. “Just an all-out shebang." Soon after, Mathes hired Holland, 22, and Joe Makosky, 19, Covington's other lead disciple, to act as additional bodyguards. They were also paid with cocaine.
The gaunt, six-foot-six-inch Holland became known as Sasquatch, another name for the mythical Big Foot. Makosky was called Mean Joe. Covington was Mr. C. or Sensei, a karate term for "the master,” and Mathes was called the Little Professor or the Brain. Vandiver was barely aware of the Mathes crew. In his efforts to maintain secrecy, he would deal only with Mathes.
After the big coke buy went down at the beginning of January, Mathes began complaining that Vandiver was still treating him like his mechanic, making him repair the beat-up Oldsmobile they used to transport the drugs. Adding to Mathes's hostility was Vandiver's tendency to tease him about his size. "That was one joke Tom could never take,” says Michael Charbeneau, a Mathes hanger-on. There was also the matter of money - still unpaid - that Vandiver had fronted Mathes for part of the shipment. "Maybe it was a commercial conflict between them," says Covington. "Whatever it was aggravated Tom really bad." Ultimately, it may have been that Mathes began to resent Vandiver's control over his drug supply and saw Vandiver as an obstacle to his own ambitions.
Mathes began painting a distorted portrait of Vandiver for his bodyguards. "Tom would manipulate their minds,” says Charbeneau. "He was feeding them information on John’s Colombian connections and how all John needed to do was make a phone call and he could have you dumped in a minute."
Charbeneau also says Mathes was continually looking over his shoulder. "He was always talking about people who were out to get him.” Charbeneau attributed Mathes's idiosyncrasies to cocaine-induced paranoia.
It wasn't long before Mathes and Covington began
carrying guns. "Mathes said there was the possibility that we might have to bust someone,” says Holland. For emphasis, Mathes would remind them of a bloody scene in the Brian De Palma film Scarface. "I've seen a lot of movies,” says Makosky. "I knew what those Colombians were like.”
Then Mathes would entice them with his grandiose visions. Makosky remembers Mathes promising them that "within a year we'll have our own dojo [karate school] in Florida, to funnel the drug money through. We'll have everything."
But Mathes's would-be drug empire was already in trouble. Relishing his imaginary role as drug lord, he burned up his profits on lavish parties and constant cocaine use. According to one friend, "Tom was the type, if he invited five or six people over, he would line up $800 in cocaine on a mirror." Another acquaintance recalls Mathes and his three bodyguards snorting coke, "even while their noses were bleeding from the irritation." By early February, says Makosky, "we were all taking mega-doses." Covington seemed the most changed; he had dropped from nearly 200 pounds to 150. "It was just wasting Cecil away,” says Holland.
At the same time, Mathes's loan was overdue, his creditors were pushing for their money, and Vandiver refused to front him any more coke. "What's the matter?" Vandiver asked Mathes. "You can't make any money, you've got to get it fronted to you?"
Mathes began acting jittery, on edge. "Tom looked like he was self-inflicting pressure,” says one friend, who saw Mathes regularly. "Any more pressure to the pressure cooker wouldn't have been wise.”
Janice Covington, Cecil's wife, later testified that in mid-February her husband told her that “Tom Mathes had a plan. . . that he knew people that had a lot of drugs and money and that could be ripped off and, if need be, killed."
The following week Covington told Holland and Makosky that their services would be needed that Thursday night. There was a big deal going down, and it had to do with Vandiver.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 21ST, WAS A BRISK WINTER day, and the morning mist carried the heavy, bitter scent of oak burning in fireplaces. John Vandiver began the day by taking a long ride on Sugar, his favorite quarter horse, and then cooking a large breakfast, as he did every morning. He used the afternoon to dub tapes of his music, which Davis would sell during and after his performances.
Davis, who usually slept later than Vandiver, spent the afternoon with the animals. Lulu, one of the dachshunds, had had a litter, and Davis got caught up in the excitement of caring for the newborn pups. But she also had a sense of dread. Earlier in the week she had confided over the phone to a friend, Judi Alderman, that she wasn't happy with the "goings-on at the house." To another friend she complained about Tom Mathes's hanging around. "She never said she was afraid, but she just didn't want him there."
That same morning Mathes put all his cocaine and drug paraphernalia in boxes and had it stashed at a friend's house. Later in the day he called Vandiver to arrange a meeting at the ranch that night. "Mathes told him he wanted to get some pot from him to make some of the money back that he owed John for cocaine," says Holland.
At 1:16 that afternoon, Covington rented a maroon minivan from National Car Rental. At approximately 5:00 p.m., Holland picked up Makosky at his house. They were both, as Covington had ordered, wearing dark clothes. Neither of them knew what Mathes had planned for the night. A few hours later Covington drove Makosky home one more time to get something he believed might come in handy Makosky's twenty-five-inch samurai sword.
Holland had spent most of the day doing drugs at the home he shared with Covington, and as he, Makosky and Covington waited for the 9:00 p.m. meeting with Mathes, all three continued to snort coke and smoke pot.
AT ABOUT SIX O'CLOCK THAT evening, Vandiver drove Davis to Judi Alderman's house in Houston. Davis seemed worried, but Alderman shrugged it off since Davis often seemed tense. After some cajoling, Davis persuaded Alderman to join her and Vandiver and Sarah Irwin at the River Cafe, in Houston's trendy Montrose section. Davis assured Alderman that they wouldn't be out late. "John has an appointment at the ranch tonight at ten o'clock," she said. After dropping Davis off, Vandiver made his rounds, collecting drug money, and then stopped at Michael Mashkes's apartment, not far from the River Cafe. The two musicians watched TV and talked about an upcoming gig; Mashkes would. be backing Vandiver up when he played at Fitzgerald's, in Houston.
Vandiver was also looking forward to Saturday night, when he was scheduled to open for Mary Travers, of Peter, Paul & Mary fame, at Poor David's Pub, in Dallas. The club's owner, David Card, had described the booking as a possible break for Vandiver. Despite his years of disappointment, Vandiver still harbored the hope that somehow his music would make it big.
Before he left Mashkes's, Vandiver asked his friend to accompany him on his drive to Telluride, Colorado, later in the month. "I've got some business to transact there,” he told Mashkes. Mashkes didn't need to ask what kind. “I’ll let you know,” he replied.
Vandiver, Davis, Irwin and Alderman met for dinner at the River Cafe around seven o'clock. They shared a bottle of wine and talked about a horse Davis had sold, which was appearing in the rodeo the following week. But Davis, looking thin and tired, was less talkative than usual. "Debbie's long nails were all bitten down to the quick,” Irwin says, "and John seemed preoccupied throughout dinner and kept checking his watch."
At 9:00 p.m. Vandiver looked at Davis and said, "It's time - let's go." As they divvied up the dinner bill, Irwin asked Vandiver if she could give him a personal check for her share. "Is it okay? Can you cover it?"
Vandiver laughed. "I think so. I've got $42,000 on me."
Davis dawdled at the table, seeming somewhat reluctant to leave. But the friends soon said goodbye in front of the restaurant.
AS VANDIVER AND DAVIS HEADED HOME, Mathes, Covington, Makosky and Holland gathered in a Best Western hotel room north of Houston. Covington was carrying a .38-caliber revolver. Mathes had a .25-caliber pistol. The samurai sword was outside in the van. The men sat around snorting coke and smoking pot while Mathes sketched a map of Vandiver's ranch.
Sometime after 11:00 p.m., Mathes called Vandiver to tell him that he was on his way. Then the four men loaded into the van. As they drove to the ranch, Mathes handed his personal two-gram vial of coke to Covington and told him to pass it around. While Mathes drove, Covington, in the seat next to him, loaded the guns. A few minutes later Mathes casually remarked that he would shoot Vandiver in the back first. "Mathes said John had a bad back and that should lay him up,” says Holland. And then Mathes matter-of-factly added, "If his old lady is there, she's got to die, too."
AT THE RANCH, DAVIS WAS ON THE telephone with her mother, Sheila Davis. "I was feeling kind of under the weather,” Mrs. Davis says. “And I was procrastinating about whether or not to make a trip I'd planned to McAllen, Texas. Debbie said, 'Go, Mom. It'll be fun for you. You need the break.' "
"I love you,” Debbie said, before hanging up.
Then Debbie, dressed in her nightgown, climbed into bed. After setting up the stereo equipment to dub some tapes, Vandiver turned on the television and settled into a large overstuffed chair to await Mathes's arrival.
At approximately 12:30 a.m., Mathes drove the van past the cabin. "You'll have to get down on the floor,” Mathes said. “John will be highly pissed off if he knows I brought somebody up here to his house."
Silently, Mathes pulled into the driveway. With the pistol in a shoulder holster under his jacket, he exited from the van through the door on the driver's side. A moment later Holland heard him enter the cabin.
"I felt like I was in an episode of Miami Vice,” Holland says. "A million things were going through my mind. Tom was inside for maybe ten minutes when we heard two shots. It seemed like an eternity."
"All the time the cocaine kept telling me, 'Everything is going to be all right," says Makosky. "Then there are shots fired. Someone is getting killed. Cecil hollered out, 'Let's go.' As I was jumping out, Cecil handed me my sword."
Holland, the first to reach the cabin door, remembers looking through the window. "I saw John laying there on his stomach,” he says. "He'd been shot in the back, and he was cussing at Tom, calling him a son of a bitch. Cecil pulled the door open and pushed me in. John looked up at me, and I'll never forget his expression. He looked relieved, like 'Somebody is here to help.'
"A minute later, I saw Debbie Davis on her knees in a closet. She was holding her hand against her chest. There was blood dripping in front of her. She was crying."
Mathes, waving the pistol in Vandiver's face, demanded money. Suddenly aware that the strangers were not there to help, Vandiver whispered, "On the shelf in the bedroom. Wrapped up like a Christmas package. Take whatever you want, just don't shoot anymore."
With a knowing look, Mathes slapped the pistol into Covington's open hand, turned to Holland and ordered, "Watch the girl,” as he and Makosky disappeared into the bedroom.
Then Holland watched Covington turn and fire into Vandiver's neck and head. While Vandiver was still alive and groaning, Holland says, "Cecil handed me the .38 and said, 'Shoot him.' I aimed at John's head. He was holding a large glass ashtray over his head, trying to shield his face. There was a lot of blood. I turned my head and squeezed. I shot him in the top of the head. The shot went through and came out the other side. After I shot him, things went blank. I froze. The last thing I remember him saying is, 'Please don't shoot anymore.'
“Behind me, I heard Davis kind of whisper, 'No, no, Tom.' Tom just stood there smiling. And then there were shots. Cecil was over there unloading the .25 into the enclosure. I walked over and looked at Debbie. She was laying there in a little closet. She had been shot all in the chest. All she had on was this little see-through blue negligee. I heard a gurgling noise, and I told the others, 'She's still alive.' Then I hit the door - fast."
After Holland ran from the cabin, Covington turned to Makosky and demanded, "Where's your sword at?"
"I'd thrown the sword outside, under a tree on my way in,” Makosky says. “I didn't want anything to do with what was going down, but something about the way Cecil and Tom looked at me I was afraid. I ran outside, paranoid that someone would see me, and I got the sword. Cecil told me, 'Go over there and make sure she's dead. Cut her throat.' I was afraid not to. I kept remembering what Tom had said about the Colombians: 'Well, if they can't get you, they'll get your family.' " Makosky pushed the sword into her chest again and again, but it kept hitting a bone. So he pulled it out and ran it across the front of her throat.
"In the van, Tom looked like Cool Hand Luke,” Holland says. “When we got back to the hotel room, Joe gave me the sword. It was covered with blood, and he just couldn't deal with it. I took it in the bathroom and washed it off. It was the next day, after the coke finally wore off, when it hit me - I killed a man last night.
"Two weeks later that song 'Smuggler's Blues' came out. When I heard it for the first time, it blew my mind. It fit so perfect: 'Someone's got to lose, it's the smuggler's' blues.' None of it seemed real. It was all like something you would see in a movie."
VANDIVER'S AND Davis’s murderers fled with more than $40,000. They left behind over $100,000 in cocaine and marijuana and another $13,000 in cash. It took six months for the police to unravel the events of that night. Lured by a $10,000 reward raised by Vandiver's and Davis's families and friends, Michael Charbeneau finally came forward to finger Mathes. The reward, however, has yet to be paid. Charbeneau's right to the money is being contested by one of his acquaintances, who claims he persuaded Charbeneau to speak up.
Dennis Holland turned state's evidence and pleaded guilty to Vandiver's murder. Joe Makosky pleaded guilty to the murders of both Vandiver and Davis. Tom Mathes and Cecil Covington were convicted of murdering Debbie Davis; Mathes's conviction was for capital murder, which carries a life sentence. Holland has been released, but Mathes, Covington and Makosky remain in prison.
