00:00:00 Speaker 1: Hey guys, a quick announcement before we get started. We ran into a bit of a delay in our production schedule. So we're going to be putting out the video version of this episode tomorrow on Friday. Now you can still listen to the full audio version right now on Spotify, iHeart, wherever you're listening to this podcast at the moment, you can listen to the whole thing. If you want to watch the video, you're going to have to wait, but I think it's going to be worth it. We apologize for the delay, but we'll be back to our regularly scheduled programming next Thursday. 00:00:29 Speaker 2: Thanks. 00:00:32 Speaker 1: A pigeon flutters through the warm Texas afternoon. Then, a shot. The bird falls to the ground and a man holding an over-under shotgun breaks it open with a satisfied snap. He's done this many times before. In fact, he's one of the best live pigeon shooters in the world. What he doesn't know is that just a few hours later, someone else will be holding a shotgun and he'll be the one fighting for his life. on the ground. That's next on Blood Trails, brought to you by Takovas. August 1st, 1971 was a night like any other in Corpus Christi, Texas. The cicadas were buzzing, the air was thick, and the clouds hung low over the coastal city. But for Chip Hogan, it was a night he'll never forget. He and his father had just returned home when the phone rang. It was one of Chip's friends, an 11-year-old kid named Jerry LaBarba Jr., who everyone just called Bubba. 00:01:40 Speaker 3: And the phone rings, and my sister answers it. And she's laughing. She said, oh, Bubba, quit talking. She thought he was making a joke. And she goes, it's Bubba. And he said, Bill's been shot. Come quick. 00:01:52 Speaker 1: Bill was Bill Richardson, who Chip and his father had just said goodbye to a few minutes before. The Richardsons and the Hogans had been at a pigeon shooting competition that weekend in McAllen, Texas. The group had caravaned home together, and the last time Chip had seen Bill, he'd been unloading his gear with his wife and Bubba, his stepson. Chip said he and his father passed police officers and the ambulance as they raced back to the Richardsons' home. 00:02:19 Speaker 3: And then we pull up to the house, and Dad, I jumped out of the car. Daddy went towards the front door. No, I wasn't around it. this wall that was by their driveway. And I was running around that corner, and about that time, a police officer pulled up in the driveway, and he was hollering at me. And I turned and looked over my shoulder. Next thing I know, I'm on the ground. I had tripped over Bill's body. 00:02:48 Speaker 1: As Chip scrambled to his feet and looked down, he saw Bill's body lying face up in the driveway. Chip, who was only 12 years old at the time, knew right away that the man was dead. 00:03:00 Speaker 3: His chest was blown open in part. The side of his face had some big tears in it. And blood, yeah, blood was sticking everywhere. I ran back over by this brick wall, and I was just standing there rubbing my hands against that wall, trying to make sense of it, I guess. I don't know what I was doing. 00:03:21 Speaker 1: Chip looked to his left and saw the Richardson's Winnebago RV and Cadillac Eldorado still parked in the driveway. 00:03:28 Speaker 3: There were big holes in his buckshot. The El Dorado was sitting there next to the, in the driveway, and it had holes in it as well. But it was the number four buckshot's what they killed Bill with. And there's four holes, shot shells that were in the front yard. 00:03:43 Speaker 1: Each 12-gauge shell of number four buckshot held about 40 lead BBs. The projectiles had peppered the vehicles and the driveway, but they mostly ripped through Bill's face, neck, and torso. When Bill's wife and stepson heard the shots and saw their husband and father lying on the driveway, they tried to call 911. 00:04:02 Speaker 4: But the phone line has actually been cut. So the phone line's just dead. 00:04:05 Speaker 1: That's Peter Barth, a journalist who's reported on this case for a news outlet called Bellingcat. He told me that once they realized the phones weren't working, Bubba and his mom ran through the backyard to get the doctor who lived in a house behind them. 00:04:19 Speaker 4: They run for his house to get help. 00:04:23 Speaker 5: She actually gets stuck on the fence and can't get over, and the son makes it over and sprints over to the neighbor and gets him to come try to help his stepdad. And by the time the doctor gets there to try to work on him, he's either dead or close to it, and he can't do much, essentially. 00:04:40 Speaker 1: Bill Richardson died within seconds of being shot. Chip doesn't remember much about what happened in the minutes and hours that followed, but he does remember that, for reasons he wouldn't understand until later, Everyone in Bill's circle took his death as a warning. 00:04:56 Speaker 3: I don't know why, but my dad and our whole family and Jerry LaBarbera and his wife Sherry, we all went to Gary Mason's ranch in Pearsall. They had guns laid out around the house. As a kid going into seventh grade, I don't really remember what I was thinking at the time. I know they were spooked, and so they went down there to gather up, I guess, in case... somebody was coming after them as well. 00:05:26 Speaker 1: For those on the outside, this reaction didn't make much sense. Bill Richardson and his friends were family men with wives and children. They'd made good livings in the oil and gas industry, and they used their earnings to hunt sprawling ranches, fish in the Gulf, and participate in competitive pigeon shooting. Why anyone would want to murder Bill on his own driveway baffled the residents of the Richardsons' well-to-do neighborhood. But Bill's friends and family knew something those neighbors didn't. A seedy underworld existed just below the surface of that wealth and luxury. And Bill was right in the middle of it. 00:06:02 Speaker 3: There was a lot of gambling going on in those pin sheets. A lot of money floating around. 00:06:08 Speaker 5: There was shady, violent activity going on around the circle of guys years before Richardson's killed. 00:06:16 Speaker 6: It was pretty horrendous with my dad being shot There was a lot of trauma in our family, and we have a lot of questions. 00:06:25 Speaker 1: I'm Jordan Sillars, and this is Blood Trails, Bill Richardson's dangerous game. Part one, Bill. 00:06:43 Speaker 6: He was very outgoing. He laughed a lot. He had a good time. He was a good guy, I thought. 00:06:52 Speaker 1: That's Lynn Richardson, Bill's daughter. Lynn was only 14 years old when her dad was killed, though she wasn't at the house that day. Bill and Lynn's mom were divorced, and Lynn spent most of her time with her mom in Houston. But she still has fond memories with her dad, and many of them revolve around the outdoors. 00:07:10 Speaker 6: We had a cabin cruiser, and during the summer we'd go fishing, and it was deepwater fishing. Sailfish, marlin. I caught a dolphin. My brother caught a sailfish. You know, I remember how pretty the water was. It was deep, dark blue. 00:07:30 Speaker 1: Bill was also a big hunter. He chased deer, elk, bear, upland birds, and pretty much anything else he could get a shot at. 00:07:38 Speaker 6: He hunted everywhere. Wherever the animals were, that's where he was. 00:07:44 Speaker 1: Bill traveled around Texas chasing game, but he did most of his hunting at the Richardson's family ranch, a 48,000-acre spread near Laredo, Texas. 00:07:54 Speaker 6: He would invite people up there. He had trucks that were fitted with a box on top to get up over the brush so that she could look down on the animals. 00:08:11 Speaker 1: Lynn recalls that when the hunting was slow during these trips to the ranch, Bill would entertain his guests with his skill as a shooter, usually to his financial benefit. 00:08:20 Speaker 6: During quail season, they'd make bets who could shoot the most quail. You know, he would give them a. 22 rifle. He would say, you know, I'll knock it down a little bit. I'll use a pistol instead. They thought that was a real good deal, but it wasn't. And he would pop their heads off with a. 00:08:43 Speaker 4: 22 pistol. 00:08:44 Speaker 3: Oh, wow. 00:08:45 Speaker 6: Yeah, he was good. 00:08:48 Speaker 3: Wow. 00:08:48 Speaker 1: Like while they were flying? 00:08:51 Speaker 4: Some of them were flying. 00:08:52 Speaker 6: Some of them were still. 00:08:54 Speaker 1: Bill didn't come by his skill lightly. Lynn told me Bill's father, her grandfather, took shooting sports extremely seriously. 00:09:02 Speaker 6: Now, as far as my dad learning to shoot, he was about five when he got his first gun shot. And when he would miss, my grandfather would hit him in the head with the butt of the gun. So needless to say, he learned not to miss. 00:09:19 Speaker 1: Lynn describes those lessons as barbaric, but they served him well, and not just on the plains of Laredo. Bill joined the Marines after high school and ended up as a platoon sergeant in the Korean War. A profile of Bill in the San Antonio Express News describes Bill's heroics during the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir. The article says, quote, on one occasion, he managed to take up a position commanding a narrow trail and proceeded to pick off 18 pursuing red Chinese from some 600 yards away. As if that's not impressive enough, Lin also said Bill was wounded in the stomach during that engagement. He had to hold his intestines inside his abdomen while he made his way to an aid station. He was sent to Japan to recover and was honorably discharged as a lieutenant. When he got back to the States, he threw himself into the oil business. His father had made millions in the same line of work, but Bill decided to open his own oil and gas company. 00:10:16 Speaker 5: I'm sure he got some help, you know, with connections and probably like starting out money from his dad sort of thing. And apparently he independently did pretty well initially. 00:10:27 Speaker 1: That's journalist Peter Barth again. He told me Bill had a P-51 Mustang. He would fly around Texas as part of his business operations. There's a photo of Bill standing on the wing of the plane. And though it's hard to tell in the old black and white image, you can imagine how proud he was of his success. But that success was short-lived. 00:10:48 Speaker 5: So I think he had a string of bad luck. He drilled too many dry holes and his oil business just kind of dried up. And eventually, we know he declared bankruptcy. So he filed that in 1969 and he owed 125 different people. 00:11:02 Speaker 4: You know, I think it was like $ 2. 00:11:04 Speaker 5: 4 million at the time, which with inflation and everything now, that's like $ 30 million. 00:11:08 Speaker 1: That professional disaster was soon compounded by personal catastrophe. 00:11:13 Speaker 6: I don't know if you know it or not, but my grandfather died. 00:11:19 Speaker 1: Bill's father, Lynn's grandfather, had gone through his own personal and financial struggles. He'd recently divorced Bill's mom, and his once-prosperous oil business had, like his son's, run dry. 00:11:32 Speaker 5: He had a grocery delivery boy show up at the house, and his grocery order was like 11 bucks or something. And he literally, he was so broke that he couldn't pay the delivery boy and just walked upstairs and shot himself with a shotgun. 00:11:44 Speaker 1: Bill's father killed himself in 1969, just two years before Bill was gunned down in his driveway. These tragedies would be tough for any family to deal with, but the Richardsons weren't the kind of clan to get together and talk through their feelings. 00:12:00 Speaker 6: Now my grandfather's thing, you know, his was kept from me for years and years and years. I was probably in my 20s or 30s before I found out that he shot himself. And then, of course, my dad, you know, mother tried to sweep it under the rug as much as she could, but it really affected her too. I think she still loved him. 00:12:25 Speaker 1: Bill's death didn't just affect his ex-wife. Lynn describes the experience as deeply traumatic, and she told me her brother, William, was even closer to her father than she was. 00:12:36 Speaker 6: That really tore him up. It changed his life, undoubtedly. A lot of anger, a lot of getting in trouble and misbehaving. I think he got into drugs because of that. And I don't think he ever would if my dad had lived. I don't think that would have been a part of his life. 00:13:01 Speaker 1: It's easy to understand why William Richardson struggled so much with his father's death. The sudden, violent, inexplicable nature of Bill's murder was impossible to process. It sent him searching for answers. But when he found them, he wasn't sure he wanted to know after all. 00:13:20 Speaker 6: I remember my brother went to Corpus a couple of months later and he found out a lot more information. He was part of the shooting world. So, you know, he knew all the hunters and everything. And he talked to him and wondered why it happened. And, um, They had a pretty good idea of who did. 00:13:51 Speaker 1: It. When police officers arrived at Bill's house on the south end of Corpus Christi, Bill's attackers were long gone. However, detectives were able to get a description of what happened from the Richardson's housekeeper, a woman named Mary Chavez. She said the family had arrived home around 10.50 p.m. Mary was helping Bill's wife put the baby to bed while Bill and his stepson unloaded the RV. 00:14:19 Speaker 5: All of a sudden, the housekeeper glances out the front window and sees two guys with baseball caps and sunglasses on. 00:14:27 Speaker 1: According to an incident report from the Corpus Christi Police Department, Mary described one of the men as tall with a red hat, while the other was shorter and appeared to be Caucasian. She could also see that the taller one was carrying some kind of long gun. 00:14:41 Speaker 5: This is around 11 p.m., sprinting across the front lawn towards Richardson. And she just sees this in a split second, and then she starts hearing gunfire. The stepson is walking from the RV into the back door, carrying stuff, carrying luggage, and hears a shot go off. And he turns around, and he sees two guys actively firing sawed-off shotguns into his stepdad. 00:15:07 Speaker 4: So they don't say anything. 00:15:08 Speaker 5: There's no account of them exchanging words with the guy or anything like that. They run across the yard and they just like blow him away from fairly close. 00:15:18 Speaker 1: The stepson, Jerry LaBarba Jr., or Bubba, told investigators that the assailants fired two shots each from break-action shotguns. He saw them eject four spent shells as they ran down the street, and neighbors reported later that they heard a car racing away. I'm sure investigators wondered at first if this was some kind of robbery gone wrong. But that theory quickly fell away. For one thing, as you already heard, the Richardsons' phone lines had been cut. For another, Mary said that earlier that afternoon, someone had called the house to ask if Bill had come home yet. Multiple neighbors also reported seeing a pair of suspicious characters hanging around the house. 00:15:59 Speaker 5: My grandmother lived on the other end of the street. And she and my grandfather had gotten home from dinner at like 1030 ish. And she actually went out in the front yard to like turn off the sprinklers. And there was a car parked directly across the street from their house. And she could see two, basically just silhouettes, like two men who had baseball caps and they were standing on the other side of the car from her. 00:16:22 Speaker 4: It was also nighttime. 00:16:23 Speaker 5: So she could just sort of make out their silhouette, but she could clearly see them smoking cigarettes and kind of chatting and She said that it looked like they were working on something and she couldn't tell what, like they were doing something behind the car. She immediately was like, these guys are out of place. 00:16:37 Speaker 4: What's going on here? 00:16:38 Speaker 5: So my grandmother was worried that maybe these guys were like scoping out the house to rob it. So she goes out and tries to act like nonchalant, turns off the sprinklers, goes inside, tells my grandfather. And by the time he comes to the window to like look out, the guys are gone. They've left in their car. 00:16:54 Speaker 1: Peter's grandparents weren't the only ones to report seeing shady characters that day. Chip Hogan recalled seeing a tall man who looked out of place while they were still at the pigeon shoot in McAllen. 00:17:06 Speaker 3: There was a man that was just weird. He was standing in the back and he just didn't fit. He wasn't talking to anybody. Just speak of it anytime I saw him. And I think maybe it's just little kids notice that sometimes, or I did anyway. 00:17:21 Speaker 1: As the Richardsons and Hogans made the two-and-a-half-hour drive back to Corpus Christi that night, something else happened. Chip was with his dad in their Corvette when they passed a car that stopped, turned around, and started following them. 00:17:35 Speaker 3: Dad thought it was a DPS. And he slowed down in that car. All it did was come up right on our bumper and put the bright lights on for, I don't know, for many, 15, 20 seconds or whatever it was, and then turned around and left. So dad didn't figure it was a cop, but nothing, you know, nothing spooked him or nothing. 00:17:56 Speaker 1: The Hogans didn't think much of these incidents until after Bill had been killed. Then they realized that they might have come face to face with at least one of the gunmen. Detectives thought the same. 00:18:08 Speaker 3: We all went down to the police station to look at a lineup, see if anybody recognized them. Me, Bubba, the maid, all picked number four. We didn't share who we picked until after it was all over with. Three of us picked the same guy, that being him, the one you're referring to. 00:18:29 Speaker 1: Mary, the housekeeper, also selected another man who she said had attacked Bill alongside the man Chip had seen earlier in the day. 00:18:37 Speaker 5: The two guys she pointed to are both like characters out of Fargo. Their names are Thomas Otis Hammond and Sam Mina. Between the two of them, Hammond had been actually in prison for murder already. He had been accused of another murder before that, but never convicted. He'd shot and killed his friend outside of a bar in Fort Worth in the late 50s. And Mina had like escaped jail one time. He'd like beaten up a guard and escaped jail from Rockwall in Texas. Both of these guys were hardened criminals. 00:19:14 Speaker 1: Hammond was the taller of the two and the one Chip thinks he saw at the pigeon shoot. He was gangly, with a long, narrow face and dark hair that stuck up straight above his head. He's a kind of cowboy outlaw type, and definitely someone you might remember in a crowd. Mina was different. He was shorter, a bit heavier, and in his mugshot published by local media, he's looking at the camera with ill intent. And I don't think I'm just imagining that. 00:19:41 Speaker 5: I was able, through an intermediary, to communicate with somebody who. 00:19:48 Speaker 4: knew Mina in this era. 00:19:51 Speaker 5: And the first thing the person asked through the intermediary was, is Mina dead? And so I'm like, yes. Sam Mina died in the mid-90s in Huntsville. He's dead and gone. He's been that way for 30 years now. And then the person was like, all right. Well, Sam Mina was a ruthless motherfucker, and I don't want to talk about any of that. 00:20:13 Speaker 4: And that was it. 00:20:15 Speaker 1: The Texas Rangers arrested Mina and Hammond for Bill's death based on the testimony of Mary, Chip, and Jerry LaBarba Jr. The problem was they didn't have a whole lot of additional evidence, and Mina knew that as much as anyone. 00:20:29 Speaker 5: Allegedly, at least Sam Mina, if not also Otis Hammond, tries to recruit... a buddy of theirs from Fort Worth named Tommy Gibbs to come down to Corpus from Fort Worth and shoot Mary Chavez before she can testify at trial. 00:20:48 Speaker 1: Police learned about this plot from Mina's cellmate, so they set up a guard around Mary's house. 00:20:54 Speaker 5: They're waiting at Mary Chavez's house. There's detectives with shotguns waiting inside of her house for this hitman from Fort Worth to come down and kill her. So they actually see Tommy Gibbs slowly drive by her house like twice down the street. He realizes that he's being watched. He must have spotted a tail or spotted the police in her house or something because he gets spooked really quickly and just like leaves town. 00:21:20 Speaker 1: Gibbs drove back up to Fort Worth after failing to get rid of the prosecution's star witness. Then about six weeks later. 00:21:28 Speaker 5: There's a deer hunter outside of the city limits of Fort Worth deer hunting early in the morning. in sort of like a wooded ravine area. And he sees a guy wearing a suit and tie, just like lying in a puddle of blood. The hunter calls the police, the police show up. It's Tommy Gibbs, and he's been shot six times in the face. 00:21:51 Speaker 1: We don't know if Gibbs was killed due to his connection to Sam Mina. Peter found a note from police indicating that there was, quote, bad blood between the two men, possibly due to Gibbs' inability to get rid of Mary. But we do know that Gibbs may have been involved in Bill's murder. 00:22:08 Speaker 5: And in the police notes on his murder, there's a quick little line that just says, Gibbs is suspected to have been the driver. And then goes on to describe, like, Gibbs lived with Mina. He was suspected of being the getaway driver. 00:22:21 Speaker 1: At this point, investigators began making some troubling connections. Hammond, Mina, and Gibbs were all implicated in Bill's death. They were all from the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and they were all wrapped up in serious, organized criminal activity. 00:22:36 Speaker 5: The most interesting threads with Gibbs' murder are that reporters had speculated that he was killed because of, quote-unquote, Dixie Mafia feuding. 00:22:51 Speaker 4: At the time, in Fort Worth and in Dallas, there were a lot of. 00:22:55 Speaker 5: Gangland killings going on between people that you could argue were probably... the local chapter of the Dixie Mafia. 00:23:04 Speaker 1: There is some debate about what exactly the Dixie Mafia was. Some believe it was a term invented by police to go after criminals operating in cities across the American South. There's no doubt that it was far more loosely organized than the Italian mob, but there was some coordination in certain cities. 00:23:22 Speaker 5: In Fort Worth and Dallas, I think it was especially prevalent. because there was like Jacksboro Highway and these places in Fort Worth that were really, they're like the Las Vegas of Texas, places people went to cut loose and gamble and go to strip clubs and spend money. And with that, you had a huge scene of gangsters who were like incredibly violent. You would have a guy who's an expert at safe cracking and a guy who would be the getaway driver and people who were, you know, talented contract killers, almost like specialists who knew each other. They hung out in the same nightclubs. They gambled together. And when it was convenient for them, they'd work together. 00:24:00 Speaker 1: Investigators wondered if rather than being motivated by a grudge or an unpaid debt, Mina and Hammond were just looking for a paycheck. Maybe they were two of those talented contract killers, and Bill was nothing but their mark. If that was true, officials knew they needed to proceed with extreme caution. 00:24:19 Speaker 5: And the other underlying common thread is that they were notoriously violent to anyone perceived as being a snitch. 00:24:26 Speaker 4: They would. 00:24:26 Speaker 5: Absolutely murder without question anybody they thought was even a risk of ratting them out to the police. 00:24:34 Speaker 1: You can see why Jerry LaBarba Sr. did everything he could to spread the word that his son didn't see anything that hot summer night in Corpus Christi. 00:24:43 Speaker 5: His dad, Jerry LaBarba, later goes on to tell people like, oh, I told everybody my son didn't see anything because he's trying to protect his son and he knows his son has witnessed this murder. 00:24:53 Speaker 1: Gibbs' death remains unsolved, so we don't know if he was killed by the same kind of people who might have gone after Jerry Jr. But as officials began prosecuting Mina and Hammond for Bill's murder, they must have been curious how a business owner, war hero, and avid hunter like Bill had gotten mixed up with the likes of the Dixie Mafia. They hoped the answer to that question would come out at trial, which began just a few months later. That's next on Blood Trails. Part three, the trial. I don't know how much the general public knew about the plot to kill Mary Chavez, but it's safe to say that everyone in the Richardson circle was on edge. 00:25:44 Speaker 3: It scared the crap out of me. I do vividly remember when my dad and stepmom were in bed asleep, I would sneak in there and real quiet and just lay on the floor by my dad. And that chilling spooked the heck out of me. 00:26:01 Speaker 1: Hammond and Mina had both secured representation from experienced defense attorneys, but Hammond's argued that his client should be tried separately. The jailhouse informer had named only Mina as the one who hired Gibbs to kill Mary Chavez. That evidence was so damning, the attorney argued, Hammond couldn't get a fair trial standing next to Mina in court. So while Mina waited in jail, Hammond's trial commenced in August of 1972. Mary Chavez and Jerry LaBarber Jr. were the prosecution's star witnesses. They testified along with others like Chip, who said they saw Hammond in the area the weekend of Bill's death. But the prosecution didn't have much beyond this testimony. The shotguns had never been recovered, and there was no physical evidence linking Hammond to Bill's murder. 00:26:49 Speaker 5: So you can imagine the defense just started shooting holes in that as much as possible. They, um, They brought other witnesses who said that Hammond was in Fort Worth the night of the murder, including like a married couple he was friends with who were like, no, he spent the night in our apartment that night. 00:27:05 Speaker 1: The defense also brought in a firearms expert who said that the four empty shells recovered at the scene came from semi-automatic shotguns, which directly contradicted Jerry Jr. 's testimony. 00:27:16 Speaker 5: He specifically said that he saw the killers break open their shotguns and eject the shells as they ran away. 00:27:22 Speaker 1: The prosecution tried to explain this discrepancy by theorizing that Hammond and Mina left empty shells at the scene on purpose to confuse investigators. But you can imagine how this apparent hole in Jerry Jr. 's statement cast doubt on everything else the 11-year-old had to say. 00:27:39 Speaker 5: The defense attorneys really hammered the maid and the stepson about how they could see the shooters that well at night. Richardson's families told me that their yard was well lit and that they would have been able to see them. But the defense attorneys were really like, this was 11 p.m. 00:27:53 Speaker 3: At night. 00:27:54 Speaker 4: How do you know it was them? 00:27:56 Speaker 1: Mary also admitted that the pair were wearing hats and sunglasses, which made a positive ID seem even less likely, at least in the minds of the jurors. 00:28:06 Speaker 4: It's a couple of weeks. I think it's a two week trial. They find Hammond not guilty. 00:28:12 Speaker 5: They interview some jurors afterwards who say that their doubt really hinged on how the maid could so easily recognize them. So he's not convicted of that. 00:28:26 Speaker 1: Of course, there were two shooters that night in August. Sam Mina was still behind bars, and the evidence against him was stronger. It's hard to imagine why someone would put a hit on Mary Chavez if they weren't guilty of Bill's murder. And yet, inexplicably, Mina was never brought to trial. 00:28:45 Speaker 5: They had arrested him with a pistol, and he was already a convicted felon by then. And so when the case against Hammond didn't go anywhere, the perception was that the DA didn't want to risk taking him. 00:29:00 Speaker 4: To trial and losing again. 00:29:01 Speaker 5: And he had already been caught with a handgun as a felon, so they could put him in prison for that, which they did for a time. 00:29:11 Speaker 1: It's possible prosecutors thought their jailhouse informant, the one who told them about Mina hiring Gibbs, wasn't credible enough to convince a jury. But it's also possible they were less motivated to put Mina away because they were far more interested in who hired him. That question was at the heart of this investigation, and they had a few leads. 00:29:31 Speaker 5: They do look into Bill's bankruptcy, and he owes 125 different people close to $ 30 million in today's money. And a half of those people he owed money to, those are like unsecured claims. So they have like no recourse to get their money back. Some of his friends in the shooting scene told reporters like, yeah, some of those people were pissed off. Like they were his straight up enemies because they just lost a ton of money. 00:29:55 Speaker 4: So the police commented. 00:29:57 Speaker 5: That they were looking into that line of inquiry. Like, was this somebody that Bill owed money to who was pissed off and just, you know, maybe that was motive enough. 00:30:08 Speaker 1: People have been killed for a whole lot less. But as investigators dug deeper into Bill's personal life, they found something more concerning than unsecured debts. Bill had fallen into a world that was lucrative, fast-paced, and perfectly suited to his strengths. It also attracted the kind of people looking for a way to earn a buck outside the long arm of the law. 00:30:35 Speaker 5: As his oil business is tanking, he starts to get involved in pigeon shooting. And by all accounts, he was very, very good. He kind of quickly worked his way up. 00:30:51 Speaker 1: Bill had always been a hunter, and as you heard earlier, an excellent shot. But by the time of his death, he was also one of the nation's most successful pigeon shooters. And we're not talking about clay pigeons. These were live pigeons, and according to author and historian R.K. Sawyer, the money-making potential was just as exciting as the sport itself. 00:31:12 Speaker 7: Yeah, it really turned into big money in a big sport, and You'd like to say the word salary, but what you really have to say is wager or side bet. So not only did you have this entertaining sport, you had these men that love to compete. They love to measure their success or failure, but they love to bet. So side wagers were huge. 00:31:37 Speaker 1: Sawyer has written several great books on hunting and fishing in Texas. He told me that the first live pigeon competitions in the U.S. were held in the 1840s in the eastern part of the country, and they'd reach Texas by the 1870s. 00:31:50 Speaker 7: Pigeon shooting was one of the, probably the largest shooting sport in the United States. Every single town, small or large, had some gun club that shot clay, well, clay targets, shot live targets. So the numbers were pretty large. Live pigeon shooting was even in the Olympics in 1900. 00:32:14 Speaker 1: Early pigeon shoots used passenger pigeons that were released from boxes. But the competition's bill-dominated used rock pigeons thrown by a specially trained thrower known as a column bear. 00:32:26 Speaker 7: The column bear really introduced a whole new element. No predictability. When a column bear throws a bird, it can change your life. And That unpredictability added to the sport. 00:32:40 Speaker 3: The thrower would grab them by the wings, you know, on the bodies down here. And then he would pull the tail feathers out, which would not make them, they couldn't fly straight. It made them more wobbly when they were flying. 00:32:52 Speaker 1: Chip explained that the column bear would stand in front of the shooter and try to throw the bird over a wire suspended between two poles in front of him. 00:33:01 Speaker 3: And the bird had to fly over that wire. to make it a legal bird. So it went under the wire, the thrower would yell, you know, no bird, no bird, no bird. It was just a safety thing so you don't shoot the dang thrower. You had two shots to knock it down and then it had to fall within the ring. 00:33:18 Speaker 1: The bird counted as a hit if it was retrieved within the ring and had blood on it. Chip and his friends would often act as runners to retrieve the downed birds. 00:33:27 Speaker 3: Those shooters, they'd tip you pretty good if you brought back a bird with blood. So that kind of It made us, we would try to squeeze some blood out of that thing as best we could. I don't know if I was ever really successful in that part of it, but it was just fun running those birds. 00:33:45 Speaker 1: Chip said the shooters would pay $ 10 for a bird with blood on it, which would be about $ 80 today. You can see why Chip was so motivated. It also gives you an idea of the kind of money involved. Pigeon shooters in the 1800s were like today's professional football or basketball players. They were followed by journalists and fans, and some became extremely wealthy. 00:34:07 Speaker 7: There was a competition that was not unusual, but around the 1880s, some of these side wagers in today's currency were worth about $ 40, 000. And that would be just one event out of many at the same contest. There was a South Texas outdoor writer who was quite good at the game of pigeon shooting. And within a year to three years of him coming to Houston and doing these competitive shoots, he made enough money to pay cash for his first house. 00:34:43 Speaker 1: The sport had slowed down somewhat by the time Bill became involved. PETA and other animal rights groups had forced the competitions, if not exactly underground, then far less in the public eye. But that didn't make them less lucrative. If anything, it increased their value to those looking to make some cash without too much oversight. 00:35:03 Speaker 3: They have a cow cut on Friday night, you know, and that was a lot of money. Back then, I remember Jerry, he had $ 18, 000 in a bag just for that shoot down there. And at that time, that was the most cash I'd ever seen in my life. 00:35:20 Speaker 1: Jerry is Jerry LaBarba Sr., and the shoot is the one in McAllen, right before Bill was killed. LaBarba had brought so much money because there were opportunities to turn that $ 18, 000 into a whole lot more. 00:35:33 Speaker 5: They'd gamble on the shoots themselves, but then after the shoots, usually the shooters and their families would stay kind of all at the same hotel nearby. And then after the shoots, there'd sort of just be this, like, party for the rest of the day in the evening at the hotel. But then like at some point in the night, the guys would kind of all start going up to different hotel rooms and play poker and play dice. They were supposedly gambling for, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars per game in some cases. 00:36:01 Speaker 1: Now, I should point out here that the vast majority of pigeon shoots, both then and now, were fun, family-friendly events. 00:36:09 Speaker 3: R.K. 00:36:09 Speaker 1: Sawyer has attended these tournaments more recently, and he told me that the environment is like any other kind of shooting competition. I've spoken with others off the record who've told me the same. Still, you can imagine how these events could take a turn for the worst, especially during the days of the Dixie Mafia. 00:36:26 Speaker 7: My recollection is it's absolutely mafia-free if you have your own money. If you've got to borrow your money, maybe you can go to a bank and tell them you need a loan for a pigeon shoot But I would surmise that players that got in too deep had to borrow money from sources less savory than you or I when, you know, we go to buy a car. 00:36:51 Speaker 1: Bill was one of the top shooters in the country, but he was also in massive debt. His winnings alone couldn't cover payments on that debt, his millionaire lifestyle and his wife, ex-wife and children. These poker and dice games offered an opportunity to take his winnings and grow them exponentially. which appears to be exactly what he did, or tried to do. Corpus Christi detectives couldn't connect these games to Bill's murder, but then they caught a break. Another gangland hit job washed up on the beaches of South Texas just a few months later, and that gruesome discovery launched a chain of events that blew Bill's case wide open. Part five, Bruce Bass. On June 6th, 1972, a fisherman dragged a bait net off the coast of Mustang Island, just a few miles east of Corpus Christi. As he pulled his net through the shallow water, it caught on something. When he went to free it, instead of a piece of driftwood or a cast-off beach chair, he found the body of a man. When police arrived and dragged the corpse to shore, They realized that this was no accidental drowning. It was also someone they'd been looking for. 00:38:12 Speaker 5: Sissy Farenthold, who's like one of the most prominent female politicians in Texas. Her stepson goes missing and then washes up on Mustang Island, chained to a block of concrete. 00:38:24 Speaker 4: He's been beaten and strangled. 00:38:27 Speaker 5: He might have still been alive when he was thrown in the water because there's water in his lungs. 00:38:32 Speaker 1: This man's name was Randy Farenthold. He was rich, good-looking, and by all accounts, well-liked. He was so well-known in the area that police officers actually recognized his face, despite having been in the ocean for several days with a concrete block wired to his neck. His stepmom, Sissy Farenthold, was a prominent member of the Texas State House. She'd also ran for governor and was nominated as a vice presidential candidate in 1972. 00:38:58 Speaker 5: His family's well-connected, so his murder gets a ton of resources initially. Texas Rangers, FBI, they go all up and down the whole Gulf Coast, like from Mexico to Florida, and everywhere in between, especially New Orleans, Houston, Corpus. And they just pour everything they have into this investigation. But what they ultimately find out through that investigation is that Farenthold, who's part of the pigeon shooting scene, he's part of the gambling scene, he's one of these wealthy people playboys from Corpus who's friends with Richardson, he was just about to testify in a federal fraud trial against a group of four guys. He had alleged that these four characters had defrauded him of about $ 100, 000 and. 00:39:46 Speaker 1: These guys had convinced the 31-year-old that they had a surefire way to make a stack of money. They claimed to have a mafia connection in Houston who was willing to sell them $ 166, 000 worth of U.S. Treasury bonds for only $ 100, 000. They needed someone who could put up that kind of cash, and Randy Farenthold was the lucky winner. Randy collected the $ 100, 000 in small denominations and checked himself into a hotel in Houston where he was supposed to meet the mafioso. He did meet someone, but as they were talking, someone burst into the hotel room dressed as Batman, if you can believe it, and stole all the money. Randy doesn't seem like the sharpest tool in the shed, but even he could figure out that he'd been set up. He went to the FBI and promised to testify against the crew that swindled him out of his cash. One of those scammers, and the one who had initially approached Randy about the deal, was a fellow pigeon shooter named Bruce Bass. 00:40:43 Speaker 3: He was a piece of dirt. I knew he was a bad guy, so to speak. 00:40:49 Speaker 1: Yeah. 00:40:50 Speaker 3: I didn't know that gangster bad. 00:40:53 Speaker 1: Chip remembers seeing Bruce Bass around the pigeon tournaments, and he was apparently a pretty good shot. In fact, the Corpus Christi Times published a photo of Bass shaking Bill Richardson's hand after Bass won a skeet shooting competition. Bass was in the same circles as Bill and Randy, but by 1971, he was far less liked. 00:41:14 Speaker 5: Bruce Bass, when you talk to people who are still alive who knew him today, the overwhelming consensus is like, that man was a thug. I've heard thug and tough character, specifically from my grandmother. 00:41:26 Speaker 4: That's what she said. 00:41:27 Speaker 5: She's like, I'm like, ma'am, did you know Bruce Bass? And she said, no, but he was known around town by his reputation. Basically, he was known around town. as a thug and a quote unquote tough character, which in my experience in that era means like a gangster. 00:41:45 Speaker 1: Even as a child, Lynn remembers harboring a dislike for Bass. 00:41:49 Speaker 6: And he was standing by the side of the pool and he was kind of a smart aleck. I didn't care for him. And I walked past the pool and walked past where he was and I just pushed him in the pool. I was about five years old. 00:42:04 Speaker 1: I got the sense that Lynn wasn't the only person in Corpus Christi who would have liked to push Bass into a body of water, whether that was a pool or the Gulf of Mexico. But for a long time, he managed to avoid any real consequences for his actions. Investigators suspected him of killing Randy, but they didn't have a witness who was willing to point the finger. That is, until Texas Rangers finally spoke to another career criminal named Robert Walters in 1976. 00:42:32 Speaker 4: He's sort of a friend of Bruce Bass. He's a burglar. 00:42:35 Speaker 5: He hangs out at clubs and stuff with Bruce Bass and that crew. He's in the similar sort of shooting, gambling strip club scene, and he testifies against Bass. 00:42:45 Speaker 1: Walters told investigators that Bass had asked him to help kill Randy Farenthold. Bass didn't want Randy to testify against him for fraud, so he arranged to have Randy kidnapped from his home, beaten and tortured, and eventually dumped into the Gulf. We don't know if Bass participated in the hit job himself or just hired some thugs like Walters to do it for him. But the Texas Rangers and other investigators corroborated everything Walters said, and Bass was charged with Randy's murder. But Walters also said something else. 00:43:16 Speaker 5: He basically says, look, Bass was sinking deeper and deeper into drug addiction. And it was impacting his ability to like perform at pigeon shoots even. Like he was actually physically getting shaky. He was getting that kind of more like erratic behaviorally. And he was like, people were starting to notice like, oh, he's got serious drug problem. 00:43:35 Speaker 1: That drug problem wasn't just impacting his ability to knock down pigeons. According to Walters, it was also impacting his ability to pull off a far more lucrative scheme. 00:43:45 Speaker 5: And according to the informant, Bass and Bill Richardson were organizing a different gambling circles after the pigeon shoots where there were incredibly high stakes at play. And this guy specifically alleged that they were hosting dice games and rigging them. Like they were physically messing around with the dice to ensure that they would win these games for hundreds of thousands of dollars per game. And the informant alleged that like, look, Richardson was part of that. Bass was in on it. And the two of them were kind of partners in this little scheme where And they were gambling with sort of the same circle of very wealthy guys, including this banker in Georgia, very prominent banker in Georgia. And they were winning an enormous amount of money off of that banker and their friends and these dice games. 00:44:33 Speaker 4: But as Bruce Bass's. 00:44:34 Speaker 5: Drug addiction takes hold, at least Bass feels like Richardson is starting to push him out of this good little thing they have going on. And so the informant alleges that Bass was pissed off at Richardson because he felt like Richardson is starting to take over their little mutual arrangement. And he testifies that Bass called him the day of the murder and said, I'm going to have, or I'm going to kill Bill today. Like, I'm going to kill him when he gets home from the tournament. 00:45:01 Speaker 1: Walters claimed that Bass showed up at his house shortly after Bill's murder with a shotgun he wanted Walters to get rid of. Walters told investigators that he threw the bolt of the gun down a storm drain and the rest of it in a nearby creek. It was a major break in Bill's case, but as with Mina and Hammond, it didn't result in what investigators, not to mention the Richardsons, were hoping for. They couldn't find the shotgun to corroborate Walter's story, and prosecutors were already going after Bass for Randy's murder. That prosecution went forward. Bass was convicted for killing Randy and sentenced to 13 years in prison. But he was never charged for gunning down Bill in his own driveway. Lynn told me that despite her longstanding dislike of Bass, she could hardly believe her father's friend had arranged to have him killed. 00:45:49 Speaker 6: I don't know that I actually did process it. It took me a lot of years to get over it. I just couldn't imagine how somebody had, you know, shot somebody that they shot Skeet with and were buddies. And when I found out it was Bruce Bass, I was like, how could that be? I mean, they were friends. 00:46:09 Speaker 1: As she looks back on that day she pushed Bass into the pool, she can't help but wonder if that was the moment her life... and the life of her family could have taken a much different turn. 00:46:20 Speaker 6: I walked past him and I pushed him in the pool. And my dad goes, don't do that, he's drunk, he'll drown. Well, if he had, at least my dad would have been alive, you know. 00:46:38 Speaker 1: Part 6. Frontier Justice Bruce Bass only spent six years in prison for Randy Farenthold's murder. We don't know how he got out so early. He was back in Corpus Christi by the mid-1980s, but the residents hadn't forgotten what he'd done. To Randy, or to Bill. 00:46:58 Speaker 5: By 84, he's in Corpus. And on the anniversary of the discovery of Randy Farenthold's body, he shows up at a nightclub owned by a friend of Randy Farenthold's. and just like shows up and is kind of like making it known that he's there to the friend. 00:47:17 Speaker 4: And it doesn't go well. 00:47:19 Speaker 1: The nightclub owner and Bass exchanged some heated words and the two walked out to the parking lot. 00:47:24 Speaker 5: He claims that Bruce Bass pulls a pocket knife on him and he shoots him, I think, five times with a. 22 Magnum little revolver. Just like shoots him five times. He hits him in like the neck, the chest, the head, kind of all over. Bruce Bass falls down in the parking lot and bleeds out and dies. 00:47:43 Speaker 1: No one, according to Peter, was kidding themselves about what really happened. But also, no one really cared. 00:47:50 Speaker 5: There's a perception that he showed up at the wrong bar and friends of Randy Farenthold and probably Richardson, too, did what they had to. And I've heard that, like, friends of both of those guys even paid for the legal defense for. 00:48:05 Speaker 4: The bar owner. 00:48:05 Speaker 3: He told the police it was self-defense. Well, all the cops, they all knew who Bruce Bass was. He was bad. So they didn't investigate that too hard. But supposedly Mr. Horton tossed a knife down there beside his body after he shot him in the parking lot. 00:48:24 Speaker 1: Chip and many others in Corpus Christi believe that, in the end, Bruce Bass got what he deserved. If Robert Walters is telling the truth, and Bass did arrange Bill's murder because he didn't want to get pushed out of their dice scheme, being gunned down in a parking lot seemed like a fitting end. But That's the problem with frontier justice. We think that's what happened, but we can't really say for sure. Beyond Walter's testimony, no one knows the extent of the evidence against Bass. That's partly because he was never tried in a court of law. But that's also because the Corpus Christi Police Department has refused to release any information beyond the initial incident report. My requests for comment have gone unanswered. Detectives confirmed to Peter that the case is still technically open, but we don't know why. It's possible that investigators just need to review the case file before releasing any additional documents, and so far, no one has taken the time to do so. 00:49:20 Speaker 3: So. 00:49:21 Speaker 1: Lynn Richardson told me that even all these years later, she would still like some answers. Answers likely contained in that Corpus Christi PD case file. 00:49:30 Speaker 6: And I think that a lot of the files should have been let loose to at least give other law enforcement a chance to solve the case. I mean, it's been over 50 years. Files are still closed. 00:49:47 Speaker 3: Why? 00:49:50 Speaker 6: All those people are dead. Why would it even matter now? 00:49:55 Speaker 1: For Lynn, the contents of that file aren't just about a criminal investigation. They're also deeply personal. Those files might contain more evidence against Bass or evidence against someone else. But they would also tell her more about her father. They'd outline the extent of his gambling and dice fixing. They'd offer information on his connections to organized crime, if any even existed. Or they might offer clues into how he was supporting his family, his relationship to his wife or Lynn's mother, or whether his business was really on the ropes. This information would help her make more sense of her own family and the trajectory of that family through the years. 00:50:34 Speaker 4: Peter. 00:50:35 Speaker 2: Barth in his article when he spoke to you one of the things that he mentioned you told him is this idea of generational curses and there's a quote in there of you where you're kind of wondering like is this something that could be with our family as well I thought. 00:50:54 Speaker 6: About it I have a older daughter that was stabbed 27 times and left. 00:51:01 Speaker 1: For dead oh my gosh that was. 00:51:03 Speaker 6: Horrible too yeah So, you know, you have to kind of wonder, is it a curse? I don't believe in that. I believe in God. But, you know, you have to ask yourself, you know, what happened to the family that something like that would happen in every generation? Because that's three generations in a row. 00:51:25 Speaker 1: Lynn's grandfather shot himself. Lynn's father was gunned down in his driveway. And Lynn's daughter was brutally attacked by a man she worked with. 00:51:34 Speaker 6: Basically, he said, if you don't sleep with me, I'm going to kill you. And she says, well, get on with it because that's never going to happen. And I guess she doubted him. He pulled a knife out of his pocket and started stabbing her. 00:51:50 Speaker 1: If this story ended here, Lynn might be forgiven for wondering if her family was truly cursed. But it doesn't. 00:51:59 Speaker 6: It was funny because I woke up at 4.30 when it was happening. And I had an irresistible urge to pray for her. 00:52:10 Speaker 4: So I did. 00:52:12 Speaker 6: After she was dead for 18 minutes, they were going to declare time. And they flipped her over to see what her wounds looked like. And there was a nurse standing there. She says, don't declare yet. She just took a breath. 00:52:28 Speaker 1: Lynn's daughter survived the trip to the hospital. She endured surgeries and therapy, and though the scars are real, she's changed the narrative of the Richardson clan. 00:52:39 Speaker 6: So now she's a marathon runner, and she's one of those extreme runners, you know, that runs like 100 miles. She's a principal at a school. If she hadn't survived, I wouldn't have survived leukemia. She was my donor. 00:52:59 Speaker 1: Yeah, right. Right. That's incredible. That's crazy. 00:53:04 Speaker 2: Yeah, it is. 00:53:06 Speaker 6: It's like things changed. 00:53:10 Speaker 1: Justice is a funny thing. We all want people to get what they deserve. But what that is, is sometimes hard to say. Thomas Otis Hammond and Sam Mina both died in prison in the late 90s. Did they deserve what they got? Or should they have been killed like bass? And what about Bill? Did his dice-fixing and associations with unsavory characters warrant his murder? Or were his actions the understandable last resort of a father and husband trying to maintain his family's comfortable lifestyle? If Corpus Christi Police one day released the full case file, we might be able to answer some of these questions. For now, we'll have to wait and hope that, in the end, true justice has prevailed. Thanks for listening to this episode of Blood Trails. Bill Richardson was killed in his driveway in a Corpus Christi neighborhood called Country Club Estates on August 1st, 1971. If you know anything about his death, please call the Corpus Christi Police Department at 361-996-2840. If you'd like to see images from this case, including a bill, the pigeon shoot, and the full cast of sketchy characters, head on over to themeateater.com slash bloodtrails and click on the case file for this episode. You can also see many of these images by watching this and every other Blood Trails episode on YouTube. Big thanks to everyone who spoke to me on the record. Peter Barth, Lynn Richardson, Chip Hogan, and R.K. Sawyer. An especially big thanks goes to Peter. He did a ton of work on this case, which he was generous enough to share with me. And there's even more to dig into. You can check out all those details in Peter's article on Bellingcat.com titled Pigeon Shoots and Hitmen, New Leads in a Texas Oilman's Cold Case. And as always, I'd love to hear from you. If you have any feedback on this case or know about another you think we should cover, send me an email at bloodtrailsatthemeateater.com. That's bloodtrailsat... themeateater.com. See you next time. Stay safe out there.

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