One day, Chief Reynolds called me into his office and said the city was
sending me to the Kilgore College Police Academy, so I went.  There
were only two of us women in the class.  The rest were men.  The
instructors were very hard on us.  Nevertheless, I made the second
highest grade in the class. I was the only one to shoot a perfect score
with a shotgun, at night, in the rain, with only police overheads for
lighting.  I later took courses such as hostage negotiations,
fingerprinting, profiling, drug interdiction, and others.  I worked hard
as a police officer, to Protect and Serve.  I worked at auto wrecks
that were horrifying, shootings, suicides, and I saw little children in
abandoned shacks, left there by their parents who were spending their
money on drugs.  Drugs were a problem, even in a small town.  Crack
cocaine was there.  I made arrests almost every night, and as a result,
the drug dealers hated me.  I kept trying to discover where they were
getting the cocaine to make the crack.  I thought if that was stopped,
it would make the difference.  Jeff Davis, a Camp County Deputy and I
worked together and shut down a meth lab.  I thought we were doing good
for the town and the county. 

   
I worked so hard, for so long, that I burnt myself out.  I developed
problems with my lungs.  I thought it was asthma.  I resigned from the
P.D. and went to work as a constable deputy, helping out when they
needed extra officers.  When I was certified as a police officer, I had
purchased a .357 Smith & Wesson revolver.  At the shooting range, I
noticed men with 9mms didn't have to reload so often, so I traded in my
.357 and a Mossburg pump riot gun for a 9mm Beretta.  I bought a Raven
.25 for off-duty protection.  My aunt was leaving work late at night and
the parking lot was not lit well, so I sold her the .25 for $50.00.  
All I had was the 9mm.

   
I was coming from Texarkana where I'd been shopping and went the Lake
'O Pines route.  I stopped at a private club where I had at one time
known the owners, an older couple.  They had sold the club to another
owner.  Drug deals were going down.  This wasn't my county, it was
Marion County.  I went to Pittsburg and told the Chief.  He gave me the
phone number of the Ark-La-Tex Task Force's supervisor, Jerry Walraven.
This was around December 1991.  He had me come to their headquarters in
Atlanta, TX.  He told me in front of his other agents that they were
all known in Marion County, and asked if I'd gather information for
them.  I agreed to volunteer my time to do this.  I had been doing well
at gentle-breaking four year old horses in the corral behind my house,
so it wasn't like I needed something to do.  An officer suggested that I
used this as an excuse to party.  I assure you, this was NOT true.  My
husband couldn't have cared less what I did.  All he cared about was
himself, and his job.  We had been married a total of 18 years at this
time.

      I would go to the club and try to identify people and see if they matched the pictures in the
mug shot book the Task Force had.  One man, Tim Rule, would sometimes
sit with me and tell me who people were.  No one there knew I was a
police officer.  If they did, they didn't mention it.

    
The only training I had had in narcotics was Drug Interdiction- traffic
stops, profiling, surveillance, and arrests of dealers- no narcotics
officer training.

    
Rule didn't seem to be doing drugs, and he never drank a lot of
alcohol.  We began seeing each other.  I knew it was wrong, but I did it
anyway.  I went to his house one afternoon.  He shared a house with Tim
Rice.  I was going to the kitchen when I heard Rice talking to another
man, planning to go to Houston to buy 2 kilos of cocaine.  They were
planning to borrow Rule's truck to go in.  They borrowed his keys and
left.  I left too, and went to the Hwy. 155 corner store and called the
Task Force.  Walraven said they would stop them on the way back.  They
didn't.  Instead, they ran a search warrant on the house the next day. 
Rice hadn't come directly back to his house with the drugs.  He had
carried it to his brother's store in Dangerfield, TX.  (H.E. Rice).  Tim
Rice was mad about the warrant.  They got his measuring scales,
paraphernalia, and a small amount of drugs.  He had been to prison and
was a twice-convicted felon.  He threatened me and Rule and said if he
found out we told on him he'd kill us.  Well, this brought me and Rule
closer.  I went to the P.D. in Pittsburg and told Lt. McClung, Rice had
threatened me.  he was on his way to court and couldn't stop.  The man
Rice went to Houston to get the drugs with, turned out to be Tim Rule's
brother, Kirk Rule.  He had been staying at his mother's

house in Mt. Pleasant.

   
Walraven put a female narcotics agent from another town with me.  We
went to the club only a couple of times, but the next time we went, it
had yellow tape across the door and a notice saying it had been
repossessed by the bank.  The property was by Johnson's Creek with the
Army Corps of Engineers campsite within walking distance.  Right by Lake
'O Pines.  The area could easily be cleaned up and made into a fabulous
resort area.  This was a great investment, I couldn't pass up.  I went
to the bank in Jefferson and bought it.