PART II SWAMP COUNTRY #7
GRACE MITCHELL
JASMINE JOHNSON
NAVINA NIXON
JOSEPHINE O’HARE
Reported missing: April 10, 1988
NEVER FOUND
Dallas, Texas
Private detective Bill Brewster
Arrest warrant issued for possession of child pornography, September 1, 1993
Reported missing: September 6, 1993
NEVER FOUND
William ‘Bill’ Brewster had been a Black private detective from Dallas who’d once been a military policeman.
And not just any old MP.
He’d been in the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division where he’d had an outstanding record. If you were up to no good, you didn’t want Bill Brewster pursuing you.
Like me, Brewster had been hired by a family member of one of the four prostitutes who’d gone missing in April of 1988, Grace Mitchell.
Also like me, he’d stuck to the case for a long time, five years.
But then suddenly—conveniently?—in 1993 a stash of child pornography had been found on Brewster’s home computer and a warrant for his arrest had been issued.
He’d vanished.
Hadn’t been seen since.
Was he dead? Possibly. I wasn’t so sure. I had a feeling that this guy had taken himself off the chessboard.
So, I’d done some searching for him and, at one point, thought I’d found him.
Now, how do you find someone who doesn’t want to be found?
Everyone has something they can’t live without.
You can’t stop being who you are.
And even folks who are determined to disappear can’t stop being who they are.
Sometime in 2019, after I’d been on my case for about a year, I spoke with a few of Bill Brewster’s former Army colleagues about him.
One told me, ‘Gosh, man, you just never know, do ya? Billy was a boy scout, the ultimate boy scout. Christ, back in the day he coached his daughter’s soccer team. Paid for all the balls, nets and practice gear out of his own pocket. Kiddy porn? Fuck. Shocked us all.’
One of Bill Brewster’s old CID buddies also revered Brewster’s ability to drink a certain kind of seriously hard liquor: a 114-proof wheated bourbon made by the Weller brand. (‘Man, that was jet fuel, but Billy just loved it. Though he only drank the wheated stuff because he was allergic to rye.’)
This was something I could work with.
That Bill Brewster might like bourbon was unremarkable, especially for an ex-military man turned private detective.
But that he drank a high-octane wheated variety of bourbon on account of his allergies was different.
That was very specific.
It was something I could track.
But not by itself. I needed something else, something I could crosscheck with that.
I looked up his daughter. Maya Brewster had been 13 years old when her father had vanished in ’93. By 2019, she was 39 years old, living in Houston, and was the mother of two girls, aged 9 and 7. The girls, I saw in an online local newspaper article, excelled at soccer.
That was the extra something I needed.
You can’t stop being who you are.
When his daughter had been a child, Bill Brewster had bought all kinds of practice equipment for her soccer team. Maybe—in addition to buying his unusual liquor—he now bought soccer--related gifts for his two granddaughters. There wouldn’t be many folks who fit that profile.
And so over the next few years, I (illegally) cross-referenced purchases of the 114-proof wheated variant of Weller bourbon alongside one other category: children’s soccer equipment.
Sure enough, a few months later, I got an alert.
Someone in outer Dallas had bought exactly those things.
Someone by the name of William Hamilton.
William Hamilton. William Brewster.
People who adopt false names often keep their original first name because they naturally answer to it.
I went to the delivery address, knocked on the door of a squalid apartment.
No-one answered.
I spoke to some neighbours but they said that the African-American gentleman who lived there—a very polite but quiet fellow who kept to himself—had recently moved.
I left wondering how close I’d come to finding Bill Brewster.
But back to his lawsuit.
It seemed that in early 1993—the fifth year of his investigation—Brewster had sued Tad Kingman Sr in the District Court.
In response, Kingman had counter-sued him and won.
I found the case on LexisNexis.
A brief summary read:
brEWSTER V KINGMAN
DISTRICT COURT of NEW ORLEANS
JUDGE R. K. SINCLAIR presiding
Summary judgment issued in favor of the defendant
Topics: defamation, extortion, habeas corpus, peonage
Case details suppressed at judge’s orders
That was odd. The details of the suit had been suppressed by the presiding judge.
Whatever the case had been about, Kingman had won it and won it convincingly.
But why would the judge suppress the verdict? I thought.
That wasn’t standard practice at all.
I knew a clerk at the District Court over in New Orleans. I made a note to call him tomorrow and ask if there were any extra case files about the lawsuit.
And I restarted my digital surveillance of purchases on of 114-proof wheated bourbon and kids’ soccer equipment.
Last of all, I ran a criminal check on Eli Gage, the vagrant from Dead Man’s Creek.
Unsurprisingly, he had a record.
He’d spent seven years in prison on multiple Class D sex offences: child molestation.
This had meant when he finally got out of prison, if he moved into a neighbourhood, he’d have to knock on every door and inform the other residents of that fact.
No wonder he’d ended up living in a swamp, moving between defunct barges.
His parole contact was his older sister, Miss Eleanor Gage, who lived in Galveston, Texas.
I yawned as I processed all this.
Eli Gage had been a sex offender. But his offences had involved children. Could he have moved up to adult women like LaToya Martyn? It was possible, but uncommon.
I rubbed my eyes.
Checked the time.
It was 4:05 a.m.
I was climbing into bed in my second house when a thought struck me and I did one final online search on my cell phone.
I looked up Colossians 3:22 in the Bible, the verse that had been scrawled on Cyrus’s wall as ‘the 11th Commandment’.
The result read: ‘Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything.’
Then I crawled into bed and fell asleep.
Hooters Restaurant, Kirby Drive
Houston, Texas
3 October, 1203 hours
I was already sitting at my usual table at the Hooters off Kirby Drive when Audrey Mills arrived for lunch.
Millie-Mae smiled at Audrey as she sat down.
‘Well, hey there,’ Millie-Mae said. ‘You joinin’ my handsome friend for lunch?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Audrey said.
She seemed a little uncomfortable for some reason. I figured it was probably because, as an FBI agent, she probably ate at more expensive restaurants than Hooters. Meals at Hooters are very affordably priced.
After we ordered—I asked for my usual and Audrey ordered a Chicken Garden Salad with no cheese—I told Audrey about my research, including Eli Gage’s criminal record and how Mr Tad Kingman owned the massive parcel of land out of which Dead Man’s Creek flowed.
Audrey said, ‘Well, I also did some searches. Remember how Cyrus talked about hanging out with other rich kids at an old alligator farm in his childhood at someplace called Slavers’ Key? Well, there isn’t a place called Slavers’ Key anymore.’
‘Anymore?’
‘The name was removed from all records after the Civil War, to avoid mentioning slavery. It’s now called Gulf Key.
It’s a cluster of abandoned marsh islands near Alligator Point in Duke County, an unincorporated county in Florida, south of Tallahassee.
You’ll recall Cyrus mentioning that his old gator farm was on some duke’s property. ’
‘He said he played at the duke’s estate,’ I said.
‘Yeah, well, Duke County is absolutely massive. Runs along the Gulf Coast for close on fifty miles and inland for about the same. The county’s got swamps, forests and, yes, there was once an alligator farm there called “Gatorville” which went out of business in the 90s.
Near it there’s a bunch of abandoned mines—salt mines and a phosphate mine—and an old port town, now ruined.
‘It was called Slavers’ Key because it was an arrival point for smugglers bringing in slaves from Africa.
‘Get this, the whole county is actually a single piece of land that’s been owned by only two families: first it was owned by the Naismith family and then, since 1850, by a Florida family named Fisher.’
‘Fisher, really?’ I said.
‘You know them?’
‘One of my missing investigators, a Union officer named McShane, interviewed some members of the Fisher family about the missing prostitutes in 1877.’
‘A connection to our case today?’
‘Hard to say. These Southern families go way back, socialising and intermarrying. That’s the world Cyrus Barbin was part of.’
Audrey nodded. ‘I also think I found the place Cyrus meant when he talked about an “old priests’ graveyard out past the end of the world”.
‘The End of the World is the local name for a massive swamp southeast of New Orleans, out past Delacroix, where the road dead-ends at the bayou before the Gulf. The Catholic Church owns a big chunk of the swamp—it’s basically a collection of hundreds of little islands and waterways that was gifted to the Church in 1861 in the belief that the Union might refrain from attacking Christian land.
It was a smart move. The Union’s troops left it alone.
‘The largest island in the swamp houses a mansion. For a hundred years after the Civil War, it was used as the winter retreat for the local bishop. And it has a cemetery which was used to bury clergy.
‘The property got hit hard by Hurricane Camille in ’69, so hard that the Church abandoned it. Then in 1992 the access road leading to it was washed away by Hurricane Andrew. Place has been isolated and in ruins ever since.’
I frowned, thinking.
‘How much do you want to find out what happened to your FBI friend?’ I asked.
‘A lot. Why?’
‘Because everything here points to old money and old institutions: the Catholic Church and some seriously rich Southern families—the Fishers, the Dearborns and the Kingmans. They’re powerful. You poke these folks at your peril.’
‘I’m game,’ Audrey said firmly. ‘What about you?’
‘I don’t like unfinished things. I want to know what happened to LaToya Martyn. I owe it to her parents.’
At that moment, Millie-Mae arrived with our food. (Not only is the food at Hooters very reliable but the kitchen staff prepare it very promptly, which I like.)
As Audrey speared her salad with her fork, she said, ‘So what do you suggest we do now?’
‘We go back to first principles,’ I said.
‘My doll and your friend were both found very close to the Kingmans’ land in Victorville.
I think we need to see what’s further up Dead Man’s Creek.
Find out where that baby in the doll floated down from during the hurricane and talk to Eli Gage again.
In short, we need to go back to Victorville. ’