THOUGH HE HAD LONG SINCE stopped dreaming in his sleep, seventeen-year-old Ken Saun-ders could not banish his most terrifying nightmare.
When he blinked into the October sun, the tableau before him seemed normal enough. Outside the two-story, buff brick house in the 1700 block of Frontier Lane, fall leaves loosed themselves from tall cedar elms. They fluttered across the landscaped lawn, dotting the flagstone walk and gliding into the azure swimming pool beneath Ken’s balcony.
But when he blinked again, there was the terror. That room with the twin beds, the youthful black voice. Man, I don’t have it… No. man! That hand wrenching his arm. The sound of the gun exploding into the room.
Another blink. Only a carillon of birds broke the stillness outside Ken’s bedroom window, beyond which the bottoms of White Rock Lake rose to meet rolling hills and a cluster of nine or ten homes folded into the crook of Frontier Lane. Nightmares seemed incongruous in one of Dallas’s finer neighborhoods that Friday afternoon in October 1982. Except in the mind of Ken Saunders.
Blink again. The kid slumped against the wall. Footsteps coming down the hall. The .22-caliber pistol hot in his hand. Running. Jesus, God, no.
Blink. A posse of police cars braked to a halt. Officers drew their weapons and surrounded the house where Ken lived with his mother and two little brothers. Minutes later. Ken Saunders. one of the golden boys of Lakewood’s next generation, the popular, polite, bent-for-success scion of a prominent family, was led away in handcuffs. The nightmare had merged with reality.
IN THE GUESTHOUSE ADJOINING HIS grandmother’s rambling home. Ken Saunders makes cleaning-up noises inside his one-room studio. Throwing the door wide open moments later, he grins nonchalantly and apologizes for the delay. His cropped red hair, tan-over-freckles face, and eyes the hue of newly minted pennies form a seamless copper monochrome. His trim five-foot-nine-inch frame is clad in jeans, a plaid shirt, a “Princeville, Hawaii” gimme cap, and leather moccasins sans socks. He has that look, that manner. The tended ease of some good family’s son, the creaseless confidence worn by people with few worries and abundant resources.
Yet there is another side to Ken Saunders. A side that caused him. a leader in his high school and a favorite son in his upscale neighborhood, to squander $100,000 on drug use over three years, beginning when he was fourteen. A side that brought him, in April 1983, before a Dallas County jury where he was sentenced to thirty years in the penitentiary for first-degree murder. Just three weeks and three days earlier, on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving 1986, Ken had been paroled from the Huntsville Unit. In a few weeks, he would turn twenty-two with the inescapable credentials of a convicted felon and the rubble of a life to reconstruct.
’The bottom that happened to me was a pretty big one.” he says softly.
Heaped in the closet are the clothes he wore home from three years in prison: navy chino pants, blue shirt, green Army jacket. Beside him on the sofa, next to the keys to his 1982 BMW and his Ray-Bans. lies his new constant companion, a Harper House organizer, So many friends to see. So many people to thank for sticking by him. So many reasons to make amends. And, stretched out before him in a confusing vista, so many choices about what to do with the rest of a life shattered by drink, drugs, and murder.
Where before the future seemed limitless, Ken now frets that jobs will be shut to him because of his record. Where once being alone meant time to daydream or watch movies, now solitude visits him with waves of remorse. Where once he strove to live up to his family’s expectations, now he worries that telling his story will revive the gossip they’ve had to live down. “They’ve gone through a lot,” he says. “I don’t want to make it worse.” Still, he says, he won’t hide from his past, however unpleasant confronting it may be. And there’s the chance that being upfront about his own descent into drugs may stop someone else’s fall.
Ken Saunders is every Dallas parent’s 3 a.m. angst. the teenage statistic who gets sucked into the dominion of dope. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, more than half of all high school students have smoked marijuana, 23 percent have used stimulants, and 17 percent have tried cocaine; alcoholism among teens is on the rise. And in Dallas, the figures may be higher, experts say. “In an affluent area such as Dallas, especially in suburban areas, you have a greater percentage of use.” says David Sugg of DISD’s drug abuse prevention program.
In Ken’s case, drugs and alcohol helped forge an uncommon criminal. Parents and peers sat stunned as news of his arrest swept through Lakewood like a flash flood in late 1982. Ken Saunders?Kill someone in a drug deal? Ken, who had everything he wanted, who had the world by the tail? Bui why?
There lurks, in our bewilderment over the iniquities of the rich and the prominent, the conviction that wealth and good breeding should somehow serve as buffers against destructive desires and the crimes they nourish. Ken Saunders’s family is Lakewood gentry, with a portfolio of business assets and social memberships to prove it. Their holdings span trucking, oil, investments, commercial real estate, restaurants, liquor stores, bowling lanes, and ranchland. They belong to the Rotary and to the Lakewood Country Club. Ken Saunders attended elite private schools. His high school sweetheart captained the drill team, reigned over homecoming, and danced with the Dallas Ballet. His friends were the sons of doctors and judges.
Ken’s world orbited in a loftier galaxy than many a Dallas teenagers. But drugs, he says, were a common denominator. “Almost. I’m serious, everybody I ran around with-from the school presidents to the cheerleaders to the ’cowboys’ to the Mexican gangs-used drugs at least occasionally. There were so many people who used, all I know is I was there with them.
“But up until that day, the only person I thought I was a harm to was myself. I”d say, hey, I’m young, I can go crazy for a while. Little did I know.”
KENNETH EDMOND SAUNDERSS JOURNEY to that day began January 8, 1965. in Baylor Hospital. Lenora Whitehead Saunders was just three days shy of her seventeenth birthday and a sophomore at Woodrow Wilson High School when she gave birth to Ken. While other teenagers bopped to the Beatles and cruised Keller’s, Lenora and twenty-one-year-old Larry Saunders, a Woodrow graduate and Sun Oil Company mail clerk, had slipped off to Durant. Oklahoma, to get married in June 1964.
When the marriage fizzled after a year and a half, Larry claimed the couple’s china, nightstand. pots and pans, ironing board, and the ’65 Ford Fairlane. Lenora won custody of Kenny and sole rights to the trust funds and stock her father had set up for her when she was seven. Then she scuttled back to the comforts of her parents’ home. Her father. C.L. Whitehead, had moved his family in 1962 to a custom-built house on one of the choicest pieces of land in Lakewood. II was there, in a sprawling red-brick ranch house on the west shore, that Kenny romped through boyhood, tended by Bernice the maid, doted on by Grandpa “Whitey” and Grandma Bonita. and surrounded by a family album of relatives, their roots and resources grounded in Texas. Ken’s playground was the promontory that forms his grandparents’ yard; he was the cute kid everybody fussed over because he had curly red hair and a smile like he’d just gotten out of braces.
When Ken turned eight, though, his world turned upside down. Lenora, then twenty-five, married thirty-four-year-old Richard Lee Smith in July 1973. Suddenly. Kenny had to abandon his grandparents’ home for new playmates, a stepfather, and an unfamiliar duplex a few miles away. Soon after, Lenora and Richard purchased their own home in Lakewood on Cornelia Lane, and Richard joined the family’s real estate firm as a salesman.
Kenny began floundering in school. Reading and English bewildered him, and he failed third grade at Lakewood Elementary. It was at Lakewood that Kenny met John Shoemaker-later to become his best friend, his partner in crime, and his cellmate in prison. After repeating third grade, Kenny transferred to the exclusive Lakehill Preparatory School. “That was a real difficult time in my life,” Ken says. “Being held back was a shaming experience.”
Diagnostic tests revealed that Kenny had a learning disability, so his mother enrolled him in Dean Learning Center, a private Oak Lawn school for children with learning dysfunctions. The next year. Kenny switched to St. John’s Episcopal School for sixth grade. Reading would continue to be his nemesis until he discovered books by the hundreds in prison.
The year he turned twelve taught Kenny about tragedy. His grandfather, the pillar of the family’s prosperity, died of Lou Gehrig’s disease. “That was the day 1 died emotionally.” says Ken. “My grandfather was like my father in a way. I only saw my dad on weekends and then not every weekend. I lived with my granddaddy. My life changed after that.” Two months after his grandfather’s death, Kenny experienced a sensation that would change his life for the next ten years: he got high for the first time. A playmate raided the family liquor cabinet while his folks were out of town. The boys mixed up bourbon and Coke in a tall glass and took turns swigging it. “I remember it instantly changed how I felt,” Ken says. “I felt loose, free to talk, joking. I rode off on my bike. acting like I was drunk. I hit a curb and fell over on purpose. My friend was laughing and pointing at me through the front window.” Kenny rediscovered that heady sensation on class trips to Europe and Mexico while attending junior high at Episcopal School of Dallas. Even at that age, he reveled in that out-of-body feeling booze gave him. allowing him to hover above his sometimes unsure self. “Whatever the liquor was doing. I liked it,” he says. “I felt more equal, outgoing, funnier. I was the person I always wanted to be.”
At home, Kenny grew close to his stepfather and gained two brothers, Richard Lee Jr. was born in 1975: Steven Loyd three years later. But the marriage crumbled; Lenora and Richard divorced in 1979. Ken’s stepfather kept the house on Cornelia while Lenora moved her boys around the corner to Frontier, just a few blocks from their grandmother’s house, so they could have the next best thing to an old-fashioned family.
Neighbors and friends recall Ken Saunders with adjectives like happy-go-lucky, cheerful, normal, and considerate. He was mischievous and adventurous, they say, but almost never mean-spirited. Though he grew up with such amenities as a live-in maid and chauffeur. Ken was never holier-than-thou. “It was always ’yes sir’ or “no sir,’” neighbor Marquis McKinney later recalled in a letter to the parole board. “He would quickly volunteer to help me lift heavy packages. The Kenneth Saunders I know is a fine, polite, gentle young man.”
“It is extremely difficult for us to associate Kenneth with the trouble charged to him,” wrote longtime family friends Marjorie and John McArthur. “It just seemed so out of character. He was ever polite, kind, and interested in the welfare of others.”
Friends who visited Ken’s home remember his fixation with films. “He was always watching movies. And he could remember all the dialogue.” recalls Dan. a Richland Community College student who attended high school with Ken. Others describe Ken as the ideal big brother who looked after Richard and Stevie, taking them skating or swimming with them in the backyard pool. Ken was close to his mother, too, friends say. helping with the chores their maid couldn’t handle, beaming when people complimented Lenora’s sunny Sissy Spacek looks.
One evening when he was fourteen. Ken watched as a tray of cocaine and joints was passed around at a cousin’s party. He decided to try some dope to impress an older girl. “When I took a drag, everybody said ’hey, look at Ken,’ because I’d never done drugs. I got attention, I got accepted.” Ken started hanging around with older teens who used drugs often. Sometimes, he didn’t go home. Then he got kicked out of Episcopal. “They said it was because of my grades,” Ken says, “but I knew other kids who had just as bad grades. The reason was because I was going to a lot of wild parties.”
After Episcopal. Ken’s mother handed him a mandate: public school. That meant leaving the rarefied bisque of a private academy, with its homogeneous two hundred-plus pupils, for teeming Wood row Wilson High School, an inner-city stockpot of 1,300 students. Ken dreaded it. But he quickly elbowed his way into the elite clique of well-to-do students from the nearby Lakewood neighborhood.
Even as a sophomore, there was something at once Vegas and vulnerable about Ken. Easing into the school parking lot in his Blazer or the sporty orange-red BMW his mother gave him as a birthday present, flashing his talk-show charm and jaunty good looks, sporting a wardrobe full of Polo and Perry Ellis labels. Ken quickly established himself as a comer. More people saw the glitter on the outside than the groping on the inside. “I was always, if you know what 1 mean, in with the popular people, but I wasn’t all that popular,” Ken confesses, “I was in with the crowd but behind the scenes. 1 wanted to be on stage.”
If neighbors and family friends envisioned Ken as the ideal son and boy-next-door, Ken’s peers perceived him as a kid who wanted for nothing. “Ken had a lot of mystery about him,” says one friend from high school. “He’d come back from vacation and talk about celebrities or going to see the space shuttle take off. He had that BMW. He had a Rolex-that could have been the first Rolex I’d ever seen. He had clothes a lot of kids in this world would love to have. A different shirt every day. Ken probably was the wealthiest person to go to Wood row. But underneath the clothes and the watch. Ken was a nice person.”
Ken took school chums to the family’s ranches in Menard and San Angelo to hunt deer and ride three-wheelers. He treated them to vacations in Acapulco. “It was neat to be seen with Ken,” says a former classmate. “It wasn’t just because of Ken, it was his family. Ken is a neat person to know if you’re going into business. His family knows anybody in town who’s a millionaire.”
Dan. the Richland student, recalls that when he transferred to Woodrow Wilson as a junior. Ken went out of his way to make him feel welcome. “I didn’t know a lot of people. Ken accepted me and invited me out to things.” he says. “Ken knows what to say and how to get along with people. Probably his best talent. If you went out with Ken. he was very generous. He’d pay your way if you were broke. Nobody really hated Ken. He didn’t have any enemies.”
Woodrow Wilson principal Wayne Pierce, who has seen thousands of students come and go in his eighteen years at the school, recalls Ken as “one of my favorite people. He was never down, always friendly. An excellent example of a student bubbling with enthusiasm and cheer. Ken was very popular, known by all, one of the elite guys.”
In his junior and senior years, Ken helped build sets for school plays. Along with John Shoemaker, he belonged to the prestigious Key Club. “If you were anybody at Wood-row, you were in Key Club,” remarks one former student. Ken played soccer and starred in track, running a 4:49 mile and finishing twenty-seventh in state cross-country as a freshman. He could also swim rings around almost anyone else on the swim team when he tried.
At Woodrow Wilson, Ken wasted no time enhancing his rowdy reputation. He col- lected speeding tickets, girls, escapades, and party pals. “I was always looking for the cool place to go, the cool people to be with, the cool thing to do,” he says. And drugs in new and challenging forms fueled Ken’s party passions: first, a joint or two on weekend nights. Then smoking dope on Saturday afternoon. And Sunday afternoon after church. Then amphetamines and cocaine on an occasional weekday. Soon, every day. “It got to where, as soon as I’d get out of school, I’d fire up a joint,” Ken says. He would schedule his week around his drug buys, take | a few hits at lunch, snort cocaine off his notebook. “I started falling asleep in class. I didn’t know what was going on.”
Ken slumps against the sola, recalling one particular morning a few months before the crime. “I got high as soon as I got up. I didn’t like to do that, but I was doing it more often, I remember I was sitting on the couch watch- | ing TV. My mother looked in, all the way across the room, and she said, ’Kenny, I’m really, really worried about you.’”
But Lenora Smith’s own addictions (she has been in a drug and alcohol abuse pro- gram since 1981) made it difficult for her to focus on Ken’s escalating problems. And despite her concerns, she continued to give Ken plenty of money to spend as he pleased. Each Friday, Ken pocketed his weekly allowance of S250 to $300 and bought his drugs. He’d pick up another $50 to $125 from his grandmother for yard work and other chores. ’And I’d usually come into some money during the week,” he says. “Christmas, birthday money, it all went into that. My mom was drinking and using at the time, so she didn’t realize what was happening.”
At the height of his drug use. Ken says, he was pouring $1,200 a week into cocaine, marijuana, and speed. “I’d go to the bank, then straight to the drug dealer,” he says. “I’d, go to Lake Highlands to buy my drugs-Lakewood’s such a talkative place. I’d get an ounce of marijuana, sometimes as much as a half-ounce to an ounce of cocaine. I was supposed to pick up Margie at seven or eight, but I was always two or three hours late, depending on how long the deal took. Margie never used drugs, didn’t even drink very much. She knew I used, but she didn’t like me to. So I’d get high all the way over to her house, rolling pretty good by the time I picked her up.”
Margie. Ken’s face brightens, then fades as he talks about Margie Hardwick, his girlfriend at Wood row Wilson. Long raven hair, elfin brown eyes. Drill team captain, honor roll student, ballerina. “Margie was everything,” Ken whispers.
Homecoming night, Ken picked Margie up in a limousine with a bottle of Dom Pérignon to sip on the way to the dance in the school lunchroom. “Her parents took pictures of us. I remember her eyes-they almost laughed at you with this little warm smile. It was like in the movies, the sun all hazy through the windows behind her. She looked like an angel” he recalls. In the 1982 Woodrow Wilson annual, there’s a photo of Margie in a shirred gauzy dress, her hand in Ken’s, waiting to step forward with the other candidates for Homecoming Court.
Ken loved to watch Margie twirl her baton or slide into splits when she and the Woodrow Sweethearts rallied Wildcat fans at games. He bought tickets to the Dallas Ballet and watched, mesmerized, as Margie floated into grands jetés as a junior corps member. “I loved Margie as much as it’s possible to love anyone then,” says Ken. But he became careless about commitments, surreal in his behavior. “Drugs were my teddy bears, then they became my nightmare. Then I became a vegetable almost.”
Ken would abandon Margie at parties, leaving for hours to buy more drugs and to drive around alone, a bottle of Wild Turkey under the seal, his stash of marijuana next to him. cocaine in the glove compartment. “All I needed was me, my drugs, and my car.” Then, a few months before the crime. Ken added a fourth ingredient to his roving trouble bubble: the ,22-caliber revolver that his mother had given him for his seventeenth birthday. Until then, he kept it hidden high on a shelf above his bed-near his huge Playboy collection-“for protection from burglars,” he later testified. But Ken was pushing eighteen and his luck; he began carrying the revolver with him in his BMW. He had ricocheted from reality into the realm of paranoia.
With his spiraling drug use, Ken’s rela- tionship with Margie whipsawed until that October morning when a bullet shredded the last gossamer remnants of the romance. Ken and Margie went their disparate ways: she to New York to join the American Ballet Theatre’s corps de ballet, he to stand trial and then vanish behind prison walls. “One of the really painful things about my drug addiction was losing Margie,” Ken says. “I wish I could have gotten sober way long before that-before I lost her, before someone died.”
KEN SAUNDERS’S COURT TESTIMONY: “If there is any doubt in anybody’s mind that this is just a freak.. .it won’t happen again, I guarantee that to anybody… It is something I will never forget until the day I die and after I die.”
KEN WOKE UP BETWEEN 7 AND 8 A.M. ON Saturday, October 2, 1982, with his gut gnawing. He shook off the covers, trying to shake the feeling with them. Must’ve been a bad dream. Nah, couldn’t have been. He hadn’t dreamed in ages. Not since he’d gotten into drugs. He’d heard that drugs sapped your ability to dream. Maybe that was because your body dreamed all day long.
Then it came to him. This was the mom-ing he and John Shoemaker were going to get the $800 back. Tracy Turner or Tony Elliott. One of them had it. Damn, if he and Jeff hadn’t been so stupid. Getting suckered in like that. Putting their money out there like blood for some shark. Geez. there’d been lots bigger deals. Who’d have thought someone would rip them off over a pound of marijuana?
As he drove to John’s house, his .22 under the front seat of the BMW. he felt jumpy. Loaded or unloaded, guns didn’t intimidate Ken. He’d used them for target practice and hunting since he was a small boy. Still, toting one to scare someone was a new feeling. To calm his nerves, he drank from the bottle of bourbon he kept in the car. He picked up John Shoemaker, and the two headed north toward Lake Highlands, to the neighborhood where the Elliotts and Turners lived just south of Hamilton Park.
As they drove. Ken’s mind churned with the details of the drug deal that had gone sour two days before. Tracy Turner was supposed to have handled the transaction. But he hadn’t been home when Ken and a friend, Jeff Hawkins, showed up that Thursday evening to buy the marijuana. Instead, nineteen-year-old Tony Elliott came out to say he’d act as go-between. Tony had led them to a nearby apartment complex, where they handed him $100 to bring back an ounce of grass so they could sample it. Ken and Jeff were in for a quarter pound each; they’d take back a half pound for John. In the past. Ken had always bought drugs for personal use. But this time, he. John, and Jeff were going to try something new: they would resell some of the marijuana at a profit in Austin, where John attended the University of Texas.
Suddenly, Tony was back, leaning into the car. “The guy’s pissed ’cause we’re late,” he said. “I’ve looked at the stuff and it’s good. It’ll be okay, just give me the dough.”
So, like dimwits, they’d forked over the other $700. Waited fifteen or twenty minutes. Got out of the car, looked around, waited some more. After an hour, still no sign of Tony, Ken and Jeff cut back to Tracy’s house. They knew they’d been ripped off and they were mad. They left Ken’s phone number and a message for Tracy: give us our money back or something is going to happen.
Friday, Ken had phoned and visited the Elliott and Turner homes. Tracy and Tony were never at home, never called back. Finally, Ken and John agreed that, come Saturday, they’d track down the culprits and their cash.
It was about 10 a.m. when they neared the Elliott home on Boundbrook Avenue. Ken parked down the street. When they reached the house, the front door stood ajar. John pushed it open. Nobody in sight. There, a bedroom. They could see Tony’s seventeen-year-old brother. Rodney, just waking up. Ken eased the gun out of his pocket. He pointed the gun at Rodney, then ripped the phone out of the bedroom wall. (Ken later testified that John also carried a .25-caliber pistol that day but never brandished it.)
“Where’s Tony, Rodney?”
“Hey, man, I don’t know. Hasn’t been home for about two weeks.” Rodney did not tell them that his brother was asleep in the next room.
For the next thirty to forty-five minutes, the three drove around, Rodney feigning efforts to find Tony. When Tony’s tracks led nowhere, the search shifted to Tracy Turner. From a drive-in phone booth, Rodney called the Turner house and learned that Tracy was home asleep.
About 10:30, Ken parked around the corner from 8515 Gladwood Lane, where nineteen-year-old Tracy lived with his parents, sister, and three brothers in a seven-room brick house in one of the few predominantly black neighborhoods in North Dallas. Rodney said he’d show Ken and John a side door where they might be able to slip into Tracy’s bedroom without being seen, but he wanted no part of going in himself. Rodney didn’t want Tracy to know he’d ratted on him, even if at gunpoint. Tracy was one of Rodney’s best friends, but he wasn’t someone you fooled with; he had twice been convicted of burglary in 1982 and was given five- and ten-year probated sentences.
As they darted up the walk alongside the Turner house, Ken drew the gun. They entered through a storm door. The house was quiet except for the sound of cartoons on a TV somewhere. They tiptoed into a laundry room, through a door, and into a dim hallway with dark shag carpeting. Rodney had said it was the first door on the right.
Then they were in Tracy’s bedroom. Beer cans littering the dresser. A black teenage boy startled awake, sitting up in his shorts. Ken and John moving closer, stopping an arm’s length away. Ken pointing the gun, scared, John at Ken’s right. What are we doing here? Scared, Jesus, scared. Can’t show it, though. Gotta scare him.
’Are you Tracy?”
“Who are you dudes?”
“You know who we are. Where’s our money? We want it back,”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“C’mon, the $800,” Tracy. That’s all we want, and we’ll go.”
“Man. I don’t know where your money is! Man, I don’t have it! No, man. . .”
Suddenly, a lunge. A hand wrenching Ken’s arm. Ken pulling back. The gun going off. Omigod, omigod, the angle of the gun, so close to his head, Tracy slumping over against the wall, going limp. Gunsmoke shrouding the room. Doors creaking. Footsteps coming. Voices. Running. Fast. Running. Blurred. Running. Scared.
WALKING. NOT BELIEVING IT. WALKING. Finally. Out of the holding tank. They’d called seven names and then he’d heard it: Inmate 356602, Ken Saunders. Forty men filing toward the front gate, the red brick walls, their $200 checks stuffed into their pockets to buy bus fare home, dinner in Waco or Dallas, cigarettes, another crack at civilization. Leaving Huntsville Prison behind them, Ken and the motley parade of prison graduates walked for one block in regimental cadence. “Then, all of a sudden,” Ken recalls, “we turned the corner of The Walls, and everybody starts trotting, then running-through the town, toward the bank, to the bus station.”
It was November 25, 1986. In three and a half years of prison, Inmate 356602 had gone from flat-weeding and picking broom corn in ninety-five-degree heat to working in the kitchen and the prison major’s office, two of the most trusted positions in the prison.
And now Ken Saunders was going home. The Fifth District Court of Appeals had reversed his conviction and ordered a new trial. Parts of Ken’s testimony, the court ruled, had been erroneously disallowed during the punishment phase of the trial. An exemplary prison record aided his case. In prison, Ken had risen to Trusty II, the highest classification available to a non-lifer, and finished high school. To avoid the expense of another trial, prosecutors accepted Ken’s guilty plea in exchange for a reduced sentence. With the good time he’d earned, that meant almost immediate parole.
A month and a half of treatment at The Meadows, a private Arizona hospital, leached the drugs from Ken’s system. Almost every evening, he attends Alcoholics Anonymous meetings for recovering drug addicts and alcoholics. “It’s the best hour of my day,” he says.
Ken’s talk is peppered with the jargon of his new-found circle. He speaks of people who are “enablers,” about “holding onto old behaviors,” or about “addicts who are co-dependents.” He’s as open, sensitive, and demonstrative as some young disciple for a new human potential movement. His eyes well up when he speaks about his “brothers and sisters” in “The Program.”
“Everything in my life that I thought was bad has turned out for the best,” he says. “I’m excited about five years from now, about the hope of a better life and being a better person.
“I don’t want to tell someone else they have to go through something like this to change their life. I wish I could have done it another way. But I’d hate to see the person I’d be today if I hadn’t gone to prison.”
Still, a little of the rakish old Ken peeks through the new. “I love to gamble,” he admits, explaining the stacks of poker chips atop the stereo. In Lake Tahoe recently, he says, he won more than $11,000 at craps. On another trip, he reaped $2,500.
But there are some stakes, he says, that he’ll never play loose with again. “For a long time I was angry at him [Tracy], but I put myself in that house. I put myself there with a gun. But I had no intention of shooting that young man. I just wanted to scare him.”
Ken hasn’t seen John Shoemaker much since they were cellmates at Gatesville after John was sentenced to two years in prison for kidnapping Rodney Elliott. Ken doesn’t see a lot of his old chums anymore. “I’ve had to turn my back on some of my friends,” he says, smoking one Marlboro after another. “I love those people and I care about them, but now I try to surround myself with peo- ple with the right thinking, the right line of life, who are winners.”
He’s enrolled in Richland Community College, taking business courses. Maybe he’ll join the family’s real estate business. Books have become his friends; the copy of Crime and Punishment that he brought home from prison waits on his dresser. Maybe he’ll read it next. An oversized glossy of Ken, his mother, and brothers grinning in ski togs, their arms entwined around each other, lies on a table. Maybe soon they’ll forget.
And Ken has started dreaming again- “vividly,” he says.
