Tom Stephenson is a study in contrasts. He’s a big bear of man who earns a living these days as a hunting and fishing guide. He’s got a bushy mustache and thick fingers that look ill-suited to a keyboard and an even thicker Texas accent that belies his literary output, at least in the pages of D Magazine.
His first story for the magazine was published in 1974. I was just 4 years old at that point and didn’t have the privilege of meeting him until many years later, possibly at the Greenville Avenue St. Patrick’s Day Parade, an event he created. Legend has it that he painted an elephant green on the first iteration of the event and marched it down Greenville Avenue as a way to draw customers to a bar he owned at the time. When I say “legend,” I mean “the story that Tom tells.” I haven’t been able to find corroboration in old newspaper reports. No matter.
A few months back, when Tom came to me with a story about an unsolved mass murder he’d investigated for the magazine 42 years ago and new developments therein, I think I saw his proposal like a Coen brothers movie. There were incompetent cops and Tom’s own arrest in the course of his reporting on those incompetent cops—it all seemed darkly comic.
My impression of the story changed when I went to the small North Texas town of Blue Mound, where the murders happened, and met the city’s young police chief, Randy Baker. He showed me the old case file on the murders, thousands of documents that normally would have been destroyed long ago but thankfully weren’t. In those manila folders were crime scene and autopsy pictures of the family, including a 6-year-old, that was slaughtered in their house on a cold winter night. Seeing those images changed the way I think about this story. Frankly, it’s a bit too real.
Knowing the facts of the case, it’s hard for me to believe that we are only just now finding a path that leads toward its resolution—in these pages, if not in a courtroom. All the physical evidence has been destroyed. Too many years have passed. It’s easy to forget. Sometimes killers grow old in the comfort of their own homes. All the lawmen can do is pay them a visit.
