THE PHONE RINGS, AND MELINDA Mason stiffens as if she’s been shot. She looks toward the front door of her quiet, suburban Dallas home, half expecting her ex-husband, Thomas Wayne Mason, to crash into her living room.
Her fear is not paranoia. It is real. Thomas Wayne Mason already has murdered her mother and grandmother in a particularly bloody slaughter that earned him a death sentence this summer.
Melinda is haunted by her last look at Mason, a 6-foot-3-inch. 250-pound man who was dragged kicking and screaming from a Tyler, Texas, courtroom hurling threats that he would somehow “finish the job” and come back to kill Melinda, too.
The 40-year-old contractor now sits in a cell at the Lew Sterrett Jail and waits for another trial, set for October 27. This time he will be tried for the aggravated sexual assault and kidnapping of Melinda, events that preceded the murders.
Melinda still believes Mason can get her. She has lived under his thumb for more than 15 years, knowing that when she turned around, he would be there, knowing that if she ran, he would track her like a hunter tracks a trophy buck. For nearly half her life, Melinda has endured Mason’s constant psychological control, punctuated by inconceivable violence.
Many days the phone rings, and Melinda hears a click and a dial tone. She’s changed her unlisted number twice, but the hang-up calls continue. So she shuts herself in her house, curtains drawn. She believes that Mason’s family calls and watches her.
Mason’s court-appointed attorney, Greg Thomas, doesn’t want his client or Mason’s family members, who may be witnesses, to be interviewed before die trial. So Melinda’s only proof that his family makes the calls is the sick feeling in her gut when the phone rings.
“This is all a game to mem,” she says. ’’And they won’t stop until they win. I know I’ll be running and hiding from now until the day I’m dead.”
Melinda was a woman stalked for much of her adult life. Her mother and grandmother. Marsha Brock and Sybil Dennis, were stalked, and eventually killed, by the same man. “Stalking”-mat is, repeatedly following and harassing another person and causing him or her to fear for their life-often happens after a woman leaves an abusive spouse or boyfriend. It is not a crime in Texas. If it were, the two women might be alive today. Certainly their murders seem preventable.
In fact, just days before Thomas Wayne Mason hunted down and killed Brock and Dennis, Dallas police had him in jail for raping and kidnapping Melinda. But less than eight hours after his arrest, Mason was freed on bond and continued his violent rampage.
On Oct. I, 1991, after weeks of threats to his 54-year-old mother-in-law. Mason drove to Tyler and checked into a Holiday Inn about 10 miles from Brock’s house. The next day Mason watched Brock’s movements, followed her home and unloaded a shotgun into the back of her head and into the arm and side of her 80-year-old mother.
“After he was arrested for kidnapping me,” Melinda says, “the police told me, ’You don’t have to worry about him. He’s been caught.’
“Now I don’t have Momma.”
WHEN MELINDA BROCK MET THOMAS Wayne Mason, she was a small-town girl looking to get out. The town was Whitehouse, near Tyler, where she lived on Robinwood Drive with her parents and brother and sister. At 17, she had grown out of exploring the woods around her house. Instead, she preferred to cruise the parking lot of the local burger joint or hang out on the shore of Lake Tyler.
Thomas Wayne Mason was hired by Melinda’s family in 1976 to add onto their ranch-style brick house, essentially building an attached second house for Melinda’s grandmother. Mason was 23. He had traveled all over the country building houses with his family-seven brothers and often several uncles and cousins-and had temporarily settled in Whitehouse. Soon the caravan of Masons would be on the road again. To a teen-age girl who had never been anywhere, mat sounded pretty good.
“I just wanted out,” says Melinda. “My parents were fighting all of the time then. I remember going to bed and covering my head with the pillow so I wouldn’t have to listen to the bickering all night.”
It wasn’t long before Melinda had her own domestic problems. She married Mason on Dec. 31, 1976, his 24th birthday, and immediately entered into a gypsy life with an irascible and physically abusive man who would hardly let her out of his sight. She tried to leave him three times that first year. Each time, she escaped to the only haven she knew-her mother’s home in Whitehouse. Each time Mason tracked her down and persuaded her to leave with him.
Mason used his 4-year-old daughter from his first marriage, Tabitha, to lure Melinda back into the relationship. Melinda quickly became mother to the little girl and felt she needed to stay to protect Tabitha from Mason’s abuse. Mason led her to believe he had full custody of Tabitha. Then Melinda and Mason had three children together, first a boy and then two girls, all within four years. Finally, Mason had the leverage to keep Melinda in his grasp.
“If I talked about leaving, he’d say, ’You do, and you’ll never see your kids again,’” Melinda remembers. “If I left, even for a few hours, I never knew if I would come home and find them all dead or be blown away when I walked through the door.”
Mason moved the family from city to city chasing construction jobs across the South and Southwest; they lived in a camper with no running water or in cheap motels. Each time Melinda tried to contact her family. Mason became more obsessed with keeping her away from her mother.
“If I snuck away to call, he would find me, and I would catch hell,” Melinda says. “I wasn’t allowed to do anything by myself. He checked the mileage on the car so he would know if I’d gone anywhere while he was away, He’d have his family watch me to see where I went. If he was supposed to go to work, he’d leave, and then he’d randomly show up. If I wasn’t home, when 1 got here I’d get the fool beat out of me.”
Melinda now is in the process of having major dental work to repair damage done by Mason when he hit her face with his fists. She permanently sees spots because of head injuries from his beatings. Other scars have healed from Mason’s regular attacks with knives, wooden stakes or dinner plates thrown at her from across the room.
Anything could trigger the violence-a child crying, a cold supper. But most often it was any show of independence by Melinda.
Finally, Melinda gave up trying. She and the children moved with Mason from Tennessee to Florida to Virginia to Texas. Usually they moved every six weeks, whenever Mason would finish a building job or hear of a better one someplace else.
Six years into the marriage, Melinda discovered why Mason kept the family on the move.
“I found my husband’s divorce decree, and he didn’t have custody of Tabitha.”
Tabitha was then 10 years old. Mason had kidnapped her when she was 2. Melinda says that may also explain why Mason made up social security numbers and never used a permanent address.
When Tabitha was 15 and no longer an easily controllable little girl. Mason sent her home to live with his ex-wife in Memphis. There was no retribution by the ex-wife because she also was terrified of Mason. The woman told Melinda that Mason had terrorized her and that his threats were truly dangerous: He had spent time in jail for shooting his ex-wife’s father.
After Tabitha returned to Memphis in 1986, Mason, Melinda and the three children settled in Dallas. The Texas building boom was over, so Melinda got a job in the office of a Kroger near their home. The job didn’t last. Mason couldn’t stand for Melinda to be out of his sight. Each night, he spied on his wife from the parking lot to make sure she was at work.
Melinda Mason second-guesses many decisions in her past, most of all her decision to marry. “I was young, and il was stupid,” she says. But despite the fact that her relatives blame her for the deaths of her mother and grandmother, Melinda has never second-guessed walking out on Thomas Wayne Mason.
“1 know it was the right thing to do.”
IN THE SUMMER OF 1991, MELINDA STARTED taking some control over her life. The couple lived in Dallas, and she was enrolled at Mansfield Business School on Lake June Road to get her assistant nursing certificate. She also worked at the Texas T Discount Grocery in Dallas. But after one prank phone call was made to the Mason home by a man named Gary. Mason became convinced that Melinda had a boyfriend at work.
Mason showed up one August night at the Texas T and started asking questions about Gary. As it turned out, a man named Gary did work there, on another shift. Melinda hardly knew him.
“Wayne walked up to me and told me that he was going to kill me when I got home,” Melinda says. “When I got home, I was a wreck. He’s laying there on the couch. He always kept a gun in the drawer, and it was always loaded. He just kept saying, ’I’m going to kill you. 1 ought to get up and throw you through the wall.’ “
Melinda says she kept talking and kept moving. She had planned to take their three kids, aged 13. 12 and 10, and go wash clothes, so she told them to get the laundry and get in the car. Mason continued to describe how he would kill Melinda, something she had listened to many times before. But she didn’t want to hear it any more. She grabbed her purse and followed the kids out the door.
“I got to the end of the driveway and stopped,” Melinda says, “and I said, LLook, 1 can’t take any more of this. If y’all want to live here, we’ll stick it out. If y’all don’t want to, we’re gone.’ And they said ’No, Momma, we don’t want to live here.’ We didn’t know when we left if we were going to be killed or not.”
That’s when the stalking began in earnest. Mason tracked Melinda’s every move. Anyone who helped her-her mother, her uncle-became an object of his rage. Mason called Melinda’s mother in Whitehouse and threatened her life, blaming her for the problems in his marriage and for helping Melinda become independent. Police in Dallas and in Whitehouse were fully aware of the threats.
That first night away from home. Melinda chose her uncle’s house in Sunnyvale as a haven because she knew Mason didn’t have that phone number. But by the next morning. Mason had found her and the children. He located her by process of elimination, going from relative to relative, knowing Melinda didn’t have much money. When he found her, he used his truck as a battering ram, trying to destroy Melinda’s car. Melinda and her uncle called the police, but by the time they arrived, Mason was gone.
The next night Melinda and the children stayed in a Motel 6 not far from her uncle’s house. They left die hotel as little as possible. But Melinda was anxious to get on with her life, and she couldn’t do that while hiding in a motel room, so her mother bought an RV for Melinda and the children. Melinda parked the vehicle in a trailer park off Highland Drive in Dallas. Every time she left or came home she watched carefully to make sure Mason wasn’t following.
Melinda didn’t leave town because she was just weeks from finishing the semester at business school. With her assistant nursing certificate she planned to start a new life. She had begun divorce proceedings and even started attending parents without partners meetings at church.
Though she lived in hiding at night, she showed up each morning for class. And that’s where Mason found her in September.
The first time Mason appeared at school, he waited in the parking lot and followed Melinda when she left with a girlfriend. When the two women couldn’t shake him. they drove to the Balch Springs Police Department. Mason didn’t follow.
The next time Melinda saw Mason, he was prowling the halls of the school, carrying a gun and looking for her. Melinda made it to the school office and called the police. But again, Mason was gone by the time the police arrived.
Two weeks went by, and Melinda didn’t see Mason. But she didn’t let down her guard. She and the children stayed close to home. Warrants had been issued for Mason’s arrest for the incidents in Sunnyvale, at the school in Dallas and in Balch Springs, but with more than 45,000 warrants outstanding in the county at any one time, authorities didn’t catch up with Mason.
Mason made the leap from threats to real violence on Sept. 16, 1991. That morning, he cornered Melinda in front of the school and chased her into the nearby Lake June Athletic Club. With police tactical squads at bay, Mason kept her there for five hours, raped her and forced her to perform oral sex on him while he held a semiautomatic pistol to her head.
Only hours after Mason surrendered to police-before Melinda got home from Parkland Hospital-he was back in his Dodge pickup planning retaliation for his arrest. A part-time Dallas magistrate. Virgil Lang, had freed him on $2,500 bond,
Bond is set at the judge’s discretion. In fact, there is no minimum or maximum amount mandated. If Mason’s crime had been a random kidnapping and assault, it is likely his bail would have been set much higher, police officials say. A higher bond might have indicated the state considered Mason’s a serious crime. While Mason sat in jail, Melinda’s family could have used that precious time to prepare and protect themselves.
Instead, Mason was free to continue his reign of terror.
“I don’t really think [the magistrate] understood the gravity of the case,” says a county courthouse insider. It’s a common complaint about local judges, who often dismiss stalking cases that involve spouses as “family squabbles.”
Lt. Bill Walsh, head of the Dallas Police Department Family Violence Unit, believes that existing laws that should protect stalking victims are not being enforced by the judiciary.
“Some of the [Dallas] judges are not knowledgeable about the dynamics of this problem,” says Walsh. “We need money for the judges to get training and for court-watch programs to hold judges accountable for the sentences they hand out.”
Virgil Lang wouldn’t comment on the Mason case because it is pending trial. But Melinda Mason believes mat Lang and the criminal justice system are responsible for her mother and grandmother’s deaths. She would like to file a lawsuit against the city of Dallas or the magistrate, but lacks the funds for a lengthy legal battle. One attorney she’s spoken with is exploring a lawsuit against the pawnshop owner who sold Mason the murder weapon. Melinda’s anger, however, remains focused on the man who let Mason go.
“If the magistrate had done his job,” Melinda says, “none of this would have happened.”
With no faith in the criminal justice system, Melinda feels helpless to defend herself from Mason. During her ex-husband’s murder trial in Tyler, Melinda was terrified that Mason would attack her in court.
David Dobbs, the Tyler district attorney who tried the case, says he has never seen a witness as visibly frightened as Melinda was of Mason. And those fears are still with her. She’s afraid to testify against him in Dallas because she doesn’t think he will be adequately restrained in the courtroom. She doesn’t believe the police or prosecutors when they tell her she’ll be safe. She’s heard it all before.
MELINDA MASON IS HARDLY THE only victim of stalking. Statistics from family violence shelters show that as many as 90 percent of their clients are stalked by their batterers. Diane McGauley, executive director of The Family Place-a shelter and comprehensive counseling service for battered women, their children and men seeking to end violent behavior-reels off several cases from the last year.
In one, the victim moved three times and changed her job, but her husband found her by going to the Department of Motor Vehicles. He claimed he had lost his license plate. The car he was requesting records for was in his wife’s name, but because they were still legally married, he was given paper work that included her current address. McGauley says stalkers often find their victims this way.
In another case, the husband stalked his wife constantly for six months after she left him, stopped her regularly when he found her and beat her in the open, on the street. During that six-month period she moved three times. He waited for her in the parking lot at work and told her something familiar to stalking victims: If he couldn’t have her, no one could. Then he shot her in the chest. The woman was in intensive care at Parkland for three months. Now in extensive rehabilitation, she refuses to press charges because she believes her husband will kill her.
Another woman, who had been held hostage in a closet, escaped from her home in Alabama to Dallas with her 6-week-old baby. Her husband tracked her through her unlisted phone number, thanks to help from a friend at the telephone company. The Family Place helped her get a new social security number and move out of state to another shelter where she began, again, to rebuild her life.
The Mason case points out the holes in the criminal justice system, holes that are being filled in states across the country with anti-stalking statutes that make it a crime to threaten someone’s life before the stalker actually acts on the threats. In 1990, California passed the first anti-stalking law and since then 26 states have followed with their own versions.
The impetus for California’s law was a deluge of family violence in Los Angeles in 1990, including five cases within six weeks in which wives and girlfriends were stalked and killed. Similar incidents (although not in such great number) prompted laws from Colorado to Wisconsin to Connecticut. Not all of the victims were female, but die great majority were.
Several anti-stalking bills are being discussed in Texas. State Sen. Ted Lyon of Tyler may use Melinda Mason as a spokesperson for one he will propose. State Rep. Brian McCall of Piano plans to sponsor his own bill in the Texas Legislature in January. McCall, whose bill has the most support, decided to pursue it after an ex-employee was stalked by a former boyfriend.
“Stalking is absolute terrorism,” McCall says. “When violence is this predictable, it’s government’s role to step in and let people live in peace.”
McCall believes a stalking law will be passed. He already has enough votes to pass his bill in the House. And he has the governor’s support for it.
McCail’s bill, patterned after its predecessors, makes it a criminal offense to follow or harass another person repeatedly or to make threats that cause the victim to fear death or serious bodily injury from the stalker. The definition of “harassment” does not inhibit me exercise of free speech, say the bill’s supporters.
A person convicted of stalking, on the first offense, would be guilty of a Class A misdemeanor and could be punished by a fine of up to $3,000 or up to one year in jail.
On Sept. 21, the Public Safety Committee of the Dallas City Council voted unanimously to recommend a city stalking ordinance for passage by the council. The ordinance was brought forth by Domingo Garcia and was drafted by city attorney Dan Postell, who says this is the only city stalking ordinance of which he is aware. It is patterned after other stalking laws and is virtually identical to McCail’s bill.
It is the most the city can do: The ordinance would make stalking a Class C misdemeanor, which carries a maximum fine of $500 and no jail time. The committee agrees that stalking is a much more serious crime, but this ordinance is intended as a stopgap measure until the state can pass a law. If the state passes a stalking law in this session, it could go into effect next spring. If the City Council passes this ordinance, as it is expected to do Oct. 14, it will go into effect the Monday after its passage.
Melinda Mason believes a Texas stalking law would have saved her mother and grandmother.
THOMAS WAYNE MASON’S ODYSSEY of rage reached its culmination Oct. 2, 1991. Out on bail for kidnapping Melin-da, he turned his attentions to her primary source of emotional and financial support, her mother.
For years Marsha Brock had told family members that she wasn’t afraid of her tough-talking son-in-law. She had earned a reputation as the only one who would stand up to him. But after Melinda left him that summer. Mason’s threats frightened Brock. He blamed her for his marital problems and threatened to burn down her house, the same house he’d helped build 15 years earlier.
Finally. Brock got an unlisted phone number to stop his abusive phone calls and asked the Whitehouse police to make drive-by checks of her house. Throughout the months of August and September, she made copious notes of the day-to-day actions of her son-in-law as he terrorized Melinda.
On October 1, Mason began his final act of vengeance against Brock. He drove the 100 miles from Dallas to Tyler and got a room at the Holiday Inn. The next day, he stopped for a few minutes at the East Texas Pawnshop and bought a sawed-off semiautomatic shotgun and 15 rounds of buckshot.
Mason knew his mother-in-law’s daily schedule. Brock worked at a doctor’s office in Tyler and attended nursing school at Tyler Junior College. On Wednesday afternoons, she drove home after work. Mason traveled those 10 miles from Tyler to Whitehouse first.
He stopped at me Chicken and Burgers restaurant and chose a boom by the window where he could watch for Brock to pass by on her way home. While Mason ate meatloaf, mashed potatoes and gravy. Brock turned for the last time onto Robinwood Drive where she lived with her 80-year-old mother.
Police believe that Mason followed Brock into the house and shot her as she ran away from him. She was found on the floor nearest the side door of her house, the sleeves of her pink jacket and white uniform torn, the back of her head gone. Skull fragments were found 37 feet away from her body. But her car keys were still next to her hand.
Sybil Dennis. Melinda’s grandmother. was on the phone with the police dispatcher when a shot nearly tore her right arm from her body. Another blast, into her side, sent her to the floor. There she was found in her black-checked house dress, lying near an overturned floor fan. The electric organ she played was still on when police arrived.
IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO SAY HOW MANY people are stalked each year. The numbers get lumped in with those for family violence, which leaves 4,000 people dead in the U.S. annually. An estimated 75,000 women in Dallas are victims of chronic abuse, and when they choose to leave, often they are stalked.
In his research for his stalking bill. McCall looked at the number of protective orders being issued to try to estimate the number of stalking victims in Texas. Protective orders, used by many battered women to defend themselves, are similar to restraining orders. They legally restrict a batterer from coming near a victim. However, the details and penalties of protective orders vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In each of the major Texas counties-Tarrant. Bexar. Travis, Dallas- as many as 1,800 protective orders are issued each year. But McCall says those cases leave out victims who are stalked by strangers.
Typically, though, stalking begins when a wife or girlfriend leaves a batterer. ’’That’s when they start stalking, and it escalates until the police intervene or the stalker kills,” says McGauley of The Family Place.
McGauley says that fear, obsession and loss of control drive the stalker. “Our statistics says that 62 percent of the guys who are batterers were abused themselves or witnessed abuse. So they have grown up feeling they are not worth anything. They have a fear of abandonment, a fear of loss. As an adult, their greatest fear becomes a reality when she walks out the door.”
Melinda Mason’s life has changed drastically in the last year. Her mother and grandmother are dead, Her father and brother don’t return her calls. She has made headway with her sister, but says that each time they talk, the conversation eventually returns to the murders and then ends in tears and anger.
Melinda’s son has had severe problems dealing with the reality that his father is a murderer. He has spent time in a psychiatric hospital and recently was suspended from school. She is trying to get him into a long-term treatment program by tapping into a fund for victims of violent crime. But her case is stalled in the Texas attorney general’s office.
Melinda says she couldn’t survive without the new man in her life. She met him at a meeting at church and married him this spring. Although she’d rather not face her ex-husband again, she’s been told by Dallas County Assistant District Attorney Julie Jones that conviction on the kidnapping and assault charges could be an important tool to keep Mason in prison. If he wins a death penalty appeal and his sentence is commuted to life. Mason could be eligible for parole in as little as 15 years.
Melinda hopes her case will spark change in Texas laws. It is even more important, she knows, to get the message across to judges that stalkers are dangerous. That seems to be the case in California, where bond for violators of the stalking law is regularly set at a quarter of a million dollars.
Thomas Wayne Mason remains very much a part of Melinda’s life. She didn’t change her name when she remarried in an effort to keep her new husband’s last name secret. “Maybe it will take Wayne’s family longer to find us this way.”
The street where Melinda Mason now lives with her family is very much like the one she grew up on in Whitehouse. The one-story brick house sits at the end of a narrow lane near a field planted with vegetables. It looks quiet and safe. But Melinda knows that appearances can be deceiving. She knows that sometimes when you feel safe, the worst is there to greet you on the other side of the door.
