Politicians were gods with chrome-plated shovels. Progress was seductively sweet. Mickey Herskowitz covered sports on the TV; Ferlin Husky played the Bandera Ballroom on South Main.
Inspiration in a six-pack, Chip Allen and the Rockertiers hit a mean riff on Old Spanish Trail, Sugar Cookie danced her life away on Irvington. Cops and robbers on a Monday night. Business was good for everyone.
For one brief moment business and government merged in a gluttony of excess. History was buried on the corner. Stainless steel and granite webbed the remains of wood frame houses and brick buildings. Neighborhoods and people faded with the wrecking ball. It became easier to forget all of them as dozers flattened a block at a time.
What didn't spring up overnight into a new office building or apartment complex became part of a seemingly endless checkerboard of parking lots. Houston had more parking spaces per capita than any city in the world.
Houston's past was dead, and the politicians couldn't shovel dirt over it fast enough. Image was everything and to Houstonians the perception of neighboring large cities was important. In the minds of many Houstonians, Dallas, not Lee Harvey Oswald, had killed President Kennedy. This was important less than two years after the fact, and by association it made Dallas appear a little less civilized than its southern neighbor. JFK spent his last evening on Earth at a testimonial dinner for Congressman Albert Thomas in Houston, and then departed for Fort Worth and a reportedly unguarded hotel room. The Secret Service went for drinks and left a couple of firefighters on guard.
To the east, New Orleans spoke of culture and sin and made Houston a pale alternative. New Orleans was for long weekends, coming home at 5:00 a.m., cultivating hangovers and easing heartbreaks. Serious people couldn't work in a place where prostitutes, showgirls, barmaids, lawyers and judges mingled as easily as goldfish in a bowl. For Houstonians it wasn't natural. San Antonio to the west was Mexican and violent, backward and historic. Davy Crockett died defending the Alamo there. A few weeks later Sam Houston licked Santa Anna just a few miles east of the city that bore his name. Houston had to finish the things that San Antonio couldn't.
Overbearing and self-important, Houston was finally in a position to piss off anyone in the world, or to extend the warmest welcome imaginable; but Houston was none of these things in the minds of the eighteen-year-old boys from Van Vleck and Cooks Point and a thousand other places that ended up in Houston a year or two before a county draft board sent them to Vietnam. It had all been seen before, other generations and other times. Prom queens escaping from Krotz Springs and Pineville, Louisiana. Travel-worn stragglers cast out of Arkansas on the floorboards of Greyhounds. Soon-to-be pipe fitters, or clerks slipping a fast blow-job for five bucks in the back of a yellow cab with prostitutes on South Main.
Deep in this chattel of dreams, the barely visible stream of humanity from Mexico surged and expanded. The trickle became a torrent and chopped up Tex-Mex Spanish blended with dialects purely regional. Generations of the first Texans, pure Spanish settlers, anglicized and almost invisible became walking billboards for the heritage they had lost. Each was cast against the prideful remnants of the last great invasion of immigrants, white sharecroppers and black slaves. Civil rights were economic rights and while Houston eschewed the largely ethnic neighborhoods of the Northeast, the color of power was black, and the richest black was still oil. It didn't matter if the liquid gold trickled from Spindletop or gushed in Venezuela. Sooner or later the oil would find its way to Texas and the color of power would become green.
South of downtown, on Fannin Street, a new denizen of power crept up on oil. The Texas Medical Center had already replaced the railroads as the largest employer in the county and the reputation of the center's heart surgeons and cancer specialists was bringing the city international attention.
Further south on Fannin, the Astrodome was completed that spring and the first major league baseball game was played indoors between the Houston Astros and the New York Yankees. The Astros won 2 to 1, and Mickey Mantle got the first hit and the first home run indoors. The Dome was a showcase, crowned the eighth wonder of the world. Southeast of the city, off the Gulf Freeway, NASA was building what was later to become the Johnson Space Flight Center. Houston saw its future in space.
In this setting the city was going through significant growing pains. The Houston Police Department, which had been chronically understaffed for decades, was ill-prepared to confront the city's newest growth industry, homicide. Politicians and influential citizens had produced a revolving door atmosphere in the police chief's office. Coupled with annexation, population growth, and the increasing mobility of criminals, the department's position was tenuous.
The Homicide Division was no exception. A department of twenty-three men and one woman, it had few physical resources, but significant dedication and purpose on the part of many of the veteran officers. They had to be dedicated because the city was on its way to a record number of murders. Beyond the crime lab, which was used by the whole department, the Homicide Division had little more than a couple of old manual typewriters, a collection of worn out desks and chairs, and what seemed like the world's longest row of file cabinets. The cabinets contained the files for most of the 1,752 people who had been slain since 1950, and the 75 murders that were considered to be uncleared since 1932, when the division was formed.
Nineteen sixty-five was a bonus year for murder. The city was headed to a record of two hundred plus murders, and almost every day a new one added to the rolls. Compared to Houston in 1999, the murder rate was over twice as high per 100,000 citizens. Despite the statistics, the Homicide Division was a place of card playing, drinking stories, and shoe leather. Baby detectives assigned to the division learned to follow leads by the old school. They knocked on doors and typed notes for hours when typewriters were available. The conviction rate of murderers was one of the highest in the nation and a great source of pride. Despite limited resources, very few killers got away. If they did, there was a good chance at least one of the old-timers would take it personally. Then, even beyond retirement, courtesy calls would be made and dust would not be allowed to gather on special files.
The Ice Box Murders is one of those special files. It has outlived most of the twenty-four officers who were in Houston Homicide in 1965, as well as most of the citizens involved with the case. No arrest has ever been made and it remains to this date Houston's most notorious and bizarre multiple homicide. It is still an active case, and in recent years it has received renewed interest.