Witnessed: Devil in the Ditch - Borderlands | 6. Oh Sh*t

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

Dale and Kelly hit the jackpot, make their first arrest, and close in on their second. Want the full story? Unlock all episodes of Witnessed, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Witnessed show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

El museo Picasso Málaga presenta Picasso es cultor, al igual que en el resto de su creación, la escultura de Picasso se distingue por innovar en el uso de técnicas y materiales poco ortodoxos. Puedes imaginar cuáles y como, descubrela. ¡Qué empecé, Miria! I think the horse likes me. If that's what's sticking the entirety of his cavernous snout into my hand means. I think the horse likes me. If that's what's sticking the entirety of his cavernous snout into my hand means. I think the horse likes me. If that's what's sticking the entirety of his cavernous snout into my hand means. I think the horse likes me. If that's what's sticking the entirety of his cavernous snout into my hand means.

As I'm standing on Saturday morning listening to the insects buzz in the tall grass, at the county fairgrounds outside of Marfa. There were plenty of days in the town's history when this spot was buzzing with activity, the pounding of hooves and swish of a rope zeroing in on a calf, with a crowd whooping it up when a young cowboy hit his mark. The only swish today is from this white horse, his tail trying to swat away flies. The county fairground is unremarkable now, A bed run down. Not used as much anymore. You'd never guess what happened here 30 years ago.

You'd never guess this was the place where the lives of Robert Chambers and Rick Thompson would change forever. Not just their lives. The events that took place here would shake the entire big bend region. From Campside Media, the first season of Witnessed, this is Borderlands. I'm Rob Domingo, Chapter 6.

Oh shit. Dale Stinson and Kelly cook were desperately trying to find their key informant, Sam Thomas. If they were going to have any hope of actually prosecuting Robert Chambers, they were going to need Sam, on the stand, laying out the details of the vast drug smuggling ring that Chambers ran. But Dale and Kelly were starting to fear the worst. It had been a few days, and no sign of Sam. Maybe they'd seen him inside a body bag.

Maybe he was in a hole in the desert and would never be found. By Tuesday, December 3rd, 1991, Dale was beginning to lose hope. It was late at night, I don't know, 10-11 o'clock at night. The phone rings. Sam Thomas. Just as suddenly as he was gone from Alpine, he had reappeared. No pleasantries, no explanation of where he'd been. Sam got right to the point.

Robert Chambers had just brought over a new drug shipment. And it's in Marfa, in the horse trailer belonging to the sheriff of Presidio County. A horse trailer belonging to the sheriff of Presidio County. That set off major alarm bells. I said, okay, I have you told anybody else? No. I said, okay, you're at home? Yes, I'm at home. I said, stay there. Don't go anywhere. With Sam still on the line, Dale tried to process what he just heard. First of all, I was relieved that he was still alive, and then I was kind of shocked when he told me what was going on.

We thought he was back in business and getting ready to do something, but this kind of confirmed it. So I hung up the phone and was going to call everybody. But Sam obviously had too much of something, he didn't hang up the phone. Sam and his rush to get off the line had him hung up the call. And the antiquated phone technology still being used in far west Texas in 1991. It required both people to hang up and a call. That cut off my phone and so I couldn't use the phone to call out.

That was it. My phone was gone. There was no other phone in my house. And there was no way I could go anywhere. So I sent my wife next door at 11 o'clock at night and I got on the door and see if she could make calls to everybody. And then she made calls to everybody and then she drove me out, dropped me out for the hotel.

The hotel was the appointed staging area for the small team of DEA and customs agents that Dale and Kelly were leading. Soon they were all arriving. Everybody's, you know, kind of on edge. Here it is, it's late. Everybody's getting ready to go to bed. And we're out on this and are we sure this is what it is?

And there's a lot of supposition, a lot of second thinking about what's going on. And what happened? Why did Sam just drop the phone, things like this. And it did seem slightly suspicious, but there wasn't time for speculation. If Sam Thomas was telling the truth, then there was a major drug shipment sitting in a horse trailer

in the middle of the fairgrounds in Marfa, Texas. Kelly knew they needed to act fast. He immediately dispatched another customs agent, Bill Fort to the scene. We had Bill go directly to the fairgrounds to watch that trailer. Then Kelly got together the rest of the team and deployed them to stake out the key players in the case. We asked them to go check on Sam. We asked them to go, you know, at least drive by and see if there's anything going on at Roberts Place.

You know, kind of the standard, you know, go by, check the bars, see if any of our usual suspects are there. And that just left Kelly and Dale, who said off to see just how good Sam Thomas' information really was. Kelly and I went over to Marfa. It was a...well, it was kind of... we didn't know what to expect to put it bluntly. Dale was sitting shotgun and Kelly's cheverlet Caprice. All thoughts on what they might find awaiting them in Marfa. The car fell silent as they sank into their thoughts. The darkness of the desert surrounded them. We didn't know how good

this information was. He's been out supposedly with Robert Chambers for a number of days and we have the information we don't know how solid it is. We don't know exactly what's going on. Are we walking into something we don't want to walk into? I mean reliable source, but this is an oddity. There was even that skepticism in your mind of Sam screwing us, something happened, and Sam got involved in something, and he's putting us off the scent. But there was something else bothering Dale and Kelly. The fact that Sam had said the load was sitting in a trailer belonging to the Presidio County

Sheriff's Office. They'd been wary of Rick Thompson before that moment. They knew he was close with Robert Chambers, and the whole time they'd wanted to make absolutely sure the sheriff didn't know anything about their investigation. But now they were asking a bigger question. Did the sheriff have a role in this whole thing? As they drove fast down the Tulane highway, they radioed ahead to Bill Ford to ask about the trailer sitting in the fairgrounds.

And I almost remember for batom his response was was it's loaded 10-4. It's like oh shit here we go. I was amped up I was nervous. Let's put it that way. And maybe I didn't show it but on the inside I was and I was churning. And I think Dale was two. After 25 minutes of driving, Dale and Kelly arrived in Marfa. By then it was, I'm saying one in the morning, maybe a little later, it was cold as hell man, it was cold, but it was early hours by then. There was nobody there.

We pulled up to the one of the stop and robbs, you know, the convenience stores, and used the pay phone to call back to the rest of the guys and find out what was going on at that end. And we look on Kelly's face while I'm standing there on the phone because, you know know it's not a phone booth And you got no cover at all. It's hanging on the side of the store and Kelly gets this look on his face and I'm wondering what the heck is going on

It's not like a truck Just winding up I mean Holland asked coming from in town. But I'm watching this vehicle as it drives by, and it's Rick. Rick Thompson, the Presidio County Sheriff, the guy whose horse trailer was sitting a few blocks away with a load of drugs inside, And he turns and looks right at us. I mean, he looks at me right in the face. And I thought, bad shit, that's it. We're dead. He's going to come back and he's going to shoot us both. But he had this

for lack of a better word. He had a very wild look in his eye. I mean, he's literally like, you know, 30 feet away when he drives by. And for whatever reason, he was so, he was so focused on something that he didn't realize who we were. And he kept going. And I'm telling Dale, we gotta get out of here. We gotta get off this street, we gotta get out of this, we gotta get off this main road. That was Rick. And I can picture perfectly right now.

Is it that way for you? Yes, still. To this day, I can still have him. He had his hat on, he had his cowboy hat on, and he had on a big coat, because like I say, it was cold. And he just looked right at us and kept going, which was a tremendous relief to me. I thought, well, okay, he's gone for the moment. We gotta get out of here. We gotta go somewhere else."

At that point, only fellow agent Bill Fort was in Marfa. Dale and Kelly planning next steps. Bill Fort watching the trailer. They consider doing a stakeout, so you think it could catch chambers red handed, picking up the trailer himself. But Thompson was now circling around, and if he'd ID them, then maybe a whole posse of Robert's guys was going to show up. So we thought, well, we can't do this.

We can't let it continue this way. There's too much heat already. So that's when we call some guys from Alpine who had to pick up some of our guys to come hook up to that trailer and get it to the office, to get it to the EA office in Alpine. And that's what they did. And then we all met up there. As the team reconvened the EA office in Alpine and that's what they did. And then we all met up there.

As the team reconvened in the early morning in Alpine, before the first light had even broken across the borderlands, there was one question on everyone's lips. What exactly was in that loaded trailer? When he says, the trailer is loaded. He didn't tell us what loaded meant. Didn't explain that. At first glance, the trailer was just a horse trailer. A lot of hay, no horses. But the agents started to sift through. First thing, looking at them, just sitting in there, you're thinking, okay, maybe it was marijuana.

And then you start feeling around, you see the bricks. You feel the bricks in there. So it was pretty plain at that point. That's not marijuana. Did you pull out your pocket knife and slice a bag open? Oh, that's good on Miami Vs, but no, we didn't do that. So now dipping the blade in a little bit of coke and tasting it. Nobody, that's not the way to test cocaine. Instead, they used a basic field test to figure out just what the substance was. No doubt about it. Cocaine.

My recollection is that it came back very, very pure, a very high percentage of purity, which meant it had not been cut at all. I mean, I recall it was like 99 something percent pure. I don't think I'd seen any trouble that large before even marijuana had never seen over a ton of it. And of course, the markings that we saw on the cocaine were indicative of a particular group. The markings were a symbol that looks like the Ralph Lauren logo, a Pollo pony with a writer.

In 1991, that meant one thing on a bag of cocaine, property of the Medellin cartel, cocaine, property of the Medellin cartel, Pablo Escobar's organization. The cocaine had come from Colombia through Mexico and was now in law enforcement custody in a warehouse in Alpine. And it's a little daunting, you know, to think that you just took off an organization's, you know, over a ton of their cocaine. And it kind of made you paranoid, really cautious, you know, wondering who knows we have it and who is watching us to see where it is. No one came to get their cocaine back, but there was one last thing for Dale and Kelly's team to do that following morning.

Arrest the guy they'd been chasing for all that time. Robert Chambers. Dale and Kelly didn't go themselves. Another key agent, Bob Mueller, had asked to leave the arrest team, and they thought he deserves some of the spotlight. After all, Bob Mueller was the guy who had first convinced the snitch Sam Thomas to talk. It also didn't seem like the most pleasant task. Mueller and his fellow agents were bracing for a fight.

This was Robert Chambers. They closed in on his trailer home. It was sitting in a field next to those grand horse stables he had built. This was going to be a surprise raid. You don't give a drug smuggler with a history of violence a heads up. So they burst through the front door, guns pointed. The guys that served that warrant said he was on his knees crying and begging not to be shot. So I guess it kind of depends on what side of the gun he's on as to how he's going to

react. More, after the break. Uncover from CBC Podcasts brings you award-winning investigations year-round. Infiltrate an international network of neo-Nazi extremists. We're at it with racist language. Discover the true story of the CIA's attempts at mind control. Their objective was to wipe my memory. Or dig into a crypto-king's mysterious death and a quarter billion dollars missing.

There are deep oddities in this case. With episodes weekly, uncover is your home for in-depth reporting and exceptional storytelling. Find uncover wherever you get your podcasts. Hay cosas que te dejan pensando como por qué los vostezos son contagiosos, pero MailChimp... No, MailChimp analiza los datos de millones de correos electrónicos para ofrecer recomendaciones personalizadas para mejorar el contenido de tus correos electrónicos, segmentar tu público, entre muchas cosas más, adivina menos y vende más con IntuitimailChimp, la marca número 1 en ImailMarketing automatización. Empiezo hoy mismo en MailChimp.com, vas a ver más tus públicos de marcas competidoras en número globales de clientes en 2021-2022. I'm going to go to the next station. I'm going to the next station. I'm going to the next station.

I'm going to the next station. I'm going to the next station. I'm going to the next station. I'm going to the next station. I'm going to the next station. I'm going to the next station. I'm going to the next station. I'm going to the next station.

I'm going to the next station. I'm going to the next station. I'm going to the next station. It was early on a Wednesday morning in December 1991, and Catherine Palmera set staring at her office window in downtown Marfa. She had the perfect spot to notice the comings and goings of daily town life. Catherine had quit working as the secretary to share Frick Thompson a few months before the dramatic events with the horse trailer, and she was now an assistant to Donald Judd, the abstract artist who came to Marfa in the 1970s and helped revive the town's fortunes.

And it was in Judd's office where another one of his workers burst through the door to break the news. I had just gotten to work. It was 8 in the morning and she came in the office and said, Robert Chambers was arrested early this morning. Apparently there was a trailer full of drugs out at the fairgrounds. And it all kinds of things started flooding in. And she said it was in a red horse trailer. And I said, you want to go out there? Let's go. Let's go see what we can see. And so we hopped in, I think my truck and we drove out

there. There was nothing to see. There was no yellow tape. There was no big crime scene. There was no... Nothing except a fairgrounds in an arena. But the fairgrounds had gotten Catherine thinking. Because just the day before, watching from that same office window, she'd notice the

sheriff driving out that direction. I kept saying, well, the sheriff was out there too, and you could start feeling the tremors. Everybody wondered what was Rick's involvement in this. There were people already starting to question early on. There was speculation, conflicting information, and Rick wasn't talking. He was saying he had no comment. Why was there a Red Horse Trailer with one ton of cocaine parked out at the Presidio County fairgrounds next to the arena. And the horse trailer, after all,

belong to the Presidio County Sheriff's Office. And why did DEA pull it away and take it to Alpine? I mean, just there were so many, many questions and I kind of felt in my gut. I started having a lot of things starting to come back to me, the conversations in the office, the Red Horse trailer, the peculiar mood swings. Katherine wasn't the only one reaching that conclusion.

Oh shit. What the fuck? Thompson? A cop? Oh shit. What are they gonna do now? Even for people like Nancy Burton, who had seen a lot hanging around Robert Chambers and his outlaw crew back in the 70s and 80s, there was shock. And how dare... how dare him as a law enforcement agent do that?

How dare he... crooked cops? Uh-uh. If you're gonna be a law enforcement agent, you better be a bovry proche, in my opinion. But Rick was a free man. He hadn't been charged with anything. Robert was the one who was sitting in a jail cell. And from that jail cell, one of his first calls had been to his lawyer, Rod Pountain. his first calls had been to his lawyer, Rod Pontin. Take trust of me to representing. No, that I had done similar work for similar people in similar situations with major drug charges. Drug lawyer, Rod Pontin, had represented chambers in an earlier federal case for illegal possession

of a handgun. But conspiracy to import one ton of cocaine was an entirely different level of trouble. Well, he recognized it was a very serious case. I mean, that amount of drugs was a life sentence, but it was still sort of being the typical puffed up arrogant Robert that he frequently was. Maybe the reason for Robert's arrogance at that moment is that he already had an explanation ready for the drugs.

His story was that he was helping Sheriff Rick Thompson run a reverse sting operation. Reverse sting operations are where law enforcement officers are in possession of drugs, sell them to willing buyers, then eventually arrest those buyers. But it didn't take a close examination to realize that the notion that Rick and Robert would have been running this kind of operation with a ton of cocaine didn't make sense. Because for a start, you can't just find a buyer for that kind of shipment. It's tens of millions of dollars worth of product, way outside the purview of a local sheriff. Even a self-proclaimed anti-drug warrior like Rick Thompson.

When Robert is telling you that story, what's the little voice in your head saying? That's Eric, one of our producers. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Robert knew I didn't believe it. And that's why I explained that. I told Robert that we're not going to even deal with that theory unless they had proof from somebody else besides he and Rick Thompson. And of course, Robert did not have any proof from anybody else. It was just his word and the word of Rick Thompson.

Yeah, that kind of leads into my next question of what was your strategy. But the strategy, in any case, you look for a defense, and in Robert's case, there wasn't one because they had plenty of evidence of him being involved in the conspiracy with Thompson from Sam Thomas Jr. and photographs and recordings and other things that the government put together. So going to trial was pretty much a guaranteed life sentence. Which meant Robert had only one option. He needed to tell the feds the truth, or something close to it, and pray he could cut a deal.

And not long after, when Robert was leaving federal court following his arrest, he made it known to Dale that this was exactly what he was going to do. I saw him being hauled back to the jail cell and he's practically trying to pull himself away from the two US marshals. He's got chains on his feet, he's got chains on his hands, and he's trying to pull away. I need to talk to you. I need to talk to you now. Well, we have a system. You have an attorney. So Dale told him, I can't talk to you now.

you have an attorney. So Dale told him, I can't talk to you now. The reason for Dale's brush off of chambers? Well, for one, DEA agents don't just get a confession from an arrested drug smuggler in the street. But really, Robert just wasn't the guy Dale wanted to talk to. I wanted Rick to talk to me. Robert Chambers, I believe, deserved to stay in jail. Because it was Rick's exact role in all this

that was still an open question. On the night of the drug bust, Dale and Kelly already had plenty of suspicions about Rick. We had an inclination that the sheriff was involved. To what extent we didn't know. I mean, obviously he was out and about that night. He did go to the fairgrounds. He did drive around. But really initially just based on that, you can't really say what his involvement was because he didn't stop at the

fairgrounds. He didn't check the trailer, you know, so it was still kind of questionable at that point. Maybe he just kind of got a similar call that we did. Hey, there's a ton of coke at your fairgrounds or there's somebody just brought a big load of coke into your town. We didn't know. But their informant Sam Thomas eventually spilled everything he knew. Left no doubt about the sheriff's role. Sam had been with Robert Chambers during the entire cocaine operation,

helping him get the drugs across the border. The handoff had been on the river, not far from the ranch where Robert had grown up. A motto choreofuentes, Lord of the skies, and the head of the war as cartel had been there personally. I guess he had 20 or 30 men there with him, all with the quarter of the Chivas. That's slang for AK-47s. They were protecting the load. After taking possession of the shipment, Sam Thomas revealed the chambers had brought

it back to his family ranch. It was a rugged road, but a fairly short drive. No cops, very little risk. But moving the cocaine shipment farther north was a lot riskier. There were checkpoints, sensors, border patrol, maybe customs and DEA. To make sure it made it through, they needed the perfect drug mule. He's the sheriff. His county can be wherever he wants in the county whenever he wants.

Sheriff Rick Thompson arrived on the Chambers Ranch in his marked car, a Chevy suburban. Chambers and his men loaded up the truck and Thompson drove north. He came up highway 67 twice, I believe, right through the Border Patrol checkpoint, and then he came up Pinto Canyon Road once. Three separate trips, 800 pounds of cocaine each time. And I think the board of patrol sensors were activated and they responded, well, it's just the sheriff, you know, stopping chat, he's on his way. So yeah, how perfect, you know, who would ever suspect the sheriff of Peacemeel and a load of coat for

a class one drug violator. Now that Kelly and Dale knew this, they still wanted to hear what the sheriff had to say. This case they had been building, it was against Robert. He was the target. Maybe Rick would help them and save his own skin at the same time. In this case, you're dealing with the sitting sheriff with an accusation of something very grave. How do you approach that?

Is there any good way to approach that? I wonder what Rick has to say in his defense. It looks bad, but let's go from there. Dale decided to talk with Joaquin Jackson. Jackson was a long time Texas Ranger, an elite branch of the state police, and something of a celebrity.

He would go on to co-star in a few westerns, with Tommy Lee Jones and Robert DeVal. I talked to Jackson the next day. Joaquin was a good friend of one to church together, and he said I'll talk to Rick. And he said he went over and talked to Rick, and Rick said, I ain't talking to Stinson. Actually, the message Joaquin Jackson passed on was a little more colorful than that. I'm not gonna use the language that was relayed to me, but he said he wasn't talking to me.

Soon enough though, the sheriff would end his silence. That's after the break. Last Wednesday, federal and state agencies discovered more than one ton of uncut cocaine, and one of the sheriff's horse trailers down in Martha. Today, the sheriff admitted to putting it there. Craig Ropper has a story. Presidio Sheriff Rick Thompson says the drug war is on, but it's between state and federal law enforcement agencies.

He has admitted to escorting more than 2 24 hundred pounds of uncut cocaine up from the border last week in the furtherance of a reverse drug sting. Tuesday, December 10th, a week after Robert Chambers was arrested. Sheriff Rick Thompson and his attorney hosted a press conference in the West Texas City of Monahans. The ostensible purpose was to allow the sheriff to explain himself. monahans. The ostensible purpose was to allow the sheriff to explain himself. Rumors were swirling, and the sheriff was out to put his constituents at ease. The sheriff and his lawyer stood in a wood-paneled room, a large American flag hanging on a pole behind them. Thompson's lawyer looked somber. Shoulders hunched, hand stuffed in the pockets of his sport coat. Instead of confidently addressing the room, he mumbled an introduction of his client toward

the floor, as if he was hoping no one would hear. The sheriff didn't seem much more at ease. He was wearing a gray jacket with a sheriff star clipped to his tie. On his head, was an almost comically large white stethsin, pulled down almost to his eyes, which were themselves cloaked in what looked to be transition lenses. A dozen or so reporters sat silently, jotting notes. Cameras started to click. The sheriff addressed the room. It was all entirely legitimate, he said. A reverse sting.

It was all entirely legitimate, he said, a reverse sting. He and Chambers were transporting cocaine so that they could catch the real bad guys. But he hadn't told anyone else about this. The operation was kind of a top secret deal, so yeah, you can understand how the DEA had gotten such a twisted impression that there was something illegal going on. Basically, we had a breakdown in communications at a time that they really wanted to communicate it because I was ready for communication. It wouldn't be that kind of felt over here if we were doing our job.

And I mean, all of my department, anybody could probably have an unorthodox manner of doing law enforcement and they have a side of the book with 15 different people, hence, I've watched and rewatched the video of that press conference. And the thing that's really striking is, this man who everyone describes is so confident, so proud, so well Texas, he looks unsteady. He's fidgety, uneasy, pacing a lot. He kind of lunges towards seated reporters when they ask a question. His answers are vague and evasive. He falls back on G-Shuck's platitudes about local law enforcement. The whole thing didn't add up, and I'm far from the only one to notice this. Everyone basically had the same reaction. They felt like Rod Ponton did when he was listening to Robert Chambers claim the whole thing was a reverse staying operation.

Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Rick has a tell, most people have a tell, when they're lying, and Rick's was that he gets nervous, he paces the room. Catherine Palmyra, who had worked for Rick in a ledged sheet seen him doctor reports and stage evidence, she watched the news coverage of the press conference It looked familiar You know he walks back and forth and back and forth and he kind of flies his arms all over the place and he talks with chew in his mouth and

I looked at that press conference where he was trying to explain That this was going to be a reverse sting, that he was going to operate on his own, because he didn't want to go through all the bureaucracy, other law enforcement agencies, and he was just going to do this by himself. And there he was, the camera had a hard time following, he was going back and forth and all over the place. who's going back and forth and all over the place. But perhaps the most damning part of Rick Thompson's December 10th press conference was a

single sentence. One he uttered when reporters questioned why the sheriff would even be involved with a man like Robert Chambers. Man, you've got to understand that cops and crooks are just about the same caliber except one's got a bag. I'll repeat that, because it's a pretty staggering thing for any sheriff to say, much less than I kind of West Texas law in order. Cops and crooks are just about the same caliber, Except one's got a badge.

This is the big old White Hat 6'4' Rit Thompson Sheriff and told a press conference of TV reporters that the only difference between a cop and a doper is the badge. Rod Pountain, like pretty much everyone else, was speechless. Sheriff Rick Thompson was hanging himself. Off he went. And that seal was faint because it pissed off every long force guy in West Texas. And they didn't want to do anything more of a do with him after that. Still, they wanted to make one last try to get Thompson to talk before indictments got

handed down. Maybe if Thompson talked, he could stave off the worst, and if he disliked Dale so much that he wouldn't talk to him, maybe he'd talk to someone else. They sent Bill and Kelly over because they knew him the best, and they tried again. Bill Ford, who had worked in the area for years, and Kelly, the local kid with the game warden dad, every cop in the area knew and liked. Rick had actually grown up with Kelly's dad. If anyone was going to get Rick to talk, it was probably going to be Kelly. So then we just decided at some point during that month, me and Bill went to interview him, to interview Rick.

And, you know, first question out of our mouths, he said, you know, boys, I think I'm gonna have to refer you to my attorney. And of course, it's like, oh God, he really is involved in this. At this point, Rick Thompson was still sheriff of Presidio County, still a free man. He still hadn't even been charged with a crime. But he had admitted to working with Robert Chambers and had likened cops to crooks.

And Robert was sitting in jail, and if he wanted to save his own hide, the best way to do that was to cooperate with the investigation and flip on Rick. Catherine Paul Mera could feel the tension everywhere she went. wind. Yeah, I mean, it was just, I think I was in kind of a shock, a trauma of thinking, oh my gosh, something big is about to happen because I could feel it. I could just feel the atmosphere and the town listening to the people talk, seeing the mood change, seeing people's reaction, hearing people's reactions, the speculation and everything. I realized this is going to have a lot of tentacles and this is going to be big. The grand jury was scheduled to announce its decision on Thursday, January 9th in the

city of Pecos, the nearest federal courthouse. Rick and Robert would both be there. That week, Monroe Elms, the county judge, decided to go visit the sheriff. Monroe thought the sheriff was plenty crooked, and he was convinced the sheriff had waged an intimidation campaign against him when he ran for office. And Monroe remembered clearly, unequivocally, being told by the sheriff that the good guys needed to sell drugs to keep it from the bad guys. But Monroe had come to kind of like the sheriff. I actually felt sorry for Rick.

So the day before he was supposed to go to court in Pekis, Rick was in the green suburban. Monroe arrived at the county jail as Rick was leaving. And Rick asked me, what do you think they're going to do to me, Monroe? And I said, Rick, I don't have a clue. You know, that's out of my league. I said, but I'll tell you one thing, and he said, what's that? I said, you see that little boy over there? His son was throwing a football to Steve Bailey.

I said, if you ever want to see him again, you need to get in your truck, you need to cut the motor on right now. You need to drive away to Ohanargas fast as you can go. And you need to get over there and hide out with your friends. You have a lot of friends in O.J. You know what I'm talking about. These friends in O.J. They were some of the same people Monroe had parties with since his youth and he clearly thought these Mexican cartel folks Would recognize Rick as one of their own and provide him shelter. You need to hide out with him and

Stay there for as long as you can and then cut a deal Turn yourself in and cut a deal and you'll get a better you'll get less time And you'll be able to see your son. If not, you're never going to seem to get. And he said, quote, I will never give them the pleasure of seeing me run. That was a quote he gave me back. Munro nodded, turned sadly toward his car, said goodbye, and drove off. Rick Thompson was doing court the very next day.

I can't imagine when he was thinking that he was going to walk away from this, but he really did. He really thought that. That's next time on Borderlands. Borderlands was reported and hosted by me, Rob Domingo, in written by me, Eric Benson and David Waters. Eric Benson is our supervising producer. David Waters is our executive producer. It came side the executive producers are Josh Dean, Vanessa Gregoriovis, Adam Hoff, and Matt

Cher. Our field producers are Ryan Cads, Travis Bubenek, and Jesse Basham. Our associate producers are Leo Schick and Lydia Smith, fact checking by Alex Yablon. Special thanks to Rajiv Gola and Ashley Ann Krigbaum. Scoring and sound designed by Ian Chambers and Rod Sherwood is our engineer. Original music by Julian Lynch. Before I let you go, I want to encourage you to check out True Crime Week on Stitcher. They've picked Borderlands as one of their featured podcasts. Thanks, Stitcher.

And we're excited to be part of a great lineup of series that dig deep into all manner of mysteries. So listen to Borderlands and other True Crime podcasts like Power and Smoke Screen for free on Stitcher. Also check out their curated homepage to find your next true crime pod obsession. If you're on your phone, you can download Stitcher in your App Store or go to Stitcher.com.