Killer Behind the Badge

"I told her that sounded like a damn good idea," he recalls.
Meanwhile, according to Harris County authorities who investigated White's murder, McGowen was outraged when he learned that the weapons charge against Jason had been ignored. The investigators say a revenge-seeking McGowen concocted a tale to obtain a warrant for the arrest of Susan White -- a warrant that accused her of threatening the life of his in-formant. According to trial testimony, McGowen, after several hours of trying, was able to cajole an assistant district attorney into okaying the warrant, and the piece of paper approving the arrest of Susan White was signed by a judge.

According to trial testimony, McGowen had given the assistant prosecutor the impression that his informant's life was in imminent danger. But rather than immediately arresting White, McGowen went home after obtaining the warrant. The next afternoon, August 24, he returned to work. It was not until after midnight, early on Tuesday the 25th, that McGowen, accompanied by two other deputies, drove to 3407 Amber Forest, ostensibly to finally arrest the woman who he claimed was imperiling the life of his informant.

Around 12:30 a.m. McGowen and the other two deputies began banging on White's doors and windows, ordering her to open up. She refused and, instead, called 9-1-1. Meanwhile, McGowen contacted a sergeant on duty by radio who gave him permission to kick in the back door. As the back door flew open, the burglar alarm sounded, and McGowen -- his gun drawn -- charged inside, heading first through the laundry room, then the kitchen and then down the hallway toward White's bedroom.

With the other two deputies a safe distance behind him, McGowen crossed the bedroom doorway, pointed his 10 mm semi-automatic pistol toward the inside of the room and three times ordered White to drop a gun. (White's .25-caliber pistol was found on the bed by McGowen and one of the other two deputies after the shooting.) In his statement to investigators and later at his trial, McGowen claimed that White turned and faced him and raised her pistol at him with her right hand. When she did, McGowen says, he fired at her three times. Later he would brag to a jailer that he had shot White first in the head and then twice in the torso -- in reverse order of the method recommended in a federal law enforcement training film he had seen. White died on her living room floor, despite paramedics efforts to save her life.

Fatal shootings involving police officers are always strange scenes. The "do not cross" perimeter cordoned off by yellow police tape is always larger. The detectives and other officers are always a little more tense, a little less friendly to reporters. But when investigators arrived at 3407 Amber Forest in Olde Oaks, they found, to their surprise, that there were no reporters or photographers around at all. Hurricane Andrew was about to hit the Louisiana coast and, in the aftermath of the Republican National Convention, newsrooms around the city were stretched thin. But stranger than the absence of the media, the investigators thought, was evidence at the scene that immediately raised suspicions about McGowen's version of what had happened in Susan White's bedroom.

The first odd thing to strike one of the investigators was the fact that McGowen had been executing a "retaliation" arrest warrant when the fatal shooting took place. You just don't see many retaliation warrants issued for people who live in fashionable subdivisions like Olde Oaks. But it could happen, the investigator admitted to himself.

Then there was the picture that McGowen, under questioning at the scene, painted of Susan White and her son being violent and dangerous, machine-gun dealing desperadoes. It just didn't seem to fit. Shortly after they had arrived, the investigators had been told that White had called 9-1-1 -- something you wouldn't expect a criminal to do.

Finally, they just had a bad feeling about the shooting. During the required "walk through" at the scene, in which an officer reenacts a shooting, McGowen seemed to be proud of what he had done.

"I've never seen that in an officer before or since," says one investigator.