Murder, arson causes trio to sweat and suffer in jail

To die for what you may know or have seen

Waco – When the flames climbed into the gloom of an early winter Thursday evening, they scorched the scrub hardwood trees in the small copse where trailers are parked near the Brazos in Bosqueville.

Alarmed, two neighbor boys tried to rescue the woman and her children who screamed for help. They were able to bring a 3-year-old out of the fire to safety. One of the rescuers was overcome by smoke; he was hospitalized overnight for treatment.

A neighbor woman found the fire too intense; the heat drove her back when she tried to break a window, and four firemen were injured by second degree burns from the steam and heat generated by the burning mobile home as they subdued the blaze.

When it was over, a mother and her two young children lay dead in the smoldering ruins of the trailer.

Today, neighbors are afraid to talk. There is a palpable feeling of mistrust and the air of the hunted as they refuse to answer a knock at the door, peeping out of curtained windows until a visitor leaves.

Terror stalks the streets; fear menaces the people. In these venues, the underworld rules.

Finding evidence of a fire of suspicious origin, a Waco fire marshal and agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms are sweating a man and his two girlfriends, the trio in custody in the McLennan County Jail.

Females in a tank there overheard the two women – one who is a former girlfriend of an inmate, the other the current paramour of the man – as the argument erupted over the former having given a statement to investigators. A man is suspected of setting the fire in retaliation for what a national drug and prostitution crime syndicate thought the woman who perished in the fire might have known, overheard, or seen.

The prison gang in question is known to operate free world methamphetamine rings, extortion operations, and prostitution conspiracies from inside penitentiary walls.

He had asked the former girlfriend for a credible alibi. Though he had seen her on a Friday evening following the fire, could she tell investigators they actually met on a Thursday?

At first she said she might be in agreement, but when she learned of the crime for which he is suspected, she changed her mind.

She gave a statement to the arson investigator detailing the man's request.

His present girlfriend, also jailed in connetion with an unrelated investigation, took great offense. The pair argued over the first woman's cooperation with investigators over the course of a week, asking other women to carry their messages back and forth.

When officers mounted a shakedown of their adjacent tanks for contraband, their confrontation intensified; they met in the corridor, screaming threats at one another until corrections staff split them up.

On the one hand, the former lover, herself a mother, said she will not help protect someone accused of so heinous a crime. Her interlocutor, the man's new lover, accused her of being jealous.

No arrests have yet been announced in the investigation.