'Sack chasers' and the all-night jick house blues

This is my house, and I'm making some changes in my life. If you don't like who's here, you can leave now.” - A hand-printed note on the door of Carrie D. Woodlock's house 

Waco – After an assailant “Glocked” her husband Kenny in 2004, her life started downhill, according to Carrie D. Woodlock.

That was the turning point.

“Babies, infants, sometimes have a condition called 'failure to thrive,'” she says. “That's what it was like with me after they killed Kenny.”

She was an LVN who dispensed medications – antibiotics, narcotics – to elderly and convalescent patients at a local nursing home on a 120-bed intensive care ward. He was a non-stop drinker, an alcoholic, she says.

“Kenny never had anything to do with drugs. He stayed drunk most of the time.” Nevertheless, a Waco homicide detective named Woodruff insisted his death by a gunshot to the head - an open case in which no murderer has ever been brought to justice - was drug-related.

“It wasn't about drugs. I know it wasn't.” He left a bar with four other people after a woman objected to the fact that he would not stop talking about herself, his wife, Carrie, she says she has learned.

Authorities later found his lifeless body dumped on the side of a street. Then what was all that about? When asked, she said, “He was hitting me. AB is real concerned about what they look like.” AB, she says, means Aryan Brotherhood, a tight-knit prison gang of heavily tattooed men allied against the hostilities of African-American and Hispanic prisoners that controls many rackets both inside penal institutions and on the streets of American cities.

Their mottos include, “blood in, blood out,” such sentiments as “bros before ho's,” and the very real fact that a commitment to their ranks is for life. The only way out is feet first. Kenny Wagner, her husband, “wanted out,” she recalls.

Then she names four people by their first names – one of them a female – who according to her sources escorted the doomed man to a vehicle outside a Waco bar. She names the trigger man.

Then she laughs. Her reactions are often startling.

“For a long time, I planned to Glock him back,” she says. She mimics the bang bang, you're dead motion kids make when they play cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers. This is not something she doesn't talk about very often.

A young man who goes by the street name “Buddha,” a Navy veteran who readily admits he lives at the Veterans Administration Medical Center on New Road in a ward devoted to a “lifestyle enhancement program,” has entered into the discussion and talks with her about the man she named as the trigger man in that long-ago gang land killing. He reports to her what certain people have said about what happened on the day her husband lost his life to a hit man's bullet.

He is a very large man with a ready smile and what is reportedly an extremely high IQ, according to people on the streets. She explains that he often sits up with her in the long nights when visitors come and go from her door at all hours. She interrupts their discussion long enough to explain that local police officials do not believe her. Of the four people she named, “They all saw something different.”

Her insistence that the police and district attorney file murder charges against these people, she repeats in a stolid tone, is the main impetus for her continuing legal battles with The People of the State of Texas.

Does the use of drugs complicate matters? She shrugs, says she's been clean and sober for months. She asks Buddha to go to a nearby Dollar General Store, that he wait outside during the interview. He is what Carrie calls a “sack chaser,” a marginalized hanger-on in the world of methamphetamine marketing to addicts who crave another bump, and another, and another. And another. And so forth. 

“Normally, I like to win,” she says. Her ability to control the actions of people who come and go in her world is the stuff of legend among her peers. The woman is said to have no aspect of the crawfish in her nature. Her pet is a pit bull terrier puppy.

Carrie is a disabled veteran of the drug wars. She explains it this way. The onset of her principle diseases, paranoid schizophrenia and major depressive disorder, came in adolescence, when she was 13.

“It's a disability,” she says. “It would probably be easier to walk around with one arm.” She lives on a disability pension granted her by the Social Security Administration, and has been in legal trouble on and off since being accused of tampering with government documents in 2003 in her handling of medications on the job.

On the day of our interview, she says she is confined to the small frame house she rents in a west Waco neighborhood due to the electronic monitor attached to her leg by an ankle bracelet. It's part of the terms and conditions of a probated sentence, an agreement that was violated by certain indiscretions on her part.In the days following the tragic February 16, 2012, deaths of Ashley Dawn Rogers and two of her children in a mobile home fire located at 6312 N. 19th Street in Bosqueville, her former problem with another adherent to Aryan Brotherhood philosophies and loyalties began anew.(please click here for an earlier report)

Delvin Maddison, a first lover she knows from her days in high school at La Vega, spent the previous night and most of the following day with her at an apartment she shared with a security guard on Sanger Avenue – The Sandstone.

They go way back. “He took my virginity; I took his virginity,” she says in matter-of-fact tones.

Carrie D. Woodlock recalls that Delvin Maddison spent the night with her at the Sanger Avenue apartment, selling crystal, jick, bumps, half grams, whatever you want to call it. A heavily tattooed man who speaks in the ghetto patois affected by some gang members, Carrie says he is not really a very influential member of the subculture to which he claims allegiance.

“Delvin is a fake,” she says, dead pan, flat-footed, and with forthright insistence. “He's fake AB and AC,” she adds. AC stands for Aryan Circle, a similar organization. “Delvin is a sack chaser.” After a night of selling drugs to people who came to the door, she alleges, drugs that were “fronted” to him by a supplier expecting repayment, Delvin bought her presents and items she needed from the grocery store.

He insisted he would have a mechanic fix her car, which wasn't running because of a transmission problem. He left the apartment at about 3:30 p.m. Hours later, at about 8 p.m., he returned with a man she knows only as John. They left to obtain a trailer upon which to transport the car to a garage. The trailer and the auto repair efforts never materialized, she remembers.

“John wasn't really a mechanic." He was a sack chaser, too.

She had spent a hectic evening during the ensuing time, trying to persuade an area bank she uses for an automatic deposit point for her government pension checks to allow another person to make an on-line transfer to her account. Clerks at the bank's debit card service could not authorize the transaction due to procedural rules. She spent when she recalls as 181 minutes arguing with various bank officials on her cell phone. Of that, she is entirely sure. She paid the bill, which put her monthly fee sky high at nearly $200.

She had arrived at an arrangement by which she would visit an area Kinko's store, make certain electronic adjustments, and enable the banking transaction to proceed. “I was just walking out the door,” she remembers. Delvin and John wanted to her stay.

“John wanted to wash his hands. They were entirely black.” She raised hell; they insisted she wait. She remembers well. John quickly washed the black substance off his hands with dishwashing soap, she recalls. It wasn't grease or oily grime. “It came off real easy.” Delvin's hands were clean. She shrugs. “He must have been wearing gloves.”

It was the last time she saw her friend Delvin until he showed up in the days following the deadly fire, a blaze so hot it had fully engulfed the trailer house within minutes of its being reported to the Waco Fire Department. He had a problem with the “Sergeant,” she recalls. The Sergeant? Police sergeant? “No, just someone they call the 'Sergeant'...” - a sergeant of the AB.

“You see, AB is real concerned about the way they look when it comes to women – and kids...Delvin put him on the speaker phone.” The sergeant told her that Delvin is a “person of interest” in the deaths of Ashley Dawn Rogers and her two children. Delvin wanted her to furnish him with an alibi as to his whereabouts at the time of the fire that claimed their lives. A neighbor youth rescued a third child from the blaze, a little boy of 3. “Delvin was gone at the time of the fire.”

She explained she couldn't do it. Her phone call to the bank, all three hours of it, are the subject of audio recordings made by officials of the banking service. “I don't have fear. Fear is a lack of faith,” she insists. “Delvin is the one.”

She explains that Delvin wishes her to change her story. “He's trying to portray me as crazy, dope smoking. Yes, I'm crazy.”

There are other unexplained killings awaiting a full accounting, according to retired Texas Ranger Matt Cawthon, a sidekick of McLennan County Sheriff's candidate Parnell McNamara.

He is presently employed by Texas Department of Corrections, seconded to the U.S. Marshal's Fugitive Warrant Task Force.

A man named O'Brien - people called him O.B. - a tattooed member of Aryan Circle, he recalls, disappeared a number of years ago. “We've never found his body.”

Parnell McNamara, a retired former Marshal-in-Charge of the Western U.S. District Court at Waco, and Ranger Cawthon advocate a drug task force which would be active in clearing crimes related to narcotics dealing and use. They also plan to institute a task force of both active and retired homicide investigators bent on clearing more than 50 unsolved killings still considered open cases.

It's scary. “Yes, it is,” says Ranger Cawthon.

Carrie D. Woodlock
(click here for the minority report)