08/15/99

By Kent Biffle / The Dallas Morning News

Texana

As the sun drooped over the Rock Island yards in Fort Worth on April 5, 1935, ace badman Raymond Hamilton pulled his hat low, trying to be faceless in a dusty gathering of hobos.

In a few fast months, the blond bank bandit from West Dallas had survived his bullet-riddled pals and risen to the top of Southwestern lawmen's hit parade.

He had fresh memories of riotous good times, having counted $5,000 in loot after a single heist - a middling fortune in a depressed nation in which most folks were hungry or in debt.

Mr. Hamilton had worrisome debts. He owed the state of Texas a total of 362 years and a few sizzling minutes more in the electric chair.

Concealed in his overalls were two loaded .45-caliber automatic pistols and three extra clips. He was hotter than the boiler of a Rock Island locomotive. If nabbed, he'd return to the death row cell he'd departed with a smuggled gun less than a year before.

Behind him, footsteps crunched on gravel.

We meet again

Whirling, he confronted a familiar squint beneath a snap-brim hat. He recognized the widely feared "evil eye" of Bill Decker, chief deputy of Dallas Sheriff Smoot Schmid. Deputy Decker cultivated tipsters.

He was pointing his .38 at the bib of Mr. Hamilton's overalls.

Mr. Hamilton reached for a pistol.

"Don't do that, Ray."

The voice was calm, firm, loaded with sound advice.

The public enemy lifted his hands.

"Well, you've got me. Why don't you kill me?"

That wouldn't have been Bill Decker's way.

On cue, Tarrant and Dallas County lawmen, among them Sheriff Schmid, rushed from cover to snap cuffs on the fugitive. Next day, in chains, the condemned man rode with three carloads of cops to Huntsville. And on May 10, 1935, he rode the thunderbolt.

Back to the desk

Ducking interviews, Deputy Decker returned to his desk and the problems of running a sheriff's office for Smoot Schmid. Meanwhile, Sheriff Schmid told a press conference, "Yes, I am a candidate for re-election."

By 1935, a fortuneteller with a cracked crystal ball could have told you that one day Bill Decker would be sheriff of Dallas County.

And what a sheriff he proved to be. Three decades after his death, an army of admirers still praises James Eric "Bill" Decker (1898-1970).

From 1948, when he pinned on the sheriff's badge after defeating incumbent Steve Guthrie, to 1970, when he resigned in an oxygen tent just before his death, Sheriff Decker was a legendary force for law and order as Dallas County's top lawman.

After winning office in 1948, he never campaigned. A Democrat, he merely filed and won unopposed. He owned the sheriff's office for more than 21 years - a record.

His reputation for truth was revered in bank towers and in the underworld. Fellow lawmen recalled his methods. He would send out word for a suspect to come in for a talk. "He wouldn't lie to them," said a fellow lawman. More often than not, the suspect would show up, asking, "You going to put me in jail, Bill?" Usually, the answer was, "Sit down; we'll talk it over."

Son of a Dallas saloonkeeper, he was married and reared an adopted son, but he devoted his life to his work. Often he would work all day, go home, take a nap, then return to his post until the wee hours.

To be sure, his methods wouldn't work today. The county and the department have outgrown his highly individualized one-man rule. No lawman today possesses the power that he routinely exercised.

Now Jim Gatewood has written a biography of the man, who by all accounts was worthy of all his laurels. The book - Decker (distributed by Sunbelt Media, Austin) - will be in stores Sept. 15.

The 410-page book is crammed with pictures and original maps. The hefty volume carries a hefty price of $41.50. I predict that every old-timer hereabouts will want to own or borrow a copy.

An insurance exec, Mr. Gatewood became a Decker fan as a kid. Smoot Schmid's chief investigator visited Gatewood acres on Duck Creek to check out a well-dressed corpse in the cotton rows - just one more casualty of the underworld war for control of Dallas gambling.

Oddly, Mr. Gatewood's hero never tried to look like a Texas sheriff. No boots or big hats. Always dressed like a city slicker, he wore highly polished shoes and that trademark snap-brim hat. Colorful he wasn't.

"The amount of energy expended on the story of Bill Decker was tremendous, but I loved it," said the author, who spent $16,000 printing the book and thousands more on research and artwork.

More than two dozen old Decker deputies regularly breakfast in the back room of a Dallas restaurant, retelling adventures and misadventures. The author is an honorary deputy dawg. He rode with them on bomb calls, drug busts and the like.

An unabashed fuzz fan, he told me: "If the book makes money, fine. If not, well, it was something I had to do.

"It started in 1994 when The Dallas Morning News ran an article about their new computer system that allowed them to go back and pull up any subject with a hit word. The next day, I asked them to give me all they had on Decker."

Having known Sheriff Decker, I got a kick from the insider tales. The author captivates when he sticks to Sheriff Decker. But he strays.

If a lack of professional polish gives the book a certain charm, it pays for the loose style with digressions and errata.

For example, the name of Texas Ranger Frank Hamer (1884-1955) is consistently spelled "Hammer." And gangland's Albert "Lord High Executioner" Anastasia (1902-1957) is described as having been tortured to death. He was shot to death in a barber's chair.

A publisher's fact checker would have fixed such pesky annoyances.

Mr. Gatewood sins when he carelessly wanders into a tar pit - the investigation of the 1963 John F. Kennedy assassination.

Mr. Gatewood said: "I felt that when I got to the assassination, I would acknowledge Lee Harvey Oswald as a nut and give it a few pages. It turned out to be a book within a book - 107 pages."

He should have given it a few pages. He made much of Sheriff Decker's doubts:

Less than a week after the assassination, "Charles Tessmer, now recognized as the foremost criminal attorney in the southwest, entered the Seven Seas Restaurant in Lakewood.

"Sheriff Decker . . . [and wife] were there having supper. Seeing Charlie, Decker motioned for him to join them. During the meal, Tessmer revealed to Decker that he had been approached to defend Jack Ruby in the shooting of Oswald.

"Decker's response was short and to the point, 'Charlie, don't get involved in that. There is grave danger of a conspiracy. You don't want to put yourself in the position of representing those people.' "

Mr. Gatewood ends his "book within a book" with a federal document recounting a phone call to the Houston office of the Secret Service from Alonso H. Hudkins, a Houston Post reporter.

On Dec. 17, 1963, after a weekend in Dallas, Lonnie Hudkins told the Secret Service that he had reason to believe that Lee Harvey Oswald was a $200 monthly FBI informer, secretly classified as number "8172."

Mr. Gatewood offers this document as a sort of conspiracy clincher.

He should know better. Serious researchers long ago parted company with Mr. Hudkins.

In Larry Sneed's oral history, No More Silence, published last year by Three Forks Press in Dallas, William F. Alexander, who was assistant DA at the time of the JFK assassination, explains the meaningless number. Reporter Hudkins simply made it up, said Mr. Alexander, "The FBI wasn't telling anybody anything, the purpose was to smoke them out and see if they would respond."

More or less repeating his 1964 answers to FBI queries, Mr. Alexander told the oral historian:

"We had a reporter here at the time, Lonnie Hudkins, from Houston, who was trying to find out if Oswald was an FBI informant. Lonnie made up some numbers that were supposed to be confidential informant numbers where they paid him. [He] passed those around to the reporters and got them to call up the FBI and ask, 'Isn't it true that this number was Lee Harvey Oswald's informant number?'

"It was a pure fairy tale."

Kent Biffle is a regular contributor to Texas & Southwest. He gets e-mail at hkbiffle@aol.com.