Remember when: Meadows talks

Ector County Sheriff Slim Gabrel had a mystery on his hands and a suspect in mind. What he needed to put the two together was the body of Gloria Sue Nix Green, who had disappeared from her job at a Kermit Highway oil field service business on June 17, 1971.

The likely culprit was Johnny Meadows, who had been questioned in connection with the Green case without being charged.

 Then the sheriff heard that Meadows, who had high-tailed it after being questioned, had landed in jail in Aztec, N.M. Gabrel and Tom Barker, investigator for the Ector County district attorney, were soon having some heart-to-heart conversations with Meadows in his cell.

"We worked him for three days," Barker, now an Odessa bail bondsman, recalled. He said a monetary arrangement finally got Meadows to talk. He was given $2,000, which the killer said he needed to help his wife make ends meet.

On Jan. 20, 1972, Gabrel called from New Mexico and directed his deputies and other lawmen to a vacant lot less than a mile from the nightclub where Green had been seen with Meadows. It was a big story when the body was found, but I was headed for the sports department and didn't get to write a single line about the case I'd covered for all those months. The lead story was written by John Sliney, the city editor. My replacement as police reporter, Richard Williams, wrote the sidebar. My footnote on one of the city's most spectacular criminal cases grew even smaller.

Meadows was charged, but Gabrel and Barker continued to spend hours talking with the suspect.

"He had six different personalities," Barker said. Gabrel developed a rapport and was able to elicit information when the right personality surfaced. "We took statements on 38 cases," Barker said.

Meadows confessed outright to killing Linda Cougat and Ruth Maynard, both of Odessa, and Ann Smith of Monahans. He'd repeat his admissions later in an interview with Sliney.

Authorities thought Meadows would clear dozens of area homicides. But they didn't anticipate what Meadows had in mind for courtroom drama.

After Meadows pleaded guilty to Green's death and was sentenced to life in prison on Oct. 4, 1972, in Fort Worth (the case had been moved on a change in venue), Ector County District Attorney John Green sought to prosecute him in the other three murder cases to which he had confessed. That trial was moved to Dallas.

It was in a courtroom there where Meadows whipped off his shirt and claimed that Barker had forced him to confess by branding him with an iron bearing initials signifying the last names of his four victims. The district judge summarily threw out the confessions. Further investigation by several law enforcement agencies showed Meadows and another inmate at the Dallas County Jail had fashioned the branding iron out of a coat hanger and used Blistex and compactly wrapped toilet tissue to burn the marks into his skin. But it was too late. And that ended attempts to bring Meadows to justice in other cases. The slaying of go-go dancer Eula Mae Miller is the oldest unsolved homicide listed by Odessa Crime Stoppers.

Years later, John Green would tell a reporter that Meadows was "the most conniving, meanest, cowardest weasel" he'd ever dealt with.

Years passed and Meadows eventually came up for parole. Gabrel warned at one hearing that Meadows would go back to his murdering ways if released.

But in 1990, Meadows was paroled to Houston. A little more than two years later, he posed as a lawyer, lured a woman into a law office and sexually assaulted her at knifepoint. He was convicted and sent back to prison.

Meadows died in obscurity on July 13, 2000, at the Polunsky Unit in Livingston. It went virtually unnoticed in Odessa. In fact, Barker wasn't aware Meadows had died until last week. But he had a ready opinion: "That's justice. Society is better off. He was scum."

Coincidentally, there was an obituary in this newspaper that weekend for someone connected to the Meadows saga. The journalist who had chronicled the case through the years, John Sliney, died the day after Meadows.

Many of the details of the behind-the-scenes portions of the Meadows matter will never surface. Gabrel died in 2005 and steadfastly refused to talk publicly about Meadows or the case. Barker said he promised the sheriff he wouldn't reveal details either. "This is the most I've ever talked about it," he said.

But he will say that he has dealt with a lot of heinous criminals through the years, but "Meadows blew me out of the tub."