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It has been more than 100 days since Sally Blackwell was found dead in a pasture near Victoria. Her family has grown impatient with the lack of information released by law enforcement and they are questioning the integrity and ability of the sheriff to investigate the case because of his professional, personal and legal relationship with a suspect.
The connection between Victoria County Sheriff T. Michael O’Connor and a former sheriff’s captain is a power of attorney the latter signed over to the sheriff before leaving for Iraq. The document, which was still in O’Connor’s possession at the time of the killing, was used to confirm the scent followed by tracking dogs at one of the crime scenes.
Blackwell, 53, a Child Protective Service program director, was found dead March 15 alongside Hanselman Road just outside Victoria city limits. An autopsy report indicated she died of strangulation. She had been reported missing the previous day after not showing up for work at her part-time job as a counselor.
The case first fell under the purview of the Victoria Police Department. Chief Richard Jones said his agency “got the first call in which Ms. Blackwell was missing under suspicious circumstances.”
He said police initially handled the investigation as a missing person’s case. Thus, investigative procedures differed from those used in a homicide, he said, which meant, for example, that no yellow police tape went up immediately around Blackwell’s home in the Cimarron neighborhood.
The Houston Chronicle reported on July 3 that Victoria District Attorney Dexter Eaves “is raising doubts about the way the investigation has been conducted”– and quoted Eaves as saying that tape should have been put up around the Blackwell home and that a sign-in log of who had been in the house should have been kept.
“It’s a combination of errors,” the Chronicle quoted Eaves as saying.
On Thursday, Eaves told the Advocate that his words were taken out of context by the Chronicle reporter, and that he was merely illustrating how the handling of a missing person’s case differs from a murder case.
The Chronicle also paraphrased Eaves as saying, “Another problem (with the investigation) could have been simple inexperience. A recent initiative at the police department put veteran detectives back on the street and veteran patrol officers in their place. …”
Police Chief Jones said Friday that this statement is misleading and that the 22 police officers involved in the case have a combined 242 years of police experience and more than 64 years of investigative experience.
Detective Sam Eyre and Lt. Tom Copeland, respectively the designated lead investigators from the police department and the sheriff’s department, have extensive investigative experience, Jones said.
Eyre has been a police officer for 10 years, six as a criminal investigator, and has worked on numerous homicides, including scenes where there were multiple deaths, Jones said. Copeland worked for at least 12 years as a police investigator before moving to the sheriff’s department.
In Thursday’s interview, Eaves said Eyre and Copeland are “the most experienced investigators in either jurisdiction.”
“With what was presented in front of them, they acted perfectly,” Eaves said. “They did the best they could do under a missing person’s situation that turned into a kidnapping-murder situation, and I don’t think there’s any law enforcement unit in the state that would have handled it any differently.”
Jones said the identities of those who set foot in the Blackwell home that day were documented in writing.
“We know who was in and out of the house,” he said.
The same night that police officers went to Blackwell’s home, they traced Blackwell’s purse to a location near Hanselman Road, west of U.S. Highway 59. Police were searching on foot in the darkness, Jones said, and at that point –“Before the body was ever found”– Texas Ranger Morgan Miller entered the investigation.
Jones called Miller a good friend whose career as a Texas Ranger spans several decades. Jones asked for air support, in the form of a helicopter, to assist in the next day’s planned search. Tracking dogs and horses from the prison unit in Beeville were also brought to the area for the March 15 search.
But at 3 p.m., county employees, assisted by a sheriff’s deputy, responded to a routine and unrelated call about illegal dumping on private property off Hanselman Road. There, in dense brush, several hundred yards from where officers found her purse, lay the body of Blackwell, dressed in a nightgown, a rope wrapped around her throat.
Among those who rushed to the scene were Jones, O’Connor, Miller, Eyre and Copeland. “We all responded,” Jones said.
Thus began an ongoing murder investigation that has been spotlighted, and some officials say distorted, by the national media.
“As administrative heads, it’s distractive,” O’Connor said.
Dogs from the Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Department followed a scent trail from Blackwell’s body to the Cimarron neighborhood – though not to Blackwell’s home. Instead it led to a home several blocks away – to a home belonging to a former captain with the Victoria County Sheriff’s Department.
On June 29, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported that O’Connor holds power of attorney for that man, who has since been identified by law enforcement both as one of three “persons of interest” and as “a suspect” in the Blackwell investigation. Neither term has a legal definition.
(Why isn’t the Advocate publishing the man’s name? See the editor’s note on Page 1A.)
In his interview with the Advocate, O’Connor explained how he came to hold the man’s power of attorney.
In about 2000, O’Connor said, he began training to become a reserve deputy with the sheriff’s office. O’Connor said the man “had oversight of the reserve organization as well as the SWAT team,” of which O’Connor was also a member. In 2003, the man was preparing to leave for Iraq, where he would train security personnel as an employee of a private company. The former captain needed someone to look after his two children, both minors, in case of catastrophe, and he turned to O’Connor.
“He chose to go to Iraq. He asked me to be responsible for his children,” said O’Connor, who was elected sheriff in 2004.
The law office of Villafranca & Villafranca on Sept. 24, 2003, prepared a document granting durable power of attorney to O’Connor, conferring upon him the duty and right to act as executor of the former captain’s estate.
Phillip Lyons, an associate professor in the college of criminology at Sam Houston State University, said of such an appointment, “I think it is indicative of a very close relationship or a kind of fiduciary relationship.”
O’Connor said it was a little of both, “I knew him. I knew his kids.” He said that he has acted in a similar capacity for other people and that the former captain was aware of that.
The Star-Telegram reported that O’Connor said he has had no contact with the man since his return from Iraq, but O’Connor said Friday that he spoke to him once in 2005.
The Star-Telegram also reported that a relative of the man said that he was in the process of moving from his home and had disconnected his telephone.
“I heard that rumor, and that’s false, like a lot of other rumors,” the man’s attorney, Steve Cihal, said Wednesday.
A call to the former captain’s cell phone on Sunday went straight to voice mail. The message was not returned.
No record has been made public that indicates the power of attorney had expired or been revoked. Villafranca & Villafranca legal secretary Laura Dolezal, who notarized the original power of attorney document, said that if the power of attorney has been revoked, the paperwork had not passed through her office. And O’Connor wouldn’t comment because of the ongoing investigation.
But Eaves did say – on national television – that the document was used as a “scent pad” for the tracking dogs, although he’d earlier refused to answer an Advocate reporter’s question about the link. Eaves appeared Friday on MSNBC’s “Abrams Report.”
After the Friday afternoon airing of the television show, Chief Deputy John Kaspar summed up the document’s role in the investigation: “The dogs were given the scent from the crime scene, and from there we went to (the former captain’s) residence. Later, that envelope was used to do a comparison and confirmation of the scent the dogs were following.”
O’Connor said Saturday morning, “I did get a report that that was in fact disclosed on national television,” but, “I cannot comment because that’s due to the continuing nature of the investigation.”
Although Eaves told the Advocate that he is “satisfied that the sheriff did not have that close of a relationship with” the former captain, Blackwell’s sister Mary Allaway of Austin says she still has questions.
“It is certainly not settled in my mind,” she said, “regarding the sheriff having a close relationship with the only person of interest named, that we know of, or there has been any court information on.”
Blackwell’s daughter Amanda Taulbee, also of Austin, said in an e-mail early Saturday morning, “Based on the fact that the sheriff did not disclose this legal tie to our family, or that he is tied at all to a person of interest in this case, inspires a sense of distrust.”
O’Connor said Taulbee’s expectations were unrealistic and that individuals who work in Victoria law enforcement all tend to know one another.
“We’re in Victoria, Texas, not a major metropolitan area,” O’Connor said. “The law enforcement community is not of a large nature.”
Maj. E.C. Sherman, with the Texas Police Association, said that in his 34 years with DPS, when a suspect is a police officer, the investigation tends to be “even more thorough and more in-depth, I think, because of the implication involved of the bad apple contaminating the whole barrel.”
Eaves pointed out that investigators also had a relationship with the victim. “We all worked with Sally Blackwell. She was the head of Child Protective Services here,” he said.
Neither O’Connor, Jones nor Eaves would comment Friday on the bearing of the power of attorney document on the still-active Blackwell investigation. O’Connor would say only that investigators “were aware of it very promptly.”
Blackwell’s sister Jan Blackwell of Houston questioned why O’Connor had not “at least gotten it out in the open” about the existence of the document tying him to a suspect.
Susan Smith Howley, director of public policy for the National Center for Victims of Crime, said in an e-mail Friday, “Law enforcement agencies are required to have a crime victim liaison, who can ensure that victims are provided their rights … They are also to be informed on request of the procedures in a criminal investigation.”
O’Connor said Sunday his office has appointed to the Blackwell family two liaisons, deputies Joe Sanchez and Larry Luna.
But “as far as they want to know what we’re doing, we cannot do that,” O’Connor said Friday. “It’s still part of the active investigation.”
The news that O’Connor disclosed to other investigators the details of his relationship to the former captain and that the legal document was used to aid in the investigation did little to sway the convictions of the victim’s family that O’Connor should not be involved in the investigation.
“Nope. … No, it does not,” Taulbee said in an e-mail Saturday.
Jan Blackwell called for O’Connor to step down and said she was leaning toward the belief that “O’Connor shouldn’t even be sheriff. Someone lies a couple times. Now you doubt everything they do.”
Allaway said there should at least be oversight of the investigation from other agencies, and she questioned why O’Connor allowed the former captain to drive his car from his home to the sheriff’s department for a search, instead of having the car towed.
O’Connor said he could not answer that question because it was part of the active investigation. Asked if the car was under surveillance while being driven from the home to the sheriff’s office, he said he could not comment on that either.
O’Connor stressed that, although his office has taken the lead in the investigation, it has been a joint effort between multiple agencies within the state, including the sheriff’s department, Victoria police, Department of Public Safety and the Texas Rangers, Fort Bend County Sheriff’s Department, attorney general and the Victoria County District Attorney’s Office.
He said that “90 percent or better” of the potential evidence collected at the multiple crime scenes – including Blackwell’s home, the former captain’s home and car, the location where the purse was found and the location where Blackwell was found – was gathered by a DPS mobile forensics unit as well as the police department.
Jones said that his department began data collection, and when DPS came on scene, the decision was made to keep as simple as possible the chain of custody of the potential evidence, meaning that no agencies besides police and DPS were involved significantly in the initial collection.
The pieces of data, more than two vanloads in all, O’Connor said, were transported by police and DPS to the DPS forensics laboratory in Corpus Christi.
Although some potential evidence has been shifted to other DPS labs around the state, in order to take advantage of scientific equipment not available in Corpus Christi, the data have remained in custody of DPS.
When asked if there was any possible way O’Connor could influence lab results or adulterate data being analyzed, DPS spokeswoman Tela Mange bristled, “No. We’re separate from the sheriff’s office.
“A lot of people are saying a lot of things. Much of what is said is incorrect,” she said. “The lab workers are DPS employees, and they’re professional.”
The Corpus Christi lab has four DNA analysts, Mange said, one of whom has been working solely on the Blackwell investigation, which she called “a priority case.”
“Our analyst has been working on this case since the beginning of April and continues to work the case everyday. Yes, it’s taking a long time, or it seems like it’s taking a long time, but there’s a lot of evidence to be gone through, a number of steps that have to be gone through,” she said.
Mange said the more than 200 pieces of data constituted “a large volume of items that have to be examined.”
“Every piece of evidence has to be gone over square inch by square inch, so we don’t miss anything,” she said. “That process takes quite awhile. Once it has been determined there is some sort of DNA or biological evidence, there are several steps that the process goes through, some of which, with DNA analysis, just going through the scientific machinery can take several weeks.”
O’Connor said that investigators sent more evidence down to Corpus Christi “as much as three weeks” after initial collection was completed.
In the investigation’s infancy, O’Connor said, DPS gave him a window of 90 days to six months in which a full report on data analysis would be ready.
“It seems like everyone’s forgot about that,” he said Friday.
But Allaway said that time frame is not satisfactory. “This is supposed to be high-profile, high priority.”
Allaway also expressed concerns about the coverage of the Blackwell investigation by Victoria media groups, including the Advocate.
“I’m surprised that the paper is not working harder,” she said during an interview Thursday. “I would like for you to show that you are putting effort into it, paying attention to it.”
Allaway said she thinks the Advocate has been neglectful in its coverage, and that it is “showing in a lack of reporting.”
The last story by Advocate staff was published May 26, when Copeland released information that Blackwell had been kidnapped from her home before being killed.
Since that time, O’Connor said Friday, the status of the investigation has remained unchanged – that deputies continue to interview new persons of interest whenever they crop up, that the number of primary “persons of interest” remains at three, and that the main thing to do now is to wait for the results from the DPS lab.
When asked if any of the three suspects are currently under surveillance, O’Connor said he could not answer and cited the ongoing investigation.
Allaway noted that it has been over 100 days since the killing. “I do not want the person to get away or commit another crime in Victoria or someplace in Texas.”
O’Connor acknowledged what he called “the fear factor” but said that when he is able to disclose information about the case, it will be to Blackwell’s family first. “I will be more than happy, when the day comes, to tell the whole story.
“Quite honestly, we’re their best bet in getting this taken care of. I know they might not want to hear that, but … there will be closure.”