A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop

“There’s a guy here you need to talk to,” Alan Jefferies, the piano player, whispered, motioning across the room toward a large, lumbering man seated, arms crossed, at a pianoside stool.

On this, like so many other Friday nights, my husband and I sat in our customary places, on corner stools at the bar, listening to music at Resa’s, the back room at Jim & Resa Kelly’s Del Frisco’s Steakhouse, not far from our suburban Houston home.

“Why?” I asked, only mildly interested.

“His name is Ray Valentine, and he dated Susan White, that woman killed by a cop in Olde Oaks,” Alan explained. “They were in here a few weeks ago with another couple, a captain at the sheriff’s department and his wife.”

I’d read an article on White’s death in one of the local papers the day after it happened. Little more than a footnote, the headline read: “Woman Accused of Making Threats Slain by Deputies.” According to the article, Susan
White had pulled a gun on a deputy serving a warrant for her arrest, and he’d shot in self-defense. I’d noticed it only because the woman lived not far from me. While sad, this particular tragedy didn’t appear any more interesting than the plethora of others that cried out from local newspapers. In fact, both the
Houston Chronicle
and the
Houston Post
buried their brief accounts on inside pages.

When I hesitated, Alan, whose break was over, brushed back his thinning dark blond hair and shot me an exasperated look. “A lot of people are saying there’s something fishy with this whole thing. Ray says she knew the cop who killed her, that she was afraid of him,” he said, turning to walk back to the piano. When I said nothing, he concluded, “He says the cop had been harassing her.”

I sighed, openly skeptical. It wasn’t unusual for friends, neighbors, anyone who knew me as a writer, to pitch their latest “great story.” Rarely did such “hot” tips pan out. Still, Alan and I were friends, and he had a good sense about people. From his perch behind the grand piano, he was ground zero for gossip, and he seemed particularly interested in the death of Susan White, a woman who had frequented Resa’s earlier in the summer. This was the second time in a week that he’d mentioned her killing.

“At least talk to him,” Alan urged.

Reluctantly, I uprooted myself from the wooden barstool and followed Alan, weaving my way through the maze of diners at candlelit tables, toward the piano. A waitress bustled past, brandishing a platter of raw steaks and a milky-white lobster tail. “This is our New York Strip,” she remarked, launching into the merits of tenderloin and extolling the generous weight of the lobster to a group of apparent first-timers.

The place was busy, a not unusual condition.

Over the past decade, Houston’s sprawl had traveled
north, resulting in typical suburbia: walled-in subdivisions that each day funneled tens of thousands of white-collar commuters onto freeways that led to the city’s skyscrapered downtown. Most residents chose the area for the soaring pine trees, the quiet neighborhoods, and the price tag on a home, a third of those in Houston’s close-in suburbs, like River Oaks and Memorial.

Kelly’s Del Frisco’s was a rarity in an area pocked with characterless chain eateries—a privately owned restaurant with a loyal following, notable enough to actually draw patrons from inside the city. Resa’s, the dark-wooded, brick-and-forest-green piano bar my husband and I favored, was the restaurant’s secret. With its private entrance, even some regular patrons didn’t know it existed. While dinner in the main restaurant veered toward the sedate, on nights when everything clicked at Resa’s, the scene resembled a congenial party with a highly diverse crowd. It was the latter I found fascinating—the chance to observe people in a confined space, lubricated by the pouring of generous drinks. From the bar, I eavesdropped on marriage proposals and divorces, business mergers and bankruptcies.

When I approached the piano on this Friday night, I noticed a few familiar faces, including a local romance writer of some repute, an oil-tool manufacturer who drove a white Rolls-Royce, and a saleswoman known for her collection of flamboyant hats. Nodding at the others, I did as Alan asked and introduced myself to Ray Valentine, a man of substantial girth, his bald head wearing a monkish fringe of dark brown hair, his unbuttoned shirt displaying a wide gold coin suspended on a heavy gold chain.

“Alan tells me you believe Susan White knew this deputy, the one who killed her,” I said.

“Damn right she knew Kent McGowen. She was scared to death of him. I sat right there with her,” he said, the words slurring together as he pointed at a
nearby table with a beefy finger. “A month before she died, she told a friend of mine, a captain in the sheriff’s department, that he was harassing her, that she was afraid if she didn’t do what he wanted, he’d hurt her or her son.”

“What did he want?” I asked.

“Sex,” Valentine growled.

Inspecting what little remained of his drink, he raised his glass toward the waitress, then turned back to me. I noticed his eyes were moist, whether from emotion or the bar’s smoky ambiance, I couldn’t tell.

“You know, I didn’t believe her,” he said, frowning. “I thought she was being hysterical, just flat silly. I didn’t think a deputy sheriff, a cop … She got so pissed when I didn’t believe her. I told her to shut up about it. That she was imagining it.”

Valentine fell silent. Around us, people laughed, couples danced, Alan, resettled behind the black-lacquer grand piano, trilled the keys then launched into a melancholy rendering of that piano-bar standard “Unforgettable,” his smooth, clear voice amplified to ring over the clamor of the crowd.

“You know one of the last things Susan White said to me?” Ray Valentine challenged, his hand trembling as he swirled his glass of melting ice. He took a quick swig and turned again to me, his rheumy brown eyes focusing intently on mine. “She said, ‘One day you’ll believe me, but by then I’ll be dead, and it’ll be because Kent McGowen killed me.’”

My husband and I left Resa’s that night and I was haunted by the remorse in the eyes of the man I had just met. Yet Ray Valentine was a stranger in a bar, a brief encounter. I tucked his business card in my purse and promised myself I would phone him in a few days at work, when he was sober.

Despite my initial hesitation, I’d spend more than two years investigating Susan White, Kent McGowen, and the circumstances that led to her killing. In the end, their story became an examination of power, how easily it is granted and how helpless the vulnerable become in its grasp. What I learned would forever change the way I viewed those entrusted with it, especially the deputy who patrolled my neighborhood, the officer behind me as I drove down the quiet suburban streets surrounding my home.

Eventually the key to what really happened that steamy Houston night in August 1992 became clear. Like most cases, it became a search for the truth, a need to know who—if anyone—could be believed.

“Shots fired, one down,” a thin voice crackled over the police-band radio at 12:30 on a muggy Houston night. Immediately the call went out, as it always does when a cop shoots a civilian. Ambulances, squad cars, a crime-scene unit, Internal Affairs investigators, and representatives from the district attorney’s office all converged in the quiet neighborhood of expensive brick homes amid towering pines bordered by manicured lawns.