A Warrant to Kill: A True Story of Obsession, Lies and a Killer Cop by Kathryn Casey Read Free Book Online Page A

nineteen-year-old drifter with dark hair and earnest eyes, Michael Todd Shaffer moved into her life that winter, gradually, innocuously. Shaffer would later discount the part he played in Susan White’s death, but as providence would have it, he became one of the central elements necessary to seal her fate.
    “It was just talk,” he maintains. “We were just a bunch of punks trying to act bad.”
    Jason met Shaffer in 1991, through mutual friends, and they quickly became as thick as brothers. He was a sullen young man, two years older than Jason. Like Jason’s, his childhood was marked by uncertainty and trauma. When he was eight, his parents separated, and of their three sons, Michael took the breakup the hardest. “He was the youngest and he had the toughest time adjusting,” reports Shaffer’s mother, Jeannie Jaques. “He was a great kid, but by adolescence we were having one crisis after the other with him. He just shrugged things off, never accepted any responsibility.”
    Michael dropped out of school at fifteen and moved to Houston, where he took on a nomadic lifestyle, at times living in run-down rented houses with his two older brothers, Bobby and Myron, both auto mechanics. Other times, he migrated among the homes of his latest best friends. He cultivated connections with cars and money, with kids who lived in big houses. By the summer of 1991, Michael drifted in and out of the Whites’ house on Valley Bend, staying with Jason whenever it was convenient. Susan liked him. He was older than Jason and, she judged, therefore more solid. “She’d ask me to keep an eye on Jason,” Shaffer recalls. “She’d say she didn’t worry about him when we were together. When Jason was with me, he didn’t have a curfew.”
    It is possible Susan didn’t know, distracted as she was by the ups and downs of her marriage. Or maybe it was easier not to know. But during those late nights when her son caroused with Shaffer, they did more than pop wheelies in Michael’s old white Pinto in the deserted cemetery near the house, trip neighbors’ car alarms, or slam golf balls into the Dumpster parked in the front yard of the burned-out house next door.
    When Susan and Ron were out of the way and Jason and Michael had the run of the house, word spread, carslined the street, every light shone into the night like a beacon calling to bored or displaced teenagers looking for a few hours of a good time. Loud music, louder laughter. Some brought liquor raided from their parents’ cabinets; others bought six-packs at the local convenience store from clerks who looked the other way. A few supplied drugs.
    “Jason and Mike liked to brag about being bad and they did what the crowd did,” says one of the throng of teenagers who hung out together that year. “We were almost always high on something, mostly pot or acid. It was a blast. Nobody talked much about anything past the next weekend.”
    As on Valley Bend, the patience of the neighbors on Amber Forest wore thin. On weekends, calls flooded the Cypresswood substation, the sheriff’s department nearby headquarters. “There’s another party at 3407 Amber Forest,” one neighbor or another would complain. “Nobody can sleep.”
    A squad car responded, but before it arrived, neighbors watched in frustration as lights flickered off and all became quiet, teenagers disappearing from the house like ants abandoning an injured hill.
    In January 1992, Michael Shaffer moved into the Whites’ home on Amber Forest, settling his few possessions into a vacant second-floor bedroom. His girlfriend, Amy, an airy fifteen-year-old with long blond hair and wide-set blue eyes, an unwed mother of an infant son, became a regular. She and Jason were old friends. They rode the Wunsche bus together to school in the mornings.
    “Jason was easy to make friends with. He thought everybody was fine. He even tried to pick me up when I was pregnant,” she relates with a childish giggle. “I was, like,