The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime by Gregg Olsen, Kathryn Casey, Rebecca Morris Read Free Book Online Page A

many of Vandiver’s Texas friends, including Walker and Murphey. Vandiver and his cronies would gather after a show for a night of partying at the house he shared with other band members and their families. "If I opened the refrigerator and found it filled with beer," says Mashkes, "I knew Jerry Jeff Walker was in town. Early one morning Murphey watched a woman through our window as she stumbled down the street, and then he wrote ‘Drunken Lady of the Morning.’”
    Vandiver bought into the whole scene; playing music and carousing filled his days and nights. His favorite song, Walker's "Gypsy Songman,” glorified the traveling minstrel, the lone figure onstage, living on the edge of society, unrestricted by convention. Vandiver, who smoked pot daily, eventually began selling a little grass, enough to pay for his own supply.
    In 1970, Vandiver and his wife had a daughter, Joanna, but that didn't stabilize their life. He began traveling the circuit with and without his family. In 1971 he and Mashkes settled in Kansas City, Missouri, where Shake Russell joined the band. It was there that Vandiver began to rely more and more on the drug money. "Whenever money was tight,” Russell says, "John would throw a lid of pot in the trunk and sell a little before and after performances to pay expenses.”
    According to one of Vandiver's former lovers: "He liked bragging that the pot money gave him more control over his life. He didn't have to knuckle under. John had this paradoxical part of him. At times he could be generous, caring. And at other times he was egotistical and almost greedy. When he talked to me about dealing, he was proud. He was proud of the independence."
    By the summer of 1976, Texas was enjoying a musical renaissance, and Vandiver, who was divorced from his wife in 1973, returned with the Times to the booming music scene in Houston and Austin. Fromholz remembers it as a time when "everybody with a guitar had a band. They put on cowboy hats and called themselves musicians." For the Times it was an era of both promise and frustration; the band seemed to be perpetually on the verge of a record deal. Walker had hit it big, and Murphey made the charts with his song "Wildfire." Vandiver was surrounded by success, but it was always just beyond his grasp. In 1971 the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band had made the charts with Walker's "Mr. Bojangles;' a song the Times had been playing for over a year. Vandiver was despondent. "That should have been us,” he muttered.
    The Ewing Street Times eventually recorded an album, but it was never released: "It just wasn't happening,” says Russell, who left the Times and took off for New York and Chicago with Mashkes. Vandiver moved to Houston and began booking gigs as a solo act, much the way he had started out ten years earlier in Dallas.
    While Vandiver never seemed envious of his friends' good fortune, says Mashkes, "I'm sure, deep down, John thought, 'Why not me?'"
    WHILE PERFORMING IN A HOUSTON club in 1979, Vandiver met Debbie Davis. They were immediately drawn to each other, although they seemed an unlikely match. Vandiver, 33, was a hardheaded blues singer, with a laid-back demeanor and a fondness for women and drugs. Davis, 26, was an attractive, gregarious computer operator from a conservative upper-middle-class Jewish family. "John was everything Debbie's mother had warned her about,” says Mashkes. “A hippie who was not Jewish and was not going to marry her."
    Davis's relationship with Vandiver would be a tumultuous one, plagued by his well-known infidelity and fierce sense of privacy. But despite - and probably because of - his outlaw image, she was drawn to him and his music. "He really became her life," says Sarah Irwin, Russell's wife. “She once told me, ‘Without John, I might as well be dead.’”
    Soon after they met, Davis moved in with Vandiver on the ranch, where he had been living for over a year. Six months later Vandiver bought the four-acre spread, but his