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

timing couldn't have been worse. Texas was hit with what became known as the Oil Bust, and the area’s music scene took a downturn. "A lot of the clubs became band-oriented," says Mashkes, "and many of the places where a single performer could play closed up."
    “In the best of times it would have been tough for John,” says Fromholz. “There just wasn't much work for a white boy who liked to play old black blues."
    "John was disappointed with his music,” says a former lover of Vandiver's and a friend of the couple’s. “He was nearing forty, and he knew he was never going to be a famous musician." And yet "he never talked about what he could have done to change things. Instead he put his energy into the drugs. Not that the music wasn't important - it was just easier with the drugs."
    And the drugs paid the bills. At one point, Vandiver had even attempted to make a down payment on the ranch with bales of marijuana. Davis's dilemma was to reconcile her aversion to drugs with the unavoidable fact that it paid for their life together on the ranch.
    "Debbie liked nice things," says the friend, "and she was always coming up with ways to spend money, knowing John couldn't make enough. She didn't like his dealing, but she wanted to be supported by it."
    When Davis complained about the dealing, Vandiver responded angrily to what he saw as her hypocrisy. "John would yell, point to the door and say, ‘If you don't like it, leave,’” says Irwin. "But Debbie couldn't leave. She wasn't capable of it."
    No matter how it was paid for, the ranch was where Vandiver and Davis were the happiest. By 1984 they had three quarter horses, two ponies, more than twenty dogs, countless cats and Lulu and Leroy, the miniature dachshunds Davis was breeding. The ranch also became a haven for local musicians. "Sometimes they'd cook a big dinner, and we'd sit around and play,” says Mashkes. “Other times we'd take a break from the music and just be together. John was just fun to be around.”
    Vandiver, who had always been handy with a hammer and saw, remodeled the four-room cabin and built corrals for the horses and a bicycle-wheel surrey for the ponies to pull. In the surrey, his belly bouncing and beard flapping, he became a common sight at local parades. He also erected a metal storage building equipped with a pulley for lifting the bales of pot, a lean-to next to the garage for bagging and an eight-foot fence to block the view from the road.
    The pot was a natural. "It wasn't just financial,” says a close friend. “It was a way to compensate for a loss of self-esteem. If he couldn't be one of the big boys, he could sell them their pot.” On the career ladder of the drug world, Vandiver was a middleman, a "mule,” who made frequent trips to Miami to bring back trunks and later trucks - filled with pot, which he then sold through a network of friends in Texas and Colorado and throughout the Midwest.
    "In our circle of friends everybody knew what John was doing,” says Mashkes, who along with Russell had followed Vandiver to Houston. “It all seemed pretty innocent. Everybody had a lot of good pot and, later, a lot of cheap cocaine."
    There was one shadowy figure in Vandiver's life, however, which made his friends uneasy – an apprentice mechanic named Tom Mathes. He was a short, slight man in his late twenties, with small, piercing dark eyes, long, thinning brown hair and a sullen manner. They met in Houston in 1982, when Vandiver hired Mathes to work on his Triumph TR3. Vandiver was taken with Mathes and soon brought him into his drug business. Russell attributes their friendship to the fact that "they were both grease monkeys. I immediately didn't like Mathes. He didn't have friendly vibes at all!”
    A bit of a drifter and a job hopper who had followed an army buddy to Houston, Mathes turned out to be a bad business risk. He was often unable to pay for the pot Vandiver fronted him, and he'd have to work off his debts by repairing