Fetch the Devil: The Sierra Diablo Murders and Nazi Espionage in America

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17 After the first flash of publicity, a dozen of Texas’s best law enforcement officers had rushed to West Texas to address the challenges of the Frome murder investigation. Despite the coordinating committee, the lawmen from various jurisdictions were tripping over one another. Most of the visiting officers did not bother to check in with the coordinator’s office on any regular basis, creating a situation where lawmen often covered ground someone else had already plowed. In other situations, potentially valuable leads or interviews were missed entirely because they were directed to the wrong agency. However, within a week of the discovery of the bodies, only one Ranger was left in El Paso to work full time on the case. An old-school lawman, Ranger Frank Mills let it be known rather quickly that he preferred to workalone.Heannouncedhewastakinguppermanentresidenceintown. When Fox offered him a desk in the sheriff ’s office, Mills said he would be working the case out of his hotel room. Other Rangers assigned full time to the Frome case were dispersed across the state to follow other leads. The day after the cordial but icily formal coordination meeting, Sheriff Fox had made a point of including the visiting Texas DPS investigators in a “microscopic examination” of the Frome car. None of the investigators thought much could be learned from such a detailed inspection, since the carwascleanedupandpassedthroughthehandsofsomanyofficersbefore being driven to El Paso by Sheriff Robertson of Pecos. The car, impounded at the Toltec Garage, was literally searched with magnifying glasses, but as expected, the fine combing yielded little new information. Then, one of the Texas public-safety detectives spotted the previously ignored scrape and splotch of green paint on the right front fender of the Packard. It was obvious that the Frome car had been in a glancing collision with something painted green. DPS captain W. W. Legge said the paint very well could be from another vehicle, because it was a color popularly used on sportier cars. murder in the desert 91 Sheriff Fox called the Packard garage and asked if anyone there had noticed a scrape on the car’s front right fender when it was in the shop for repairs. He was assured there was no such mark on the car when they released it.83 All automobiles were carefully inspected, and such scrapes, however minor, were noted on the work order, as protection against customersaccusingthegarageofthedamage .Later,Foxquestionedthedeputy who had the car washed the day after it was discovered. The officer said he might have noticed the scrape and green paint, but the damage was so slight, he thought nothing of it. The new discovery was troubling. The green paint did not seem to fit any eyewitness descriptions of cars seen pursuing or parked near the Frome vehicletheWednesdayofthedisappearance.Yetthedamagewasapparently inflicted between the time the car left the garage and when it was found abandoned in the desert. Upon closer examination, it was determined that the green paint did, indeed, fit the color used on sports coupes. Nothing else on the roadways cametomindthatwouldhavebeenpaintedsuchacolor.Still,nowitnesses hadmentionedagreencar.MostofthewitnesseswhohadseenthePackard and another car said it was a coach or small sedan. The vast majority of those cars were painted black. One of the more credible witnesses, besides the now-wavering Jim Milam , was an unemployed oil-field hand who had a day job building a cattle stock tank at a ranch on property near where the bodies were found.84 Bill Tripp, an oil-field roughneck from Odessa, was working on the tank at Wild Horse Creek six miles east of Van Horn on the day the women disappeared. His girlfriend, Juanita Elliott, drove out from Van Horn to pick him up that afternoon. She stopped on the highway and blew her horn to attract his attention. As he was walking to the highway from the stock tank, he noticed a small car parked about a hundred yards off the roadway. He was sure the car was not a coupe because he saw a man and woman sitting in the backseat. He thought it was a dark blue or black sedan, probably a Ford, Plymouth, or Chevrolet. Tripp commented about the car and its occupants to Juanita. He thought it odd that a couple would be necking at that time of day, in plain sight of the highway. Juanita said that when she was driving slowly down the same highway 92 fetch the devil a short...