Childress, TX is Haunted

North of Childress, Texas there is a lone horse apple tree in the corner of an open field. On some nights the shadowy image of a body twisting at the end of a creaking rope has been seen.

There’s a reason for this.

In the summer of 1988, seventeen-year-old Tate Rowland was found hanging from that tree. His father cut him down after a friend of Tate’s told him what had happened. Though the county sheriff would later say that every family member he interviewed couldn’t imagine Tate wanting to take his own life, an eyewitness claimed to have seen Tate hang himself. And it was true that Tate’s long-time girlfriend had just married someone else. Officially the case was labeled a suicide.

The fact that there were two rope burns visible on Tate Rowland’s neck—one above the Adam’s apple, one below presented a problem. When someone is hanged, the body weight invariably pulls the chin toward the rope so that the rope mark is always above the Adam’s apple. Was Tate strangled first with the rope, then hung up in the tree to make it look like suicide? No answer because no autopsy was ordered.

A few days later, the Childress Police Department, were told that tree had been turned into a satanic altar. Officers arrived to find a cow skull lodged into the tree. Beneath it were logs surrounding a pile of rocks.

It was regarded as one of those tragic mysteries and the impulsive act of youth until May 1991. That was when Tate’s older sister was found dead, face down on a bed. And then, in quiet little Childress, a town of 5,800 in the southeast corner of the Panhandle, the panic hit like a clap of thunder.

This kicked off the Stanic Panic in this small town.

Terrifying tales had been whispered around town since Tate’s death. It was said that he had been murdered by a satanic cult that lived in town. According to the rumors, the cult was made up of 10 - 12 members. The editor of the local newspaper had heard that twenty cultists attended the sacrifice of Tate and his sister, 27-year-old Terrie Trosper, was then murdered because she knew too much about the cult.

Stone altars, mutilated animals, defaced tombstones, and black-robed Satanists who met in abandoned houses were sighted. Driving past the cemetery, Officer Conners saw a figure standing by Tate Rowland’s grave. When he came by later to check, he found spittle all over Tate’s tombstone. More than one person reported seeing teenagers eating pages from a Bible and then foaming at the mouth. Another rumor had the cult searching for a blond child to use as a human sacrifice.

Due to the many bizarre satanic-related confessions from people who said they knew about the crimes the sheriff reopened the old cases. The district attorney convened a grand jury to investigate them. Bodies were exhumed. An expert on satanic cults arrived to give a seminar to the townspeople on how to spot a devil worshiper and later helped the sheriff sift through evidence. Certain citizens were subpoenaed to tell the grand jury what they knew about the cult and the murders; others freely called up the sheriff’s office and provided names and phone numbers of people they believed were cult members.

Just after Halloween that year came a “confession” made to the police by fifteen-year-old Ray Wilks. One of the town’s more renegade teenagers, Ray was arrested for stealing a car and drunkenly smashing it into a light pole. According to the arresting officers, when Ray was booked, he said he was a member of a satanic cult that had been at the tree when Tate was hanged. After that the Wilks family became synonymous with the rumored satanic cult in town.

One might have figured, as time passed, that the whole story would finally die down. But then Terrie Trosper showed up dead—and when Childress residents heard where she had died, they couldn’t believe their ears.

Terrie had died in the infamous “devil house” of Frank Wilks.

Terrie’s new boyfriend was a 28-year-old ex-convict named Ricky Bradford, who was then a close friend of Frank Wilks’s 22-year-old son, Darwin. Both Darwin and Ricky had been convicted and sent to the state prison in separate cases of aggravated assault. On the night of her death, Terrie, Ricky Bradford, Darwin, and some friends were at the Wilkses’ house, drinking.

Terrie had been drinking heavily—at the autopsy, her blood alcohol level was determined to be .23, more than twice the legal intoxication limit.

An autopsy determined that Terrie had died by choking on her own vomit. Officers from the Childress Police Department, finding no evidence of foul play, closed the case. Yet allegations quickly surfaced that Terrie’s death was somehow linked to Tate’s. “She never believed Tate took his own life,” says Lisa Barber, a courthouse secretary and long-time friend of Terrie’s. “Right up to her death, she never accepted it. She was hell-bent on finding out who killed him.” Ricky Bradford admitted to me that Terrie once told him that Tate had warned her to keep her daughters in the house because the cult was going to sacrifice one of them in a satanic ritual.

Days later Darwin Wilks attempted to kill himself by swallowing nearly 30 tablets of Elavil, a mild anti-depressant that has tranquilizing effects. He left a suicide note that read, “I know something that the cops don’t know. I know who killed Terrie. I can’t live anymore.” However when he recovered he recanted saying he didn’t even remember writing the note.

After exhuming Tate’s body they discovered that because Tate’s casket was not airtight, he was too decomposed for the medical examiner, Dr. Veasey, to make any conclusive judgments. But a drug test did find traces of Elavil. The same thing Darwin Wilks used to attempt suicide. By no means a party drug—“It’s the kind of thing you take to sleep,” says the district attorney David McCoy. He suggested that it might be the very thing a cult would use to sedate a sacrifice before killing him. The rumor mill went berserk.

The grand jury requested Terrie Trosper’s body be exhumed too. Dr. Veasey, after studying the previous autopsy of her death, said it was unlikely that she could have choked to death since she had been lying face down. Less than a week before Halloween 1991, the new autopsy results were announced: Terrie had died of asphyxiation, most likely smothering. The report said that contusions on her body, especially on her inner thigh, and bruises in her mouth “indicated blunt trauma, likely incurred during an assault.” McCoy told the press that more than one person may have been involved in her killing—someone held her down while another did the smothering.

There was another thing found in Terrie’s body—Elavil. Though Veasey warned that he could only be 70 percent certain that Terrie Trosper’s death was from murder, McCoy vowed that he would pursue the case as a homicide.

Frank Wilks testified that Darwin told him Terrie had been murdered by another person in the house that night. But no one who was there would confess to anything.

That night David McCoy’s house mysteriously burned to the ground. The fire marshal said the fire was accidental. “But the first thing I thought was that someone was after me,” McCoy says. “I still wonder if that’s not what happened. Anything can be made to look accidental.”

No one was ever convicted of either death.

For more information

Wikipedia article