One stares at a map of Texas, with its 254 counties containing some 17,000,000 head of cattle—in fact, there are more cattle than people in Texas—and it is obvious that a group of moneyed mutilators could chop away pretty much to the tune of their own folly. More than 500,000 cattle reportedly die each year in Texas from natural causes, so a few hundred moos mutilated by night stealth would not be significant.
The Texas mutes reached public attention in November 1974 and then appeared to stop. More cases occured in early 1975, with parallels to cases in other states. On January 20th, for instance, Hopkins County sheriff Paul R. Jones announced that a blood-slurping group calling itself the Devil's Disciples was believed responsible for the mutes. In Kaufman County, east of Dallas, mysterious helicopters were reported and police officers started directing their spotlights into the night sky. And Texas authorities tended to ascribe the mutes to those coyotes with table manners and stomachs big enough to hold eight gallons of moo blood—even though, as in other states, there were instances in Texas where predators had uncharacteristically avoided cattle that had been mutilated. (Usually, when a cow lies dead for a few days, the ripening fumes spread widely and predators quickly arrive by land, air and burrow for the feast.)
Also, in January, the Forth Worth Star Telegram paid for toxicology tests on a heifer found near Brownwood, and the test showed "a significant amount of nicotine" in the liver and the blood; nicotine is the material most commonly used in tranquilizer guns. In March, a cow was chopped up north of Big Spring; its udder had been removed—but carefully, so that the stomach lining had not been punctured—and its heart had been removed through a small hole in its chest.
There were UFOs reported also. In Cochran County, following numerous flying-objects reports in early March, two mutes were found in a large wheat field, each lying in a circle of borned, stubbled wheat about 30 feet in diameter. Sheriff C. G. Richards checked the circles and reported finding some radiation residue.
By late March 1975, Texas investigators had gotten word of the Federal investigation of the mute mgh in Minnesota. As severla of the suspected mob members—including the leader—were supposedly residing in Texas, the state department of public safety, as well as local police departments, conducted surveillance operations in Austin and in Hurst, Texas, near Fort Worth.
Texas, however, had its own prime satanic suspects in the mutilation case: a group called the Sons of Satan. In 1974, a Kilgore College student had written a paper in which he said that this group performed dawn rituals in which cattle where chopped up. The student's theme was destroyed by one or more of his teachers, who felt that the material was disgusting. But word of the paper reached T. O. Tinsley, an employee of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, who was investigating the mutilations; Tinsley located the student and traveled around Texas, talking with several of the student's sources.
I knew of a motorcycle gang in California that also called itsefl the Sons of Satan; in 1970, a pack of its members murdered an Orange County woman and, according to a young man who later confessed, offered her heart to Satan by placing it in the woman's station wagon and setting the vehicle afire. The leader of the California Sons of Satan claimed to belong to a larger satanic organization that regularly sacrificed human victims in ceremonies in Northern and Southern California. One Colorado investigator believes that the Sons of Satan are involved in the mutilations and that the purpose of the mutilations is clandestine bacteriological warfare research. I found no indication, however, that the California and Texas Sons of Satan were connected.
Between January and September 1975, John Makeig of the Fort Worth Star Telegram wrote a series of articles on the mutilations. The articles eventually attracted the attention of mute-moo informant Bankston, who began a correspondence with Makeig, in which he repeated some of his old charges and also came up with some new ones tailor-made for Texas. There is no measuring the terror that Bankston caused in Texas that spring and summer of 1975.
In a small city south of Houston, for example, Texas Department of Public Safety agents called together the mayor, the chief of police and the city manager and announced that the town water supply was going to be poisoned by occult terrorists. In Mayflower, a small town near the Louisiana border, a sheriff's deputy called together the town's 100 citizens and announced that tow of them were going to be mutilated. The result in both places was total fear-fire.
Meanwhile, learning that the Federal investigation had been called off, Makeig began to treat Bankston with more cuation. When Bankston announced in a letter that the mutilators were going to rendezvous in August at the Big Bend National Park in south Texas, Makeig contated the park superintendent, who watched, but no gathering took place. When Bankston promised to deliver a list of mute-mob names, Makeig waited patiently for several weeks, but no list arrived.
Bankston then compounded his credibility problems by hinting that a stock-broker's daughter he had already fingered as a member of the mute-mob was about to do something possibly baleful to Makeig. Makeig took the veiled threat seriously and gave the Fort Worth police voluminbus data on the mute mob. "If I get killed," Makeig told one in September 1975, "I want the police to have plenty of leads."
Around this time, Captain Keith Wolverton, a very diligent investigator from the Cascade County, Montana, sheriff's department, traveled to Marion Penitentiary to give Bankston a polygraph examination; Bankston failed on important questions. Makeig followed up by calling alleged members of the mutilation mob—including the alleged leader and the woman—and found no indication of involvement.
In early October 1975, Makeig wrote a scathing article in the Star Telegram discounting mosst of Bankston's allegations, as self-serving jailhouse bunk-bubble. Bankston was finished in Texas.