Park Predators - The Biologist

Episode Date: June 11, 2024

When a biologist disappears into the Texas marshland he's charged with protecting, law enforcement comes together to find answers. When the truth finally surfaces, a murderer's cover up unravels, and a beloved game warden is avenged. View source material and photos for this episode at: parkpredators.com/the-biologist Park Predators is an audiochuck production.Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter: @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck

Hi, park enthusiasts. I'm your host, Delia D'Ambra, and the story I'm going to tell you about today is a unique one. It takes place just north of Palestine, Texas, in a marshland previously referred to as the Catfish Creek State Game Preserve, a state-owned wetland that was part of a wildlife management area which covered roughly 9,000 acres back in 1951. which covered roughly 9,000 acres back in 1951. A listener wrote to me and suggested I feature this case in an episode, and once I read a few articles about it, I knew I had to research it more. It's quintessential park predators content. In our century, the geographic area I'm going to be talking about is called the Gus Engling Wildlife Management Area,

named after the biologist-slash-game warden who vanished there 72 years ago. Up until 1952, the management area was called the Durden Wildlife Management Area, but as a nod to Gus's sacrifice, the state renamed it in his honor. Since the late 1980s, Texas parks and wildlife has slowly allowed the public to access more and more of this beautiful landscape. Though it remains a dedicated haven for biologists and researchers to study different animals and plants, some parts of the habitat are now accessible to visitors who want to explore on their own, a privilege that was not around back in 1951. One day in December of that

year, Gus Engling was doing what he always did, patrolling the swamp, when suddenly he disappeared. Rumors swirled that the marshland itself had swallowed him whole. But after an exhaustive hunt for clues, the truth of what happened to him finally surfaced, literally. This is Park Predators. Around 10.30 in the morning on Thursday, December 13th, 1951, a man named Dudley Jackson, who was overseeing a group of men working on repairing a section of pipeline inside Durdon Wildlife Management Area, looked up to see the refuge's director, 33-year-old Gus Engling, approaching. Gus was out on his routine patrol,

likely studying and collecting specimens of flora and fauna as the resident biologist and keeping an eye out for poachers. Gus was right in the middle of having a conversation with Dudley and his workers when suddenly the group heard a gunshot ring out from somewhere not far away in the preserve. Immediately following the sound, a flock of ducks that had been in the general area where the gunshot came from,

made a bunch of noise and started to fly away. Now, normally the sound of gunfire wouldn't have been that out of the ordinary considering hunting was allowed in the marshland. But Gus knew that December was not an open hunting season for ducks, which meant only one thing could be going on. A poacher was illegally operating in the refuge.

To give you some background about how big of a no-no incidents like this are, the Texas Parks and Wildlife website states that the wildlife management area is currently home to more than 100 types of birds, dozens of mammals, and more than 50 species of reptiles and fish. So to say this spot was a paradise worth protecting is kind of an understatement. For a while at the turn of the 20th century, all that beauty found itself facing a crisis due to overhunting. Up until 1920, a person could hunt year-round inside the preserve, so the deer and turkey populations were pretty much decimated during that time. But by 1950, things had changed. The state had gotten a lot stricter with hunting seasons and how many animals hunters could legally

kill. Gus was one of the few people tasked with enforcing those new regulations. Anyway, right after hearing the gunshot, Gus took off in the direction of the sound, trudging through thick, wet brush and several feet of water as he made his way toward where the noise had come from. Within a few seconds, Deadly Jackson and the pipeline workers saw him disappear into the swamp. The men settled back into their task and really didn't think much else about Gus or the gunfire until about 10 or 15 minutes later,

when another gunshot rang out. The second loud bang got the workers' attention because it had come from the same general direction as the first shot. They waited and listened, but didn't hear any more gunfire. There was only silence and the sounds of nature. The pipeline workers never saw Gus reappear.

The available source material doesn't go into a lot of detail regarding what happened next, but from what I was able to gather from reading several articles, is that eventually Dudley Jackson and the rest of the pipeline workers got concerned about the situation. You see, Gus had left his work truck parked near their construction site, and it sat there for a while. Dudley told the Associated Press that when he'd last seen Gus, he'd been unarmed or not carrying any kind of service weapon. The group was worried something bad may have happened to the game warden after he went to investigate the gunshots. Eventually, the pipeline crew reported Gus missing to the Anderson County Sheriff's Office, and within a few hours, a full-scale search was underway to find him. According to an article for the Tyler Morning Telegraph and Bob Brister's reporting for the Tyler Courier Times. When Anderson County deputies went out to investigate,

they spoke with the pipeline workers and learned that where the two shots had come from were about 200 yards away from where they'd been working. When deputies trudged to the spot in the preserve that the workers said Gus had headed to, they found wadding from a 12-gauge shotgun laying in the brush. For those of you who don't know what wadding is,

it's the packing material that goes into shotgun shells along with the pellets and gunpowder. When a cartridge is fired and a shell is ejected from the gun, pieces of wadding come out too, and they usually land in the general area where the gun was fired or in the vicinity where a shooter was standing. This wadding the deputies found did not give them a good feeling. Just a few hours into the search, a group of volunteers, the Army, Navy, and Civil Air Patrol had arrived and fanned out across the preserve to help the local deputies look for Gus. By the start of that following weekend, Saturday, December 15th, even more people had gotten

involved. Bob Brister's article I mentioned earlier stated that close to 200 people were out searching the swamp. Teams utilized helicopters and motorboats to scour as much of the dense landscape as they could, trying to find any sign of Gus. And the task wasn't easy, since the swamp consisted mostly of soggy bogs and standing water with thick, tangled vegetation concealing a lot of areas. December's poor weather conditions also posed a challenge to the teams combing the terrain. Search crews had to battle frigid temperatures and blustering winds as they waded through the marshland. Some news reports stated it got as cold as 20 degrees on that Friday night.

Some news reports stated it got as cold as 20 degrees on that Friday night. For his article, Bob Brister interviewed Gus's wife, Lisa, at the couple's home in Palestine. The mother of three was understandably distraught, but said she was not giving up hope that her husband was still alive. She told the newspaper, quote, I can't believe he is gone. I won't believe it until they find some proof. I just have a feeling that he is alive somewhere,

that he isn't even in that swamp, end quote. Members of law enforcement who were charged with the task of finding Gus weren't as optimistic as Lisa. They believed that Gus was most likely dead, and I think the reason they were so convinced of that had to do with what Gus didn't have with him when he disappeared. You see, when the pipeline workers had last seen Gus, he was only wearing what was described as light clothing, not apparel that would have kept him warm in 20-degree windy weather in the marsh. Officials were worried that the harsh weather conditions that had unleashed on Thursday and Friday posed a real threat to Gus if he was in fact still in the preserve.

Locals who were familiar with the landscape told the Tyler Currier Times that the terrain Gus had vanished in could easily kill a person in a matter of minutes. Quicksand bogs were known to be all over the swamp, and one former cattle rancher of that area even told reporters that if Gus had stepped into a quicksand pit, it was unlikely he would have been able to get out. The rancher explained that he'd once had an entire steer sink in quicksand up to its horns. On top of that, an abundance of alligators living in the marsh also posed a threat. And not just the fact that the reptiles were living in the swamp, but more so the peril their homes could pose to humans walking through the landscape. Alligators were known to burrow out holes, which were almost impossible to see if you were wading through water. Some locals told the press that it was possible Gus had fallen into one of those holes

and drowned or become obscured from view. At the time, Anderson County deputies assured reporters that they were investigating every possibility of where Gus might be, including quote-unquote working out alligator holes. But behind the scenes, Anderson County deputies weren't really concerned that the elements had swallowed up Gus. Instead, they had far darker suspicions. They believed someone had done something to him. And as it turned out, they had a man in custody at their jail who they suspected knew much more about where Gus Engling was. According to the Kilgore News-Herald, while the search for Gus had been underway on Thursday, deputies in Anderson County had received a tip that

indicated a 59-year-old black man who lived near the preserve named Alton Paris had been illegally hunting inside the swamp around the same time Gus disappeared. Some source material says authorities tracked Alton down on Thursday night, while other articles say he was picked up Friday morning. But whichever it was, when the sheriff's office brought him in, investigators detained him on suspicion of poaching. When they questioned Alton about what time he'd been in the preserve on Thursday and what exactly he'd been doing,

Alton admitted that he'd been illegally hunting ducks in the swamp. He said he'd killed two of the birds and gave them to a friend of his, but emphasized that he was not involved in Gus's disappearance. News articles reported that Alton lived really close to the swamp, like technically on the edge of the refuge, so getting in and out of the area was much easier for him to do than most folks. He was also super familiar with the terrain. In fact, according to the Tyler Morning Telegraph and the Tyler Courier Times, before this incident,

Alton had been caught previously for illegally poaching wildlife in the preserve. So all that information made him check a lot of boxes for law enforcement investigators. When deputies pressed him about if he'd seen anything suspicious while he'd been poaching, Alton said he hadn't. He claimed he hadn't seen Gus or anyone else.

But investigators were still unsure about Alton's story. So to vet it a little more, Anderson County deputies and the sheriff, along with a state game warden, took him out to the preserve and had him show them where he killed the two ducks he claimed to have shot on Thursday morning. Alton took the men to a remote part of the preserve and told them that the location they were standing in was where he'd killed the two birds.

Investigators determined that spot was more than a quarter of a mile away from where the pipeline workers indicated they'd last seen Gus investigating that gunfire. Like, it was totally in the opposite direction. So it seemed on the surface, at least, that Alton's story logistically checked out. For investigators, it seemed highly unlikely,

due to the swampy terrain, that Gus and Alton would have encountered one another in the timeframe they believed a potential crime had occurred. But just to be extra thorough, deputies tracked down the man who Alton said he'd given his ducks to, and that guy confirmed that portion of Alton's story. The source material doesn't go into detail about this, but I have to assume that the man who ended up with the ducks

confirmed for investigators that Alton had given him the dead birds sometime on Thursday morning, making it impossible for Alton to have been doing something to Gus in the preserve, and also handing over these dead ducks to his friend. I don't know, again, it's kind of a murky part of the story. But anyway, the Tyler Morning Telegraph reported that after the field trip into the marsh with Alton, the authorities made arrangements to take him back to jail while they continued investigating. What's wild to me is that the

deputies who accompanied Alton on this show-and-tell field trip allowed him to walk home alone through the swamp to change his clothes before going back to jail. Yeah, essentially law enforcement cut Alton loose for a bit. He promised he'd come back to the jail, then he cleaned up at his house, and then deputies basically detained him again. Now, if that whole sequence of events seems super strange to you, you're not alone. It's bizarre to me too. The only thing I can chalk it up to is that this happened in 1951, and law enforcement did things completely differently back in those days.

I highly doubt they had anything close to what we would now consider to be proper police procedure. Regardless though, the Tyler Courier Times and Austin American reported that once Alton was back in custody, law enforcement officials drove him from Anderson County to Austin on Saturday so that he could undergo a lie detector

test. But the results of that test were inconclusive. Now, for those of you who don't know, polygraphs are extremely unreliable and are not admissible in court today. But the reason why results might be inconclusive is due to the fact that there's insufficient data available. Maybe a question needs to be rephrased or there's a physiological thing happening that interferes with the test, such as rapid heart rate or sweating. But none of the source material for this story

goes into detail about that part of the case or why Alton's results were inconclusive. But what I do know is that the next day, Sunday, December 16th, the investigation took a dramatic turn. According to articles published in the Tyler Morning Telegraph and the Associated Press via the Austin American, right before noon on Sunday, a guy named Ed Montgomery, who was one of the volunteers for the large search party looking for Gus, stumbled across a submerged log that he had

a hard time moving out of his way. For several hours, Ed had been making his way through the swamp with other searchers, and most of the vegetation and debris they'd encountered had been easy to dislodge or move aside. He told the newspaper that as he approached this particular piece of wood, though, he noticed the water was getting deeper and deeper. And when he went to step over the log, something shiny sunken down about 18 inches in the water had caught his eye. When he bent down to investigate,

he realized that the shiny thing was a buckle to a man's boot. Shortly after discovering the boot, Ed and the other volunteers who were with him saw a man's hand float into view from beneath an adjacent log. After removing the bigger log, they uncovered a man's body. He was fully intact and had clearly been stuffed beneath the submerged pieces of wood so that he wouldn't float up. Right away, everyone realized the dead guy was Gus Engling.

None of the news articles for this case say exactly how everyone knew it was Gus, but I must assume that maybe the clothing he was wearing or some of the searchers' familiarity with what he looked like was what helped them shore up the ID. However, part of me doubts it was the latter option because, according to an article by the Tyler Morning Telegraph, Gus had been shot in the face with what authorities at the time said came from the blast of a shotgun. His facial features were gruesomely disfigured as a result. So I find it hard to believe that someone in the search party

looked at his face and was able to recognize him. But maybe that was the case. I don't know. That same article from the Tyler Morning Telegraph said that not long after authorities found Gus, the Anderson County Sheriff located a pair of gold-rimmed eyeglasses near his body. The glasses were an intriguing clue because everyone who knew Gus knew that he didn't wear glasses, which meant the pair of spectacles likely belonged to whoever had killed him.

Unsure of how the eyeglasses fit into the crime, which meant the pair of spectacles likely belonged to whoever had killed him. Unsure of how the eyeglasses fit into the crime, investigators seized them as evidence anyway, then removed Gus's body from the swamp. He was sent to a funeral home in Palestine to await funeral arrangements. News of Gus's murder weighed heavily on members of the Palestinian community, as well as with his extended family and friends, who lived in his wife's hometown of Taylor, Texas. Gus was a husband and father to three young children, Paul, who was eight years old, Faye, who was six years old, and Donald, who was just one year old. None of them would ever see their dad again, which was a heart-wrenching

reality for everyone to accept. The Associated Press reported via the Taylor Daily Press that Gus and his family had only been living in Palestine for less than a year before this happened. The Wildlife Refuge hired him as a fish and game warden after it tightened up the preserve's hunting regulations in 1950. The state needed someone with an interest in wildlife conservation to direct the operations of the management area, and Gus was the perfect choice. He'd had a successful career in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, and after leaving the service,

he earned his bachelor's degree at the University of Texas and then completed his master's degree at Texas A&M. People who knew Gus described him as a soft-spoken man and said that when he was at work, he spent the majority of his time on duty in the wooded areas he was charged with protecting. Gus was laid to rest on December 19th, roughly a week after his death. Leo Heeler reported for the South Plains Sportsman that Lisa, Gus's wife, stopped receiving his paychecks after his death,

but the state Game and Fish Commission's office in Austin allowed her to come work there as a clerk. After Gus's body was discovered, the Anderson County Sheriff's Office said that the general public shouldn't be worried because they already had a suspect in custody for the crime. Alton Paris. Yeah, remember him? Well, according to an article for the Tyler Morning Telegraph, at some point in the hours between Saturday night, December 15th, and Sunday afternoon, December 16th, Alton had confessed to murdering Gus. In fact, law enforcement officials in Anderson County

had elicited a verbal and written confession from him. In it, Alton admitted to gunning down Gus after the biologist had caught him poaching ducks in the refuge. He said he'd initially lied to law enforcement investigators and then went on to describe in detail how Gus had found him looking at some live ducks on Thursday morning. But then things escalated quickly once Gus found the two ducks Alton had illegally shot and killed. In his written confession, Alton admitted, quote, I saw the white man coming. He hollered at me and asked me if I was having any luck. I told him no and walked

straight off, but he kept on coming. So I started to speed up. We passed the two ducks I had killed, and he stopped and picked them up. It looks like you're having a little luck, he said. Then I started running. He hollered to halt, but I kept on running. I looked back, and he was gaining on me. I started across a log and thought I got ahead of him, but he was closer than ever. He was running fast, throwing up water and making an awful fuss. Then he got too close and I whirled and shot. He just throwed those ducks straight up and fell over backwards. I guess he must have been about 30 feet away. I didn't stop. I picked up them ducks he dropped and kept on running, end quote. Alton told authorities that on Friday, December 14th, during the short

window of time Anderson County investigators had let him go home on his own to change his clothes, he'd returned to the spot in the swamp where he'd shot Gus and quickly worked to conceal his body. Alton said that despite how risky it was to return to the body amongst all the other searchers being nearby, he stealthily dragged Gus roughly 25 feet through the swamp and crammed his body underneath a large log. He said he then grabbed another log to ensure the biologist stayed submerged and out of view. I have to imagine that this task couldn't have been easy because according to an article by the Austin American, Gus weighed 200 pounds and was six foot tall. Plus, you have to figure he was soaking wet

after spending a day floating in the swamp. And because he wasn't alive anymore, he was nothing but dead weight. Alton took a huge risk returning to the scene of the crime and concealing the corpse of his victim while there were so many other people in the marsh searching for Gus. Regarding his guilt and how remorseful he was for committing the crime, Alton said, quote,

I'd give everything I have if I hadn't done it, but it's too late. It learned me some sense, but it won't do any good now, end quote. On Sunday night, Anderson County District Attorney John McDonald charged Alton with Gus's murder. But it wasn't just Alton's confession that made the case against him so strong. The authorities claimed they had physical evidence tying him to the crime too. Evidence that, despite the suspect's best efforts to cover up his misdeeds, pointed squarely at him. The Tyler Morning Telegraph reported that it was the gold-rimmed eyeglasses found near Gus's body in the swamp

that sealed out in Paris' fade, at least as far as physical evidence was concerned. The Anderson County Sheriff at the time, a guy named Roy Harrington, told the press that investigators had shown the eyeglasses to Alton's wife while he was in custody, and she confirmed the glasses belonged to him. Apparently, this interaction with his wife had taken place shortly before Alton ultimately confessed to the crime and was the catalyst that had prompted him to come clean. There are only a few articles I could find that mention this next piece of information,

but apparently when Alton was first being questioned by investigators on Thursday night, literally hours after Gus had vanished, there was a moment where he attempted to escape being interrogated. The Associated Press, via the Kilgore News-Herald and Fort Worth Star-Telegram, reported that Alton lunged for the Anderson County Sheriff's gun while the Sheriff was escorting a stenographer and another person into Alton's jail cell. During the scuffle, it was reported that Alton bit off a piece of a newspaper reporter's finger while being subdued. Yeah, wild, right? Anyway, on December 21st, eight days after Gus's murder, a grand jury formally indicted Alton for the crime.

A judge scheduled his trial for mid-January 1952. Before the trial got underway, though, Alton's defense attorney filed a motion to have his confession thrown out and not used as evidence at trial. By that point, Alton was claiming the confession had been coerced, and in reality, he had not intended to shoot Gus, but rather, his shotgun had gone off accidentally while he'd been running away from the game warden. Alton also recanted his previous claim of having gone back to the crime scene to hide Gus's body. But the presiding judge denied the motion.

And ultimately, it was Alton's confession that swayed a jury to convict him of murder. According to the Associated Press via the Lubbock Evening Journal, Alton was found guilty at his trial and ultimately sentenced to death for his crime. In October 1952, while sitting on death row, he and his attorney appealed his conviction to the Texas Supreme Court, citing once again that his confession

was involuntary and should not have been used at his trial. But the Supreme Court did not grant him a hearing or consider his claim. On December 2nd, 1952, almost a year after Gus's murder, prison authorities at Huntsville Penitentiary in Texas executed Alton. He was subjected to death by the electric chair. Before he took his last breath, prison staff overheard him whispering a prayer to himself. Nearly eight months later, the Texas Game and Fish Commission renamed the wildlife refuge in Gus Engling's honor. The roughly 9,000-acre preserve became a living, breathing memorial to the fallen biologist. During the announcement about the name change, the Game and Fish Commission unveiled a bunch

of new conservation initiatives that they said were intended to improve water supply distribution and quality of life for the plant and animal species that called the swampland home. Something that's interesting to me is that Gus Engling isn't the only Texas game warden to be murdered in the line of duty. Texas Parks and Wildlife's website has a list of all the game wardens who have ever perished while on the job. Several of the men featured were said to have died during storms or were involved in car accidents or drowned, but at least six of them were killed by poachers or illegal trespassers, including Gus. An eerily similar case to Gus's that I stumbled across in my research for this episode really shook me. There are so many similarities, it's almost unbelievable.

It happened on December 8, 1963, almost 12 years to the day that Gus Engling was murdered. A 33-year-old game warden named John Murphree, who was also a father of three young children, was patrolling a wetland in Jasper County, Texas, when he was brutally gunned down by a duck poacher. The Officer Down Memorial page for John, as well as the Texas Game Warden Association website, states that he came across a group of men who were illegally hunting ducks. They tried to outrun John, and when he got close, one of them blasted him in his stomach and the back of his head with multiple rounds from a shotgun, then left his body floating in a flooded field.

At least one of the suspects in that crime was convicted of the murder, but only received a two-year prison sentence. The state of Texas named an 8,400-acre wildlife management area in southeast Texas in John's honor. The J.D. Murphree Wildlife Management Area near the town of Port Arthur memorializes his sacrifice. To close out this episode, I want to leave you all with the moving words from Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter George Kellum, who published a remembrance piece in 1964 dedicated to fallen game wardens. In a section specifically addressing Gus's murder,

Kellum wrote, quote, I remember the name of Gus Engling. Gus thought that wildlife had a value to all the people. He was a biologist who placed his sincerity, his devotion, and dedication above his personal safety, and he stepped into the deep woods of East Texas in an effort to prevent his beloved wildlife from being abused. At the same time, he stepped into the face of a shotgun and into an open grave. Remember the name Gus Engling.

End quote. Park Predators is an Audiochuck original show. So, what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?