The Binge Crimes: Lady Mafia - Borderlands | 6. Oh Sh*t

Episode Date: October 5, 2021

Dale and Kelly hit the jackpot, make their first arrest, and close in on their second. Want the full story? Unlock all episodes of Witnessed, ad-free, right now by subscribing to The Binge. Plus, get binge access to brand new stories dropping on the first of every month — that’s all episodes, all at once, all ad-free. Just click ‘Subscribe’ on the top of the Witnessed show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you listen. A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. Find out more about The Binge and other podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts and follow us @sonypodcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Afua Hirsch. I'm Peter Frankopan. And in our podcast, Legacy, we explore the lives of some of the biggest characters in history. This season, we are looking at the life of the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill. It's fair to say he's a complex and controversial character. Almost 150 years since his birth, how does his legacy hold up today? Follow Legacy now wherever you get your podcasts. Or binge entire seasons early and ad-free on Wondery Plus.

Campsite Media. I think the horse likes me, if that's what sticking the entirety of his cavernous snout into my hand means. As I'm standing on Saturday morning, listening to the insects buzz in the tall grass at the county fairgrounds outside of Marfa. There were plenty of days in the town's history when this spot was buzzing with activity. The pounding of hooves and swoosh of a rope zeroing in on a calf, with a crowd whooping it up when a young cowboy hit his mark. The only swoosh today is from this white horse, his tail trying to swat away flies.

The county fairground is unremarkable now, a bit run down, not used as much anymore. You'd never guess what happened here 30 years ago. You'd never guess this was the place where the lives of Robert Chambers and Rick Thompson would change forever. And not just their lives. The events that took place here would shake the entire Big Bend region. From Campside Media, the first season of Witnessed, this is Borderlands. I'm Rob D'Amico. Chapter 6. Oh, shit. Dale Stinson and Kelly Cook were desperately trying to find their key informant, Sam Thomas. If they were going to have any hope of actually prosecuting Robert Chambers,

they were going to need Sam, on the stand, laying out the details of the vast drug smuggling ring that Chambers ran. But Dale and Kelly were starting to fear the worst. It had been a few days, and no sign of Sam. Maybe they'd see him inside a body bag. Maybe he was in a hole in the desert and would never be found. By Tuesday, December 3rd, 1991, Dale was beginning to lose hope. It was late at night, I don't know, 10, 11 o'clock at night, the phone rings. Sam Thomas. Just as suddenly as he was gone from Alpine, he had reappeared.

No pleasantries, no explanation of where he'd been. Sam got right to the point. Robert Chambers had just brought over a new drug shipment. And it's in Marfa, in the horse trailer belonging to the sheriff of Presidio County. A horse trailer belonging to the sheriff of Presidio County. That set off major alarm bells. I said, okay, have you told anybody else? No.

I said, okay, you're at home? Yes, I'm at home. I said, stay there. Don't go anywhere. With Sam still on the line, Dale tried to process what he'd just heard. First of all, I was relieved that he was still alive, and then I was kind of shocked when he told me what was going on. We thought he was back in business and getting ready to do something, but this kind of confirmed it.

So I hung up the phone and was going to call everybody. But Sam obviously had too much of something. He didn't hang up the phone. Sam, in his rush to get off the line, hadn't hung up the call. And the antiquated phone technology still being used in far west Texas in 1991? It required both people to hang up to end a call. That cut off my phone, and so I couldn't use the phone to call out. That was it. My phone was gone. There was no other phone in my house, and there was no way I could go anywhere. So I sent my wife next door at 11 o'clock at night, knock on the door and see if she could make calls

to everybody. And then she made calls to everybody, and then she drove me out, dropped me off at the hotel. The hotel was the appointed staging area for the small team of DEA and customs agents that Dale and Kelly were leading. Soon they were all arriving. Everybody's, you know, kind of on edge. Here it is. It's late. Everybody's getting ready to go to bed. And we're out on this. And are we sure this is what it is? And there's a lot of supposition, a lot of second thinking about what's going on and what happened. Why did Sam just drop

the phone? Things like this. And it did seem slightly suspicious, but there wasn't time for speculation. If Sam Thomas was telling the truth, then there was a major drug shipment sitting in a horse trailer in the middle of the fairgrounds in Marfa, Texas. Kelly knew they needed

to act fast. He immediately dispatched another customs agent, Bill Fort, to the scene. We had Bill Fort, to the scene. We had Bill go directly to the fairgrounds to watch that trailer. Then Kelly got together the rest of the team and deployed them to stake out the key players in the case. We asked them to go check on Sam. We asked them to go, you know, at least drive by and see if there's anything going on at Robert's place.

You know, kind of the standard, you know, go by, check the bars, see if any of our usual suspects are there. And that just left Kelly and Dale, who set off to see just how good Sam Thomas' information really was. Kelly and I went over to Marfa. It was, well, it was kind of, we didn't know what to expect, to put it bluntly. Dale was sitting shotgun in Kelly's Chevrolet Caprice, all thoughts on what they might find awaiting them in Marfa. The car fell silent as they sank into their thoughts. The darkness of the desert surrounded them. We didn't know how good this information was.

He's been out supposedly with Robert Chambers for a number of days. And we have the information. we don't know how solid it is we don't know exactly what's going on are we walking into something we don't want to walk into I mean reliable source but this is an oddity there was even that skepticism in your mind of Sam screwing us. Something happened, and Sam got involved in something, and he's putting us off the scent. But there was something else bothering Dale and Kelly. The fact that Sam had said the load was sitting in a trailer belonging to the Presidio County Sheriff's Office.

They'd been wary of Rick Thompson before that moment. They knew he was close with Robert Chambers. And the whole time, they'd wanted to make absolutely sure the sheriff didn't know anything about their investigation. But now they were asking a bigger question. Did the sheriff have a role in this whole thing? As they drove fast down the two-lane highway, they radioed ahead to Bill Fort to ask about the trailer sitting in the fairgrounds. Bill Fort, I almost remember verbatim, his response was, it's loaded 10-4. It's like, oh shit, here we go. I was amped up. I was nervous.

Let's put it that way. And maybe I didn't show it, but on the inside I was, and I was churning. And I think Dale was too. After 25 minutes of driving, Dale and Kelly arrived in Marfa. By then it was, I'm saying one in the morning, maybe a little later. It was cold as hell, man. It was cold.

But it was early hours by then. There was nobody there. We pulled up to one of the stop-and-robs, you know, the convenience stores, and used the pay phone to call back to the rest of the guys and find out what was going on at that end. And the look on Kelly's face while I'm standing there on the phone, because, you know, it's not a phone booth. You got no cover at all. It's hanging on the side of the store. And Kelly gets this look on his face and I'm wondering what the heck is going on. It sounded like a truck just winding up.

I mean hauling ass coming from in town. But I'm watching this vehicle as it drives by, and it's Rick. Rick Thompson, the Presidio County Sheriff. The guy whose horse trailer was sitting a few blocks away with a load of drugs inside. And he turns and looks right at us. I mean, he looks at me right in the face. And I thought, man, shit, that's it. We're dead. He's going to come back and he's going to shoot us both.

But he had this, for lack of a better word, he had a very wild look in his eye. I mean, he's literally like, you know, 30 feet away when he drives by. And for whatever reason, he was so focused on something that he didn't realize who we were. And he kept going. And I'm telling Dale, Dale, we got to get out of here. We got to get off this street. We got to get out of this. We got to get off this main road. That was Rick. And I can picture perfectly right now. Is it that way for you? Yes. Still to this day, I can still, I mean,

he had his hat on, he had his cowboy hat on, and he had on a big coat because, like I said, it was cold, and he just, and he just looked right at us and kept going, which was a tremendous relief to me. I thought, well, okay, he's gone for the moment. We got to get out of here. We got to go somewhere else. At that point, only fellow agent Bill Fort was in Marfa, Dale and Kelly planning next steps, Bill Fort watching the trailer. They considered doing a stakeout,

see if they could catch Chambers red-handed, picking up the trailer himself. But Thompson was now circling around, and if he'd ID'd them, then maybe a whole posse of Robert's guys was going to show up. So we thought, well, we can't do this. We can't let it continue this way. There's too much heat already.

So that's when we called some guys from Alpine who had to pick up some of our guys to come hook up to that trailer and get it to the office, to get it to the EA office in Alpine, and that's what they did. And then we all met up there. As the team reconvened in the early morning in Alpine, before the first light had even broken across the borderlands, there was one question on everyone's lips.

What exactly was in that loaded trailer? When he says, the trailer is loaded, he didn't tell us what loaded meant. Didn't explain that. At first glance, the trailer was just a horse trailer. A lot of hay, no horses. But the agents started to sift through. First thing looking at them just sitting in there, you're thinking,

okay, maybe it was marijuana. And then you start feeling around and you see the bricks. You feel the bricks in there. So it was pretty plain at that point. That's not marijuana. Did you pull out your pocket knife and slice a bag open? Oh, that's good on Miami Vice, but no, we didn't do that. So no dipping the blade in a little bit of Coke and tasting it? Nobody, that's not the way you test cocaine.

Instead, they used a basic field test to figure out just what the substance was. No doubt about it, cocaine. My recollection is that it came back very, very pure, a very high percentage of purity, which meant it had not been cut at all. I mean, I recall it was like 99 something percent pure. I don't think I'd seen any drug load that large before. Even marijuana, I had never seen over a ton of it. And of course, the markings that we saw on the cocaine were indicative of a particular group. The markings were a symbol that looks like the Ralph Lauren logo, a polo pony with a rider.

In 1991, that meant one thing on a bag of cocaine, property of the Medellin cartel, Pablo Escobar's organization. The cocaine had come from Colombia, through Mexico, and was now in law enforcement custody in a warehouse in Alpine. And it's a little daunting, you know, to think that you just took off an organization's, you know, over a ton of their cocaine. And it kind of made you paranoid, really, really cautious, you know, wondering who knows we have it and who is watching us to see where it is. No one came to get their cocaine back. But there was one last thing for Dale and Kelly's team to do that following morning.

Arrest the guy they'd been chasing for all that time. Robert Chambers. Dale and Kelly didn't go themselves. Another key agent, Bob Mueller, had asked to lead the arrest team, and they thought he deserved some of the spotlight. After all, Bob Mueller was the guy who had first convinced the snitch Sam Thomas to talk. It also didn't seem like the most pleasant task. Mueller and his fellow agents were bracing for a fight. This was Robert Chambers. They closed in on his trailer home. It was sitting in a field next to those grand horse stables he had built.

This was going to be a surprise raid. You don't give a drug smuggler with a history of violence a heads up. So they burst through the front door, guns pointed. The guys that served that warrant said he was on his knees crying and begging not to be shot. So, you know, I guess it kind of depends on what side of the gun he's on as to how he's going to react. More after the break. From the award-winning creators of the hit podcast Father Wants Us Dead comes the stunning new true crime series In the Shadow of Princeton. In 1989, a prominent woman was found stabbed to death in her Princeton home.

With no clear motive, it's a chilling mystery that vexed investigators for years. Was the culprit a young outsider the police said was a serial attacker? Or someone in her family? Or even well-heeled students at the renowned Princeton University. He had a ski mask in his possession and a knife. She was familiar enough with them and trusted them enough that she turned her back on. And that was her mistake. One investigator sees a conspiracy.

Is he way off base or does privilege help you get away with murder? In the Shadow of Princeton is available wherever you get your podcasts. Or you can binge it ad-free by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. I'm Indra Varma, and in the latest season of The Spy Who, we open the file on Daphne Park, the spy who killed a prime minister. As the Belgian Congo gains its independence, Officer Park sets out to build a spy network. Together, they're about to go to new extremes to keep Congo free of communists. Follow The Spy Who now wherever you listen to podcasts. ¶¶ It was early on a Wednesday morning in December 1991, and Catherine Palmeira sat staring at her office window in downtown Marfa.

She had the perfect spot to notice the comings and goings of daily town life. Catherine had quit working as the secretary to Sheriff Rick Thompson a few months before the dramatic events with the horse trailer. And she was now an assistant to Donald Judd, the abstract artist who came to Marfa in the 1970s and helped revive the town's fortunes. And it was in Judd's office where another one of his workers burst through the door to break the

news. I had just gotten to work it was eight in the morning and she came in the office and said Robert Chambers was arrested early this morning apparently there was a trailer full of drugs out at the fairgrounds and it all kinds of things started flooding in and she said it was in a red horse trailer and i said you want to go out there let's go let's go see what we can see and so we hopped in i think my truck and we drove out there there was nothing to see. There was no yellow tape. There was no big crime scene. There was nothing except fairgrounds and an arena. But the fairgrounds had gotten Catherine thinking, because just the day before, watching from that same office window,

she'd noticed the sheriff driving out that direction. I kept saying, well, the sheriff was out there too, and you could start feeling the tremors. Everybody wondered what was Rick's involvement in this. There were people already starting to question early on. There was speculation, conflicting information, and Rick wasn't talking. He was saying he had no comment. Why was there a red horse trailer with one ton of cocaine parked out at the Presidio County fairgrounds next to the arena? And the horse trailer, after all, belonged to the Presidio County Sheriff's Office. And why

did DEA pull it away and take it to Alpine? I mean, it just, there were so many, many questions, and I kind of felt in my gut, I started having a lot of things starting to come back to me, the conversations in the office, the red horse trailer, the peculiar mood swings. Catherine wasn't the only one reaching that conclusion. Oh shit, what the fuck? Thompson? A cop? Oh shit, what are they going to do now? Even for people like Nancy Burton, who had seen a lot hanging around Robert Chambers and his outlaw crew back in the 70s and 80s, there was shock. And how dare him as a law enforcement agent do that? How dare he? Crooked cops? Uh-uh. If you're going to be a law enforcement agent, you better be above reproach, in my opinion.

But Rick was a free man. He hadn't been charged with anything. Robert was the one who was sitting in a jail cell. And from that jail cell, one of his first calls had been to his lawyer, Rod Ponton. He trusted me to represent him, knew that I had done similar work for similar people in similar situations with major drug charges. Drug lawyer Rod Ponton had represented Chambers in an earlier federal case for illegal possession

of a handgun. But conspiracy to import one ton of cocaine was an entirely different level of trouble. Well, he recognized it was a very serious case. I mean, that amount of drugs is a life sentence. But he was still sort of being the typical puffed up, arrogant Robert that he frequently was. Maybe the reason for Robert's arrogance at that moment is that he already had an explanation ready for the drugs. His story was that he was helping Sheriff Rick Thompson run a reverse sting operation. Reverse sting operations are where law enforcement officers are in possession of drugs, sell them to willing buyers, then eventually arrest those buyers. But it didn't take a close examination to realize that the notion that Rick and Robert would have

been running this kind of operation with a ton of cocaine didn't make sense. Because for a start, you can't just find a buyer for that kind of shipment. It's tens of millions of dollars worth of product, way outside the purview of a local sheriff. Even a self-proclaimed anti-drug warrior like Rick Thompson. When Robert is telling you that story, what's the little voice in your head saying? That's Eric, one of our producers. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.

And Robert knew I didn't believe it. And that's why I explained that I told Robert that we're not going to even deal with that theory unless they had proof from somebody else besides he and Rick Thompson. And of course, Robert did not have any proof from anybody else. It was just his word and the word of Rick Thompson. Yeah, that kind of leads into my next question of what was your strategy? Well, the strategy, in any case, you look for a defense. And in Robert's case, there wasn't one

because they had plenty of evidence of him being involved in the conspiracy with Thompson from Sam Thomas Jr. and photographs and recordings and other things the government put together. So going to trial was pretty much a guaranteed life sentence. Which meant Robert had only one option. He needed to tell the feds the truth, or something close to it, and pray he could cut a deal.

And not long after, when Robert was leaving federal court following his arrest, he made it known to Dale that this was exactly what he was going to do. I saw him being hauled back to the jail cell, and he's practically trying to pull himself away from the two U.S. Marshals. He's got chains on his feet, he's got chains on his hands and he's trying to pull away. I need to talk to you. I need to talk to you now. Well, we have a system. You have an attorney. So Dale told him, I can't talk to you now. The reason for Dale's brush off of Chambers? Well, for one, DEA agents don't just get a confession from an arrested drug smuggler in the street. But really, Robert just wasn't

the guy Dale wanted to talk to. I wanted Rick to talk to me. Robert Chambers, I believe, deserved to stay in jail. Because it was Rick's exact role in all this that was still an open question. On the night of the drug bust, Dale and Kelly already had plenty of suspicions about Rick. We had an inclination that the sheriff was involved. To what extent, we didn't know. I mean, obviously, he was out and about that night. He did go to the fairgrounds. He did drive around, but really initially just based on that, you can't really say what his involvement was because he didn't stop at the fairgrounds. He didn't check the trailer, you know, so it was still kind of questionable at that point. Maybe he just

kind of got a similar call that we did. Hey, there's a ton of coke at your fairgrounds or there's somebody just brought a big load of coke into your town. We didn't know. But their informant Sam Thomas eventually spilled everything he knew, left no doubt about the sheriff's role. Sam had been with Robert Chambers during the entire cocaine operation, helping him get the drugs across the border. The handoff had been on the river not far from the ranch where Robert had grown up. Amado

Carrillo Fuentes, Lord of the Skies and the head of the Juarez Cartel had been there personally. I guess he had 20 or 30 men there with him, all with Cuerna de Chivas. That's slang for AK-47s. They were protecting the load. After taking possession of the shipment, Sam Thomas revealed that Chambers had brought it back to his family ranch. It was a rugged road but a fairly short drive. No cops, very little risk. But

moving the cocaine shipment farther north was a lot riskier. There were checkpoints, sensors, Border Patrol, maybe Customs and DEA. To make sure it made it through, they needed the perfect drug mule. He's the sheriff. His county, he can be wherever he wants in the county whenever he wants. Sheriff Rick Thompson arrived on the Chambers Ranch in his marked car, a Chevy Suburban. Chambers and his men loaded up the truck, and Thompson drove north. He came up Highway 67 twice, I believe, right through the Border Patrol checkpoint, and then he came up Pinto Canyon Road once. Three separate trips.

800 pounds of cocaine each time. And I think the Border Patrol sensors were activated and they responded, well, hey, it's just the sheriff, you know, stop and chat. He's on his way. So yeah, how perfect, you know? Who would ever suspect the sheriff of piecemealing a load of coke for a Class 1 drug violator. Now that Kelly and Dale knew this,

they still wanted to hear what the sheriff had to say. This case they'd been building, it was against Robert. He was the target. Maybe Rick would help them and save his own skin at the same time. In this case, you're dealing with a sitting sheriff with an accusation of something very grave. How do you approach that? Is there any good way to approach that? I want to know what Rick has to say in his defense. It looks bad, but let's go from there. Dale decided to talk with Joaquin Jackson.

Jackson was a longtime Texas Ranger, an elite branch of the state police, and something of a celebrity. He would go on to co-star in a few westerns with Tommy Lee Jones and Robert Duvall. I talked to Jackson the next day. Joaquin was a good friend. We went to church together. And he said, I'll talk to Rick. And he said he went over and talked to Rick, and Rick said, I ain't talking to Stinson. Actually, the message Joaquin Jackson passed on

was a little more colorful than that. I'm not going to use the language that was relayed to me, but he said he wasn't talking to me. Soon enough, though, the sheriff would end his silence. That's after the break. has been helping Canadians build secure tomorrows. Their insurance solutions are designed to help protect you and your loved ones financially, giving you the peace of mind to focus on what truly matters. Find their products through banks, credit unions, and associations, or visit SecurianCanada.ca. Securian Canada. Insurance designed for life. Hello, it's your beauty and wellness BFFs.

And we're here to answer all your burning questions. Skincare, makeup, parenting, and more. We have got you covered. Oh, yes, we do. We'll speak with industry insiders, celebrities, and our close friends. And give all our honest and unfiltered thoughts always. Listen to Lipstick on the Rim now on Apple

or wherever you get your podcasts. Last Wednesday, federal and state agents discovered more than one ton of uncut cocaine in one of the sheriff's horse trailers down in Marfa. Today, the sheriff admitted to trailers down in Marfa. Today, the sheriff admitted to putting it there. Craig Gropper has the story. Presidio Sheriff Rick Thompson says the drug war is on, but it's between state and federal law enforcement agencies. He has admitted to escorting more than 2,400 pounds of uncut cocaine up from the border last week in the furtherance of a reverse drug stink. Tuesday, December 10th, a week after Robert Chambers was arrested,

Sheriff Rick Thompson and his attorney hosted a press conference in the West Texas city of Monahans. The ostensible purpose was to allow the sheriff to explain himself. Rumors were swirling, and the sheriff was out to put his constituents at ease. The sheriff and his lawyer stood in a wood-paneled room, a large American flag hanging on a pole behind them. Thompson's lawyer looked somber, shoulders hunched, hands stuffed in the pockets of his sport coat. Instead of confidently addressing the room, he mumbled an introduction of his client toward the floor, as if he was hoping no one would hear. The sheriff didn't seem much more at ease. He was wearing a gray jacket with a sheriff star clipped to his tie.

On his head was an almost comically large white Stetson, pulled down almost to his eyes, which were themselves cloaked in what looked to be transition lenses. A dozen or so reporters sat silently, jotting notes. Cameras started to click. The sheriff addressed the room. The purpose of it was to further an investigation. It was all entirely legitimate, he said. A reverse sting. And we would take them down along with their money.

Still have custody of them. He and Chambers were transporting cocaine so that they could catch the real bad guys. But he hadn't told anyone else about this. The operation was kind of a top secret deal. So yeah, he could understand how the DEA had gotten such a twisted impression that there was something illegal going on. Basically, we had a breakdown in communications at a time that there really weren't any communications because I wasn't ready for communications. There wouldn't be that kind of dope over here if we were doing our job.

And I mean all of us. My department, anybody's department. We probably have an unorthodox manner of doing law enforcement and they have it by the book. There's 15 different people they have to talk to before they can do certain things. Whatever their problem is. They have the bureaucracy. We start talking bureaucracy, and that's why I'm at it. I've watched and re-watched the video of that press conference,

and the thing that's really striking is, this man who everyone describes as so confident, so proud, so, well, Texas. He looks unsteady. He's fidgety, uneasy, pacing a lot. He kind of lunges towards seated reporters when they ask a question. His answers are vague and evasive. He falls back on G. Shuck's platitudes about local law enforcement.

The whole thing didn't add up, and I'm far from the only one to notice this. Everyone basically had the same reaction. They felt like Rod Ponton did when he was listening to Robert Chambers claim the whole thing was a reverse sting operation. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. Rick has a tell. Most people have a tell when they're lying. And Rick's was that he gets nervous. He paces the room. Catherine Palmiro, who had worked for Rick and alleged she'd seen him doctor reports and stage evidence. She watched the news coverage of the press conference. It looked familiar. You know, he walks back and forth and back and forth, and he kind of flies his arms all over the place, and he talks with chew in his mouth. And I looked at that press conference

where he was trying to explain that this was going to be a reverse sting, that he was going to operate on his own because he didn't want to go through all the bureaucracy, other law enforcement agencies, and he was just going to do this by himself. And there he was. The camera had a hard time following. He was going back and forth and all over the place. But perhaps the most damning part of Rick Thompson's December 10th press conference was a single sentence. One he uttered when reporters questioned why the sheriff would even be involved with a man like Robert Chambers. Ma'am, you've got to understand that cops and crooks are just about the same caliber, except one's got a badge. I'll repeat that, because it's a pretty staggering thing for any sheriff to say, much less an icon of West Texas law and order.

Cops and crooks are just about the same caliber, except one's got a badge. I listened to the big old white hat, six foot four Rick Thompson sheriff and told a press conference of TV reporters that the only difference between a cop and a doper is the badge. Rod Ponton, like pretty much everyone else,

was speechless. Sheriff Rick Thompson was hanging himself. Off he went. And that sealed his fate because that pissed off every law enforcement guy in West Texas. And they didn't want to have anything more to do with him after that. Still, Dale wanted to make one last try to get Thompson to talk before indictments got handed down. Maybe if Thompson talked, he could stave off the worst. And if he disliked Dale so much that he wouldn't talk to him, maybe he'd talk

to someone else. They sent Bill and Kelly over because they knew him the best, and they tried again. Bill Fort, who had worked in the area for years, and Kelly, the local kid with the game warden dad every cop in the area knew and liked. Kelly, the local kid with the game warden dad every cop in the area knew and liked. Rick had actually grown up with Kelly's dad. If anyone was going to get Rick to talk, it was probably going to be Kelly. So then we just decided at some point during that month,

me and Bill went to interview him, to interview Rick. And, you know, first question out of our mouths, he said, you know, boys, I think I'm going to have to refer you to my attorney. And of course, it's like, oh, God. He really is involved in this. At this point, Rick Thompson was still sheriff of Presidio County, still a free man. He still hadn't even been charged with a crime. But he had admitted to working with Robert Chambers

and had likened cops to crooks. And Robert was sitting in jail. And if he wanted to save his own hide, the best way to do that was to cooperate with the investigation and flip on Rick. Catherine Palmyra could feel the tension everywhere she went. Yeah, I mean, it was just, I think I was in kind of a shock, a trauma of thinking, oh my gosh, something big is about to happen.

Because I could feel it. I could just feel the atmosphere in the town, listening to the people talk, seeing the mood change, seeing people's reaction, hearing people's reactions, the speculation and everything. And I realized this is going to have a lot of tentacles and this is going to be big. The grand jury was scheduled to announce its decision on Thursday, January 9th in the city of Pecos, the nearest federal courthouse. Rick and Robert would both be there. That week, Monroe Elms, the county judge, decided to go visit the sheriff. Monroe thought the sheriff was plenty crooked. He was convinced the sheriff had waged an intimidation campaign against him when he ran

for office. And Monroe remembered clearly, unequivocally, being told by the sheriff that the good guys needed to sell drugs to keep it from the bad guys. But Monroe had come to kind of like the sheriff. I actually felt sorry for Rick. So the day before, he was supposed to go to court in Pecos, Rick was in the green suburban. Monroe arrived at the county jail as Rick was leaving. And Rick asked me, what do you think they're going to do to me, Monroe? And I said, Rick, I don't have a clue. You know, that's out of my league.

I said, but I'll tell you one thing. And he said, what's that? I said, you see'll tell you one thing. And he said, what's that? I said, you see that little boy over there? His son was throwing a football to Steve Bailey. I said, if you ever want to see him again, you need to get in your truck. You need to cut the motor on right now. You need to drive away to Ohinaga as fast as you can go. And you need to get over there and hide out with your friends. You have a lot of friends in OJ. You know what I'm talking about. These friends in OJ, they were some of the same people Monroe had parties with since his youth.

And he clearly thought these Mexican cartel folks would recognize Rick as one of their own and provide him shelter. You need to hide out with him and stay there for as long as you can and then cut a deal. Turn yourself in and cut a deal and you'll get a better, you'll get less time and you'll be able to see your son. If not, you're never going to see your son. If not, you're never gonna see him again." And he said, quote, "'I will never give them the pleasure of seeing me run.'" That was a quote he gave me back.

Monroe nodded, turned sadly toward his car, said goodbye, and drove off. Rick Thompson was due in court the very next day. I can't imagine what he was thinking, that he was going to walk away from this, but he really did. He really thought that. That's next time on Borderlands was reported and hosted by me, Rob D'Amico, and written by me, Eric Benson, and David Waters. Eric Benson is our supervising producer. David Waters is our executive producer. At Campside, the executive producers are

Josh Dean, Vanessa Grigoriadis, Adam Hoff, and Matt Scher. Our field producers are Ryan Katz, Travis Bubenik, and Jesse Basham. Our associate producers are Leo Schick and Lydia Smith. Fact-checking by Alex Yablon. Special thanks to Rajiv Gola and Ashley Ann Krigbaum. Scoring and sound design by Ian Chambers and Rod Sherwood is our engineer. Original music by Julian Lynch. Before I let you go, I want to encourage you to check out True Crime Week on Stitcher.

They've picked Borderlands as one of their featured podcasts. Thanks, Stitcher. They've picked Borderlands as one of their featured podcasts. Thanks, Stitcher. And we're excited to be part of a great lineup of series that dig deep into all manner of mysteries. So listen to Borderlands and other true crime podcasts like Power and Smokescreen for free on Stitcher. Also check out their curated homepage to find your next true crime pod obsession. If you're on your phone, you can download Stitcher in your app store or go to stitcher.com.