Cricket Coogler's Revenge

At 18, pretty, ignorant little Ovida ("Cricket") Coogler was a product of New Mexico's political corruption. Her world did not include the Southwest's fabled wide-open spaces. Cricket had been a barfly since she was 14. She had her good points--she helped support her widowed mother and worked hard as a waitress. But, like many another teenager, she was chiefly interested in excitement, romance and escape from throttling poverty.

In prosperous, sun-baked Las Cruces (pop. 13,500), an agricultural town 30 miles from the Texas border, Cricket had little trouble finding a variety of primrose paths. The town and surrounding Dona Ana County was dotted with bars and gambling joints. The law was administered by big, smiling Democratic Sheriff A. L. ("Happy") Apodaca, a former prizefighter with a great fondness for women.

Under Happy and his political friends nobody cared if a girl like Cricket ran wild. Occasionally, as a matter of fact, flashy politicos from the state capital itself came to Las Cruces and obligingly helped her get drunk. But when she disappeared last spring after staggering away from the De Luxe Cafe just before dawn, Las Cruces began to burn with curiosity.

Voluntary Suspect. The curiosity gave way to horror and indignation 17 days later Cricket's bruised, partly clothed body had been found in a shallow grave on a mesa twelve miles from town. Happy Apodaca announced that she had been raped and murdered. No autopsy was held. Cricket was just sprinkled with lime and buried again. But Happy did take action--of a sort.

When the town began to resound with rumors that somebody was trying to cover up the crime, the sheriff secretly jailed a fellow who had been drinking with Cricket on the night of her disappearance. The man was one of his own friends, beefy, crop-haired Jerry Nuzum, a professional football player for the Pittsburgh Steelers. For three days no word of the arrest leaked out.

Then an El Paso police reporter named Walt Finley began nosing around Las Cruces on his day off, went back with a startling story. The football player had dim-wittedly agreed to stay in jail under what Happy called "voluntary arrest" because he had been told he would be charged with murder if he objected or tried to see a lawyer. But when Reporter Finley slipped into the jail and talked to Nuzum, he protested convincingly that he had nothing to do with Cricket's murder.

Western Ways. Enraged at the splash this made in the El Paso Herald-Post, Sheriff Apodaca first slapped the football player into solitary. Then he cleared him of all charges and turned him loose. The roof promptly fell in on the sheriff. A Negro construction worker named Wesley Byrd complained that he had also been held incommunicado in jail for twelve days, that state policemen had tried to make him admit the crime by squeezing his testicles with a bicycle lock. Nuzum's landlady, who backed the athlete's alibi, had been warned by the sheriff that "he didn't want any more dead women around here."

After that a group of hotheaded ranchers were all for dealing with the sheriff and some of his political friends "in the good old Western way." They were dissuaded. But students from nearby New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts held a mass meeting, passed around a petition, managed to get a grand jury called. The jury began laying about with a trumpeting, trunk-swinging fury.

It indicted the sheriff, charging him, on one count, with attempting to rape a 15-year-old girl who had worked as a domes tic for one of his friends, and on a second count, with seducing another teenager. As the result of a judicial hearing, Happy Apodaca was thrown out of office. The jury raided gambling joints on its own, confiscated slot machines and piles of gambling paraphernalia, scared every gambler in the state into shutting up shop.

Apprehensions. Last week the state was shaking from the effects of the biggest political land mine which had blown up in years; the jury had indicted State Corporation Commission Chairman Dan Sedillo, one of the biggest shots in New Mexico's Democratic hierarchy. The charge: Sedillo had fed Cricket Coogler drinks and had "possessed her for evil purposes."

The jury had already returned 58 indictments against 25 people, had brought the cold sweat of apprehension springing to the brows of many a high-placed gambler and politico.

The grand jurors still hadn't found out who killed Cricket Coogler, but thousands of New Mexico's plain citizens thought they were doing better than the old vigilantes.

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