Archive for March 29th, 2009

Recalling Vicky Wharton: a new call for justice

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

Writing about the late Margaret Campbell Banberger earlier today (see the previous post) brought to mind again the 25-year-old unsloved murder of another environmental activist and agitator, Vicky Wharton, in Bastrop County. On Feb. 6, 1984 her scantily clad body was found with 25 stab wounds beside a raw rural subdivision road south of Elgin off FM 1704. She was 31.

No one has ever been charged, arrested or tried in connection with the brutal death.

Vicky joined Margaret Campbell and other early stalwarts of the Central Texas Lignite Watch not long after its formation. She had a rather public life in the county as an environmental activist, propagandist and spokesperson as well as a far more private life as a sex worker in nude modeling “studios” and an apparently independent escort service in Austin.

The murder was front-page news in Bastrop County newspapers for weeks afterward, but the criminal investigation was plagued with problems from the start. First, investigators could not immediately identify the victim. The body, dressed only in a house robe, carried no identification. Her Ford pickup was later found miles from the murder scene a few hundred yards from her residence in Sayers (west of Texas 95 between Bastrop and Elgin).

Vicky’s body was found on Monday morning. I think it was sometime Tuesday afternoon before investigators had a tentative identification. Her home in Sayers was not searched until sometime Wednesday. At the time investigators said they believed she probably died late Sunday night. Her modest home, a trailer house on rented property, revealed no sign of a struggle, they said. The trail was already getting cold.

And the subsequent investigation was complicated further by political rivalries. The sheriff, Tommy Moseley, was running for re-election. A former sheriff, Nig Hoskins whom Moseley had unseated in 1980, was running against the incumbent. And a newcomer, Judy Edwards, who was an investigator for the district attorney’s office, had made herself the first woman to seek the sheriff’s office in Bastrop County. Moseley asked Texas Ranger Ron Stewart for assistance in the complicated affair.

In less than a month, squabbles broke out among the agencies about who was pursuing the case diligently and who might have been withholding information from other investigators. Clearly, it was a mess.

And in the mele, the murderer vanished, unidentified to this day. Essentially the case has been stalled ever since.

A few years ago former Bastrop County Chief Deputy Sheriff Ronnie Duncan tried to breathe new life into the long-cold case. That effort cleared a few former possible suspects but fell short of revealing promising new lines of investigation, so far as I can tell.

Earlier this year I mentioned the case to Chief Deputy Charlie Littleton, who has begun trying to locate the sheriff’s department’s files and aging evidence. District Attorney Bryan Goertz, who was a college undergraduate when Vicky was murdered, said more recently his office will afford any assistance in its power.

It’s still an unsolved case that I (and many other old timers from the area) hope to see resolved. Justice is overdue.

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In Memoriam: Margaret Campbell Bamberger

Sunday, March 29th, 2009

A leader of the first wave of environmental activists and agitators in Bastrop County beginning in the late 1970s, Margaret Campbell Bamberger, 70, died at her Bamberger Ranch home near Johnson City on March 6, after a struggle of more than four years with lung cancer.

She was much more than an activist. She nurtured her own three children and many others over the decades. “She was like a second mother to me,” said one of my sons, Reuben McAuley, who came to know her in the mid 1970s. She was also a gifted photographer, an artist, acclaimed teacher and generous soul.

When Lower Colorado River Authority officials announced plans (early in 1979, I believe) to lease almost 6,500 acres at Camp Swift to strip mine deposits of soft coal for electric generating fuel, Margaret was among the first handful of local folks to step forward as volunteers to organize opposition efforts either to halt the project or minimize its poetntially harmful effects. That early group, known as the Central Texas Lignite Watch, was the mother of later efforts on other environmental fronts including work undertaken by the Bastrop County Environmental Network, Neighbors for Neighbors and related organizations.
When LCRA plans to mine Camp Swift came to grief about two years later–for reasons only partly related to CTLW efforts–the agency shifted its focus to creating an even larger mining effort in Fayette County, but Margaret and her colleagues followed that plan as well and quickly stirred up local opposition there to reinforce the critics. By that time CTLW had also linked up with environmental activists in Austin who helped persuade that city council to back away from an increasingly complex, costly and environmentally questionable enterprise.

Also during the early 80s other facets of Margaret’s talent began to emerge, including photography and drawing, along with a deepening understanding of the natural world and how it works. Most early issues of the Bulletin of the Sayersville Historical Society, a local history group from central Bastrop County, were illuminated by her work, including technical illustrations such as prehistoric stone projectile points and later archaeological artifacts from the area. Perhaps she reached her largest audience with the illustrations for Water from Stone, The Story of Selah, Bamberger Ranch Preserve (Texas A&M University Press, 2007). Margaret married J. David Bamberger in 1998 and spent the rest of her life with him at the ranch preserve near Johnson City. She also produced a wonderful series of hand-colored prints based on many of those same illustrations.

Ave atque vale, Margaret. We will not see your like again.

Her last public appearance, I believe, was Feb. 22 at a reception in her honor at a gallery and sculpture ranch just west of Johnson City. It was thronged with friends and family, including a number from the Bastrop area. A memorial service in her honor was also held in Austin on March 28

She is survived by her husband; a sister, Mary Greene; three children, Chris Campbell of Austin, Margie Crisp and Franny Sharp of Elgin; and a number of grandchildren.

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