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.