Editor's note: This story originally appeared in the Houston Chronicle on Monday, Nov. 18, 1985. More information on the property today can be found at chron.com.

The mansion at 3300 Todville Road was as big as a child's fantasy.

Backed to the edge of Galveston Bay's brown water, the brick and iron building rose three stories out of an otherwise middle-class neighborhood of unremarkable stilted bayfront homes.

It was a grotesque monument to the success of Bill List, the businessman who built it and lived there with his houseboys. And, at that moment when he started climbing the winding staircase for the last time, it assumed the added dimension of a local museum of horrors, a testament to the violence and anger of Smiley's throwaway mind.

At 19, Smiley was a street kid who had continuously collided, but never connected, with the world outside his own. That afternoon, in the explosion of a gun, the world finally latched onto him.

He wasn't always Smiley. That was a name he got sometime early in his two years on the streets. He had been born Elbert Ervin Homan in Pasadena.

His mother would say her parents arranged the marriage to Smiley's father when she was 13. By the time she was 16, Smiley had been born. Smiley's father and mother split up when Smiley was young, and he remembered little of the man.

He remembers more about the three stepfathers, although he would say he had a "father-son type relationship" with none of them. In fact, the relationships were frequently hostile.

He hopped from school to school during the succession of stepfathers and at each one he was known for making trouble. He just couldn't get along with the other kids, and both he and his mother lost count of the number of fights he was in.

The accident, when he was 14, made things worse. A car barreled over him as he was helping a freeway accident victim out of another car. His leg and pelvis were crushed, and when his mother was told Smiley was in Ben Taub Hospital, she was also told to make funeral arrangements for him.

His survival was regarded both by Smiley and his mother as a divine sign. "We knew God had spared him for a reason," his mother said.

She hoped it also meant a change in Smiley's demeanor. It did not.

After months in the hospital and months more of therapy at home, Smiley returned to school with a limp and a chip on his shoulder. The fights became more frequent (he said he was teased about the limp), he began getting drunk and smoking dope and he left school at 15. He failed with halfway houses and relatives and started with heroin and speed.

At 17, after living with girlfriends and an uncle, he came to the Covenant House, a non-profit home for runaways, throwaways and street kids a block off the lower Westheimer strip in the Montrose area.

More than any place in the city, the 10-block stretch of Westheimer was home to the young homeless. It was a series of gay and straight clubs, massage parlors, strip joints, flophouses, vacant buildings and hangouts. Teen-agers, boys and girls, walked the streets selling acid, pot, crystal and themselves.

It was a vicious environment where there were no real friends when it came to trust, where winos were rolled for cigarettes and tricks for their cash.

At night, the streets were bumper to bumper with a 2-mph traffic of gawkers and buyers. When the sun went down and neon lights and portable signs lit up, the kids on the sidewalks started looking for something to deal or somebody to hustle. If they failed it meant dumpster-diving for food and a day without a high.

But in the deprivation of substance there was a geyser of dreams.

Everybody had their dreams of wealth or fame, of rising out of it as sort of a hero to the ones who remained. There were few heroes, though.

Most of the street kids lacked either the luck or support or willingness to work to climb out. And many dreamed only of finding a sugar daddy to take care of them and give them what they had never known.

"It's a big fantasy," Smiley told an acquaintance. "But it keeps you waking up in the morning."

Covenant House was located near lower Westheimer on purpose.

Those who built it knew the street's influence would invade it, but they also knew it was the best place in town to get the type of kids they were trying to help.

Smiley showed up there after a relative told him about it. It sounded great, he thought. The place would give him shelter, find him a job and ultimately make him independent, he was sure.

He wanted to break with the past, and this was his chance to start again. He was going to quit heroin and speed and straighten out his life. "All my life I've wanted to be something great - a judge or a lawyer or a policeman, " Smiley thought. For the moment, this seemed to be the way to get there.

But his stay started with lies. He had no living parents, he told those he met. He was coming here because his wife left him and he lost his job.

Smiley had this charm about him that made you want to like him.

He could conjure up a story, look you in the eye and flash his easy, toothy grin and make you want to believe him.

He was congenial and charismatic when he wanted to be, but there were bursts of rage. He was the sort of kid you wanted to trust even though instinct told you better and you knew he didn't trust you.

"Inside, Smiley was a real angry kid, " one of his friends said.

"Belligerent. He didn't fit in anywhere."

And, as a social worker would say, "When you get a kid like him who doesn't give a damn about anybody or any other kid you might as well hang it up."

Smiley made a few friends at Covenant House in the few days he was there. Friends, in Smiley's case, translated to running buddies.

One of them was a 16-year-old named Ronald Brown Jr., the progeny of a poor Third Ward neighborhood in southeast Houston.

Ronald's street name was Zero. He had been on the streets since he left home at 13 and became a prostitute. His mother said she had lost her job and couldn't support her son so he was encouraged to leave. Zero was black, but he told those he met he was half Chinese and that his real name was Ailong Brong. He fantasized out loud that he was a descendant of Chinese royalty.

Smiley and Zero enrolled in drug and alcohol abuse programs together, but they went only once and when they came home late from the meeting they were kicked out of Covenant House.

They spent that night in a vacant house near the Westheimer strip. It was August 1983, and Smiley was about to be christened a street kid during a bloody rite.

If Smiley needed an introduction to the streets Zero was going to give it to him.

The sordid strip of Westheimer had begun to take on a strange glamour for Smiley. There were drugs and girls, and there were kids like him who were alone and had nothing. In a world where he couldn't or wouldn't fit in, there was a place for him on Westheimer, a place with people he understood. He forgot about getting a job and his thoughts turned to what he perceived as the good life. It was fast, and it was fat. What outsiders found frightening, Smiley thought was thrilling.

He was cocky and confident. He knew how to hustle a buck, and it didn't bother him at all that he'd been thrown out of Covenant House.

That first day he was out on the streets. At about 9 a.m. on a Friday, Smiley and Zero were hanging out at the Stop-N-Go in the 500 block of Westheimer.

The 24-hour store is one of the round-the-clock street kid stopping points along the strip.

Cops cruise by but seldom stop. And when it does look like a hassle is coming, be it from cops or store management, the kids just move out of sight to the side of the building along Whitney or they stand by the Westheimer curb and pretend to be waiting for a bus.

Kids hang out there waiting for tricks and chumps to pull into the parking lot. That's where Zero found their victim.

Like Zero and Smiley, he was a teen-ager, but the similarity stopped there. He had a good home in a good part of town, and he had a car, a late model Jeep CJ-7.

Smiley would say later he had nothing to do with the robbery, but the victim said otherwise.

The 18-year-old had stopped to get something to eat when Zero struck up a conversation with him. The three of them got into the Jeep and began to ride with Smiley up front and Zero in the back. They turned onto a quiet street three blocks from Westheimer, and that's when Smiley and Zero made their move.

Smiley grabbed the ignition keys and jumped to the ground. Zero, with his folding knife already out, grabbed the victim around the throat with his left forearm. The blade flashed in front of the youth's face. It was so quick he didn't feel it pierce his chest. He remembers nothing more until he woke, bleeding, in a vacant lot. There were tennis shoe marks on his face and neck. He'd been left for dead, but he lived.

Smiley and Zero thought they'd take the jeep to California. Or maybe just to the woods around Deer Park where they could teach themselves karate and become the terror of the streets. It didn't happen that way, of course. Like every other grandiose plan, for Smiley it turned out wrong.

They tried to rob a martial arts store later that day, but the clerk pulled a gun and they ran. Then Zero started bragging that he had killed a dude and the cops heard about it. Within 24 hours Smiley was arrested and he led police to Zero. Zero still had the knife in his pocket with blood on the blade.

For 48 days Smiley stewed in County Jail and learned what prison was about. One inmate hanged himself during that time. There was fighting and scrounging for cigarettes and change and Smiley got scared.

On his right shoulder he had another inmate tattoo "Smiley" and below it (11), "his lucky number." A third tattoo was added after that: "F.T.W." It stood for "F... the world."

Again Smiley told himself that if he got out of this one, he was going straight. He was going to find a job and a girlfriend, quit the dope and settle down. When he was offered 10 years probation for a guilty plea, he took it.

But Smiley was like a little boy who promises God he'll never miss Sunday school again if he can just get out of a whipping. Within minutes of being released, Smiley was walking down Smith Street in downtown, headed for Westheimer.

In the next year, the glamour Smiley once saw on Westheimer began to fade and life got tough. But it was still the place where he was most at home.

He got a job with his stepfather's business but caused so much trouble among the other workers he got fired. He tried living with his parents, but the fights started again.

He moved in with his grandmother and ended up hitting her. He didn't hate her. He loved her. But she started to lean on him when she caught him smoking dope.

His probation officer got him back into Covenant House, but those who knew him said he started fights there, too. And without a job or a place to live there was no way he could stay on probation. He stopped making the $25 weekly probation fee payments and dropped out of sight.

Nearly a year after the robbery, in July, a warrant was issued for his arrest for breaking probation.

In the months after his release from jail, Smiley continued a love affair with heroin and crank, a home-brewed methamphetamine made by boiling nasal spray.

Smiley could shoot the crank and feel the rush burning up his arm into his brain. It was instant escape. And while he was speeding on the crank he could still turn tricks, steal or peddle the leftovers. Crank made you want to burn up energy.

"Westheimer is the place to go," Smiley thought then. "Westheimer shows you the good life and the bad life at the same time. You're down there trying to find some answers to your life. Drugs, women. Living the fat life, that's all there is to it. If something gets on your nerves and you get really p....d off, you go rob a store and the store cries or knock over a hobo or something. Makes you feel good."

Smiley added another tattoo to his right shoulder, a unicorn.

That stands for the last one, "the one that remains."

During this time he lived with several of the people he met on the streets, people with no last names.

There was the guy who said Smiley reminded him of his son and he wanted to take care of him. That lasted until Smiley was caught stealing to buy dope.

There were the two drag queens who were perpetually saving up for their sex-change operations.

There was the cabbie who gave Smiley free rides when Smiley found him a young hustler for sex.

And there was the older man who made him a houseboy for a couple of weeks.

Mostly, he floated between the Memorial Park Motel on Waugh and the Starlite Motel in the 200 block of Westheimer.

Both places were known to the cops as $25-a-night flophouses where prostitutes and transients and down-and-outers stayed, where drugs were in good supply and up for sale.

When he couldn't find an acquaintance or a trick to hustle for a room, Smiley slept in the alleys. That's where he met Charles, he says, behind the Kroger store on Montrose Boulevard.

Charles said he was from the planet Zubon and that he was here on a mission from God and that he was here to save everybody, that he was going to "(expose) the anti-Christ child, " Smiley would say.

And, Smiley says, Charles taught him a poem, one since committed to memory:

Look into my eyes and you will see who I am.

My name is Satan, take me by the hand.

I will show you a world of wizards and witches;

And that's where all the good people will destroy the sons of bitches.

I will show you money, women and wine;

All these things I show you are already mine.

So be a wise man and take me by the hand,

For if you do not you will die

by the sound of Lucifer's cry.

Smiley still had the smile everybody liked, but the anger was building inside him. He was now a veteran of the streets.

"I know how it gets," he said. "I know how when the cops harass you what you got to do. I know what it feels like when people come up to you and say you're gay and then they offer you money. I know how it feels, and it don't feel good. I mean, if you got pride, it don't feel good at all.

"And every Friday and Saturday night you got the rednecks coming up from Alief, you got the preps coming from Friendswood. Pearland's coming down here harassing, throwing bottles at kids down on the street, and that's not right."

There was money all around him, but it was just out of reach.

Money carried by men in expensive cars who were looking for a trick and by kids from the outside who wanted to buy drugs.

By September 1984 Smiley had bottomed out. He had no crank to sell. The cops were looking for him because of his probation problems.

Vice officers were busting hustlers, and people were starting to put burglar alarms on their cars.

He was reduced to mugging bums for cigarettes.

Things had to change. Something had to give.

It did early on Oct. 14th.

Smiley had two hits of acid, or LSD, in him, and it had started to rain. He liked tripping on acid in the rain. Shapes took on a razor-sharp clarity, colors were more pronounced and bright. The drops of rain felt like tiny cotton balls hitting his face and gently penetrating the skin. It gave him the Superman syndrome and made him feel impervious to the outside.

It was then he met Tim, a 19-year-old who had just recently hit Houston. He had come to the big city from a mostly blue-collar neighborhood in Belleville, Ill., population 42,150.

They had breakfast that morning at a coffee shop further down the strip and walked back together to the Starlite. Tim had something to do, and for a while Smiley lost track of him.

Smiley walked across the street to the Superway grocery, hiked himself up on a newsbox and watched the rain fall.

Within a few minutes the Pontiac pulled up in front, and Tim got out.

"You want to go riding with me and Bill?" Tim asked.

"Yeah," he answered and got into the car.

Behind the wheel was Bill List. List was 57 with thinning brown hair and a heavyset frame. Smiley knew him from the streets. He knew List drove along the strip almost every weekend and picked up hustlers.

He preferred them in their teens. And Smiley had heard what Bill liked to do at home, in the mansion at Seabrook.

Bill had the money Smiley would never have, and Smiley hated him at that instant. Partly because of his wealth, and partly because of his perversion.

"Would you like to come home with us?" Bill asked.

"Yeah."

"You don't have any place to go?"

"No."

Bill drove the Pontiac around the block several times while the deal was struck. Tim and Smiley concocted a story that they were lovers. Tim was available for sex for money. Smiley was not. But Smiley and Tim both agreed to clean for room and board. Bill was in a good mood; he usually was at first.

They made a couple of stops on the way to the mansion. Bill bought Smiley a carton of Camels and a sandwich. And he talked about what he liked in bed.

Smiley thought he heard Bill say something else, too. In his mind, he heard Bill say, "Smiley, I know you're going to kill me."

It was late afternoon when they turned into the quarter-mile driveway in front of Bill's house. He'd built the place himself a few years earlier. Bill owned a trailer manufacturing business, and he had prospered during the oil boom, making trailers to haul drilling pipe.

When he poured the slab for the 34,000-square-foot building the neighbors worried that an apartment complex was going to be built there. He dug a reflecting pond the length of the driveway and used the dirt to build up the bayfront lot. He'd bought a financially ailing brick manufacturing plant and made his own bricks for the house before he closed that business down.

The house was divided into two wings with an atrium in the center and a catwalk between the wings at the second level. He covered the enormous verandas with iron bars.

The ballroom in the front had terrazzo tile from Mexico on the floors. In the foyer, a fountain spouted water under the apex of two staircases that united at the ceiling. A 20-foot, U-shaped bar was at one side of the huge room, and a fireplace with a semicircular white brick bench around it was at the other end.

On the first level beneath the entrance, a 40-by-70-foot game room had a pool table and 20-foot octagonal bar. There was a 40-foot swimming pool in the three-story atrium and hundreds of plants growing from brick planter boxes.

A Jacuzzi at one end of the atrium, on a second-level balcony, overflowed water into a fountain below it.

There was a 30-foot table in the dining room. The master bedroom suite upstairs, Bill's apartment, had its own kitchen.

It was the most magnificent place Smiley had ever seen. And yet, despite all the money spent to build it, it was hideous. One visitor described the furnishings as "contemporary Holiday Inn." The prices of some of the wall paintings were written in Magic Marker on the back.

The carpets were not the expensive type you'd expect in such a place. The three-foot electric circuit box was located in the living room. The central air-conditioning units were on the verandas. A steam table, complete with "sneeze guard," was in the dining room.

And the iron bars on the facade made it look like a gymnasium or even a prison.

The place was big enough to get lost in, and Bill told Tim and Smiley to find a bedroom for themselves.

Not much happened that night. Bill gave them some pot, and Smiley got lost in a marijuana stupor and passed out on a couch in one of the bedrooms. Tim was in Bill's apartment for a while. Then he came out and fell asleep in Jeff's bed, but it was only a minor irritation for Jeff.

Jeff Statton had found a bird's nest on the ground" when he met Bill List, a friend would say. Jeff thought that was a fair assessment.

"I like money and nice homes and nice cars, and I don't like to work, " he said. "Even if I have to put up with a lot of bull."

Jeff listened to Bill's harping and did maybe 30 minutes of housework a day and cooked the meals, but other than that life was a big party. There was always some pot in the house and plenty of booze at the two bars. Bill had a car that Jeff could use, and with the money Bill gave him, he could buy heroin.

He wasn't required to have sex with Bill, and a sort of congenial, though casual, relationship developed. There was no real affection. They only saw each other about two hours every day, in the morning when Bill woke up whoever was staying with him and Jeff cooked breakfast, and in the evening for a while after Bill came home from work but before he went upstairs to his apartment to watch TV.

Jeff had been there about nine months when Smiley arrived. Jeff figured he had lasted that long, in a place where most kids stayed less than a week, because he was blessed with the power of manipulation."

He had never really been a street kid. He started running away from his Sagemont area home when he was 14 but always had friends to stay with and always came back. At 16, he became aware of his homosexuality. He did time in prison for auto theft and time in a mental hospital as well.

By the time he was 22, he was living in Montrose with a 17-year-old named Lance. Both of them lost their jobs and were about to be evicted from their apartment. Jeff thought about going to stay with a friend in New York, but Lance knew a man named Bill, and Bill would take them both in if Jeff did the housework and Lance provided the sex.

Seemed OK to Jeff.

"We were together there about three or four months and Lance and Bill got into an argument and he threw Lance out. It was over Lance not wanting to go to bed with him anymore, that's what really started it. It was basically just whenever Bill felt like he wanted Lance, he would tell him to come, " Jeff said.

"I knew they had been having sex, but I didn't know what they were doing and to what extent. Lance was real embarrassed to tell me what he was doing with Bill. So it took awhile to figure out exactly what was going on. Bill was a really strange guy. He always felt it necessary to go to Montrose on the weekends and pick up guys there, " Jeff said.

After Lance left there was a succession of street kids in the house. Some stayed a few days. Some only went upstairs to the apartment for an hour or so. Jeff got used to the revolving door situation.

"It didn't bother him. I was enjoying myself, " he said. "I was having a good time. I wasn't working hard. I had everything I needed. I was real comfortable."

And, in Jeff's estimation, things just got better when Joey arrived about two weeks before Bill died.

Joey was a street kid Bill picked up on one of his weekend trips to Montrose. Joey said later he was hunkered over a pool table at the Midnight Sun when he caught Bill's eye. At 16, Joey, who had run away from his Tomball home, was getting wise to the ways of the street.

He knew that the Sun was tolerant toward street kids, and unlike some of the clubs along lower Westheimer nobody was going to make him buy a drink in order to stay.

The place had developed a reputation over the years as a hangout for hustlers. Out in front, across the street and around the corner on Avondale, hustlers on the sidewalks would talk business through their tricks' open car windows.

Bill asked Joey if he wanted a job. He would pay $100 a week, he said, if Joey would come to his mansion and do housework. There was more to the job, of course. That was understood.

Jeff and Joey hit it off right away. Within two days Jeff told Bill they were lovers, but the sex between Joey and Bill continued.

"Things were going real good until Joey started crying a lot," Jeff said. "He wouldn't say why." So he kept asking him, and Joey finally explained.

"I can't stand what I'm doing with Bill, " Joey told him.

"I didn't know it was that kind of sex, " Jeff said much later.

Bill's idea of sexual gratification involved more than intercourse. It was a blend of sadomasochism and filth; of pain and degradation. A witness to one of the sex sessions said he threw up afterward. And another familiar with List's sexual practices described it this way: "He was perverted, and by perverted I don't mean gay."

Bill had a record as a sex offender. In 1959, back home in Ohio where he had another trailer business, he was sent to prison for molesting teen-age boys. Some of the boys said it happened after he promised them jobs and expected sex in return. A ninth-grade dropout, he told a psychologist there he knew he was a homosexual when he was 8.

Bill was married with two children when he went to prison. His wife divorced him while he was in. With his prison good time, he was paroled and came to Texas in 1962. His children followed to Texas, and tragedy followed them. His daughter, Deborah Thornton, was the victim of a notorious pickax slaying in 1983. And his son and he had a falling out, and Bill disinherited him.

Bill was known as a braggart with a quick temper. "He was a very hard man to get along with, very hard to understand and people just couldn't deal with him, " Jeff said. "Other than sexually, he was disagreeable, constantly bitching, and he would bitch on and on and on.

"He didn't care who was there. It was his house and whoever was there had to listen to it. After a while, I was able to calm him down some.

"He got hacked off if he found cigarettes in the ashtrays, the plants had not been watered enough, anything. Some days he would come home in a jovial mood, and other days he was just looking for something to bitch about.

"If you did what Bill wanted, everything was OK. If you bucked the system it was over. He always said, I've never made anybody do anything they didn't want to. That was true. He never raped anyone. He never forced anyone to do anything, but he had these boys in situations where they didn't have anyplace to go. At first he seemed real nice. After awhile you started thinking I'm getting the fuzzy end of the lollipop."

Jeff stayed clear of Bill's temper and he knew how far he could push him. He knew that Bill trusted him, at least enough to keep an eye on things in the mansion and make sure none of the hustlers who stayed there stole anything. He knew Bill wanted him to stay.

So after Joey told him what was going on in Bill's apartment, Jeff confronted the man.

He told him to leave Joey alone and that if he didn't, he was moving out. There was no fuss. Bill agreed.

Joey and Jeff continued to party in the big house. Bill continued to make his trips to Westheimer.

Both Joey and Jeff had been at a friend's house the night Smiley and Tim arrived. It was no big deal to Jeff that they had showed up, except that Tim was sleeping in Jeff's bed. Then he walked to the room next door and found Smiley. He shook him awake and asked him what he was doing there.

Smiley began explaining that Bill had picked them up. "No need to say more, " Jeff thought. "I know the story."

The next morning was typical. Bill woke everyone up about 6:30, and Jeff made the kind of big breakfast Bill liked - eggs, pancakes, bacon, sausage, juice and melon.

"Mondays were plant watering days and after Bill went to work Jeff made sure the plants were watered and the house straightened up. Smiley was there and he wasn't there, " Jeff said. "He didn't act strange. He had a lot of dope."

It was becoming obvious that Bill didn't like Smiley, and Smiley didn't like Bill. They were abrupt toward each other, and that night, when Bill found a cigarette had dropped out of an ashtray and burned a carpet, he threatened to throw Smiley out.

It ended just as suddenly. They apologized to each other, and the subject, Jeff thought, was closed.

But after Bill went to bed, and the four of them gathered in Jeff's bedroom to smoke dope and drink, the talk turned to Bill and the way he screamed insults at them.

Why don't we just kill the old son of a bitch, and then he'll shut up, " someone said. It was supposed to be a joke.

Later that night, Tim called information in Sydney, Australia. He got the number of a 24-hour restaurant, called and talked to a waitress he didn't know. The idea was to run up the phone bill.

"Afterwards he told me that the reason he did it was because he wanted to kill Bill and if he did this, he would have to kill him or Bill would kill Tim, " Jeff said. That night, they all slept in the same room.

Bill woke them up at the usual time the day he was to die.

Breakfast was as big as usual. And Bill, who was generally in a better mood in the morning, was even more cheerful than usual.

"Excellent mood, " Smiley thought. "This is a special day for him, I guess. Just so happy."

Even when Bill found Jeff's syringes and Jeff admitted to Bill he had been using heroin, Bill wasn't upset. Jeff figured he'd go through the ceiling, but he let Jeff off with a short lecture about how the junk could kill him.

When Bill left, Jeff started on the dishes. Smiley went downstairs to the pool, poured himself a rum and Coke and lit a joint.

That day Bill told Jeff he wanted them to scrub some rust stains off the terrazzo tile floors. Later in the morning, when Jeff told Smiley, the reaction was predictable.

"I'm not scrubbing floors, " Smiley said.

Jeff tried to be the diplomat. "Well, you know how Bill is. If it's not done when he gets home, well, you know he doesn't like you anyway. I wouldn't push my luck."

"I want to leave anyway, " Smiley said. "I don't want to stay here." And, after a pause, "But before I go I'm going to tear this house apart."

It was the most magnificent place he'd ever seen, but it wasn't his. It would never be his. And, as if to rub that into his face, it belonged to a man like List, an ex-con, a pervert. There was an explosion in Smiley's mind.

"It p....d me off that an ex-con could have so much." He imagined List had been raping children there. He imagined List was telling Smiley to kill him. He hated him. To this day he can admit to the murder easier than he can admit to tearing up the house.

It was about 9 a.m. and Smiley started with the china. He hurled plates through the windows and then he and Tim hoisted a huge potted tree over the catwalk rail and dropped it in the pool.

His adrenalin was pumping. "We're not going to go, " Smiley said to Jeff. "We're going to wait here and I'm going to kill him."

Jeff went to his room and fixed a shot of heroin. It rolled up the vein in his arm to his head, and he got that familiar rush. His breathing and heartbeat seemed to slow, and he felt the slight tingling, the kind you feel when your foot goes to sleep except softer, and he relaxed. He was there, but he felt miles away as if he were only looking down on what was happening.

It was during that high that Joey went to Jeff's bedroom and told him. Despite Bill's promise to Jeff, he was demanding sex from Joey and threatening to throw Joey out if he told Jeff about it.

Jeff was too doped to be angry. But he thought he ought to be.

And he resolved then that Bill would die.

For different reasons, all of them were in agreement, and they began making their plan.

As they talked in Jeff's room, Joey began writing obscenities about List in red ink on the wall and this: "The Problem lies in head."

Smiley took the pen and wrote what amounted to his confession:

"Bill List's a very sick man. he is going to die. Smiley 1984."

The next three or four hours were constant activity. Food was pulled from the refrigerators and thrown on the walls. Cushions were ripped open. Using shaving cream, they began writing on the walls and carpets; Tim wrote, "Have a nice day."

The chandeliers and light fixtures were broken, and a house plant the size of a tree was rammed through a wall in the dining room.

Furniture was smashed. Hundreds of planters were broken. The lawn furniture was tossed into the pool. Lamps were broken. A glass top from a table was dropped out of third floor bedroom window to shatter on the atrium floor. The pool was brown with dirt from broken planters.

Laundry detergent was dumped in the Jacuzzi and the suds began dripping into the fountain below. They were literally looking for new things to break.

The only part of the mansion untouched was a portion of the atrium visible from the door that led from the garage where Bill parked. And he would have to come in that way. Smiley broke off the keys in the front door and another rear entrance was padlocked.

In the living room, they gathered what they were going to bring with them: a VCR, some tapes, Jeff's stereo, clothing.

There was no turning back now, they thought.

They got Bill's shotgun from his bedroom closet and a box of shells. The only thing left before Bill got home was to decide who was going to use it.

"I'll do it," Joey said. But Jeff and Smiley told him no. He was too young.

"I can't do it. I'm too scared, " Jeff told the others.

Tim only shook his head.

"It's cool," Smiley thought.

"I'll do it, " he told the others. "What the heck."

They fired the gun several times in the house to make sure the neighbors wouldn't report a gunshot to police. Then Smiley dragged a chair out to the catwalk, just a few feet from the top of a spiral staircase that led to the door to the garage.

He laid the shotgun across his lap and waited. He felt good. He was high on the pot and the rum.

Jeff got a six-pack of beer, went to the front of the house and sat near the door, thinking. Joey came in and out of the room and they talked about what they were going to do.

"I had the resolve to do it. After the point I decided I wanted to do it, I never changed my mind, " Jeff said.

At 5:45 p.m., Bill's Pontiac pulled into the drive.

Jeff began running for the rear of the house. "He's here! He's here!" Jeff went to his bedroom and sat on the bed, still feeling numbed by the heroin. "We've gone too far. It's the only thing we can do."

Joey and Tim went to the part of the atrium first visible to someone walking through the garage door.

And Smiley aimed the gun at the level he thought Bill's head would be.

When the door to the garage opened and Bill walked in, someone, either Tim or Joey, shouted, "Hi, Bill!"

Bill's foot was on the second step of the staircase. It was in that split second between drawing breath and responding that Smiley pulled the trigger.

List grabbed at his head and dropped.

Smiley's head was spinning. He broke open the single-shot gun to put in a new shell and the ejector spit the hot casing onto his chest.

The sting and burn of the shell shocked him. He thought he had been shot and he dropped the gun. Somebody kept screaming, "Do something! Do something!"

"Hell, there's nothing I can do," Smiley thought after a moment.

"He's dead. His feet are kicking, but that's just nerves."

"The explosion seemed to continue echoing in Jeff's room. He rose from the bed and started down the hall when he was met by Tim. He's dead," Tim said.

Jeff went to the catwalk and looked down at Smiley standing over List's body. The blood from Bill's head was oozing toward the garage door and Smiley was urinating on the body.

It took them less than five minutes to pack what they were taking and start driving. Nobody was talking in the car and Jeff stuck a Tina Turner tape in the cassette player.

There was fear among them but no real regret, at least for Jeff and Smiley. Tim wanted out. They bought him a plane ticket with a credit card from Bill's wallet and sent him back to Illinois.

They went to the home of two of Jeff's friends and told them about the killing. That night, Jeff said, they went to Bill's business (Jeff had a key) and took Bill's company checkbook. They ate at a Denny's restaurant and all stayed together in the same Holiday Inn motel room. They went shopping until one of the stolen cards was confiscated by a clerk. Smiley got a new suit. Joey got some leather pants. With what was in Bill's wallet and what they got from forging checks on his account, they had a few hundred. They lost $200 in a heroin deal ripoff.

Plans to get away to New York were becoming muddled. Nobody was talking about the killing much now. They were talking about getting away, but like in a dream when you try to run but can't budge a foot, they were bogged down.

The body was found the next day when List didn't show up for work. When they tried to cash that one last check at an icehouse before leaving for New York they were caught by an off-duty deputy who worked there part-time. The deputy called List's business to verify the check Smiley was trying to cash and was told List had been murdered and the check was no good.

They knew they were going to be caught. Jeff knew it when the shot was fired. Smiley knew it when he wrote on the wall that List was going die.

And, for Smiley, there are still no regrets, except that he was imprisoned.

"I wanted something that wasn't in my life, something exciting. It wasn't that I was a screw-up. I was never a screw-up. It's just hard to live a righteous life when you're living out there on the streets because of the way things are going right now. Things are so screwed up in this world that nobody knows what they want. There's nothing to wake up to, nothing to look forward to. That's what I wanted.

"If I do get out of here things are going to be different. No more drugs, no more stealing, no more robbing, no more killing. I figure that. If I get out of here."

EPILOGUE

Smiley pleaded guilty to murder in List's death and was given a 45-year prison term. His probation on the 1983 robbery case was revoked and he was sentenced to a concurrent life term for that. He is confined to the maximum security Ferguson Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections.

Jeff was indicted for aggravated robbery in connection with List's death but in a plea bargain the charges were reduced to credit card abuse. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison and is eligible for parole in December 1986.

A juvenile court judge refused to certify Joey to stand trial as an adult. He was given what amounted to juvenile probation.

Tim remains in Illinois. He is fighting extradition and is free on bond.

The mansion at 3300 Todville Road is vacant, except for a cat, and up for sale. The asking price is $1.2 million.



