Chapter 7: Conspiracy

Martha Stafford, the longtime English teacher who remembered Rick Thompson in his heyday, was in Marfa the following morning as the impact of events in the Pecos courtroom started to reverberate around the waking town.

I lived in Marfa at the time on a corner, and a guy that worked at the bank lived across the street.

And we never really chatted, you know, just waved.

But I mean, I remember standing in the middle of the street talking to Mr. Mertz about it.

You know, can you believe it? And then what's going to happen now? And, you know, and then it got to be where, you know, you had the people who said, no, he's been set up.

This is not true.

And Marfa kind of divided over it at that point.

But, of course, Rick Thompson wasn't loved by everyone in town.

Right from the start of his career as sheriff, he'd been a polarizing figure.

His first election bid in 1976, it had been so close it had been resolved in the courts.

And while the old ranching families loved the guy, he'd also had that reputation as La Puerta, the door, a cop who, if rumors were to be believed, was acting as the gatekeeper for the drug trade in the Big Bend, deciding which drugs entered and which drugs didn't.

So once Rick got indicted, all this came up to the surface again.

To some, he was an upstanding lawman who was being persecuted.

To others, he was a dirty cop who had finally got what was coming to him.

You've got those who are guilty as charged, and then those who really said, no, there is no way.

He was set up.

You know, I remember the DEA agent, and, you know, he was seen as a bad guy by a lot of people in Marfa because he did his job.

Dale Stinson was that DEA agent.

Never very popular in Big Bend with the powers that be, he became a symbol of the federal government messing with good West Texas folks.

Rod Ponton, Robert Chambers' attorney, he got cast as a villain too.

How did the community feel about you representing Chambers, or did you get reactions from friends and family or the community?

I got a lot of negative reactions because you got to realize that 30 years ago, the the ranching community was still sort of prominent in the economies of Alpine and Marfan.

The ranchers were still pretty big players out here.

They didn't like me representing Chambers, so it was easier for them to deal with the situation by thinking that, well, Chambers just brought him down.

Chambers just said things that brought him down.