A growing problem

 

While it has some legal uses, in treating attention deficit disorder and narcolepsy, methamphetamine is the most widely synthesized illegal drug in this country, according to the Office of National Drug Control Policy. Its value lies in its ability to produce a feeling of well-being that can last as long as a day.

 

The drug, commonly called crystal, ice or glass, also produces jittery, revved up, frantic side effects. Methamphetamine creates a craving that feeds on itself.

 

The body exhausts itself trying to keep up with the chemically altered mind.

 

"It's like filling your car up with gas, putting it in neutral, pushing the pedal to the floor and running the car until it's out of gas," Larry Wilson, a drug counselor with the state Community Supervision and Corrections Department office in Pampa. "Once you start this meth, you don't want to stop. This drug has done more damage than any other drug I've ever seen. We're seeing a friggin' epidemic here."

 

Much of the methamphetamine powder snorted or smoked or injected in this country comes from clandestine labs in Mexico. Texas is a natural market. But methamphetamine is almost ridiculously easy to make if you know a little chemistry. What you most need to produce meth is distance, from people who might recognize the acrid smell of the drug cooking, and from the law.

 

Rick Roach's former territory, including Lipscomb, Roberts, Hemphill, Gary and Wheeler counties, is such a place. More than half of its 34,000 residents live in Pampa. The others are spread out over more than 4,500 square miles of flat ranchland where oil and gas exploration still provides most of the jobs.

 

While people here resent outsiders stereotyping the region as blue collar, down on its luck, with nothing to do, these are some of the reasons they say drugs have taken root.

 

That root system has spread over the past decade in rural areas, particularly on the West Coast, the Midwest and in the South. An Office of National Drug Control Policy survey in 2003 reported that more than 12 million Americans have tried methamphetamine at least once. In 2001 drug officers seized 1,370 kilograms of methamphetamine along the Texas and Mexican border, the federal Drug Enforcement Administration reported. In 1992 the figure was just 6.5 kilograms.

 

Rumors of drug use

 

Thinking back on it now, she wonders whether her husband had abused alcohol or drugs from the time they were married almost 25 years ago. Over the years, Roach had told various counselors he'd taken prescription medication for a depression the depth of which Cynthia found impossible to fathom.

 

"It hasn't been all 100 percent bad," she said in a cramped voice, devoid of emotion. "There were some good times, not many, I guess."

 

The Roaches met in the the late 1970s in Canadian, a pretty little town in mesa country about 50 miles northeast of Pampa. Both were Texas Tech graduates.

 

In 1975, when Roach was in law school at Tech, he had been arrested for drunken driving, but the charges were later dropped, according to Lubbock police records.

 

Roach was a lawyer working in Canadian, and Cynthia was employed by a certified public accountant when they met. The couple married in 1980, and over the next eight years, Cynthia gave birth to three boys. In 1988, the year the twins were born, Roach moved out of their house in Miami, midway between Pampa and Canadian, for the first time. He was gone for months.

 

That same year a jury in Breckenridge, between Abilene and Fort Worth, indicted Roach on charges of stealing natural gas, according to Stephens County Court records. When he agreed to pay $2,400 in restitution, the indictment was withdrawn.

 

"I didn't know if he was alive or dead for months," Cynthia said. "While my parents fed us, Rick sold an oil well he had for $50,000. He sent us $7,000 to live on. I don't know what happened to the rest of the money."

 

His disappearances and unexpected returns were to become a pattern, although the times, dates and places are a blur for Cynthia Roach. "He was extremely depressed. Every day seemed to be drudgery for him," she said. "I just don't see how a person can be so unhappy."

 

Roach pulled himself together enough by the mid-1990s to hold down the job of Roberts County attorney in Miami, handling misdemeanor cases in a county with more square miles of territory (924) than people (820). The work fueled his interest in the top law enforcement job in the region, district attorney for the five-county bloc.

 

But nagging rumors of drug use outside the job threatened his ambition. To quell the talk, Roach agreed to sit down shortly before the 1996 election with Laurie Ezzell Brown, the third generation editor of the Canadian Record, a fiercely independent weekly newspaper.

 

Under Brown's persistent questioning, Roach acknowledged that he was diagnosed with clinical depression and was taking medication for his condition.

 

Roach admitted he had been treated in the past for alcohol abuse and that at one time, he had taken amphetamines and used marijuana.

 

When he was crushed by 500 votes by incumbent John Mann , Roach sued the Canadian Record for libel. Brown fought Roach for 18 months and spent several thousand dollars before Roach dropped his suit.

 

Scourge of meth

The Record reporter who covered Roach's implosion understands the impact of meth better than most. Jenny Klein, 24, watched her brother take a six-year spiral into addiction, manufacturing and dealing. She has seen five other relatives either go to jail or into rehab because of methamphetamine. Klein's brother, Curtis Klein Jr., 26, is on probation and working in Fort Worth.

 

"A cousin of ours was killed by a drunk driver and he just did not handle it. He turned to drugs," Klein said. "With my brother, you could just see the decline. He lost weight, he was angry and very edgy. He was belligerent and hateful, not the brother I grew up with."

 

In November, Gary Henderson, who had spent 31 years with the Department of Public Safety, the last 14 as a Texas Ranger stationed in Pampa, took over as Hemphill County sheriff. He had also worked as an investigator for Roach last year. Forever a Ranger, Henderson has a ruddy, road warrior complexion, a military haircut with plenty of room for the ears and a western shirt with pearl snaps that's creased along the sleeves.

 

Over the final four years, before his retirement as a Ranger, Henderson said, he worked 10 capital murder cases in the region. "I can link methamphetamine to each and every one of them," he said.

 

In 1999, a young man on methamphetamine killed a store clerk during a robbery in Canadian. Just outside Henderson's office in the Hemphill County law enforcement center is granite memorial to Deputy Jim Graham, who was shot and killed by a methamphetamine user, Christopher Britton, in June of 2001. Britton killed himself on Feb. 4 while on death row in Huntsville.

 

"The one thing people talked to me about during the campaign was drug enforcement," said Henderson, who has replaced three deputies with his own hires. "They wanted something done about it and I took to heart what people told me."

 

A zealous prosecutor

Roach, too, had taken to heart the public impatience with drugs when he ran again for district attorney in 2000.

 

The candidate with a public history of drug use recast himself as a crusader against drugs, in particular methamphetamine. He used his and his wife's family ties to the community, dissatisfaction with Mann and a promise of stiff sentences for drug dealers to eke out a three-vote victory.

 

Roach's office won the conviction that put Britton on death row. His office rolled up big sentences for all sorts of drug offenses. Kerry Layne Zeek, of Pampa was among the first.

 

Zeek's mother, Linda Weatherbee, a widow who styles hair out of her Pampa home, thought that her son ought to be punished. Zeek was running with a drug crowd, she said. But 60 years in a maximum security prison in Amarillo on a first offense for possession with intent to deliver methamphetamine was excessive, she said.

 

" 'I'm going to make an example of him.' He (Roach) made that statement to the papers about Kerry," Weatherbee, who is trying to get a new trial for her son, said. "He asked that the jury give him 99 years, and they gave him 60."

 

Even as he sent methamphetamine users to prison, Roach fell deeper into addiction. His aggression — pressuring the five sheriff's departments to step up drug seizures and getting a drug sniffing dog for the district — drew the attention of federal agents. In January of 2002 he offered Rolex watches and cash to two troopers with the Department of Public Safety in exchange for stepping up cash and drug seizures, knowing that almost a third of the cash and property confiscations would come back to his office, according to an FBI affidavit.

 

The troopers, who ultimately triggered the federal investigation of Roach, told Roach they would have no part in bribery. "According to multiple witnesses, Roach often dismisses the criminal charges against defendants if they agree not to contest their money seizures," according to an FBI affidavit.

 

"I do know he was obsessed by money, of collecting it in these busts," his former assistant, Lynn Switzer, said. "And I do know we argued about the strength of the cases he wanted to pursue." The FBI is satisfied that Roach did not embezzle drug money, although the special prosecutor to be appointed by Switzer may still look into it, she said. Regardless to whether the cases were legitimate or not, Switzer would prosecute to the max and has now brought attention to herself as having probably prosecuted cases wrongfully in an effort at aiding Roach in paying off "political favors" owed to other crooked public officials within the area.

 

Things fall apart

In 2002, Cynthia Roach for the first time discovered a stash of her husband's pornography in a shed at their home and sex toys in the trunk of one of the five cars she says he regularly drove after they were seized in drug busts.

 

Switzer said she never witnessed Roach doing drugs, but as he spun more wildly out of control Roach would call on Rebecca Bailey, one of his clerks, to watch him inject himself with methamphetamine, according to statements she made to the FBI shortly before Roach's arrest.

 

In December, just a month after he was elected to a second term, Roach began to terrorize his staff, according to the FBI reports. "Physically and mentally I couldn't stand another day working for that man. I did what I did for the good of Gray County," she said last month.

 

The case worked up by the FBI included charges of conspiracy and possession of a controlled substance, possession of a firearm while an unlawful user or addicted to any controlled substance and possession of child pornography.

 

On Feb. 7, Roach agreed to a deal with the U.S. attorney in Amarillo in which he pleaded guilty to a single charge of owning a firearm while using illegal drugs and all other charges were dropped. A federal judge could sentence Roach to up to 10 years in prison and a maximum fine of $250,000. Roach spends his days before sentencing in his stepfather's, small, wood-shingled ranch home on the southeastern edge of the campus of West Texas A&M University.

 

Roach came to the door at noon one recent day, alarm bracelet on one of his ankles. He has already been scolded by his attorney for giving a wildly incoherent interview to a national newspaper admitting his drug addiction, and so he closed the door on a reporter.

 

Not long before he was arrested, Cynthia Roach was finished with her husband. Through a courier, Roach has asked her to sign a division of property agreement and wants a divorce. The agreement, she said, would leave her with nothing but debt.

 

"You know, the opposite of love isn't hate; it's indifference. That's what I feel," Cynthia said. "I think eventually it will get better, but I don't sleep very well at night. I want to take care of my boys. I have been just praying for peace in my life."

 

Despite the allegations against him, there is a state law protecting the prosecutions Roach's office made, Switzer said.

 

 

 

What is methamphetamine?

• A man-made drug that combines the stimulants ephedrine or pseudoephedrine (found in such over-the-counter cold remedies as Sudafed) with cooking agents, ether and anhydrous ammonia, a fertilizer ingredient.
• Can be prepared either through cooking the ingredients or through a "cold" process
• During cooking, creates an evaporate that smells like sweaty gym clothes stowed in a steamy locker for a week — and can kill the producer in close, unventilated quarters.