• August 16, 1999
• Vol. 52
• No. 6

The Man in the White Hat

By Patrick Rogers

When the Accused Railroad Killer Turned Himself In, Texas Ranger Drew Carter Took Charge

Matches are made in heaven and on the floor of a Texas dance hall. Sheree Herbert was a 19-year-old college student when she first spotted Drew Carter, also 19, at a C&W joint in College Station, Texas. He asked her to dance; she said she didn't know how. So Carter invited Herbert to put her feet on top of his brown cowboy hoots. He swept her across the floor—and off her feet. When Herbert left the club that night, she was impressed, though she hadn't been able to see the color of her future husband's eyes. "He was wearing this big hat," she says, "a big white one."

Thirteen years later, Sheree's beloved is still wearing a big white hat, only now as part of the unofficial uniform of one of America's oldest police forces, the Texas Rangers. And ever since Drew Carter appeared on national TV during the dramatic surrender last month of suspected Railroad Killer Angel Maturino Resendiz—a surrender that Carter, now 32, helped orchestrate—callers have deluged the Rangers' Austin headquarters with questions about the force.

They've learned that the elite, 107-member brigade was established in 1832 by Stephen F. Austin, the founder of the first American settlement in Texas, to protect the pioneers from Comanche attacks, and that Rangers were among the first to use Samuel Colt's Peacemaker six-shot revolver. Today's Rangers keep busy investigating high-profile crimes and tracking fugitives. "One woman said Sergeant Carter and the other Rangers made wonderful role models for her children," says the Rangers chief, Sen. Capt. Bruce Casteel. "I can't argue with that."

Carter qualified for the Rangers by serving seven years with the Texas highway patrol and winning 14 citations for superior performance. "I guess I always wanted to be a lawman," says Carter, who was born in Luling, La., but grew up in Houston with his father, Andy, a candy factory owner, mother, Freida, and younger brother Jewels. According to Freida, Carter's taste for big hats goes way back too. She says the family used to tease him: "They'd say, 'Hey, hat, where you going with that boy?' "

After graduating from Houston's Bellaire High School, where he played football, Carter joined the highway patrol in 1988 before earning a business degree from LeTourneau College in Longview, Texas. Accepted by the Rangers in '98, he became part of a force steeped in tradition. Rangers wear star-shaped badges fashioned from Mexican five-peso coins and revere legendary forebears such as Bill McDonald, who was sent solo to quell a riot in Dallas at the turn of the century. When asked if reinforcements were on the way, McDonald reputedly replied, "One riot, one Ranger."

That, however, wasn't the strategy of Rangers who joined a multi-agency task force to tackle the recent Railroad Killer case. Carter had been investigating the 1998 murder of Houston pediatrician Claudia Benton when he got a phone tip from a person distantly related to Maturino Resendiz, who was wanted for that killing and several others. Carter parlayed that contact into direct talks with the suspect's frightened sister, nurse Manuela Maturino. "Manuela is a very nice person," says Carter, "torn by the love of her family and the need to do right."

In the end, Maturino Resendiz gave himself up to Carter on a bridge spanning the Rio Grande at El Paso. "Drew is my hero," says Sheree Carter, who works at a daycare center and looks after the couple's daughter, Amber Michelle, 3, in Cypress, Texas. "Now Amber can look back and see that her dad was able to work out a problem with his words and not with violence."

Patrick Rogers
Bob Stewart in Cypress

• Contributors:
• Bob Stewart.