The Whatley Mystery

"Austin American Statesman," February 8, 1976, via Newspapers.com

John Whatley was, in many ways, a quintessential Texas self-made man.  He was born in Mexico in 1903, but as a young man, was compelled to flee across the border when revolutionaries appropriated his father’s lands.  Whately started a dairy and went into land investments, with such success that he eventually acquired a 1,500 acre ranch outside Bastrop, and a net worth estimated at somewhere between $2-7 million.

Whatley’s personal life was considerably bumpier than his professional career.  After going through four divorces, in 1972 he married a 64-year-old named Faye. (I wasn't able to find her previous surname in any of the accounts of this case).  They both had adult children from their previous unions: John had a son named Barney, and Faye a daughter (her son had been killed in a plane crash.)  The Whatleys appeared an oddly matched couple:  Faye was an outgoing, gracious, popular person, while John was a reserved type who rarely socialized.  Despite John’s wealth, the couple led a fairly modest lifestyle.  Still, to outside eyes, the marriage seemed happy enough.  The Whatleys had few close friends, but no enemies, either.

On January 30, 1976, the Whatleys planned to go to Houston to attend the wedding rehearsal for Faye’s granddaughter.  When they failed to show up to the rehearsal or the wedding held on the next day, Faye’s family asked the Bastrop County Sheriff’s office to go to the Whatley ranch to do a welfare check.  The police found that the couple’s twin Mercedes cars were parked in the garage.  The Whatley dogs were running free across the property, but their owners were nowhere to be found.  

Finding that the front door was locked, the sheriff entered the home through an open window.  None of the couple’s possessions, including eyeglasses and wallets, were missing.  Everything appeared to be in order, except for one ominous thing: a hole in a bedroom window, evidently made by a gunshot from a .22 caliber bullet.  The window shade was pulled down, and although it also had a bullet hole, it did not match the trajectory of the shot fired through the window itself.  A second bullet mark was on the tile interior of the window, so it was theorized that after the gunman fired through the window, he/she pulled down the shade and fired an additional shot through it.  (Yes, I know that makes little sense, but as you will see, this is one of those cases where almost nothing is very logical.)  John owned two .22 caliber revolvers, but one of them was missing.  The strangest touch of all was that someone had removed the bedroom door.  It has been speculated that the door was used as a makeshift stretcher to remove a body (or bodies,) although a sheet or blanket would be a more obvious item to use.  (Over a year after the Whatleys vanished, the door was found inside a barn on their property.  A barn that had already been searched numerous times.)

Investigators learned that the couple had last been seen on the evening of January 27, when a man who had been hired to pick pecans on the ranch got into a quarrel with John, who appeared to be very drunk at the time.  The following morning, another ranch hand showed up for work.  He knocked at the Whatley’s door, but no one answered.  The January 28 edition of the “Austin American Statesman” was still in the mailbox, suggesting that the couple vanished sometime during the night of the 27th.  At around 9:45 that night, some hunters saw a blue or green Ford van with a camper driving in the direction of the Whatley ranch.  Less than an hour later, someone else saw this same auto driving in the opposite direction.

That is all we know for certain about the disappearance of John and Faye Whatley.  To date, no trace of either of them has been found.  

Did John’s wealth cause someone to kidnap the couple?  But if such was the case, where was the ransom demand?

For a while, authorities turned their attention to John’s son Barney, who worked for Austin’s city sanitation department.  Barney freely told investigators that he saw little of his father, and considered himself to be financially independent of John.  It was noted that he owned a green Ford van which matched the description of the auto seen around the Whatley ranch.  Barney denied any knowledge of what happened to his father and stepmother, but he refused to take a polygraph.  All this might seem a bit suspicious, but although Barney stood to inherit half his father’s estate, John’s disappearance meant that his son would have to wait seven years before having him declared legally dead.  If Barney wanted his father’s money, it would have been more to his benefit to arrange an obvious murder, not a vanishing.

In 1984, serial killer Henry Lee Lucas confessed to murdering the Whatleys.  He told police that he and an accomplice had stabbed the couple and dumped their bodies in the Nevada desert.  Although the story he told seemed plausible enough, authorities simply could not make up their minds if it was enough to warrant filing murder charges.  Although Lucas was indeed a prolific murderer, he had the ghoulish habit of “confessing” to killings he could not possibly have committed.  On the whole, it seems most likely that he was not involved in the Whatley case.

Or was John not a victim, but a villain?  When police searched the ranch, they found a box of legal documents.  When a man goes through four failed marriages, it’s generally a sign that he is not a prince among husbands, and these documents indicated that such was the case with John Whatley.  In fact, only three months after John and Faye married, he filed for divorce.  Faye responded with a countersuit alleging that John abused her.  For whatever reason, the couple dropped their suits, although it seems probable that the marriage remained troubled.  All this has led some to surmise that John, wishing to avoid another expensive and scandalous divorce, murdered Faye.  According to this theory, the green van seen in the vicinity was driven by an accomplice who helped John hide the body and flee, probably back to his homeland of Mexico.  It is certainly not an impossible scenario, but, unfortunately, one that doesn’t have a speck of actual evidence to back it up.

A newspaper reporter named Nat Henderson suggested there was a link between the Whatley mystery and a murder which had taken place two decades before the couple disappeared.  In 1955, two brothers, Calvin and Charlie White, murdered a 78-year-old man named Felix Heidel on his small Texas ranch.  The killers gave his body a shallow burial not far from what would become the property of John Whatley.  The motive for the slaying was to put Heidel out of the way so the murderers could rustle his herd of 24 cattle.  (The Whites were arrested after trying to sell the cows to an Austin cattle buyer.  Charlie died in the electric chair, while Calvin cheated “Old Sparky” by dying of natural causes in his cell.)  Henderson thought it possible that Whatley--who was far wealthier than poor Heidel--was murdered for similar reasons.

Two months after the Whatleys vanished, Bastrop County Sheriff Jimmy Nutt told a reporter, “We’re up against a stone wall--nothing to go on but guesses.”  Unfortunately, that statement still holds true nearly fifty years later.