Joseph White settled down after he caught a bus out of Beatrice in March 1985.

Drifting had left Lobo broke and homeless, but he got back on his feet at his parents' home in Holly Pond, Ala. He moved to nearby Cullman and got work building wooden shipping barrels. He eventually made supervisor.

He fell in love and his girlfriend gave birth to a son in 1988. They were going to marry. He started making payments on a house and an acre of land.

Life was pretty good by early 1989.

He hadn't thought much about that small Southeast Nebraska city spelled like an old lady's name but pronounced bee-AT-triss. He'd made a bourbon-soaked detour through there in late 1984 and early 1985. His stay overlapped with the horrific rape and suffocation of a 68-year-old widow on Feb. 6, 1985.

Four years later, a Nebraska sheriff's deputy was thinking a lot about this guy called Lobo.

The deputy was leading an investigation that would put six people behind bars for the Wilson homicide - an investigation that two decades later would be linked to the greatest miscarriage of justice in modern Nebraska history.

But in 1989, the deputy would be knocking on the wolf's door.

A lawman again

The deputy, Burt Searcey, navigated a convoluted course to put himself at the head of the Wilson investigation.

He launched on that course just days after police found the widow beaten, raped and suffocated in her Beatrice apartment in 1985. The victim's family had agreed to let Searcey, a former police officer, pursue the case as an unpaid private investigator.

What he considered his best lead had come from a 17-year-old girl. The informant, Searcey would report, said JoAnn Taylor and Lobo had killed the woman.

The private investigator had also learned Lobo and Taylor frequently stayed at the apartment of a friend named Tom Winslow. So Searcey questioned Winslow.

But Winslow claimed he was cooking at Marshall's Truck Stop the night of the murder. Searcey did some checking and soon learned Winslow had called in sick that night.

The inconsistency caused Searcey to suspect Winslow was involved with the killing as well.

The private detective then asked a police officer friend if he could see the crime scene evidence. His request was denied. So Searcey said he gave the officer his leads and walked away.

He could do little else without a badge.

As months passed without an arrest, Searcey wasn't surprised.

He had worked under Police Chief Don Luckeroth in the early 1980s. When Searcey resigned from the force in 1982, he left a note in his file saying the department was poorly run, the former chief said recently.

Five years after leaving the police department, Searcey was hired by a newly elected sheriff. It was 1987 and Searcey wanted to heat up a cold case, but he would need more time than he had as a road deputy.

Searcey started working on his new boss, saying he had developed suspects as a private investigator.

"The pressure I seen was within my own heart, you know," Searcey said. "This needed to be taken care of."

Sheriff Jerry DeWitt thought his new deputy was a go-getter with the potential to be a good investigator. But Searcey's nervous energy contrasted with DeWitt's laid-back demeanor.

"Burt is a very fidgety person," DeWitt would say years later. "He's just like a fart in a skillet."

DeWitt, who spent 23 years with the State Patrol, grew weary of Searcey's hints about the Wilson case.

Plus, it bothered the sheriff that Searcey never put anything in writing. In fact, little of his private investigation was written down.

"You either put it in a report or end the investigation," DeWitt said he told the deputy in late 1988.

Searcey wrote. The sheriff agreed there was enough to warrant a full-time investigation.

DeWitt met with the county attorney, who gave him the go-ahead to put Searcey on the case. The sheriff, well aware the case fell under the police department's jurisdiction, then offered police everything his deputy had developed.

Surprisingly, the police chief didn't want it.

The deputy had the wrong people, the chief said.

First accusations

Tom Winslow needed money in late 1988. He and Cliff Shelden, a friend who used to live in Beatrice, came up with a plan to rob men in Lincoln parks at night.

Eventually they found a target. He worked as a motel clerk, and the two men arranged to meet him during a night shift.

On Oct. 26, while the clerk was distracted with Winslow, Shelden crept up and repeatedly bashed the clerk with a tire iron. They failed to pry open the cash register and fled without a dime, but they left a 51-year-old man bleeding on the floor.

The assault cast ripples that would have a major impact on the Wilson homicide investigation.

Lincoln police arrested Winslow about a month after the motel attack. Two days later, they arrested Shelden.

Shelden immediately offered police information about the Wilson case. Look at Lobo and JoAnn Taylor, he told them.

The tip represented another brick in a wall being built by Deputy Searcey.

On Jan. 15, 1989, the deputy revisited Confidential Informant No. 1, who had put him on the trail of Lobo and Taylor four years earlier. He convinced her to give a videotaped statement, which meant she had to relinquish her anonymity.

Her name was Lisa Brown and back in 1985, she was a 17-year-old high school student who had spent some time in juvenile dentention and liked to party with an older crowd.

That's how she knew JoAnn Taylor, but they weren't friends. During a fit of rage, Taylor had beat up Brown and tried to break her arm in a car door. Brown also said she once saw Taylor pull a knife on someone and cut off the hair of another young woman.

In the video, Brown repeated to Searcey the story he reported she had told him four years earlier: Taylor had admitted to the murder while she and Brown stood near Wilson's apartment building at 7:30 the morning the widow's body was found.

But this time on tape, Brown offered new details, including that Taylor had shown off scratches as proof she had attacked the woman.

And at the deputy's prompting, Brown said she frequently saw Lobo perform a trick in which he ripped money in half. That would help tie him to the torn $5 bill found in the apartment.

She wasn't done.

Brown said she saw Taylor and Lobo get out of a car in the parking lot of Wilson's apartment on Feb. 5, 1985, the night of the murder. What's more, she knew the time - 10:18 p.m. - from a bank clock across the alley. It matched the time of death cited by the pathologist.

Brown also said she saw Winslow get out of the car with his girlfriend. She even recalled, down to color and style, the coats each was wearing.

The car, too.

"I think it was a '72 green Oldsmobile with a brown top."

Winslow's car.

Winslow talks

Searcey's next step was to interview Tom Winslow at the Lancaster County Jail on Feb. 13, 1989.

Winslow said he loaned his car to Lobo and Taylor on Feb. 5, 1985. The next morning at his apartment, he overheard them talking about a crime.

In the meantime, Searcey developed a second confidential informant. Charlotte Bishop of Lincoln, who agreed to give a videotaped statement on Feb. 25.

In a transcript described as having been made from the tape, Bishop said she often shared her Beatrice apartment with Taylor. On the day the widow was found, Taylor returned to the apartment and said she and Lobo may have been involved in the killing.

Searcey took the statements of Brown, Bishop and Winslow to County Attorney Richard Smith. The two began preparing warrants for the arrests of JoAnn Taylor and Joseph White.

On March 14, 1989, the deputy and the prosecutor paid another visit to Winslow, who was still being held for the motel assault. Winslow's attorney sat in on the videotaped interrogation.

At first, Winslow told the same story as before. But Searcey prodded him, saying he wasn't convinced Winslow had revealed everything.

The camera shut off.

When the taping resumed about an hour later, Winslow changed the story.

This time, he said he and his girlfriend entered the old woman's apartment, along with Taylor and Lobo. Almost immediately, Lobo and Taylor forced the victim into the bedroom and shut the door. Winslow and his girlfriend fled when they heard the woman scream.

The day after interviewing Winslow, Searcey and other officers boarded a Nebraska State Patrol plane heading south.

The arrest

At about 11:25 p.m. on March 15, 1989, the phone awoke Joseph White in the bedroom of his Alabama house.

The caller said police were outside.

White later recalled how he pulled on a pair of jeans and opened the door.

"Twenty riot guns rack and somebody hollers 'FREEZE!'"

They shouted for him to raise his hands and kneel. Now lie down, they ordered.

A SWAT team officer kneed White in the middle of the back as he started to lean forward. Then he felt a handgun pressed to the base of his skull.

"They told me I was under arrest for first-degree murder."

Reach Joe Duggan at 473-7239 or jduggan@journalstar.com.