Ex-officer’s murder-for-hire trial starts
Letter introduced as detailing how pair were to be killed
Testimony began Tuesday in the murder-for-hire trial of a fired Houston police officer who is charged with giving written instructions on how he wanted his estranged wife — and a coworker — to be tortured, sexually assaulted and then killed.
Clarance McNatt, 64, was arrested in November 2016 on solicitation of capital murder charges. When police searched his car, they found two dog bowls, two dog leashes, duct tape and condoms. The hit men turned out to be undercover officers from the Pasadena Police Department.
The implements in the car were part of a cache of tools that McNatt wanted the contract killers to use to interrogate and torture the two women, part of an elaborate plan he detailed in a letter, prosecutors said Tuesday in opening statements of McNatt’s trial.
“His hatred runs so deep,” Assistant Harris County District Attorney Samantha Knecht told jurors. “You can see that from his letter to kidnap, sexually assault and kill his wife and her friend.”
‘He was serious about it’
Defense attorney Tommy LaFon is expected to argue that McNatt was going through a painful divorce with his younger wife and was encouraged by a neighbor to hire someone to pose as a Border Patrol agent to convince the native Filipino that she was going to be deported.
“The solicitation of capital murder case just didn’t happen,” LaFon said outside of visiting state District Judge Reagan Clark’s courtroom.
That neighbor, Robert Kent, was the second witness to testify and said he contacted Pasadena police after being approached repeatedly by McNatt. The two retirees lived near each other and spent their days working on cars, Kent said. “At first, I thought it was a joke,” Kent said on the witness said. “Then I figured out he was serious about it.”
Kent testified that McNatt said he wanted his wife and her friend, a co-worker at the daycare where they worked, kidnapped, tortured and killed.
Because Kent went to the police during the Thanksgiving holiday and undercover officers were not immediately available, detectives advised him to get McNatt to write out the plan.
That letter, read in court Tuesday, detailed an elaborate plan to kidnap the women together, interrogate them about their sexual history, then convince McNatt’s estranged wife that she was facing deportation and kill her friend. In the letter, McNatt appears to concede that it may be easier for kidnappers to kill both women to cover their tracks, and that result would be fine with him.
McNatt allegedly offered the investigators $500 but eventually paid just $100 cash and three gold rings containing various stones. He has been in jail in lieu of $250,000 bail since his arrest on Nov. 30, 2016.
History with police
The allegations arose 30 years after McNatt was fired from HPD.
He began working as a police officer in July 1982 when he joined the Houston Police Department, according to Texas Commission on Law Enforcement records.
After being fired in 1986, McNatt allegedly threatened to kill the supervisor who investigated him.
No charges were filed, and he went on to seek work at other police departments in the area, according to personnel records obtained by the Chronicle.
In March 1987, McNatt joined the police force of Ames, a small town in Liberty County, and spent 16 months there.
In 1992, McNatt worked 30 months for the Galveston County town of Clear Lake Shores, where he obtained an Advanced Peace Officer certification before leaving police work in January 1995.
His peace officer license lapsed on Aug. 31, 2012.
The weeklong trial before Clark is being held in a substitute courtroom in the federal courthouse in downtown Houston.
The 20-story Harris County Criminal Justice Center remains closed after being damaged last year in Hurricane Harvey.
If convicted, McNatt faces the possibility of life in prison.