Re: 11/19/02 - Dallas Morning News: Legal intricacies help attorney revise record; Despite guilty plea, lawyer can deny having a felony conviction
Legal intricacies help attorney revise record
Despite guilty plea, lawyer can deny having a felony conviction
11/19/2002
By HOWARD SWINDLE / The Dallas Morning News
Last of three parts
When Catherine Mehaffey Shelton told a court two years ago that she had never been convicted of a felony, she failed to mention that she had pleaded guilty in 1983 to a shooting.
Legally, at least, her statement was accurate.
It wasn't the first time that the Dallas attorney has benefited from intricacies of Texas laws that can turn fact into fiction.
Lawyer Catherine Mehaffey Shelton has benefited from intricacies of Texas laws that can turn fact into fiction.
Two reported arrests by Houston police 30 years ago, for example, are nowhere to be found in public records. The expungement law that apparently obliterated any mention of those arrests also required police agencies to destroy any reports, fingerprints and mug shots in their files.
"The process is friendly to the person who had their records expunged [deleted], but not friendly to investigators," says Julia Vaughn, executive director of the Texas Board of Legal Examiners, which is responsible for investigating the backgrounds of lawyer candidates. "A person is at liberty to say 'no' to questions about arrests."
Likewise, Ms. Shelton can legally deny that she has the felony conviction. That's because the early-release law that knocked off about half of her probation not only allowed her to withdraw her guilty plea in the shooting, but also set aside her conviction.
The early release meant that her law license – suspended while she was on probation – was automatically reinstated. She was back in business about five years earlier than expected.
When Ms. Shelton pleaded guilty to the shooting in Houston almost two decades ago, recalls the prosecutor in the case, "I thought I had slammed the door on her."
"I assumed at the time she'd lose her license," says Bert Graham, Harris County's first assistant district attorney. "Then they early-released her."
Ms. Shelton has chosen not to comment for this series of articles. Her comments, according to her attorney, could affect at least three pending lawsuits, including one she filed two weeks ago against The Dallas Morning News. She has accused The News and a Rowlett homicide detective of libeling her in a story written late last year.
Stalking accusations
Ferris Bond is one lawyer who maintains that Ms. Shelton should never have been licensed as an attorney in the first place.
When he saw her name in the Texas Bar Journal in the late 1970s among those scheduled to take state bar exams, Mr. Bond recalls, he wrote law regulators saying he "was surprised they'd consider someone of her character."
Ferris Bond says Catherine Shelton began to stalk him after their relationship soured in the early 1970s.
He says he explained in his letter that Ms. Shelton had stalked him in Houston for three years while he was a law student. He noted the numerous times he had reported her to police, including the two instances in which she was arrested – accused of torching his apartment and stealing and destroying his car.
"I volunteered to fly down and talk to them," says Mr. Bond, a former U.S. Department of Justice attorney and now a defense lawyer in Washington, D.C. "I never heard from them."
Moral character and mental and emotional health are among the factors regulators consider in granting licenses to practice law. And the Texas Disciplinary Rules of Professional Conduct says that lawyers should conform to the law, "both in professional service to clients and in the lawyer's business and personal affairs."
In the 25 years since Ms. Shelton was licensed, she has been convicted in the Houston shooting in which a boyfriend says he, like Mr. Bond, was stalked; has been convicted of the misdemeanor assault of a pregnant woman; and has twice been suspended by the State Bar of Texas.
She currently faces a civil disciplinary trial on charges that she took fees from 19 clients without providing them legal services and owes $50,000 in back taxes to the IRS.
And according to the allegations contained in stalking charges currently pending in Denton County, not much has changed since the days Ferris Bond was looking over his shoulder 30 years ago.
Houston, early '70s
Ferris Bond was working his way through South Texas School of Law with a series of part-time jobs when he met Catherine Shelton, then Catherine Mehaffey, in late 1971 or early 1972. She was an undergrad at the University of Houston at the time and freshly divorced, according to court records.
"It was a real quick, passionate involvement," recalls Mr. Bond. "For a while there, I thought I'd died and gone to heaven."
But he began noticing "weird" behavior, he says, that made him wonder about his new girlfriend.
"So I just started trying to distance myself from her," he says. Four times in three years, Mr. Bond recalls, he moved from apartment to apartment, once in the middle of the night, and each time Ms. Shelton found him. Once she even moved into the same apartment complex.
"I couldn't go anywhere without fear of her being there," he recalls.
He called police frequently, he says, but almost always officers wrote off his complaints as "boyfriend-girlfriend problems," Mr. Bond recalls.
On July 12, 1973, the alleged stalking and harassment took a decidedly nasty turn, Mr. Bond says. He returned to his apartment to find it had been gutted by fire.
"Basically every possession I had, including my law books, was destroyed," he recalls. "A neighbor saw her [Ms. Shelton] climb out of the window, then saw flames.
"They arrested her, and the police and arson people said they were going to get her, but nothing ever happened."
'Stunned' by phone call
Ms. Shelton, in an unrelated court proceeding five years later, would say that she was never arrested for setting the fire.
Mr. Bond's problems weren't over. Ms. Shelton, he says, stole his Volkswagen Beetle so often that he began taking the rotor cap off the engine's distributor so it wouldn't start.
On Nov. 7, 1974, after his apartment manager told police she saw Ms. Shelton steal his car, Ms. Shelton was arrested on charges of auto theft and criminal mischief, Mr. Bond says. His car had been wrecked.
After staying around just long enough to pass the bar exam the following spring, Mr. Bond joined the U.S. Marine Corps.
"You'd had to pull all my teeth out to get me to join the Marines without the stalking," he recalls. "But I figured they'd send me far away and that they'd know how to handle it if she created trouble."
Many months later, while based on the East Coast, he got a phone call. "I was stunned," he says. "It was long-distance collect from Houston. It was her. How she found me, I have no idea." He hung up when he heard her voice.
"It took me years before I took a walk without looking for her," says Mr. Bond, who still has an unlisted home phone number.
Neither of the Houston arrests appears on Ms. Shelton's record today, however, and she was never prosecuted on either charge. In 1979, Ms. Shelton filed a lawsuit against the Texas Department of Public Safety, the custodian of the state's criminal records. The court index shows the case as an expungement proceeding, but the actual file is sealed from the public.
The specific dates and charges for the arson and car theft were confirmed by The Dallas Morning News from a report by a private investigator who was retained in early 1979 to investigate Ms. Shelton in a civil wrongful-death lawsuit.
Former FBI Agent Kent Ferguson attributed the information in his report to the Houston Police Department.
Because the Board of Legal Examiners destroys its records after five years, it is unknown whether background investigators discovered the police reports, even after Mr. Bond wrote his letter urging regulators not to license Ms. Shelton.
Those police reports, however, contain a date and place of birth that conflict with those listed on other official documents. The News found, for example, that:
• Houston police reports show she was born on July 5, 1944.
• State bar records list her birth date four years later, on July 5, 1948.
• Her driver's license shows her date of birth as June 7, 1948, the same date listed on records of the Denton County Jail when she was booked on stalking charges in December 1999.
• A marriage application she signed in San Diego in 1968 lists her birth date as July 5, 1943.
• And while the marriage application and Houston police records indicate she was born in Illinois, her place of birth on Denton County records is listed as Philadelphia.
Houston, the '80s
Mr. Bond's protests aside, Ms. Shelton was licensed to practice law in June 1977 and began working as a criminal defense attorney in Houston. It wasn't long, though, before she found herself as a defendant in need of a lawyer.
By 1983, she had pleaded guilty to shooting another former boyfriend, Gary Taylor, and was serving 10 years' probation – which meant that her law license was suspended. And she had married Clinton Shelton, a gunsmith in north-central Texas.
With his help, she set out to win early release from her probation.
Michael Hierro was shot to death in a 1999 ambush at his Rowlett home, and his wife, Marisa, was seriously wounded.
In November 1985, Mr. Shelton wrote the judge in the Taylor case a letter on his wife's behalf.
"She [Ms. Shelton] is not now the person she was when I married her," Mr. Shelton wrote from Stephenville, where he was a student at Tarleton State University.
Mr. Shelton's letter said his wife was "much calmer and leads an orderly life." He didn't mention that she had been convicted in Goldthwaite of a misdemeanor for assaulting a woman who was five months pregnant.
On April 29, 1983, according to court records, a jury found Ms. Shelton guilty of attacking Susan Edwards Griffin, a one-time friend she had met in Houston who, with her husband, owned a ranch in Mills County. Ms. Shelton was fined $100. Ms. Griffin declines to talk about the assault.
Mr. Shelton's letter to the judge did, however, chronicle tough times for his lawyer wife since winning her appeal in the Houston trial and then plea-bargaining the probationary sentence. The stigma of probation, he said, made it impossible for her to keep even "a series of low-paying, temporary teaching jobs."
"A caller to the Bar Association will hear that Catherine Shelton is ... on 10 years' felony probation for aggravated assault. This always frightens people terribly."
Mr. Shelton beseeched the judge to give her an early release. "I seriously fear for her well-being and mental health," he wrote.
District Judge Jon Hughes apparently was unmoved; Ms. Shelton remained on probation.
More than two years later, in June 1988, Ms. Shelton tried again, citing a law that allowed probationers to be released after serving a third of their sentence. She had served about half.
A visiting judge who was sitting in for Judge Hughes granted Ms. Shelton's request, according to court documents. The proceeding also allowed her to "withdraw her plea of guilty" and noted that her "conviction is hereby set aside."
Though she had admitted shooting Mr. Taylor and plea-bargained for probation, the judge's decision provided her the legal basis for saying 11 years later in the Denton stalking case that she had never been convicted of a felony.
Equally important to Ms. Shelton, the decision meant that her law license was immediately reinstated.
"There's no language [in the rules] that allows us to prevent someone from practicing law once their probation is up," says Mark Pinckard, director of special projects in the bar's office of chief disciplinary counsel. "It [reinstatement] is automatic."
After winning back her right to practice, Ms. Shelton ran afoul of the state bar in 1998. Bar records show that her license was suspended, but probated, from January to June of 1999. According to the bar, Ms. Shelton failed to keep a client informed about the status of a case and failed to respond to the bar grievance committee.
Denton County, 1999
Copper Canyon's acre-plus lots loll over rolling hills, and many of its sprawling houses are hidden amidst thickets of oaks. Even as development has sprung up like toadstools in damp mulch elsewhere in southern Denton County, Copper Canyon's thousand or so residents steadfastly have clung to their rustic lifestyle.
But a flurry of uncustomary events unfolded in 1999: Two sets of criminal charges, an emergency protective order and a graphically nasty divorce were filed in Denton, the county seat. Sheriff's deputies investigated a body found hanging in a closet; undercover police crept around in the night hauling off bags of trash, and police executed a search warrant.
Things in Copper Canyon weren't the same after Catherine Shelton bought the red brick house on Woodland Drive in March 1999.
William M. Parker, a retired Dallas homicide detective and private investigator who lives nearby, won't talk about Ms. Shelton.
"I don't want to do anything to make things worse," he says.
But two complaints he filed with the Denton County Sheriff's Department appear to be another verse of the same song sung by Ferris Bond and Gary Taylor. For a year before she bought the house near his, Mr. Parker told deputies, Ms. Shelton had followed him and trespassed on his property, putting him "in fear of bodily injury to himself or family."
Actually, Denton County sheriff's deputies had been to the Shelton residence before Mr. Parker filed his first report. Three months after she bought the house, according to sheriff's reports, Clint Shelton called 911, on June 6, 1999, to report that he had discovered a body.
Trespass charges against Catherine Shelton were dismissed, and a 3-year-old stalking case in Denton County has been transferred to a third county court.
Deputies found 38-year-old Christian Harald Hansen's unclothed body hanging by a black double-twined rope in a bedroom closet. Toxicological tests revealed alcohol, marijuana and cocaine in his blood and urine, according to investigators' reports; his death was ruled accidental, apparently the result of an autoerotic sexual misadventure.
"That doesn't sound like Chris," says his mother-in-law, Betty Hawthorne of Paris, Texas. "I can't believe it. Chris was a handsome man, and when he wasn't drinking or doped up, he was really intelligent."
Mr. Shelton told investigators that Mr. Hansen was remodeling his wife's house at the time of his death. Records in Travis County show that Mr. Hansen was also one of Ms. Shelton's clients. His body was found less than two weeks before he was scheduled for trial in Austin on felony drunken-driving charges.
Court records show that Ms. Shelton guaranteed his $3,500 bail.
Mr. Hansen, a Canadian who had lived in the United States more than 10 years, also had turned to Ms. Shelton for help on his immigration status, according to his mother-in-law: "She was ... trying to get him citizenship."
Followed to hotel
By mid-October, according to police reports, Ms. Shelton not only had been accused of stalking Mr. Parker in Copper Canyon, but in Texarkana, too, where he had gone for a regional meeting of polygraph operators. Two law enforcement colleagues called police after they said they found Ms. Shelton in Mr. Parker's hotel room "going through Parker's bathroom items." Ms. Shelton, they said, told them she was leaving Mr. Parker a note.
Investigators discovered that Ms. Shelton had specifically asked for a room on the second floor of the Four Points Hotel that ended up being across the hall from Mr. Parker's. An entry in her reservation file, typed in capital letters, said: DO NOT GIVE ANY INFO ON THIS GUEST.
According to Butch Dunbar, a Bowie County prosecutor at the time, Ms. Shelton allegedly called room service, ordered several drinks and had them delivered to Mr. Parker's room. When the waiter arrived with the drinks, Mr. Dunbar says, Ms. Shelton persuaded him to use his master key to open Mr. Parker's door.
Mr. Dunbar, a former Dallas police gang unit officer, filed misdemeanor charges of criminal trespassing against Ms. Shelton; she pleaded not guilty.
Five days after the incident at the Texarkana hotel, Mr. Parker told Denton County deputies that Ms. Shelton had been stalking him. On the same day, a justice of the peace approved an emergency protective order that prevented Ms. Shelton from talking to, stalking, or going near Mr. Parker or his wife, who reportedly was battling cancer.
Three weeks later, according to a sheriff's offense report, Ms. Shelton violated the protective order. A Denton prosecutor told a judge that Ms. Shelton "has been driving by the [Parkers'] house."
As a condition of Ms. Shelton's bail, the judge approved another order that forbade her from getting within 500 feet of the Parkers.
The next day, Nov. 17, 1999, Clint Shelton filed for divorce, accusing his wife of having an affair with Mr. Parker. An attorney for Catherine Shelton filed a routine, general denial of her husband's claims.
On Dec. 20, Marisa Hierro, Ms. Shelton's one-time office manager, was critically wounded in a nighttime ambush at her Rowlett house.
Michael Hierro, her husband and a former Shelton client, died of a shotgun blast to the neck and chest. Though Ms. Hierro said both attackers wore black clothing and masks, she told investigators she recognized the voices as those of the Sheltons.
In a portable toilet at a nearby home construction site, an officer discovered a pair of latex gloves and a black mask.
Before sunup the next morning and a good 50 miles to the northwest in Copper Canyon, a Rowlett detective quietly loaded five plastic bags of trash from outside the Shelton house into the trunk of his unmarked car. Back at Rowlett police headquarters, Lt. David Nabors sifted through the garbage, according to an affidavit for an arrest warrant, and discovered a pair of purple Hanes briefs with eyeholes cut in them and a receipt for 12-gauge shotgun shells.
Barely more than a week later, Rowlett detectives were back at the red brick house on Woodland Drive with a search warrant.
The warrant also authorized them to take hair samples from Mr. Shelton. When the DNA results came in, according to the arrest affidavit, DPS experts said the saliva from the mask found near the Hierro murder scene came from Mr. Shelton.
The Shelton divorce suit, prosecutor Toby Shook would later tell jurors in Mr. Shelton's murder trial, was a "sham" designed to throw off detectives investigating the Hierro shootings. Mr. Shelton was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
Ms. Shelton has not been charged.
Cases languish
In the meantime, the stalking case in Denton County and the criminal trespass case in Texarkana, which a clerk called the "fattest misdemeanor file in the courthouse," were grinding through a series of postponements.
Ms. Shelton's witness lists in both cases grew to include several Dallas-area lawyers, the Parkers, the veterinarian who treated her dog and three women who live in Copper Canyon. Likewise, Ms. Shelton subpoenaed the Denton County district clerk to bring to court "the entire contents of [Ms. Shelton's] divorce file."
After languishing for nearly two years, the trespass charges in Texarkana were dismissed, according to court records, "in the interest of justice." There was a credibility problem with the case, according to Mr. Dunbar, now in private practice. Ms. Shelton said she had had an extra-marital affair with Mr. Parker; Mr. Parker repeatedly denied it.
"The facts show she broke into the hotel room and committed the offense of criminal trespass," Mr. Dunbar says. "But by my own standards, I'm not going to put somebody on the stand if I'm not sure they're going to tell the truth."
The stalking case in Denton, meanwhile, is 3 years old and, according to the file, has been transferred to a third county court-at-law, still with no trial set. Assistant District Attorney Denver G. McCarty hasn't returned several phone queries about the case's status.
Ms. Shelton sold the Copper Canyon residence in June 2000, according to appraisal district records, and continues to live in her house in North Dallas. That property, according to county records, is the subject of two IRS liens totaling $52,357.
Two weeks ago, Rowlett police added the Hierro case to the Crime Stoppers portion of its Web site. Clint Shelton, police noted, has been convicted in the 3-year-old ambush, but they asked for help in locating the second suspect Ms. Hierro identified in the attack:
"Marisa [Hierro] described the second suspect as 'a white female with blonde hair sticking out of a ski-type mask and [with] manicured nails.' The second suspect at the scene during the shooting has not been arrested."
Ms. Hierro, in a telephone interview a week ago from an undisclosed location, says she knows private investigators working for Ms. Shelton are trying to find her.
"No, I don't use my real name and, no, I don't stay in a place too long," Ms. Hierro says. "I tell the police wherever I'm at ... there's a Catherine Shelton out there."
E-mail hswindle@dallasnews.com
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