Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 10, 1991 TAG: 9103100319
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By MIKE COCHRAN ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: FORT WORTH, TEXAS LENGTH: Long
She broke free, but he caught her, jerking her back so severely she felt her entire body had been "whiplashed."
With his fists, he broke her nose, blackened her eyes and dislodged several teeth.
"I have never been afraid of anything or anyone," she recalls now. "I was terrified. He almost broke my neck."
But, she sighs, it goes with the territory. No one forced her to become a private investigator. She just wanted to find the person who murdered her father.
At 51, Nina Neal is a 5-foot-3, 115-pound, blue-eyed blonde, a divorced grandmother with no desire to alter her marital status a fourth time.
Her first husband was a "career criminal" and the second was permanently disabled in an industrial accident. The third, she said, enjoyed hunting, fishing and wife-beating.
Nina Neal runs her own private detective agency, Pyramid Investigations, and a newly acquired bail bond company.
She often is the low-profile, behind-the-scenes investigator in a high-profile case, including some recent ones. You'll not find her in an office but out zipping around town in a pickup truck, a mobile phone stuck in her ear.
Female private eyes are not uncommon, but ones like Nina are.
"You can't help but like her, at least until she gets mad at you," says veteran homicide detective Danny LaRue. "Then she's a tiger. Nina's credible, although sometimes I get the impression she just arrived on the last flight from Mars."
Says Jackie Farmer, an investigative colleague: "Professionally, Nina's the best there is. Not many people know that she is also a humanitarian. She just likes to help people who need help."
Born and raised on the wild side, bright lights and darkened bars were a way of life that spilled over into adulthood.
"My daddy was a hell-raiser, and I grew up on the Jacksboro Highway. That's what it boils down to," she says. "I was daddy's favorite and I got to go places with him because I wouldn't tell on him."
In the '40s and '50s, flashy underworld figures and just plain old hoods had a way of dying or disappearing on the Jacksboro Highway.
In its heyday, the highway was a neon strip of nightclubs, liquor stores, gambling joints, saloons and dance halls. Slot machines were exceeded in popularity only by hotels and motels that rented rooms by the hour.
For Nina, the mid-'50s was a pivotal period, but for all the wrong reasons.
That was when she met Odis Hammond, a dashing "career criminal" who would change her life forever. And that also was when someone killed her father.
"They were having a shutdown strike at the Lone Star Steel Mill in East Texas," she says, "and my father and the others from Fort Worth were staying in a motel there. He was thrown into a vat of coke acid."
His remains were not discovered until weeks later.
"After that," Nina says, "I set out to find out who killed him."
Just 16 at the time, she dropped out of high school and headed to Daingerfield, arriving not long after the Texas Rangers. The Rangers didn't solve the case, but they did conclude that the killing was not strike-related.
Her own investigation would one day point to an infamous Texas gambling figure, but she could never prove her suspicions. Her other suspect was a guard at the steel mill.
"I still don't know for sure," she says.
If nothing else, her inquiry introduced her to the intricacies of law enforcement - "how it worked and didn't work." While attending night classes and getting a diploma, she became a courthouse regular, adept at rooting out information in obscure or bewildering legal documents.
She met and mingled with judges, lawyers, prosecutors, cops, pimps, prostitutes, gamblers, bartenders, dedicated criminals and an occasional killer.
With her courthouse expertise, Nina had little trouble landing a job with a law firm headed by several of the city's best-known attorneys, including Doug Crouch, who was eyeing the district attorney's office.
One night at a dance hall, Nina met Odis Hammond. He was, she said, 27 years old, and the "handsomest man I ever saw."
Hammond also was a police character, a pimp by preference and a killer more or less by accident.
"Odis was the biggest pimp ever to hit Fort Worth," Nina recalls with a wry smile. "He had 30 prostitutes working for him, including Jackie Bottoms, a beautiful $200-a-night call girl."
It was during a debate over Bottoms' earnings, if not her affections, that Hammond shot and killed his lifelong buddy, Wylie D. Bartley.
"Odis didn't mean to kill him," Nina said. "He grieved over that shooting for years."
Despite his grieving, Odis found time for an affair with Nina, who was then 17, still a bit naive and soon quite pregnant.
Odis was not opposed to marriage, but Doug Crouch was.
He felt his chances of being elected DA would be damaged if word got out that one of his investigators had wed a known pimp, particularly one under indictment for murder.
In the end, Nina and Odis were quietly married in nearby Weatherford, and she left the next day for California.
Crouch won the election, although Nina returned to Fort Worth prematurely when Odis got himself seriously wounded in another shooting, again involving a woman.
Soon she and Odis were living together, but not for long. One night Odis forsook his pregnant spouse for an evening with gambling cronies.
Nina was not pleased. She chased Odis across town and got off a shot or two as he jumped from his car outside the old Sands Club on the Jacksboro Highway.
After she was arrested, the cops turned her over to a suburban mayor, who telephoned the new district attorney for instructions.
"Just take her home," sighed Doug Crouch.
When the inevitable divorce was final, in 1959, Odis and a pal celebrated by killing a hood in Houston, which almost got them both the electric chair.
Odis hired legal legend Percy Foreman, who pleaded him out for 30 years, 15 of which he served in the Texas Department of Corrections.
With Odis off in jail, Nina remarried, choosing ironworker Gary Carter.
On Jan. 31, 1962, Nina's life all but unraveled, beginning with the funeral of Carter's father.
That same day a coin machine dealer named Dan Starns, 53, shot and killed Nina's mother, Ruby, as she sat in her car behind the clinic where she worked.
Starns shot Ruby Pearce four times with a .38-caliber pistol. As he turned to walk away, he whirled and fired again. He then crawled into his pickup truck and blew his head off.
"Starns visualized himself in love with mother," Nina says. "But she spurned him and married Jack Pearce. He was vice president of a bank."
Nina spent the '60s with Carter, whom she said gave her a degree of "direction and stability" and a second son. She sharpened her investigative skills in a variety of projects, some for lawyers, some for free and some for John Herrick, a well-known and respected personal injury attorney.
It was Herrick who eventually encouraged her to get her license and become a full-time investigator, which she did in 1985.
In the meantime, Nina went through one more husband and two more divorces and acquired four grandchildren via her two sons, both ironworkers. She also worked off-and-on as a welder, bartender, bookkeeper, hand driller and saleswoman.
The latter involved peddling memberships in the newly opened VIP club at Billy Bob's Texas, the "world's largest honky tonk."
With a local millionaire builder-investor, she acquired her own club, leasing a North Side joint called the Bloody Bucket in the heart of the Stockyards entertainment complex.
Nina's Little Texas, as she rechristened the club, was doomed from the start.
After forming Pyramid Investigations, she got involved in the probe of a truck and trailer insurance scam - and met the satanist.
"This guy called and said he wanted to talk to me about a case," Nina says. "He didn't say what case. But he turned out to be nice looking and seemed well-to-do."
She said the man took her to an old house on the west side, which she quickly realized was no ordinary residence. He left her alone in a room that contained a bed but was not a bedroom. There were chains and a goblet and books with script she couldn't read. She would learn later that items scattered about the room were used by devil worshipers in their so-called Black Mass.
When the man returned, his demeanor had changed from cordial to threatening. He grabbed her, tossed his head back and began to howl like an animal. She struggled free and tried to escape. He overtook her and began beating her savagely.
He told her to get off the truck insurance case and said he was hired to make certain that she did. After throwing her on her face in the driveway, he picked her up, shoved her into his Porsche, drove her back to her car and ordered her out.
Nina stumbled into a residence and called police, who intercepted the man and ticketed him for assault. He paid a $200 fine.
Did she drop that case?
"Of course not," she snapped. "We eventually got our client acquitted."
One of Nina's more interesting cases involved tracking down murder suspect Phillip Gray, alias Phillip Gray McBride, and helping expose his car burglary and forged check operation.
That case made front-page headlines in 1989 when Gray, a convicted killer, was arrested and charged with theft, forgery and pulling a gun on a police officer. Nina's role was never fully revealed, perhaps because much of her investigative activities were irregular, if not illegal.
While most of her work involves insurance fraud, Nina was instrumental in getting police, the FBI and the media to look into the disappearance of Denise Dansby, 24, a General Dynamics computer programmer who vanished while vacationing in Florida in 1989.
Once convinced that Dansby probably had been abducted and killed, authorities launched a full-scale investigation. Her remains were found in a field outside Deltona, Fla.
Among her current cases is one involving a man jailed for delivery of a simulated controlled substance.
"It was a setup," Nina insisted. "My client is innocent."
And who is this client?
"Odis Hammond."
by CNB