July 3, 2009 - The Austin Chronicle

NEWS MISSING CONTINUED FROM P.22 The Boyfriendrecalled recently. Walls was perfectly aware ofhis girlfriend’s close relationship to her mother,and it would seem logical, Harris thinks,that he would assume she’d left him and gonehome. “To me, he was saying he already knowsthat something happened to her.”An Insane SituationHarris’ suspicions were not without basis.The two-year relationship between Roxanneand Walls had been volatile. “I never approvedof Louis from the beginning,” says RachelGonzales, who had been friends with Roxannesince the two met as students at Kealing JuniorHigh. The relationship didn’t exactly start on apositive note: According to friends and family,Walls lied about his age to Roxanne, telling the16-year-old that he was just 19, when in truth,in the summer of 2004 when they met, he wasalready 28. It wasn’t until well over a year intotheir on-again-off-again affair that she finallylearned he was actually closer to 30. Thedeception felt purposeful and manipulative,say Roxanne’s friends and family. The relationshipwas also abusive – starting “at the beginning,”says Gonzales. “He would cheat on herevery once in a while and push her around.”Gonzales said she tried to tell Roxanne thatshe should end it, but Roxanne defendedWalls. “It got to a point that we were beingseparated, that she was telling me less and less[about] things that were going on.”According to another friend, ElizabethEllis, Roxanne was simply too trusting andtoo generous. Roxanne stayed with Walls inpart, she believes, to help take care of his twoyoung children to whom she had grownattached. She would buy them presents atthe dollar store – dinosaur toys for his son,for example, and pretty accessories for hisdaughter’s hair. She’d go to the apartmentWalls shared with his mother and babysit forthe kids by herself when Walls wanted to goout, sometimes overnight. “She had a bigheart and was a nurturer,” Ellis says. Ellissays that she and Harris tried to convinceRoxanne that she was being used. “She reallydidn’t know how to pick ’em,” Ellis recalledrecently. “Roxanne was always trying to [getWalls to] get himself a job, to be a man. Andthat’s something that her mom and I wouldalways tell her: ‘You can’t tell a man to be aman; he needs to just be one.’” But Roxannewould always stick up for him – and, perhaps,lie for him.Roxanne Paltauf was lastseen at the Budget Innnear Rundberg Lane.That’s what seems to have happened in2005, when Harris found Roxanne sittingalone at a bus stop, her face bruised and puffy.Her nose was not just broken but internallydetached, requiring serious surgery. Roxannetold Harris that the injury had been an accident:She and Walls had been down on SixthStreet when a group of guys began to catcallher, saying she should leave Walls and go offwith them. Before she knew it, Walls was fightingthe whole group – Roxanne tried to breakup the fight and instead got popped in theface. Walls had gone off to have a doctor atBrackenridge Hospital look at his hand.That was the story Roxanne initially toldGonzales too, and Gonzales didn’t believe aword of it. “She stuck to it, but I knew itwasn’t the truth. He was pushing her, slappingher,” she says. “I honestly believe he did thatto her.” Ellis says that Roxanne ultimatelyadmitted to her that Walls was responsible forthe damage to her face but shrugged it off. “Itwas just an insane situation,” Ellis says.Time to GoIn the months leading up to Roxanne’s disappearance,it seemed to her friends and familythat she was finally pulling away from Walls.Although she’d dropped out of McCal lum HighSchool as a junior, she had found her way to theGoodwill job training and GED program andwas thriving there, said her case worker, SandraMcDowell, and her teacher Jane Comer. “Shewanted to grow, to become more, to get a goodeducation and … a good job,” says McDowell.“She had friends who did not have those credentialsand wants in life, [but] that was herambition.” Roxanne was “very artistic,” Comersays, and she was excited to land an unpaidmentorship spot with Charlotte’s Fiesta Flowerson Lamar Boulevard, near the cluster of hospitalsand medical facilities off 38th Street.“Everyone loved working with her,” says flowershopowner Charlotte Wainscott. “She was justsuch a sweet and nice person.” She did so wellin her mentorship that after it ended Wainscotthired her on. “She learned and caught onquickly. She was one of those people that reallyloved flowers.” Indeed, says McDowell, Roxannethought that one day she might be able to haveher own flower shop.Roxanne was also making progress in herschool work, says Comer, and by early 2006had passed all but one of the tests needed toreceive her GED – only math was standing inher way. But like many young adultsJANA BIRCHUMwho fail to secure a GED on the firsttry, Roxanne began to drift from theprogram; she didn’t come around asoften and put off further study. Butshe kept working and eventuallytook a second job, working for theCensus Bureau.Not long after that Walls began toreappear, says Ellis. According tophone records, in the month beforeRoxanne disappeared, Walls was callingher constantly. Roxanne wouldtell Walls what neighborhood shewas working in that day doingLouis WallsCensus business, and then “she’d run intohim at a park on that side of town,” Ellisrecalls. “He’d just randomly show up placeswhere she would say she was going to be. Hewas way weird.” Less than two weeks beforeshe disappeared, however, it seemed to Comerthat Roxanne had made up her mind: Shewanted to get back to school and get on withher life. “I think the job made her think, ‘Ineed to get my GED and do something else,’so that’s when she decided … that ‘I’m goingto go back and do this.’”Yet Roxanne had also apparently reconciledwith Walls – at least enough to go with him atthe end of June to spend a week together, endingup at the Budget Inn just south of Rundberg.Harris, Ellis, and Gonzales now insistthey believe Roxanne was truly and finallydone with the relationship. Ellis called her thelast weekend in June and caught Rox anne crying.Was there trouble with Walls, she asked?“And she was like, ‘I can’t talk about it now.’”Ellis told Roxanne to get dressed, and shewould pick her up; Roxanne agreed.Ready to go, Ellis called back, but Roxannenever answered. Gonzales says she had asimilarly cryptic conversation on July 4, 2006.“She told me that they were arguing,” sherecalls. “She was trying to leave him alone, buthe wasn’t letting her. I said, ‘Just leave; don’ttalk to him anymore.’ But you can only tell aperson so much.”Harris and Patrick Doyle now wonder ifRoxanne had decided to break things off withWalls for good – and if, perhaps, that’s whatkicked off the argument they had on the eveningof July 7, 2006. “I think that argumenthe said they had, I think it finally clicked forher …,” says Harris.“That it was time to go,” finishes Doyle.“Time to go,” agrees Harris. “I’ve got nothingelse to go on.”Walls has never wavered from his versionof events – that he and Roxanne argued andshe walked out, alone, and disappeared completelywithin 20 minutes. But in the yearssince, police investigators have developed amore complete picture of Louis Walls, andit’s not impressive. “Louis, among his peers,is an idiot,” says 15-year APD veteranDetective James Scott, one of two investigatorsassigned to the department’s missingpersons detail. “I mean … you can look athis criminal record and tell he’s not thesmartest criminal out there.” Indeed. InMarch 2005, for example, he was popped foragreeing to sell three rocks of crack for $50 toan undercover APD officer. The cop had spottedhim walking along Rundberg, and gavehim a ride to the Ramada Limited just off thehighway. Walls fetched the rocks and waspromptly arrested. After testing, it turned outthat the crack was fake. (Walls was handed a120-day jail sentence.)Walls has also exposed a far darker side,and particularly a history of trouble withyoung women – trouble that started beforehe met Roxanne, says Harris, who madecontact with an ex-girlfriend Walls callednumerous times in the hours after Roxannedisappeared. The girl told Harris that shehad taken out a protective order to keepWalls away. More cryptically, Harris says theyoung woman told her that when Wallscalled her he told her that he was “in trouble”but did not elaborate. (The ex-girlfriend,who lives out of state, did not return a callfrom the Chronicle.)Since Roxanne disappeared, Walls hasapparently not changed his ways. In March2008, he was charged with making a terroristicthreat against his current girlfriend,Cassan dra Tolbert. According to courtrecords, she told police she’d met Walls tomake arrangements for him to see the sonhe’d conceived with her but that he wantedinstead to talk about her getting “back withhim.” When she said no, Tolbert recalled, hewhispered in her ear, “I don’t want to kill youlike I did that girl Roxanne,” and, “I reallydid kill her; I know how to do somethingwith bodies.” (He pleaded no contest to thecharge, was found guilty, and sentenced to140 days in jail.)More disturbing, says Harris, is that Tolberttold her that Walls had tried to pimp her out.Could it be, Harris wonders, that Walls triedthe same thing with Roxanne? That is a possibility,says Scott. “I don’t think she wasstraight-out tricking for him,” he says, but hecould have been trying to groom her for thatrole. Ultimately, Scott says, he thinks Roxannedid not see the writing on the wall: “She wasnaive; she was in over her head and didn’tknow it. Of course, in missing persons thereare a lot of young ladies who feel like they’repart of the ‘in’ clique – they’re with a gangleader, or whoever, and they don’t realize whothey’re with.”CONTINUED ON P.2724 T H E A U S T I N C H R O N I C L E JULY 3, 2009 a u s t i n c h r o n i c l e . c o m