The next morning around 9:30, Van Tyne says, he heard more gunfire, this time directly behind his house. When he went outside to investigate, he found two more carcasses and called security. Jones and Aiken were standing nearby, says Van Tyne, and were soon confronted by security. "They were just very matter-of-fact, acting like: We eliminated them, and what are you going to do?"
Fire chief Goldfuss got wind of the shootings while listening to security guards discussing the incident over the resort's radio band. "When security went out," he says, "[Jones and Aiken] had just finished the shooting. I was told there were goats lying everywhere. They had been shooting since early morning."
No one is sure exactly how long the slaughter lasted or how many goats were killed. Apparently, some were hunted down, while others were trapped against the cliffs, then either shot, chased, or pushed off the edge and onto the jagged rocks and tall trees some 80 feet below. Van Tyne later counted 27 dead, including those around his house and in the pile of carnage at the base of the bluff. When White Bluff's maintenance crew lowered themselves down the steep drop, they found some of the animals still alive, dying slowly either from the fall, their wounds, or both.
"That Sunday morning they shot the mother of the two twin kids," says Van Tyne. "I thought it was pretty heartless to shoot a mother with her two little ones right there with her." The kids, too young to survive without their mother's milk, died soon after that, he says. Eventually maintenance crews used ropes to hoist the goats to the top of the cliff and burned all the carcasses in a deep pit.
Why no one sought the involvement of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals is still a mystery. According to Bobby French, the Texas SPCA's chief investigator, "We could have gone out and tried to round them up and find someone to take them. If we couldn't do that, we'd try to put them through an auction." As a final solution, the SPCA would have euthanized the animals in a more humane manner than shooting them off a cliff. "That would have been better than killing them, and having the animals falling and possibly still living and suffering."
Game warden Kenneth Holder, however, empathizes with Jones and Aiken--saying that if he had been in their situation, he might have shot the goats as well. "You have bunny huggers and tree huggers," he explains derisively. "They want to protect everything that's out there."
But many of the homeowners were furious with what they believed was a senseless and sadistic slaughter. "This is just unreal," says one neighbor. "It's all for the ornamental cabbage and pansies they wanted to plant in their back yards...I wouldn't expect these supposedly well-educated people to do this kind of thing. But they're apparently well-off and felt they could get away with it."
Not content with just filing a formal complaint with White Bluff management, Van Tyne pressed his grievance with the Hill County Sheriff's department and the Army Corps of Engineers. But the sheriff told him no criminal laws had been broken, and the Army Corps of Engineers again wanted no part of the feud. "Quite a few people have tried to get us involved," says Bert Brunett, reservoir manager of the corps. "But we have no involvement with it. We don't know any place that we fit into this."
Frustrated, Van Tyne confronted Bryant Aiken himself. "I told [Aiken] he'd better not discharge any more firearms in my back yard," says Van Tyne. "He told me he didn't fire anything. It was all Mr. Jones. Now, whether that's true, I don't know."
Although Jones has refused to publicly comment on his motive for the killings, at least one of his former colleagues at Thompson & Knight claims he must have felt justified before taking such drastic action. "Jones is a really fine, fine person and a man of really good judgment," says Ben West, his former law partner. "He is not a man to jump and do rash things."
Others at White Bluff see Jones in a different light, signing a letter of protest and demanding that something be done to discipline both neighbors who had acted as if they were above reproach. "I guess people with the name Jerry Jones are just arrogant," says Goldfuss. "I know a couple of them."
White Bluff's security conducted its own internal investigation and recently issued its findings: Since wild goats are not a protected species, their slaying was not an infraction and would go unpunished. However, for the willful discharge of a firearm on the resort property, both Jones and Aiken were assessed a fine equal to the cost of cleaning up the carnage. Moreover, their rights and privileges to the amenities of White Bluff were temporarily suspended: Both men were banished from the resort's tennis courts, its swimming pools, and its two championship golf courses for a period of one year.
Whether this brand of country-club justice fits the crime depends on whom you speak with at White Bluff. But most will lament that things should have never gotten out of control the way they did. "There are plenty of places around the Hill Country where they could have found a place for those goats," says real estate agent Linda Alesi-Miller. "But that needed to happen a long time ago.
