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Cruising With the Whore Cop

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Terry Peters likes to say that he doesn't care about the girls. But ride with him for a while, and you'll see different. Girls will call him. Girls that are sober, girls that have cleaned up their lives. One is a drug counselor now; another works at the mall behind a cosmetics counter. Which cosmetics counter and which mall, Peters won't say. Well, he'll say, but you better not print it. The last thing these girls need is some newspaper reporter putting them on the front page as former crack whores. They're trying to move on, and they're fragile.

When they call, his voice softens. It's like he's talking to his grown children. "Oh, she's fine," he'll say, when they ask about his wife, to whom he's been married for 33 years. She has health problems and this worries the girls, because they care about Peters. When he hangs up he'll start worrying himself--how this one's been struggling, how this one's been sober for three years now, how this one's having dreams about smoking dope.

"But I don't ever smoke it in my dreams," says one of the former prostitutes, who calls me at Peters' request. "Either the lighter won't light, or there'll be a breeze, or the dope will fall off the pipe and when I pick it up it's a peanut or something." She can laugh at it all now.

She went by Baby Doll back when she worked the truck stops. She got started in Corpus Christi, and one night she fell asleep in a driver's truck, and that's how she ended up in Dallas. The money was so good she never left. For seven years she worked the truck stops near I-20 and Lancaster Road, which is where she met Peters.

Hers was a $300 a day habit, but she made more than $1,000 a day, easy. Most of it came from dealing, not prostitution. After she'd smoked her crack, she spent what was left on a hotel room and food. Tried to take care of herself, unlike some of the other girls, who didn't even bathe.

She got hurt like everybody else. Once, a guy who claimed to be a cop picked her up in a little red pickup. He had a badge on and a radio and everything. He raped her. Another time, another guy claiming to be a cop took her to a hotel room and made her strip. Told her if she did what he asked he wouldn't take her in, so she did what he asked. Maybe he was a cop, but she doesn't think so.

Worst thing that ever happened to her? Maybe the time two truckers robbed her and cut her up. She rubbed blood all over their cab so the police could catch them. Then she ran over to the Flying J truck stop and found a security guard. "He wouldn't even call the police for me, just because I was a prostitute. That's how we were looked upon."

In that kind of situation, it's easy to get frustrated, which is why the girls will rob the drivers or collude with pimps to rob them. Sometimes, truckers get killed too. She knows a girl that got put in jail for 10 years, another for 35 years on an armed robbery charge.

She was put in jail many times, often by Peters. Finally, she looked around at all the women getting old and dying in prison and decided she didn't want that for herself. "Then I started reading the Bible, and I realized, this is not me and the way I want to live my life."

When she got out of prison, she got a job at Golden Corral. One night, Peters came in with his wife. He didn't even recognize Baby Doll at first. For as many times as he arrested her, he should have.

Now she's a drug counselor and trying to get into Bible college. She goes to church in Balch Springs, and you could say that's her life.

She talks to Peters every month or so. He just calls to see how she's doing, which makes her laugh, because she's doing fine.

It's a hot Wednesday afternoon in August. This evening, when it gets dark, Peters and I are going back out to the truck stop. It will be my last visit. We meet at the Southeast Patrol Substation, a squat brick building off Jim Miller Road, hidden from view by some raggedy trees that look like they need water.

Peters buzzes me in and leads me into a messy conference room. There's some kind of diagram on the dry-erase board--stick figures and boxy cars and crisscrossing streets--the remains of a briefing on a robbery, or a murder, I can't tell. Peters pulls up a chair in front of a computer.

This is where he spends a good portion of his time. With every new hooker he meets, he has to enter all her information into the database. It's a tedious job--one hooker might take four hours, checking out all her aliases and stuff--but it's important. Say there's a robbery at one of the truck stops and all someone has is a nickname, such as Sweet Pea. With a database of more than 1,100 prostitutes, chances are Peters can identify her if she came from one of the truck stops he works.

When he finishes, we hit the highway. Tonight, Peters promises, we won't get a flat. On the way, he talks about different things that have happened since my last visit--stolen cargo recovered, different girls that have shown up, that kind of thing.

A big 18-wheeler rumbles by. I think of something the spokesman at the American Trucking Association told me: "Trucking keeps America running." And it's true. Eighty-seven percent of the stuff you and I buy is at one point hauled by truckers. Maybe some truckers are ex-cons and maybe some smoke crack, but they account for a very small percentage of the trucking industry. Think of it this way: Every day, 5,000 trucks pass through the five truck stops Peters works. Over the last three years, he's arrested maybe 300 truckers. A tiny fraction.

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