Sunday November 16, 1941 Corporal Brewster McKinney was tired when he climbed out of his 1937 Ford Model 74 coupe. The fifty-year-old Texas Ranger had spent the night before on a stakeout with another Ranger at an old Roadhouse on the Trinity River. It was after five that morning when he finally got to sleep, and then a little before noon he got the call to go down to Elza. Elza was the only black mark in the otherwise perfect career of Brewster McKinney. The Rangers prided themselves in always solving their cases. Unfortunately, the fact was that the world-famous law enforcement agency left a lot of cases unsolved or “open” as the Rangers preferred to say. Most Rangers had a number of “open” cases on their record, but Corporal McKinney only had one. Some years earlier a local playboy had gotten drunk and driven out on some railroad tracks just in time to get hit by the Santa Fe headed up to Dallas. The problem for Brewster McKinney was that the man didn’t have a history of getting drunk.
