Geno Ruiz Camacho was a feared drug kingpin in Dallas, Texas, during the late 1980s.
Connected to a powerful Mexican drug cartel, Camacho’s brutality was unparalleled—he put a woman through a tree mulcher and murdered a three-year-old boy and his mother.
After a Dallas County jury sentenced him to death, the judge remarked that the trial had featured “the most grotesque and bizarre set of facts ever heard in a courtroom since the Charles Manson killings in California.”
Haunted By Evil
Three decades after Camacho’s reign of terror was brought to an end, retired FBI Special Agent Tase Bailey, who played a key role in capturing Camacho, spoke to me on the True Crime Reporter® Podcast about the case that continues to haunt him.
We had a history together from my reporting years earlier on bank robbery takeover gangs and wanted violent fugitives.
In 1999, Bailey presented me with the first-ever Dallas Crime Commission Award for “Excellence In Crime Reporting.”
Bailey was no stranger to the world of violent crime. A Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, Bailey had spent 14 years with the Bureau before transferring to the Dallas Field Office in the late 1980s to head up the SWAT team and work on the violent crime squad.
But even for Bailey, the Camacho case would prove uniquely disturbing.
Reign of Terror
Camacho’s reign of terror began with the kidnapping of 31-year-old Evelyn Banks and her 3-year-old son Andre over a drug debt in Pleasant Grove, a crime-ridden neighborhood of Dallas.
Camacho had fronted her $30,000 worth of marijuana, but she had been ripped off trying to sell it at housing projects. “So Camacho kept calling, wanting his money, and she wouldn’t answer the phone. She blew him off and wouldn’t come to the door. So he finally got fed up,” recalled Bailey.
Camacho, a stocky, swarthy 5-foot-7, 175-pound drug dealer, was already wanted in South Texas for killing a man with a shotgun over a trivial name-calling dispute. The wanted killer and three henchmen armed with a Mac 10 submachine gun and .357 handgun confronted Banks and her common law husband 52-year-old Sam Junior Wright who was a wanted drug fugitive.
Murder and Abduction
Bailey vividly recalled the details of the abduction. “They kicked in the front door. They grabbed Evelyn. They sent one of the guys up the stairs, grabbed Sam Wright and Andre Banks, Evelyn’s three-year-old boy, and brought him downstairs. Camacho started screaming at them, demanding his money. When David Wilburn, Sam Wright’s nephew, arrived, Camacho ordered David Cooke to shoot him.” Cooke, a sadistic killer of animals hesitated, Camacho grabbed the .357 caliber handgun and shot Wilburn point blank in the back off his head to show that he was serious.”
Wright escaped. Camacho abducted Evelyn Banks and her three-year-old son to hold for ransom. Authorities were unaware that the mother and child were being held at the apartment of Eddie Blaine Cummings and his girlfriend, Pamela Miller, a topless dancer at the Baby Dolls strip club. Cummings, a muscular 24-year-old known as “Fast Eddie,” had been Camacho’s cellmate in the Dallas County Jail a few months earlier.
The murder abduction drew wide publicity, and Special Agent Bailey was hot on Camacho’s trail. Camacho decided to get rid of the witnesses to the murder. He ordered David Cooke to find 26-year-old Spencer Stanley, a dangerous psychopath who did his dirty work. The group drove Banks and her son north to Ardmore, Oklahoma, just across the border from Texas. Camacho kept Banks calm by telling her they were going to fly her to California from a clandestine airstrip.
A Hole In The Ground
Meanwhile, Spencer Stanley found a remote spot in the backwoods of Oklahoma to dig a grave. After spending the night in a motel, Evelyn Banks thought she and her son were about to be released. Instead, the trip down a bumpy dirt road ended at a hole in the ground.
“As soon as Evelyn saw the hole, she knew what was coming. She let out a scream and collapsed. Spencer Stanley had Andre on his shoulders. He threw him down in the hole. Camacho pumped four rounds into his head, a three-year-old, from a 380 caliber handgun. He then pushed Evelyn in the hole and pumped several rounds into her. And then he sprinkled cat litter over her.”
David Cooke cut a deal to plead guilty to one federal count of kidnapping in exchange for sharing what he knew. He directed Bailey to the site of the execution.
On a sweltering August afternoon with no breeze to offer relief, FBI agents began their grim task of digging. They soon uncovered spent .380-caliber cartridges, a chilling testament to the violence that had occurred. After two hours of labor, an FBI agent, standing waist-deep in the hole, unearthed the remains.
A foul stench filled the air, overwhelming the agents. They neutralized the odor by smearing Vicks VapoRub under their noses. As they continued to dig, they found Evelyn lying as she had died, on top of her son. Both bodies were partially mummified by the cat litter the killers had spread over them.
Mulcher Murder
Another grisly revelation awaited. David Cooke in a matter-of-fact tone, made a startling disclosure about the disappearance of Pamela Miller, the topless dancer from Baby Dolls. “David Cooke told us she’s dead. We said, well, where is she buried? He said you’ll never find her,” Bailey remembered. “And we said, why not? He said Well, we ran her through a tree mulcher.”
The full depravity of Miller’s murder soon came into focus. Camacho needed to make a drug score to get cash to flee to Mexico. The deal turned sour when Pamela Miller drunkenly recognized the prospective buyer as a customer at the Baby Dolls strip club. The spooked buyer excused himself to the restroom and slipped away from the meeting.
Enraged that the topless dancer had cost him a major drug deal and knew too much about the abduction of Banks and her son, Camacho beat her in the back seat of his car. When Miller challenged his manhood, Camacho tried to choke her to death. Miller regained consciousness, so Camacho pulled her out of the car and repeatedly ran over her.
After keeping her body in a barrel for two days, they took it to David Cooke’s family ranch located west of Fort Worth in Stephenville, Texas. Camacho and his psychopath accomplice Spencer Stanley chopped up the young woman’s body with an axe and fed it into a rented tree mulcher.
Bailey and fellow agents found her remains scattered across an area half the size of a football field. Bits of tissue were still hanging from the trees. They recovered a jaw bone which identified Miller as the victim of the gruesome murder.
The case still haunts Bailey. “Some people are just pure evil, pure evil. And I think when you look at what’s going on in Mexico today, which is where this all originated from, and you see the brutality of the cartels down there. I think you can understand what we’re dealing with here. It’s an offshoot of what’s coming out of those Cartels south of us.
The Search for Camacho
Camacho fled to a drug haven in Mexico where nothing short of military action could capture him.
With help from a DEA informant and one of his drug informants, Bailey set a trap.
They lured Camacho back to Texas with the promise to receive a $100,000 advance payment on a six-million-dollar drug deal.
Camacho took the bait and was arrested, crossing the bridge across the Rio Grande to McAllen, Texas.
During the flight back to Dallas to stand trial, Bailey stared down Camacho. When the six-seat, single-engine FBI aircraft hit turbulence and started bouncing around, Camacho became scared, recalled Bailey. “He says, Are we going to die? And Tom Porter, the pilot, turned around and said, We’re not, but you are.”
Delivering Texas Justice
In August 1998, exactly ten years to the day since Tase Bailey and fellow FBI agents exhumed the bodies of Evelyn and Andre Banks, Camacho faced the Texas executioner.
Bailey, his former boss on the violent crimes squad Joe Hersley, and Pamela Miller’s mother, Mickey Miller, watched at the Death Chamber at the Walls Unit in Huntsville, Texas.
Mickey Miller, the mother of the dancer who had been fed into a tree mulcher, pressed herself against the glass window of the booth reserved for victims’ families.
Camacho lay on a gurney with his arms outstretched and intravenous tubes inserted. She chanted, “You’re paying. You are finally paying.”
Bailey muttered under his breath, “Suck it up, Mr. Badass. You’re going to be dead in about five minutes.”
The warden asked Camacho if he had any last words recalled Bailey, “His family was in a room adjacent to us. And his words to his family was I’ll see you on the other side. And then they put the injection of the fluid in. And you could hear in the next room the family somebody was pounding on the glass in the next room. And then you hear him kind of snore. And he was pronounced dead.”
Legacy of Evil
Reflecting on the execution-style murder of a three-year-old boy and the brutal end of Pamela Miller in a tree mulcher Bailey said, “I thought he got off easy. Going out the way he did compared to what his victims had to go through.”
The case of Geno Camacho stands as a stark reminder of the capacity for human brutality and the relentless pursuit of justice by FBI agents.
It is a testament to the determination of the brave men and women in law enforcement who fight on our behalf in the age-old conflict of good versus evil.