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For days at Stonebridge ranch, people drove past the Becker house to gawk. Neighbors on the street talked about how Becker used to give each of them a nice bottle of wine for Christmas. Parents from the soccer teams that Becker helped coach wondered if the soccer league would let him coach again after he got out of prison. He was, after all, so good with the kids. "We definitely knew what he did was criminal," said Jodi Anderson, "but we did admire the way he pulled it off. It did take a lot of courage. And it's pretty hard to get away with something like that for so long in this neighborhood, where everyone knows your business."
Some neighbors withdrew from the Beckers, and one woman on the street told her children they could no longer play with the Becker children because their daddy was a burglar. Cathy told me she was so furious at what the neighbor had said that she marched up the street to where the woman and others were gathered one evening and shouted, "You hypocrites! I've seen you get drunk in front of your own kids. I know you smoke pot. I know you went swimming naked in someone else's pool!"
When investigators asked Becker to explain how he could maintain his Stonebridge Ranch lifestyle despite filing income tax returns that showed him earning less than six figures, Becker said that he had made money gambling in Las Vegas. (Becker had indeed done some gambling over the years in hopes that he could earn enough money to quit burglarizing.) But Becker quickly succumbed after hearing the evidence accumulated against him. Besides the state burglary charges he was facing, an IRS task force was charging Becker with money laundering and was pla
To keep his wife out of prison, Becker agreed to confess to everything he had done. His attorney, Mark Watson, of Dallas, also arranged that in return for a five-year federal prison sentence, Becker would reveal the names of the various fences around the country who had bought his stolen computers years before.
Dwayne, Bill, and Paulo received two-year sentences in Florida. The cases against Joey and Da
"It sounds just like the life Todd wanted you to live," I said.
There was a pause. "Well, no," said Dwayne. He paused again. "I don't know. Maybe."
I went to see Becker and his wife for the last time this past November, just before he left for federal prison. The IRS had decided not to confiscate his Stonebridge Ranch home, which still had a sizable mortgage, because real estate values had decreased in the area and the home would be difficult for the federal government to sell at a profit. As a result, Cathy and the children were going to be able to stay in the house. (Although Cathy, who has gone back to work as a real estate agent, said she was going to make the mortgage payments with her income, some detectives speculate that the Beckers still have a secret stash of stolen money.) When I walked through the front door, Cathy was busy decorating the house for Thanksgiving and Becker had just returned from his next-door neighbor's home, where the woman there had locked herself out of the house. "I used a flat-head screwdriver to pop open her back door," he said with a shrug.
Becker had been busy that week-cleaning out the attic so that Cathy wouldn't have to do it for the next five years, going to the school cafeteria to eat lunch with his children, and attending church. I asked Becker if he could imagine ever returning to the craft that he does so well. There are plenty of police detectives who believe he will go right back to burglary when he gets out of prison, because it's the only profession he knows. But Becker firmly insisted that this time, he was going to go straight. When I asked what he might do for a living after prison, he mentioned a seminar he had given a few months earlier to a group of detectives on the burglaries he had committed. The audience was so attentive that he had begun to ponder the idea of becoming some sort of paid consultant to police departments and businesses that wanted to know how to stop good burglars.
"I think that's a good idea, honey," said Cathy, coming in from the kitchen.
"There could be some money in it," Becker agreed. "We might finally get the money to open that Chuck E. Cheese's."
He grabbed Cathy's hand, and the two of them smiled at each other. For a moment, they looked just like Ward and June.
Skip Hollandsworth has been a writer for Texas Monthly magazine for fifteen years. He is completing a history of the city of Austin in the year 1885, when a Jack the Ripper-like killer ripped apart seven women over the course of twelve months, sending the city into chaos, exposing one major political scandal after another, and setting off a rip-roaring and, at times, completely comic hunt for the killer.
When this story was published, many of the people who lived in Stonebridge Ranch called me to ask how much of what I had written was true. They had no idea about the extent of Todd Becker's criminal life. They simply assumed I was exaggerating. Many of them also refused to believe that Todd's neighbor Joey Thompson had been involved in the safe-stealing ring. They still didn't believe Joey was involved until Todd was brought back from Florida to Texas in 2004 to testify at Thompson's trial. Meanwhile, Kathy and the children still live their pristine suburban life in the home Todd had bought for them, and rumors are flying about how she is able to afford the mortgage payments. CBS has bought the rights to her life story, and a television movie about the Beckers might be made soon.