The McFarlands chose a home with an open floor plan and a natural circular flow perfect for entertaining—the right match for a woman who loved to throw parties. It was situated in Terrell Hills, a suburban community just off Austin Highway in Central Bexar County. Five miles northeast of downtown San Antonio, Terrell Hills was a 1.2-square-mile island in the ocean of a major metropolitan area.
The town adopted a home rule charter in 1957 to keep from being annexed and washed into the multicultural sea of the larger city, where more than 55 percent of the population was Hispanic. Terrell Hills—87 percent Anglo—was, like neighboring Alamo Heights, an enclave of yuppie sensibilities that cherished its separate identity. The two towns also shared a prestigious zip code—78209—and the residents labeled as 09’ers. If you lived there, you carried that badge with pride. If you didn’t, calling someone as 09’er was an insult whose intensity varied from speaker to speaker, from comic condescension to disdainful loathing.
It was a leafy green community of good schools, chi-chi boutiques and extravagant grocery stores. It was a great place to drive an SUV and raise a family.
In this comfortable middle-class backdrop of normalcy, the McFarland family settled into their new home at 351 Arcadia Place. From the first day, though, it was apparent to neighbors that for this family, normal was only a façade.
The weekend of the move, the family in the house behind them—Carrie and Steve Miller and their three children, Billy, Stephanie and Wesley—were away at Lake LBJ for the weekend. When they returned home, Steve looked in the backyard. He recognized change at first, but not the source of it. Then his eyes zeroed in on the fresh stump sticking out of the ground where a hackberry tree used to be. He went outside for a closer examination. His first thought was that an engineer had ordered it cut because it interfered with the power lines. But when he called the government offices of Terrell Hills, they denied responsibility.
Puzzled, he looked out the window again. On the other side of the fence, he saw his new neighbor, Rick McFarland, holding his youngest son, Timmy. He went back out and introduced himself over the fence. After they shared a few pleasantries, Steve asked, “Rick, did you see our tree? It was here on Friday.”
Rick shrugged.
“Did you see it walk off?”
“No,” Rick said.
Steve was amazed—Rick answered the question as if Steve had serious concerns that the tree had grown legs and moved on to another yard. Did the man have any sense of humor? Steve took a more direct approach. “Did you see anyone come into my yard and cut down my tree?”
“No.”
“Rick, did you cut down my tree?”
“Yes.”
“Why, Rick, why?”
“The tree was dropping too many leaves in my yard.”
Dumbfounded, Steve looked in the McFarland yard and saw that the only leaves that fell from his tree landed in the graveled dog run along the fence. “That was my tree. It was in my yard. I know you’re a Yankee, but down here you come on somebody’s property and you’re lucky to make it to the property line alive. What were you thinking?”
“I’ll make it up to you,” Rick said.
“How?”
“Do you have a website?”
“I’ll design a website for you.”
Steve thought the offer was odd—and Rick was odder still. He didn’t think about it again until a couple of weeks later when he heard back from Rick. “I’m almost finished with the website design. It’ll cost you twenty-five hundred dollars.”
“Twenty-five hundred dollars? I thought you were doing it for free. I thought you did it in exchange for cutting down my tree. Twenty-five hundred dollars? Forget it.”
“I can’t. I already registered the domain name.”
“Shove it, Rick.”
Not exactly an auspicious beginning for building new neighborly relations.
Steve told a friend the story of the hackberry tree and the website a while later. His friend said, “That’s bizarre. What’s that guy’s name?”
“Rick McFarland.”
“Rick McFarland? That crook? He came by my office to sell me advertising to go on the side of a VIA bus. We went back and forth about it and McFarland didn’t want to take no for an answer. But the bottom line was, I didn’t need advertising on the side of a bus and I told him so. A few days later, I get a call from McFarland’s boss. He called to personally thank me for the major contract I had signed. I told him, ‘I didn’t sign a contract with anybody. If you have a contract with my signature on it, it is a forgery.’ ”
So much for Rick’s first job in San Antonio, selling bus advertising for Transportation Display. Rick then spent seven months with Clear Blue Media in Internet advertising sales. After June 2000, he was occupied in dubious self-employment schemes and caring for his boys.