4 women say they're victims of man accused in SMU student's

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4 women say they're victims of man accused in SMU student's drug death

10:26 PM CST on Saturday, December 20, 2008

By JASON TRAHAN / The Dallas Morning News
jtrahan@dallasnews.com

The women came to his poker room near the Southern Methodist University campus – sometimes with their boyfriends, sometimes by themselves.

Many of them found the atmosphere at his illicit poker games enticing, said James McDaniel, a self-described professional poker player known for hosting Texas Hold 'Em games four nights a week.
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Authorities say Mr. McDaniel preyed on at least four of these women, maybe many more, offering them free drugs and alcohol. But , prosecutors say he tricked the women with ground-up depressants instead of lines of cocaine, or slipped the date-rape drug GHB into their drinks.

When they woke up, they believed they had been raped.

Federal prosecutors have asked the women, most of them former SMU students, to testify anonymously at Mr. McDaniel's trial. They say he caused the 2007 death of Meaghan Bosch, the 21-year-old SMU student from McKinney whose fatal overdose prompted serious introspection at the university about students' abuse of drugs.

Ms. Bosch had cocaine, methamphetamine and the addictive pain pill and respiratory depressant oxycodone in her system when she died – the same drugs Mr. McDaniel is accused of supplying to her. Authorities say he also was a drug pipeline for other SMU students.

"What they want to do is get me into a courtroom and paint me as this monster," Mr. McDaniel said last week in a phone interview from the Seagoville federal prison. He said he didn't sell drugs, had nothing to do with Ms. Bosch's death, and never committed sexual assault.

He has pleaded not guilty to federal charges, including being a felon in possession of a firearm and running a drug distribution network that resulted in a death.

U.S. Attorney Richard Roper said prosecutors "have a strong desire to achieve justice for Meaghan." But he declined to elaborate on the case.

Mr. McDaniel, who looks more youthful than his 48 years, said he enjoyed partying with a younger, faster crowd.

The tournaments at his loft at Mockingbird Station, and later at a nearby duplex on Winton Street, attracted students – mostly men and most of them in fraternities – from nearby SMU, among others. And the men often brought along their girlfriends.

"In that crowd, you've always got the groupies, people who hang on, hang around because of the celebrities that are there, the money that is there," he said, declining to name anyone who went to his games.

Poker nights

It was through this network that Mr. McDaniel met Ms. Bosch, though it's unclear how many in the young crowd, including Ms. Bosch, knew that he was a convicted killer.

In 1979, Mr. McDaniel was convicted of killing James Burt Horan, a 33-year-old former Dallas police officer who had been working as a private investigator. He was found Aug. 23, 1978, shot multiple times in his Oak Lawn townhouse.

Police linked Mr. McDaniel, then 18, to the slaying after they found the ex-officer's car and belongings at Mr. McDaniel's Oak Cliff apartment.

At the time, Mr. McDaniel was publicly identified as a suspect in the June 14, 1978, slaying of John Miller, a 29-year-old Parkland Memorial Hospital physician found in his car on Lemmon Avenue.

Mr. McDaniel was also questioned about the death of an 8-year-old boy found in Mr. McDaniel's closet in October 1978 in Joliet, Ill. Police believe Mr. McDaniel fled to Joliet after he was indicted in Dallas for Mr. Horan's death. The boy had been missing for two days when a relative of Mr. McDaniel found the youth, whose body bore what appeared to be teeth marks, inside the closet.

Mr. McDaniel was never charged in those two cases, and he has denied any involvement in them. He would not comment on Mr. Horan's death, but was convicted of the murder and served 22 years in prison. He was paroled in 2001 and returned to his hometown of Dallas.

Some admissions

Mr. McDaniel said he used cocaine after he was released from prison, and he admitted doing drugs with Ms. Bosch. But he said he did not give her any drugs around the time of her disappearance.

"I'm not an angel in all this," he said. "I'm not saying I didn't do some things that I shouldn't be doing."

Ms. Bosch's parents, who declined to be interviewed for this story, have said that she struggled with drug use.

Friends and family told police that she had dinner with Mr. McDaniel on Thursday, May 10, 2007. They reported her missing the next day.

Mr. McDaniel previously has admitted going to dinner with Ms. Bosch at an On the Border, but he now maintains the last time he saw her was later at his duplex on Winton Street on Thursday evening. He said she was in the company of his neighbor.

After the three of them talked for a while, Mr. McDaniel said, he left them standing in front of the duplex. He said he drove to a poker game in Addison and never saw Ms. Bosch again.

That neighbor told police a different version. He said that he encountered Ms. Bosch with Mr. McDaniel that evening and that Mr. McDaniel introduced her as "Meg."

The neighbor said he saw Ms. Bosch again the next day on Mr. McDaniel's bed, semi-conscious from drug use. He told police he didn't call 911 because he feared Mr. McDaniel, who had a shotgun in the house.

He also told police that Mr. McDaniel urged him to pretend he did not know Mr. McDaniel if questioned by police.

Mr. McDaniel denied the neighbor's account and said by Friday he was playing poker at Winstar and Choctaw casinos in Oklahoma. When asked if he had an alibi, he said he is on surveillance video. But he could not recall which room he stayed in and said no one accompanied him on the trips.

As authorities searched for Ms. Bosch, Mr. McDaniel met with missing persons detectives and told them about the dinner. He denied having any other knowledge of her disappearance.

"Let's just be honest – if I had known at that point that Meaghan was dead, there is no way in God's green Earth I would have walked into the Dallas police station for that interview," he told The Dallas Morning News. "I spent 22 years in prison. There's no way I'm walking in there."

Third SMU drug death

Ms. Bosch had been missing for four days when her body was found May 14, 2007, inside a portable toilet near Waco. Her death followed two other fatal overdoses – one less than two weeks prior and another in December 2006 – by SMU students, prompting criticism that the university was ignoring a severe drug problem.

Since then, SMU officials have implemented reforms recommended by a Substance Abuse Prevention task force, including efforts to encourage students to seek help for addiction, extending hours of student activity centers and improving the tracking of students who show signs of stress.

Lori White, SMU's vice president for student affairs, said that the mandatory student orientation program includes lessons on substance abuse and campus safety.

"I think we do a very good job educating students about making good decisions, about the resources available to them," said Dr. White, who added that some students ignore the advice. "At that age, regardless of our best efforts, sometimes they do things we would rather them not do."

Dr. White, who came to SMU after Ms. Bosch's death, said that she was not aware that federal authorities had found former students who told authorities that they were sexually assaulted by Mr. McDaniel.

She said she would ask campus police what they know about the investigation. SMU Police Chief Richard Shafer declined to talk to The News about the federal case against Mr. McDaniel but added "we certainly would cooperate with them if they would ask us to."

But for some, the school is still in denial.

Spanish professor George Henson, who taught Ms. Bosch, said the fact that federal authorities say they have found more alleged victims who say they were lured by the promise of illicit substances "underscores just how deeply rooted the drug problem is at SMU."

"I think it's incumbent on SMU to ask some very tough questions," he said. "The problem is, they don't want to know the answers."

Date-rape suspect

Even before Ms. Bosch's death, Mr. McDaniel was a suspect in a 2005 date-rape. Police used that case to obtain a warrant for his arrest after her body was found.

On May 17, 2007, police raided Mr. McDaniel's duplex and found a shotgun, a camera and tripod, and videos of Mr. McDaniel having sex with what appeared to be drugged women. Ms. Bosch does not appear on those videos.

Authorities caught up with Mr. McDaniel on May 23 at the University Park apartment of an SMU student and friend. They found Mr. McDaniel passed out, apparently from an attempted suicide by overdose.

He was arrested on the 2005 sex assault charge, but that case was eventually dropped, police say, because that victim left the area. But by then, Dallas police had publicly urged any other victims to come forward, and they investigated three more sexual assaults probably related to Mr. McDaniel.

Dallas police Lt. Sally Lannom, who supervises sex assaults cases, said that investigators believed that in all four cases, the women had been drugged, but "we didn't have enough to make cases."

Mr. McDaniel has not been charged with murder. Authorities pursued a federal case where, if convicted, he faces 20 years to life on the charge that he caused Ms. Bosch's death, and an additional 25 years if convicted on gun charges.

His friend Linda Tran, who often accompanied him on poker trips to casinos in Louisiana and Oklahoma, said she doesn't believe he's capable of hurting anyone. "As far as I know, he was a great guy," she said.

Ms. Tran, now living in Las Vegas and working as a poker dealer, said she knew Mr. McDaniel occasionally partied with a younger crowd, but "he's not the kind of guy who is going to take advantage of girls." She said she never saw him using or dealing drugs.

Mr. McDaniel, awaiting a February trial, said he's being used as a scapegoat by authorities who can't pin murder on him and have opted for what he said is a weak federal case.

"In their push to get someone to pay for what's going on at SMU, and setting me up as the take-all candidate, they have pushed the envelope," he said.