taught me all about the cattle business. The AH-connected brand comes from his mother — my great-grandmother An- nie Hunt,” Rainbolt says. After Rainbolt went off to college, he worked for NASA
in Houston as a performance engineer. “We worked on the new mission control center, putting in computers for the guys you see on TV. From time to time, I worried about keeping my job due to frequent funding cuts, so I decided to get into the cattle business full-time,” he says. Rainbolt lives in Palestine but owns cattle scattered
throughout Leon County. He spends his days overseeing them, offi cing out of his truck. In the years leading up to the theft, Rainbolt couldn’t
fi gure out why his calf crop appeared so low at the Marquez ranch when his numbers were fi ne at his other properties. “It was a gradual thing. When we’d do roundup and I’d
An answer to low calf numbers started to emerge when AH branded cattle were found at an auction market Rainbolt never uses.
several pastures with 5 sets of working pens. Rainbolt said his ranch foreman Flores reported that someone left the gates open at a particular set of pens. Mast and Leon County Sheriff’s In- vestigator Victor Smith found some footprints. Tire tracks leading up to the loading chute ap- peared to have been made by a trailer pulled by a dually pickup. “I doubted that Rosario and Ashley could load
the cattle by themselves, so I knew I was look- ing for whoever helped them,” Mast remembers.
Telltale calf crop fi gures Mast sat down with Rainbolt and Rainbolt’s
brother and father at the ranch to discuss the case and look over cattle records. Rainbolt had an extremely low calf crop — as low as 45 to 50 percent in some of his pastures. This just didn’t add up to Mast, especially in light of the recent theft. Walter Rainbolt grew up in South Louisiana.
His grandfather, Dick Gragg, was a longtime Texas rancher and TSCRA member. As a young boy, Rainbolt spent a lot of time with his grand- father in Leon County, learning about cattle and eventually working with him and for him. “He
92 The Cattleman June 2013
count cattle in each pasture, we were short a few cows. I thought it was normal because we’ve got wooded areas and it’s hard to pen them all. We also had holes in the fences that I was trying to get my foreman, Sergio, to fi x,” Rainbolt explains explained. Flores justifi ed the shortage by saying the cattle were skittish and ran back and forth through the fences. Rainbolt thought maybe coyotes and buzzards got some
of the calves, or maybe he didn’t get an accurate pasture count before roundup later in the spring.
Proving the case Special Ranger Mast decided to go back out to the ranch to
talk to Flores. “Brent was really helpful,” Rainbolt says, “He’d done all of his research — some I didn’t even know about. He also found where Sergio had sold cattle under his own name, often using the ranch truck and trailer. When Brent asked him if he’d ever bought and sold cattle, Sergio said ‘no,’ but then Brent showed him the records where he had.” Flores then changed his story, saying he’d bought cattle
from a guy named Joel who had showed up on the ranch, but knew nothing else about him. By then, Mast had a feel- ing he was talking to the one who’d helped pen the cattle for Carrizales and Nelson. When Mast asked Rainbolt if he thought Flores was in-
volved, Rainbolt replied, “Absolutely not.” He trusted Flores. But as Mast’s investigation continued, it all started to add up. Rainbolt says, “I really thought about it, and remembered noticing here and there that Flores had been spending a lot of money. His wife and daughter even traveled to Europe the summer before, but I knew he was on a fi xed salary at the ranch.” Flores initially agreed to a polygraph to clear his name but soon hired an attorney who advised him against it. Rainbolt
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