This is the second installment of a three-part series for Gulf Coast Reads, HCPL’s shared reading event. This year’s selection, The Librarians by Sherry Thomas, is a cozy mystery set in an Austin library, making this the perfect time to revisit our own real-life library mystery.
Read The Great Library Heist of 2000, Part One
In Part One of this story, we left off with North Channel Branch Manager Pat Lippold standing in a North Channel Branch parking lot, watching a man climb into a small purple car. She didn't know who he was, but she jotted down the license plate number. That number would lead investigators to a name, but as I found out, one name isn't always a suspect. And it certainly isn't the whole story.
Constable Precincts 3 and 4 joining forces on the investigation couldn't have come at a better time. Precinct 4 Deputy Joseph Lacher was scheduled for personal leave in July, so Precinct 3 Deputy Blankenship led the suspect identification phase.
Running the license plate through state databases pointed to one person, and the suspect was on parole, so mugshots were available. Deputy Blankenship obtained the suspect's mugshot profile from the Sheriff's Department and created a formal photo lineup. To build the case, they needed positive identification from multiple eyewitnesses.
Six Faces on a Sheet of Paper
A photo lineup is just what it sounds like, minus the Hollywood drama. In the film The Usual Suspects, a row of criminals stood against a wall with height marks on it. In real life, it’s a legal-size sheet of paper with six photographs of similar-looking people. No trip downtown, no two-way mirror, just a piece of paper a deputy can carry from witness to witness.
With the lineup in hand, Deputy Blankenship set out to speak with all the eyewitnesses. He met with North Channel staff including Branch Manager Pat Lippold, Reference Librarian Amy Arnold, and many others. Every single witness positively identified the same man as the one who walked out with duffel bags.
The investigators now had a suspect. The next question was where did all the books go?
Meeting the Thief in the Museum District
When Deputy Lacher returned from leave in August, he had the results of Deputy Blankenship's photo lineup interviews and was prepared to locate the man identified. Because the suspect was on parole for prior convictions, Deputy Lacher had his residence and workplace addresses.
On Friday, August 11, Deputy Lacher traveled to the suspect's listed workplace: a car detail shop on Fannin Street in Houston's affluent Museum District.
According to Lacher's report, he arrived on Fannin Street, identified himself, and read the suspect his Miranda rights. When questioned, he admitted he had been taking reference books from county libraries, but he insisted he only "traded or gave them away" because he liked to read, claiming he had never accepted cash for the books. When pressed by Lacher where he traded the books, the suspect mentioned a used bookstore in Pasadena.
From there, Lacher left Fannin Street and drove straight to the bookstore in Pasadena. The bookstore owner confirmed the suspect had been selling his books for months. The owner walked Lacher to the shelves, where Lacher recognized one of the books on the stolen list. He pulled the book from the shelf to examine it. At first, it didn't look like a library book, but on closer inspection, the distinct ghost of the lettering "ATA " could be seen on the back of one of the pages. The book had clearly been "cleaned," but it definitely belonged to the Atascocita Branch Library. Deputy Lacher identified a few more HCPL books, but nowhere near the hundreds now on the missing-books list. That would have to be figured out later, but the real coup for Lacher was that the store owner had even more physical evidence that shattered our suspect's story: signed store receipts and canceled checks—proving that the thief was making money from selling the books.
Lacher headed back to the Fannin Street detail shop and confronted our thief. Caught in a direct lie, his defense dissolved.
How Do You Launder a Library Book
When a public library purchases a book from a publisher, it doesn't just go straight onto a shelf. It undergoes an extensive processing procedure designed to embed the library's identity permanently into the volume. Mylar protective sleeves are taped over dust jackets, cataloging barcodes and spine labels are adhered, and indelible property stamps reading "Harris County Public Library" are stamped across the top page edges. And obviously, these markings ruin any resale value to collectors or used bookstores, instantly flagging the items as stolen county property.
I couldn't believe my luck when a tip from the Retired Library Workers of HCPL's Facebook page turned up a man who had a lot to share about the story, former Catalog Librarian, Bill Jarvis.
Bill recalled when he saw the recovered haul of reference books—which filled roughly 40 shelves at HCPL's former administrative building on El Rio Street—he was stunned by what he saw.
"They were remarkably thorough in removing all library identification from each volume," Jarvis recalled. "The Harris County Public Library property stamp was very cleanly erased (bleached) from the top of each volume. Many of the volumes had dust jackets with a mylar cover, and they removed the taped-on cover without any marring the surfaces. They also removed the barcode and the spine label which were adhered to the dust jacket without any visible damage. They then neatly reattached the mylar cover and attached the cover back onto the book."
The only detail that stumped the thief was a small, rubber-stamped branch code (like "ATA" for Atascocita or "NC" for North Channel) on the top right corner of the front flyleaf. The thief tried dabbing whiteout over these initials, but the ink often bled through the paper, leaving the branch codes faintly visible on the back side.
"All this must have taken a significant amount of time and effort," Jarvis noted. "One also wonders where they acquired the skills to begin with. I joked at the time that we should have the thief give our processing staff a seminar on how to correct errors without damaging the book."
The "how" was finally clear. The "why" was going to take longer.
Life before eBay and Amazon
Although Amazon and eBay were founded in the mid-nineties, e-commerce was still in its infancy in 2000 and barely on the radar of the broader retail industry. In Houston at that time, a thriving ecosystem of brick-and-mortar used bookstores fostered a rich marketplace full of opportunities, if you had the right books to sell.
Keeping a close watch on your own inventory was difficult enough for used bookstores, much less knowing what your competition was doing across the county. So, if someone walked into a used bookstore with an armload of books and a little bit of confidence, it was just another day of buying and selling. Constable Lacher's investigation notes would go on to show that our thief had a go-to cover story when it came to passing off the now-clean library books. He simply told the unsuspecting shop owners that his father had recently passed away, and that he was just selling off his father's extensive reference collection.
The Long Way Home for Books
Over the next few weeks, Deputy Lacher made the rounds all over Houston. Armed with a phonebook list of used bookstores, Lacher turned the investigation into a recovery mission. Our thief took advantage of the abundance of bookstores and sold books all over the county. This made Deputy Lacher's job laborious for the next few weeks, Deputy Lacher did something you don't ever see on TV detective shows: he took inventory. At each of more than a dozen stores, he would introduce himself, explain why he was there, and show the photo lineup to see if the store employees had any recollection of selling books to that individual; then he walked the stacks with the manager and a long list of stolen titles, pulling every volume that belonged to Harris County Public Libraries.
Then came the storage units. Many used bookstores kept their overflow or new stock in un-air-conditioned storage facilities. Lacher had to read the tiny print on the book spines while wiping sweat from his eyes and melting in the kind of August heat only Houstonians understand. He would then fill his county-issued police car with the recovered stolen books and drive them to the police station. There they were cataloged and ultimately returned to the Harris County Public Library to be reprocessed and distributed back to the branches. Obviously, not every book made it home. Some were undoubtedly sold by the stores, and others were never identified. At the time, the library estimated that closer to a thousand books had been taken, meaning fewer than half were recovered.
Looking at the full list of bookstores that Deputy Lacher visited and recovered books from makes me nostalgic for that time. I’d forgotten how many used bookstores once dotted the city. We are all familiar with the story told in You’ve Got Mail, in which a big-chain bookstore squeezes out a mom-and-pop shop. Less often discussed are how online resale websites eviscerated local used bookstores.
In total, Deputy Joseph Lacher recovered 428 books valued at $37,500, and on August 29, 2000, he officially filed a felony aggravated theft charge against Steven Ray Jackson.
Coming in Part Three
This story takes an unbelievable turn when we look at the life, the sentencing and tragic murder of Steven Ray Jackson
Join HCPL and Gulf Coast Reads for An Evening with Sherry Thomas
October 30, 6:30 p.m.
West University Branch Library
Harris County Public Library and the Gulf Coast Reads Committee invite you to a special evening with Sherry Thomas, author of the 2026 Gulf Coast Reads selection, The Librarians. Registered attendees will receive a free copy of The Librarians while supplies last.
This is a FREE event but space is limited. REGISTER NOW
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