Extracted from The Victoria Advocate (Victoria, TX)
Friday, July 14, 1995

Friends recall the ‘softer side’ of a decisive cop

Victoria's thin blue line will forever be a little thinner.

Lt. Bill Hatton, who helped the city usher in a new era of police work when he joined the department in 1970, will be buried today with honors.

“Twenty-five years ago, he was one of the new breed of police officers who entered law enforcement with a college education,” Chief Tim Braaten said.

Hatton died early Tuesday at age 46 after suffering a heart attack. He is survived by his wife, Betty Sue; daughters Heather and Tiffany; and a son, Seth.

A 1970 honors graduate of Sam Houston State University, he was one of the first college graduates hired by the department, said Lt. Richard Jones, a longtime co-worker and hunting buddy.

“His favorite things were to hunt and fish. If he could have lived in the days where you hunted and fished to survive, that's what he would have done,” he said.

Instead, he dedicated himself to law enforcement and to his department, helping it achieve national accreditation, campaigning for Civil Service protection for its officers and as an active member of the Fraternal Order of Police.

Over the course of his nearly 25-year career, an anniversary he would have marked next month, Hatton worked in almost every area of the department -- but it was on the streets where his friends and former colleagues say he truly distinguished himself.

“He was the kind of man that when you called a policeman, you hoped someone like him showed up. He was authoritative. He was decisive. And he never made you wonder what his decision was,” said John Mays, who joined the police department three months before Hatton and worked with him until he left it in 1980.

“Everything he did had a purpose. He didn't say things twice. He had a rule that, ‘You ask them, then you tell them, then you make them.’ If he said ‘One more word and you're going to jail’ and you said ‘But ...’ Then that's it,” Mays recalled.

But Jones said Hatton also had a softer side. “He could be tough when it was necessary to be tough. When it was necessary to be compassionate, he was compassionate. He always enjoyed doing things the quieter way. He'd rather talk than have to wrestle with people.”

But wrestle he would, if necessary. Mays believes that an Advocate photograph of Hatton holding Ronald Ray Howard on the ground during his arrest for shooting a state trooper in 1992, “says a thousand words about Bill.”

“That photo shows the decisive man that I've been talking about. He was always the frontrunner. If you had 10 cops on the scene, Bill was going to take command -- regardless of rank,” he said.

“He loved police work. With his intelligence, he could have gone on and done something more financially rewarding. But he loved the job.”