Property Tax Funds Crime

Follow the PO Box to WTF Happening

Follow the PO Box

What it cost me to find out who was really running Godley ISD and why you have to do this where you live, too.

---

I’m going to tell you the truth about what this kind of work does to a person, and then I’m going to tell you what I found. I’m doing it in that order on purpose. Most people who read advocacy reports skip the part where the human paid for them. I want you to read that part first, because if you’re sitting at your kitchen table right now wondering whether to file a single open records request in your own school district, wondering whether it’s worth it, you deserve to know what you’re signing up for. And then, once you know, I want you to do it anyway.

What it costs

For thirteen months I have been sitting at a kitchen table in Kingwood, Texas, learning a body of state law I never asked to learn. Texas Government Code Chapter 552. Texas Education Code § 21.355. The eight exception plus nine reserved structure of an OAG ruling request. The procedural posture of a TEA Special Investigations Unit complaint. The Texas Ethics Commission’s filing schedule. The Texas Real Estate Commission’s License Holder Search. The Texas Comptroller’s Taxable Entity Search. The Johnson County Clerk’s recorded instrument index. The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation’s architectural barriers filing system. I can navigate every one of these systems half asleep now, and I learned them half asleep, because the people I am up against have salaried lawyers and I have a Google Doc and a stubborn refusal to let this go.

The work is not glamorous. It is a thousand hours of squinting at PDFs. It is the same five names showing up in the same five places and not being able to explain to anyone at a dinner party why that matters without sounding like a person who has lost the plot. It is your spouse looking at you across the room at eleven at night and saying, gently, please come to bed. It is your friends not asking anymore. It is the quiet realization, somewhere around month four, that the only people who really get it are the other citizen advocates fighting the same kind of war in their own counties, and you find each other on Twitter, Facebook, you tube and on Substack at 2 a.m. and you trade screen captures like soldiers trading cigarettes.

There is a particular kind of mental tax that I want to name out loud, because nobody warned me about it and I think people deserve to be warned. It is the tax of knowing too much. Once you’ve followed the documents, you can’t unsee what they say. You walk into the grocery store in your own town and you know which contractor donated to which campaign and which trustee’s spouse is on which committee and which superintendent went to school with which lender, and none of the other people in the cereal aisle know any of it, and you are not allowed to talk about it because half of it is in front of the Attorney General and the other half is in front of the Texas Education Agency.

And then there are the threats. On May 2, 2026, an account on Facebook that calls itself “Tiffany Tellepsen” an account that the documentary record places in the same digital orbit as the former mayor of Plum Grove, Texas posted, in a Godley community group, that it knew what neighborhood I lived in and invited me to come meet it at a specific restaurant near my house. That post is exhibit seventeen in the file. I am redacting the restaurant name from the public version because my children eat there. The unredacted version is with the people who can do something about it.

You should know this part too, because it is true: the days after that post I sat in my chair broken for several minutes. Not from fear, exactly. From exhaustion. From the recognition that the cost of doing this work is now also the cost of looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life. And then I turned on my desktop, and filed another open records request. Because here is the thing nobody tells you about advocacy: the people you are up against are counting on you to stop. The entire model the procedural delay, the eight exception OAG escalation, the harassment account, the public comment intimidation all of it is designed to make ordinary citizens give up. The architecture of small town corruption assumes you will go away.

I am not going away. And I am writing this so that you will know, when you read the file, what every page of it cost.

What I found

What follows is the summary. The full 57-page documentary file, with twenty-one exhibits and a redaction key, is at the bottom of this post.

In a small post office in Granbury, Texas, a single PO Box Box 997 appears as the mailing address of three Texas entities that, on their faces, have no reason to share an address. The first is Avalon Property Company, a Texas corporation owned by a Granbury real estate developer named Don Murphy. The second is the Texas Real Estate Commission salesperson license of Lee Ann Walker, publicly identified as Lee Ann Penton-Walker, the former Mayor of Plum Grove, Texas a town two hundred miles away in Liberty County. The third is the American Transparency Alliance, a Texas general purpose political action committee whose treasurer of record is Denna Ramsey, and whose only reported donor in its initial filing period is one “Walker Lee (Mrs.)” of Cleveland, Texas the same ZIP code where Penton-Walker has campaigned for political office.

Three filings. Three Texas state agencies. One PO Box.

That, by itself, would be unusual but not, in itself, evidence of wrongdoing. What turns the coincidence into a documented network is what the v3 supplement to this file establishes: the Texas Real Estate Commission’s License Holder Search page for Broker Don Murphy lists exactly two sponsored sales agents. They are Denna Ramsey and Lee Ann Walker. The treasurer of the political action committee at PO Box 997 and the licensee identified by Don Murphy’s own company website as his sales marketing director are not just at the same post office box. They are the only two sales agents sponsored by the same Texas real-estate broker a broker whose business operates out of the same PO Box.

Then the network reaches into a Godley ISD classroom. Penton-Walker is, by her own Facebook record, the stepmother by marriage of Celesta “Chanel” Rawls, a first grade teacher at R.B. Godley Elementary School. The relationship is established by three independent documents a 2017 Neal Funeral Home obituary, a 2023 Bluebonnet News article on Rodney Walker’s appointment to the Plum Grove City Council (beneath which Chanel Rawls publicly commented “Congratulations Dad!!”), and Chanel Rawls’s own public Facebook profile. The file makes no allegation of personal wrongdoing by Ms. Rawls. It documents her as the family network anchor and as the one Godley ISD records request, of seven that I have filed since May 2026, on which the District has retained outside counsel and escalated to a full Texas Attorney General ruling request invoking eight statutory exceptions and reserving nine more. Six of my other requests, covering the Superintendent, the District’s vendors, the bond planning correspondence, and the District’s relationships with appraisal officials, were handled through ordinary procedural channels. One the one centered on Celesta Rawls was met with the full legal arsenal.

The political action committee at PO Box 997, the American Transparency Alliance, filed exactly one publicly recorded action in its initial period: a Texas Public Information Act request targeting Godley ISD Trustee Kayla Lain on her last day in office. May 18, 2026. The same Kayla Lain who had campaigned against, and is publicly associated with the defeat of, Godley ISD’s 2023 $889 million bond program. As well as 2024 and 2025 Bond rejections The committee at the developer’s PO Box waited until the moment her shield expired, and then it filed.

And then there is the account. Active in the “Godley Residents Talking — Uncensored” Facebook group is a profile calling itself “Tiffany Tellepsen.” The account is, on the present record, hypothesized but not proven to be operated by Lee Ann Penton-Walker. (Formal attribution will require a Texas Rule 202 deposition petition against Meta. That petition is being prepared.) What the account has done, on the documented public record, is this: it pre-announced the American Transparency Alliance’s records demand against Trustee Lain in the first person plural “we have some open records request coming for you” eighteen hours before the committee filed. It tags a specific Plum Grove civic figure publicly hashtagged “#MyMaria” by Penton-Walker’s own campaign page. It uses “Coffee City” as a comparator for Godley a deep cut reference to a Henderson County town that has specific institutional meaning to Penton-Walker’s family. It signs off with “Don’t be a Mockingbird!” a phrase the Penton-Walker family has used elsewhere in public posts. Two independent community commenters, in a public thread on Trustee Lain’s own Facebook page, addressed the account directly as “Lee Ann.” The account did not deny it.

On May 2, 2026, that account stated it knew where the compiler of this report lives and proposed a face-to-face meeting at a specifically-named restaurant near his residence.

That is when this file was written.

Why it matters where you live

I want to be careful here, because the easiest mistake a citizen advocate can make is to project his own county’s story onto somebody else’s. Your district is not Godley ISD. Your villains are not these villains. Your PO Box is not 997.

But I will tell you what the work has taught me, and what I think translates.

The architecture of small town capture is almost always the same. There is a developer with a multi decade portfolio and a quiet relationship with a school district’s bond program. There is a real estate license, or a contractor’s license, or a law license, attached to a politically active spouse. There is a political committee at the same address or an LLC, or a 501(c)(4), or a “civic association” that takes the public facing action the principals don’t want their fingerprints on. There is a teacher, or a coach, or a vendor, in the right classroom. There is a Facebook account, or a Twitter account, or an anonymous newsletter, that does the harassment so the named parties don’t have to. And there is a school board majority, or a city council majority, or a county commissioners’ court majority, that benefits from each of them in turn.

The architecture is not the same because the people are clever. It is the same because corruption, in the absence of sunlight, tends toward the same equilibrium everywhere.

The fix is also the same. Open records requests. Texas Ethics Commission filings. Texas Real Estate Commission licenses. County clerk recorded instruments. State comptroller corporate filings. Facebook screen captures, dated and preserved. You will not need a law degree. You will need a Google Drive folder, an email account, the ability to read a PDF carefully, and this is the part nobody tells you the willingness to spend your weekends and week days doing it for free for as long as it takes.

You will also need, and I cannot stress this enough, someone who loves you and is willing to sit with you while you do it. I do not know how I would have done this without mine.

The ask

If you have read this far, you are already one of us. Welcome.

The file is below. It runs fifty seven pages

Read it carefully. Share it with the people in your district who need to see how this kind of network is mapped. Then go look at your own PO Box. Your own real-estate licensee. Your own political action committee. Your own teacher in the wrong classroom. Your own Facebook account that posts a little too quickly with a little too much knowledge.

Follow your own PO Box. I’ll be here when you find what’s at the end of it.

Travis Spencer travis@realestatemindset.org May 2026

---

📄 Read the full investigative file:

Follow The Po Box V3 Public 57 Page

3.42MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

The unredacted prosecutorial version is held under separate cover. If you are a Texas reporter, a Texas legislator, or a Texas oversight official and you need the unredacted version, write to me.