Texas: Home to Bizarre True Crimes (And So Many Serial Killers)

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True crime writers hold the state of Texas in special regard, not so much for the volume, or even variety, of newsworthy crimes committed there, but for the often strange character of Texas lawbreakers, their quirks, their gruesome excesses and the sometimes striking originality of their offenses.

“Texas doesn’t have more crime than other places,” the late Mike Cochran, an Associated Press reporter and true crime author (Texas vs. Davis: The Only Complete Account of the Bizarre Thomas Cullen Davis Murder Case and others) in Ft. Worth, used to say. “We just do it better.”

Here’s a representative, though hardly exhaustive, look at what Cochran meant.

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In 1991, Wanda Webb Holloway thought she might advance her middle-school daughter’s chances of making the cheerleading team if Verna Heath, a rival contestant’s mother, could be eliminated. So, the Channelview (near Houston) housewife contacted a former brother-in-law for help, but instead found herself accused of soliciting a murder. Evidence at trial included a voice recording of Mrs. Holloway offering her own diamond earrings as compensation for the job.

The “Pom Pom Mom,” as Holloway was known in the press, pleaded no contest and accepted a plea deal in court. She spent just six months in prison, and also settled a civil suit, paying $70,000 to Verna Heath and her husband, $30,000 to their children and $50,000 for legal expenses.

Holloway was later portrayed in separate TV movies by the actresses Holly Hunter and Lesley Ann Warren.

A book about the case, Mother Love, Deadly Love, by Anne McDonald Maier, a lawyer and People correspondent, released in 1992.

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Considerably grittier than Wanda Holloway’s bizarre folly are the still-unsolved “Texarkana Moonlight Murders” of early 1946. There were four night-time gunshot attacks in all—three in remote lovers’ lanes and a fourth at a farmhouse. Five of the eight victims died from their bloody wounds.

The subject of a lurid cult film, “The Town that Dreaded Sundown,” and closely examined by writer James Presley in his book, The Phantom Killer, the mysterious slayings terrified the Texarkana citizenry and baffled detectives, including most prominently “Lone Wolf” Gonzaullus, a noted Texas Rangers investigator of the day.

Texarkanians carried around searing lifelong memories of The Phantom Killer’s spring of terror. Among them was another well-known Texan, Dr. James Grigson, a folksy forensic psychiatrist who was 14 at the time of the crimes. Grigson discussed the case often throughout his career.

A “courtroom terror of death-penalty foes,” as writer Ron Rosenbaum described him in a 1990 Vanity Fair profile, Grigson falsely assured jurors during the penalty phase of hundreds of Texas homicide prosecutions that he could tell without fail if a convicted killer might murder again should he somehow escape, or be released, thus threatening the community all over again.

As it turned out, in a great majority of cases in which Grigson’s opinion was consulted, his pronouncements from the witness stand persuaded jurors on his say-so that the best penalty for the defendant was the death penalty, and they would vote thumbs down accordingly.

“Dr. Death” as he was known throughout Texas, was reprimanded twice by the American Psychiatric Association and then expelled for unethical conduct.

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Henry Lee Lucas for a time back in the 1980s successfully promulgated a patent untruth, that he had murdered more than 600 victims, making Lucas the most prolific serial killer in history. Then Hugh Aynesworth and Jim Henderson, Dallas Times Herald reporters, revealed that the one-eyed drifter with an IQ south of 70 had fabricated the confessions, selling the Texas Rangers and an army of police investigators from around the country, and abroad, on a global murder spree that never occurred.

In one memorable exchange, Lucas told Aynesworth that he’d even killed victims in Japan. When the reporter asked Henry Lee how he got across the Pacific Ocean he said that he drove.

The Lucas hoax was among the more egregious, and embarrassing, fiascos in US law enforcement history. Any police detective should have known it was impossible that Lucas and his sometime partner, the adoring Ottis Toole, could have committed a fraction of the homicides to which they readily confessed. The Confession Killer, a mini-series documentary treatment on the case, has attracted large audiences on Netflix.

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Of course, Texas has produced some real serial killers, as well, including a bloodthirsty psychopath named Kenneth McDuff.

Born in 1946 in tiny Rosebud, Texas, about 60 miles south of Waco, McDuff was a self-described murderer and rapist by his teen years. At 18 he was convicted of multiple burglaries, but spent just a year in prison before being released.

In August of 1966, McDuff participated in the triple murder of three teenagers; two boys whom he shot in the trunk of their car, and a girl whom he repeatedly raped and then choked to death with a broom handle. Though sentenced to the electric chair as Dr. Grigson likely would have approved, McDuff nevertheless was released again in 1989.

“Twenty-one years after he should have died in the electric chair,” wrote the late Gary Cartwright in a Texas Monthly piece, “Kenneth McDuff was back on the streets, as cocky and mean and dangerous as ever.”

He was almost immediately sent back to prison for a parole violation, then released again in December of 1990. Cartwright wrote that McDuff committed at least six more abductions and torture-murders of women until he was arrested in May of 1992 for the final time in Kansas City, Missouri.

Gary M. Lavergne wrote Bad Boy: The True Story of Kenneth Allen McDuff, the Most Notorious Serial Killer in Texas History. McDuff was executed by lethal injection at Texas’s Huntsville prison in November of 1998 at age 52.

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As Betty Lou Beets (née Dunevant) told the story, she lived a very hard life. Betty was rendered deaf by the measles at age three. Her father—as well as other men, she said—sexually abused her. Her emotionally-unstable mother was institutionalized when Betty was 12, leaving her alone to raise two younger siblings.

Unsurprisingly, Betty sometimes could be disagreeable.

In 1953 at age 15, she married Robert Franklin Branson, the first of her five husbands. They had five children before Branson abandoned her in 1969.

She married Husband #2, Billy York Lane, in 1970. During one of their frequent marital set-to’s, Lane broke her nose, and she shot him. An attempted murder charge was dropped after Lane admitted threatening to kill Betty. They divorced in in 1972.

In 1978 Betty married Husband #3, Ronnie C. Threlkeld. A year later, she unsuccessfully attempted to run over Threlkeld, who, along Billy Lane later testified against her.

She shot her fourth husband, Doyle Wayne Baker, then buried him in a garage.  She also shot husband #5, Jimmy Don Beets. According to testimony from one of her sons, Betty salted Beets’ fishing boat with his heart medicine, leading police to three unsuccessful weeks of dragging a lake bottom for his body. In fact, she’d buried Jimmy Don in a defunct wishing well.

She pleaded not guilty at her 1985 trial for his murder, insisting that two of her kids committed the crime. The jury didn’t believe her, and sentenced Beets to death October 11 of that year.

The conviction was overturned on appeal, then reinstated three years later. After a decade of unsuccessful appeals, Beets was sentenced again to death in November of 1989. Her case then wound through the Federal courts for another ten years before she received a lethal injection at Huntsville in February of 2000.

Betty declined a final meal and did not make a confession or any other statement. After a tumultuous life and long years in prison, she had no fight left, and offered no resistance in the death chamber as she was being strapped on the gurney. “She really didn’t have no expression on her face at all,” a son by her first husband told CBS reporter Hattie Kauffman. Find more about Betty in Buried Memories: The Bloody Crimes and Execution of the Texas Black Widow by Irene Pence.

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Few of the folks in Carthage, Texas, believed that Bernhardt (“Bernie”) Tiede II was capable of murder, although just as few were apt to mourn the mortician’s late companion, Marjorie Nugent.

The unlikely twosome met in in March of 1990 in Carthage, a cozy burg of several thousand residents set deep in the East Texas Piney Woods, about 20 miles west of the Louisiana border. Tiede, at the time was the very popular assistant director of the Hawthorne Funeral Home in town.

“He was especially empathetic with the older ladies who had just lost their husbands,” Skip Hollandsworth wrote of Tiede in Texas Monthly. “He led them weeping to a sofa in the parlor, handed them handkerchiefs, quoted from comforting scripture, and stood close to them at the interment, always prepared to catch them in case they fainted.”

Richest among Carthage’s wealthy widows was Marjorie Nugent, whom Bernie came to know in the process of helping Marjorie bury her late husband, R.L. “Rod” Nugent, a retired oilman and major investor in the First National Bank of Carthage.

Bernie was then 31. Mrs. Nugent was 75.

Tiede had first come to Carthage 1985, and immediately plunged into the town’s daily life. He happily ran errands and performed others favors for the community’s considerable elderly population. He taught Sunday school and from time to time delivered the Sunday sermon at the Methodist Church. He also was a tenor soloist the church choir. “With that nice tenor voice of his,” one Carthage widow told Hollandsworth, “I just knew that Bernie could sing me right into heaven.”

Tiede enthusiastically supported the music and drama departments at local Panola College, sharing an encyclopedic knowledge of show tunes with the college kids he directed in several amateur theatricals.

“He brought a lot of compassion to Carthage,” said Paula Carter, a counselor at the high school. “He was very quick to shake hands and ask you how you were doing. He would drop everything to talk to you and see what he could do. He sewed curtains for people who needed them, and helped others with their tax returns.”

Bernie took a particular interest in Marjorie Nugent. Though opinion in town differed whether Marjorie was simply a bit crotchety – no surprise at her age – or a genuinely nasty old witch, consensus was that though a town native, Nugent did not mix well with fellow Carthaginians, or even with members of her own family, for that matter.

“According to most locals, “Hollandsworth wrote, “she acted as if she was too good for Carthage. It was said that when she made an appearance at the bank, she sat in a chair in the lobby and barely nodded at people.”

Bernie Tiede didn’t seem to mind. He later said he was at first deeply sympathetic toward the widow, stirred by her obvious loneliness as she stood by her husband’s casket during his funeral.

Others have suggested that Tiede also was interested in her $10 million bank account.

Whatever Bernie’s motives, he and Marjorie soon were seen together around town, often holding hands. They began traveling together; first around the U.S. and later to Europe, the Middle East and Asia. She revised her will and named Bernie her sole heir.

“The money was a lure, OK?” Bernie later told Marjorie’s nephew, Joe Rhodes, who wrote a first-person piece about her for The New York Times Magazine. “I was also afraid to leave her. She could be very vindictive. I’d seen that.”

Then one day in November, 1996, Marjorie Nugent vanished. At first, few people wondered about her whereabouts. In time, however, the inquiries grew more insistent until August of 1997 when the local authorities invited her son, Rod, from Amarillo to come search his mother’s property. That’s when Rod and his daughter found Marjorie where Bernie left her, wrapped in a sheet and stuffed in a large freezer, resting above a frozen flounder, and tucked beneath some Marie Callender chicken pot pies.

In order to safely transport Marjorie’s corpse by pick-up truck 160 miles to Dallas for autopsy, deputies loaded a generator into the vehicle’s bed to keep her frozen. Once she thawed, the medical examiner found four .22 caliber bullet holes in her back.

The case received considerable national attention. Carlton Stowers, a two-time Edgar Allan Poe Award winner from the Mystery Writers of America, covered Tiede’s story for People magazine. CBS devoted a 48 Hours feature segment on him. Skip Hollandsworth wrote a long piece for Texas Monthly, entitled “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas,” and also received a co-screenwriting credit for the 2011 dark comedic movie, Bernie, directed by Richard Linklater. The film starred Jack Black as a roly-poly small-town mortician fatally entangled with Marjorie Nugent, a rich and cranky, 81-year-old widow played by Shirley MacLaine.

Bernie was too popular locally for Danny Buck Davidson (played by Matthew McConaughey in the movie) to seat a jury, so the trial was moved two counties away where jurors convicted Bernie of first-degree murder, and sentenced to 50 years in prison. Then in May of 2014 Bernie was temporarily released on information developed by his lawyer, Jodi Cole, that he had been sexually abused as a child by an uncle. Appearing on Tiede’s behalf, forensic psychiatrist Richard Pesikoff endorsed a defense contention that Bernie had suffered a dissociative episode the day he killed Marjorie.

For the next two years, he was permitted to live in Richard Linklater’s garage apartment.  Then in a 2016 resentencing hearing he was given a prison term of 99 to life.

As of this writing he is eligible to be considered for parole in 2029.

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