by John Bloom
One reason Don was doing so well was that his partner, Jim Mattox, had been elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1972, one of many liberals who swept in on a reform ticket after a particularly nasty state banking scandal. Ever since then Crowder & Mattox had had a steady flow of unsolicited casework. As time went on Mattox would handle much less, and Don much more of the load, especially after Mattox, making a name for himself as a renegade liberal, ran successfully for a vacant Congressional seat in 1976. But no matter how hard he tried, and how many cases he won, Don’s reputation never rose much above the status of a workmanlike, if very successful, lawyer for the injured and abused. As Mattox continued to rise in the political world, bucking an archconservative city, Don wondered whether he shouldn’t have chosen politics himself. In 1977, when Congress created several new federal judgeships in Texas, Don was even so bold as to nominate himself for one of them, hoping that Mattox’s friendship with Senator Lloyd Bentsen would work to his advantage. Even though he enclosed all his legal articles and summaries of the only two federal lawsuits he’d ever tried, Don’s application was politely denied.
Don eventually contented himself with an active life in the local civic affairs of Lucas. He was elected to the Lovejoy Board of Trustees (governing body for the little red schoolhouse on Farm-to-Market 1378), served as City Attorney for the town of Allen, and became active in the Methodist Church of Lucas around the time Jackie Ponder arrived. He coached numerous children’s sports teams. He also founded, wrote, edited, and distributed a mimeographed newspaper, first of its kind, called the Lucas Looking Glass. It appeared bimonthly, or whenever Don got around to having his secretary type it up, and was mostly a potpourri of Don’s own opinions. His column, “Ruminations,” ranged from an essay on Eric Hoffer, the longshoreman/philosopher, entitled “A Country of Cowards?” to a grisly description of death in the electric chair (to make a political point) to a long, atrociously-metered Christmas poem, to a lament about how public schools don’t offer good organized sports anymore.
Despite his romantic vision of small-town life, Don never made any close friends in the country. He knew everybody, but nobody really knew him. He was not the sort of person to go glad-handing through the PTA meetings, or making social calls for the sake of conversation, and he had an abrupt way of speaking that some people mistook for rudeness. When Don presided over a meeting, he got through the agenda with a minimum of ceremony. Sometimes he would show up in his jogging togs, run hastily through the business at hand, and be off in a flash to get home in time to watch that night’s game on television. One thing Don did relish, though, was a good debate, and that made for a lot of long nights spent with the church Pastor/Parish committee after the arrival of Ron Adams. As chairman of the committee, Don felt an obligation to back Ron until someone could prove the man wasn’t doing his job. One of the committee members didn’t agree, though; her name was Candy Montgomery. He and Candy would have frequent arguments, sometimes verging on shouting matches, over “the Ron problem.” Don came to like Candy as an adversary. He liked her energy and her intelligence, but mostly he liked her bluntness; she was almost as direct as he was. After a few months Don came to count Candy among his favorite people in the church, and probably the only real friend he had.
Though Don rarely accepted social invitations, he did agree on one occasion to go with the Montgomerys and a few other couples to a famous country-western dance hall in Plano called the Trail Dust Steakhouse. That’s when he discovered the other side of Candy Montgomery. It was after they’d all had dinner and a few drinks. The women wanted to dance, and the men obliged. But Candy didn’t dance like the others: she had moves he hadn’t seen since college days, when they called it “getting down and dirty.” Don was fascinated. “When was the last time you saw someone shimmy?” Don asked his wife. The longer the evening went on, the wilder Candy got, until at one point she was dragging people onto the dance floor and draping her arms around them. Don danced with her once and, as he later told a friend, “she practically put her body right through me.” Don kept looking over at the table to see what Pat’s reaction would be, but Pat had no reaction. He seemed to look at the whole scene with a benign lack of interest. One thing Don was beginning to realize about Candy; there was a lot more to her than what he saw on Sunday morning.
It was very late on the evening of June 18 when Don finally found a few minutes when he could be alone. He had gone to a baseball game after talking to Candy and Pat, but he hadn’t been able to concentrate. All he could think of was the strange story Candy had told him. Either she was concealing something or the police were using her to get at someone else. Don was no criminal law expert, but he knew Candy Montgomery, and he knew she was incapable of violence. Normally Don left his legal work at the office, but he had never even been close to a murder case before, and suddenly the hottest one in Texas had been dumped in his lap. Carol went to bed, but Don didn’t think he could sleep. He went into his study instead, took out a yellow legal pad, and decided to make a list of reasons Candy could not have committed such a crime. First on the list was “size.” Don didn’t know Betty Gore’s exact weight, but he knew she was a big woman. She had never lost the weight from her last pregnancy. Besides, she was big-boned, with bulky arms and a stocky build, while Candy had more regular features. Don estimated Betty was at least thirty pounds heavier than Candy, so how could Candy have used such a large, awkward weapon as an ax? Wouldn’t a gun make more sense? Even a knife would have been easier to handle. Don moved on to reason number two: “clothing.” Candy had worn the same clothing back to church after going to the Gore home; she couldn’t have left such a grisly corpse without getting blood on herself. Finally, Don wrote “demeanor.” If Candy had really done this, she would have been a basket case. Instead, she was calm and collected; she was even able to joke about it.
Don wouldn’t know until later that Candy was anything but calm and collected that night as she placed the phone calls he had instructed her to make.
“Betty,” she said, her voice trembling slightly, “the police have been asking me questions about Betty Gore’s death because I was there that morning. And to help them I need to know whether you remember what I was wearing at church that morning.”
Betty Huffhines thought for a moment. “No, I can’t recall it.”
Candy had a sinking feeling at the tone of Betty’s voice. What did Betty think of such a strange question? This was going to be awful.
“Oh well,” she said, “I just hope someone remembers.”
“Sorry I couldn’t help,” said Betty.
Candy tried to collect her thoughts again. Tears were forming at the corners of her eyes. She brushed them away, steeled herself, and called Barbara Green, Suzan Wright, Marie Childs, and Connie Holmes in quick succession. Marie and Barbara remembered that she’d been wearing blue jeans and a maroon blouse. Connie recalled the blue tennis shoes. When she was finished, Candy breathed a sigh of relief. As far as the women of the church were concerned, she could have worn blue tennis shoes that morning. Everything was all right.
Armed with the results of her informal poll, Candy drove to Dallas the next morning so she could give Don a more complete and formal itinerary. Pat came along, too, and immediately went into a meeting with Rob Udashen, Don’s young legal associate. Rob told him that, if it turned out that Candy needed full-time legal defense, he would help find a first-rate criminal attorney to take the case. In the meantime, he needed money to cover the hours it was going to take to check out Candy’s story and prevent the police from bothering her. Pat wrote out another check, for $2,000, which was all he had in the Texas Instruments Credit Union.
Rob Udashen was twenty-seven years old and the exact opposite of Don Crowder in almost every respect. He was a brilliant student from the University of Texas, where he had graduated Phi Beta Kappa and then been honored as the most outstanding law student in the field of criminal law. He had spent a year after graduation working as a lawyer for p
rison inmates, then moved to Dallas, made the rounds, and ended up filling the criminal position at Don’s firm now that Congressman Mattox was away in Washington all the time. As much as Don gloried in his own pugnacious, anti-intellectual approach to the law, he had a secret respect for men like Rob. Rob didn’t look like a criminal lawyer at all. He was ascetic and bookish in appearance, reserved and scholarly in manner. Don had a hard time imagining Rob coaxing tears from a jury with the eloquence of his summations. But Rob’s knowledge of the law was encyclopedic. That’s why, on the morning Candy came in to give her statement, Rob was asked to do the interview.
Also sitting in was Rob’s clerk, Elaine Carpenter, who had recently graduated from the SMU Law School at the age of thirty-four. For the two young lawyers, it was more excitement than they’d had in all their previous careers. As soon as Candy walked into the office, looking pleasant and respectable and entirely inoffensive, they sensed the uniqueness of the case. Elaine immediately liked her and felt a certain illogical sympathy for her predicament. Perhaps it was because they were both about the same age, from similar middle-class backgrounds. They even looked alike, with the same Anne Murray-style frizzed hair. How could this little woman be accused of an ax murder, of all things?
Candy seemed to feel at home right away. The first thing they asked about was her relationship with Allan. They asked her to go over her itinerary on the thirteenth one more time, and then they got her to remember, as best she could, everything the police had asked her. As the interview continued, Rob started to get a strange feeling about Candy’s responses. It was becoming clear that this was much more serious than he had thought at first.
“Are you telling me,” he said, “that the police said they can match your fingerprints and your shoeprints?”
“Yes, and they took my shoes to check them out.”
“And they actually accused you of murder?”
“Yes, they say I’m a suspect. They weren’t very nice about it either.”
Rob couldn’t fathom what was going on. Candy seemed so cool, so detached. If they had just questioned her, that was one thing. But if they had accused her, they were not just guessing. Why wasn’t she angry, or panicky, or something? How could she sit there and just calmly answer their questions?
When they had finished the interview, Rob gave Candy a pen and paper and asked her to write down everything she had done on the thirteenth, in as much detail as she could remember. While she was working, he and Elaine conferred in another room.
“What do you think?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Elaine said. “I get the feeling she might be covering for someone. Maybe she didn’t do it, but she knows who did do it. Maybe Allan.”
Rob and Elaine had both taken extensive notes during the interview. On one page Elaine had written, “Big void in time at time of murder for client.” Throughout the day Candy had been around people who could identify her—at church, at department stores, at gas stations. But at the time that Betty apparently died, Candy could only say that she had driven to the parking lot of a Target store in Plano, where nobody had seen her, and then to the church. No witnesses.
After Candy had finished filling out forms and completing her written itinerary, Rob sent her home with stern instructions not to talk to the police or reporters.
“Reporters?” she said, a trace of desperation in her voice.
“We don’t know who the police might be talking to. Just don’t talk to anyone without talking to me first.”
Don had spent the morning in court, so he didn’t arrive at the office until midafternoon.
“A DPS agent named Murphy has been calling me all day,” said Rob, “trying to bully us into letting them put Candy on the lie box. So I’ve arranged for our own polygraph tomorrow afternoon.”
“What do you think of her story?”
“We think she’s covering up,” Rob told him. “There’s just something missing. Her alibi makes sense, except for that hour or so when she left the church.”
“Debby!” Don bellowed, his customary way of getting his secretary’s attention. “Get me Candy Montgomery on the phone.”
But Candy called first.
“Don, I don’t know what to do. I’m over at a friend’s house. A reporter came to the house. I’m scared to death.”
“Who came to the house?”
“A reporter from the Times Herald. Sherry told him I wasn’t there, and he went away. But now I’m about to go to pieces.”
So the police had talked to the media.
“Candy, this thing might get rougher before it gets better. Why don’t you and Pat and the kids leave the house for a few days. Is there somewhere you could go?”
“We could probably stay with the Clecklers.”
“See if you can, then, and call me back and let me know where I can reach you.”
Pat left work as soon as Candy called to tell him the news. They picked up the kids from school, packed some luggage, and drove over to the Clecklers, about a half-mile away in a mostly undeveloped area still used for farmland. The kids were thrilled, but Pat was growing more worried and perplexed by the minute. He couldn’t figure out what was happening, and it was all happening so fast.
That night Don called the Cleckler house.
“I want to prepare you for dealing with the media,” he said, “and I think you and I need to meet alone, face to face, about this.”
“Okay,” she said.
“We might as well do it at my house.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“I’m on my way.”
When Candy arrived in Lucas, Don ushered her into the “family room,” a spacious area filled with couches and stuffed chairs and lined with bookshelves.
“Personally, Candy,” he began, “I don’t think you did this and I think the police are just harassing you for some reason. I talked to all the officials involved, and I think the chances are good that they won’t even have enough evidence for an indictment. But listen to me, Candy. I’m your lawyer, and there are three people in the world you should never lie to—your preacher, your doctor, and your lawyer. So don’t lie to me, Candy. I don’t think you did it, but I think you know who did do it. I think you’re covering up something. Who are you covering for?”
“No one.”
“Did Allan do it?”
Candy didn’t answer. It was the first time she’d thought of Allan as a suspect.
“Did you walk in on something and get scared?”
“Allan didn’t do it.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I did it.”
“What?”
“I did it.”
“I don’t believe you.”
A half hour later, Candy emerged from the family room, red-eyed and ashen-faced.
“What about Pat?” Don asked. “Have you told Pat?”
“No, of course not.”
“What would he do if you told him?”
Candy thought for a moment. “He’s a very honest person. He might tell the police for my own good.”
“Then definitely do not tell Pat. Go home and don’t talk to nobody, no way.”
As soon as Candy left, Don called Rob Udashen. Despite the late hour, Don sounded excited and hyperactive.
“Rob, you aren’t going to believe this, but what we’ve got is a self-defense case.”
Rob didn’t believe it.
A half hour after that, Candy lay next to Pat on the strange guest-room bed at the Clecklers. Pat had gotten paranoid and worried when Candy had stayed away so long, but she had calmed his fears and told him that she would clear up everything the next day with a polygraph examination.
Pat fell asleep first, but after a few minutes he woke up to the sound of Candy’s low moaning and inarticulate sounds. In her dream, Candy is driving the station wagon through the countryside. Suddenly she notices that Betty Gore is in the passenger seat. Betty reaches over and grabs the steering wheel, not trying to c
ontrol the car but to run it directly into the ditch. The two women struggle for the wheel.…
Candy woke with a start, one second before the crash. Pat put his arms around her, and she sobbed quietly.
17 Suspicions
There were no empty pews in the United Methodist Church of Norwich, Kansas, on the morning they buried Betty Gore. The 250 mourners represented better than half the population of the town, and most of them had known Betty all her life. Allan Gore sat with his parents on the front row, feeling vaguely uncomfortable, scarcely aware of his surroundings. The sanctuary was stifling with heat. “Words are so empty,” he heard the minister say. Just ahead of him lay the casket. It was closed, of course. The funeral home had said it was impossible to have an open one.
“Betty Gore!” he heard the young minister say. “Such a person! Talk to Bob and Elsie Sheetz. They’ll tell you how hard a worker she was when she worked harvest for them …”
Allan was confused. He had a gnawing feeling in the pit of his stomach, and yet his face remained dry. He couldn’t cry.
“I wish we could gather all the children who have had Betty as a teacher.… You know, I think they liked her!”
Sweat started to form on Allan’s forehead and at the base of his neck.
“… faithful, loving wife, a good mother, and a good daughter … Thank God for the hope and promise of eternal life …”
The funeral meditation had been brief. The pastor led a prayer, and then a woman friend of the family began singing a hymn called “My Friend and I.” Allan watched as six men approached the casket and lifted it slowly from its resting place. He didn’t recognize any of them. They were “town boys,” the kids who had attended Norwich High with Betty, played on the football team, accompanied her to the summer movies and the swimming hole and asked her to ride around in their cars. At the front of the casket was Jimmy Sheetz, the boy who had once seemed the closest to true love Betty would ever come (“He’s so wonderful” she had written in her diary). Behind him was his brother John Sheetz, and behind the Sheetz boys was Jon Tilson, her other great adolescent love (“I think he likes me best,” she had written as early as the eighth grade). On the other side of the casket stood John Thornbro, a three-sport athlete who had dated Betty once or twice (“We played with Wee Jee boards and danced & ate & ate & ate. XX.”), and behind him were Danny Liddeke, her class president, and Brent Burford, another star athlete (“Today we practiced for graduation. I get to walk with Brent. It’s too good to be true!”). All of them had known Betty well, and yet none of them had seen her for the past twelve years. They had all assumed she was living a wonderful life in Dallas.