by Gregg Olsen
Despite the ups and downs of the trial, the prosecution was building its case, adding witness after witness to the evidence laid before the jury. One tantalizing piece of the puzzle was Bill Hulin, a gas company comptroller, who testified during the fourth week of the trial. To a hushed courtroom, Hulin described driving through Polk County on his way home from work early in the morning of the previous April 13. The day after Bill Fleming disappeared, Hulin said he saw a dark-colored pickup with a white camper shell on the back near the site where Fleming’s body was later found. The description matched Hurley’s pickup truck.
That was interesting, but all Hulin could see of the driver was one arm and shoulder. He couldn’t even say if the driver was male or female.
AFTER MORE THAN A MONTH OF TESTIMONY, Hulin’s brief stint on the witness stand brought the prosecution to a close. Finally, the following morning, DeGuerin stood before the jury to give his opening statement and lay out the defense. From his seat, Hurley nodded confidently as DeGuerin said: “The evidence will show there was no love triangle. Her relationship with Hurley had been over for months before Laura Nugent fell in love with Coach Fleming.”
There would be some surprises in the statement - the first and most important, perhaps, was that DeGuerin planned to have his own client as his star witness. Hurley, the attorney said, would take the stand and answer questions, although not required to do so.
From his first witness, Dick DeGuerin attacked the prosecutors’ case, painting for the jury a very different picture of the events surrounding Bill Fleming’s disappearance and murder. Although the DPS expert had testified that there was so little blood in Bill’s body and on the undercarriage of Hurley’s truck it was impossible to type either one, an expert defense witness disagreed. He testified that he had done just that and concluded that the blood in the camper and on the car axle didn’t belong to Billy Mac Fleming. He also testified that he hadn’t found Fontenot’s saliva on the stamped envelopes that had contained the anonymous letters.
When it came to the rings Hurley had shown Laura on the day he asked her to marry him, Hurley’s sister testified that the set wasn’t his to give. The diamond engagement ring and wedding band, she said, were hers, and the only reason Hurley had them was because he’d offered to clean them for her.
What happened the afternoon Bill Fleming disappeared? The prosecutors had constructed a timeline of events based on a group of witnesses, many of whom worked at the junior school, who saw Bill and Hurley together in the parking lot about 3 p.m. They’d also produced the woman who’d testified that she’d seen the two men drive off together. But the defense had its own witnesses, and they disagreed.
“I saw Coach Fleming walking to his truck that afternoon,” a high- school student testified on the second day of the defense. At 3:15, the fifteen-year-old said he was buying a soft drink from a machine in front of the junior school gym when he looked up and saw the burly coach sauntering through the parking lot. Perhaps the most important part of the teenager’s testimony was that he said Bill was alone.
A 64-year-old retired Exxon employee told yet another version. Paul Gradney, who lived across the street from the junior school, said that he was in his garage that afternoon when Fontenot and Fleming walked out of the school at about 3 p.m. That testimony matched the accounts of the prosecution witnesses, but Gradney said that while Fleming first got into Fontenot’s truck, the principal simply drove the coach to the field house. At that point, as Hurley had told investigators, Gradney said Fleming got out of Fontenot’s truck and the principal drove away. Moments later, Gradney said, Fleming left in his own truck, only to return minutes later. Appearing flustered, Fleming then walked into the school building. “The door slammed on his back and I have never seen him since,” the man said.
Who was telling the truth? Could the 15-year-old or the retired Exxon employee have been recalling the wrong afternoon?
The teenager stood by his testimony, but on cross-examination, David Walker asked Gradney pointed questions, including if he was sure it was that Friday. At first the man said he was, but before long he capitulated, admitting that he wasn’t at all sure, and that it could have been another day, not the Friday Bill Fleming disappeared.
There were so many inconsistent statements about who saw what on the day in question. All of them couldn’t have been right.
Early in the trial, prosecutors had put before the jury an investigator who’d tried to reenact Hurley’s alibi, driving from the junior school, stopping at the post office and buying gas, then driving into Houston to both airports. That man had said it was impossible to leave at 2:50, as Hurley said he had, do all he’d said he’d done and arrive at Intercontinental in time to get the parking receipt at 5:09. But DeGuerin’s investigator said he’d driven the same route and arrived at Intercontinental Airport just after five p.m. without a problem. Yet what about that other prosecution witness, the man who’d testified he saw Hurley filling up his truck at four that afternoon?
“Could you have driven that route and arrived by five or so if you left Hull at four?” David Walker asked.
“No,” DeGuerin’s investigator said.
In the courthouse, the spectators huddled in the hallway talking about the evidence. One said she felt as if she were at a tennis match, watching a ball being pummeled back and forth between opponents. That view didn’t change when DeGuerin produced witnesses who contended that Hurley Fontenot’s health was too fragile for him to have carried out the murder. The picture prosecutors painted included Hurley shooting Bill Fleming twice through the head and then dumping his body out the back of his pickup into the field. But on the stand, two of Fontenot’s doctors said that was highly unlikely; due to his heart condition, it would have been difficult for Hurley to move Fleming’s dead body.
“I DID NOT KILL BILLY MAC FLEMING,” Hurley Fontenot said when he took the stand the final week of the trial. His voice resonating through the courtroom, the former school principal insisted that not only had he not killed Fleming, but “I have no idea who did.”
As he recounted the previous year’s turmoil at the junior school, Fontenot emphasized that he’d recommended Fleming for the junior school job, and that he saw the dead man as an outstanding coach, a good teacher. “He had a smile that would impress anybody.”
Hurley said, however, that he’d worried about Bill. When he’d first questioned the coach about the trouble in his marriage, asking if he was separated from Lynda, Hurley described cautioning Fleming, who’d lived in bigger cities and wasn’t familiar with small-town scandals: “in rural towns, rumors and gossip are more supreme than the Bible.”
When it came to Laura, he said he’d been drawn to her “caring” personality and that he still thought of her as “one of the finest, caring, loving persons that I ever came in contact with.” She hadn’t broken up his marriage, he said, and when it came to their affair, there’d never been a great passionate love between them.
It was at a Dairy Queen drinking malts that Laura first told him she was seriously dating someone else. Hurley described the event in light-hearted terms, saying the two of them indulged in a guessing game as he tried to come up with the name of the man Laura was interested in. Rather than being upset about Laura’s relationship with Fleming, Fontenot insisted he was merely concerned for her after her two failed marriages. Not only had Fontenot not been jealous or angry over Laura’s new love interest, Hurley said he’d encouraged it. “Bill thought he had finally found the person to make him happy for the rest of his life.”
Despite what so many others had seen, Hurley insisted, “There was never a harsh word between Bill and me.” Then, looking around the courtroom soulfully, his hands folded calmly on his lap, the former principal insisted, “I wanted the best for Laura. I wanted her to find somebody to be happy with.”
When it came to the evidence the prosecutors pointed at – from the unsigned letters to his fingerprint on the motel receipt – Hurley Fontenot was adamant that he w
asn’t responsible for any of it. Why would he? By then, Hurley said he’d lost interest in Laura and had begun spending time with his ex-wife. Then Hurley dropped another bombshell, saying that he and Geneva had quietly remarried three months after Fleming’s murder.
On the stand, Hurley attempted to explain away much of the prosecutors’ evidence, including saying that he now remembered driving over pine saplings when he went to check a fishing line at a nearby lake.
In the final analysis, however, it all came down to when he’d last seen Bill Fleming. When asked that specific question, Hurley replied: “The last time I saw Bill he was walking swiftly toward the field house.”
HANDING HURLEY A BEST WESTERN motel receipt, District Attorney Peter Speers asked if he’d ever stayed at the motel. “Yes, that’s my handwriting,” the ex-principal admitted. The receipt was dated March 15, 1985 - a month before Bill Fleming died and nearly a year after Hurley said he and Laura had ceased to be lovers - yet it was filled out as Mr. and Mrs. Hurley Fontenot.
“I stayed there with my wife, Geneva,” Hurley said.
“What’s typed here?” Speers asked, pointing to the word Laura. “Didn’t you come back and ask the desk clerk to type that, saying you’d just gotten married and wanted a souvenir?”
“No, I did not do that,” Fontenot answered, sounding annoyed.
“It’s true that the real reason your relationship ended was the problems you were having with sexual dysfunction which wounded your pride,” Speers charged. “And it really hurt when she took up with Fleming, a big, strapping, handsome young man, didn’t it?”
“No, it’s not true,” Fontenot insisted.
“And isn’t that why you began spreading those anonymous letters accusing her of being a whore?”
“No,” Fontenot again insisted, repeating that he’d had nothing to do with the letters. Yet he couldn’t explain how his fingerprints had gotten onto the receipt on which one of the letters was written. Perhaps, he conjectured, it had happened while he was being questioned, that one of the investigators had handed him the receipt in amongst other paperwork. Yet there was that motel clerk, the one who’d identified him in the courtroom as the man who’d picked up that very same receipt.
“I don’t know,” Fontenot said, shaking his head. “The first time I saw [the clerk] was when she walked through the courtroom door.”
As Speers attacked, Fontenot held his ground, insisting that he’d never owned a .22-caliber revolver, and that when he’d inquired about buying a silencer, it was because his neighbor’s chickens were digging up his snap beans. When it came to the human blood found in his truck, Fontenot said he’d hauled trash in the truck, trash that included his wife’s used sanitary napkins and blood he’d vomited from a stomach ulcer.
So much testimony had centered on whether or not Hurley Fontenot owned a gun. After Hurley left the stand, former Hull-Daisetta coach Ronnie Jefferson contradicted Hurley’s denials, testifying that he’d once asked Fontenot about his handgun. “Oh, you mean that .22?” Jefferson said Hurley replied. “I carry it all the time for protection. It’s dangerous at night. Sometimes I even carry it to the races with me.”
There was more. A friend was selling a gun, and Jefferson testified that when he mentioned it to Hurley, the principal said he wasn’t interested because he already had one. But Hurley was interested in buying a silencer. After inquiring into it with his friend, Jefferson said he told the principal that his friend couldn’t get him one because they were illegal. What Jefferson said Fontenot then replied was: “That’s all right. I already got one.”
Then the man that DeGuerin had been holding out as the most likely suspect walked in the door: Bill Fleming’s old partner in the carpet business. While DeGuerin had portrayed Fleming’s old friend as a big-time drug dealer who hadn’t been seen since his business burnt to the ground, the man said he wasn’t hiding, merely working as a carpet installer in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That was where he’d been on the day Bill Fleming disappeared. “The last time I saw Bill was in mid-1982, when we both worked at the carpet store I owned.”
CLOSING ARGUMENTS BEGAN the following Monday, six weeks after the trial began. Before the jury, Assistant District Attorney David Walker contended that there was no way Hurley Fontenot could be believed. “The critical time of his alibi, between 3 p.m. and 3:45, is unaccounted for,” he said. Why had Hurley made that trip to Houston, the one he claimed was to pick up his daughter? “Why the story about a telephone call from the airport that was never made?”
Walker speculated that Hurley had never gone to the first airport, Hobby, but only to Intercontinental, and only to pick up the parking receipt he’d given to police - evidence he thought would bolster his alibi. Did Hurley drive there with Bill Fleming’s body locked in the camper, and then, early the next morning, dump it in the field where it was found? There was that one witness who said he’d seen a truck matching the description of Hurley’s drive from the field in the early morning hours.
As Walker framed it, the jurors’ main job was to judge the truthfulness of the witnesses. Vanessa Fontenot, for instance. Had she told the truth? The three Austin businessmen who’d testified cast doubt on her account. And why had she changed her story? “What we have is a desperate attempt to form an alibi.”
In Walker’s account, Hurley had a bit of Scripture he often quoted: “Judge ye not and ye shall not be judged.” Pointing at Hurley, Walker argued: “I give you Hurley Fontenot, the judge, jury, and executioner of Billy Mac Fleming.”
MOMENTS LATER DICK DEGUERIN ADDRESSED the jury with all the resonance of a hellfire-and-brimstone Pentecostal preacher. “Not a single witness testified Hurley Fontenot killed Billy Mac Fleming. Not a single one testified about a single bad word between them,” he said. “The prosecution told you in the beginning they were going to prove how Coach Fleming hated Fontenot.” But Bill Fleming had used Hurley as a reference on a job application. If that were true, would he have done that?
Although prosecutors said Lynda Fleming had a solid alibi - she’d taught school that day and given another teacher a ride home - DeGuerin suggested jurors look at her for answers, since she collected more than $50,000 in life insurance. “Hurley Fontenot had no motive, nothing to gain by Bill Fleming’s death,” DeGuerin insisted. “And the prosecution’s star witness, Laura Nugent, tells you that. She tells you that their relationship was over by September 1984.”
DeGuerin’s closing ended with a plea: “It isn’t going to be easy. It’s going to be tough. If you think Fontenot is innocent, don’t surrender. Don’t give in. If you have a reasonable doubt, don’t compromise. He didn’t do it. The state hasn’t proved it. God bless you.”
As the final speaker, District Attorney Peter Speers appeared concerned that the panel of jurors would be unable to reach a decision. “Guilty or not, either way,” he said. “Go back there and sort out the facts. You determine what the truth is.”
THAT TUESDAY AFTERNOON AT 4:30, the jury began deliberations. The attorneys splintered off to work on other cases, and Hurley Fontenot held court with the legion of reporters seated in the front two rows in the courtroom. He laughed and cajoled in his most charming manner, comparing the trial to a Barnum & Bailey circus and stating that the first thing he was going to do when it was over was “take a long nap.”
No decision came in that day, or the following morning, but eleven-and-a-half hours after they began deliberating, the jury returned. As the judge ordered, Dick DeGuerin stood next to his client. It was then that the foreman of the jury read the decision: “Not guilty.”
A cry went up in the courtroom, and Hurley sat back down, as if weak-kneed from the tension. In the gallery, Lynda Fleming threw her hands over her face and sobbed.
Afterward, Houston Chronicle reporter Cindy Horswell tracked down jurors, who said they’d voted seven times before coming to a unanimous decision. “Personally I feel there’s a very strong possibility Mr. Fontenot might have done it,” the jury’s foreman told her. “
But there was doubt. The strongest doubt was Fontenot’s poor health. I don’t think he could have done it by himself…we wish we’d had some direct evidence something to go on. All these variables made it like an Agatha Christie whodunit.”
Considering that, the man said, “I know in my heart, if the man is completely guilty, there will be a judgment on him. I believe in Christ’s judgment.”
Another juror would later say that there were only a couple of jurors who believed Hurley might actually have been innocent, but none of them could get beyond a reasonable doubt. “My personal opinion? Yes, I think he did it,” the man said.
Looking back on the case, Speers pointed to the lack of “a smoking gun,” and said the case was circumstantial and difficult to prove.
On his way out of the courtroom, Bill Fleming’s father said, “I think the man got away with murder, but there’s nothing we can do.” Fleming’s mother walked up to Fontenot and tugged on his shoulder. The color drained from his face as she said, “I want you to know something. You did kill my son. I don’t doubt it for a solitary moment!”
DeGuerin motioned him on, and Hurley walked away.
On the courthouse steps, flanked by his brother and DeGuerin, Hurley told the gaggle of reporters: “I feel good. Real good. I’ve always been innocent, and my innocence was proved by the jury system here.”
Behind him stood the identical twins, Hurley’s one-time classmates, on this day dressed in matching yellow outfits. They waved plastic American flags over Hurley’s head as he concluded: “I’ve always been proud to be an American. But I’ve never been prouder than I am at this moment.”