Buried Memories (32 page)

“Please don’t take it that I’m scoldin’ you for your decision on Friday. You can be back out here in forty-five minutes and rectify a mistake. Come back here and answer both of these questions ‘no,’ and let’s stop this thing.”

Bandy had one last chance in his rebuttal. He said, “The fact that it took you six and a half hours to arrive at the verdict speaks well for your sincerity. The issue of guilt of capital murder has been finally resolved. That’s over with, so don’t get that trip put on you. The answer to both of these issues must be ‘yes,’ unanimously. It’s your case.”

The jury came back in forty-five minutes, but not with the answers Andrews had requested. The judge read the jury’s answer of “yes” to both questions as Betty stood listening; then he told her she could sit.

“The jury having found you guilty of capital murder in the punishment phase,” Holland said, “the punishment is hereby assessed as death.”

The reality of the decision finally struck Betty. “No,” she screamed, “I didn’t do it.” She buried her face in her hands as E. Ray patted her back, then handed her a Kleenex.

Judge Holland had paused at her brief outburst, then continued. “You are remanded to the sheriff of this county to await the decision of the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals on the appeal of your case.”

TWENTY-NINE

The reality of prison aged Betty Beets five years in the three months she’d been incarcerated. The gray hair around her face and her puffy eyes were easily noticed when she came back in January of 1986 to start appealing her murder conviction.

Three guards accompanied her from the women’s prison, housed in the Mountain View Building, 150 miles away in Gatesville, Texas. She shared death row with three other inmates. One was Karla Faye Tucker, a sweet, pretty, and now religious woman. Tucker had been found guilty of hacking two people to death with a pickax during a robbery. The women made up a little more than one percent of the death row population.

Gatesville housed the women’s death row in a redbrick building surrounded by a twelve-foot-tall chain-link fence topped with swirls of razor wire. Inside were six ivory painted cells, five by eight feet, with a red tile floor. In the dayroom, afghans were draped over benches, and books sat neatly stacked in bookcases, including one entitled
Why Do Women Kill?

Each woman had her separate cell with a stainless-steel commode and mirror, but the four shared a shower and the dayroom. In the dayroom, Betty and the others painted blue eyes and red lips on faces of dolls, and sewed intricate dresses for them. Betty saw it as a way to make time go faster. A
Dallas Morning News
reporter described the process as “Dolls that are brought to life by women waiting for death.”

The dolls sold for twenty-five dollars, but the inmates profited nothing from their efforts, save for the camaraderie of working together, as the revenue went directly to the Texas Department of Corrections.

A fenced recreation yard adjoined Betty’s building. The soil of the yard had once held grass, but now was bare from the pacing of women’s feet as they sweated out their appeals or waited for their execution dates to be announced.

Betty Beets needed a lawyer. She swore before Judge Holland that she had no money for an attorney. She didn’t have money to pay an attorney at her murder trial and that was why the unusual compensation of her story rights went to E. Ray Andrews.

E. Ray now stood beside her. He still hadn’t collected a penny on Betty’s story, but he, along with Gil Hargrave, had offered to represent Betty at her appeal on a contingency basis. If her case was overturned, she’d still be eligible to receive the insurance and pension. If she lost, the county would pay the two defense attorneys. With the agreement that they wouldn’t be paid until the aftermath of the appeal, Judge Holland appointed Andrews and Hargrave to represent her again.

Michael O’Brien felt confident about the outcome of Betty’s appeal. He had read numerous criminal cases before writing her indictment based on the 1974 “Candy Man” case in Houston. He had copied that case’s verbiage for Beets’s indictment. The Candy Man case had traveled smoothly through every appellate court in the land, including the U.S. Supreme Court, and every time, the courts rejected the appeal. O’Brien had nothing to worry about, especially since the Candy-Man murderer, Ronald Mark O’Bryan, had already been executed before Betty’s trial began.

On November 12, 1987, Michael O’Brien left the front entrance of the District Attorney’s Office. One of the reporters, who routinely hung around the building, approached him as he walked down the steps.

“Mr. O’Brien, what’s your opinion of the Criminal Appeals Court’s decision to reverse Mrs. Beets’s verdict?”

O’Brien thought the man was joking. “What’s this all about?” he asked.

That’s how Athenians learned of the appeals decision, and the entire community was thunderstruck. The Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas in Austin had rejected the trial court’s findings that Betty Beets had killed for remuneration. On a vote of six to three, Judge Teague wrote the majority opinion for the appellate justices who took away Betty’s death penalty.

The appellate court’s thinking skirted the issue of killing for an expected future gain. They decided that killing for remuneration only applied to hired killers, and an individual couldn’t hire himself to kill someone. The judges agreed with Betty that the prosecution offered no evidence to show that she had entered into an agreement to be paid for murdering Jimmy Don Beets. That required a third person.

DA Billy Bandy’s overall reaction at first was disbelief. Then after thinking it over, he became madder than hell. A furious Billy Bandy condemned the court’s ruling, and demanded a rehearing.

The grumbling started anew in Henderson County. Many people thought Betty didn’t flee when she knew of her impending arrest because she had successfully slid through Wayne Barker’s killing without a ripple. Her cockiness tripped her when the court found her guilty of murdering Jimmy Don Beets. Now again she felt untouchable with the appeals court canceling her execution.

The highly controversial and unpopular appeals decision received heated criticism from newspapers throughout the state. In a state where judges have to stand for reelection, they’re forced to listen to the electorate. A Houston newspaper dug into the case and learned that none other than Judge Teague, an unpopular judge with the newspaper, had been the defense attorney for Ronald O’Bryan, the “Candy Man.”

Giddy reporters pointed out that Teague never supported the death penalty, regardless of the circumstances. His previous client, O’Bryan, had no insurance on himself or his wife, but took out $100,000 policies on each of his small children before poisoning them. Obviously, the judge wanted to reverse the case any way he could so Betty could get off with her life.

Ten months later, in September of 1988, in a rare and precedent-setting move, and after many negative editorials and newspaper articles, the appeals court reversed itself.

Judge W. C. Davis said in the majority opinion, “We have examined this issue and now agree that the remuneration statute includes the killing of a person in order to receive a benefit like an insurance settlement on the life of a deceased victim.”

Following along with her one-appeal-a-year schedule, Betty Beets’s lawyers ambitiously took her case to the U.S. Supreme Court. The court refused to hear it, thus letting the reversal decision of the appeals court stand. Betty could now be executed. She’d be the first woman in Texas since the Civil War to die for her crime.

In 1989, as Betty waited for her execution date to be set, she began giving interviews to garner sympathy for her plight. Once described by newspapers as “sullen and haggard” at her arrest, now when she talked with the press, they said she had a softer look. Newspapers portrayed her gray hair as neatly coifed, and mentioned her “pink nail polish that matched her dark pink lip gloss.” The papers made her seem more human, almost playful, by referring to the Garfield-the-cat scarf she wore around her neck with her prison whites.

Soon E. Ray Andrews became the target of Betty Beets’s bitter attacks. “He gave me poor representation,” she’d say to anyone who would listen. “He failed to tell me that the district attorney offered a life sentence in exchange for a plea of guilty.”

A quick check with the court showed no such offer had been made.

But Betty continued. “E. Ray persuaded me to sign over the book and movie rights to my life, and wants to profit from my execution.”

Asked by the
Dallas Morning News
to respond to Betty’s tirade, E. Ray said, “I went overboard to help this lady. But if I were on death row, I might be grabbing at anything I could too.” In August of 1989, the court granted E. Ray’s motion to withdraw as Beets’s attorney.

Betty’s life continued to change. She found religion. “I’ve got Christ in my life,” she told reporters. “Every night before I go to bed, I hold hands with my cellmates and pray; then we give each other a hug.”

Two years after entering prison, she took classes and received her general equivalency diploma. Then she began correspondence courses in business and accounting.

After moving away from E. Ray’s representation, Beets relied on a legal resource center from the University of Texas School of Law.

A dark hammer fell on Betty’s life in August of 1989 when guards whisked her into Athens to appear again before Judge Holland. He announced that he had set November 8, 1989, for her execution date.

As she stood before his bench, Holland said, “You are to be taken to a room at some hour before sunrise as provided by law to be injected with a lethal substance.”

Handcuffed and pale, Betty quietly turned to her jailers to be taken back to Gatesville.

Her daughter Faye Lane said, “I feel sick. It seems like things are speeding up and it may happen sooner than we thought.”

Frantic to stop her execution, Betty Beets agreed with her new attorney, Eden Harrington, when she suggested filing a writ of habeas corpus to postpone the execution date. This step would also elevate her case to the federal level. Betty resurrected the argument that the prosecution had made a deal with her son Robby, and daughter Shirley, in exchange for their testimony against her.

DA Bill Bandy vehemently denied Betty’s claim, but Ms. Harrington said she would file the writ, ordering that the person placed in custody be brought before the court. The court had the burden of proving why Betty Beets was being imprisoned. Beets insisted that she had a witness who overheard the deal being made with her children.

Judge Holland received a menu of complaints from Harrington: Betty’s children had testified only to obtain their release, Betty was mentally incompetent to stand trial at the time of her conviction, the judge had erred in his instructions to the jury, and he refused to grant a trial delay as requested by the defense.

Judge Holland had no recourse but to postpone Betty’s death sentence and grant her attorney until January 1990, to file papers on the writ of habeas corpus.

The merry-go-round continued to twirl with the time-buying efforts of the convicted killer and her attorney. Their latest plan bought them almost a year, but on December 6, 1990, the U.S. Supreme Court again refused to hear Betty’s case. That decision made Betty eligible for a new death sentence.

Beets and her attorney had to come up with a whole new scenario.

A psychologist came in from Denver to perform elaborate tests on Betty Beets in January 1991, at the request of her appellate attorneys.

Betty received the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory—a widely used, objective personality test, and the Weschler Adult Intelligence Scale. The psychologists searched back and found Betty’s school and divorce records, and also her mother’s mental records. Then they talked with people who knew Betty at different points in her life.