Buried Memories (34 page)

When former DA investigator Michael O’Brien was asked about Betty’s hearing, he said, “She didn’t have hearing aids in when I told her I had a search warrant to go out to her yard and dig up bodies. She had no trouble hearing that.”

Her stories had a religious tone and she professed that God worked a miracle for the nonbelievers, saying, “I am God’s miracle.” Her Internet web page displayed her address where fans could write. And write they did. Internet viewers gushed: “We’re praying for you, Betty. You’re a wonderful person. Your strength has changed my life.”

Her hardworking attorney, Joe Margulies, filed petitions on February 5 with both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals for a restraining order to prevent the execution.

The author of
Dead Man Walking,
Pulitzer Prize–winner Sister Helen Prejean, visited Betty Beets on death row for two hours and found her very sincere. Then the nun toured the country making speeches on Beets’s behalf, urging people to write Texas Governor George W. Bush and ask him to stay her execution. Jesse Jackson wrote the governor, asking him to demonstrate his “passionate conservatism” by staying Betty’s execution.

A week before her scheduled injection,
Good Morning America
ran footage of their death-row interview with a sad-looking Betty Beets peering through her glass-enclosed visitor’s booth. Their reporters caught Governor Bush that day as he campaigned for the Republican presidential nomination and asked him if he intended to give the great grandmother a thirty-day stay. However, the governor bought into Betty’s more recent testimony that all of her actions stemmed from a lifetime of abuse, and called violence in the home “a terrible scourge” and insisted the courts deal more sternly with offenders.

A taped video of Betty’s oldest daughter, Faye Lane, appeared almost hourly on television channels. She held a photograph of her mother with a bruised jaw and a black eye. The picture depicted a younger Betty, most likely from the 1970s when she had been married to Billy Lane. The family gave no proof that any abuse occurred at the hands of Robert Branson, Wayne Barker, or Jimmy Don Beets.

Burden of Proof
with Greta Vansustern, picked the minds of Betty Beets’s two appeal attorneys, in addition to a criminal defense lawyer. The one-sided argument overlooked the evidence. Beets’s attorney stated that her purchasing the $10,000 J. C. Penney life insurance policy on Jimmy Don’s life shouldn’t have raised eyebrows, since she also bought one for herself, naming Jimmy Don as the beneficiary. Had he checked more thoroughly, he would have learned that Betty had bought a $5,000 policy for herself, but named her son Bobby as beneficiary.

Geraldo Rivera, on his television show
Rivera Live
, had one of the more balanced shows. He involved Attorney Marcia Clark of O. J. Simpson fame. Ms. Clark had taken the time to learn the facts of Beets’s case. However, that was somewhat negated when she was caught on camera sticking out her tongue at another panelist, Lenore Walker, Ph.D., who had testified for O. J. at his trial. The architect of the “Battered Wife Syndrome,” Dr. Walker purported that the malady causes abused women to become helpless to act.

CNN carried nightly countdowns, while every newspaper in the country printed a photo of a sobbing Betty Beets. The
New York Times
devoted a half page of picture and newsprint to her.

The day before Betty Beets’s execution, reporters found Governor Bush on the campaign trail in California.

“I’ll be back in Austin tomorrow to study the Beets’s case with my staff,” the governor told reporters.

“Here’s what I’ll be looking at,” Bush said. “Is she guilty of the crime? Did the jury know all the circumstances? Did the appeals court have all the circumstances related to her case?”

The governor received over five hundred letters from anti-death-penalty protesters to grant Betty’s stay, and only a handful asking for her execution, mostly from the families of the victims. He vowed to wait until the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles met to decide Betty’s fate.

On the day of her execution, Texas radio stations broadcast a minute-by-minute countdown to Beets’s six
P.M.
date with death. Crowds began gathering outside the Walls Unit in Huntsville, an ancient three-story building on Twelfth Street and Avenue One. A huge clock, made of black metal numbers and hands, was bolted to the outside of the redbrick building and counted the last minutes of Betty’s life.

Every major news media in the country crammed their disc-crowned vans into the parking lot. Betty had been transferred that morning from Gatesville to Huntsville, and spent the afternoon visiting with family and friends. Prison chaplain Gary Mayfield dropped by to pray with her.

The anti-death-penalty advocates arrived with placards showing the abused-Betty photo Faye Lane had exhibited on television.

Some of the posters were printed with a Texas Council on Family Violence quote: “Beets’ life is a chronicle of virtually uninterrupted physical, sexual and emotional abuse. She was severely abused as a child and was battered by multiple husbands. Beets suffers from severe learning disabilities and a hearing impairment she has had since early childhood. She also suffers from organic brain damage caused by repeated blows at the hands of abusive men.”

The protesters rallied around the Battered Wife Syndrome, to the point of excusing murder. Their posters read:
DON’T KILL BATTERED WOMEN,
and
WHAT MY HUSBANDS STARTED, TEXAS WILL FINISH.

The media strolled through the crowd with microphones on extended poles. People visiting in small groups would suddenly look up to see a microphone dangling inches over their heads, not realizing their conversations were subjected to technical eavesdropping.

One woman, garbed in a long black dress, black hat, and wearing white makeup with white lipstick, wore a sign around her neck depicting a thorn-crowned, bleeding Jesus. The caption read:
JESUS CHRIST—VICTIM OF THE DEATH PENALTY.
Another described Governor Bush as a serial killer because he had signed the execution orders on 120 murderers since he took office. Others unfurled a cloth banner with a huge green injection needle on it.

At five
P.M.
, Margulies announced that both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had denied his petitions for restraining orders.

Shortly after that, the Texas Pardons and Parole Board voted down a stay. Then word came from the governor’s mansion thirty minutes before Betty Beets’s execution. Bush had decided to not extend Beets’s life.

As the clock crept closer to six
P.M.
, the crowd grew and the assembly took on a circus atmosphere. College students gathered for the experience, not particularly caring one way or another about Betty Beets, but treating the execution as a happening.

A few moments before six
P.M.
, the witnesses to the execution marched silently and single file past grim-faced guards and Texas Rangers into the building that housed the death chamber. Betty had asked her family not to attend, for she wanted only her spiritual adviser, Paul Carlin, and attorney, Joe Margulies.

The same number of friends of the perpetrator were invited as the families of the victims. Even though no chairs were provided, there was not enough standing room for all of the victims’ families who wanted to attend. Some of them were looking for closure. Jamie Beets, being more realistic, said he had forgiven Betty, and only wanted it all to end.

Five media representatives were invited, including the Associated Press and United Press International. One place was reserved for a reporter from the county in which the crime took place. Gary Bass, a young reporter for both the
Athens Daily Review
and the
Cedar Creek Pilot,
received the nod.

While the execution began inside, a handsome, young preacher stood outside and raised his hand to quiet the gathering near the Walls. “Dear, Father,” he said. “We pray for mercy for those carrying out this heinous act. We ask that Betty finds peace . . .” To listen to him, the murderer was the victim, law enforcement the villain, and the public held the responsibility for ending the madness.

The minister urged everyone to work for a moratorium on the death penalty. Someone in the crowd muttered, “What about a moratorium on murder?”

Inside the death chamber, the reporters divided themselves between the two viewing rooms. Gary Bass followed behind Beets’s minister and lawyer.

Bass stood before a large window that separated the viewers from Beets by only five feet.

The vivid green death chamber measured six by eight feet, just large enough for a white-covered gurney, plus a doctor and the warden of the Walls Unit. The executioner, a prison employee who would add the deadly poisons to Beets’s intravenous solution, stayed hidden behind a partition.

Bass noticed a set of wooden steps under the gurney and wondered if Beets, looking small and frail, had to climb them to get onto her deathbed. He recalled interviewing her three weeks before on death row. She was friendly and could have passed for anyone’s grandmother. Then he also remembered that her demeanor had changed when he pointed out the inconsistencies in her story about what had happened to her fourth and fifth husbands. The tears stopped, her eyes narrowed, her gaze grew a little colder, and she became more intense. At that moment he saw the cold-blooded killer—two sides of the same coin.

By the time onlookers had entered the viewing room, Betty Beets lay strapped to the gurney. One strap crossed her chest, others held down her wrists and ankles, as she lay there in white prison scrubs and blue canvas deck shoes. An IV had been inserted into each arm. Twice Beets glanced at the victims’ families, but made eye contact with no one.

Then she turned to the room where Bass stood and he saw her cold blue eyes stare at him. As her gaze passed over him, he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand up—and he knew he’d remember that fleeting moment for the rest of his life.

The warden asked Beets if she wanted to make a last statement. She calmly shook her head, seemingly resigned to her fate. By doing that, she denied the victims’ families that one last concession, that one last olive branch of peace. There would be no last-second confessions, just stoic silence.

She gave her attorney a small, melancholy smile as he placed his hand on the window and mouthed, “It’ll be all right.”

As the lethal injection began flowing into her veins, Beets coughed twice and gasped. She sputtered as if something was caught in her throat. Then she closed her eyes and slipped into unconsciousness, appearing to be asleep. For a few moments, her chest continued to rise and fall; then it stopped and her complexion grew pale.

At that point, Carlin removed his glasses and sobbed briefly, his burly shoulders slumped in defeat. As he wiped his eyes, he softly said, “The Bible says to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.”

In the other room, both families of the victims held hands, forming one large group during the entire ordeal.

A long, profound silence descended. Then at 6:18, the doctor beside Betty Beets placed a stethoscope on her chest. Seconds later, he nodded to the warden. “She’s dead.”

Quietly, the families filed out to an anteroom where they held a brief group hug before leaving the Walls Unit.

Afterward, the witnesses strolled somberly down the ramp, except for Rodney Barker, who felt the weight of a truckload of bricks leave his shoulders. The execution of Betty was a catharsis for him. She had withheld his father from him in his teenage years, then permanently took away the father he had loved. Rodney shot up his arms in a victory salute. For him, nineteen years of grief and misery had come to an end.

Then he and Jamie Beets went to the conglomeration of microphones and spotlights to tell the waiting reporters and the world what good men their fathers had been.

A reporter roamed the crowd of onlookers and antideath-penalty protesters as word leaked out that the execution had taken place. He noticed a young woman with tears running down her cheeks.

The reporter, who had researched the details of Betty Beets’s case so he could write about her, walked over to the woman and whispered in her ear, “Don’t cry for Betty. Cry for the families whose fathers she killed, and cry for her own children who she turned into accomplices to murder.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a true story of two murders that took place over fifteen years ago forced me to search out many people, asking them to recall minute points of their experiences with Betty Lou Beets. I found an outpouring of detailed information and a certainty that no one had forgotten her. The dialogue and scenes have been reconstructed from these interviews, in addition to the court transcripts and signed documents obtained by investigators for the District Attorney and Sheriff.

I am indebted to the following for their help.

Judge Jack H. Holland of the 173rd District Court generously opened all trial transcripts and court records to me, and I had the gracious cooperation of Jovanna Herrington and Kim Gabel from the district clerk’s office.

The Dallas Fire Department, for whom Jimmy Don Beets was a captain, cooperated fully. Thanks to Chief Tanksley, Captain James Blackburn and his wife, JoAnn, Chaplain Denny Burris, and Stu Grant from the Dallas Firefighters Museum.

Without former Henderson County Sheriff’s Chief Investigator Rick Rose, who broke this case, this book would have been an impossible task. Rick generously gave me his insight, along with detailed recollections of an investigation that lay for two years until he grasped the reins. His counterpart in the Henderson County District Attorney’s Office, Michael O’Brien, continuously amazed me with his photographic memory. Mike was invaluable in explaining the legal ramifications and details of the case, as well as the investigation from the DA’s perspective. Karen Warner Hewitt, also a former DA investigator, provided me with the emotional side of dealing with Betty Beets. Karen remembered how Betty’s mere presence could decrease the temperature of a room.