The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime (11 page)

The following Thursday afternoon, Bill and Jack Young, head of athletics for the district, were in the press box overlooking the high school's football stadium, five miles from the junior school, getting ready for a district track meet. A closeness had developed in the two years the men had worked together, and Young felt obligated to talk some sense into Bill.

"I can't understand why you feel you've got to marry the woman right away, Bill."

"I know what I want, and Laura's it," Bill insisted.

Young asked how much Bill really knew about her.

"I know all I need to," Bill replied. "I'm no virgin either, and I don't care who she's slept with."

Then Bill related a "wild story" Hurley had told him recently. "He says the board's going to fire Voytek and make
him
the new superintendent. My God, Jack, Hurley as superintendent?"

Young was concerned. The politics within the school board had been more volatile than usual and, although he doubted Hurley's story, Young felt that Voytek should know. "It can't be true, but you stay here and handle the track meet. I'll let Mr. Voytek know." Young left and walked to Voytek's office next to the high school.

When Young finished telling Bill's story, Voytek told him not to worry and to go back to the meet. "I'll see you at the track later," Voytek said.

Accustomed to Hurley's political maneuvering, Voytek doubted the story's truth, but he made a few phone calls to check his standing with some of the members of the board just the same. Convinced that there was no truth to the gossip, he decided to talk to Bill.

When Voytek arrived at the track meet, Bill was on the field directing the action. Voytek waited for a break before walking out to him. Voytek then repeated what Young had told him and asked if it were true. "Yeah, that's it. And I want you to know that I won't work for that man next year,” Bill said.

For the time being, Voytek told him to try to forget it, suggesting that they talk about it later. But then, as he turned to leave, the superintendent looked up at the press box. Hurley had always boasted to Voytek that he could read his face and know what he was thinking. Now Hurley stared down at them from the perch where he was watching the meet, and Voytek felt certain that Hurley knew that they were talking about him. As he left the field, Voytek felt that he had Hurley; it was rare that he was able to catch the principal in a lie.

When Bill finished with the meet late that afternoon, he made plans to see Young at the high school at 3:30 the following day, Friday. When they made the arrangements, Bill explained that he wanted to talk; he was afraid that Hurley would retaliate for having told Voytek by trying to hurt his career. Then he went home to his apartment, where Laura had dinner waiting. Later they crawled into bed together. "With Bill and me, it was like he wanted all of me all the time," Laura says. "It was like it had never been with anyone else."

The next morning, Friday, they stopped at Laura’s house and had coffee with her parents. When the time came, Laura kissed Bill goodbye, not knowing that it would be the last time she would see him alive. Bill then left for the junior school, and Laura drove to her new position at the high school. At 1:45 that afternoon Laura's office phone rang. "Just wanted to remind you that I promised Jack Young I would see him at the high school about 3:30," Bill said. "I should be at your parents’ house no later than 4:30."

Forty-five minutes later, at 2:30, Voytek opened the door to his office and saw Hurley standing outside. "Hurley, I thought you were leaving at two today. Don't you have to pick up your daughter in Houston at the airport?"

"Just running a little late. I have to get the junior school's mail and money," he said.

Voytek was surprised; although this was one of Hurley's regular duties, it was rare in the five years he had known Hurley for him to work late.

Hurley turned and walked out the door of Voytek's office, five miles from the junior school, at 2:35. At about the same time, Bill was walking across the field at the junior school. Thomas Brooks, another coach, saw him and yelled out: "Hey, Bill, where are you going?"

Bill punched the fist of his right hand into his left palm and said, "Damn Hurley." But Brooks had seen Bill do that a lot lately. He surmised that Bill was on his way to meet Hurley or do something for him.

Moments later, Bill walked past Mary Clark, Hurley’s secretary, waved, and left through the school's front door. A few minutes later, Hurley rushed into the junior school and dropped the school's mail and money on Mary Clark's desk. Later she would say that her boss seemed tense, something Clark pegged as anxiety over reaching the airport in time for his daughter's flight.

After saying good night to Clark, Hurley walked out the door about ten minutes behind Bill.

At 3 p.m., Voytek drove past the junior school and noticed that Hurley's truck with the camper top was gone. Bill's was still parked next to the field house.

An hour later at the high school, Jack Young looked at his watch. It was four o’clock, and he assumed that Bill must have forgotten their appointment. He was slightly irritated, but then brushed it off, deciding that something important must have come up. When he saw Coach Brooks later that evening, he asked if he had seen Bill at school. Brooks said, "Yeah, I saw him leaving a little before three. I think he must have been doing something for Hurley."

By five o'clock Alma Booth was trying, unsuccessfully, to convince her daughter to cook dinner. Laura told her mother to go ahead and start dinner without her and that she'd wait for Bill on the porch.

Then at 6:30 that evening, Estelle Maxwell, a high school teacher, drove past the junior school. In the parking lot she noticed Bill's white pickup. Parked next to it was a black and silver van.

At 3:30 A.M. Saturday, the small towns were quiet in a way that cities never are. The air was clear and the night calm. Lynda Fleming was sleeping in her home in Hull when something awakened her. "Suddenly it was like someone fired a gun in my head.”

IN THE DAYS FOLLOWING BILL FLEMING’S DISAPPEARANCE, Hurley Fontenot did something rather remarkable. Before he’d been charged with anything, he wrote out a statement, detailing his account of what he’d done that Friday afternoon. In it, he said that he left the junior school about 2:50 and saw Bill in the parking lot. He drove Bill to his pickup and left him there. Hurley said he then left the school in his own pickup with the camper on the back. First he stopped at the post office, and then he filled his tank at a local gas station about three. From Daisetta, Hurley said he drove the 60 miles to Houston’s Hobby Airport to pick up his daughter. But Vanessa never showed up at Hobby.

Instead of calling his daughter, Hurley said he then drove another 30 miles through Houston’s rush-hour traffic to the city’s larger airport, Intercontinental, on the northern rim of the city. Again, Hurley said he waited. Again Vanessa didn’t arrive. This time Hurley said he parked his pickup and went inside the airport, where he used a pay phone to call Vanessa. When Vanessa said she wouldn’t be coming, Hurley wrote in his statement that he returned to his truck, paid for parking, and left Houston, driving to the racetrack. Late that night, not wanting to wake up his ex-wife at the house, Hurley said he drove to his sister’s and spent the night. As evidence, Hurley gave police a parking receipt from Intercontinental Airport, which clocked him out of the lot at 5:09 that afternoon.

Yet as Liberty County deputies investigated, there were problems with Hurley’s alibi. First, someone came forward to say he saw Hurley filling up his truck at the local gas station in Hull at four that afternoon, not three. The local sheriff, Sonny Applebe, and his men doubted that Hurley could have done all he’d claimed and still arrive at Intercontinental in two hours, and it was impossible for him to accomplish it all in little more than an hour. Yet law enforcement didn’t yet know what they were dealing with, since no one knew where Bill Fleming was or if he’d simply return.

Then the coach’s decomposing body was found in Polk County, in the dewberry field.

AT BILL FLEMING’S MEMORIAL IN THE JUNIOR SCHOOL, red and white banners, the colors of the Bobcats, the school’s teams, draped the stage. Although only 200 students attended the junior school, nearly all the 800 auditorium seats were filled. Many students talked of Bill as a favorite teacher and coach, and one said he was like a father to them. “We are a close-knit community that wants to know why and how this could have happened,” Voytek told
Houston Chronicle
reporter Cindy Horswell.

On his way back from the memorial, Hurley, too, talked to Horswell. By then, Hurley was on a leave of absence. “My ulcer problem is really acting up,” he said.

Meanwhile, the investigation was kicking into high gear.

Before long, many had come forward to tell investigators about the ill feelings between Hurley Fontenot and Bill Fleming. When deputies carrying copies of the junior school yearbook approached them, two desk clerks at the TraveLodge picked out Hurley’s photo, saying he was the man who had asked for and copied Bill Fleming’s receipt, the one that had been used to write an anonymous letter. Even more damning, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) lab found human blood splattered inside the school camper Hurley used and diluted human blood on his pickup’s axle. In the truck, a crime scene investigator also discovered a receipt, one that revealed that the day after Bill Fleming disappeared, Hurley had steam-cleaned the camper and pickup.

Hurley’s ulcer had reason to complain, as he was brought in for questioning by Sheriff Applebe and Tommy Walker, a Texas Ranger who’d been asked to assist in the case. The interview didn’t go well for Fontenot, and a polygraph test he took only worsened his situation when the examiner pegged Hurley’s answers as deceptive.

Then there was the conflict between Hurley’s alibi and the statements given by his own daughter. Vanessa Fontenot told Ranger Walker that she’d never made arrangements with her father to fly into Houston that Friday and that she hadn’t planned to move any furniture. In early May, she repeated that same testimony to a Polk County grand jury.

Few were then surprised when a little more than a month after Bill Fleming’s disappearance, on May 16, 1985, Hurley Fontenot was indicted for murder.

I MET WITH HURLEY FOR the first time in the summer after Bill Fleming’s murder. We stood outside the junior school with his attorney, Dick DeGuerin, one of the best known in Texas, and talked about the case and Hurley’s life. What he told me was the same thing he’d told police: that the afternoon Fleming disappeared, he’d given Bill a short ride to his truck at about three, then driven off for the post office, the gas station, and Houston’s two airports to pick up Vanessa.

The day of our interview, DeGuerin ardently supported his client, voicing other theories on what might have happened to Bill Fleming. One was that his death had something to do with the mysterious black and silver van – its occupants and reason for being at the junior school that evening unknown. Like some of the townsfolk, DeGuerin speculated that the murderer was more likely someone out of Bill's rocky past. And then there was the matter of a gram of cocaine found during the police search of Bill’s apartment. Rumors circulated that the murder might have had something to do with Bill’s former business partner, the one who had disappeared years earlier. Had Bill’s death been a drug killing? DeGuerin indicated that Bill’s missing boots were a known drug gang signature, one he insisted confirmed that the killing was drug-related.

My meeting with the two prosecutors on the case, DA Peter Speers and Assistant DA David Walker, took a markedly different tone, as they described their case against Hurley as circumstantial but strong. By then a former coach at the junior school had told prosecutors he remembered a .22-caliber pistol Hurley said he kept in the glove compartment of his truck. Experts had determined that Bill Fleming was shot with either a .22- or .25- caliber weapon. As for that drug signature, neither one had ever heard of it.

When it came to much of the scientific evidence, however, the prosecution suffered one disappointment after another. In this era before DNA testing, Bill Fleming’s body was too decomposed for the medical examiner to even type his blood. The result was that in a courtroom, the prosecutors would be unable to say conclusively that the blood found inside the camper and on the pickup axle belonged to the junior school coach. All the lab could determine for certain was that the blood was human.

In the months that followed our interviews, lawyers on both sides prepared for trial as the school district bought off Hurley's contract for $25,000. The former principal became a regular churchgoer, attending weekly Mass at the local Catholic church in Raywood. For her part, Laura joined Central Baptist Church in Daisetta.

When I first met with her, Laura fluctuated from day to day, wondering if Hurley had killed Bill. At one point, she shook her head and said, "No, sometimes I don't think he did it. We just weren't that close anymore for him to do something like that. He never acted like he cared for me that much." But then there were so many who believed differently. They pointed to such evidence as the diamond wedding set he’d tried to give her and a two-year-old Easter card Hurley had saved in his desk at school, one that was affectionately signed - Laura.

TALK IN THE SMALL TOWNS didn’t let up all that summer or into the fall, as the love triangle and murder continued to make national, even international, tabloid headlines.

In October 1985, the case became more mysterious when it was revealed that the bloody clothes Bill Fleming’s body was found in, along with the personal effects taken off his body, had disappeared from the Liberty County Sheriff’s property room. The statement released to the media explained that the items came up missing after the department had moved, but the defense cried foul. “This makes it impossible for us to have an independent analysis of the material,” DeGuerin told reporters. So critical was the lost evidence, he argued before the judge, that the charges against his client should be dropped.