The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime (12 page)

That didn’t happen, and on January 7, a panel of 24 potential jurors filed into the brown brick and white-columned Polk County Courthouse in Livingston, 50 miles north of the junior school where the drama had begun. DeGuerin had argued that he wanted the case moved, based on the intense pretrial publicity, including TV news reports in which Liberty County Sheriff Sonny Applebe told reporters that as he saw the case, Hurley Fontenot was “guilty as hell.” Arguing racial bias, DeGuerin said that Fontenot couldn’t receive a fair trial in the county.

State District Judge John Martin, an avuncular man, listened to both sides and then sided with the prosecutors, ruling that the case would remain in Polk County, where Bill Fleming’s body had been found. In the end, ten women and two men were seated in the jury box on Monday, January 20, 1986, when opening statements began.

IN THE COURTHOUSE ON THAT first day of the trial, the scene felt like opening day at a county fair as folks from small towns throughout the area bunched in the hallway outside the locked courtroom and rushed in as soon as the bailiff opened the door. One was a duo of middle-aged women, identical twins, college classmates of Hurley’s who would come each day in matching outfits. Seats were at a premium, and those who couldn’t be accommodated were turned away. I sat with the press in one of the front rows, my place reserved, and during breaks many approached me, voicing their opinions, sometimes whispering racial slurs under their breath. One woman told me that murder was an expected outcome when someone “broke the rules of nature and paired a black man and a white woman.”

As the case was called to order, Hurley Fontenot stood before Judge Martin.

“My plea, sir, is not guilty. I did not commit any murder,” the former military man said in a clear strong voice. He then sat down, joining his attorney brother, Walter, and Dick DeGuerin at the defense table. Across from them sat the two prosecutors, both mustached and wearing cowboy boots with their suits. It was District Attorney Peter Speers who first addressed the jury, saying: “We will build one circumstance after another until the sole conclusion that you can reach is that Hurley Fontenot is guilty of murder.”

As he continued, the prosecutor contended that Hurley’s alibi wouldn’t hold up under scrutiny, and that it would have been impossible for him to do what he said he’d done that afternoon. Add to that the human blood found in the camper, the anonymous letters, Hurley’s fingerprints which had been discovered on the original hotel receipt - the one an anonymous letter had been typed on - and the evidence appeared damning. “Hurley Fontenot’s truck had been meticulously scrubbed with a cleaning solution,” Speers said. Yet the telltale blood remained, along with chips of pine bark that an expert witness was prepared to tie to saplings found at the scene where the body was dumped.

“The motive is in fact jealousy and hatred,” which had, according to Speers, resulted in bad blood between Fleming and the principal.

But it was Dick DeGuerin whose opening statement left many wondering. Early on Vanessa Fontenot had told investigators and grand jurors alike that she’d never asked her father to pick her up at the airport that day, and that she’d had no plan to move any furniture. But according to DeGuerin, that wasn’t what Hurley’s daughter would say on the stand. Instead, the defense attorney claimed that Vanessa Fontenot would completely change her account of the Friday Bill Fleming disappeared. The prosecutors were left wondering: Was that true?

Outside the courtroom that afternoon of the trial’s first day, Hurley said he couldn’t elaborate because of a gag order, but insisted that he hadn’t killed Fleming and promised that soon everyone would “know the name of the real killer.”

OPENING ARGUMENTS COMPLETED, among the first evidence presented was Hurley Fontenot’s own handwritten account of his alibi, one he’d voluntarily delivered to police days before Fleming’s body was found and before he’d been charged with any crime. Dick DeGuerin had fought to keep the document out of the trial but lost, and in the statement, Hurley said he’d seen Fleming in the school parking lot about 2:50 that afternoon and given him a ride to his truck before heading off to buy gas and drive to Houston to pick up his daughter.

At the trial, Hurley’s statement was brought into evidence while Detective Jimmy Belt, one of the investigating officers, was on the stand. It was also Belt who’d tracked down the original of the motel bill that had later been used to write one of the anonymous letters. When Belt had taken the school’s yearbooks into the motel, two clerks picked out Hurley’s photo and identified him as the well-dressed man who’d asked for a copy of Fleming’s receipt.

Under a long, arduous cross-examination, however, Belt talked about the cocaine found in Bill’s bathroom. He agreed with DeGuerin about Fleming’s past connections with his former partner, whom DeGuerin described as “a big-time cocaine drug dealer.” Adding to the defense scenario of Bill Fleming’s death being drug-related, when asked if he’d heard that the removal of shoes or boots was a sign of a drug killing, Belt said he had but had never seen such a case.

As in many such cases, it would seem that the prosecutors took a step forward, the defense pushed back, and the prosecutors attempted to regroup and marshal yet another offensive. The next day, the prosecutors fought back with witnesses who rebutted the defense’s notion that Bill Fleming’s missing boots were an indication his death was tied to drugs. On the stand a former U.S. Customs Service officer who’d worked drug cases undercover testified that, “Maybe they’ve seen [this kind of sign] on television, but not in person.”

Yet it was the testimony of Polk County Sheriff Ted Everitt that introduced jurors to the scene where the body was found. To Everitt, it appeared that Fleming was killed elsewhere and his body dumped out of a vehicle. He’d seen recently torn pine saplings still oozing sap, ones they’d cut and taken into evidence.

DeGuerin brought up the possibility of suicide, but Speers followed up, asking if a weapon had been found on the scene.

“No,” Everitt replied. How could Fleming have managed to shoot himself twice in the back of the head? And if he had, who removed the gun? If it was suicide, shouldn’t the weapon have been found near the body?

Despite the small triumphs, as the testimony seesawed back and forth, it seemed craters were developing in the prosecutors’ case during that first week of the trial. The first time was with what had been touted as locked-in testimony. One of the two clerks who’d been in the motel the morning someone had come in for Bill Fleming’s receipt picked Hurley out in the courtroom without a hitch, but a second woman took the stand and floundered, looking about the courtroom, unable to point to the man she’d seen that day.

As the first week ended, Hurley Fontenot’s recorded interview with Ranger Walker and Sheriff Applebe was played for the jury, one in which he talked of having a “special bond” with Coach Billy Mac Fleming. Hurley described how he’d done “something I don’t think any other administrator in America has ever done,” on the day he told the board that if they didn’t renew Fleming’s contract, he would leave as well. About those anonymous letters, Hurley had a theory: Someone tied to the school had sent them. As to his ex-lover’s relationship with the dead coach, Hurley said he’d felt no jealousy. In fact, Hurley contended that he’d been uninterested when he’d heard that they’d begun dating.

At the defense table, Hurley Fontenot’s face remained unemotional as he listened to his own voice on the tape recorder describing how he’d cried four times on the day Bill Fleming’s body was discovered.

At one point in the tape, Hurley was heard in his soft East Texas drawl insisting, “I haven’t the slightest idea” who killed Bill.

THE FOLLOWING WEEK, THE CROWD trying to shoehorn into the courtroom had grown as prosecution witnesses tried to explain the disappearance of the evidence from the Liberty County Sheriff’s office. On the stand, Linda Pruitt, an evidence officer, testified about how Bill Fleming’s clothing and personal effects could have been lost. The items, she said, had been stored away from other evidence in the department’s radio room, because of the decomposition odor that clung to them. Pruitt pegged as the most likely explanation that the evidence had been mistakenly thrown away.

During cross-examination, DeGuerin pointed at what could only be described as carelessness and labeled it proof of a sloppy investigation.

As big a story as the Fontenot trial was throughout Houston and much of Texas, another event took precedence that Tuesday, January 28, 1986. Seventy-three seconds into its flight, the space shuttle
Challenger
exploded and broke apart, leaving trails of white billowing through the blue sky over the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of central Florida. For days after, it felt as if a cloud of sadness hung over the Polk County courthouse. Throughout that week in the hallways outside the courtroom, instead of rehashing the evidence, spectators and attorneys discussed the historic event.

The day after the tragedy, Hurley’s daughter, Vanessa, sat at the head of the courtroom, called as a prosecution witness. She’d be anything
but
. Hurley had said in his statement that he’d called her from the airport around 5:00 p.m. the day Bill Fleming disappeared, but Vanessa had told both a Texas Ranger and a grand jury that wasn’t true. Instead, she said that she’d had no plans to fly to Houston that day and that the only time she’d talked with her father was in the morning.

Yet as DeGuerin had implied in his opening statement, when testifying from the witness stand, Vanessa Fontenot gave a markedly different account of the events of that all-important day. The prosecutors bristled in their chairs as Vanessa insisted before the jury that she did remember a call from her father between 5:00 and 5:10 that afternoon. After giving her initial accounts, she said she’d noticed a meeting on that day written on her boss’s calendar. Spurred by that information, she recalled that her father had called her, just as a group of men walked in the office door for their appointment. The prosecutors pushed hard, but Vanessa remained steadfast. Her first account had been wrong, she insisted. Her father was telling the truth.

Despite their disappointment, the prosecutors pushed on, putting their most convincing forensic evidence on the record the following day. On the stand, chemist Mike McGeehon explained the details of how he’d tested the undercarriage of Hurley’s truck and the interior of the camper, discovering human blood. Yet as McGeehon talked, it was apparent the evidence didn’t answer all the questions. The amounts of blood had been too small to type, and even if it had been typed, they couldn’t have determined whether or not the blood belonged to Bill Fleming. So little blood remained in Fleming’s corpse that the medical examiner hadn’t been able to type it.

When he took over, DeGuerin suggested that the sample could have been contaminated and McGeehon’s tests compromised, but the chemist held firm to the only conclusion he appeared able to defend: “In my opinion, it is human blood.”

The testimony turned dramatic as McGeehon gave testimony concerning a lint ball found near the body - one that contained a human hair. When DA Speers suggested it could have come from Fontenot, DeGuerin offered the chemist a sample to compare. As the jurors watched wide-eyed, the chemist left the witness stand and walked over to Hurley, who stood at attention. The scientist then pulled a hair from Hurley’s head and placed it between two glass slides. Dealing with what he had available in this period when forensic science was still in its adolescence, McGeehon visually examined the hair and then testified that it didn’t match the strand found in the lint at the scene.

Meanwhile, DeGuerin asked pointed questions about the cocaine found in Fleming’s bathroom, which McGeehon had also analyzed. At 90 percent pure, it was “about the best I’ve seen,” the chemist testified.

The day was proving to be an arduous one for prosecutors, as DeGuerin meticulously fought each point of their case. In pre-trial publicity, the sapling scrapings taken from Hurley’s truck had been trumpeted as proof of his presence on the scene, but the forestry professor prosecutors called as an expert witness admitted to the jurors that he couldn’t actually make that jump. In fact, it was impossible to pinpoint when the trees had been scrapped, he contended, except that it had happened sometime during the 1985 growing season.

As the second week of the trial drew to an end with prosecutors enduring one disappointment after another, it seemed all wasn’t going well for the state’s case. Then something noteworthy happened. Shirley Nugent, a Daisetta housewife and a distant relation to Laura, took the stand as a surprise witness. Prosecutors said that she wasn’t on the witness list because, reluctant to get involved, she had only contacted them the day before. Her testimony, if the jurors believed it, could have been crucial: She said she saw Bill Fleming in Hurley’s truck driving away from the junior school that afternoon, countering Hurley’s statement that he’d dropped Bill off at his pickup before leaving the school.

“You have a grudge against Hurley Fontenot for failing your daughter, don’t you?” DeGuerin charged.

“No, sir,” Nugent replied. Her daughter had failed because of medical issues, she said, and she’d had only one argument with Fontenot about the issue.

At that, prosecutors led her through a more thorough account of that day. That afternoon, Nugent said she sat in her car in the junior school parking lot waiting for her daughter when sometime after 3:25, she saw Hurley and Bill walk out of the school “talking loud.” She then watched as Hurley drove Bill to the field house. Once there, Hurley waited while Bill got out and went to his truck, where “he opened the truck door and either put something in or took something out. I couldn’t see.”

In her testimony, Nugent said that then Fleming got back into Fontenot’s truck and the two men drove off together, south on the road that bordered the junior school. She’d watched until they turned the corner.

That day would be one of the better ones for prosecutors. After Nugent, Texas Ranger Tommy Walker took the stand. DeGuerin had continued to point to Fleming’s old partner in the carpet business as a possible suspect, but Walker said he’d found the man and ruled him out as a suspect. Another bit of evidence didn’t help the defense. Even if the one hotel clerk couldn’t identify Hurley in court, Walker presented evidence that the man on trial had, in fact, been the man who borrowed Fleming’s motel receipt to make a copy. How? The DPS lab had found Hurley’s fingerprints on the receipt.