The Final Gun
In a small town deep in the Big Thicket a coach and a principal loved the same woman. Their rivalry ended after...
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Into the Thicket
A series of anonymous letters came to light at the school board meeting in March. A letter to Voytek stated that the coach and Laura Nugent had been observed in a “very compromising position” during class and at lunch breaks and that the author (the letter was signed “concerned parents”) had pictures showing the pair checking into a motel. An earlier letter to Fleming’s estranged wife, Linda, called Laura Nugent “a no good trashy whore” who bragged about the marriages she had broken up. “You and Bil’s [sic] is the 4th one that we know about,” the writer said.
Anne Richardson, one of the school board members who had received letters, spoke out at the meeting and asked the principal if he knew anything about the letters. Fontenot replied that he had received several himself. He had handled the situation the way he always handled anonymous mail, by throwing the letters away. When it came time to vote on renewing teachers’ contracts, Richardson made a motion that the board hold off voting on Fleming’s contract until the accusations in the letters had been investigated.
Hurley Fontenot immediately responded with what some school board members thought was an uncharacteristically spirited defense of the coach. He told the board in effect that if it failed to renew Bill Fleming’s contract, it ought to tear up his contract too. “We all knew there was trouble between the coach and the principal,” Richardson said. “I thought it was very unusual he would be defending him like that.” After the meeting Fontenot drove to Fleming’s apartment in Liberty and told him what had happened. Fleming, who had already decided to look for another job, was surprised by the unexpected late-evening visit and told Laura Nugent later that the principal had stayed and talked for more than an hour.
What happened a few weeks later was even more unexpected. One afternoon the principal asked the coach to ride with him to the bank in Liberty. Afterward, Fontenot drove Fleming to the coach’s apartment and surprised him with a wedding gift—a microwave oven, still crated in the back of the principal’s red pickup. “Bill was real thrilled,” Laura recalled. “I was surprised at what Hurley had done, but Bill said he was just trying to be nice. Bill would do anything to get along, at least until school was out.”
Laura wasn’t convinced that the principal was taking their wedding plans all that gracefully. Around the first of March, she remembers, he had walked into the office at school and offered her a diamond ring. Even when they were dating, she says, Fontenot had never talked about marriage. She refused the ring. “Just think about it,” he had said. “People change their minds every day.”
After the gift of the microwave oven and the incident with the diamond ring, Laura was surprised to receive an Easter card from Fontenot. He wrote across the bottom that she was a good friend and he was happy she had found “a wonderful person to spend your life with.” On Easter Fleming took his fiancée to meet his family in Center. Five days later he was dead.
Those days had seemed routine at the time, but in retrospect otherwise ordinary occurrences took on sinister meanings. On April 9, the Tuesday after Easter, the principal went to the office of the superintendent and asked to borrow the school’s camper shell, which was used to protect luggage on Future Farmers of America trips. Fontenot said that he needed it to protect some furniture that he was taking to his daughter in Austin. His daughter was supposed to fly from Austin to Houston on Friday, and he requested the superintendent’s permission to leave school early to meet her at the airport.
It had only been a month since the coach had talked with the superintendent and asked to appear before the school board at the end of the term to discuss “the educational environment” at the junior school. Fleming didn’t spell it out, but Superintendent Voytek knew he was talking about Hurley Fontenot. Voytek knew that relations between the coach and the principal were strained, and he suspected that the animosity was something more than mere jealousy. For almost a year there had been rumors of financial irregularities at the junior school. The previous summer, in fact, a little more than $2000 was missing, and though the investigation had been turned over to the Liberty County district attorney, nothing had come of it yet.
There was a track meet the night of April 11 at the junior school. Bill Fleming was usually in his element at such functions, but on that night he seemed preoccupied. He had learned earlier that evening that his divorce, which was supposed to be final the next Monday, had been delayed. It was only a technicality—Linda’s attorney hadn’t finished preparing the documents—but the coach came as close as he ever had to losing his temper and accused her of dragging her heels. “Are you trying to get all my money?” he asked. Linda, who was a teacher too, told him, “Bill, we don’t have any money. We’re just trying to get all the paperwork straight.”
At the track meet there was some mix-up with the ribbons, and the coach promised to meet athletic director Jack Young the next afternoon, half an hour or so after the final bell at three-fifteen, to straighten things out. The coach never showed up. He was supposed to have dinner at Laura’s mother’s house in Hull at four-thirty, but he didn’t show up there either. Lawmen speculate that sometime between three and four the killer lured Fleming down one of the isolated roads near the school, found some pretense to get behind him, and shot him in the head—then shot him a second time.
That same night, by the light of a half-moon, the killer drove north, deep into the Big Thicket, along one of those narrow, deserted blacktops sheltered and obscured by walls of trees, turned down an even narrower logging road, and dumped the coach’s body in a grove of pines.
Bloodline
Newspaper and television reports called Hurley Fontenot black, and technically he was. In this part of Texas anyway, if a person has even a trace of Negro blood, that person is black. Hurley was a frail, wiry, tightly wrapped man with brown hair and off-white skin. His skin appeared bleached, as though he had worked for years in the sun but had recently retired and by choice allowed himself to pale. Hurley and his brother Walter Fontenot, Jr., could and did pass for white outside the community. At out-of-town education seminars, Hurley usually gave his race as white, and when the FBI was conducting a security clearance for his son, who was studying to be a military cryptographer, Hurley asked a former school board member to tell agents that the boy was white. In Liberty County, however, the Fontenots were indelibly black. Walter Junior, who practiced law in Liberty, sometimes referred to himself sardonically as “the town’s only black lawyer.”
The Creoles who originally settled Liberty County were white plantation owners, descendants of the aristocrats who had fled the French Revolution. Along with their slaves, they crossed the Sabine River from Louisiana in 1845 and bought cheap land in the new Republic of Texas. Over the decades the term “Creole” came to mean anyone whose bloodline contained a mixture of black, European, and sometimes Indian or West Indian stock.
Hurley Fontenot’s great-grandfather was Garand Fontenot, a Frenchman by birth and part of the Catholic migration from Canada that settled in southern Louisiana. A painting of Garand Fontenot hung in Walter Junior’s law office; he was a handsome, blue-eyed blond with a bushy beard. Garand married a woman who was one-eighth African, an octoroon; thus their descendants were destined to bear the nebulous racial classification of Creole, or black Creole as it is sometimes called.
Garand’s son, Desilvia, migrated to Texas in about 1912 and helped found the Creole village of Raywood. He became a landowner, opened the first cotton gin, and later founded Raywood’s first school, the Fontenot School. After the Hull-Daisetta school district was formed in1925, Desilvia’s son, Walter Senior, was principal of the district’s black school, Carter G. Woodson High, which became the junior school after integration.
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