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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It is likely that Bill Fleming was smitten by a case of the middle-age crazies in the fall of 1984. He was 36, an age when many ex-athletes go to seed, an age when a man begins to sense that time is fleeting and the future will not be what he envisioned. Linda Fleming didn’t know it, but her husband was already lusting after Laura Nugent. “When I look back,” she says, “I remember that Bill mentioned her more frequently around October. I saw her at the Christmas banquet. She was dressed in this old-style sixties dress, and I remember looking at her and feeling sorry for her. Bill told me she was poor and not well educated. When I looked at her she dropped her eyes. I remember wondering why.”
Fleming shocked his wife a few weeks after Christmas by asking for a divorce. There wasn’t another woman, he said. He just needed space. He needed to find himself. In January Fleming moved into the apartment, and in early March Linda received an anonymous letter at her school. “Another teacher was standing beside me when I opened the letter,” Linda says. “I was shaking all over. It was the first time I knew there was another girl.”
Fleming was angry when she showed him the letter, angrier still when letters continued to arrive. One of them was typed across the top of a motel registration form signed by Bill Fleming of Nacogdoches, Texas, and it said that the coach was shacked up with Laura Nugent. There were four in all, not counting the ones mailed to Superintendent Voytek and the school board. “I was frightened, Linda says. “I said, ‘Bill, somebody is watching you. Somebody dislikes you a lot.’“ At first Fleming accused his wife of writing the letters, but Linda pointed to numerous grammatical errors and told him, “You know I’m an English teacher; I even correct letters people send to me.” No, the letters had been written by someone who was poorly educated—or pretending to be.
Fleming and Laura Nugent went back to the motel, the Travelodge in Crosby, on U.S. Highway 90 between Liberty and Houston, and demanded to know how a copy of the registration form had gotten into the hands of the anonymous author. Motel workers wouldn’t tell them.
When Laura confronted Fontenot about the letters, one of which asserted that pictures of the lovers were available, he was evasive, she recalls. “At first he told me he had the pictures, then he told me he misplaced them. Later he said he found them again. I asked to see them, and he said he locked them in his safe-deposit box. ‘Nobody’s ever going to see them,’ he said, like he was protecting me.”
When Fleming got back to his apartment after the track meet on Thursday, April 11, Laura was there. She spent the night, as she did frequently, and the next morning they had coffee at her mother’s house in Hull, which was also a regular practice. He telephoned that afternoon, and she reminded him that supper was at four-thirty. But four-thirty came and went, and the coach still hadn’t arrived.
“I knew he was supposed to see Coach Young first, and I was sitting on the front porch with Mama and Daddy, just waiting. Billy wasn’t hardly ever late, or he’d phone if he was. But he never phoned.” Around eight she drove over to Liberty and checked his apartment. None of his clothes were missing, and there was no sign that he had been there. On the way home she noticed his truck parked near the junior school, but for some reason she didn’t stop.
Laura and her sister drove back to the junior school Saturday morning and parked near Fleming’s truck. ‘“I was scared to look inside—he could have had a heart attack or something—so my sister looked. Then we peeped in the field house window. We didn’t see nothing.” She searched again all day Sunday. Just like his friend Douglas Duncan, Billy Mac Fleming had vanished.
Inspector Voytek
Superintendent Voytek had already learned that Fleming had failed to keep any of his appointments over the weekend, and when he was informed Monday morning that Fleming hadn’t arrived for his first class, a chill went up his back. “I knew something was wrong,” he says. “I knew my coach. He was a man of integrity. He wouldn’t have let his boss [Jack Young] down. He wouldn’t have let the girl he was planning to marry down. He was supposed to have picked up his son in Houston for the start of the Little League season on Saturday. He wouldn’t have let his son down.”
Voytek telephoned the principal at the junior school. Fontenot didn’t sound concerned. He told the superintendent, “He was over here Sunday washing his clothes at the field house.” Fontenot hadn’t actually seen the coach, but he had seen the coach’s truck. Voytek immediately telephoned the sheriff. Jack Young borrowed Laura’s key, and Voytek, Young, Fontenot, and a deputy sheriff searched Fleming’s apartment. The superintendent remembered the conversation he had had with Fleming the previous Thursday in which the coach had threatened to blow the whistle on the principal, and the next morning Voytek jimmied the lock on the coach’s truck and searched his briefcase for the ribbons from the track meet and for any evidence of foul play. Though he found no evidence linking the principal to the coach’s disappearance, Voytek would later say, “I knew Fontenot. Give him an inch, he’ll take a mile. If he does you a favor, you owe him, and I promise you’ll never get even. I’ll bet the coach owed him.”
In the days that followed, Voytek became obsessed with the coach’s disappearance. It was the worst experience in his career as an educator, he said. People started calling him Inspector Voytek. He wanted to believe that Fontenot was innocent of any wrongdoing, but, as the inspector, he had a theory: On the day of the murder the principal might have picked up the coach outside the gym and given him some kind of story about needing help. The coach was a soft touch for anyone in need of help. Maybe the principal needed help lifting some furniture; everyone knew he had a bad heart. At that point the principal could have driven about a mile down the road to a farm where his cousin trained horses, persuaded the coach to climb into the back of the camper shell, and killed him.
Voytek furnished the Liberty County sheriff’s department with two copies of the Hull-Daisetta yearbook. When a deputy showed the yearbooks to two women clerks at the motel in Crosby, they identified a man who looked like the well-dressed gentleman who had picked up a copy of Fleming’s registration form. They identified Hurley Fontenot.
But then the investigation turned up something else. Searching Fleming’s apartment, lawmen opened a medicine cabinet in the bathroom, and there behind some bottles they found a gram of cocaine. A gram isn’t much (it would cost about $100), but it was enough to suggest another motive. In some minds, the drugs squared with the mystery of the missing boots. Victims of drug-related murders are sometimes found without their shoes; it’s a handy way to keep the victim from running until the killer is ready to pull the trigger. There was no evidence that this was a drug-related murder, but someone might have wanted it to look that way.
A Pine Desert
When Billy Mac Fleming disappeared, his mother in Center, his first wife in Houston, and others who had known him long and well thought about the missing friend, Douglas Duncan, and wondered if there was a connection. Maybe Billy had wanted to vanish, his mother thought. People do that sometimes. Maybe he was with Duncan. The Big Thicket was so desolate that a search seemed pointless. People had been vanishing in the thicket for years, and hardly any of them had ever been found except by accident.
That’s how they found the coach. A berry picker discovered the body near a logging trail in Polk County, near a section of the Big Thicket National Preserve. Like many areas of the thicket, that one had been clear-cut and replanted in nursery pines by lumber companies. The big hardwoods were long gone, and so were the birds and animals; it had become what folklorist Bill Brett called “a pine desert.” There were vehicle tracks near the body, and some of the pine saplings had been broken or had bark skinned away as the vehicle passed over them.
Traces of pine bark were found underneath Hurley Fontenot’s pickup, and when they were examined by an expert at Stephen F. Austin they proved identical to samples found near the body. The authorities also found bloodstains on the truck, though it had been washed the day following the murder. On April 23, one day after the body was found, Texas Ranger Tom Walker summoned Hurley Fontenot to the sheriff’s office in Liberty. The principal assumed that he had been called in for routine questioning and talked freely to the Texas Ranger and to lawmen from Liberty and Polk counties. He didn’t bother to consult his brother, even though Waller’s law office was only about two blocks away. Talking without benefit of counsel turned out to be a mistake. Lawmen surprised him with questions about the pine bark and flustered him with questions about the anonymous letter typed on the motel registration form.
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