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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Fontenot had no explanation for how the bark got under his truck. The night that the coach disappeared, he recalled, he had been staying at his sister’s vacant rent house in Raywood. He usually spent the night with his ex-wife—they had such an amiable divorce that they remarried last July—but since he was late arriving home that night, he chose not to disturb her. He remembered driving around a mud hole and suggested that maybe he had run over some saplings.
The lawmen crowded around Fontenot, who must have realized by now that this was more than just routine questioning. They were coming at him from every side. “What if we had some evidence that you had checked on them [at the motel]?” Ranger Tom Walker asked. “For what reason would you have checked on them?” Another lawman told him they had witnesses who would testify that he had gone by the motel the following day and gotten a copy of the motel bill, but Fontenot flatly denied following Bill Fleming and Laura Nugent to the motel or writing the letter.
“That is incorrect,” he said. “I’ve never been to that motel in my life.”
“Those ladies sure seem to be real positive about you doing that,” Walker told him. “And of course the one that done that is probably the one who mailed the letters and [schemed] to discredit the coach . . . with his affair with Laura. You didn’t have anything to do with that?”
“No, sir! Emphatically no,” Hurley Fontenot declared.
The principal supplied his interrogators with a detailed account of his activities the day that the coach vanished. He remembered having lunch with the coach and others on the staff. Fleming made several phone calls during the lunch break and appeared to be “emotionally upset.” Shortly before three, Fontenot told his secretary that he was driving to Houston to pick up his daughter at the airport. Walking toward his truck, he met the coach and gave him a ride to his own truck, which was parked near the field house. The principal recalled that they talked about a lesson plan the coach intended to complete over the weekend. That was the last time he saw the coach.
From school, Fontenot said, he drove to the post office in Raywood, then filled his truck with gas and headed toward Hobby airport. When his daughter failed to arrive on the Southwest flight from Austin, he drove to Intercontinental Airport, thinking he had gotten the schedule mixed up. There were no Southwest flights from Austin to Intercontinental, but he had a parking receipt to prove he had been there. He stopped for gas in Dayton and ran into two friends—by now it was nearly six-thirty—and then drove to the races in Vinton, Louisiana. It was nearly mid-night when he went to his sister’s house.
During the long interrogation, the principal gave the coach a glowing report, calling him “one of the most dedicated teachers I’ve had.”
“You liked Bill a great deal, then,” Ranger Walker said. “Thought a lot of him.”
“You doggone right,” the principal said. “I cried four times today.”
The Ranger asked the principal why anyone would want to kill the coach, and Fontenot said that he had no idea. He had heard a radio report about drugs and about the disappearance of Fleming’s former partner, the principal said, but as far as he knew it was all speculation.
The lawmen made it clear that they thought Fontenot might have planted drugs in Fleming’s apartment. If the coach had used cocaine, neither Linda Fleming nor Laura Nugent knew it. Linda speculated that maybe Douglas Duncan had given her husband the cocaine, but that didn’t make a lot of sense. Nobody in his right mind hides cocaine in a medicine cabinet. What was more, Fleming hadn’t seen his former partner in at least two years. Laura Nugent recalled that only a month before his death, Fleming had tried again to locate his missing friend and had told members of his family that he believed Duncan was dead.
Pervading Evil
The principal’s trial was scheduled to start in Polk County on August 19 but was later reset for November 18. As the summer wore on, rumors as fat and thick as mosquitoes swarmed over Liberty County. Some of the stories were loosely rooted to events of the crime: the alleged motel pictures gave rise to a story of a porno ring. Others came completely out of the blue. There was one rumor that the coach had been fired from his job in Anahuac for messing around with a teen-age cheerleader. Backyard wags even concocted a scenario in which Fleming was still alive and hiding in South America. All of those stories were ridiculous, but the fact that almost everyone had heard them cast a shadow over the trial.
Some of the strangest rumors concerned Laura Nugent. For someone who had lived almost her entire life in the community, she was a true enigma. Some people said that she had once ridden with the Hell’s Angels. The truth was, her first husband had owned a motorcycle. “He was like the Fonz on Happy Days,” a friend says. Laura had never ridden with the Hell’s Angels or done much of anything else. The most exciting part of her life was her two years in Houma, Louisiana, with her second husband. When he decided to come back to Liberty County, she believed that she had no choice but to follow. She had dreamed of leaving the thicket, dreamed it many times, but for some reason she had never been able to make the move. She loved Billy Mac Fleming partly because he had promised to take her away. He had applied for a teaching position at Galena Park, and they had talked about opening their own carpet company. Now that dream was dead too. “Billy was my last chance for happiness,” she says.
As for Hurley Fontenot, about half the community seemed convinced that he was guilty, and the other half swore he wasn’t capable of such a crime. “There is no way he could kill,” says Wiley Smith, owner of the Liberty Gazette. Smith, who was white, wrote an editorial blasting Sheriff E. W. “Sonny” Applebe after the sheriff told a Beaumont TV crew that Hurley was “guilty as sin.”
The mood of the town was almost as volatile as the fierce and ominous thunder-storms that hit southeastern Texas the first week in July. The normally diffuse light of the thicket turned purple and then black as wind lashed the trees and torrential rains swelled the rivers and creeks. By the afternoon of the Fourth of July, the storms had moved out of Liberty County, but you could still see dark clouds and occasional lightning flashes. At a backyard barbecue in Daisetta, the guests appeared apprehensive, as people do when events do not follow the natural order. A screen door slammed suddenly, startling the birds and causing a man who was chewing on a pork rib to flinch and freeze for an instant. He watched a woman carrying a rifle move beneath a canopy of Spanish moss, toward some cows that had wandered too close to her garden, and he flinched again as she fired a shot into the air and shook her fist at the retreating cattle.
The murder was old news by now, but the sense of pervading evil was thicker than ever. The feeling was nearly unanimous that no matter what happened at the trial, the mystery—and the threat—would remain.
Many people at the barbecue stood behind the principal, though some of them resented a letter he had written to the Gazette soliciting money for his defense. At the urging of his brother Walter Junior, Hurley had hired a top criminal attorney from Houston, Dick DeGuerin, who used to work under Percy Foreman.
“I didn’t think he did it till he hired that big-name lawyer,” said a man in overalls and a gimme cap.
A rancher who was weaving hatbands from strands of horsehair considered the murder but didn’t speak for a time. His two sons had studied agriculture ten years ago at Hull-Daisetta and had loved Hurley Fontenot. “I know Hurley,” he said at last. “He’s a quality man. He’s no killer.”
A mother said, “All I know is for seventeen years we loaded our kids up and let them go all over the country with Hurley.”
Those who could bring themselves to believe that the principal was capable of murder were nevertheless puzzled by the apparent motive. On one level it didn’t make sense. But emotions were high in Liberty County, and they would probably be just as high in Polk County, where the trial would take place. A skillful prosecutor could argue that this thing had been building for months, that the defendant had ulcers, a bum heart, and debts up to his eyeballs, that he was struggling and doing everything he could just to hang on—and while all this was happening, some hunk, some outsider, came along and took his girl. Whatever anyone might prove or even say about Billy Mac Fleming, he was an outsider. That was motive enough for some people.
An oil-field worker who had been squatting by the back porch drinking beer and tossing pieces of bread to a hound observed one more thing that no jury in this part of Texas could overlook. The principal was black. He may not have looked black, but he was, and the jury would know it from the outset. “Yes, sir!” he said. “He got to going with that white woman and couldn’t let go of it.”
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