The Blood of the Farentholds
The mysterious disappearance of Sissy Farenthold’s youngest son is only the latest chapter in a tragic family history.
(Page 4 of 4)
IN THE EARLY DAYS OF APRIL 1989, Jimmy traveled to Houston and stayed with his mother for a couple of weeks. It had been a rough year so far for Jimmy, as Sissy well knew. He had been doing crack cocaine, and once she discovered him lying unconscious on a bed with drug paraphernalia strewn about him. But now he was attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, sometimes as many as four a day. One late night, while they strolled the streets of River Oaks, Jimmy told Sissy that he wanted to straighten his life out. He was really trying, he said. “But, Sis, it’s not one day at a time for me,” he admitted. “It’s one second at a time.”
He told her that a friend of his had successfully undergone drug treatment at a center in West Palm Beach. He would make all of the arrangements, if Sissy would put up the money. Jimmy’s earnestness impressed her; she said that she would. Jimmy booked a plane reservation for Monday, April 17, 1989.
Sissy was in Washington on April 17. After she returned and failed to hear from Jimmy, George Farenthold called the treatment center. They told him that Jimmy had not arrived. Sissy’s heart sank. Jimmy had duped her again. A few months later, Sissy got a refund for the unused Pan Am ticket. Sissy placed the receipt in a folder, next to a voucher representing a trip to Vienna Jimmy was supposed to have taken with her a few months before. He hadn’t made that flight either—he was in Corpus Christi at the time, doing crack with a friend.
“There had been times where he would be gone four, five, or six months, and we wouldn’t hear from him,” she says today. “So it was one of those things you might worry about—but it wasn’t unique.” Her concern began to mount after talking with those who had been close to Jimmy. A friend in Fort Worth had spoken to him by phone on the morning of April 14. Jimmy had told the friend that he had no intention of going to the Florida treatment center. Instead, he was going to San Antonio to visit his sister Emilie’s husband, Alan Stewart. For some time now, Alan had been holding on to a sum of money that he had indicated he might give to Jimmy for the purpose of starting a legitimate business, once Jimmy got straight. “When I get the money,” Jimmy told the friend, “I’m going to get some of my things, and I’m going to come up to Fort Worth, and I’m going to get a new place and a new car and a new job, and I’m going to have a new life.” To the friend, he sounded sincere. Yet she had not heard from him since.
Sissy spoke with her son-in-law, Alan Stewart. Alan told her that Jimmy had flown in to see him on April 16. He wanted money, and while Alan was loath to hand over a bundle of cash to a drug addict, he assured Jimmy that he and other family members would do all they could to set Jimmy up in some kind of legitimate business once he successfully completed drug treatment. It appeared to Alan that Jimmy’s commitment to getting straight was wavering: He was already worrying that the center might be too harsh, that he might need a car so that he wouldn’t feel imprisoned, that he might have to postpone his trip to attend to a few matters back in Corpus Christi. Still, he told his brother-in-law he intended to make it to Florida, and Alan dropped Jimmy off at the airport that afternoon, feeling no reason to doubt him.
A call came in from an Austin couple who had served as one of Jimmy’s surrogate families. They had been in fairly constant contact with Jimmy over the last few years and found it odd that he had not called them recently. A similar call came from a friend in Corpus Christi, who would tell several people that she had spoken to Jimmy on the phone on April 29. Jimmy told the friend he would be traveling to the Florida treatment center soon and wanted to see the friend before leaving. The two made plans to meet, but Jimmy never showed up. The friend later visited Jimmy’s house and found no one home, but noticed that Jimmy’s driver’s license was sitting on the kitchen table. The friend was worried—and now so was Sissy Farenthold.
In June 1989, two months after Jimmy’s last known contact, Sissy and her daughter, Emilie, paid a visit to the San Antonio Police Department and filed a missing persons report. The officers were not altogether encouraging. Your son’s an adult, they said. Even if we locate him, he’s entitled to his privacy. The police assured Sissy that they would do what they could. But she returned to the department a year later and found that her son’s name had not been entered into the police computer. The months passed without any news about Jimmy. For Sissy Farenthold, the familiar fatalism was difficult to resist. Her son was burdened with all the family millstones. Jimmy was dyslexic, a free-bleeder, unhinged by tragedy, perilously addicted; a child of 33, part of him still waiting at the screen door for Vincent, the other part seeking to join his twin in death. He was the embodiment of an entire family’s degeneration. To hope for Jimmy was to ignore history.
ALL OF THIS REMAINED A QUIET family matter until the fall of 1991, when George Farenthold, Sr., six years divorced from Sissy, decided to launch a public crusade.
His role in the Farenthold family dynamic had been less noticeable to the public eye but at least as significant as Sissy’s. George was a heavy drinker, according to various family members, and often became verbally explosive after having a few too many. Frequently he directed his wrath at his children, particularly his three boys, who wore long hair and showed no signs of following in their father’s footsteps as military-minded aristocratic capitalists. They were more liberal than their father, and they took drugs, which George flushed down the toilet whenever he could. The boys were failures, and George let them know it.
“Jimmy was always my favorite,” he says today, but at times the father had a curious way of showing his affection. In early 1989, while George was moving his property to a new house in Corpus Christi, five of his valuable paintings were stolen. George accused Jimmy of being the thief. Jimmy was deeply offended by the charge and remained so up until the time of his disappearance.
Yet he continually sought his father’s approval, just as he had his mother’s. When George suffered a stroke in August 1988, Jimmy’s fear that his father would die was dramatically apparent to Sissy. It was hard to fathom Jimmy’s wandering off for good and not once checking in on his ailing father.
In the meantime, guilt gnawed at George Farenthold, now 75 and living alone with his memories, his conscience, and his advancing decrepitude. At times he would lash out at his absent son, saying he wished he could find Jimmy so that he could throw him in prison; at other times he would cry. “I want to see my son before I die,” he would say. The lack of news as to his son’s whereabouts taxed his patience, and the family’s obsession with grieving behind closed doors irked him. At three family meetings, Sissy and the Farenthold children urged George not to take drastic action, but the father was undeterred. He told his story to a reporter from the San Antonio Express-News, who then interviewed several friends of Jimmy’s, each of whom had been fuming over Sissy Farenthold’s unwillingness to air the matter publicly. Jimmy had always been a family embarrassment; perhaps, some suggested, Sissy was glad her son was gone. Or perhaps she was responsible for his being gone. Maybe she had had him institutionalized, they told the reporter, who published the unsubstantiated theory. She is hiding something, they insisted. Why else would a mother be silent about her missing son?
After the article appeared this past January, George Farenthold, Sr., found that his ex-wife and his children were not speaking to him. More family blood had been spilled, and there was nothing but pain to show for it. “I’m just as confused as I was the day I started,” the grieving father would say. No one had a clue where his son was—not the Nueces County Sheriff’s Department, not the two private detectives the family had hired, not a single relative or friend.
Today it has been three years since James Robert Dougherty Farenthold made his customary Mother’s Day telephone calls to his surrogate families; three years since he told friends in Corpus Christi he would return from the Florida treatment center a changed man; three years since he departed the edge, heading in one of two directions—but in either case, away from the family.
“IT WAS A THOMAS HARDY DAY,” Sissy Farenthold would say of the wet, ash-gray afternoon of February 4, 1992, when what was left of the great family gathered in Beeville to bury another one of their own. The forty-year-old man was Jimmy Farenthold’s second cousin, Sissy’s first cousin. The obituary would discreetly note that he had died accidentally. In truth he died of a drug overdose.
Had Jimmy Farenthold been there instead of wherever he is today, he might have been a pallbearer. In Jimmy’s absence, those who remained—though for how long, Lord?—bore the burden of their kin through the mud and the wind and laid him down next to the others who had fallen.
Under the darkening skies, they stood there for a time. Among them was Sissy, whose brown trench coat was wrapped tightly around her body and whose enormous sunglasses obscured the top half of her face. When she bowed her head at the prayer, her expression and all that it might tell the world was completely hidden from view. For that brief moment, she too had disappeared, and surely to a better world. Then the moment passed. The Catholic priest said all there was to say, after which Sissy Farenthold and her family turned to go, hastening before the storm clouds burst again.
My Library
