Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
Midnight in the Garden of East Texas
Marjorie Nugent was the richest widow in an eccentric town full of rich widows. Bernie Tiede was an assistant funeral home director who became her companion. When she disappeared, nobody seemed alarmed. When he confessed to killing her, nobody seemed outraged.
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Despite the questions about Bernie’s personal life, Carthage’s citizens couldn’t help but take a shine to him. Bernie clearly loved the small-town life of East Texas. At First United Methodist he was the tenor soloist in the choir, he taught Sunday school, and sometimes, when the minister was sick or on vacation, he gave the sermon. (“Let me tell you, he was doggone better than the paid preacher,” one elderly member says.) Bernie got involved with the drama and music departments at Panola College, and he became so renowned for his knowledge of Broadway musicals that he was asked to conduct the drama department’s performances of Showboat and Guys and Dolls. He sang with the Shreveport Chamber Singers, a professional singing group just across the state line, and he served on the chamber of commerce’s Christmas decorating committee, giving advice about where the lights and wreaths should be placed around the town square.
“He brought a lot of compassion to Car-thage,” says Paula Carter, a fellow church member and a counselor at the high school. “He was very quick to shake your hand and ask how you were doing, and if you told him you weren’t doing too well, he would drop everything to talk to you and see what he could do.” He sewed curtains for people who needed them, he helped others with their tax returns, and he began buying so many gifts for his new Carthage friends that, according to Lip-sey, “the UPS truck started arriving in Carthage every day with something that Bernie had ordered from a catalog.”
Born in Tyler, Bernie spent his earliest years in Kilgore, a 45-minute drive from Carthage, where his father was the chairman of the fine arts department at Kilgore Junior College. His mother died in a car wreck when he was only three, and his father, after remarrying and moving Bernie and his younger sister to Abilene, died after a long illness when Bernie was fifteen. To help support himself and his sister, Bernie took an after-school job at an Abilene funeral home, first doing yard work and then helping out at the funerals. “I really think that because of the loneliness he went through in his childhood, Bernie made it his calling to serve people in times of their own need,” says his sister, a Central Texas social worker who asked not to be identified. “He wasn’t a dour boy. He was popular at high school, and for kicks he’d sneak the hearse on Fridays out of the funeral home and drive a bunch of us around Abilene. But he said a long time ago that he was meant to take care of others—and I think that’s why the funeral business appealed to him.”
He received an associate’s degree in mortuary science from McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, worked at a funeral home in town, and in 1985 came to work in Carthage, living in a small apartment just behind the Hawthorn Funeral Home. “He was probably the most qualified young man I have ever seen,” says Lipsey. “He waited well on the families, he would sing solos behind the screen during the funeral, and he was a darned good embalmer. He had a talent of making the hair of the deceased look really natural.”
He was especially empathetic with older ladies who had just lost their husbands. He led them weeping to a sofa in the parlor, handed them handkerchiefs, quoted comforting Scripture, and stood close to them at the interment, always prepared to catch them in case they fainted as their husbands’ caskets were lowered into the earth. In the weeks after the funeral, he would call the widows, offering to pick up their medicines at the drugstore. Some of them loved him so much that they told their children that Bernie had to sing at their funeral when they passed on. “With that nice tenor voice of his, I just knew Bernie could sing me right into heaven,” one Carthage widow says.
Carthage is full of well-to-do widows who have inherited small fortunes from their rich husbands. Some of them can be seen driving their huge Cadillacs up and down the town’s streets, occasionally bumping into trees or stop signs when their tiny feet miss the brake pedal. They are a spirited bunch, even if they are somewhat behind the times. Speaking to me on the phone, one widow said that a man who had just delivered lunch to her house knew Bernie. “Chris,” she said to him, “why don’t you tell this reporter what you know. Shall I introduce you as Negro, black, or colored?”
Bernie was not partial outright to the wealthier widows. One of the first women he took a special interest in was Gracie Duke, the widow of a mechanic. When she complained about an ache in her bones, Bernie felt so sorry for her that he took her to Hot Springs, Arkansas, so she could sit in the baths. But he would eventually give the most attention to the richest widow in Carthage—Mrs. Marjorie Nugent, who arrived at Hawthorn in March 1990 for the funeral of her husband, who was worth between $5 million and $10 million.
Born in 1915 just outside Carthage—her father ran a grocery—Marjorie Mid-yette attended Louisiana Tech, where she met R. L. “Rod” Nugent, who had recently graduated from the school with an electrical engineering degree. After their marriage, Nugent took a job with Magnolia Oil (which later became Mobil), and the two of them lived throughout Louisiana, New Mexico, and Texas, spending more than a dozen years in Midland, where their only child, Rod Junior, was raised.
In 1989, at the end of his career, the eldest Nugent decided to bring his wife back to her hometown. He bought controlling interest in the First National Bank of Carthage, and the couple built a sprawling, six-thousand-square-foot stone home at the edge of town, surrounded by a stone wall and electronic gates. Although Mrs. Nugent rarely left the estate, it wasn’t long before she became the talk of the town. Curious neighbors learned that she refused to speak to her own sister, who was also a Carthage resident (another sister lived in Ohio), because of an argument the two had back in the eighties over their dead mother’s estate. Mrs. Nugent had so many disagreements with her son, who had become a prominent Amarillo pathologist, that she would only occasionally speak to him. According to most locals, she acted as if she was too good for Carthage. “If she had held her nose any higher,” one man once said of her, “she would have drowned in a rainstorm.” It was said that when she made an appearance at the bank, she sat in a chair in the lobby and barely nodded to people. She didn’t participate in any civic activities or contribute to worthy Carthage causes, and she seemed to hate spending money around town. When a local veterinarian told her that he would charge $45 for treating her dog, she argued with him until he lowered his price.
Even those close to her admit that she was imperious and critical, lashing out at whoever disappointed her. “If she liked you, she sent lovely birthday cards and thank-you notes,” says Lloyd Tiller, one of her stockbrokers. “But you had to cater to Margie and constantly flatter her. She could throw a temper tantrum if everything didn’t go her way.” A close relative, who wishes to remain anonymous, says that there were times when Mrs. Nugent seemed to lapse into a low-level clinical depression: “It was like these blue periods came on, and when they did, she could be very biting in her comments to people. Margie was a very difficult woman to love.”
Much of the gossip about Mrs. Nugent was, no doubt, exaggerated. “She wasn’t all that unfriendly, but she didn’t go out of her way to be friendly, which can mean a lot in a small town,” says a teacher at the high school. Nevertheless, when Mr. Nugent died unexpectedly of heart failure, only a handful of people came to the funeral to offer her their condolences. Bernie Tiede would later tell others that he could see the loneliness etched in Mrs. Nugent’s stern face as she stood by the casket. When Mrs. Nugent started shivering, Bernie gave her his coat. At the funeral service, held in the chapel, he sang a hymn, then he helped Mrs. Nugent to her car for the trip to the cemetery.
In the months after the funeral, the only person who took an active interest in Mrs. Nugent’s well-being was Bernie Tiede. “I don’t know if Mrs. Nugent had a single friend in town other than him,” admits Danny Buck. Bernie would arrive at her estate for lunch, leave little notes of endearment for her around the house, and take her to see theatricals at the local college. Says Tiller: “Bernie made her smile, he gave her plenty of attention, he was an excellent conversationalist. It was like he made her feel young again.”
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