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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At thanksgiving, 1996, Bernie went alone to see his sister, telling her that Mrs. Nugent had decided to spend the holiday in Ohio with the one sister she was still talking to. At Christmas, Bernie decorated Mrs. Nugent’s home, but he again told those who asked that Mrs. Nugent was in Ohio. Early that spring, he began telling people that Mrs. Nugent was in bed because of an illness and not accepting visitors. By late spring, he said she was in a nursing home outside Carthage, recuperating from a stroke. He told Lloyd Tiller, who was concerned that Mrs. Nugent had not answered any of the messages he had left on her home phone, that she was losing her mind and perhaps had Alzheimer’s.
Tiller says he didn’t entirely believe Bernie’s explanations, but it never occurred to him that Bernie might have harmed her. Ruth Cockrell, a Carthage widow who was Mrs. Nugent’s first cousin, was also dubious: “I was worried something had happened to her, but I didn’t know who to talk to about it. Bernie was so beloved in Carthage that if I suggested he had done anything wrong, I would have been laughed out of town.”
Meanwhile, the maid continued coming to the empty estate to clean the house, and the yardmen kept cutting the yard. And Bernie kept giving: money for jet skis and pickup trucks, and to every student who performed in Panola College’s production of Guys and Dolls a $200 gift certificate to Boot Scootin’ Western Wear. In April Bernie performed with the Shreveport Chamber Singers. His solo rendition of Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer” was so heartfelt the audience gave him a prolonged ovation. In June he went on a Carthage Chamber of Commerce trip to Nashville to view a new Opryland exhibit honoring Tex Ritter. When he made sure to pay extra attention to one of the Carthage widows who had come along on the trip, pushing her through Opryland in her wheelchair, people patted him on the back and said, “Good old Bernie.”
Then, in early July 1997, an unidentified Carthage woman called the sheriff’s department and said she was worried about Mrs. Nugent—had anyone there seen her lately? Because of more pressing matters around town, sheriff’s deputies didn’t look into the matter for nearly a month. Bernie, whom they found in Las Vegas singing at a Panola College student’s wedding, explained that Mrs. Nugent was staying in a hospital in Temple under an assumed name and did not wish to be contacted. But deputies couldn’t find anyone at the hospital who matched her description. They called Mrs. Nugent’s son in Amarillo, and he came to Carthage with his eldest daughter to search the house. When she told a deputy how odd it was that the deep freeze had been taped shut, he took a look inside. At the bottom, wrapped in a white sheet underneath some frozen food, was Mrs. Nugent.
Not wanting to destroy evidence, the sheriff ordered his deputies to lift the entire deep freeze, with Mrs. Nugent still inside, onto a pickup truck and drive it to Dallas for an autopsy. (The deputies connected a gasoline-powered generator to the freezer to keep it working.) Other deputies spread through town looking for Bernie. They found him preparing to take a team of Little League baseball players and their parents to dinner. He seemed surprised that deputies wanted to ask him some questions. With officers looming over him in a small room at the sheriff’s department, Bernie tried to keep his composure. But he grew increasingly nervous, and he finally, calmly admitted to shooting Mrs. Nugent the previous November 19. He said he had used the same gun she made him buy to shoot armadillos. When asked why he killed her, Bernie looked at the officers in bewilderment, as if the answer were obvious. At last, he said that Mrs. Nugent had become “very hateful and very possessive.”
The uproar in Carthage over Bernie’s arrest was, in the words of Danny Buck, “like a bunch of fireworks going off.” After a group of women tried to raise the money to meet Bernie’s $1.5 million bond, the DAwent to the justice of the peace and filed additional theft charges against him (for stealing money from Mrs. Nugent’s account after she was dead) and got the bond raised to $2.7 million. He got so mad at the Reverend E. B. Beasley for publicly praying every Sunday for Bernie that, for a time, he stopped going to church. “Bernie is a con man and an accomplished actor,” Danny Buck kept telling anyone who would listen. “He duped a really nice, trusting town. He’s evil.”
IRS agents arrived in Carthage to charge Bernie with money laundering—it is estimated that he took more than $1 million from Mrs. Nugent—and Sheriff Ellett set off another round of fireworks when he said that certain Carthage men were seen on the videotapes confiscated from Bernie’s house. Soon there were rumors that everyone from elected city leaders to a DPS trooper to a sheriff’s deputy was seen on the tapes, engaged in what the local newspaper, the Panola Watchman, described as “misconduct.” One man showed up at a Carthage High School football game wearing a T-shirt that read “I’m the only one in Carthage NOT on the videotapes.”
Some of Bernie’s friends hired famous East Texas criminal defense attorney Clifton “Scrappy” Holmes to defend him. “Let’s face it, Bernie’s ox is in a ditch,” Holmes told me. He is reportedly trying to discuss a plea bargain for Bernie, which would be just fine with Danny Buck, who’s worried about finding an impartial jury in Panola County. “A couple of people have said to me that Bernie deserves to fry for what he’s done,” he says, “but I know there are a lot more who just want the whole thing to go away. They keep asking me if there aren’t some extenuating circumstances that would help his defense. And I think, ‘Good God-almighty, do people really think Mrs. Nugent was so mean to him that he had to shoot her in the back in self-defense?’”
That drove Bernie Tiede, the gentlest and most compassionate man in Panola County, to kill Mrs. Nugent? Many townspeople wonder if Bernie suddenly snapped and had a psychotic breakdown. They think he should plead temporary insanity. Danny Buck assumes that Mrs. Nugent finally discovered Bernie was looting her bank account and that Bernie panicked and shot her when she said she was going to expose him. But Bernie’s sister says that when she phoned him at the jail, he told her that there had been no particular problems that November day between him and Mrs. Nugent. They were about to go to Longview to run errands and have lunch when suddenly Bernie picked up the .22 rifle in the garage and started firing. He dragged Mrs. Nugent into the kitchen, put her in the freezer, and washed the blood off the garage floor with a garden hose. “He said, ‘I started thinking about having to live with her for the rest of her life, and I just couldn’t take it,’” recalls the sister. “He said, ‘I realized I couldn’t stand it another day.’”
But why on earth did Bernie leave Mrs. Nugent in the freezer for nine months? Sure, Bernie was used to being around dead bodies from his funeral home days. But Danny Buck admits that he probably never would have been able to file murder charges against Bernie if he had simply dumped her somewhere where she would never be found. “I don’t understand why Bernie didn’t put her in one of his little airplanes and fly her over the Gulf of Mexico and kick her out,” one of the town’s widows told me matter-of-factly.
According to Bernie’s sister, Bernie said that he couldn’t be so cruel as to abandon Mrs. Nugent.
“You couldn’t be so cruel?” the astonished sister asked. “Bernie, what were you going to do?”
In a very soft voice, Bernie said, “I want-ed to give Mrs. Nugent a proper burial. You know, everyone needs a proper burial.”
Mrs. Nugent did get her proper burial, in a small rural cemetery outside Carthage. Some of her relatives, who hadn’t spoken to her in years (including her sister in Carthage) came for the service, hoping in some way to say good-bye to a woman they never really understood. A granddaughter stood and sang “Amazing Grace.”
One Carthage widow, who didn’t make it to the funeral, later asked if Mrs. Nugent’s granddaughter had sung well. She said she was looking for a soloist for her own funeral now that she knew Bernie was going to be unavailable.
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