Honor Thy Father

They seemed like the perfect team. Bill Butterfield was a former Texas high school football star, renowned for his speed and power. His son Lance, a gifted defensive back, was determined to follow in his footsteps. But in Lance’s senior year—his championship season—something went wrong. A story of youth and passion, obedience and trust, insanity and murder.

by Skip Hollandsworth

June 1998

(Page 2 of 5)

But no one doubted his knowledge of sports. “He’d talk to you about your kids and how they were doing,” Parkey says, “and he could point out flaws in their baseball swings or the way they tackled. And he was happy to talk to the kids when they needed extra motivation.” He didn’t hesitate to tell other parents that sports was the best way to instill discipline and drive in a child’s life. In fact, even though Bill was the president of the mattress company, it was Kathy who went to work each morning to run the business—Bill spent most of his time training his children. When Billy was in the second grade, Bill set up daily workouts for him, having him do pull-ups from the top bar of the swing set and then run wind sprints in the yard. He later taught Billy to be a switch-hitter, and he took him to a park and pitched batting practice to him for hours while Kathy, Sandy, and Lance, who was then just a toddler, shagged balls in the outfield. Bill had Sandy playing softball and basketball, and he told her that if she wanted to be a cheerleader, as her mother had been, she would need to develop a better body, which meant eating less. He kept her away from all sweets and carbonated drinks, and he went so far as to order for her when they went to restaurants.

Some parents, of course, were disturbed by Bill’s obsession with his children. During Billy’s baseball games, Bill sat in the stands until Billy came to bat. Then he walked to the backstop to critique his swing. Once, during a critical inning, when the coach of Billy’s baseball team ordered him to bat right-handed, his natural way, an outraged Bill stormed onto the field and shouted at the coach, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? My boy is a switch-hitter!” At a youth-league football game one night, Bill ran out onto the field after a referee made a poor call against Billy, grabbed the ball from the referee’s hands, threw it into the darkness, and stomped off the field.

There was no question that Bill often let his competitive spirit get the best of him. Bill’s neighbors had also heard stories about his disciplinarian methods. According to one rumor, Bill had grounded Billy for a week for not playing well in a youth-league football game. One of Sandy’s girlfriends said that several times when she went over to the Butterfield house, an angry Bill met her at the door and demanded that she open her purse so he could make sure she was not sneaking in food for Sandy. Some parents had heard Wade Parkey tell the story about the evening in 1984 when he and his wife, Arvettia, invited Bill and Kathy over for a night of cards. After the Butterfields lost the first hand, Bill threw his cards at his wife and yelled, “You are a stupid f—ing bitch!” Parkey was shocked, at a loss for words. But Kathy quickly smiled, said, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and after a few minutes, the couple acted as if nothing had happened.

For all of his tantrums, however, Bill was liked well enough around the community that he was voted president of Richland High School’s booster club after Billy started school there. Parents flocked to the booster club meetings to hear Bill talk football—he could explain Richland’s veer offense to them as well as the coaches could. Even the high school coaches liked him. “To be honest with you, we didn’t see him as being that different than any other sports-oriented dad,” says Coach Briscoe. “And there was a lot to admire about him. He was a good teacher, especially the way he had trained Lance. You could tell that Lance was go-ing to make something of himself.”

“Definition of insanity,” he wrote on another page. “Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

ALTHOUGH NEVER A STAR, BILLY BUTTERFIELD did become a starter on Richland High School’s baseball and football teams, and Sandy did become a Richland High cheerleader. After they graduated, they left North Richland Hills, Billy for a junior college in Colorado and Sandy for Texas Tech University in Lubbock. By the time Lance started junior high school in 1989, he was the only child left.

Kathy used to call her youngest son “the gentle child.” Whenever Lance saw a cricket in the house, he’d catch it and set it free outside. He kept to himself, going straight to his room after school to study. Although Lance, like his brother, began a running and pull-up regimen once he reached the second grade, the truth was that Bill didn’t give him much attention during his early years, focusing mainly on Billy. Other parents noticed that the father would take his sons to the park and leave Lance alone for hours at a playground while he and Billy went off to another field to train.

But one afternoon, an assistant coach from Texas Christian University walked into a sandwich shop where the Butterfields were eating. He recognized the twelve-year-old Lance—under his father’s orders, Lance had attended TCU’s football clinic earlier that summer—and turned to Bill and said, “If your boy keeps his head on straight, he’s going to have a great future.”

Bill gave Lance a long, curious look—he seemed to be seeing his son for the first time. “And right at that point,” recalls Wade Parkey, “everything changed. I remember Bill saying to me, ‘Wade, Lance is my last chance. He can make it.’ I could see Bill’s whole demeanor changing. He was going to make his son a star.”

Bill had Lance jump rope daily in the driveway to improve his quickness, run up and down a hill near the house for endurance, and lift weights in the newly converted garage. He put Lance through rigorous football drills in the yard, making him backpedal furiously as if he were covering a wide receiver and then leap into the air as if to intercept a pass. Determined to make Lance a star in baseball too, Bill built a gigantic backyard batting cage, the size of batting cages at public parks, and he bought an electronic pitching machine. He installed �oodlights in the yard so that he and Lance could practice into the night.

At Bill’s instruction, Kathy made a steak and baked potato every night for Lance, and she was also in charge of taping all of his games. Afterward, Bill would go through the tape with Lance, pointing out his mistakes, rewinding the tape over and over to the same spot until Lance understood what he had done wrong. Lance studied the tapes intently, never moving from his seat. When his friends asked him to spend the night, Lance would tell them he was sorry, but his father wanted him to get up at six every morning for a five-mile run. When one friend invited him to his family’s lake house for the weekend, Lance said he couldn’t go because his father wouldn’t want him to miss two days of workouts. “I know that some of the boys would ask him, ‘Lance, why do you always do what your father wants?’” says Sharon Kates, a neighbor whose son Matt was the same age as Lance. “And his reply always was, ‘Because I respect him. He’s my father.’”

And as far as anyone could tell, Lance was willing to do anything for him. Late one afternoon, Wade Parkey pulled up to the Butterfield’s home and heard the sound of the pitching machine in the back yard. As he walked around the house, he heard Bill shouting.

“Watch the f—ing ball, Lance!…What is wrong with you?…Maybe this will teach you to keep your eyes on the ball!”

Parkey came around the corner and saw Lance cowering at the plate. Bill had aimed the pitching machine directly at his son, and the balls were spitting out at 60 miles per hour, bouncing off Lance’s body.

“Bill!” Parkey shouted. “What are you doing?”

Bill looked surprised. But he recovered quickly and said, “What the hell does it look like we’re doing, Wade? This is a concentration drill.”

Parkey stared at Lance, whose eyes were indecipherable. Then he saw that, from inside the house, Kathy was watching them through the family-room window, her hand frozen to her mouth. For a moment, he thought she was going to rush outside. But Bill’s eyes also turned to the window—and Kathy slowly backed away.

Lance broke the silence. “I’m sorry, Dad. I’ll do it right this time.” Then he resumed his batting stance, waiting for another ball to come �ying out of the machine.

On one page was the same sentence repeated thirteen times. “I wasn’t somebody else. I wasn’t somebody else. I wasn’t somebody else.…”

IN FORT WORTH IN THE MID-SIXTIES, nobody trained like Bill Butterfield. All summer long, wearing ankle weights, he ran six miles a day up and down the steep Trinity River levees, and then he went home and lifted barbells. During the ferocious two-a-day practices in August, he went the entire day without taking a drink of water—to make himself tougher. “He was a natural-born leader, an inspiration to the rest of us,” says former Amon Carter teammate Richard Sloan. With his wavy hair and a lopsided smile, Bill looked a little like James Dean. He tooled around the neighborhood in a ’55 Chevy, and he played the guitar and sang at the school talent shows.

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