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.
Teshannah says: I read this in school, It remindes me one of my friends father. I think they should find lance NOT giulty for the murder... (November 10th, 2009 at 1:31pm)
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Kathy Adams, the daughter of strict Baptists and one of the prettiest girls at school, told her friends that she didn’t like the way Butt cussed and that she was bothered by his temper. Still, like a lot of other girls, she sat by the phone every night, waiting for him to call. When they started dating, they were considered the ideal couple, voted favorites of their sophomore class. Then, in the summer of 1967, just before their senior year, word spread that Bill and Kathy were going to be married at a brief courthouse cere-mony. Kathy was pregnant. In one passion-filled teenage night, she and Bill had had sex on the fifty-yard line of Amon Carter’s football field.
The news stunned the whole school—the whole city, even. Under the headline WEDDING BELLS CRIPPLE WINGS OF THE EAGLES, the Fort Worth Press reported that Bill Butterfield would no longer be playing for Amon Carter; the school had a rule against married students playing varsity sports. Just like that, the great Butt’s career was over. He and Kathy moved to a tiny duplex to start their new life.
He continued to keep himself in top physical condition, running up and down the bleachers at a high school stadium. “You know Bill had to be deeply disappointed about leaving Carter and losing a chance at a scholarship,” says Bill Crawford, a former teammate. “But he had a way of keeping things hidden.” Telling none of his friends, he attended an open tryout for the Dallas Cowboys in the early seventies; he put weights in his shoes so he would be heavier on the scales at the weigh-in. Bill was cut after the first round. When Kathy tried to give him a hug when he came home, Bill suddenly reached back with his fist closed, two knuckles sticking out, and popped her so hard in the chest that she thought one of her breasts was going to cave in. “You keep away from me, you f—ing bitch!” he shouted. “You keep away!”
At the time, she later said, she assumed that he was just frustrated. But his anger kept building, especially around the children. “He told me that his children were going to grow up right,” Kathy recalls. “And he said that you raise a child like you raise a dog. You beat them until they obey.” He would slap their hands if they touched a glass vase on the coffee table or if they accidentally spilled their food at a meal. When they got older, he began using a solid oak paddle, three and a half feet long and three quarters of an inch thick. Kathy lost count of the times she watched him coming down the hall, slapping the paddle into his palm, his shadow bobbing along the walls. He would tell the kids to put their hands on the edge of their bed and bend over. They learned to take their licks without making a sound. If they ever cried out, their father would only hit them harder. Sometimes he would hand the paddle to Kathy. “Your turn,” he would say, his voice stabbing into her ear. Trembling, she would try to get away with a halfhearted swipe, but Bill would grab her hair or kick her in the back. “Harder, you bitch! You’re the one who taught these kids to disobey!”
Kathy was not strong. She was not a fighter. Only one time, a few years into their marriage, had she tried to leave, carrying young Billy and Sandy to the car and racing to her parent’s home. But Bill followed them, nearly knocking the door down to get to her, pushing her elderly father against the wall and telling him to stay out of his business. Kathy realized that if she ever tried to hide from Bill again—if she and the children went into one of those underground programs she had read about in Good Housekeeping—he would abandon the home, the mattress plant, everything he owned, just to find them. She decided she had no choice but to return home and, for the children’s sake, try to make everything feel as normal as possible. She bought sports posters to cover up the dents in the doors Bill had kicked in. She cooked large meals and smiled lovingly at all times. When Richard Sloan drove past their home one afternoon and saw her in the driveway in a rubber sweat suit, with one end of a rope tied around her waist and the other end tied to the back of a car, she put on her best smile and waved cheerfully and called out, “Bill is just helping me lose weight.” Shrugging at Sloan as if the whole scheme were Kathy’s idea, Bill began pulling Kathy around the block, forcing her to run at full speed. Her breaths came in little whoops. But Kathy kept smiling.
“He pretty much controlled everything that went on in the house—everything we ate, everything we did,” Sandy said later. “It was like walking around on eggshells. We just tried real hard not to do anything wrong.” Lance became an expert at acting like the model child, going to school every day wearing crisp, button-up shirts, neatly tucked in. Even his jeans were ironed. “Our parents would hear us tell stories about Lance spending two hours working on a single calculus problem, and they’d ask us why we couldn’t be more like him,” says one of Lance’s friends and football teammates, Jason Meng. Besides his straight A’s, he was such a perfectionist in sports that “when he made the smallest mistake, he would hang his head in embarrassment,” says Coach Briscoe. “We didn’t have to get on him because he was already so hard on himself.”
“You don’t understand the straw that broke the camel’s back, but there is one.…When it happened to me—you didn’t understand you still don’t.”
DURING THE FIRST FOOTBALL PRACTICES of Lance’s senior year, a pretty girl began jogging around the track that circled the practice field. Kim Maywald was a clear-complexioned, brunette junior with a perky personality and a way of giving boys long, lingering looks. And when Kim loped around that track, she aimed those looks at Lance.
In the past, plenty of girls had slipped Lance romantic notes, but he kept his distance. Although he had never been told the reason his father’s football career ended—Bill didn’t want any of the children to learn the story of Kathy’s teenage pregnancy—he had been warned many times by his father to limit his extracurricular activities to sports. “You don’t want those girls turning you into their pacifier,” a disgusted Bill often said.
But Lance and Kim found themselves in the same computer class that fall semester. He started walking her down the hall, and soon he was holding her hand while she dug the point of her chin into the muscle of his shoulder. For Lance, the experience of a first girlfriend must have been overwhelming. He bought Kim stuffed animals. He wrote her lavish love notes, which she kept in a shopping bag under her bed. In them he called her “my little cowgirl” and “my snugglebunny” and always concluded with the phrase: “With all my love from the bottom of my heart to the top of the sky…Butter.”
To keep the relationship a secret from his father, Lance met Kim at Young Life meetings, and afterward they slipped away in his new pickup, parking on a remote street next to a golf course. But Bill already knew something was going on. From his position at the top of the bleachers during Richland’s practices, he had seen the looks that passed between Kim and Lance. He began getting in his pickup and tailing Lance whenever he left home at night. He also began staking out Kim’s house, even following her to and from school, sometimes making Kathy come along with him. “He became obsessed with Lance and this girl,” says Kathy. “I remember him saying, ‘That little bitch Kim is going to ruin everything for us!’ And I thought, ‘What does he mean by us?’”
Bill had planned carefully for Lance’s senior year. To make his son more muscular, Bill was giving him ten to fifteen pills every morning—vitamins, liver pills, protein supplements, and metabolic boosters. At the end of each school day, he was at the locker room with a protein drink for Lance. Then, in the third game of Richland’s season, Lance mistimed an interception attempt that led to a touchdown for the other team. A few days later, a devastated Bill Butterfield appeared at Coach Briscoe’s office and confessed, “I think his mind is on other things.”
“Bill, it was just one pass,” replied a perplexed Briscoe. “Lance will be fine.”
“Coach, I’ll get him back on track for you.”
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