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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Bill ordered Lance to drive over to Kim’s house and break up on the night of her seventeenth birthday. When Lance asked if he could wait for another night, Bill grabbed him by the shirt and snarled, “Don’t you ever f—ing talk back to me again.” Lance arrived at Kim’s birthday party and asked her to step outside. With tears in his eyes, he told her it was over. He said his father had told him he wasn’t even supposed to look her way during computer class. “I said, ‘Lance, you are eighteen years old. Your father can’t control your life forever,’” Kim recalls. “And he said, ‘I know, I know. But you don’t know what my dad can be like.’”
Lance did get back on track in football. After his two interceptions against the Haltom Buffalos in October, he was named one of the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s players of the week. Richland fans proudly shook Bill’s hand, but he was not satis-fied. “Lance could have had three,” Bill snapped to one father. Bill told Parkey that Lance needed to be tougher for the upcoming playoffs. “I need to get the pussy out of that boy,” he said.
Like other parents, Parkey used to chuckle at what he called Bill’s “eccentricities”—to lose weight, Bill once went for weeks eating only Rice Krispies—but now Parkey was becoming genuinely alarmed. He knew that before each game, Bill would take a Vicodin, a powerful prescription painkiller, and sometimes he’d take another at halftime. Yet at one game the relaxant had little effect. Wearing a camou�age hunter’s suit to keep warm, Bill rose and screamed at the coaches, “You f—ing idiots! Turn the page on your playbooks!” The whole side of the stadium turned to stare at him. Her hands shaking, Kathy kept filming with her video camera, too embarrassed to pull it away from her face.
Lance and Kim tried to keep their relationship alive, meeting in the back hallways at school or in darkened movie theaters. But Bill was determined to keep them apart. At a party for one of the football players, Bill was spotted half a block away, sitting motionlessly in his truck, staring at the player’s house, the exhaust from the truck’s engine muttering softly against the pavement. Lance, his head lowered in shame, told his teammates that his father was still following him. After Kim’s parents learned that Bill had not stopped stalking their daughter, they complained to the North Richland Hills Police Department. To avoid further detection, Bill rented a car to follow Lance and Kim. One evening Lance and Matt Kates were driving around when Bill passed them, made a screeching U-turn, and came right up on their back bumper. “It’s your father!” Matt cried. “He’s going to run us off the road!” Bill, however, seemed content just knowing that his son had seen him. He followed them to a friend’s house and waited outside for several minutes before driving off.
Soon, alarms were going off all over the neighborhood. In late October word spread among the other players that Lance had shown up at the home of his friend Carl Prichard, asking if he could stay the night. When Kathy called looking for him, Carl’s mother could hear Bill in the background cursing and throwing things against the wall. Although the Prichards told Lance that he could stay with them as long as he wished, he returned home, saying his dad was just “a little high-strung.” But on a freezing night a few weeks later, dressed only in a pair of sweat pants, Lance pounded on a back window of Matt Kates’s house. He was shaking uncontrollably. Matt wrapped him in a bed cover, then held him. “My dad tried to strangle me,” Lance gasped. “He caught me on the phone with Kim, and he jumped on me and put his hands around my neck, and he started choking me.” Once again, Kathy tracked Lance down and told him that Bill had promised not to bother him as long as he came home. Lance was hesitant. Then Kathy pleaded, “Please come home.” Lance knew the meaning of her words. If he didn’t go, Bill was likely to explode and hurt her. Mrs. Kates heard Lance say over the phone, “Mom, I’ll come home for you.”
Lance’s teenage love affair had clearly loosed something in Bill Butterfield’s head. One night in November, when Wade and Arvettia Parkey were having dinner with Bill and Kathy, Bill suggested that they drive back to their old Fort Worth neighborhood. They piled into the car and cruised past the small, unlit homes where they grew up. Bill told Parkey to stop at the Amon Carter High practice field. While Kathy and Arvettia walked toward the end zone, Bill and Wade stood on the fifty-yard line. Under the dim glow of the moon, Bill looked into the distance and said, his voice trembling, “This is where it all ended for me, Wade. Right here, it all ended. All because of one night…one f—ing night.”
Several nights later, while cleaning the house, Kathy came across a little notebook hidden away in a desk drawer. She had seen her husband in previous weeks writing in it, but he had refused to tell her what he was doing. “This involves or is the past,” she read on one page. “Everything stems from past.” On another page was a short sentence about high school: “Junior Summer: Pain Every Summer Since.” And then, her heart in her throat, she came to the last entry: “I have to be able to express my hurt—my pain—my animosity toward you or I will die or worse hurt my kids more than I already have or us.”
Kathy later said that she felt as if she had walked into a Stephen King novel. Her husband was losing his mind. Still, she tried to convince herself that if the family could get through that last season—if Lance could play well enough to help get the Rebels to the playoffs—perhaps their lives could again be, well, “normal.”
Richland did win the district championship, but the Rebels were beaten in the first round of the playoffs by Grapevine High School, 45—28. It was a surprisingly lopsided loss; Lance did not play well. He seemed distracted throughout the entire game. For a long time afterward, Bill sat alone in the stands, the muscles of his forearm rippling as he squeezed his hand into a fist and relaxed it—back and forth, back and forth. Then he shrugged at Parkey and headed home. The next day he was back in the yard with Lance, putting him through new workouts to get him ready for baseball season.
To the Butterfields’ neighbors, the tension appeared to subside. When they were in the yard, Bill and Lance waved at friends who drove by. At the end of the fall semester, Bill allowed Lance to go on a Young Life ski trip to Colorado. Bill seemed relieved to learn that Kim, weary of the clandestine nature of her romance with Lance, had told him she wanted to date other boys.
What no one outside the family knew was that Bill had started beating his son again. While Bill had never hesitated during Lance’s high school years to pop him in the chest with his knuckles or push him against a wall, he had not paddled Lance since he was a freshman. But in early December he told Lance to go to his room and put on a thin pair of athletic shorts. He pulled out the wooden paddleball rackets he had recently bought at a toy store and wrapped together with duct tape. From another room, Kathy heard Bill bellow, “Your problem, Lance, is you didn’t get the shit beat out of you enough when you were younger.” She heard the whack of the paddle. “You going to be a mama’s boy and cry?” Bill roared at his eighteen-year-old son. “Is that what you’re going to do?”
Kathy was too afraid to intervene. She began preparing for the holidays. With Lance’s help, she got the Christmas decorations laid out in the yard, and she made sure the whole family came to the house on Christmas Day. Sandy was there—she was living temporarily at her parents’ home while she looked for a new apartment—and so was Billy, who was married and living nearby, working with his mother at the mattress factory. Lance sat in a corner of the room, saying little. He politely handed his father a present, a couple of old John Wayne movies; his father handed him one in return, a new shirt that Kathy had bought a few weeks before. Kathy gave Lance a framed photo of him making an interception.
The next day, Lance worked for a few hours at the mattress factory, then he came home and spent the rest of the day in his room, lying in bed. Bill asked him if he was sick, and Lance said no. “Then you need to get a workout in today,” Bill replied. Lance went for a run. The next morning, Bill told Lance that he needed to get in another run. Without a word, Lance went running again.
A few hours later, Kathy received a phone call at work from a hysterical Sandy. “Mom, something’s happened between Lance and Dad!”
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