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 5 of 5)

Kathy drove home frantically and stumbled out of the car, calling Lance’s name. She felt something giving way inside her, like dominoes falling, one by one. “Is Lance all right?” she screamed as she ran toward the house. “Is Lance all right?”

But it was her husband she found inside, sprawled in the hallway, one bullet in his back and another in his brain. Her son was over at Kim’s, sobbing so uncontrollably he could hardly speak.

LANCE INITIALLY TOLD THE POLICE THAT he had found his father in the house. Then, when a detective in the interrogation room gently asked him if he would like to say a prayer for Bill, he put his hands to his face. He confessed that he had jogged past Kim Maywald’s house that morning and tried to assure her that “everything was going to be cool with my dad,” but upon returning home, he saw his father getting out of his truck, an angry look on his face. Lance realized that his father had been following him again. “It was going through my mind that I could make the pain quit hurting by killing my dad,” he said in his confession. He got the .38 revolver that Bill kept in a kitchen cabinet. After his father, wearing only a towel, came out of the bathroom, Lance shot him in the back. “I said, ‘I’m sorry, Dad.’ He turned and he said, ‘Call 911,’ and he was holding his chest and that’s when I pointed and fired the second shot.” The second shot hit Bill in the middle of the forehead.

The news of the killing hammered North Richland Hills. Like a chorus from a Greek tragedy, many of the Butterfields’ neighbors lamented why no one had done anything to prevent it. They argued whether Lance had committed an act of madness or an act of justice. Kids at the high school wrote “We Love You Butter” on the windows of their cars. Bill’s former teammate Richard Sloan told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that the only thing Bill wanted was “the best for his kid.” At the funeral, a couple of the pallbearers squabbled over the truth of the stories about Bill’s abuse.

Kathy, Billy, and Sandy arrived at the Tarrant County District Attorney’s office to ask that the murder charges be dropped, saying they preferred to handle the situation as “a family matter.” But the prosecutors announced that Lance’s trial would send a clear message to teens about the crime of parricide. Lance was eighteen, the prosecutors said, old enough to be accountable for his own life. He was a straight-A student; he knew there were places to turn for help. What’s more, they said, Lance was in no imminent danger that day. Bill was defenseless, coming out of the shower. Just because Lance had a turbulent relationship with his father didn’t give him the right to commit murder in the first degree.

About the only one who didn’t take part in the debate was Lance himself. For days he sat in jail, saying little to anyone. When his mother came to visit, he stared at her through the thick, fingerprint-stained glass that divided them, barely holding on to the telephone that connected them. One psychiatrist who arrived to interview Lance wondered if he was experiencing the kind of post-traumatic stress disorder seen in combat veterans. When Lance met with Randy Price, a well-known forensic psychologist, the boy said, “It’s not like I killed my father. It’s like I don’t have a father anymore.” Price speculated that Lance was subconsciously disassociating himself from the shooting, drifting deeper into denial.

After his release on bail, Lance took correspondence courses in the spring of 1996, earning his high school diploma. He enrolled at a nearby junior college. He called Kim a few times and wrote her letters, but she insisted the relationship was over. When she realized they were taking classes at the same junior college, she transferred to another campus. “Some of his friends believe that if I hadn’t broken up with him back in the fall, he wouldn’t have killed his dad,” Kim said one afternoon, sitting with her mother at the kitchen table. “But I think he was always hoping his dad would die. When he told me on the phone from jail one night how he did it, I hung up and started crying and went downstairs and said to my mom, ‘Mom, Lance is a murderer.’”

The trial was postponed for nearly two years. On the first day of testimony last August, the courtroom was over�owing with spectators, most of them Lance’s supporters. Bill’s older sister �ew in from California to testify that Lance should be given probation. “Lance has been in prison since the day he was born,” she said. A psychiatrist testified that the Butterfield home was like a concentration camp. Kathy herself testified that Lance was driven to kill his father because “he had no help from me, no help from anyone in the community.”

Lance’s lead defense lawyer, Jeff Kearney of Fort Worth, knew that if the boy was to have a chance at probation, he would have to take the stand and fully explain what he did. But Lance remained reluctant to talk about the years of abuse. Finally, the evening before Lance was to testify, Kearney’s co-counsel, Greg Westfall, asked Lance to write a letter to his dead father, thinking the exercise might help him break through his wall of reserve. Late that night, after everyone in his house was asleep, Lance pulled out some notebook paper and began to write. He wrote a sentence, then stopped. He wrote another sentence, then stopped again. “Dear Dad,” the letter began. “You’ll never know how much I admired you. You’ll never know how much I loved you. Why weren’t you able to love me back?”

When Lance took the stand, he testified so powerfully about his father’s violence that some jurors blinked back tears. But prosecutor Mitch Poe interrogated him for mercilessly shooting his father a second time even after Bill asked his son to call 911. The jury split down the middle—six for probation and six for a prison term. One angry juror demanded a life sentence. After days of deliberations, the foreman passed the judge a note that read “We are close to coming to punches.”

After a mistrial was called, the lawyers on both sides, realizing that the chance of another hung jury was high, got together to negotiate. The district attorney’s office settled for a deal: a guilty plea to manslaughter in exchange for a three-year sentence. Lance’s attorneys declared it a victory. In the courtroom, Lance hugged his mother good-bye, asked a few friends to check on her daily, and was led away in handcuffs.

“Dad, I just wanted our family to be a happy family. Was that too much to ask?”

AT THE STATE PRISON IN BEAUMONT, he stays in shape by doing arm curls with buckets filled with water. He attends church and a Bible-study class, and he is taking college correspondence courses. He keeps his hair neatly combed, his uniform spotless, and he is unfailingly polite around the guards. “They yell and cuss a lot at the new prisoners to see if they can get under our skins,” Lance says with a thin smile. “It’s not a problem for me. I’ve had a lot of experience with yelling.”

He is still having trouble coming to grips with what he did. “When I think about it,” he says, staring blankly at the floor, “I see a part of me leaving my body and walking down the hall and shooting my father. And there’s another part of me saying, ‘Don’t do it. Don’t do it.’”

He pauses, trying to maintain his composure, and says he isn’t sleeping well at night because of his dreams. In one of them, he is running like a racehorse across the football field, the crowd urging him on. He leaves his feet at just the right moment, suspended in the air as if �ying, and comes down with the ball. He turns to the crowd and sees his mother and older brother and sister applauding. He then sees another man, alone, in the top corner of the stands, his unblinking eyes fixed on Lance. It is the man who turned him into a star—and took away his childhood.

“Dad,” Lance calls out.

But the man never smiles, never waves.

After that dream, when he cannot sleep, Lance gets out his notebook and goes back to work on the letter he started during the trial. He changes it often, he says, trying to get the words right. He recently wrote that he forgives his father and that he hoped his father forgives him. “I still love you, Dad,” he wrote, then stopped.

When he gets out of prison, Lance says, he will go to his father’s grave and read him the letter. He will drop by the football field where the Richland Rebels played their championship season. Then he will go back to his home, the one that was once decorated with so many Christmas lights, and he will go through the front door, calling out his mother’s name to make sure she is safe.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5