The Secret History
Did Richard King, in collusion with Robert J. Kleberg, cheat his partner's heirs out of a piece of the King Ranch back in 1883? The Texas Supreme Court will soon decide whether this little-known but serious dispute can go to trial. Has the past come back to haunt the state's most storied spread?
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The architect of this consent judgment was a young attorney named Robert J. Kleberg, who contended that the deed for the Lewis half of the Rincón could not be found (although five years later it would turn up in the possession of a King Ranch lawyer). In 1881, following Helen Chapman's death, Kleberg began handling her case in Texas on behalf of her estate. In 1883 he wrote the estate's co-executor in South Carolina, telling him that he, Kleberg, had had no choice but to accept the settlement agreement because the court's term was about to end and it would be another two years before the next term. So, presented with a fait accompli, the South Carolina co-executor accepted the $5,811.75 payment specified by the consent judgment—and that, in the view of the Kings, was the end of it.
And it was—until Coker came along and looked at the facts in a new light. He zeroed in on the role played by Kleberg. What riveted Coker's attention was the fact, reported by Tom Lea, that in 1881 Richard King had placed Kleberg on a personal retainer of $5,000 a year. So from then until the final resolution in 1883 of Cause No. 1279, Helen Chapman v. Richard King, Kleberg was simultaneously representing the interests of his out-of-state client, the Chapman estate, and the interests of his in-state client, Richard King. This, one might say, is the J.R. moment in the history of the King Ranch.
In any event, things certainly worked out beautifully for Kleberg. Richard King chose him as the man who would manage the rancho after he was gone, and the year after King's death, Kleberg married the old captain's favorite daughter, Alice Gertrudis King. Thus it would be the Kleberg line that would preside over the King Ranch for over a century to come.
THE NEWS FROM BROWNSVILLE: HELEN Chapman's Letters From the Texas Military Frontier, 1848-1852, edited by Caleb Coker, was published by the Texas State Historical Association (in conjunction with the University of Texas) in the summer of 1992. Curiously, although it received excellent reviews, both in the daily press and in academic quarterlies, only one newspaper at the time, the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, took note of the explosive implications of the story told in its epilogue and footnotes. Ron George, a staff writer for the paper, interviewed both Ed Coker and Bruce Cheeseman for an article on the book that appeared on August 23, 1992; the most damaging stuff appeared in a sidebar that accompanied the article, headlined "King and Kleberg Fought Widow for Her Half Share of King Ranch." Coker was quoted as saying, "Richard King made his ex-partner's widow litigate to the death rather than pay her a penny. And by modern standards, Kleberg should have been disbarred."
After further research and the discovery of other documents brought to his attention by family members—including Major Chapman's account books showing payments to King for purchases of land—Coker approached a number of South Texas law firms seeking legal counsel for a lawsuit against mighty King Ranch, Incorporated. At first there were no takers. The attorneys thought the case was too old. Everything had happened so long ago. And there was the defendant, one of the most famous and powerful entities in the state. King Ranch, Inc., could put together a stable of top-flight attorneys in a heartbeat. The case appeared unwinnable.
Then Coker visited the Edwards Law Firm, whose sumptuous offices occupy two floors of the Frost Bank Center in downtown Corpus Christi. Bill Edwards and his associates agreed to take the case. They felt that it had intriguing, far-reaching implications regarding land rights in South Texas. They also thought they could win it.
William Warren Chapman, III, et al., Appellants, v. King Ranch, Inc., et al., Appellees, was filed in the Twenty-eighth District Court in Corpus Christi on April 20, 1995. The suit charged that the 1883 settlement was a conspiracy between Richard King, Robert J. Kleberg, and others that resulted in the Chapman heirs' being deprived of their rights to the Rincón and any profits from it.
The new lawsuit spelled the end of Bruce Cheeseman's tenure as King Ranch archivist. Acting in his capacity as keeper of the records, Cheeseman had sent Coker documents that would buttress his research into the relationship between the Chapmans and Richard King. And in that interview with the press back in 1992, Cheeseman had made a remark that would prove damaging to him and King Ranch, Inc. For these reasons and others, King Ranch, Inc., restricted access to the archives and took away Cheeseman's sole authority over who could gain admission. Cheeseman resigned in July 1996 but remained in a consultancy role until December 1997. His assignment: litigation research, which included looking into Major Chapman's life to find evidence against him that might be useful to the King Ranch's lawyers. Today the archives of the Walled Kingdom are, for all intents and purposes, closed. My own requests to visit the Henrietta Memorial Center, for example, were always turned down.
The legal process set in motion by Coker and his lawyers ground slowly; three years would pass before a decision was handed down by the court. On January 5 and January 13, 1998, the court released a summary judgment against the Chapman plaintiffs and in favor of King Ranch, Inc. Though obviously disappointed, Coker was not deterred. He still thought he had a strong case and hired Corpus Christi lawyer Craig Smith to appeal the decision. The King Ranch had won the first round, but it wasn't over yet.
Three years later, things went Coker's way. On January 11, 2001, the Thirteenth District Court of Appeals of Texas, in Corpus Christi, reversed the lower court's decision, paving the way for a trial in the matter of Chapman v. King Ranch. Justice Federico G. Hinojosa wrote the favorable ruling, with Justice Melchor Chavez concurring. They based their decision on two bodies of evidence. The first, "Kleberg's Representation," listed three items of evidence having to do with Kleberg's dual representation of Chapman and King. Ironically, one of these items was a statement by the King Ranch's own archivist, Bruce Cheeseman. In the 1992 article about Helen Chapman's lawsuit in the Corpus Christi paper, he was quoted as saying, "Clearly, Kleberg was looking after the interest of his in-state client versus the interests of his out-of-state client." The second body of evidence supporting the court's decision listed seven items under the heading "Richard King's Fraud." Hinojosa and Chavez's ruling concluded: "The foregoing evidence reasonably puts into question Richard King's claim to the entirety of the land in the Lewis deed, Robert Kleberg's alleged inability to prove Helen Chapman's land title [to the Lewis parcel], and Kleberg's legal loyalty to his clients. Therefore, we conclude appellants have produced more than a scintilla of probative evidence to raise a genuine issue of material fact of extrinsic fraud."
In a dissenting opinion, Judge J. Bonner Dorsey found no basis to recover on Richard King's supposed fraud in "that ancient litigation." He argued that any challenges to the 1883 case should have been made earlier and felt that the grounds for reviewing it were too "narrow." Summing up his view of the case, he wrote: "The settlement of any lawsuit involves many difficult considerations and decisions, especially given the period in which this litigation occurred. At the time of the consent judgment both William and Helen Chapman were dead, as were other alleged witnesses. The Chapman heirs were in South Carolina and were investigating via long distance. The [1883] judgment gave the Chapman estate certain lands that King had apparently had the use of for years, and approved a sale of the land to King. The Chapmans did not take nothing by their 1879 lawsuit."
Coker was elated. As he told the San Antonio Express-News, "We want recognition of the Chapman role in the development of South Texas and our rightful share of the property interest." The King Ranch's attorneys wasted no time in appealing the decision to the Supreme Court of Texas, but yet another wrinkle in the modern case has delayed any decision by the high court. When Coker was seeking new legal counsel to handle the appeal after the adverse 1998 ruling, one of the lawyers he talked to was Russell McMains, of Corpus Christi, a specialist in appeals. But because he considered McMains' fee too high, he went elsewhere. So Coker was surprised and outraged when, in August 2001, he saw the name of Russell McMains on a list of the small army of lawyers the King Ranch had working on the appeal. At his 1998 meeting with McMains, Coker says, he laid out the entire theory of his case. To Coker it was déjá vu with a vengeance: What had happened in the nineteenth century was happening again; nothing had changed. But McMains denies that Coker told him anything of substance in the meeting, and so that too has become a matter of dispute. In September 2001 Coker and his attorneys moved to disqualify all of the defendant's attorneys who had received information from McMains. A hearing held the following November and December rejected Coker's request. Now the entire matter rests in the hands of the Texas Supreme Court.
Ed Coker is still waiting, still hopeful. He says that what he wants is "simple justice." A jury trial is the only way to achieve that goal, he believes, but the powers that be at King Ranch, Inc., obviously would prefer that the case not go to trial. They would prefer that history remain as quiet and undisturbed as it was before Coker started poking around in the past, before he summoned forth the ghosts of the major and his wife to once more stake their claim to the most fabled ranch in Texas history.
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