A Kiss Before Dying
Betty Williams was a fast girl from the wrong side of the tracks. Mack Herring was a handsome football player with all the right friends. When he broke up with her during her senior year at Odessa High School, her world fell apart. But she asked him for one last favor: to kill her.
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Some nights, Betty would slip out the back door after her parents had gone to bed and walk the four blocks to Tommy’s Drive-In, where there were always boys to talk to. Plenty of girls were flirts, but few of them were as assertive as Betty. She made no secret of the fact that she was not a prude and that she was willing to prove it. At the end of an evening at Tommy’s, it was not unusual for her to end up parked in a secluded spot somewhere with a football player—after, of course, he had taken his girlfriend home to meet her curfew. While boys were free to do as they pleased, “good” girls were expected to obey an unspoken code of conduct. “If a girl had a steady boyfriend, then she could have sex, as long as she didn’t advertise it,” says Jean Smith Kiker, a Capri who was a year below Betty. “But if she did it with someone who wasn’t her boyfriend, then she was a pariah.” Betty chose to disregard the rules, and if she had earned herself a reputation, she hardly seemed to care. “Eisenhower had been president during most of our years of growing up, and kids were kept on a very short leash,” remembers classmate Dixon Bowles. “You got the feeling with Betty that she was always straining against that leash, even when it choked her. Maybe especially when it choked her.”
Mack,
Well, I guess you accomplished what you set out to do. You hurt me, more than you’ll ever know. When you handed me that note this morning, you virtually changed the course of my life. I don’t [know] what I expected the note to say, but not that. I’ll not waste time saying that I didn’t deserve it because I guess I did. I’ve never been so hurt in my life and I guess your note was the jolt I needed to get me back on the straight and narrow. I’ve done a lot of things, I know, that were bad and cheap, but I swear before God that I didn’t mean them to be like that. I was just showing off. I know it’s much too late with you, Mack, but I swear that another boy won’t get the chance to say what you said to me. You’ve made me realize that instead of being smart and sophisticated like I thought, I was only being cheap and ugly and whorish.
Forgive me for writing this last note and thank you for reading it. I’ll not trouble you again, and Mack, I haven’t forgotten the good times we had. I really have enjoyed knowing you and I’m awfully sorry that it had to end this way. …
Best of luck with your steady girlfriend. I hope she’s the best.
Betty
P.S. When you think of me try to think of the good times we had and not of this.
MACK HERRING WAS NOT ONE OF THE ELITE FOOTBALL players at Odessa High School on whose shoulders rested the hopes for the 1960 season; as a back for the Bronchos, and one of average abilities, he was just another guy on the team. Tall and good-looking, with jet-black hair that framed a long, contemplative face, Mack was “a guy’s guy,” his classmates remember, who was quiet and self-contained. The oldest son of a homemaker and a World War II veteran who owned an electrical-contracting business, Mack grew up in the solidly middle-class neighborhood that was home to many of his teammates and the Tri-Hi-Y girls they dated. An avid hunter, he was happiest when he could spend a few days bagging dove or quail on his father’s hunting lease north of town or ramble around the oil fields with his .22, plinking jackrabbits. “If Mack wounded an animal when we went hunting, he would pursue it and dispatch it,” says Larry Francell, who grew up across the alley from him. “A lot of kids were cruel—they would shoot something and watch it hobble off—but Mack was different. He didn’t like to see things suffer. If he was going out there to hunt, he was going to kill.”
Although Mack was near the top of the high school caste system and Betty was at the bottom, they managed to strike up a friendship when she was a junior and he was a sophomore. Betty thought she sensed in him a kindred spirit; he seemed more sensitive than the other boys she knew, and she thought there was something lonely and romantic about him. In the summer of 1960, they started dating, and Betty wondered if she might be falling in love; Mack, she told friends, really listened to her. But Mack was careful to be discreet about the time they spent together. He never took Betty to his neighbor Carol McCutchan’s house, where the in crowd gathered for dance parties and rounds of spin the bottle. He never gave her his letter jacket or brought her home to meet his parents.
Perhaps because he had wounded her pride, or maybe just to make him jealous, Betty tried to even the score one night when she parked with one of his best friends, a popular football player who had been voted the most handsome in his class. The stunt soured Mack on the relationship, and by the fall, he had broken things off and started going steady with a pretty redhead in Amicae. “I’ve never been so humiliated and torn to pieces as I am now,” Betty wrote to a friend. “I feel so lonely and deserted I don’t care what happens now or ever. … This is pure hell!”
Betty was crushed to discover that fall that Odessa High’s new drama teacher did not see much promise in her and had relegated her to the role of stage manager for the spring production of Maxwell Anderson’s Winterset, a gloomy 1935 play based loosely on the Sacco-Vanzetti case. Worse, she learned that Mack would be playing one of Winterset’s lead roles, a remorseless killer named Trock Estrella. Still reeling from their breakup and depressed at the prospect of not being cast in a single play her senior year, Betty began to feel hopeless. Mack was “the one,” and without him, life wasn’t worth living. “She said she wanted to die if she couldn’t be with Mack,” remembers her cousin Shelton, who was a year her junior at Odessa’s Permian High School. “She told me, ‘I have to get him back.’” Her mood turned darker after her father rummaged through her dresser drawers, looking for evidence of her disobedience. Distraught, Betty confided in a friend that he had found her diary, in which she had detailed her experiences with boys. Though she had pleaded with her father to believe her when she swore to him that she had changed, he could not be convinced. “Betty said that the situation at home was bad,” says the friend, who asked not to be named. “I wanted to help, but I didn’t know what to do. I was sixteen years old.”
By the winter, Betty had started telling friends that she would be better off dead. “Heaven must be a nice place,” she told junior Howard Sellers. She claimed to have halfheartedly tried to kill herself by taking four aspirin. She boasted of climbing up to the auditorium rafters, intending to throw herself onto the stage below, only to find that she lacked the courage. Betty, who had always enjoyed being outrageous, talked about wanting to die to whoever would listen. But the only reaction she was able to provoke was a few eye rolls. The response was always the same: There goes Betty again, trying to be the center of attention. Even when she began acting more erratically during rehearsals for Winterset, her peers wrote off her overwrought confessions about wanting to die as nothing more than a theater girl’s high school histrionics. She informed at least five students working on the play that she wanted to kill herself but didn’t have the nerve. Would they be willing to do it for her, she asked? “No, I don’t think I will,” senior Mike Ware said, passing it off as a joke. A sophomore, Jim Mercer, also deflected the invitation. “I charge for my services,” he kidded, quoting her an impossibly high price.
At a time when Betty felt marginalized by those around her and forsaken by the one boy she loved, death seemed to hold its own allure. Or was she just acting, pushing the boundaries in another bid to catch Mack’s attention? One night he gave her and Howard a ride home from rehearsal, and she made the request of him: Would he be willing to kill her? She would hold the gun to her head, she said, while he pulled the trigger. Mack laughed at the absurdity of the idea, and Betty laughed with him. She even went so far as to write out a wildly melodramatic note clearing him of culpability were he to be apprehended for her murder, a note that Howard would later say had seemed like a joke. But the next afternoon during rehearsal, Betty pulled Mack into the prop room backstage. She was miserable, she told him, and she wanted to die.
It was the week before Winterset was scheduled to premiere, and students were busy running their lines and painting the set as they readied for the final dress rehearsal. In the middle of the chaos, Betty spotted Mike. “It’s been nice knowing you,” she said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I finally talked Mack into killing me,” she said.
Mike shrugged. “I’ll send roses.”
I am consumed with this burning emptiness and loneliness that has taken charge of me, body and soul. I have to fight it! If I am to live I have to fight [or] else it will pull me down, down, down into that thankless pit of fear, pain, and agonized loneliness.
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