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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TWO DAYS LATER, on March 22, 1961, the Odessa Police Department received a frantic phone call from Mary Williams, who reported that her daughter was missing. One by one, Betty’s friends were called into the principal’s office, where they were asked to tell what they knew. Ike Nail, a popular junior who had taken Betty home from rehearsal the previous evening, recounted a story that interested investigators. When he had dropped Betty off at ten o’clock, he said, she had suggested that he return in half an hour and meet her in the alley behind her house. As promised, at ten-thirty Betty had snuck out the back door and slipped into his car. The two teenagers had parked in the alley for a while, but they had been startled to see headlights coming toward them. Betty immediately recognized the approaching car as Mack’s. “Oh, my God, I didn’t think he’d come,” she had exclaimed. Ike had been certain Betty was only joking when she had remarked earlier in the evening that Mack had promised to kill her—so certain that he did not try to stop her when she climbed into Mack’s Jeep. As she turned to go, she said to Ike, “I’ve got to call his bluff, even if he kills me.”
Odessa police youth officer Bobby McAlpine sat Mack down to answer a few questions. The football player told a plausible-enough story: He had dropped Betty off outside her parents’ house at midnight and had not seen her since. But inconsistencies in his account led McAlpine to believe that the seventeen-year-old knew more than he was letting on. Had he left Betty at the front door or the back, McAlpine inquired? The front door, Mack answered. And no, he hadn’t waited to see that she’d gotten inside safely. His answer struck McAlpine as peculiar; the officer knew that Betty had been dressed for bed when she had slipped out of the house that night. According to Ike, she had been wearing only pale-pink shorty pajamas and a blue-and-white-striped duster—not the kind of clothes a boy would leave a girl standing in on her front porch at midnight. McAlpine also felt sure that Betty would not have wanted to sneak back into the house through the front door. Mack was brought down to the police station for further questioning, and 45 minutes later, he broke down. Betty had begged him to kill her, he told McAlpine; all he had done was carry out her wishes. He claimed to have committed the crime with a twelve-gauge shotgun that Betty herself had picked out.
Mack led officers to his father’s hunting lease, 26 miles northwest of town, on a lonely piece of scrubland studded with pump jacks. They turned off the highway onto a winding dirt road and continued on until Mack directed them to stop. He showed them where his and Betty’s footprints—his large, hers small—led down a steep incline to a stock tank. Beside the water, the ground was spattered with blood. In a flat monotone, Mack told investigators that he had shot Betty next to the stock tank, weighted her down, and submerged her body. Unsure of the exact location of the body in the tank, officers asked Mack if he would retrieve it. He stripped off his red-and-white varsity letter jacket, sport shirt, loafers, blue jeans, and socks and waded into the water until it came to his chest. The assembled group of lawmen fell silent. When he reached the center, Mack oriented himself by looking at the mesquite trees on either side; then he dove under the water and came back up. He began wading back toward land, dragging an object that appeared to be very heavy; when he was near the water’s edge, Odessa police detective Fred Johnson could see that he was holding a pair of human feet. Johnson advised him to leave the body, which was still clad in pale-pink pajamas, in the water. Around Betty’s waist were tied two lead weights. She had been partially decapitated by a single shotgun blast to the head.
“It didn’t move him when he pulled her body out of the water or when he said that he’d put a shotgun to her head,” remembers retired highway patrolman E. C. Locklear. “It was as cold-blooded and premeditated as it could be. What pushed him to do it, none of us knew. Later on, when I put him in the squad car to take him to jail, I said, ‘Mack, didn’t you expect to get caught?’ And he said, ‘Not this quick.’ He showed no emotion or regret or fear. It was like he was talking about shooting a dog.”
Investigators called for an ambulance to be sent to the scene without sounding its siren, but reporters were not far behind. Before Mack was taken to jail, he recounted what had taken place the night before while newsmen from the Odessa American and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram took down his story and six photographers jockeyed for the best angle. On the drive out to the hunting lease, “she was cheerful and chatted about how happy she was going to be when she was dead,” Mack explained. He had parked his Jeep a short distance from the stock tank, and he and Betty had sat there for a while and talked. “She was happy,” he recalled. “She kept saying what it was going to be like in heaven.” Then they had walked down to the pond together. Shivering, Betty had hurried back to the Jeep to retrieve her duster. When she returned to the spot where Mack was waiting for her by the water, she took off her shoes. “I just stood there with the gun,” Mack told reporters. “I said, ‘Give me a kiss to remember you by.’ She gave me a kiss and then said, ‘Thank you, Mack. I will always remember you for that.’ Then she said, ‘Now.’ I raised the gun barrel up, and she took ahold of it with the back of her hand and held it up [to her temple]. And then I pulled the trigger. She was dead—like that.” He snapped his fingers for emphasis.
As word spread around Odessa that afternoon that Mack had been arrested for Betty’s murder, the news was greeted with incredulity. “I just can’t believe it! Not Mack!” a sixteen-year-old girl shrieked as she collapsed in tears against a wall in the police station. “We were shocked that one of our own—a popular football player who had been to our parties and had dated our friends—had committed a heinous crime,” says Jean Smith Kiker. “And as more information came out, we were shocked to learn that Mack, and a lot of the other boys we knew, had been spending time with Betty after they had taken their girlfriends home.” But despite the gruesomeness of the crime and the first-degree murder charges that were filed against him, Mack was not ostracized by his peers. He was still invited to parties at Carol McCutchan’s house and was welcome at Tommy’s Drive-In. Girls visited him at home and boasted of knowing him. Rather than seeing Mack as a killer, many classmates acted as if something tragic that was beyond his control had befallen him. “We were all supportive, because we couldn’t believe it,” says a former Tri-Hi-Y girl who asked not to be identified. “We figured that if Mack did it, then there had to be a good reason.”
After the arrest, the gossip centered less on Mack than it did on Betty. “She was seen as a slut and a diabolical manipulator,” says Shelton Williams. “My father overheard a customer at his car wash say, ‘Everyone knew that girl was no good. She tricked that boy into killing her.’” Betty’s classmates in Winterset, which was canceled after the news of Mack’s arrest, puzzled over her intentions on the last night of her life. Had she really wanted to die, or was she still hoping, somehow, to win Mack back? “I think Betty trapped herself in a real-life drama of her own making,” says Dixon Bowles. “She was ad-libbing all the way, and it spun out of her control. I remember a teacher taking me aside afterward and asking me, ‘Was Betty pregnant?’ And I said, ‘No. I wish it were that simple.’ It was a game of chicken, and she never backed out.”
March 20, 1961
I want everyone to know that what I’m about to do in no way implicates anyone else. I say this to make sure that no blame falls on anyone other than myself.
I have depressing problems that concern, for the most part, myself. I’m waging a war within myself, a war to find the true me and I fear that I am losing the battle. So rather than admit defeat I’m going to beat a quick retreat into the no man’s land of death. As I have only the will and not the fortitude necessary, a friend of mine, seeing how great is my torment, has graciously consented to look after the details.
His name is Mack Herring and I pray that he will not have to suffer for what he is doing for my sake. I take upon myself all blame, for there it lies, on me alone!
Betty Williams
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