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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After eleven hours of deliberation, during which jurors asked that Grice’s expert testimony be read back to them, they determined that Mack had, in fact, been temporarily insane on the night of the murder. Upon hearing the verdict, Mack slumped in his chair and wept, while friends and classmates rushed to his side to embrace him. Betty’s parents slipped through the exuberant crowd and out of the courtroom before reporters could reach them for comment.
While Burnett had been careful not to malign Betty’s character during the hearing, some details of the case, like her sneaking out of her house in her nightclothes to meet Ike Nail, had tarred her as a loose, immoral girl. “I overheard a juror talking about Betty,” says Hazel Locklear, the wife of the highway patrolman who had been struck by Mack’s aloofness at the crime scene. “I remember her saying, in a very ugly way, ‘That girl was nothing.’” To some observers, it seemed as if Betty’s transgressions had eclipsed those of the teenager who’d killed her. “Nobody talked about how Mack could have said no,” observes Sandra Scofield, who graduated from Odessa High a year before the murder. “Betty had enlisted him—this worthy young man—to do what she didn’t have the courage to do herself. She had ‘roped’ him into doing it. So she became not the victim but the villain.”
Sullivan appealed the verdict to the Texas Supreme Court, on the grounds that Judge Olsen did not have the authority to grant a hearing that only evaluated Mack’s sanity at the time of the crime. On June 27, 1962, the court sided with Sullivan, vacating the judgment and ordering a new trial. But what advantage he gained in being allowed to present his evidence was negated by Burnett’s skill and showmanship. Because of the intense publicity, the second trial was moved nearly six hundred miles away, to Beaumont. Burnett relied on his old playbook. He put Grice back on the stand and packed the courtroom with teammates, teachers, parents, and community leaders who took the stand to extol his client’s virtues. Mack had been a stellar student, one of his teachers told the jury, and added, “I’ve never known a more brilliant mind.” His football coach testified that Mack had never used profanity. Howard Sellers said that Mack was his “idol” and “personified everything that was good.”
In an impassioned closing argument that Burnett delivered before a standing-room-only crowd, he hammered home the fact that nearly two years after Betty’s murder, the prosecution had still not established a motive. “Does the evidence show you any possible explanation?” he challenged the jury. “Until some evidence is brought to show the psychiatrists were wrong, I’d be inclined to believe them.” Jurors agreed, and twelve days before Christmas, they found Mack not guilty by reason of insanity. A smattering of applause broke out in the courtroom when the verdict was announced, and once again, Mack was mobbed by jubilant supporters. A few glad observers, including the wife of a Baptist minister who sat on the jury, looked on with tears in their eyes. Mack, who had once worried aloud to a reporter that he would be sent to the electric chair, was a free man.
To whom it may concern,
The time has come to leave, and as I prepare to go, I find it difficult to write the words that will explain …
I love you Dick, for all that you have meant to me. You’ve been the greatest friend I could ever ask for. Here’s to all the stories we never wrote. Maybe it’s better that way—they’ll never be exposed to the critics or the public. I hope our story about Jerry makes it. Think of me once in a while and know that I’m glad we met.
Gayle … I’m sorry about Indiana, but I hope you’ll understand. Here’s hoping you’ll always have the best because you’re one of the best!
I find the tears clouding my eyes as I say goodbye to those I love. May they forgive me …
Mr. Herring, you’re a wonderful man. So many times I’ve wanted to tell you how much I appreciate you. I’m sorry I have to tell you like this. …
Memories, so many memories to come back and cloud my mind, memories that I’ll carry through all eternity.
ANYONE WHO HAD SUFFERED the unrelenting scrutiny that Mack had—the Odessa American alone ran nearly two dozen front-page stories on the case—might have pulled up stakes and started a new life somewhere else. But Mack chose to stay. After attending Texas Tech University, where he was once introduced to a class as “the famous Mack Herring,” he returned home to the town that never turned its back on him. He made a quiet life for himself, and he steered clear of trouble with the law. He married and divorced, twice. He worked as a dock foreman at a chemical company, a carpenter, a welder, and, for at least the past 25 years, as an electrician. Few of his former classmates still see him; most have moved away or fallen out of touch. As the booms and busts of the oil patch have brought new people to Odessa and taken others away, Mack has faded into the background.
I caught sight of him one afternoon in November as he pulled up to his house, a mint-green frame house not far from where he grew up. His own neighborhood lacks the gracious lawns and spreading trees of his childhood; the house, which is a bit down at the heels, looks like the province of a man who lives alone. A meager yard of packed dirt and weeds led to the street, and an old rusted pickup sat in the driveway. Mack, who declined to be interviewed for this article, looked indistinguishable from any other working man in Odessa, right down to his beat-up truck with the toolbox in the bed. Nothing suggested that he had once been sharply handsome or held a great deal of promise. At 62, he was utterly unremarkable.
“This has not been a free ride for Mack,” says his childhood friend Larry Francell. “It’s ruined two lives. One’s dead, one’s still alive.” And because many people in town would prefer never to hear the words “kiss and kill” again, the case still touches a nerve. “I suspect most of us would rather let the thing stay in the past,” one Odessa High School alumna wrote me in an e-mail. “There was already enough pain in ’61. Why dredge it up again?” But others refuse to forget. “I don’t take well to the fact that people don’t think this is an important story,” says Shelton Williams, who carried a photograph of his cousin in his wallet for 35 years after her murder. “I don’t believe that Betty ever wanted to die.” In the Williams family, grandiose threats and melodramatic bids for attention had not been unique to Betty. “When her father lived with my parents, he used to threaten to kill himself in the middle of the night,” says Shelton. “My mother would sit up with him and try to talk him out of it, until he did it one too many times. Then she told him to just go ahead and do it, which he didn’t. When Betty said that life wasn’t worth living without Mack, I understood it within the context of our family.” Her murder and the verdicts that followed had stripped away any of his preconceptions about fairness and justice. “No other event in my life impacted me the way this did,” he says. “Everything looked different to me afterward. Betty had been murdered, and everyone wanted to sweep it under the rug and make it go away.”
And still, after nearly half a century’s worth of other tragedies, the stories at Odessa High School live on. In October an Odessa College student named Sammi Sanchez, who was researching a paper she had to present to her speech class on the best place to spend Halloween, received permission to spend the night in the high school’s auditorium. When I met Sanchez and three of her girlfriends a few weeks later, they told me, in great detail, about all the strange and unexplained things they had heard and seen: the door that had mysteriously slammed closed behind them, the eerie footsteps, the stage lights that had moved when they had called out Betty’s name. After two hours in the auditorium, Sanchez and her friends were so unnerved, and so certain that they had felt Betty’s presence, that they decided to leave. But first they did what they assumed any drama girl—spectral or not—would have wanted. “We let Betty know she was the star,” Sanchez says. “We sat there in the theater seats, in the dark, and we applauded for her.”
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