Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
Midnight in the Garden of East Texas
Marjorie Nugent was the richest widow in an eccentric town full of rich widows. Bernie Tiede was an assistant funeral home director who became her companion. When she disappeared, nobody seemed alarmed. When he confessed to killing her, nobody seemed outraged.
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And Mrs. Nugent was apparently willing to do what it took to keep him around. Soon after the funeral, she gave Bernie Mr. Nugent’s Rolex watch, worth $12,000—a startling act of generosity from a woman known as the town Grinch. In 1991 she ordered officials at First National Bank to accept checks from her account signed by Bernie so that he could handle some of her bills. When Tiller asked if she was certain she could trust Bernie, Mrs. Nugent grew livid and threatened to move all her stocks out of Tiller’s brokerage.
Bernie began spending his days off with Mrs. Nugent, which reportedly upset some of the town’s other widows, with whom he’d spent so much time over the years. One afternoon Don Lipsey called Mrs. Nugent looking for Bernie. She told him that Bernie was in one of her bedrooms taking a nap. Then word spread that Mrs. Nugent had gone on a cruise—something her husband had never wanted to do—and that she had paid Bernie to go with her. The two even slept in the same cabin.
Rumors flew through Carthage. Was the cherubic Bernhardt Tiede II trying to seduce the haughty Marjorie Nugent? Or was it the other way around? Some people were shocked when Bernie was seen holding Mrs. Nugent’s hand in town, but Bernie was quick to explain that Mrs. Nugent wobbled when she walked. “I think Margie truly enjoyed the companionship with Bernie, and I think Bernie truly enjoyed Margie’s money,” says a close relative of hers. For Bernie, who was making a reported annual salary of about $18,000 at the funeral home, Mrs. Nugent’s money must have been tempting. She was making between $200,000 and $300,000 a year in oil and gas royalty payments alone. He was constantly behind in his American Express payments, and he owed the IRS $4,000 in back taxes. “Bernie was a buyaholic,” says his sister. “He not only wanted to experience the finer things in life, he loved buying as much as he could for others. He’d order the same items over and over—like three of the same chairs or boxes of Cross pens—just so he could give them away.”
In late 1993 Bernie told Don Lipsey that Mrs. Nugent had asked him to work for her—at a much higher salary—as her business manager and escort on trips around the world. A barrel-chested, plain-talking East Texan, Lipsey had grown fond of Bernie, despite his discomfort with what he described as Bernie’s “tutti-frutti speaking voice.” “Bernie,” he warned, “you know what kind of woman Mrs. Nugent is. Whatever you think you’re going to get out of her, you’re going to have to earn every penny of it.”
“Mrs. Nugent is already so possessive of you,” added Sally, Don’s wife. “She’s already making you drive out there every morning just to fix her coffee! Is that really what you want for yourself?”
“Now, Don and Sally,” Bernie replied, “Deep down inside she’s a sweet woman. We will get along just fine.”
What few in town knew—and what Bernie was not saying—was that Mrs. Nugent had already changed her will, making Bernie the sole heir to her multimillion- dollar estate. (Mrs. Nugent later told a cousin that she didn’t want to leave a cent to her son or her immediate family because they didn’t “appreciate” her.) How could Bernie risk Mrs. Nugent’s wrath, and thus risk losing her money, by turning down her job offer?
WITH MONEY MRS. NUGENT ADVANCED HIM, Bernie bought a two-bedroom home about a mile from the Nugent estate. He set out his collection of black-and-white plastic penguins in the front yard. (He liked penguins, he told others, because they looked so well-dressed.) He hung white curtains on the living room window and displayed his collection of more than seventy wristwatches in the hallway. He threw a Christmas open house, inviting members of the chamber of commerce, professors at the college, and other Carthage VIPs. One widow who was there took a look at the polished furniture and the porcelain penguins on the side tables and said, “Bernie, you’ve created a doll house!”
“Bernie found himself living a dream,” says his sister. “For the first time in his life, he got to be somebody.” Bernie earned his pilot’s license and bought a couple of small airplanes. He took Mrs. Nugent’s seat on the board of the First National Bank, and he regularly placed calls to Lloyd Tiller, irritating the stockbroker to no end with recommendations of stocks that he thought should be bought for Mrs. Nugent. “What do you know about the stock market?” Tiller once shouted at Bernie. “You’re nothing but an undertaker!” A few minutes later Mrs. Nugent called Tiller and told him in an icy voice that if he spoke that way to Bernie again, she would be changing stockbrokers.
On their vacations together, Bernie and Mrs. Nugent traveled all over the world, visiting the Orient, Egypt, and Russia. They flew to New York to see new Broadway musicals, and they sailed on the Queen Mary for Europe, returning on the Concorde.
It was a glamorous life, but as Lipsey warned, Bernie paid a price. According to Bernie’s friends, he had to have Mrs. Nugent’s medicines laid out every day. If he wasn’t at her house by eleven forty-five for lunch, she would become extremely frustrated—“Almost panicky,” says one man—and call his pager incessantly until he arrived. When visiting someone else, Bernie would have to interrupt the conversation at regular intervals and use the phone to check in with Mrs. Nugent. “If I don’t call her, she will give me living hell,” Bernie would say.
Perhaps Bernie decided he deserved extra pay for his service to Mrs. Nugent. Or perhaps he thought he could do whatever he wanted with her money since he knew it would be coming to him anyway after her death. Or, as his sister suggests, maybe Bernie genuinely believed in the good of giving. For whatever reason, Bernie became the town’s Robin Hood. Unbeknownst to Mrs. Nugent, he started slipping money out of her hefty bank accounts and giving it to anyone he thought could use help. He bought at least ten cars for people who couldn’t afford one, telling them to pay him back when they could. He bought a home for a struggling young couple. He provided scholarships to students at Panola College, he pledged $100,000 to the new building campaign at First United Methodist, and he led the fundraising drive for the Boy Scouts. When a woman who owned a local trophy shop told him that her business was failing, Bernie stepped in and bought it so that Carthage High School and youth sports teams could get their trophies for another year. Bernie was on a one-man campaign to improve culture in Carthage, giving away tickets to the college theater productions and paying for the expenses of choir concerts. When a man who once worked with him at the funeral home told him that he wanted to open a clothing store, Bernie agreed to fund it, saying that Carthage needed its own Neiman Marcus. The man’s idea of what Carthage needed was a little different. He proudly opened Boot Scootin’ Western Wear.
Some townspeople thought Bernie’s presence did have a positive effect on Mrs. Nugent. At his urging she joined the Methodist church, and she once had the women’s Sunday school class over to her house for brunch. But sometime in 1995, Bernie told his sister that he thought Mrs. Nugent was developing a mild dementia. Mrs. Nugent had fired the gardeners, he said, because the flowers hadn’t bloomed on time. She also made Bernie buy a .22 rifle to shoot the armadillos that were rooting up her front yard. Bernie found himself stalking the armored pests while Mrs. Nugent supervised from the front porch. “Bernie said to me, ‘She’s so controlling, it just wears me down,’” his sister recalls. “I asked him why he didn’t quit, and he gave me this tortured look and said, ‘Because I’m her only friend. I have to stay because I’m the only one she has.’”
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