The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime (13 page)

Finally, Walker took on those wildly-speculated-about pine bark scrapings recovered from underneath Hurley’s truck. As the ranger talked, he recounted how he’d questioned the principal about where the scrapings might have come from. Hurley contended that they must have become lodged under the truck’s carriage while he was driving on his sister’s property. Yet when Hurley took investigators to show them, they found no pine saplings with scrape marks. During cross-examination, DeGuerin remarked that Hurley lived in the Thicket, covered with pine trees, and drove his truck daily.

Afterward in the hallway, the Texas Ranger wisecracked: “I guess he’s trying to accuse us of throw-down pine bark.”

As the trial ended for the week that Friday, it seemed that both sides had won and lost points in the courtroom. The following day,
Houston Chronicle
reporter Cindy Horswell wrote a piece about the carnival-like atmosphere at the Fontenot trial, including the two middle-aged twins who showed up dressed identically each day, and the housewife who looked like Aunt Bea on
Mayberry RFD
who’d brought a straight pin to the trial, one she planned to use to poke anyone who rushed to take her seat. One day someone had tried. “I had the breath knocked out of me,” she said. “But it won’t happen again!”

Interest in the trial had mushroomed and seats in the courtroom were at such a premium that some spectators arrived two hours early to ensure getting in. Others brought lunches and ate on the courthouse steps to enable them to rush back inside and claim a place in line for the afternoon sessions. One woman made the hundred-mile commute from Houston every day, and a couple from Liberty had driven their RV to Livingston to stay close to the courthouse. They planned to live in it for the projected six weeks of the trial. “What’s the use of driving back and forth?” the man asked. “In this drama, we know all the actors. It makes it interesting. We can’t wait until they get to the good stuff, Laura Nugent and Lynda Fleming. I think we could sell seats.”

When it came to how the spectators saw the trial - perhaps an indication of what the jurors were thinking - one retired fabric store owner said: “Every day we leave with a different opinion.”

HURLEY FONTENOT ARGUED AGAINST Laura Nugent’s transfer, superintendent Kenneth Voytek testified early the following Monday morning. “Fontenot came to me about it. He was very upset. He said there was no reason to do it. I said I’d been patient and understanding enough and should have moved her a year ago.”

As the prosecutors asked questions, Voytek laid out a timeline of the events leading to Bill Fleming’s murder, starting as far back as 1983, when Fontenot was first confronted about his relationship with one of his employees and the principal repeatedly denied his romantic involvement with Laura Nugent. Once Bill and Laura began dating, as early as spring 1985, Hurley began reporting to Voytek about their relationship. The first time was when Fontenot told Voytek that the coach and his wife had separated. How did Hurley know about the coach’s private life? Voytek testified that Hurley mentioned that he’d been watching Fleming, and he’d noticed that the coach drove up to the school from a direction other than his home.

Why wasn’t Fontenot in a hurry on the day Bill disappeared? The principal was dawdling at the school at 2:30 that afternoon, Voytek said, despite having claimed that he had to rush to pick up his daughter in Houston. When Bill didn’t show up for work that Monday, Voytek called Fontenot, but the principal didn’t seem alarmed. “Fontenot did acknowledge Fleming’s absence but said it was not a matter of importance,” Voytek testified. Instead Fontenot said, “I guess Mr. Fleming needed another day off.”

When DeGuerin took over, he questioned Voytek about Lynda Fleming, asking if she’d inquired about her estranged husband’s school life insurance policy. She had, Voytek said, days after Fleming’s decomposing body was discovered.

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE MURDER WEAPON consumed the courtroom over a period of days. First, a weapons expert said that the bullet fragments retrieved from Bill Fleming’s body indicated that the gun that had killed him was a .22 caliber. When he was questioned, Hurley had told police that he didn’t own a pistol, but others disagreed. Two of his employees, teachers, got on the stand and testified that at different times their principal told them that he had a pistol he kept with him in his truck. A former reading teacher contended that Fontenot had said “he had a lot of money and was going to the horse races. He mentioned he always carried a gun in his pickup, always had one handy.”

The gun testimony had DeGuerin repeatedly objecting, arguing that the pistol Hurley talked about could have been any caliber, and that they had no evidence Hurley owned a twenty-two.

Throughout the trial, DeGuerin jumped up often, objecting to testimony, a bulldog poised to pounce. Perhaps the defense attorney was most ardent when defending the honor of Hurley’s daughter, Vanessa. Still fighting back after her change in testimony the previous week, when she’d suddenly bolstered her father’s alibi instead of contradicting it, prosecutors brought in three Austin businessmen who all testified that what Vanessa had portrayed on the stand had never happened.

The day Bill Fleming disappeared, Vanessa had said she’d remembered that her father called about 5:00 p.m. because just then the men in question walked through the door to meet with her boss. But they all testified that wasn’t possible, because the meeting Vanessa referred to had been held at a different location. “I left the office that day at 1:30 p.m. and never returned after that,” Vanessa’s former boss testified.

In the following days, more testimony would emerge to cast doubt on Vanessa Fontenot’s account, including a telephone company clerk who testified that Hurley couldn’t have called Vanessa from a Houston Intercontinental pay phone around five that day, as he claimed. Why not? The prosecutors had subpoenaed all the phone records for every pay phone at the airport for that time period. They’d all been examined, and the call didn’t appear on any of the logs. The call simply didn’t exist.

Yet there was more disappointment in store for the prosecutors. During the third week of the trial, Judge Martin issued a ruling that banned Coach Thomas Brooks from recounting Bill’s final words to him, spoken just moments before the coach disappeared: “Damn Hurley.”

AT TIMES LYNDA FLEMING appeared near tears. As prosecutors asked questions, the coach’s widow recounted the dissolution of her marriage, the string of anonymous letters that had arrived at her house, and the way Hurley had asked her probing questions. “Hurley wanted to know why I thought Bill had left me,” Lynda testified. “I told him I thought Bill left me because he wanted to find himself, but now I’ve received a letter that makes me think differently, that there was someone else.”

That day when they happened upon each other in a store, Hurley had first asked her: “Lynda, have you ever known someone you thought you could trust and they turned against you? Do you understand what I’m talking about?”

Lynda had replied that she didn’t, and later she’d seen Hurley leave the store with a small package, something he’d purchased in the sporting goods/hunting equipment department. And there was more. During her visits to Bill’s apartment, Lynda contended that she’d sometimes seen Hurley driving by slowly in his truck, as if keeping the place under surveillance.

As Lynda Fleming testified, Hurley stared at the witness stand, focused on her every word, frowning. Identifying a photo of Bill passed out to the jury, Lynda cried. Although they’d quarreled, she said that her last phone conversation with him, on the day of his disappearance, had been amiable. “No, there was no argument,” she insisted.

During cross-examination, DeGuerin not only questioned Lynda Fleming’s account but also pointed an accusatory finger, asking about her dead husband’s life insurance and a man Lynda briefly dated after she and Bill had separated. Nothing was off-limits, as the defense attorney asked about her sex life and Bill’s drug use. Contradicting DeGuerin’s portrayal of her dead husband, Lynda insisted that although she’d seen the bag of white powder throughout their marriage, her husband wasn’t a drug user. Over all the years they’d been together, she said she could only remember Bill smoking pot on two occasions.

That day in the courtroom the events of the prior months continued to unravel before the jury. As she testified, Lynda filled in more details about all that had transpired beginning in January 1985, after her separation from her husband. The first anonymous call she received was on March 14, and she described the voice on the other end as sounding like “a well-educated black female.” That day, the woman told her: “The cause of the breakup of your marriage is at your husband’s apartment.” When she hung up, Fleming and the man she was dating rushed to Bill’s. Once there, she confronted Bill, and he admitted that Laura Nugent had just left.

At that, Lynda and her boyfriend left in his car and tracked down Laura, following her to her parents’ house. “I wanted to see where she lived,” she testified.

The last call from the anonymous woman came on March 17, and this time the woman apologized, saying that she hadn’t meant to frighten Lynda. Yet the caller suggested that Lynda needed to take what she now knew about her husband’s affair with the school secretary to the district’s school board.

NO TESTIMONY WAS MORE ANTICIPATED than that of Laura Nugent, the woman at the center of the love triangle that prosecutors contended had ended in murder. Looking wistful and at the same time nervous, Laura wore dark pants and a silky white blouse as she talked about her two-and-a-half-year relationship with her boss. They’d dated off and on, seeing each other weekly, but at times not more than once a month, often accompanying him on his forays to the track. “We decided to marry in 1983, and then he changed his mind,” she said. Hurley had never explained why he didn’t want to go ahead with the marriage.

“To me, my relationship with Hurley ended in September of 1984,” Laura told the jurors. Yet they’d continued to go out after that date. When she’d begun dating Bill, “at first Hurley seemed very upset about it, and later he appeared to accept it.”

Yet there was that silver and diamond wedding set, the one Hurley had offered Laura in March of 1985, when he’d again asked her to marry him. “He told me to look at the rings. I handed them back and said the rings were very pretty, but I couldn’t accept them.”

“Just think about it,” he’d responded. “People do change their minds.”

That same month, Laura and Bill Fleming were talking marriage. Instead of being upset, her ex-lover told her that he was glad she’d found the coach. Yet one day Hurley asked Laura to drive with him, to talk about his health issues. He seemed upset that day, and he confronted her with the anonymous letters.

“I told him I really didn’t care about the letter,” she testified. When Hurley said he’d also been sent photos of Nugent and Fleming together, she asked to see them. Fontenot refused to show them to her. “I don’t believe they existed,” she said.

“Wasn’t Hurley teasing when he offered you that wedding ring set?” DeGuerin asked.

“I don’t think he was teasing,” Nugent answered, looking confused at the notion.

Fontenot had later told her that the rings belonged to his sister, but that didn’t gel with the testimony of another witness. During her account of the weeks before the murder, a friend of Laura’s said Hurley called her and asked if she knew Laura’s ring size. Days later, he stopped at the woman’s house and opened a small velvet box, displaying a beautiful diamond ring set that he said his sister had helped him pick out.

In all, the testimony suggested that Hurley Fontenot had not given up on his desire to be with Laura Nugent, suggesting he wasn’t as complacent about her relationship with Fleming as he’d told investigators. Shortly before Bill disappeared, Laura said Hurley had asked her to go out with him on his birthday. She refused, and he seemed disappointed.

Despite the ups and downs of the trial, the prosecution was building its case, adding witness after witness to the evidence laid before the jury. One tantalizing piece of the puzzle was Bill Hulin, a gas company comptroller, who testified during the fourth week of the trial. To a hushed courtroom, Hulin described driving through Polk County on his way home from work early in the morning of the previous April 13. The day after Bill Fleming disappeared, Hulin said he saw a dark-colored pickup with a white camper shell on the back near the site where Fleming’s body was later found. The description matched Hurley’s pickup truck.

That was interesting, but all Hulin could see of the driver was one arm and shoulder. He couldn’t even say if the driver was male or female.

AFTER MORE THAN A MONTH OF TESTIMONY, Hulin’s brief stint on the witness stand brought the prosecution to a close. Finally, the following morning, DeGuerin stood before the jury to give his opening statement and lay out the defense. From his seat, Hurley nodded confidently as DeGuerin said: “The evidence will show there was no love triangle. Her relationship with Hurley had been over for months before Laura Nugent fell in love with Coach Fleming.”

There would be some surprises in the statement - the first and most important, perhaps, was that DeGuerin planned to have his own client as his star witness. Hurley, the attorney said, would take the stand and answer questions, although not required to do so.

From his first witness, Dick DeGuerin attacked the prosecutors’ case, painting for the jury a very different picture of the events surrounding Bill Fleming’s disappearance and murder. Although the DPS expert had testified that there was so little blood in Bill’s body and on the undercarriage of Hurley’s truck it was impossible to type either one, an expert defense witness disagreed. He testified that he had done just that and concluded that the blood in the camper and on the car axle didn’t belong to Billy Mac Fleming. He also testified that he hadn’t found Fontenot’s saliva on the stamped envelopes that had contained the anonymous letters.

When it came to the rings Hurley had shown Laura on the day he asked her to marry him, Hurley’s sister testified that the set wasn’t his to give. The diamond engagement ring and wedding band, she said, were hers, and the only reason Hurley had them was because he’d offered to clean them for her.