The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime (9 page)

By Monday night she was frantic.

She lay in her bed, going over and over her weekend's desperate search, remembering the phone at his apartment that rang endlessly without answer. Bill hadn't shown up for work that morning at the school, and the district's superintendent had called the police, reporting him missing. Bill’s pickup, still parked in the school lot, hadn't been moved all weekend. Now, despite her exhaustion, Laura had difficulty sleeping. When she finally drifted off she had a hazy dream: Bill stood in the distance. She ran toward him, but just as she came close enough to touch him, he turned away. He couldn't see her. Laura bolted upright in bed.

"I knew it then," she whispered. "I knew then that Bill was dead."

On a quiet Monday morning a week later, Don Griffin, a retired electrician, found the body. While supervising workers cutting a road to his brother-in-law's land in the pine forest off FM 943 in southeast Polk County, Griffin spotted dewberries growing on bushes. As he popped a few into his mouth, Griffin smelled a peculiar odor. Edging toward a clearing he saw it – the decomposing body of a large man lying face up. The body was dressed in shirt and jeans but had no shoes or wallet. There was a ring, however, from Stephen F. Austin State University, dated 1973 and engraved with the initials BMF.

A month later, a grand jury indicted the principal of the junior school where Billy Mac Fleming taught. Before long, stories of a love triangle involving the accused black principal, the slain white coach, and the white school secretary, Laura Nugent, spread quickly throughout the little towns. Photos of the three from school annuals were published in newspapers and national tabloids with headlines that linked the love triangle with murder. The principal, Hurley Fontenot, with light tan skin and thinning brown hair, appeared on the television news turning himself in to the Liberty County Sheriff. He was charged with pumping two small-caliber bullets at close range, execution-style, into the back of Bill Fleming's head.

THERE'S AN AURA of frustration in these small east Texas towns that border the Big Thicket, the nearly mystical expanse of pine forests and swamps that merge Texas and Louisiana. The bucolic landscape thinly veils an underlying uneasiness. The murder of Billy Mac Fleming would lay open a tale of love, small-town politics, and racial tension. And at the middle of the vortex was Hurley Fontenot.

In his law office in Liberty, Hurley's brother, Walter, displayed a portrait of their blond, blue-eyed great-grandfather. Garand Fontenot, born in 1831, was the family patriarch. Walter had a plaque made to hang beneath the portrait that traced the family through Garand's migration from France to Canada, and then Louisiana. In Louisiana Garand was known as "the one-armed sheriff of Opelousas Parish." The plaque didn't mention Hurley and Walter's great-grandmother; she was biracial. In this part of Texas even in the 1980s, racial lines were still carefully drawn, and for locals, a drop of African blood was considered enough to label a family as black.

It was Garand's son, Desilva Fontenot, who moved the family to East Texas. Other Creole, French-Canadian, and biracial families settled nearby and established a community. They were better educated than many of their black and white neighbors. Many of the families spoke French, and they tended to marry among themselves. In Raywood, a town with a population hovering around 200 residents, the Fontenots were one of the more prominent families.

The combined school district ran like an artery through Hull, Daisetta, and Raywood, tightly binding the three little towns together. Once-bustling oil centers with much of their land and mineral rights owned by companies like Mobil, Tenneco, and Gulf, they grew rapidly in the twenties when the Hull-Daisetta oil field was discovered. In the sixties, when Hurley returned after teaching four years in a neighboring district, Daisetta's mayor, Jim Hale, vowed to bring industry to the area and widened the main highway, FM 770, to attract business.

By the eighties, however, the streets were lined with boarded-up storefronts. The oil slump, as well as faltering rice and soybean markets, had devastated the economy. The population aged as many of the area's young people left to find jobs in Houston or Beaumont.

HURLEY’S FATHER HAD BEEN THE PRINCIPAL while Hurley attended Woodson High, the pre-integration school for black students. In 1966 the schools were combined, and Woodson became Hull-Daisetta Junior School. Townspeople describe both father and son as strict disciplinarians who were admired by the students. But, unlike his father, Hurley Fontenot was uncomfortable with his Creole heritage, using racial epithets when referring to his black neighbors. Theresa Metoyer, who ran the small grocery store across from the school, remembered many of her light-skinned neighbors and relatives who left for California "where they could blend in and no one knows."

For 16 years, Hurley taught at Hull-Daisetta Senior High, building a power structure within the school district. Many long-time residents talked about his success with the agriculture program. He helped students win national awards. And when they did, he submitted articles to the local newspapers along with pictures of his students and himself celebrating their successes.

It was difficult, however, for Hurley to hide his personal problems, in particular gambling and drinking. A regular at Delta Downs in Vinton, Louisiana, he bet on the horses at least two to three times a week. Hurley never liked to talk about his wins or losses, but friends say he went into heavy debt.

In the summer of 1980 Hurley Fontenot's life started to rupture. Students and parents filed complaints that he had been drunk at a June FFA (Future Farmers of America) program, and he was suspended for a month. In January 1981 he disappeared for three days, claiming that he had the flu. When the district's new superintendent, Kenneth Voytek, couldn't reach him by phone, he gave Hurley an ultimatum: quit drinking or be fired.

In issuing his decree, Voytek affected the manner of a revivalist preacher. Hurley's drinking was a problem, so Voytek simply ordered him to commit himself to the VA hospital in Houston "and be cured of the dependency." Hurley, who’d served a stint in the Navy, stayed at the hospital for three months, until March 1981 when he returned to his job at the school and began regular attendance at AA meetings. That August, Voytek recommended Hurley for the principal's position at the junior school, which Hurley judged as a demotion. His main accomplishment, his political strength, was the agriculture program he had built up at the high school. It was his dynasty.

WHEN HURLEY ARRIVED AT THE junior school, Laura Nugent had already been working there for slightly more than a year as a clerical aide. Although they’d lived 15 miles apart for much of their lives, Laura and Hurley barely knew each other. Laura had started with the schools under the CETA program for training the disadvantaged and unskilled. For the first time, at age 32, she was learning skills that she could use to support herself. With two bad marriages behind her, Laura had a history of picking the wrong man.

Laura's first husband, Charles Moor, still lived across the field from her home north of Hull. He was the arm-wrestling champion of the area, and liked to ply his talent in local bars for free drinks. Their marriage lasted eight years and produced a daughter, Lisa. Laura’s second husband, Carroll Nugent, had come off a hard stint in Vietnam. When he came home late at night he would hide all the guns and knives in the house because he feared being murdered as he slept. After three years that marriage also ended, and Laura again moved into her parents' small home. The house, built on scattered cinderblocks, shuddered as lumber trucks sped past on the highway. The black-and-white photograph on her parents' dining room wall was of a beautiful but somber five-year-old Laura holding a toy phone to her ear.

At the junior school, Hurley and Laura worked 15 feet away from each other, just inside the double-doors at the main entrance. A beige brick building with creaking hardwood floors, the school was built in the fifties and had changed little since.

In May 1982, after nine months of spending their days together at the school, Hurley walked up to Laura's desk with his divorce papers in hand and said that he was going to end his 25-year marriage to Geneva Morris. He'd made overtures before, but Laura had refused. "See, Laura, I told you I would do it," he told her in his soft East Texas drawl. "There's no reason now why you can't go out with me."

Their relationship developed slowly, and they were careful to hide it at school. Few knew, or even suspected, that the principal and secretary were dating. Hurley's enjoyment came from the horse races, and he taught Laura how to handicap the ponies. Her days with Hurley took her away from Hull and the confines of her parents' home, and she found it exciting. By summer, they were staying together on weekends at the TraveLodge near the racetrack. When they went to bed, Laura says, it was without any great passion, and as their affair continued, it gave her more a sense of companionship than love.

Late in the summer of 1982, Hurley had heart bypass surgery. The month before, he’d repeatedly told Laura that he wanted his divorce finalized before he went in the hospital. He told her that he had moved in with his brother, Walter, and was trying to force Geneva out of the house. The divorce became final that November, but unknown to Laura, Geneva and Hurley continued to live together.

The following March, parents started to complain to Superintendent Voytek that the black principal was dating the white school secretary. Voytek called in the pair and asked if there was any truth to the rumors. Both denied it, and Laura sobbed when confronted with the accusations.

That spring, 1983, other storms began to swirl around Hurley. Local merchants complained that he had given them bad checks. Then in October 1984, $200 in junior school funds was discovered missing, and school employees went to Voytek saying that Hurley hadn’t repaid money they’d lent him. By November the amount missing at the junior school had climbed to $1,500, and Voytek called in Hurley, Laura, and the school’s new coach, Bill Fleming, for questioning.

WHEN BILL FLEMING CAME TO THE JUNIOR SCHOOL in August 1983, he was looking for a fresh start. That wasn’t unusual. In fact, Bill became dissatisfied easily, and he was often looking for a change. This time he was coming out of two disappointing years of trying to make it in a private carpet business. When he proposed the move, he told his wife, Lynda, that coaching seemed like a haven to him. Forming his argument in favor of uprooting the family, he persuaded Lynda the same way he always had. "We can be a family, with a little place in the country. . . raise some chickens, and maybe even get a horse." She wanted to believe him, but much of her trust had been lost over the years.

Along with losing interest in jobs, Bill had a long history of losing interest in women. The truth was that Bill Fleming fell in love a lot. During their seven-year marriage, he’d left Lynda three times. A husky man with shaggy dark hair and an affable smile, Bill Fleming had an easy manner and a vulnerability that attracted women, and whenever he pursued a woman he became a torrent of romantic poetry, adulation, and passionate desire.

On the surface everything came easy for Bill. He was an honor student who’d lettered in four sports at Galena Park High School, outside of Houston. In his 1965 school annual, he was voted most popular. One reason was that Bill had a way of telling people what they wanted to hear. At graduation he had scholarship offers from schools across the country. That fall he started at Houston’s prestigious Rice University - as close to an Ivy League school as Gulf Coast Texas gets - on a football scholarship, but after his second year he flunked out. He finished college at Stephen F. Austin while he was married to Ann, his high-school sweetheart, and they later had a son. While they were both teaching in Corrigan, a small town 100 miles north of Houston, when their boy was three, Bill began to pursue Lynda. Two weeks after they met, and while still married to Ann, he proposed to Lynda.

Lynda, small with a heart-shaped face and short brown hair, wasn’t unlike Bill's first wife, Ann. Both were teachers and each had an ambitious nature that seemed to simultaneously attract and repel Bill. Once he was married to Lynda, he quickly turned his attention to other women. "I should have been born when I could have been a cowboy," he used to tell her. "I would have married an Indian woman, who would follow me from place to place and never talk." The bookcase in their bedroom was filled with Louis L'Amour novels, and after they moved to Hull he spent hours sitting on their screened porch staring off into the fields.

WHEN THE SCHOOL FUNDS WERE discovered to be missing, athletic funds were among them, and Hurley said they came under Bill's jurisdiction. No charges against Bill were ever filed, and he was not asked to take a polygraph test, but the incident soured Bill on his new principal. The coach said he felt violated, and he blamed Hurley.

Meanwhile, Laura and Hurley continued to spend weekends together, but they were little more than roommates. They sat on opposite sides of the truck on the way to the races. Tired of spending the day at the track, Laura now stayed alone in the motel room watching television. Hurley would return late at night and throw himself onto the bed to sleep, while Laura sat at the small round table in front of the window figuring the next day's handicaps on Hurley's pocket calculator. They made love less and less often, until they stopped altogether. "Hurley would say he was sorry,” she says. “He'd say that he knew there was something missing, but he was just sick so much of the time."

A few days before the 1984 Christmas break, Lynda Fleming paid a surprise visit to her husband at the junior school. Things between her and Bill had been hectic; in addition to teaching English in another school district, she was working on a second master’s degree. A sixth-grade party was going on, and Bill looked upset to see her. He pulled her by the arm into the auditorium. "There's something wrong, Bill, isn't there?" she said.

"No, Lynda, nothing's wrong. Go on home and we'll talk about it later," Bill urged. Lynda pressed and Bill resisted until finally she consented to wait for him at home. That night he told Lynda he was leaving, but swore that there was no other woman, and asked her to forget about it until after the holidays.