The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime

by Gregg Olsen

  As he left the courtroom, David Walker lamented the outcome and blamed the circumstance that kept much of the bad-blood evidence he’d wanted to show between Fontenot and Fleming out of the trial, because it was hearsay and inadmissible. “We couldn’t show the negative feelings because we couldn’t say what a dead man had told others,” he explained.

  When asked if they would pursue any other leads, Speers said: “I believe we’ve already tried the man who killed Bill Fleming. As far as I’m concerned, the case is closed.”

  SIX MONTHS AFTER THE TRIAL ENDED, a grand jury indicted Hurley’s daughter, Vanessa, charging her with perjury. DeGuerin decried the charge as sour grapes. By then Vanessa had moved to Houston, where she was an accounting major at the University of Houston. A year later, many of those who’d attended Hurley’s trial were back in the same courthouse, this time listening to taped grand jury testimony in which Vanessa said she’d never planned to fly into Houston that day and that she’d never planned to move any furniture, her father’s stated reason for borrowing the school district’s camper top. On the tape, she was also heard saying that her father never called her at 5:00 that afternoon. Hurley sat in the gallery, unemotional, listening to his daughter’s voice fill the courtroom.

  “Did you know your father was involved with Laura Nugent?” the prosecutor asked Vanessa during the grand jury inquiry.

  “Yes…. He told me,” she said.

  “Can you tell how he felt about her?”

  “He loved her,” Vanessa answered.

  As at the murder trial, Vanessa’s former boss was called to the stand. He testified for a second time that he’d never walked in that office at five that day for a meeting and that the conference noted on his calendar had been held at another location. It therefore wasn’t possible that the memory of that happening spurred Vanessa to remember a phone call from her father.

  When she took the stand, Vanessa called her change in recollection an honest mistake and said that she believed “in my heart” what she’d told the jurors. She also contended that investigators on the case had pressured her into the statement and hadn’t allowed her to read and correct it. “I just did what he asked me to do. He didn’t give me a choice,” she said.

  When the man she referred to took the stand, Texas Ranger Tommy Walker said that he had, in fact, warned Vanessa about the possible repercussions for committing perjury: two to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $5,000. “I was shocked by what she proposed to do. I was concerned as to the possible result.”

  In the end, the irony was that while her father was found not guilty, Vanessa Fontenot was convicted and sentenced to six years probation and a $2,400 fine.

  For a brief period after his daughter’s trial, Hurley Fontenot disappeared into obscurity. Unable to be an educator with the cloud of suspicion lingering, Hurley worked as a vending-machine stocker. Before long, he and Geneva again divorced, and Hurley became romantically involved with a then-42-year-old woman named Vina McCool, a desk clerk in the Livingston hotel he’d stayed in during the long weeks of the trial. Their relationship was volatile, and two years after his murder trial ended, charges were filed against Hurley for assaulting McCool. She asked that they be dropped. “What can I say? I still love that squirrelly Hurley,” she said at the time.

  Then on May 17, 1989, a little more than four years after Bill Fleming’s murder, McCool was with Hurley Fontenot when he died of a massive heart attack. “He never got over the strain of that trial,” McCool said. “People still hated him and acted as if he was guilty. If he was, God will take care of it now. If not, I hope God takes care of all those people who wanted to convict him.”

  WHO KILLED BILL FLEMING? Years later while working on books, my path sometimes crossed with Dick DeGuerin’s and we had lively conversations about that very topic. He still maintained that he didn’t believe Hurley was guilty, that the ex-principal with the bad heart didn’t have the physical fortitude to murder Bill Fleming and dispose of his body. “If you’re asking me if Hurley ever told me he killed Billy Mac Fleming, he never did,” DeGuerin said. “He never said anything like that to me.”

  What do I think? I’ve always leaned toward believing that Hurley must have been the killer. I never accepted his explanation for the blood in the camper and on his truck axle: that it had somehow managed to drip off of soiled sanitary napkins and tissues. That Hurley steam-cleaned the camper and his truck the day after Fleming’s disappearance was too great a coincidence. Just think about how much blood must have been inside the camper for some to remain - enough to collect on the truck axle even after such a vigorous cleaning.

  As to Hurley’s health, would the murder have been so physically taxing? Shooting a man twice through the back of the head wouldn’t take a great amount of effort. If Hurley murdered Fleming in the camper, all he had to do was drive the truck to Intercontinental Airport to pick up a parking receipt for his alibi. The next morning, he could have driven to the field and rolled the body out, then taken the truck to the car wash to steam-clean away the evidence.

  The main reason I doubted Hurley’s innocence, however, was that I never believed his story that he’d stopped loving Laura Nugent. One reason is a call I received a few weeks after Hurley’s acquittal. When I picked up, the former principal said hello in his soft East Texas drawl and then added that he’d enjoyed getting to know me better at the trial.

  “I just wanted to thank you,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked. “What do you have to thank me for?”

  In a whisper he answered, “You were nice to my Laura, and that means a lot.”

  Photo Archive III

  Laura Nugent on her parents’ front porch.

  Hurley Fontenot standing outside of the junior school.

  Bill Fleming.

  Laura’s mother, Alma Booth.

  Liberty County Sheriff E.W. “Sonny” Applebe

  Author’s note:

  I was at the Hurley Fontenot trial, and the remembrances of it are from my time there, talking to people and listening to testimony. It has, however, been 27 years, so I pulled some of the facts and quotes from articles in the Houston Chronicle, many of which were written by Cindy Horswell, who did an exceptional job covering this case. A big thank you to Janice Rubin (www.janicerubin.com), the superb photographer who generously allowed me to publish her pictures with this piece. – KC

  Tanya Reid — The Panhandle Mother Who Loved Her Baby to Death

  By Gregg Olsen

  TANYA REID LOOKED AT THE GRIM FACES OF THE PEOPLE STANDING NEAR HER. Her husband. Her sister. Her parents. Her young daughter. Two detectives.

  The moment she’d seen the police drive up, she knew they’d come for her.

  “Tanya, you are going to have to come down to the station. We have a warrant for your arrest,” one said.

  She started to cry. “Could I change my clothes and call my lawyer?” she asked.

  He agreed. When she came back downstairs a few minutes later, she turned to seven-year-old Carolyn. “They’ve taken Michael away from us, and now they’re taking me away!” she cried out.

  Tanya was doing what she always did, putting herself before what was best for her children, gulping the attention.

  The detective tried to soothe the child, but Tanya had done a good job of agitating Carolyn. Her brother, three-year-old Michael, had been removed from the family and was in foster care. Now her mother was about to be led away by police.

  At the Urbandale, Iowa police station Tanya Thaxton Reid was formally charged with endangering Michael’s life. Soon, authorities in Texas would be investigating the death of another of her children, her baby daughter, Morgan.

  She, and many who knew her, were stunned by the accusations.

  Tanya was a devoted wife and mother. She rocked her children to sleep every night. She had dinner on the table for her husband when he came home from work and she kept a clean house. She was a LVN, a licensed vocational nurse, helping patients – including babies
– with day-to-day challenges they faced when hospitalized. She had literally saved the lives of her own children by breathing oxygen into their tiny mouths. She kept a vigil at their bedside during dozens of hospitalizations for a terrible genetic disease she said they had.

  Tanya? Responsible for her baby daughter’s death and the near-death of her son? It was impossible. She loved her children to death.

  THE URBANDALE POLICE HAD NEVER HEARD OF MUNCHAUSEN SYNDROME by Proxy (often shortened to MSP or MSBP). Not many people had when the first of Tanya Reid’s children died in 1984, or even in 1988 when doctors who treated Michael and state child protection investigators finally began to put the pieces together.

  “Munchausen syndrome” was coined by a doctor in 1951 writing in the British medical journal Lancet (the name refers to the eighteenth-century adventurer Baron Von Munchausen, who told tall tales about his exploits in war). The doctor used the term to describe patients who faked illnesses to receive unnecessary medical care and the attention and sympathy that accompanies it. It wasn't until 1977 that another doctor wrote in Lancet about two mothers who had inflicted illnesses on their children and received the same attention "by proxy."

  Tanya Thaxton was the fourth and last of the daughters born to John and Wanda Thaxton in their middle-class neighborhood in Dumas, a town in the Texas Panhandle. Tanya once described herself this way: "I was raised as a Baptist. I was in the youth choir, and I sang in the church there. I played in the high school band. I played clarinet. Went to all the football games and basketball games. Just a normal growing up."

  After graduating from high school in 1976, Tanya began the vocational nursing program at Dumas Memorial Hospital, where as part of her duties she helped care for the babies in the nursery. At about the same time she met her family’s new next door neighbor, Jim Reid. He was seven years older than Tanya and was working for Swift Independent Packing Company, a meat-packing plant. He was the quiet one and Tanya was the more out-going partner. They married in 1977.

  The Reid’s daughter, Carolyn, born in 1981, didn’t seem to have any health problems. But from the day her sister was born in May, 1983, little Morgan Renee seemed to struggle for her life.

  Just days after her birth Tanya rushed Morgan to the hospital saying she had a strange rash and colic. Doctors said she was healthy, but suggested Tanya stop breastfeeding and try a supplement. She did and the rash disappeared. Later, Tanya resumed nursing.

  Lots of babies are allergic to breast milk or colicky, but Tanya was dramatic about even the simplest sniffle dramatic. Neighbors said that if they heard sirens, they knew an ambulance was on its way to the Reid’s house.

  Tanya loved the attention. Nurses admired the way she wouldn’t leave Morgan’s side. Other mothers would share the usual worries about their children but no one could top Tanya’s stories. She thrived on the attention and sympathy.

  Tanya learned quickly that Jim’s career at Swift made her something akin to a military wife. They moved, and then moved again for his work, back and forth between Texas, Illinois and Iowa. The constant buying and selling of houses, with temporary stays in motels or apartments, were hard on the marriage. So were the children’s illnesses.

  It meant that Tanya didn’t only fool her husband, parents and friends about her children’s health. She fooled doctors in three states.

  In August, 1983, when Morgan was just three months old, she stopped breathing for the first time. Tanya saved her by giving her mouth to mouth resuscitation. Tanya told her parents that Morgan had experienced a seizure and stopped breathing. She said doctors told her it was a SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) near-miss. At the time, SIDS was a catchall designation assigned to cases in which otherwise healthy infants mysteriously stopped breathing, usually during sleep, and died.

  In February, 1984 when the girl was just nine months old, there was another seizure. Tanya didn’t save her this time. Morgan was hospitalized and when doctors said she was brain dead, life support was removed. For a few hours she struggled to live, then died in her mother’s arms.

  Morgan was buried wearing a yellow pinafore and white tights, with a white bonnet on her head to try and conceal incisions made during the autopsy. The conclusion was that Morgan most likely died of SIDS. It would take years, but physicians and pathologists would eventually have a keener understanding of just how often child abuse and infanticide – from SHS (Shaken Baby syndrome) and MSBP – was responsible for the death of children.

  Tanya and Jim stopped attending church. She told friends that their minister didn’t seem sympathetic and didn’t understand her anger at God.

  “There’s all these people who commit crimes—rapists, murderers—or even those dying of cancer. Why did God have to take an innocent child and not one of them? Why did he have to do that?” she cried.

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER MORGAN'S death, Jim was transferred back to Chicago and the family moved again. Tanya became pregnant. She fainted several times and each time she did she received some much-needed attention from the aloof Jim. On May 2, 1985, she gave birth to a ten-pound boy, Brandon Michael, who they called Michael. He was a “happy, happy baby," Tonya said. "He slept through the night, never bothering us a bit."

  The day after his birth, Tanya had her tubes tied. It was too risky to have more children, she told friends, because “there’s a problem with our genes.”

  The happiness was short-lived. When Michael was just 26 days old, Tanya called the paramedics: She had found him unconscious and was performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to keep him alive.

  By the time Michael was two, the family had left Illinois and moved back to Texas, and then on to Des Moines, Iowa for Jim’s job. Tanya told Michael’s doctors during his frequent medical appointments that Morgan had died of SIDS and that Michael had frequent bouts of apnea – seizures when he would stop breathing, turn blue and seem glassy-eyed. She would resuscitate him and hurry to the hospital.

  Just two days after their move to Iowa, Tanya rushed Michael to the emergency room. She said that he had had a seizure and resuscitated him. Nurses noticed the unusual relationship between mother and son. Some felt the boy was lucky to have such a concerned mother who never left his side. But notes about Tanya’s mothering began to show up in hospital charts. One nurse wrote: “Mom and child interaction somewhat inappropriate, i.e. seem antagonistic toward each other…”

  Hospital staff noticed that while waiting to be admitted, Tanya seemed excited, grinning as she greeted the doctors and nurses she knew with a big smile, almost “showing off.” It was like a social event to Tanya. They also watched at how disturbed Michael seemed when Tanya returned from grabbing some food in the cafeteria. One time, from his hospital crib, he cried out, “Mom - go!”

  Hospital staff referred her to a counselor. Tanya seemed agitated when discussing her son and his health concerns but when the counselor suggested the entire family could benefit from therapy, Tanya agreed it might be a good idea. The young mother also talked about Morgan’s death, prompting the counselor to write in her report: “I believe this issue (SIDS death) is unresolved for her.”

  Tanya took Michael to the doctor dozens of times. They knew she was an unusually attentive mother, even paranoid, but decided it was because she had lost a baby girl.

  In my book about Tanya Reid, Cruel Deception – A Mother’s Deadly Game, A Prosecutor’s Crusade for Justice, I described the moment when doctors finally wondered if they were seeing what for most of them was their first case of MSBP:

  Brandon Michael Reid was a beautiful little boy with blondish hair that just brushed over the tops of his ears. His eyes were bright and blue, the color of his father’s. He was the calendar boy for the American Heartland. Under ordinary circumstances he would be the apple of anyone’s eyes. But at 12:14 p.m. on February 7, 1988, he was not a little kid playing in a grassy field, or rolling on the floor with a puppy. He was sweaty and terrified. His hair was matted in whorls onto his forehead. Despite the fact that it was lunchtime,
he hadn’t even been dressed for the day.

  Instead, he had been fighting for his life. Fighting for air. This one would be recalled as the episode that was very different—in its beginning and its outcome. Jim Reid was not at the office; he was at home enjoying the lull of a Sunday afternoon. He was not in the yard. Not at the neighbors. Not in the garage. Jim Reid was in the house. His son and wife were upstairs in the master bedroom playing. He could hear Tanya and Michael laughing and giggling. It was a good sound. The sound of a happy family. After all they had been through, good times were cherished, savored. Then the noise stopped. It was quiet upstairs, as though the volume control of a TV had been turned off. It was an abrupt, slamming silence. A moment later, Jim lurched in the direction of Tanya’s screams.

  “Jim, come quick! It’s Michael! He had another spell!”

  Jim climbed the stairs and rushed into the bedroom. Michael, sweaty and limp, was on the bed. Tanya hovered over their son doing mouth-to-mouth.

  “Have you called paramedics?”

  Between breaths, Tanya said she had.

  Jim checked his son’s heart rate and studied the boy’s blue, still face for any sign that he’d be all right. In a minute, even before the paramedics came, Michael was breathing on his own. And by all accounts, the little boy was angry. Michael wore a two-piece pajama set as he was carted kicking and wailing across the glint of linoleum of the emergency room at Blank Children’s Hospital that Sunday afternoon. The child was not a stranger to the staff working that shift. Dr. Robert Colman and Dr. Anne Zoucha had seen the little boy before. They also knew his mother. They knew the routine. But this time it would be different. ER nurse Callie Sandquist watched as they put the Reid boy into Trauma 1, one of a pocket of five examination rooms directly across from the nurses’ station. The little boy was screaming. Not crying, but absolutely howling. He was not saying any words, just making noise.