The Bride Wore Crimson and Other Stories

by Bryan Woolley

Stephanie was the first witness. “I considered us very close friends,” she said. “Our children played together daily. There was not a day that went by that they weren’t at each other’s houses…. Sometimes as many as four times a week, we would share meals together.” Sometimes she and Michele would drive to garage sales together, she said. Sometimes Fred would watch the children while they were gone, and sometimes James would.

  Then one day, she said, she was drying off Sally after her bath, and Sally “asked me to put my finger in her. I said to her that we don’t do that to other people. She said, ‘Yes, we do.’ I said, ‘No, we don’t,’ and she said, ‘Yes.’ I said, ‘Has someone done that to you?’ and she said, ‘Yes.’”

  Stephanie asked her if Clara had done it. Sally said she didn’t. “I asked her if Michele had done it,” Stephanie said, “and she said, ‘No.’ I asked her if her daddy had done it, and she said, ‘No.’ I asked her if James did it and she said, ‘Yes.’”

  Stephanie said Sally calls her vagina her “tushy.” She said Sally told her James touched her tushy during “parties” in his studio, where she and Clara were “finger painting and eating oranges.” Stephanie said she thought the molestation had occurred “on or about Nov. 1” because she remembered that the weather was cool when she went to pick up Sally and the child told her about the oranges and finger painting.

  Sally followed her mother to the witness stand. She was self-possessed and cute and blond. When she sat down, only the top of her head and her eyes could be seen above the wall surrounding the witness stand. The six women on the jury leaned forward and smiled maternally at her.

  “Do you remember back when you and Clara and James had parties in the studio?” Mr. Kirlin asked her.

  “Uh-huh,” Sally said.

  “Can you tell me what happened at the parties?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Do you remember something that James did to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me what that was?”

  “He touched my tushy.”

  “Do you remember where that happened?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And where was that?”

  “In the bathroom.”

  “Do you remember where else it happened?”

  “No.”

  Mr. Kirlin never called Clara, the alleged eyewitness, to testify, nor did he call the physician who examined Sally, nor introduce the physician’s report into evidence. But many witnesses would follow Sally to the stand.

  Detective Gregston would try to defend her investigation of the case from Gary Noble’s withering ridicule. “Do you mean to tell me you had a walking, talking, living, breathing eyewitness and never tried to talk to her?” he asked when she admitted she had never questioned Clara. “Do you mean to tell me you never warned the parents of the other kids on the block that there was a child molester in the neighborhood?”

  Mr. Noble began his defense with Mary Frances Gassett, a schoolteacher who lives across the street from Stephanie and Fred. Mrs. Gassett testified that Stephanie approached her one morning last July and said: “I hate to tell you this, but James has been molesting Sally and Clara for over a year now.”

  Mrs. Gassett said she replied: “You ought to be more careful before you go around accusing people of things like that.”

  She said that Sally, who was with her mother, chimed in: “But Mom, Papa (her name for James) didn’t touch my pee-pee.”

  She said Stephanie picked up Sally and hurried back across the street.

  During the five days of testimony, Michele would tell of Alice Umbach’s visit and of James’ goodness as a husband and father.

  James would present a detailed calendar of his life from April 1988, when Stephanie and Fred had moved in next door, until Ms. Umbach’s visit in June 1989, showing he had little opportunity for the regular abuse that Stephanie alleged. He would describe his household’s daily routine, and his babysitting with Sally and Clara, and his cleaning-up of Sally’s potty-training accidents. He would testify that there had never been any “parties” or finger painting in the studios.

  Twenty-two neighbors and friends of James—many had traveled from as far away as California, Georgia, Tennessee and Ohio—would testify to his good character and reputation, and to his devotion as a husband and father.

  Julie Ogg, a lifelong friend of Michele’s, would tell of a bizarre episode she said she had witnessed in which Fred came to Michele’s house to get his daughter. Sally became hysterical and tried to hide from him, Mrs. Ogg said, and Fred threatened to “take her back to the orphanage.” The child then stopped crying, Mrs. Ogg said.

  Fred would testify that the episode never happened, and that he hardly ever kept the children when Stephanie and Michele were away, but that James did.

  Alice Umbach would deny that she had been rude or abusive during her visit to James’ family.

  Stephanie’s other next-door neighbor, Kathleen Maloney, would testify that she hadn’t rallied to James’ side as the other neighbors did after he was accused. She had had her locks changed instead.

  But the crux of the case was simple: Would the jurors believe, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Sally was a reliable witness and what she had told them was the truth?

  Sally was the only evidence in the case, Mr. Noble argued, and she had been coached for nearly a year by Stephanie and the Department of Human Services.

  Sally was telling the truth, Mr. Kirlin argued, and James was “an artist, a master of deception.”

  Sally was in the courtroom, sitting on Fred’s lap, clutching her doll, while the lawyers made their arguments. The women on the jury kept looking at her.

  At 11:07 a.m. Judge Thorpe turned the case over to the jurors, and they left the courtroom. Mr. Noble stalked into the hallway and exploded. “In all the years I’ve been practicing law, I’ve never seen a three-year-old alleged victim sitting in the courtroom during the arguments!” he said. “That may be a first in the United States!”

  At 6:04 p.m. the red light beside the witness box finally flashed on. The jury had reached its verdict. James’ friends streamed into the courtroom. “Bring in the jury,” Judge Thorpe said. An awful tension fell upon the room.

  “We, the jury, find the defendant not guilty,” the presiding juror said.

  Suddenly Fred and Stephanie and Sally and the grandparents were gone, and the women in the audience were weeping. Michele was weeping. Gary Noble was weeping. James rose from his chair at the defendant’s table and numbly accepted the embraces of his friends. Darryl Hughes, who had had the bad feeling, whooped with joy. Everybody applauded.

  “My daughter was in therapy for at least six months, and she went through hell before that,” Stephanie told me over the phone. “She started wetting her bed and has not been able to get past that, and that’s a real hard stigma now that she’s four. We went through night after night of nightmares and yelling in the middle of the night over this…. Listen, from my perspective, James did this. There is no doubt in my mind that he did this. Absolutely none.”

  “Will you and your family continue to live next door to James and Michele?” I asked. “That must be difficult for all of you.”

  “The difficulty for us is not living next door to them” she said. “The pain for us is how the neighborhood reacted to this. But no, we’re not moving. It’s our home. We chose to live there. I’m not going to be run out of the neighborhood.”

  A few days after the trial, Michele saw Fred out in his yard and called to him: “There’s the liar.”

  He responded, “Michele, you told a few yourself.”

  She said, “Fred, I didn’t lie.”

  Another day, a limb fell off one of James’ trees into Fred’s yard. Fred tossed it into James’ yard. They tossed it back and forth for about four days. Although Fred wasn’t in sight, James exploded: “Next time I see this limb in my yard I’m going to stick it…”

  “If he had come out of the house at that moment,”
James told me, “I think I would have murdered him. All the anger of the last 10 months came back at that moment.”

  Including work they lost because of the time they had to spend on the case, James and Michele estimate it cost them between $50,000 and $60,000—much of it borrowed. “And a lot of emotional damage has been done to us,” Michele said. “It’s going to take a lot of time to recover. It’s so horrible to have somebody you thought was your friend do this to you. And they still believe…”

  One day they looked out the window and saw Fred working. He was building a fence between their two houses. It is eight feet tall.

  July 1990

  GLORY DENIED

  I graduated from Texas Western College in 1958, long before it was the University of Texas at El Paso. We had some good basketball teams in my day, but nothing like the Miners of 1966. I watched that NCAA final game on a black-and-white TV set in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I was a graduate student at Harvard. I had to explain to my classmates who watched it with me exactly what and where Texas Western College was. None had ever heard of it. But they rooted for Texas Western, and I don’t think they did it entirely for my sake. By then, the amazing Miners had captured the interest of the nation. When the 1966 Miners gathered in El Paso to celebrate the 25th anniversary of their accomplishment, Arturo Vasquez, the editor of Nova, the UTEP alumni quarterly, invited me to attend the reunion and write about it for the magazine. A slightly different version of the story was published in the Dallas Morning News, and was reprinted in The Best American Sports Writing: 1992.

  AS THEY ARRIVED ONE BY ONE AT THE HOTEL, THEY SHOOK HANDS, embraced, kidded each other about gray hair, bald spots, heavier bodies and slower feet. They marveled that a quarter century had passed since the remarkable thing that they had done. They were returning to celebrate the memory of it with their old school and the city. But first they would celebrate with their coach and each other.

  “It’s great to see all these guys in one place again, to tell the good old war stories,” said Nevil Shed. “It makes us feel warm inside to have a city as great as El Paso still remember something that we did for them. And we don’t forget what they did for us.”

  Twenty-five years ago, Coach Don Haskins said, it never entered his mind that they had done anything special. But few who saw it happen would forget it.

  For the first time, an all-black team had played an all-white team for the NCAA national basketball championship. The black men had won. History had been made. The Texas Western Miners had changed college basketball forever.

  But it was 1966. The march from Selma to Montgomery had happened only a year before, and the struggle for the rights of black people still held the country in turmoil.

  Civil rights workers still were being shot. Arsonists still were torching black churches. Gov. George Wallace still was defying a school desegregation order in Alabama. A congressional committee was investigating the Ku Klux Klan. The Georgia Legislature was refusing to seat a newly elected black representative named Julian Bond. Rioting had broken out in a Los Angeles neighborhood called Watts. And Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was promising to take the civil rights movement northward to Chicago.

  A lot of people in the country didn’t like the kind of history that the team from Texas had made.

  “I was so young and naive,” Coach Haskins remembers. “I hadn’t thought of it as putting an all-black team on the court. I was simply playing the best players I had. It’s what I had done all year. Then we came home, and the hate mail started pouring in. I got them for months. Thousands of letters, from all over the South.”

  The letters were only the beginning of his bitter time. A dozen years after winning the greatest athletic triumph in his own life and the history of his school, he would say: “If I could change one thing about my coaching career, I’d wish we came in second in 1966.”

  * * *

  On the night of March 19, 1966, the Texas Western College Miners walked onto a court in College Park, Md., to play the University of Kentucky Wildcats in the final game of the NCAA tournament.

  Kentucky had compiled a record of 23 wins and only one loss during the regular season. It was ranked No. 1 in the nation. On the previous evening, in the game that most of the coaches and sportswriters attending the tournament thought would really determine the championship, the Wildcats had beaten the nation’s No. 2 team, Duke. If the Wildcats beat the Miners, as almost everybody expected, they would give Kentucky and its legendary 64-year-old coach, Adolph Rupp, their fifth national championship.

  The Miners were the “Cinderella team” of the season. Texas Western College—now the University of Texas at El Paso—was a small group of buildings perched on a desert hillside a few hundred yards from the narrow Rio Grande and Mexico. Some 6,000 students were enrolled there. The Miners’ 36-year-old coach was in his first college job. A few years earlier, he had been coaching both boys’ and girls’ basketball at tiny Hedley High School in the Texas Panhandle and doubling as the school bus driver to make ends meet.

  Until the 1965-66 season, no one in big-time college basketball had paid much attention to Texas Western. In its entire history it had won only one NCAA tournament game. And at the time it was an “orphan” team, an independent, belonging to no athletic conference. Since none of the major basketball schools had bothered to recruit any of Haskins’ players, the Eastern and Midwestern press had dismissed them as “castoffs,” “unknowns” and “nondescripts.”

  But the Miners also had compiled a 23-1 record during the regular season, and when the tournament started, they were ranked No. 3 in the country. After an easy victory over Oklahoma City University in their first tournament game, they had nipped Kansas and Cincinnati, both in overtime, and had beaten Utah in the semifinals to get a crack at Kentucky and the title.

  They were upstarts. Traditionally powerful Kentucky and the arrogant Rupp, called “The Baron,” were the Establishment. The underdog-lovers of America, watching the tournament on black-and-white TV in living rooms, bars and dormitories, became fascinated with the unknown team from nowhere. But most of the new fans knew absolutely nothing about the school the Miners represented.

  “I run into people who remember that game, and they still think I went to an all-black school,” said Willie Worsley.

  Of course, Texas Western wasn’t an all-black college. Far from it. A large percentage of the small group of black students on campus had been recruited from all over the country for their skills at basket ball, football, and track. El Paso, where a majority of the citizens are Hispanic and Mexico’s fourth-largest city lies over the river, had comparatively few black residents. So did the vast, nearly empty desert region around it.

  But 11 years earlier, in 1955, Texas Western had been the first all-white college in Texas—indeed, in the entire old Confederacy—to admit black undergraduates. And in 1956, it had recruited its first black athlete—a basketball player named Charlie Brown.

  These steps were taken without fanfare and without incident. And, since El Paso is isolated from the other big Texas cities by miles and miles, and since most of Texas Western’s athletic opponents were Southwestern and Western schools that never had been segregated, nobody east of the Pecos noticed, and nobody west of the Pecos cared.

  “We were so insulated out here in El Paso that we barely knew all that racial stuff was going on in other places,” said David Palacio, one of the players. “We heard about it, I guess, but we didn’t think about it.”

  Nor were the Miners really an all-black team. Of the 12 men on the squad, five—Togo Railey, Jerry Armstrong, David Palacio, Louis Baudoin and Dick Myers—were white. All had played in games during the season, and Armstrong had been instrumental in winning the NCAA semifinal game, coming off the bench to shut down Utah’s star shooter, Jerry Chambers.

  They and the seven black players were a close-knit group. “We used to drink wine in the dorm together because we didn’t have the money to go out,” Palacio said. “We used to play a lot
of cards. It was friendship, pure friendship. I don’t remember a single instance of race being an issue or a problem among us.”

  But the team’s seven best players—Bobby Joe Hill, Orsten Artis, David Lattin, Willie Cager, Harry Flournoy, Nevil Shed and Willie Worsley—were black, and they were the only players who got into the game against the Wildcats, the only Miners seen on TV.

  In its entire history, Kentucky had never had a black player. Neither Adolph Rupp nor any other coach in the Southeastern Conference had ever seriously attempted to recruit one.

  “It was the first time such a thing had happened,” Coach Haskins said, “and it was against mighty Kentucky and The Baron. Had it been against a team with some black players, probably nothing would have been said of it.”

  Midway through the first quarter, with the Miners leading by one point, Bobby Joe Hill stole the ball, dribbled down the court and made an easy layup. As Kentucky was bringing the ball back up the court, Hill stole it again, dribbled down the court and made another easy layup, giving the Miners a five-point lead. The Wildcats never recovered. Texas Western won, 72-65. For the first time, a Rupp team had been beaten in an NCAA championship game.

  “They were a bunch of crooks,” he said. “One was on parole from Tennessee State Prison. Two had been kicked out of a junior college in Iowa. Texas Western was suspended by the NCAA for three years after that.”

  After the game, the Kentucky players—minus their coach—went to the Miners’ locker room and congratulated them. “There wasn’t any racial thing as far as the two teams were concerned,” Artis said.

  The next day, 10,000 delirious fans turned out at El Paso International Airport to welcome home the only team from Texas ever to win the NCAA Division I national championship. Willie Cager made a speech: “From all of us to all of you, No. 1 was the best we could do.” The crowd went wild. There was a parade through the town.

  “It was wonderfully crazy,” Willie Worsley said. “The people of El Paso made us feel very special.”