Buried Memories (33 page)

According to a neurological examination, there was still evidence that Betty suffered organic brain damage and serious hearing loss dating back to her bout with measles. Because Betty had achieved her GED since she had been incarcerated, the psychotherapists held she had received extra help in order to accomplish that feat.

Betty had many interviews with the psychologists. She told them, “My father beat me when I was a child, but he never sexually abused me.”

The counselors wrote off her last response, insisting that Betty was in denial about her father, whom they considered a jealous man since he wouldn’t let her attend school functions or date. They held that repressing her father’s sexual abuse was consistent with Betty’s personality pattern and subsequent relationships with men.

Beets continued telling them about her husbands. “It seemed like we had so many arguments and fought a lot. Maybe it was my migraine headaches, but whatever, I was too afraid to act.

“After my first husband ran off with a younger woman, I married Bill Lane because he’d provide a home for me and my children, and only a few days after we married, he began beating me. But what else could I do? I had all these children to care for.”

Betty acknowledged having visual hallucinations and hearing a choir singing when no one was around. She also admitted being ashamed of working in bars, which the psychologists termed “indecent employment.”

After hearing Betty’s life story, the doctors determined that she was a battered wife with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. In early 1990, the psychologists readied a report for the court describing the syndrome as a situation where a murder isn’t necessarily spontaneous with the abuse. A murder can occur when an abused person becomes stressed at a later time and then kills her abuser. The appeals attorneys were critical that no mental-health information or reports of abuse were presented at her initial murder trial.

The doctors concluded that Beets’s physical and mental disabilities made her dependent on a man to help her pay her bills and provide emotional support. They also said, “Her drug and alcohol abuse was her attempt to self-medicate and reduce the intrusive thoughts and feelings of traumatic events. She exhibited strong dependency needs that caused her to be in relationships with men who abused her.”

The sister of Bill Lane’s first wife added credibility to Betty’s claim. She told the doctors that, “Bill struck my sister on numerous occasions with violent force causing physical and emotional harm. He had a violent, ungovernable temper. He attacked her without provocation and used offensive language in the presence of others.”

Bobby Branson signed a statement that when he was a small child he remembered Ronnie Threlkeld slapping Betty. On the statement, his signature closely resembled Betty’s, with the same large, proud capital letters.

Bobby had lived with his mother longer than any of the other children and eagerly testified. He told her appeals attorneys, “I knew Wayne Barker real good. Every few days he’d hit Mama.”

The claims became more elaborate and accusatory as family members heard of Betty’s newly discovered memory and came forth with their own distant recollections, complete with colorful details.

Bobby remembered a time when Wayne Barker grabbed Betty by her hair. With the children present, “He stood in front of her with her hair in one hand, and hitting her with the other. She was all twisted up trying to get away, but couldn’t. Wayne also used to threaten her all of the time. Mom bought a little tape recorder and held it to the phone for forty-five minutes. She said she planned to take it to court.”

When quizzed about the tape, Bobby admitted, “I don’t know what happened to it.”

Even Faye Lane’s husband got into the act of accusing Wayne Barker of beating Betty. He said, “I never saw Wayne hit her because he was a coward—always hit her when no one was around to help. But I would see her afterwards, and I sure do remember her black eyes and bruised chins. Hell, there were even choke marks around her neck. I got so damn mad that I took pictures of her to use in court.”

The eager appeals attorneys wanted to see the photographs. “Unfortunately,” he told them, “I can’t find any of them. Turned the house upside down, but couldn’t find a one.”

Betty Beets’s attorney shopped around for an antideath-penalty judge. U.S. District Judge Robert Parker in Tyler, Texas, fit the description. He signed an order staying Betty’s execution because her latest appeal characterized Mrs. Beets as being raped and tortured throughout her life. She also had been an alcoholic, and suffered brain damage because of the beatings.

In April 1991, after Judge Parker studied the appeal, he found that “ample evidence supported the original jury verdict.” Also, he found no evidence that prosecutors offered leniency to Shirley and Robby in return for their testimony at their mother’s trial.

However, he brought up a new wrinkle. He felt that Mrs. Beets’s defense attorney, E. Ray Andrews, who had tried to collect the insurance benefits before the trial, “should have testified on her behalf rather than represent her at trial, because it related to an essential element of the State’s charge of murder for remuneration. The court finds that counsel pursued a course of action inconsistent with his client’s best interests.”

Then after the judge criticized E. Ray, he said, “Andrews is well known to the court as a competent and tenacious criminal defense lawyer.”

Bandy protested that any lawyer, after getting to know all the details about his client, would invariably be a valuable witness in some phase of the trial.

Finally, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans came to E. Ray Andrews’s aid by ruling he had no conflict of interest. But as with past appeals, the courts learned of new appeal points they wanted to examine. It became obvious that resolving Betty’s case would take at least another three years.

THIRTY

District Attorney Billy Bandy had suffered from prostate cancer several years earlier, but it had been in remission. Now in 1992, the disease came roaring back with a vengeance. Cancer ate his body while chemotherapy burned away his thick curly hair. Bald and frail, he insisted on staying in his job, even when his associates had to help him to and from the courtroom. Sometimes Bandy would be forced to ask for a five-minute recess.

The courthouse staff knew about his current chemotherapy treatment, which made him nauseous, and his need to go to the bathroom and throw up. He died on May 19, 1992.

To fill Bandy’s unexpired term, Texas Governor Ann Richards appointed lifelong Democrat, E. Ray Andrews. At first, E. Ray did a good job. His charismatic way of dealing with people proved effective, and he hired conscientious employees who proficiently performed their tasks.

When time came to elect a new Henderson County District Attorney, E. Ray ran for the position. His opponent took out newspaper space and tried to tell everyone how E. Ray, while in private practice, left some of his clients hanging in the wind without fulfilling his contractual agreements. He also reminded voters that E. Ray had once been sanctioned and couldn’t practice law for two months, had a DWI on his record, and frequently didn’t pay his bills.

Andrews could not challenge his accuser, for he told the truth, but E. Ray promised to “clean up my act.” He’d stop drinking and pay full attention to his position. Wanting to believe him, the electorate gave E. Ray forty-one more votes than his opponent.

The following year, a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court finally made its decision regarding E. Ray Andrews’s failure to testify in Betty’s case. The essence of the court’s thirty-four-page report stated, “Our review of the record convinces us that Andrews’s failure to testify did not, and could not have adversely affected Beets’s defense.”

It somewhat vindicated E. Ray’s representation of Betty. The court also said, “Mrs. Beets apparently never gave Mr. Andrews reason to suspect she had physical or psychological problems.” However, in a footnote it suggested, “The State Bar might look into Mr. Andrews’s ‘apparent breach of his ethical obligations.’ ”

Once again, a court had reinstated Betty’s death sentence.

In 1994, Betty’s youngest son and the love of her life, Bobby, was run over by a car while he strolled down the sidewalk. She was devastated.

At the hospital’s emergency room, doctors found that he had no broken bones, but was brain dead. Her family generously arranged to donate his eyes, heart, lungs, liver, and kidneys. The tragedy moved Betty to begin writing poetry that expressed her sorrow, for she suffered more pain than if she had been given an execution date.

While serving as the DA, E. Ray Andrews began doing favors for his friends, such as forgiving speeding tickets. Then he left the scene of an accident after slamming his Oldsmobile into a closed gas station with an empty bottle of Wild Turkey in his car.

Two years after becoming DA, in July 1994, Andrews resigned. “I just don’t want no more of the cheese,” he said of his turbulent DA career. “I want out of the trap.”

E. Ray must have seen the writing on the wall, for he had slipped out of office only one month before FBI agents hauled him off in handcuffs.

Athens buzzed with the news of E. Ray’s arrest, a man they genuinely liked, but knew had a black side. They called him “a heck of a campaigner, a talented lawyer when sober, and a real witty and friendly guy who had a winning way about him.” A fellow worker said E. Ray would come late to work; other days he’d leave early; and then sometimes he didn’t show at all. Everyone agreed that his downhill slide was a self-inflicted tragedy.

E. Ray had talked a friend into approaching a Corsicana businessman who had been indicted for murdering his wife, and to tell him that DA Andrews would drop the indictment for $500,000.

Once the businessman heard of the bribe, he told his attorneys, who immediately reported it to the FBI. The suspected murderer and the FBI collaborated to trap Andrews. With the FBI listening and recording the phone conversation, the businessman negotiated a new price of $300,000 for Andrews’s service. The next day, the man placed $100,000 in Andrews’s safety-deposit box. Later, the court dismissed the businessman’s murder indictment after his attorneys argued that the district attorney’s conduct had tainted the proceedings.

In that same year, E. Ray’s wife of thirty-two years divorced him, the bank foreclosed on his four-thousand-square-foot house on the peaceful shores of Lake Athens, and took away his Mercedes.

Andrews pleaded guilty to violating the federal Hobbs Act and was sentenced to forty-two months in a federal prison.

In 1995, Betty Beets used E. Ray’s fall from grace as a new attempt to save her life. Arguing incompetent counsel, Betty had her attorney petition the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to say that E. Ray Andrews should have resigned as her defense attorney in order to testify on her behalf.

The court’s decision came swiftly. It held that E. Ray’s testimony would not have made much difference in Betty’s defense, since another witness had testified that Betty was unaware of her husband’s death benefits before she met with Mr. Andrews. The court had heeded the testimony of Chaplain Denny Burris at Betty’s trial, recalling that Betty didn’t know the amount of Jimmy Don’s insurance.

Betty again pleaded to the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals under the guise that twenty-three of her constitutional rights had been violated. Judge Hannah studied them, including her right to competent counsel, and denied each one. Now her case would return to Henderson County for Judge Holland to set another execution date.

That threat came much closer when the court set the execution date of Betty’s friend, Karla Faye Tucker. On February 4, 1998, Karla Faye, and not Betty, became the first woman in Texas to be executed since the Civil War. Thousands of people congregated outside the Walls Unit at Huntsville to protest her execution.

Up until then, the public thought the state didn’t have the stomach for executing women. Tucker’s death cast a pall over the women on death row. Not only had they lost a friend, but they could hear the bell tolling for their own deaths as well.

In the meantime, Attorney Joseph Margulies of Minneapolis took up Betty’s fight. He returned her case to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear an earlier ruling by the district court. Unfortunately for Betty, the court only reaffirmed the earlier ruling that upheld her death sentence. With that, the judges closed the appeals process at the circuit court level.

Beets had but one recourse—the U.S. Supreme Court. Her team of attorneys stretched the ninety-day time limit to buy their client a few more weeks, then filed their petition during the first week of December, 1999.

THIRTY-ONE

The explosion of notoriety around Betty Beets’s trial could be considered a teaspoonful compared to the clamor as her execution drew near.

As soon as the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to hear Betty’s case, Judge Holland set February 24, 2000, as her new execution date. Everything moved much faster than expected. But in a way, it had taken an eternity—almost fifteen years of appeals.

Publicity-shy Betty became a sought-after celebrity. Reporters from the major television networks interviewed her on death row, and television’s legal minds and guest attorneys discussed her case daily.

Betty became a champion of abused women and now professed that
all
of her husbands had abused her, in addition to her father. Once getting everyone’s attention, she added that her mother and grandmother had been abused as well. As usual, she offered no proof, but that didn’t matter. Her followers believed her anyway.

Now a notable on the Internet with a page for abused women, Betty wrote a three-part story of her life. She told how she had been raped and abused, dragged out in a field and strangled, then left for dead. She pushed her hearing impairment as the weakness that had made her so vulnerable.