In his East Texas hometown, James Beathard was known as an unconventional thinker—an outspoken peacenik who marched in the high school band and sometimes played chess during lunch breaks. His student body was unapologetically pro-2nd Amendment and, in those pre-mass shooting days, the parking lot in Rusk held plenty of pickups with gun racks full of loaded shotguns and hunting rifles.
So Beathard, whose high school years in the 1970s overlapped with the Vietnam War, shocked his entire lunch table during a raucous debate one day by “coming out as a conscientious objector,” recalled his friend Lucy Murphy. “He really felt he could not … use a gun against anybody. So there was really no sense in him going to the military. And yet his father had been in the military, and my dad was a career military person.”
After graduation, Beathard attended college and then took a job at his hometown’s largest employer: the state mental hospital. In 1984, his biggest problem seemed to be that he’d recently gotten divorced and needed money for a lawyer in order to win more visits with his kids, Murphy said.
So it confounded his fellow residents of Rusk when Beathard was arrested for capital murder—along with a coworker—in connection with a heinous crime that left three people dead in a remote cabin in the Davy Crockett National Forest 50 miles south. Beathard had no prior criminal record.
Fewer seemed surprised about the arrest of Gene Hathorn Jr., the co-defendant, who was a local drug dealer with a history of violence and clear motive. The victims were Hathorn’s father, who’d recently disinherited him, his stepmother, and half-brother. Some locals later testified to threats he’d made against his family and his violent temper: In one instance, he’d used nunchucks to brutalize a man simply for taking a drink of whiskey without asking him. The Trinity County district attorney sought the death penalty for both men.
Beathard’s case went to trial first, and Hathorn testified for the prosecution, claiming his friend planned and carried out the killings. Beathard then denied knowing anything about Hathorn’s murder plot; he testified he’d been tricked into riding to the family home and claimed he’d fled and hidden when Hathorn opened fire. But Beathard was sentenced to death.
A few weeks later, Hathorn recanted, saying he’d concocted false testimony only after being threatened and promised leniency. “I freely admit that I caused the death of all of the decedents by shooting them with guns. I did this without the aid of James L. Beathard. None of the testimony … was in fact true,” he said in an affidavit.
The new version of events made no difference: Beathard, who claimed innocence, was executed in 1999; Hathorn had his death sentence commuted to life.
That’s a portion of this twisted Texas tale that two recent graduates of an English law school—Alicia Nice, originally from Humble, and Gurvin Chopra, who visited Texas for the first time to investigate this case—hope to tell in a new documentary along with Christian Roper, an East Texas filmmaker whose family members knew Beathard. The trio call their film-in-progress, Shadow of a Doubt: The James Beathard Story, and have raised more than $15,000 for the The Beathard Project through a grant and Kickstarter.
Nearly 25 years after his execution, Beathard’s story remains largely untold. In January 2000, the Texas Observer published one of the only articles about his innocence claim. In “A Letter From Hell,” editor Michael King posed the question of why Texas was killing Beathard despite “considerable evidence that Beathard was not guilty.”
In that era, Governor George W. Bush was running for president on a tough-on-crime platform. Texas executed 152 people during his tenure in the governor’s mansion.
Moments before death, Beathard thanked the Observer and condemned the system that was about to kill him: “I’m dying tonight based on testimony, that all parties, me, the man who gave the testimony, the prosecutor he used knew it was a lie.”
His haunting last words were part of what drew the attention of those students at the undergraduate law school in Bristol, England, decades later. Nice and Chopra learned of Beathard’s story from attorney Clive Stafford Smith, a legendary defense and human rights attorney, who recruited them for the Postmortem Project, a multi-year effort to scrutinize cases where Americans used their last words to proclaim innocence before being executed.
Many cases examined in the project involve Texas, which has both condemned and executed more people than any other state. Since 1976, when U.S. executions resumed after a four-year moratorium prompted by a federal Supreme Court ruling, Texas has killed 595 people, according to the Death Penalty Information Center’s execution database. The center separately tallies 18 people from Texas death row who were exonerated and released after flawed forensic evidence, perjury, or other flaws were exposed.
The same group’s Innocence Database includes Kerry Max Cook, another East Texas man who was wrongfully convicted of a murder in Tyler. In a 2001 back-and-forth with state lawmakers, Cook, who knew Beathard, cited the latter as a clear case of a wrongful execution: “Mr. Beathard, I know beyond a shadow of a doubt, was innocent.” Cook was recently declared actually innocent and has sued Smith County officials who allegedly framed him.
There are several other infamous Texas executions involving innocence claims. These include Cameron Todd Willingham, a father from Corsicana whose three small children died in a Christmas-time house fire that seasoned forensic experts later said was sparked by an electrical problem rather than the arson that the state’s expert witnesses had described based on discredited techniques.
Carlos DeLuna, of Corpus Christi, was the subject of a Columbia University investigation (and subsequent book) and a Chicago Times series and was executed despite evidence that an eyewitness confused DeLuna with the true killer, another man named Carlos. And Ruben Cantu, a Southside San Antonio youth was executed for a robbery-murder he allegedly committed at age 17—though Cantu’s co-defendent and the lone eyewitness later said that Cantu was never at the scene and detectives targeted Cantu after he’d been in a bar fight involving an off-duty officer.
In an interview with the Observer, Stafford Smith argued that Texas likely has many more cases involving executed innocent people whose stories received far less publicity than Willingham, Cantu, and DeLuna.
Beathard saw all of his appeals denied. Texas courts rejected his innocence claim as too late, since Hathorn’s recantation came 90 days after his trial and Rule 21 of the Texas Rules of Appellate Procedure “barred the introduction of new evidence as grounds for a new trial more than 30 days after sentencing,” Nice explained in an email. “This quirk of procedural law” combined with a legal doctrine that rejects new evidence of innocence as grounds for relief by itself, she added, “led to an instance where a man was executed on evidence that was essentially nonexistent at the time of his execution.”
Given Texas’ history of largely pro-death penalty court rulings, it’s somewhat astonishing that Hathorn, nearly five years after Beathard’s death, won his own appeal in the same murder case. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals overturned his death sentence based on arguments that evidence of abuse he’d suffered as a child from his father, the principal target of his killing spree, had never been presented as a potentially mitigating factor during the punishment phase of his capital murder trial.
In 2004, Hathorn’s attorney negotiated a plea deal, and Hathorn was resentenced to life. In an interview with the Observer, David Sergi, Hathorn’s appellate attorney, told the Observer that he recalls a judge requested the court hearing be held early in the morning to avoid drawing a potentially angry crowd.
One of the few news stories available on the internet about the resentencing does not mention that Beathard had already been executed for the crime, despite an innocence claim. (More than a decade later, Hathorn died of natural causes.)
Joe Price, the Trinity County DA who sought death sentences for Beathard and Hathorn, made different arguments in their two trials. He initially used Hathorn’s testimony to convict Beathard and to argue for a death sentence, saying: “Hathorn might be a cold-blooded killer, but there hasn’t been any evidence in this courtroom that says he is a liar. He is telling the truth.”
Then, in Hathorn’s trial, Price attacked Hathorn’s testimony against Beathard as unbelievable. It could not have convinced a “one-eyed hunting dog,” he said.
Price died in a car accident in 2003. Despite Hathorn’s recantation, William Lee Hon, the retired Polk County prosecutor and Price’s close friend, told the Observer Price never expressed doubts about Beathard’s execution given that under Texas’ so-called law of parties others involved in a crime can sometimes be held responsible for the actions of the mastermind or the triggerman. “I don’t think there was any doubt in Joe’s mind, at least based on my discussions with him,” Hon said.
Still, some people in Rusk ask themselves how it was that the gunman ended up getting off death row and the innocent onlooker was executed. Roper, the documentary filmmaker on the Beathard project, grew up in Rusk, and he said plenty of locals consider Beathard’s execution to have been unjust. Among them is his Aunt Lucy.
Lucy Murphy was one of Beathard’s close friends and lunchroom pals growing up. Her father employed him at the state mental hospital. She was sitting with him the day he declared as a teen that he could never use a gun against another man. She thinks Texas executed an innocent man, someone guilty mainly of trusting the wrong person. “At the beginning, when he was convicted of this, I thought he didn’t do it. There’s no way he could have done this. He did not shoot anybody,” Murphy told the Observer.
Murphy remembers Beathard telling her: “This guy took me off in the middle of nowhere to his parents’ house. And he killed his family. Oh, I waited outside, not knowing what the fuck was going on. I figured it out pretty quick, he said some things in the past, but it was too late.” Afterward, he told her, Hathorn repeatedly threatened to kill his family if he didn’t cover for Hathorn.
“What would you do?” Murphy asked. “You just, you protect the people you love. And I think that’s why he made some bad choices and got some bad advice. But he didn’t shoot anybody.”
The post The Innocent and the Executed: James Beathard’s Long-Forgotten Story appeared first on The Texas Observer.
