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Journal of the TEXAS SUPREME COURT HISTORICAL SOCIETY Fall 2014 Vol. 4, No. 1 General Editor Lynne Liberato Executive Editor David Furlow Columns Lead Articles Features President’s Page Election Hustle: The Flimflam, Fraud, The Making of a Hemphill Dinner By Marie Yeates and Flight of Justice Yarbrough By David A. Furlow An exciting year is ahead, If it takes a village to By Judge Mark Davidson preserving the Court’s raise a child, it takes Voting for familiar names history, educating the almost as many people public, and engaging our has had good and bad to bring us the Society’s fellow members of the results. Almost certainly Annual John Hemphill the worst result was the bar. Read more... Marie Yeates Dinner. Read more... Two indispensable 1976 election of Justice “villagers” Don Burt Yarbrough. Judge Mark Executive Director’s Page Read more... Davidson An Evening in Pictures: Scenes from the By Pat Nester Nineteenth Annual John Hemphill Dinner In celebration of the State By Marilyn P. Duncan Bar’s 75th anniversary, Murder and Mayhem on the Texas Freelance photographer its Archives Department Supreme Court: The Shocking Death of Mark Matson recorded has assembled an the highlights of this excellent display in the Justice William Pierson and the Evolution year’s Hemphill Dinner lobby of the Texas Law of the Insanity Defense in Texas for posterity. Center. Read more... Pat Nester By Gary Lavergne Read more... In Austin in 1935, an Guests in foyer Associate Justice of the Fellows Column Texas Supreme Court Hard Times: A Short List of Violent By David J. Beck and his wife were brutally In June the Fellows held murdered by their own Episodes in the Life of the Texas son. Read more... a live oral reenactment Gary Lavergne Supreme Court and discussion of By Marilyn P. Duncan Sweatt v. Painter in Violence has touched the the original Supreme On Trial: Reasonable Doubt and the Texas Supreme Court Court Courtroom in the over the course of its Capitol. Read more... David J. Beck Rights of the Juvenile Offender existence more times than By Rachel Palmer Hooper you might think. Judge Williamson While the reasonable doubt Read more... drew his pistol Executive Editor’s Page standard of proof is now in court viewed as fundamental to By David A. Furlow every criminal trial, this Join us in preserving, was not always so. For the Record: Significant Autumn protecting, and sharing Read more... the history of Texas Rachel Palmer Dates in the History of the Nineteenth courts and Texas law. Hooper Read more... Century Texas Supreme Court David A. Furlow Test your knowledge of the Court’s history. How many of these significant dates do you know? Read more... continued next page Murder and Mayhem on the Texas Supreme Court: The Shocking Death of Justice William Pierson and the Evolution of the Insanity Defense in Texas By Gary M. Lavergne1 EAR THE INTERSECTION OF THE CAPITAL OF TEXAS HIGHWAY and Ranch Road 2222 are some of the most exclusive neighborhoods in all of Austin, NTexas. Over decades, prime real estate at the confluence of the Colorado River and Bull Creek, the realization that the hills offered majestic views of the Hill Country, and the dramatic growth of the University of Texas, the City of Austin, and state government spurred the development of the area. As Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Senior Judge Thomas Reavley said recently in an interview for this paper, “it is filled with expensive homes today.”2 But in 1935, the same area was in what many people called “the sticks.” It was a dark and quiet area mostly The view from the Colorado River near Cat Mountain— not out in the sticks anymore. populated by deer and coated with cedar pollen. Austin was a sleepy college town of about 60,000.3 The area between Bull Creek and the Colorado River held few homes and they served as modest ranch headquarters connected by narrow roads or quiet, lonely trails and paths. One trail went from Bull Creek Road to the Pecan Experiment Station on the river’s bank. It was there, on April 24, 1935, that an Associate Justice of the Texas Supreme Court and his wife were brutally murdered ... by their own son. 4 Like every other elected official in Texas at the turn of the twentieth century, William Pierson was a life- long Democrat. He was born in Gilmer, Texas, on March 12, 1871 and was raised by his father in a rural area called Haskell. He graduated from Baylor University in 1896 and completed his education with two years of law school at the University of Texas. Afterwards, Pierson hung his shingle in Greenville in Hunt County. In 1901, he married Lena Haskell and the union produced three children: two sons, named William, Jr. (hereafter referred to as Bill) and Howard, and a daughter named Alice.5 1 www.GaryLavergne.com © 2014 Gary M. Lavergne. An earlier version of this article appears as Murder and Mayhem on the Texas Supreme Court Family Matters: The Shocking Death of Justice William Pierson, available at http://www.garylavergne.com/TSCHS- Lavergne-PiersonCasePaper-20140307.pdf (last visited Aug. 20, 2014). 2 Interview with Hon. Thomas Reavley, Senior Judge, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in Austin, Tex. (Dec. 10, 2013) [hereinafter Judge Reavley]. 3 See CITY OF AUSTIN, POPULATION HISTORY 1840 TO 2014, http://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Planning/Demographics/ population_history_pub.pdf (last visited Sept. 19, 2014). 4 See Will Ervin, The Tragic Case of Justice William Pierson: Justices in the State Cemetery, Part 2, J. TEX. SUP. CT. HIST. SOC’Y, Fall 2012, at 14. 5 See David Minor, “Pierson, William,” HANDBOOK OF TEXAS ONLINE, http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fpi17 (last visited Sept. 19, 2014). 20 William Pierson was elected to the Texas House in 1901. As a legislator he is remembered for sponsoring the bills that established a significant part of what is now the second tier of our state university system. What was then called the College of Industrial Arts for Women is now known as the Texas Woman’s University. His bills also created the state normal schools that became the University of North Texas at Denton and Texas State University at San Marcos. He served in the House for only one term, returned to his law practice in Greenville, and later ran successfully for a judgeship of the Eighth Judicial District of Texas. During his tenure on the bench his decisions in seven brewery cases impressed Governor Pat Neff, who appointed Judge Pierson as an Associate Justice of the Texas Supreme Court in 1921.6 Historian James Haley described Justice Pierson as “another in the growing Justice William Pierson set of native Texans who replaced aging Confederates born in the Deep South.”7 Citing memoirs of a Supreme Court clerk, Haley described Justice Pierson as “a kind Christian gentleman, [who was] saddened by his own somewhat frail health, and more [so] by a siege of family problems, not the least of which was his six-year-old younger son, Howard.” The clerk related how, shortly before Pierson’s swearing-in, the new Justice lifted young Howard into his chair on the distinguished bench to show him the courtroom. Howard reacted to this show of affection in a “strange and resentful” way. As Haley summarized, “The boy was clearly, in country parlance, not right.”8 By the time Howard grew to be a young man of twenty-one, he had a firm reputation among his own family members for having a troubled soul. But as a family, the Piersons had unconditional devotion to the profoundly delusional and disturbed Howard. His delusions included the unshakable belief that he was not, in fact, the son of an accomplished and well-known jurist, but of some renowned scientist. He believed that he had been adopted and that the Piersons were determined to suppress his emergence as a premier scientist who would literally “save the world.” This delusion was Howard’s explanation for his father’s refusal to fund his education at the University of Texas. Howard was quoted as saying, “To my mind it is just a question of whether my success as a scientist means more to the world than my father.”9 Howard also believed that his father had always favored Bill and Alice and nurtured their ambitions and education. He hated French people and wanted them exiled to Mars. Howard eventually realized that one way to secure funds for an education in science was to gain access to a $17,000 life insurance policy Justice Pierson owned. The problem was that for Howard to receive any of that money his mother, Mrs. Pierson, would have to die: “Of course, I would have to kill my mother, too, or she would get it all.”10 In addition to (or because of) his delusions, Howard was a difficult employee in the job he held as an oil 6 Id. 7 JAMES L. HALEY, THE TEXAS SUPREME COURT: A NARRATIVE HISTORY, 1836–1986, 163–64, 171–72 (Univ. of Tex. Press 2013). 8 Id., Haley cites Carl Lyda, at 5 (on file at the Texas Supreme Court Historical Society). The frail health attributed to Justice Pierson was severe rheumatism. There were rumors that the Justice would have to resign as a result. SAN ANTONIO LIGHT, Apr. 25, 1935. 9 One of the most complete descriptions of Howard’s delusions is a sworn statement of an unidentified high school and college friend dated April 25, 1935.

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