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  • Sex, Murder, and the Unwritten Law: Courting Judicial Mayhem, Texas Style by Bill Neal
  • Mark M. Carroll
Sex, Murder, and the Unwritten Law: Courting Judicial Mayhem, Texas Style. By Bill Neal. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2009. Pp. 280. $29.95 (cloth).

The Texas legislature adopted Article 1220 of its 1856 penal code to authorize as justifiable homicide the killing by a husband of his wife’s paramour, provided he caught them in flagrante delicto and “before they separated.” Article 597 of that code declared that any member of a woman’s clan who killed in retaliation against “insulting words or conduct” directed toward her could be found guilty of manslaughter rather than first-degree murder. Practicing criminal lawyer Bill Neal maintains that unusual statutory provisions such as these were emblematic of the cultures that prevailed in the Old South and Old West, which imposed upon a man a sacred duty to defend his honor and protect the reputation of his womenfolk. Focusing on five Texas murder trials arising in the period between 1896 and 1925 and one in 1976, Neal argues that the two 1856 provisions also undergirded a more encompassing “unwritten law” by which Texas juries disregarded less forgiving murder statutes to acquit those who killed in response to sexual dishonor. [End Page 353]

Neal situates Sex, Murder appropriately in a body of legal and social history scholarship, examining the nineteenth-century unwritten law and its relationship to masculine honor, sexual transgression, and related violence. He sidesteps the scholarly debate over whether antebellum Anglo-Texan men merely projected onto tough frontier women southern ideals of pure white womanhood. But he maintains that the white male jurors who acquitted the obviously guilty killers in his six cases placed a high premium on this feminine ideal and that Old South/Old West honor culture, in fact, informed the unwritten law producing the acquittals in each case.

The author intends Sex, Murder to illuminate how criminal statutes and jury verdicts in murder trials responded, over time, to changing sexual mores and gender norms. To this extent, he seeks to inform a multidisciplinary community of scholars in the liberal arts and social sciences. Neal’s other purpose, at least in the case of violent crime, is to advocate against what legal scholars and historians have dubbed “jury nullification,” that is, the practice by which petit jurors acquit defendants in the face of countervailing evidence or legal authority or both. To this extent, Sex, Murder addresses laypersons interested in criminal justice, lawyers, judges, and legal historians.

The cases under study in Sex, Murder do not deal exclusively, or even mostly, with honor killings of the kind that 1856 Texas penal code articles 1220 and 597 accommodated. Particularly out of kilter in this respect is the case of Wichita Falls mayor Frank Collier, a social climber who killed his unwanted son-in-law, nineteen-year-old Elzie “Buster” Robinson, on Valentine’s Day in 1925 because he was “common” and thus unfit to be the husband of his daughter, Mary Frances. Equally divergent is the case of wealthy oil man Floyd Holmes, who shot to death similarly prosperous Warren Wagner, the paramour of his wife, Alma Holmes, on a busy downtown street in Fort Worth in 1921. And then there is the case of multimillionaire oil man Cullen Davis of that same city, who in August 1976 shot and killed former Texas Christian University basketball star Stan Farr and Andrea Wilborn, the young daughter of Cullen’s wife, Priscilla Childers. Cullen and Priscilla, who was also shot but not killed, had been married to other people at the time they commenced their sexual relationship in January 1968. By the time of the murders, Cullen had been embroiled with Priscilla for over two years in a protracted divorce battle during which the bon vivant “socialite” Priscilla drew out the proceedings to extract ever larger alimony payments and use the posh six-million-dollar marital domicile as a residence and party venue for her and her several paramours.

Strictly speaking, Neal sustains his argument. Virtually all the defendants, victims, and interested parties in those cases were native-born Texans. Neal shows clearly how defense...

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