Vengeance is Mine: The Scandalous Love Triangle that Triggered the Boyce-Sneed Feud (review)

On January 13, 1912, John Beal Sneed strode into the plush lobby of the Metropolitan Hotel in Fort Worth, Texas, and killed Colonel Al Boyce Sr., with at least four bullets shot at close range from his .32 automatic pistol. Nine months later, Sneed walked up behind Al Boyce Jr. as he ambled along Polk Street in Amarillo and fired three .12 gauge shotgun blasts into his back at point blank range, killing him almost instantly. After both shootings, Sneed calmly surrendered at the local jail. After both ensuing murder trials, John Beal Sneed walked away a free man.

The story begins in an earlier day when three West Texas families became forever intertwined as their children attended college together, a fateful beginning to the tale. John Beal Sneed was the heir to an entrepreneurial banking and ranching clan who won the affections of and married the bewitching Lena Snyder of Georgetown, Texas, despite the rival courting of a fellow student, the handsome and gregarious Al Boyce Jr., whose father at the time ran the mammoth XIT Ranch in the Texas Panhandle. Over the next decade the successful but humorless Sneed found himself cuckolded by his former rival, as Al and Lena carried on a torrid love affair almost under his nose. In a desperate attempt to keep the two lovers apart, Sneed had Lena committed to a sanatorium, an act that only moved the love triangle inexorably closer to tragedy.

Undaunted, the daring Al Boyce scooped his beloved Lena from her snare and made for Canada where they intended to live happily ever after. Boiling with anger and with only vengeance to feed him, Beal Sneed happened upon the aging father of his adversary in the Fort Worth hotel and gunned him down. Released from jail, Sneed then plotted and carried out the murder of Al Jr., disguise and stakeout and all.

At the sensational trials that followed the crimes of passion, Sneed was found not guilty, winning a claim of self-defense in the first, and the jury bowing in the second to the "unwritten law" of a man's right to avenge his besmirched honor. Sneed returned to both prominence and prosperity in the decades that followed, his captive and melancholy wife Lena at his side until the end. Could a playwright have done any better than the true story that unfolded?

Bill Neal has done his usual painstaking research into the voluminous files of newspaper and trial records that trailed this strange and exotic tale over half a century, continuing in the tradition of two earlier books of his, Getting Away with Murder on the Texas Frontier: Notorious Killings and Celebrated Trials (2006) and Sex, Murder, and the Unwritten Law: Courting Judicial Mayhem, Texas Style (2009). As an aside, one wonders if the topic at hand might not have had more than enough run by now: as engaging a writer in his casual style and as fascinating the stories, Neal's myriad tales finally seem to run together as the same historical plot with only the names changing along the way.

The case for the so-called "unwritten law," variously described in all three of Neal's books as the somehow God-given or at least Texas-given right of a wronged man or woman to seek revenge despite the cold-blooded nature of the crime or the evidence or the witnesses or the written law, gets more than its due here, to be sure. And yet it still astounds and fascinates the contemporary reader who is transported back through the trial testimony and arguments of yet another scandalous love triangle.