CARTHAGE - This is a simple case. Unless you get sidetracked.

Those were among the first words the wily Panola County District Attorney Danny Buck Davidson told a deep East Texas jury in the 1999 murder trial of Bernie Tiede, a beloved Carthage assistant funeral director, Sunday school teacher and Methodist lay minister.

The way Danny Buck saw it, too many folks in Carthage had been so sidetracked by their love and admiration for Bernie that they couldn't see the simple truth: Their jovial, effeminate choir boy had confessed to shooting the wealthy 81-year-old widow he cared for - in the back, with her own .22 - then stuffing her body in her deep freeze, where it remained for nine months until law enforcement officials happened upon it.

It didn't matter to Danny Buck that the old woman, Mrs. Marjorie Nugent, was so mean and reclusive that she had no other friends and even her own son wouldn't talk to her. It didn't matter to Danny Buck that many of the citizens who elected him believed the evil Mrs. Nugent had driven the sweet, gentle Bernie to his violent act. It didn't matter that he couldn't enjoy his favorite plate at Daddy Sams' BBQ and Catfish without somebody hounding him to let Bernie off.

He even stopped going to church for a time because the preacher wouldn't take Bernie off the prayer list.

Murder is murder. So, Danny Buck, in a grand performance later immortalized by Matthew McConaughey in Richard Linklater's brilliant dark comedy "Bernie," went against virtually a whole town and prosecuted Bernie to the fullest extent of the law - after getting the trial moved an hour down the road to San Augustine.

During the trial, Danny Buck argued Bernie's motivation was greed, that he was a sort of widow whisperer who cozied up to older women awash in their late husbands' oil fortunes. Danny Buck dwelled on the fact that after Bernie killed Mrs. Nugent, he carried on as if nothing had happened, attending theatrical rehearsals, singing and preaching at church, and guzzling the old lady's money like it was sweet tea - although he mostly spent it on gifts for other people.

Bernie maintained he cared for Mrs. Nugent, described the murder as an out-of-body experience, and said he put her body in the freezer to preserve it for a "proper burial."

"What did it feel like to preach a sermon, knowing where Mrs. Nugent's body was?" Danny Buck asked at one point.

"If I had been thinking about it, it wouldn't have felt very good. But I had not thought about it," Bernie replied. He simply put it out of his mind.

For Danny Buck, that cold, remorseless response sealed the deal. And apparently, it did for the jury as well. Bernie was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Evidence of abuse

After the 2011 movie, Bernie got infamy and Danny Buck got fame. Then, late last year, the district attorney, now 66, got something very different - new evidence. It came from Austin lawyers, led by Jodi Callaway Cole, who claimed Bernie should have gotten a lighter sentence.

Danny Buck scoffed. But he agreed to read the report from their expert, Dr. Richard Pesikoff, clinical professor of psychiatry at Houston's Baylor College of Medicine. In the doctor's opinion, Bernie had suffered severe, ongoing sexual abuse as a child between the ages of 12 and 18. And, in the years after Bernie befriended Mrs. Nugent and became her sole caretaker and international traveling companion, he endured abuse again, this time from a woman who had become possessive, jealous and painfully controlling.

Pesikoff details the "mean and nasty" behavior Bernie alleges: Mrs. Nugent made him shave her legs while she undressed and massage her back with a vibrator. She made a man who had never fired a rifle shoot armadillos while she demeaned and ridiculed him. She flung accusations and criticisms at her gardener, with whom Bernie had a clandestine sexual relationship.

It was when Mrs. Nugent began targeting the gardener that Bernie was moved to act, Pesikoff said.

Danny Buck could have dismissed it as hogwash. But he didn't.

He called his own trusted expert from the trial, Dr. Edward Gripon of Beaumont. Gripon agreed with Pesikoff, concluding that the murder was likely the result of a "dissociative episode," which allowed Bernie to separate himself from the heinous act, as if somebody else was pulling the trigger, then to compartmentalize it.

Bernie apparently had kept the abuse a secret - not even telling his lawyers - which is common among abuse victims, and understandable for someone who had lived nearly his entire life in East Texas as a deeply closeted gay man.

Meanwhile, Danny Buck did his own investigation into the sexual abuse.

He began to realize that when Bernie told him on the stand he put Mrs. Nugent's murder out of his mind, that wasn't a sociopath talking. That was compartmentalization.

Gripon and Pesikoff agreed that since Bernie had no history of violence before the murder and none since he would likely pose no further danger to society if freed.

Not for leniency

Suddenly, Danny Buck found himself in another fix. The exact opposite fix he faced in 1997, when everybody was rallying for leniency.

"Fifteen years later, this group of folks giving me hell, most are in the cemetery," he told me. "The ones that are left, they saw a movie where a man killed an old lady and put her in a freezer and went on ahead and kept spending her money. They think he should never get out."

RD Green is one of them. He was on the grand jury that indicted Bernie, attended the same Methodist church, and still has bitter memories of the congregation paying back donations Bernie made with ill-gotten funds.

'Debt to society'

One morning last week, he sat at his regular table at Wanda and Renee's café in Carthage, chewing the fat with his fellow retirees, gnawing at his sausage patty sandwich, and intricately describing what should be done with ol' Bernie.

"I think they ought to leave him in prison, take care of him, feed him well, proper diet," says the former chemical company owner with sun-dried skin and searing blue eyes. "When someone needs an eyeball or a kidney or a lung, go get it and take it from him," he continues, to raucous laughter from the table. "And when he runs out of parts they can use, put him in the ground. That way he'll be paid back his debt to society."

Across the table, 87-year-old Carl Davis, a former Army man and bar owner, chimes in: "If I'd a'been in Bernie's position, and him with three airplanes, and he could fly, alligators would'a eat her, I guarantee you," he says, setting off more laughter.

The whole place seems to be nodding in agreement. And none of them want to entertain the idea that Danny Buck would let Bernie out.

'Trying to be fair'

Back at the courthouse, Danny Buck is slouched behind a computerless desk scattered with yellow legal pads and a real, flippable phone book. His missing front teeth and his loose-hanging suit are as disarming as they are misleading about a shrewd lawyer as adept at courtroom theatrics as he is the penal code.

On this day, though, he is stumped.

"I think I might have put 80 years on Bernie that he didn't deserve," he says, explaining that with the mitigating evidence of abuse, the most he likely would have gotten in 1999 was 20 years. He might not get even that if he tried Bernie again.

And besides, Bernie's lawyers wanted him to agree to Bernie's release, under conditions he'll undergo counseling and live in Austin with Linklater, the film director, pending a final appeals court ruling. If Bernie walked after a retrial, he wouldn't have to undergo counseling or stay in Austin.

"I'm trying to be fair, but I'm also trying to be practical," Danny Buck tells me. "I've got a little bit of a win for keeping him out of the county."

Ultimately, Danny Buck had only one choice.

"We're supposed to do the right thing. You should never be afraid to follow truth where ever it leads you. Remember, that's my deal: justice. Not prosecuting," he says, paraphrasing the part of the penal code that requires prosecutors to prioritize justice over convictions.

"Sometimes people don't like justice, especially if you're in a lynch mob," he says. "I think I got a lynch mob around here."

On Tuesday, Danny Buck faced down the mob and did the unpopular thing. He agreed in state district court to Bernie's release after more than 17 years in jail and prison.

An old country prosecutor in the woods of East Texas did what some other prosecutors in this state, including those in the uppity, progressive, big cities, have failed to do: the right thing. He let himself get sidetracked from that mission to convict. And he found something he never expected. Justice.