A behind the scenes of researching a short screenplay

Truth is Stranger Than Fiction

It only took a small mention on the radio, but the story described sank a harpoon into my memory:

A Texas Woman racked up several thousand dollars of credit card debt, and rather than tell her husband, who was about to go buy a boat and find out, she shot and killed him…according to a jury she has been found guilty…

A similar kind of unforgettable news snippet

Wait, wait, what?! That’s a pretty strange way of problem solving — I mean, yeah maybe that’s some Jerry Springer type relationship dynamics…but wow…wake up, thinking happy thoughts about buying a boat, then BAM like out of a Johnny Cash song.

As life tends to do, I had plenty of other things on the agenda to deal with. Cat litter don’t clean itself. Dragging leaf piles to the front for “the Claw” of the Dallas waste disposal takes effort. The Celica needed a spray wash and a good run up to the 8,200 redline to clean off the spark plugs. Yet doing chores is also thinking time, and I couldn’t get the story out of my head.

There had to be more.

Murder in 1999

Normally a few keywords is all it takes for me to use a search engine like Google to surface a hit, but this case took surgical digging. Finally getting a combination together I found a few articles that went into details I sought. There was a lot more to the story.

The case actually got started in 1999. The Victim was found dead by his Wife, his body with multiple gunshot wounds. She claimed to be out of the home at the time, and without much to work with, the case was set aside, unsolved. There is no statute of limitations on murder in the State of Texas.

The Sister of the Victim apparently suspected foul play, and spent 15 years assembling evidence and gathering testimony in order to point the finger of justice to the Wife. In year 15, a Texas Ranger law enforcement official reviewed the case file, the additional material, and forwarded it to the District Attorney in the County where the Wife still lived. The DA packed the case into a file, submitted it to a Judge, and a sealed Indictment followed. Soon after, the Wife turned herself in to law enforcement custody.

17 Years and 10 Months

The case took a couple weeks. 30+ testimonies. More than 150 pieces of evidence. It took a Texas Jury all of four and a half hours to convict the Wife of murder, and the Judge sentenced the already elderly woman to 60 years — a life sentence for all practical purposes.

The DA and the Texas Ranger who brought the case to trial repeatedly stated they were proud to bring justice to the Victim and his Family after so long.

It took 17 years and 10 months since the murder, but the case was finally closed.

A Writer’s View

There is so much pain and hope in the story, intertwined, that it allows me to look into the situations and motivations and thoughts just enough — just enough — to feel that I can put their story into a form for the rest of us to learn from while still feeling entertained. I don’t look at human suffering and murder as trivial things, they are heavy decisions, choices, emotions, actions that come from a mix of reality and thoughts we can only begin to understand after they’ve happened. Truth really is stranger than fiction.

Treating death with respect is paramount to me, because as a writer to exploit and profiteer is to rip out the jugular of integrity. If I do my job well, and show how human we all are, then I think you’ll appreciate it. You’ll be able to walk for a brief moment in the shoes of another, like I have, and come out the other side a little bit wiser, empathetic, than if I had not tried at all.

Stay tuned, because this short film screenplay should be a doozy.