Читать книгу Buried Memories - Irene Pence - Страница 11

FIVE

A house painter named Billy York Lane came courting a year after Betty’s divorce, and he easily swayed her. They both had March birthdays, but he was seven years older. After dating only a few months before deciding to marry, she told her children about her plans.

“Bill is so nice to me,” she said. “He’s real gentle and kind. I know you’re just going to love him.”

Had the courtship lasted longer, she might have glimpsed flashes of Bill Lane’s hot temper and controlling ways before she married him on July 28, 1970.

Now thirty-three, the once trim and curvaceous Betty couldn’t shed the weight she so easily lost after each baby. She began gulping down the diet drug Dexatrim, while still continuing to drink. In her mind, if she took more of the drug than the label suggested, she’d lose weight more rapidly. However, in larger quantities the drug caused insomnia, irritability, restlessness, and headaches.

In addition to the side effects, Betty’s personality began to change. Her children noticed that she became two different people. In an instant she flipped from the caring mother they loved, to a woman who used foul language and screamed at them.

Added to those changes, Bill began slapping her around just days following the wedding. In the next few months, his abusive treatment escalated until he was frequently punching and beating her. Her children were horrified to see Betty covered with bruises.

Lane particularly liked hitting Betty in the face. She always wanted to look her best, so a swollen and bruised face caused more than physical damage. She tried to cover the bruises with makeup, but the dark purplish injuries refused to hide.

Appalled with her life, Betty mustered the courage to take out a restraining order against Lane on October 28, 1970, then divorced him two months later. But even after the divorce, and despite the restraining order, they continued their love-hate relationship, unable to stay apart.

Some nights she would drive home from work and notice a car with its lights out, sitting a half block from her apartment. From the silhouette of the man inside, she knew it was Lane. Other nights, she would look in her rearview mirror and see him following her.

The violence increased, and in May of 1971, he broke her nose.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Betty complained to the doctor treating her. “I get so depressed because I can’t pull myself away from this man, and he keeps hitting me. What can I do?”

The doctor didn’t suggest that she leave Lane or report his abuse, even though hospital records provided sufficient documentation. Instead, he merely prescribed an antidepressant. A few months later, she took another trip to the emergency room after Lane doubled up his fist and hit her left eye. His blow opened a gap that required several stitches to close.

They continued to frequent the same smoky clubs where they’d first met. A country song bellowed from the jukebox, and a neon sign in the window advertised WOMEN ADMITTED FREE WITHOUT AN ESCORT. They glared jealously when one or the other danced or talked with someone else. Betty enjoyed watching a rage build within Lane as she danced closely with other men. When she knew he was watching, she would cuddle tighter and look into the men’s eyes until Lane turned crimson. He acted just as vengeful, using other women as she used other men.

Then on January 17, 1972, Lane walked up to her after she had danced with a man he had previously told her to stay away from. He told her to get home or he’d kill her.

“You sorry son of a bitch,” Betty screamed at him, then hurried to her car to go home. On the way, she found a policeman, and honked for him to stop. The officer turned around and pulled up beside her. Betty said, “My ex-husband is following me. I’m going right home now, but could you be on the lookout for a ’57 white Ford?” The officer assured her that he’d watch for the car and keep an eye out on her apartment.

She now lived in the town of Hutchins, not far from Mesquite where she and Branson first settled. She took pride in her recently built apartment that fronted Franklin Street, close to the open fields and farms of rural Hutchins. The buff brick, two-story structure stood on one of the gently rolling hills of the area, and on the opposite end of town from Hutchins’s huge Texas State Jail with its cyclone fences topped with miles of rolled razor wire.

That night, the Dallas County sheriff answered an emergency call from Betty’s apartment at 1:45 A.M. When deputies arrived, they found a man lying unconscious in a pool of his own blood outside the apartment’s rear door. He had been shot and had fallen from a small concrete stoop, then down three steps.

Two Dallas sheriff’s deputies walked into Betty’s apartment ready to slap handcuffs on her.

“Okay, who is he and what happened?” a deputy said.

“That’s Bill Lane,” Betty stammered. “He flew into a jealous rage. Here’s what happened. Tonight I was dancing with this man at the Slipper Club.” Betty assumed the policeman would know which bar she meant since it sat on a seedy stretch of broken sidewalk on Industrial Boulevard and the manager frequently called police to squelch brawls.

“I was headed toward the ladies’ room when Billy grabbed my arm as I passed him. He said, ‘You go home and stay away from him, or you’re gonna be sorry.’

“I said something like, ‘What the hell are you gonna do about it?’ and he said, ‘Just remember, I know where the fuck you live.’ He said that if he couldn’t have me, nobody could.”

“He ever threaten you before?” a deputy asked.

“Yes. Once with a gun. So when he got that look in his eye and started talking that way, I knew enough to take him seriously. That’s when I left the club.

“When I got back here to my apartment, my teenage daughter, Connie—” Betty nodded toward the young woman sitting on the other side of the room, and added, “She’s living with me for a while. Connie told me Bill had been calling. Said he was getting to be a real pest.”

“Did he call again?”

“Yes. Just shortly after I got home. He told me he was coming to kill me. I begged him not to come, but he was adamant.

“I guess I got hysterical. I told Connie that Bill was coming over. I said whatever she did, she wasn’t to answer the door.

“That’s when I ran to my bedroom and grabbed my .22 pistol I always keep loaded.” “Where’s the gun now?” the deputy asked.

“I keep it in the top drawer of my nightstand.”

The deputy nodded toward the bedroom, and Betty led him there and opened the drawer. When she reached for the gun, he held out his hand to stop her, then wrapped it in a clean white handkerchief to take with him.

“Go on,” he said.

“So I pulled out the gun and laid it on the bar by the door. Probably only ten minutes later, I heard knocking at my back door. That’s when I screamed for Connie to call the police. At the same time, Bill yelled, ‘Open the door, or I’ll break it down.’ ”

“Why did you open the door, lady?”

“I was afraid he’d turn it into kindling. Anyway, I opened it, and Bill rushed in. I was so scared. I remember yelling, ‘Leave me alone, you son of a bitch, and get the hell out of my life.’

“He said, ‘I’ll never leave you alone.’ Then he backed me up against the bar, and told me he got crazy when he saw me with other men.

“That’s when I reached behind my back and got my gun. He didn’t act afraid. Maybe he thought I was bluffing. He took another step toward me, so I fired at him. Can’t remember how many times, but I kept firing until I saw him stagger out the back door.”

The deputies listened to Betty’s story, then read her her rights. They drove her to their office, where she waived her right to an attorney and gave a statement admitting that she had shot Bill Lane. The officers questioned why they found two bullet holes in Lane’s back if he were coming toward her as she insisted. When Betty had no answer, they charged her with “Assault with intention to commit murder with malice.”

Before Betty had been carted off, a third deputy had arrived, and now stayed at Betty’s apartment to take a statement from a tearstained, nervous Connie. The young woman blew her nose and tried to calm herself, but she still sobbed as she told the deputy what she had heard while listening on a bedroom extension when Lane called.

Between sniffles, Connie said, “When Bill called, he told my mother, ‘I’m coming over to kill you, and Juvenile will come out and get the kids.’ I called the operator and she got the police. Mama told me to get out of the house and she yelled at Bill to leave. That’s when I heard some shots and ran to the kitchen. I looked outside and saw Bill on the ground by the porch.”

Like a rehearsed drama, Billy Lane’s daughter, Barbara, also claimed to have listened on a telephone extension. She told a sheriff’s deputy: “Betty called and Dad answered the phone. She was crying and asked Dad to come over and get his things. He asked how many times are you going to shoot me and she told him none. He also asked how many police would be there and she said none. Dad wanted her to meet him at a different location, but she wouldn’t do it.

“Dad left at 1:10 A.M. and told me he’d be back in thirty minutes. At the time I begged him not to go, but he went anyway.”

After the sheriff’s men had arrived at Betty’s apartment and called an ambulance, they ordered the driver to take Bill Lane to Parkland Hospital, where the staff pronounced him in critical condition. The doctors had to perform surgery to remove two bullets.

Lane’s version differed considerably from Betty’s. Because of his injuries, he wasn’t strong enough to give a statement until a week later. He finally told deputies, “I was at my daughter’s home watching television when Betty called and asked me to come over ‘just to talk.’ I thought it was too late and I asked her if it couldn’t wait until morning. She said that if I didn’t come right then, I could just forget it.

“So I climbed into my car and drove over there, but when I got to the back door of her apartment, everything was dark. I called to her to open the door, but she told me to leave. Guess she had changed her mind about having a conversation. Next thing I know she’s at the door holding a gun on me, so I start to leave and she fires the darn thing. I was still able to move, but she fired again and I lost consciousness. Last thing I remember was her saying, ‘If you move, I’ll shoot again.’ ”

Lane spent three weeks in the hospital and several weeks afterward enduring painful therapy. One of the bullets badly damaged a nerve leading to his right leg, leaving him unable to walk.

After Parkland released him, Betty immediately went back to him. One of Lane’s neighbors told authorities, “I like Billy, but he’s jealous of Betty because she’s so beautiful. I know Betty loves him. You should have seen those two. After he got out of the hospital his right leg was no good. He had to learn to walk all over again, and Betty spent hours helping him. She’d get him on his feet and they’d put their arms around each other. They’d go back and forth on the sidewalk. Quite a thing to watch. She loved that man. You could tell by the way she’d spend whole afternoons just walking him up and down the street.”

The officers didn’t know what to make of the case, but they were more puzzled when just days before the hearing, Lane hobbled up to them on crutches and said, “I’m willing to sign an affidavit that I threatened Betty.”

Without a plaintiff to press charges, the court had no option but to drop the murder charge to a misdemeanor aggravated assault.

In court, Betty gladly pleaded guilty to the lesser charge, and Lane pulled out his billfold and paid Betty’s hundred-dollar fine and fifty-dollar court costs. In addition, she persuaded the judge to return her pistol.

Then, baffling her entire family, Betty and Billy Lane remarried the following month.

The crowd back at the bar where the Lanes usually frequented wondered if Betty had helped Billy learn to walk just to get back in his good graces. They figured she probably promised to remarry him in exchange for his cooperation on her plea reduction.

In any event, their second marriage lasted but one month, and to ensure that the Lane saga had finally ended, thirty-five-year-old Betty packed up Bobby and moved to Little Rock, Arkansas.