Dangerous Logic

Dyslexic White Trash: I Insult Your Girlfriend, Then I Kill You

If I made this stuff up, nobody would believe it, and I swear that the names are real. From the Nacogdoches (Texas), Daily Sentinel:

Jerry Don Hartless was engaged in a heated argument about an episode of the Jerry Springer television program moments before he reached into his overalls, pulled a gun and shot Billy Bob Wallace under the Angelina River Bridge on FM 343, according to testimony heard Tuesday in the 145th District Court.

. . .

Witnesses, including Wallace's live-in girlfriend and his son, testified Tuesday that the two men had been friends before the shooting. If one of them was going to the liquor store, he would ask the other to ride with him, they said.

The friendship apparently went sour when Hartless' boat motor disappeared.

You know what they say - "It's all fun and games until somebody's boat motor gets stolen."

Monday's testimony centered on witnesses who heard Hartless threaten to kill Wallace "or whoever" stole his boat motor. Tuesday's testimony centered on accounts from those who witnessed the shooting.

Donna Rawlinson said that she, Wallace, Wallace's son and another friend, Evelyn Powers (who is now deceased), were sitting around a campfire at the river bridge, prior to the shooting, when Hartless and his wife pulled up in their truck. At first, the conversation was cordial, she said.

Well, we can't have that. Let's Springer it up a bit. Literally.

That changed when the discussion turned to an episode of "Jerry Springer" that featured a black man who was a member of the Ku Klux Klan, Rawlinson said.

"Don said a black man couldn't be in the Klan," Rawlinson said. "I told him if a black man couldn't be a KKK member, he couldn't either."

Hartless responded by calling Rawlinson a "white [deleted - ed]," then he told her that her "ex-husband held her down while black people (had sex with) her," Rawlinson testified.

"I told him I never had sex with a black man," she said. "That's when Billy Bob started to get up, and Don just pulled out a gun and shot him."

That seems a bit hasty, even for our subject demographic. It would appear that Jerry Don was afeared of Billy Bob's skill and quickness with the ol' pigsticker:

It was the once deadly accuracy with which he had seen one of Billy Bob Wallace's knife throws clip the tail off of a nearby lizard that Jerry Don Hartless said ultimately caused him to shoot his former drinking buddy twice in the chest and once in the back, during an altercation between the two friends.

. . .

He testified that Wallace was a knife expert who carried weapons concealed in his boots and in a scabbard on his belt.

Hartless told the jury he had seen Wallace throw the knife and cut off a lizard's tail, but he had also heard of another instance in which Wallace twirled his knife around, castrated a dog and fed the amputated parts to the animal.

Or was he just looking for an excuse? Back to the Daily Sentinel story:

Defense Attorney John Heath Sr. asked several questions about the knife Wallace carried at the time of his death and the proximity of the knife to Wallace's hand at the time of his death. Witnesses testified that they never saw the knife in Wallace's hand in the moments before the shooting.

It's White Trash Wednesday! Take the whole tour:

Posted by Chris at March 2, 2005 08:38 AM

Category: White Trash Wednesday