Post by Graveyardbride on Apr 22, 2016 22:18:49 GMT -5
Real-Life 'Bernie' Murder Trial Continues
HENDERSON, Tex. – An East Texas jury deliberating whether an ex-mortician (above left) convicted in the 1996 fatal shooting of a wealthy widow must return to prison has sent a note to the judge requesting records. Deliberations began Friday afternoon in the Bernie Tiede (TEE’-duh) sentencing retrial in the death of 81-year-old Marjorie Nugent (above right), whose body was found in a freezer at her Carthage home in 1997.
The Longview News-Journal reports jurors asked for transcripts of three psychiatrists' testimony. Judge Diane DeVasto instructed jurors to narrow their request. She also told lawyers to prepare for the likelihood she would sequester the jury overnight. Earlier, jurors asked for three wills Nugent and her oilman husband, who died in 1990, had written beginning in 1987. The panel also sought a definition of the term "sudden passion."
On Monday, April 18, a psychiatrist testified that years of emotional and sexual abuse added up and added up until one day Bernie Tiede just broke, fatally shooting the rich widow who had become his companion. “It’s a strange, unpredictable event brought on by intense emotional experiences,” claimed Dr. Richard Pesikoff, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.
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Tiede was convicted in 1999 of the November 16, 1996, murder of octogenarian Marjorie Nugent, whom he shot four times in the back. He then wrapped her body in a Land’s End bed sheet and stored the corpse in a freezer at her home.
Tiede met Mrs. Nugent at her husband's funeral and through a series of events, became her trusted companion and only friend. The two of them traveled the world together, spending her fortune on lavish trips, airplanes and even scholarships for the poor. “We had a ball,” Tiede told the New York Times. “I think I probably saw her happier than anyone in her family ever did. Including her husband. She kind of opened up to me. She became a different person.” But, according to Tiede, over time, his elderly companion became increasingly demanding, insisting he clip her toenails, pluck her chin hairs and spend all his time with her. “She was very possessive of my life – so much of my life – for the last few years. And it got worse,” he continued. “I guess that’s what made me just snap.”
During his first trial, Tiede said that he arrived at Mrs Nugent's home at 7 a.m. the morning of her death to make her breakfast and noticed a .22-caliber rifle she kept for shooting armadillos and scaring squirrels away from her bird feeder. The two were preparing to leave the house around 10 a.m. for a trip to the dry cleaner’s when Mrs. Nugent stopped to pet her dog. Tiede picked up the rifle, shot the elderly lady four times in the back and stuffed her into the freezer – among packages of flounder and chicken pot pies – where she remained for nine months as he continued spending her money.
However, there is evidence Mrs. Nugent wasn’t exactly a pleasant person. “Bernie’s not the first one who thought about killing her,” confirmed writer Joe Rhodes, who also happens to be Mrs. Nugent’s nephew. “He’s just the first one who went through with it.” Rhodes described his relationship with his aunt as “difficult.”
During the current trial, which entered its third week Monday, prosecutors for the state have portrayed Tiede (shown above as he looks today) as a greedy con man who killed Nugent to cover up his swindling of millions of dollars from her, and argued his sentence should fit the crime. But defense lawyers contended the popular church singer suffered years of sexual abuse at the hands of a close relative and was the subject of Nugent’s emotional abuse, which caused him to snap suddenly. The 17 years he has already spent in prison is punishment enough, they said.
Jodi Cole and Mike DeGeurin, Tiede’s lawyers, presented witnesses who claimed they were sexually abused by the same man who allegedly took advantage of Tiede. Three other men told jurors that Elmer Doucet, Tiede’s uncle, also abused them. Tiede has said that his uncle sexually abused him from the time he was 12 until he was 18.
Doucet, however, took the stand and denied he abused Tiede or the other men. When confronted with a suggestive letter Tiede received in prison from Doucet, the elderly man said the story was made up and that he sent the note because he thought his gay nephew would like it.
In her questioning of Dr. Pesikoff, Assistant Attorney General Jane Starnes reminded jurors that many people are abused, but do not commit murder. “People that are sexually abused can act on other emotions such as greed, anger, self-protection,” she emphasized. “It doesn’t automatically mean there’s a causal relationship between abuse and crime.”
Special prosecutors Starnes and Lisa Tanner, appointed to represent the state after Panola County District Attorney Danny Buck Davidson recused himself, presented their case last week. They submitted financial documents they said showed Tiede was the abuser, not Nugent. They said he was embezzling millions of dollars, telling Nugent that he was investing her money wisely, but instead, he was spending it lavishly on himself and his friends.
Bernie, the movie. The crime was the subject of award-winning director Richard Linklater’s 2011 black comedy Bernie. Following release of the film, Tiede secured a new lawyer who successfully argued in 2014 that the defendant suffered years of sexual and emotional abuse and a life sentence was too harsh. The state’s highest criminal court agreed that Tiede should receive a new trial to decide his punishment.
In the movie, Jack Black (above right) plays a gay mortician who befriends a rich widow at her husband's funeral, shoots her in the back and spends her millions while desperately trying to hide the fact she's packed in a freezer alongside chicken pot pies. Shirely MacLaine (above left) plays Marjorie Nugent, and Matthew McConaughey has the rôle of District Attorney Danny Buck Davidson, who prosecuted Tiede.
Rod Nugent, Mrs. Nugent’s only son, was none too pleased with the comedy's portrayal of his mother's cold-blooded killer, nor the fact the film made light of such a dark story. “Marjorie Nugent’s son and grandchildren do not want their mother and grandmother’s memory ridiculed and dragged through the mud, or her murderer celebrated, Charles M. Hosch, Rod Nugent’s attorney, said at the time. “He deceived her, stole her savings and tried to use her money to buy friends,” claimed Hosch. “He is not sympathetic. He preyed on an elderly, vulnerable widow.”
When Bernie was filming, Rhodes visited the set in Carthage, where the town welcomed the film with open arms and several residents even served as extras. “There are little things in Bernie that aren’t exactly true, bits of dialogue, a changed name here and there,” Rhodes explained. “But the big things, the weirdest things, the things you’d assume would have to be made up, happened exactly as the movie says they did.” Many thought his aunt was the meanest woman in East Texas, he added, and that her killer was one of the nicest folks around. “There was something about Aunt Marge’s ending up in a freezer that seemed appropriate,” Rhodes reasoned. “She’d always been kind of cold-hearted.”
“This town is split up,” District Attorney Davidson, who prosecuted Tiede, told the News-Journal at the time. “People remember him as being real nice and doing nice things, and they'd like my office to go real easy on him. And then, there's a group that wants no mercy.”
The Midsomer Murders 2003 episode, “A Talent for Life,” also is loosely based on the Tiede case.
Sources: The Associated Press, April 22, 2016; Brandi Grissom, The Dallas Morning News, April 18, 2016, and The Daily Mail, May 20, 2012.
