Long before TV had its desperate housewives, Wylie had Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore - and the bloody killing that catapulted the small town into national attention.
If their story had been fiction, it would have been overwritten. Too many flashy details: The 3-foot ax, the 41 wounds, the salacious affair, the improbable defense, the astonishing verdict. Even the date of the killing seemed ripped from a bad crime novel. Friday the 13th, June 1980.
Because Gore's body wasn't found until that night, the first newspaper headlines didn't appear for two days:
"Teacher hacked to death in Wylie home," shouted The Dallas Morning News that Sunday. "A 5th-grade teacher at R.C. Dodd Middle School was hacked to death by an ax-wielding killer who took a shower afterward."
The brutal death and the trial and acquittal of Montgomery became the singular focus of the community. At the time, Wylie was a town of 3,700 people. Last year, about that many folks showed up for the annual downtown Halloween party. Have the echoes of that killing vanished?
In the Shoemaker and Hardt Coffee shop on Wylie's historic main street, the young baristas looked blankly at a visitor asking about an event that happened before they were born. But a customer needed no prompting.
Jacklyn Brown easily rattled off details from the long-ago accounts of the case. She and her family had moved to Wylie only a few months before the killing. In particular, she recalled the immediate fear that shut down the town, even after the arrest.
"We didn't know for sure that she was the one," Brown said of Montgomery.
The killing continues to reverberate, she said.
"Nothing that big happens here. I still have people ask me who move to the community what happened" to Montgomery, she said. "They like to drive by the house."
Immediately after the trial, Montgomery said she wanted "to get all this behind me and be normal again." She moved to Georgia and was certified as a family counselor. Ten years ago, she declined to talk to a News reporter: "I'm telling you in big bold letters I'm not interested."
For this anniversary, she didn't respond at all.
The death site remains, a brick home on an unremarkable suburban street. Betty and Allan Gore lived there with their two young daughters. He had been away on a business trip that Friday and finally had neighbors visit the house when he couldn't get his wife on the phone. They found the baby crying in the crib and what was left of Betty Gore in the utility room.
A book and a movie
Neighbors quickly told neighbors, and fear spread with the news. Robert King owned the Wylie Flower and Gift Shop and was out making deliveries that Saturday. When he got back to the shop, the back door was unexpectedly locked.
"We thought there might be a mass murderer coming around here," he said this week.
The investigators had clues to work with: bloody footprints, a fingerprint on the Gores' freezer, and a small community of people who knew a lot about each others' whereabouts.
Six days after the killing came a new headline: "Female friend of husband sought in ax killing of Wylie housewife."
The community started to line up for and against Montgomery. A July 8 story in the Dallas Times Herald was headlined "Candy Montgomery: Is She a Killer?" It quoted people who said they knew her.
"Candy," said an admiring friend, "doesn't have a dark side."
That neighbor turned out to be wrong, but people in Wylie still pull for each other. It's a quality that hasn't been lost in the spectacular growth of the past 30 years, said Eric Hogue, Wylie's mayor. When Gerren Isgrigg, a severely disabled boy, was found dead in a park two months ago, he became "Wylie's Angel." People are still leaving flowers where the boy's body was found.
"For whatever reason, we are fortunate to have that spirit in Wylie," Hogue said.
The spirit has endured despite a book, then a movie, that solidified the connection between the Collin County town and an ax murder. Newcomers still ask about the case. There's a public library branch less than a half-mile from where the Gores lived. Two women behind the counter smile knowingly when asked if they have a copy of Evidence of Love.
"When new people come to town, they want the book," said circulation manager Cheryl Roberts.
The number 13
Steve Deffibaugh has been the Collin County fire marshal since 1996. In 1980, he was a crime scene investigator sent to the Gore house. He instantly recalls the details from 30 years before. Occasionally he still gives lectures about handling a crime scene. And his students invariably want to see the Gore material. Why?
"I think it's about the use of the ax. People don't use that very often to murder someone," he said.
The body was in bad shape, he recalled. Of the 41 wounds, 28 were to the head.
Aside from the gruesome specifics, Deffibaugh has his own personal collection of odd coincidences that he reels off without a pause:
Start with the Friday the 13th date. That was also the week in 1980 when the first "Friday the 13th" movie opened, featuring ax-spattered gore. The Gores' house was the 13th from the corner. From the time of the death until the body was discovered took about 13 hours. From the day of the death until Montgomery was arrested took 13 days.
And one more: On the kitchen table, Deffibaugh found a blood-flecked newspaper opened to the movie page and an ad for The Shining, a movie where Jack Nicholson's character famously hacks through doors with an ax.
"I think about it," Deffibaugh said about the Gore crime scene, "every June 13th."
Self-defense plea
By October 1980, the focus had shifted from Wylie to McKinney and the old courthouse on the town square. The building had been shut for a couple of years, but the new courthouse didn't have a room large enough to handle the expected crowds.
These days, the building is the McKinney Performing Arts Center, and the courtroom is the main theater. But the local justice of the peace still uses the room for night court a couple of times a month. The folks who run the theater keep the basic details of the case close at hand for the visitor or two a month who wander in with questions.
The trial kicked off with another of those details that would be implausible in fiction. After months of hinting at alibis and alternate suspects, Montgomery's lawyer opened with a bombshell, a self-defense plea.
Don Crowder, arguing his first criminal case, apparently shocked the prosecution, too. The state presented its case proving that Montgomery killed Gore. Crowder and Montgomery offered no argument. But Montgomery did take the stand.
She and Allan Gore had an affair that ended months before, she said. She had gone to the Gores' house that day because Lisa Gore, 5 years old, had been on a sleep-over with Montgomery's daughter and needed a bathing suit.
Betty Gore confronted Montgomery with a question about the affair. And came at her with the ax, Montgomery said. In a struggle with the larger woman, Montgomery gained control.
"I hit her. I hit her. And I hit her. She fell slowly, almost to a sitting position. I kept hitting her. And hitting her. ... I felt so guilty, so dirty. I felt so ashamed."
Crowder brought in a psychiatrist who said that an offhand remark by Gore during the fight - an incongruous "Shhhh!" - had triggered a repressed memory from when Montgomery was 4 years old and fueled the rage behind the frenzied series of blows that obliterated Gore's face.
The jury acquitted Montgomery in less than five hours. The number of wounds was never an issue, juror Alice Doherty Rowley told The News:
"We determined it never had a bearing on the verdict at all - whether it was one gunshot or 1,000 whacks."
The verdict stunned the community, which had condemned Montgomery for infidelity and generally didn't buy the self-defense argument.
Today's story
Allan Gore quickly remarried and moved away. But that marriage ended in divorce, and his daughters were raised by Betty's parents. Crowder, the defense attorney, took his own life in 1998. The Montgomerys have stayed out of the news.
But a few years after the trial, many of the principals cooperated with two local journalists, John Bloom and Jim Atkinson, who wrote Evidence of Love. In 1990, the book was used as the basis for a TV movie called Killing in a Small Town. Barbara Hershey won an Emmy and Golden Globe award for her portrayal of "Candy Morrison."
Twenty years after the movie and 30 after the killing, Wylie is both changed and the same, residents say. It's certainly a lot bigger - more than 40,000 residents, with all the attendant new homes and businesses. Residents maintain a smaller-town pride in their community and schools.
But consider the Wylie News. Thirty years ago, the town's weekly paper printed not a word about the Gore killing. Chad Engbrock, the current publisher, assumes that his long-ago predecessor chose to avoid a story that did not reflect well on the city.
These days, the paper is writing about Wylie's Angel and about Isgrigg's grandmother, who has been changed with murder.
"It's not a pretty story, but it's a story our readers want to know about," Engbrock said. "They are better served to get the news in the pages of the paper than through coffee shop gossip."
When Bloom and Atkinson worked on the book, they tried to find a deeper meaning in the killing. Gore and Montgomery were troubled housewives whose marriages weren't working out in very specific ways.
"We thought it was that backdrop that made the story 'of its time,' and not just an ax killing," Bloom said.
With the perspective of 30 years, does he think the case has left any significant imprint, beyond the families involved? That's the wrong question, he said.
"The answer to your question is not so much that Candy Montgomery's actions left a mark on the world," Bloom said. "But Candy Montgomery's life was representative of many others. We just don't get to see inside those others because, in most cases, there's no ax handy."
