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Vic Feazell is an American lawyer, who was a District Attorney in Waco, McLennan County from 1983 until his resignation in 1988. During his time in office he was involved in the investigation and prosecution of the 1982 Lake Waco murders and also several crimes to which Henry Lee Lucas had been linked. Feazell currently resides in Waco, Texas, and is an attorney with his own firm. He is known for his commercials sporting the "Drive Laid Back" slogan. [1] [2]
Feazell was raised in Texas. At 17 years old, he took the civil service exam and was hired by the Austin Police Department. In the early 1970s, Feazell graduated from University of Mary Hardin Baylor and he then attended Baylor Law School, receiving his J.D. in May 1979. [3] Ten days after graduation from law school, Feazell tried his first jury trial, alone, and won it.[ citation needed ]
Feazell announced his candidacy for District Attorney of McLennan County in Waco, Texas in 1982. He would go on to win the election against the incumbent district attorney and became one of the youngest to hold the position in McLennan County. During his first term as District Attorney, Feazell tried the 1982 Lake Waco Triple Murders. In 1984, a jury found David Wayne Spence guilty of the murders and sentenced him to the death penalty. A chronicle of the Lake Waco Murders can be found in the Edgar Award-winning book Careless Whispers by Carlton Stowers. [4] Feazell notes on his website that he is "now a vocal advocate against the death penalty." [3]
In 1984, after Henry Lee Lucas claimed to have killed over 300 people across the country, the Texas Rangers announced numerous murders to have been solved. Three of these announced murders were in McLennan County. An investigation by the Dallas Times-Herald , published in 1985, cast doubt on the validity of Lucas's confession spree, but the Rangers stood by the confessions as legitimate and their claims that Lucas was a mass-murderer. This prompted Feazell to begin investigating the claims, and eventually publish the Lucas Report. The report suggested that Lucas could not have committed some of the murders to which he had confessed, including the ones in McLennan County. [5] The Texas Rangers were unhappy with Feazell's defiance and casting doubt on them. The Texas Department of Public Safety began an investigation of Feazell which several sources have tied to retaliation against Feazell; Feazell was arrested, and his office and home searched by agents. [6]
Feazell's arrest came seven weeks before election day. Voters in McLennan County re-elected Feazell for another term. During the criminal investigation leading up to Feazell's indictment, a reporter from Dallas television station WFAA-TV named Charles Duncan ran an eleven-part series about Feazell, which later led to a libel judgement in favor of Feazell worth $58 million. [7] [8] [9] This series was the only evidence shown to the federal grand jury that indicted Feazell. [10] Feazell was found not guilty of all charges on June 29, 1987. Feazell then returned to work as District Attorney of McLennan County. On September 13, 1988, Feazell sent out a press release stating he would be resigning as District Attorney.
Feazell then began representing Lucas in all of the still-pending murder cases he had confessed to around the country.[ citation needed ] Feazell spent much of the 1990s representing Lucas to ensure he was not convicted based on any more false confessions. The work done by Feazell and others cast enough doubt on the validity of the Lucas confession to the Orange Socks murder case that in 1998 then-Governor George W. Bush commuted Lucas's death penalty to life imprisonment. [11] [12]
In 1991, represented by former U.S. Attorney Gary Richardson, Feazell was awarded a $58 million judgment for libel charges against WFAA-TV, at the time the largest libel judgment in U.S. history. [9] As a result, he was cited in the 1993 edition of Guinness World Records for largest defamation lawsuit in history. [13]
A.H. Belo Corp, WFAA’s parent company later announced [14] the $58 million libel judgment was dismissed as part of a settlement. The terms of the settlement with Feazell were not disclosed. [14]
In the 21st century, Feazell formed his own law office, The Law Offices of Vic Feazell with offices presently in Austin and Waco, Texas. The offices work primarily with personal injury cases and occasionally criminal cases. [15]
McLennan County is a county located on the Edwards Plateau in Central Texas. As of the 2020 census, its population was 260,579. Its county seat and largest city is Waco. The U.S. census 2023 county population estimate is 268,583. The county is named for Neil McLennan, an early Scottish settler who worked to evict the Native Americans in frontier Texas. McLennan County is included in the Waco Metropolitan Statistical Area.
Waco is a city in and the county seat of McLennan County, Texas, United States. It is situated along the Brazos River and I-35, halfway between Dallas and Austin. The city had a U.S. census estimated 2023 population of 144,816, making it the 24th-most populous city in the state. The Waco metropolitan statistical area consists of McLennan, Falls and Bosque counties, which had a 2020 population of 295,782. Bosque County was added to the Waco MSA in 2023. The 2023 U.S. census population estimate for the Waco metropolitan area was 304,865 residents.
The Waco siege, also known as the Waco massacre, was the siege by U.S. federal government and Texas state law enforcement officials of a compound belonging to the religious cult known as the Branch Davidians between February 28 and April 19, 1993. The Branch Davidians, led by David Koresh, were headquartered at Mount Carmel Center ranch in unincorporated McLennan County, Texas, 13 miles northeast of Waco. Suspecting the group of stockpiling illegal weapons, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) obtained a search warrant for the compound and arrest warrants for Koresh and several of the group's members.
Henry Lee Lucas, also known as The Confession Killer, was an American convicted murderer. Lucas was convicted of murdering his mother in 1960 and two others in 1983. He rose to infamy as a claimed serial killer while incarcerated for these crimes when he falsely confessed to approximately six hundred other murders to Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officials. Many unsolved cases were closed based on the confessions and the murders officially attributed to Lucas. Lucas was convicted of murdering eleven people and condemned to death for a single case with a then-unidentified victim, later identified as Debra Jackson.
William Boyett was an American actor best known for his roles in law enforcement dramas on television from the 1950s through the 1990s.
The United States District Court for the Western District of Texas is a federal district court. The court convenes in San Antonio with divisions in Austin, Del Rio, El Paso, Midland, Pecos, and Waco. It has jurisdiction in over 50 Trans-Pecos, Permian Basin, and Hill Country counties of the U.S. state of Texas. This district covers over 92,000 square miles (240,000 km2) and seven divisions.
Ronald Dale Earle was an American politician and judge who was, from January 1977 to January 2009, the District Attorney for Travis County, Texas. He became nationally known for filing charges against House majority leader Tom DeLay in September 2005 for conspiring to violate Texas' election law and/or to launder money. In Texas, Earle was known for his criminal justice reform efforts which focused on crime prevention, alternative sentencing, victim advocacy, and the reintegration of former offenders into society. In 1983, Earle – an Eagle Scout – prosecuted himself for an election law violation after missing a campaign finance filing deadline by one day; he was fined $212. Earle was a fixture in Travis County politics and served in public office there for more than 30 years, joking that he was asked if he was the "District Eternity".
James Blackburn Adams was an American attorney, politician, and two-time associate director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Tom Moore Jr. was a Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives from 1967 to 1973 from McLennan County. Moore is most noted for an April Fool's Day prank he played to demonstrate that his fellow legislators often did not read the legislation they were approving and for being a member of the "Dirty Thirty."
Jesse Washington was a seventeen-year-old African American farmhand who was lynched in the county seat of Waco, Texas, on May 15, 1916, in what became a well-known example of lynching. Washington was convicted of raping and murdering Lucy Fryer, the wife of his white employer in rural Robinson, Texas. He was chained by his neck and dragged out of the county court by observers. He was then paraded through the street, all while being stabbed and beaten, before being held down and castrated. He was then lynched in front of Waco's city hall.
James Robert Dunnam is an American state politician and prominent trial lawyer from Texas. He was a Democratic member of the Texas House of Representatives, representing the 57th District since his election in 1996 from January 14, 1997, until January 11, 2011. He is the grandson of William Vance Dunnam, who served as a member of the Texas House of Representatives from Coryell County in the 35th Legislature, 1917–1918.
Gary Richardson is an American lawyer who was the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Oklahoma from 1981 to 1984. He is also a perennial candidate for elected office in Oklahoma. As of 2018 he is a partner in the Richardson Law Firm, P.C., a plaintiff law firm in Tulsa.
The Oak Hill satanic ritual abuse trial occurred in Oak Hill, Austin, Texas, in 1991 when Fran Keller and her husband Dan, proprietors of a small day care, were accused of repeatedly and sadistically abusing several children.
The 1982 Lake Waco Murders refers to the deaths of three teenagers near Lake Waco in Waco, Texas, in July 1982. The police investigation and criminal trials that followed the murders lasted for more than a decade and resulted in the execution of one man, David Wayne Spence, and life prison sentences for two other men allegedly involved in the crime, Anthony and Gilbert Melendez. A fourth suspect, Muneer Mohammad Deeb, was eventually released after spending several years in prison.
Deadly Little Secrets: The Minister, His Mistress, and a Heartless Texas Murder is a 2012 true crime book written by the non-fiction author and novelist Kathryn Casey and released by HarperCollins about the 2006 murder by Baptist minister Matt Baker of his 31-year-old wife, Kari Baker, and the staging of her death as a suicide.
Roy Mitchell was an African-American man from Waco, Texas who was convicted of six murders and executed on July 30, 1923. His arrest, trial, conviction, and execution are considered an example of continued bigotry in the Texas judicial system of the 1920s, but also of reforms aimed at curbing mob violence and public lynching. Mitchell was the last Texan to be executed in public and is often described as the last to be legally hanged before the introduction of the electric chair.
On April 17, 2013, an ammonium nitrate explosion occurred at the West Fertilizer Company storage and distribution facility in West, Texas, United States, while emergency services personnel were responding to a fire at the facility. Fifteen people were killed, more than 160 were injured, and more than 150 buildings were damaged or destroyed. Investigators confirmed that ammonium nitrate was the material that exploded. On May 11, 2016, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives stated that the fire had been deliberately set. That finding has been disputed.
On May 17, 2015, in Waco, Texas, United States, a shootout erupted at a Twin Peaks restaurant where more than 200 persons, including members from motorcycle clubs that included the Bandidos, Cossacks, and allies, had gathered for a meeting about political rights for motorcyclists. Law enforcement, which included 18 Waco Police Department officers and four Texas Highway Patrol troopers, had gathered to monitor the restaurant and meeting from outside, and, according to police, "returned fire after being shot at". Nine bikers were killed, 18 others wounded or injured, and 177 individuals were ultimately arrested and initially detained in connection with the shootout, most for alleged participation in organized crime. According to The New York Times, "the response by prosecutors was widely criticized as brazen overreach". According to the Waco Tribune-Herald, the shootout led to a "four-year prosecutorial fiasco that resulted in zero convictions."
Irene Garza was an American schoolteacher and beauty queen whose death was the subject of investigation for several decades. She was last seen alive on April 16, 1960, when she went to confession at a church in McAllen, Texas. She was reported missing the following morning. Following the largest volunteer search to that date in the Rio Grande Valley, Garza's body was discovered in a canal on April 21. An autopsy concluded that she had been sexually assaulted before being killed; the cause of death was suffocation.
The Confession Killer is a 2019 American true crime documentary miniseries directed by Robert Kenner and Taki Oldham. The plot revolves around the 1983 case of Henry Lee Lucas, who confessed to over 200 murders in the United States. Years after his admissions, they turned out to be lies.