“This is the way things were back home,” they would say, or “Thank God we had enough money to move to the country so kids could get a good education.” The country was pure, untroubled, safe, innocent, a vision of regenerate America. But here there was quiet and solitude and control over their lives. Twenty miles to the southwest were the teeming freeways of Dallas, the huge electronics corporations where many of them worked as engineers and physicists and computer analysts, the endless chain of suburban housing developments and shopping malls and office centers running due north out of the city. They sent their children to a little red schoolhouse, joined a civic club or ran for the town council, and started going to church again when they found the quaint little chapel by the roadside of Lucas. They came in the seventies, just about the time the Dallas developers started buying out the farmers one by one, and they settled on pasture-size lots in homes designed exclusively for them by architects happy to get rich by satisfying their personal whims. Most of its residents had come there to escape something: cities, density, routine, fear of crime, overpriced housing, the urban problems their parents had never known. The country, as the people who settled there liked to call it, was eight to ten amorphous little towns in eastern Collin County, but it really had no name. When the sky was clear and the wind strong, as it was, the landscape had the feel of a rough and untamed outpost, solitary and a little forbidding, not beautiful but stunning in its brown and gray emptiness. The church buildings sat on a slight rise surrounded by fallow blackland wheat fields on three sides and a farm-to-market road on the fourth. Set back from the roadside, paint peeling, steeple rusted, its floors echoing hollowly under the tread of men’s heavy soles, it did not at first resemble a place likely to house the more liberal strains of Methodist theology. The center of Candy Montgomery’s universe, almost from the day in 1977 when she moved to her dream house in the country, was the drafty white clapboard building known to its congregants simply as the church. The Methodist Church of Lucas was, more than most places of worship, an institution controlled by women.
It was a church service that first brought Candy Montgomery and Betty Gore together, and it was the church that led them to their times of closeness and, eventually, to their mutual hatred and Betty’s brutal death. The entire right half of her face seemed to be gone. As to her right eye-she appeared to not have one. And Betty’s left eye was wide open, staring down at the gaping black craters in her arm. Her hair radiated in all directions, a tangled, soaked mass of glistening black. Her lips were parted, showing her front teeth, the mouth fashioned into a half-grin. To get a look at her face, the men had to walk around the ocean of red and black to get closer. It lay in a pool of blood and fluid so thick that the arm appeared to be floating above the linoleum.
Her left arm was the first thing they noticed after opening the door. The book had a white cover, which stood out in sharp relief because, in the harsh overhead light that glared off the harvest-gold linoleum, it was one of the few objects in the room not coated in blood.
Closer to the center of the room, where the freezer stood against one wall, were two dog-food dishes and a bruised book of Mother Goose nursery rhymes. In one corner were a brand-new toy wagon and a child’s training toilet. It was a small room, no more than twelve feet long by six feet wide, made smaller by the presence of a washer, a dryer, a freezer, and a small cabinet where Betty had kept toys and knickknacks. Few looked at the head at all-the sight was too horrible-so the early reports as to the manner of death were conflicting, and usually wrong. Even those who already knew what lay beyond the utility room door were never bold enough to look more than a moment before closing the door. Without exception, each man who saw the lifeless body of Betty Gore the night of June 13, 1980, reflexively averted his eyes.
HOTELS NEAR GAY BARS IN DALLAS TEXAS SERIES
This story from Texas Monthly’s archives is the first of a two-part series that concludes with “ Love and Death in Silicon Prairie, Part II: The Killing of Betty Gore.” We have left it as it was originally published, without updating, to maintain a clear historical record.