This is final installment of a seven part story.

The difference between a criminal trial and a civil trial, well one of them anyway, is that a civil trial can be settled out of court.  Or not.

Angela Crane and her stepson / lover, Thomas Crane, had no cards to play, and not even an attorney who had a full deck.  Obviously stripped of their fortune, along with their luck, they could only afford a guy from Verhalen fresh out of law school by the name of Will Wickett.  Will meant well, to be sure, but if he were bacon, he wouldn’t even sizzle.  The Cranes didn’t have two nickels to rub together to make an offer to settle out of court, much less any real money.  Even the Dual-Ghia and Porsche 356A they drove were registered in the name of Theodore Crane, and therefore part of his estate, and no longer available to the pair to make use of while things played out.

If they’d had enough money to make an offer, Perry would have just laughed.  The money was the last thing he wanted or needed.  The sheer enjoyment he took from showing up at the Pecos County Courthouse everyday during the trial and witnessing the two squirm made whatever he spent on his attorneys a small price to pay.  “It wasn’t that I had an undying love for my biological father,” Perry told Braxton over a few cold beers out by the pool at his house.  “I mean, I know what he was.  I never even knew he was my real father till my mother shared her secrets on her deathbed.  But he was big enough to admit it, when I confronted him, and swear to it later in writing when asked.  The man was murdered in cold blood.  Doesn’t matter what his particular demons were that led up to it.  Justice is justice.”

By the time the case came to trial, there was one car parked out in front of the courthouse every day, no matter the weather or the witness. Guy Glasscock’s 1959 Plymouth Fury hardtop became a fixture on the courthouse square. Folks over at the Rex Hall Drug Store said it was fitting Glasscock drove a black Fury. “The stories he wrote for the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch were black as anything I ever read,” Rex used to say to customers around the prescription counter as they pretended to be looking at Hallmark cards. Each tried to top the other with details they’d learned from the trial, some shouting their contributions from the laxative aisle, not caring who heard.

“And every word he writes creates one helluva fury,” Sister Thelma chimed in, surprising everyone with the coarseness of her comment. Sister Thelma likes to drop an explicative nugget every now and again, just to make herself relatable, though she’d ask forgiveness once she was back at Our Lady of Immeasurable Concern.

Trixie was the first to get the paper every morning and memorize every salacious detail she could, before the Klip-N-Dye opened, so she could pepper her customers with enough of the graphic nature of the case that they’d blush. She didn’t shy away from making up her own details where the paper had used discretion, enough so that some women were getting their haircut twice a week and darn near bald by the time the jury announced their verdict. Trixie could spin a tale about as good as anyone here in Fort Stockton. The more unmentionable body parts and titillating details she could weave in, with appropriately salty adjectives to punctuate several of the action verbs, the better each story became. Brother Bob’s wife refused to go in for the longest time, not wanting to be caught up in the sin of listening to Trixie’s stories, but finally couldn’t hold out any longer. She came home with what looked like a crew cut. Brother Bob feared she’d started playing for the other team the first time he saw her standing in the kitchen.

At the Lucky Lady over a couple beers during the trial, Braxton asked Perry if he had any regrets about folks finding out Theodore Crane was his real father. “The man I thought was my father died when I was young,” Perry said. “He hadn’t been able to father a child. When he found out my mother had gotten pregnant as the result of an indiscretion, he eventually took it as a blessing. My mother didn’t think it was anybody’s business, but at the end thought I should know. All three of the people involved are gone now, so I can’t see that it matters.” Braxton nodded. “I don’t think any of them would have done anything any different if it would have meant justice not being served.” Perry took a deep breath and thought for a minute. “There were a lot of sins exposed. Those of my own parents were not exempt.”

Everyone assumed that Perry was paying Glasscock absolute top dollar for his coverage of the trial. An average salary for a new reporter at the Telegram-Dispatch would not have been able to afford a top of the line Plymouth. “For goodness sakes, the driver’s seat on it swivels more than mine does! You ever seen such a thing?” Lucinda noted when everyone was in the Grounds for Divorce one morning during the trial. “I guess it matches the dashboard on the darn thing. Something Buck Rodgers would lay claim to, if he could.” It was a darn good looking automobile, to be sure. The 318 cubic inch V8, complete with the Super Pak option, rocketed Glasscock from the courthouse to the STD offices for late editions so fast folks’ heads would spin. Advertising rates went up just from the huge increase in readership; sometimes a second or third run having to be printed just to keep up with demand.

KFSX, the local radio station, got into the act, as well. Right after the farm report everyday at 10:00, 2:00, and 4:00 they’d also give a trial update with the latest news. Trixie would occasionally stop in to be interviewed for her perspective, but there was a tendency for the details she provided to turn blue pretty fast and she’d have to be cutoff by Arrty Dillo, the mid-day on-air host, lest the FCC be forced to make their way to Fort Stockton and start imposing fines.

Brother Bob over at Second Baptist preached a two part sermon on vengeance the weeks before the final verdict came down, pretty well using Romans 12:19 like an axe; the congregation a full forest of East Texas pines. Perhaps it was a subtle attempt to sway the jury. More than likely it was more an effort to help heal the marriages of those called to testify during the trial. Franklin Danbury’s law firm had to hire three new attorneys to handle the high profile divorces that took place immediately preceding and during the trial. One more was brought on after the verdict was finally announced.

Of course, as years went by, there were things that happened in Fort Stockton that were just as repugnant as the Crane murder, and what went on leading up to it. But after that it took a lot more to shock people. “It’s the frog in boiling water theory,” Pastor Peterson told his congregation. “Throw a frog into a pot of boiling water and he’ll instinctively jump right out before it can kill him. Put him in a pot of lukewarm water and raise the temperatures slowly and he’ll get relaxed and eventually not even pay attention to the heat. Till it’s too late. Just like frogs, we become numb to the sin all around us.”

Folks over at the Grounds for Divorce still think about the analogy all the time and marvel at how many things it applies to, right up to today. Rodger commented that it felt like Fort Stockton had lost its innocence. “You can’t lose something you never had,” Lucinda noted. Lucinda wasn’t one who normally commented on innocence.

It was fairly anticlimactic when the actual verdict was read at the conclusion of the trial. Everyone knew Angela and Thomas Crane were guilty. Outside the courthouse, on the morning the verdict came down, Pearl Parnell was quoted as saying, “He’s so crooked he has to unscrew his pants at night, and she’s more slippery than a pocketful of pudding.” Of course she was embarrassed when she read her own words quoted in the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch the next day, but didn’t back down in her assessment. Trixie gave her a free perm, just to ease Pearl’s guilt.

When the jury found for the plaintiff, Perry Silverman, and against Angela and Thomas Crane, the crowd in the gallery cheered. The banner headline on the front page of the Stockton Telegram-Dispatch that night read CRANES CAN’T DUCK GUILT. Of course the victory was a moral one. “If a trip around the world cost a dollar, Angela and Thomas Crane couldn’t afford to get to the New Mexican border,” Glasscock wrote in the scathing final article. Nonetheless, they somehow both got out of town as quickly as they could.

Where they each ended up remained sketchy for a long time, though they definitely each went their separate way. Mayor Goodman told friends out at the Fort Stockton Country Club that he swore he’d spotted Angela Crane waitressing at the Playboy Mansion a few years later, but cut the conversation short when it brought up a series of other questions that weren’t of a political nature.

Word filtered back to town that Thomas had joined the military in order to try to turn his life around and learn some worthwhile skills.  That effort later went awry on a training exercise when he was killed by friendly fire.

Guy Glasscock and his gorgeous 1959 Plymouth Fury didn’t stay around Fort Stockton too long after the trial. He had no interest in writing about the normal goings-on around town after the Fort Stockton story-of-the century. He bounced around Texas working freelance jobs till 1967, when he moved to San Francisco and took a job with start-up magazine, The Rolling Stone. He did some of his best work there, but eventually accepted an offer while he was under the influence of psilocybin mushrooms and quaaludes to return to the Lone Star State and write for Texas Monthly.

Braxton and Susan Tyler had three more kids, but eventually divorced when he took a job in Washington DC in the early seventies, continuing the work he’d started in surveillance. After getting involved in an unseemly situation at the Watergate Complex he moved back to Fort Stockton under the terms of a plea deal. He and Susan got back together and Braxton eventually went to work for Perry full-time. They divorced again a half dozen years later. Nobody was all that surprised.

Perry Silverman got a huge windfall from the verdict, inheriting the Crane estate, and the insurance settlement that followed. True to his word, he kept none of it for himself. The estate itself was cut up into smaller pieces, one tract developed into low income housing, another was turned into a communal gardening experiment that focused on the benefits of organic methods and using bees to pollinate the crops rather than more traditional farming methods. A large swath of the estate was kept for grazing cattle, the manure they generated being used for organic farming with enough left over to form the basis of several Captain My Captain blog stories.

The Dual-Ghia, Mercedes 220, and the Porsche 356A were all donated to the auto shop at Jim Bowie High School, Perry’s alma-mater. “In retrospect, I probably should have thought that through a little better,” Perry was quoted as saying years later, as the cars skyrocketed in value. Braxton’s old green 1949 Oldsmobile can still be seen out at Earl’s Salvage Yard and Formalwear. Treks are still made to the rusty two door sedan, mostly by young teenage boys trying to see if there was anything left in the trunk. Franklin Danbury’s Cadillac Eldorado convertible was blown to bits out in front of the Piggly Wiggly in late ‘59 under suspicious circumstances that were never fully investigated by Chief Martin. Questions remain unanswered. Danbury was unharmed, having exited the vehicle just prior to its detonation, but he never bought another Cadillac again. He drove Lincoln Continental convertibles till 1963. After November of that year, he drove nothing but Volvos.

The old Crane mansion itself, the site of the brutal murder of Perry’s biological father, was donated to the Texas A&M University System and developed into the Southwest Texas College of Audio Visual Arts. The carriage house became the Silverman Center for Genealogical Studies, with Calhoun Holden named as its managing director. Perry Silverman and Cal Holden maintained a close relationship right up until Mr. Holden passed away a few years ago. Cal Holden was buried right next to Perry’s mother, Perry’s two dads on the other side.

A white Kaiser Darin was a common sight parked out by the plot for years after that.

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