Over 30 years ago I was local counsel on a case that ended up being the basis for a book and then made for TV movie.  Unfortunately neither the book nor the movie mentioned me despite the considerable work I did on the case.
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A Bryan man hired my client out of soldier of Fortune Magazine to kill his wife.  The victim had done nothing to deserve killing, except for spectacularly bad judgment in her choice of a spouse.  Her husband was having a torrid affair with a beautiful young woman who happened to be his first cousin.

Instead of just divorcing his wife, hubby decided he needed a large sum of money to accompany his new found freedom.  He took a $100,000.00 insurance policy on his wife’s life and then contacted my client for a “high risk assassination.”

My client flew from his home in Florida to do the job.  The husband let him in the house to wait for the target to get home from her grocery shopping.  When she came in my client shot her behind her ear with her own pistol.  She fell on the kitchen floor and was still breathing; so my client put another round through her eye.

When the husband got to the house he decided to send his 12 year old son in to make the discovery of the body.  Meanwhile back in Florida, my client had been hired by his girlfriend and her sister to kill their respective husbands, which he did.

Naturally the murder of two men, with no known enemies or criminal connections who happened to be married to sisters aroused suspicion.  In a bizarre postscript my client attended one of the funerals posing as his girlfriend’s lost cousin and a freelance photographer.

He took a picture of the widow placing a rose on her husband’s grave.  My client decided to make a pilgrimage to Colorado to visit his hero, Robert Brown the publisher of Soldier of Fortune.  While in Colorado, he turned himself in to the police and confessed.

The Defendant was a big tough looking man who had killed numerous people while serving in Vietnam.  When I saw him on TV, he reminded me of Bluto from the Popeye comics.  I got a call from the District Judge’s office notifying me of my appointment with instructions to go see him in the jail at once.

My office was located across the street from the jail, so I got there very quickly.  The jailers said, “The consultation rooms are full but you can talk to him in the kitchen, we’ll have to lock you both in.”

Being locked up with a Bluto-looking hired killer was unsettling enough, but when the kitchen door closed I realized there were knives, cleavers and other cutlery hanging on the kitchen wall.

My client turned to face me and he was indeed a bid Bad Ass Looking Dude.  He was also crying hysterically.  “Mr. Banks, they’re gonna kill me!  They’re gonna kill me.”  I thought “This guy is as big a Weenie as I would be if I was in his boots.”  From that time on I was very comfortable talking to him.

The local victims’ family was given the choice of seeking the death sentence on my client or the husband.  They opted to have the husband prosecuted for Capital Murder and my client received three (3) life sentences in return for testifying against the husband and his girlfriend and her sister.

At the husband’s trial the courtroom was packed with both spectators and security.  I was directed to sit next to my client while he testified against the husband.

He made a very effective witness and the jury ended up sentencing the husband to Death by Lethal Injection.  When I got off the stand the Sheriff (a good friend of mine) said, “You looked pretty calm up there Phil, I guess all those death threats against your client didn’t scare you any.”  I was blissfully unaware of any such threats when I was sitting next to him but instead I indicated to the Sheriff that I wasn’t concerned about such nonsense.

The State of Texas put the husband to sleep and although I am not a big death penalty man (unless somebody hurts a member of my family) I thought he had it coming for sending his son into the house to find his murdered mother. 

I ended up actually being friends (as much as I could) with my client.  He was genuinely remorseful about the killings he had done at home and abroad.  At one point he asked if I could get my Pastor to come visit him.

I told Father Oxly about the situation and said “He probably should have gotten the death sentence for what he did.”  Father Oxly said “ I guess we are all lucky to not receive the penalties we deserved.”  Father Oxly and my client and I all prayed together in the jail that day and in the years since I have come to appreciate the wisdom and goodness of Father Oxly’s observations.

-Phil

Below please find two local media articles from the case: 

There are certain cases you have history with:

            In 1960, I was a 3rd grade student at David Crockett Elementary School in Bryan, Texas. Me and my friends would frequently fish for crawdads in a creek near the school.  The creek was fed by water from the Bryan Municipal Lake. One day there were more crayfish that we had ever seen; they were all dead, floating in a green foam-like substance.  No crawdads were ever seen in that creek again.

           A few years later me and my friends would dive for golf balls in the lake to sell back to the golf pro shop. When I was in college, my folks had a place on the Brazos River where we would run trot lines to catch catfish. We would seine the Bryan Municipal Lake to get Bait fish for the trot lines.

            In the 1990’s it was revealed that a cotton poison (arsenic) manufacturer named Elf Atochem had dumped Arsenic into our town. First they put Arsenic into the Municipal Lake for many years and when that was finally curtailed, arsenic was discharged repeatedly and illegally into the air over our town.  In recorded history there had never been a toxic arsenic experience of this magnitude for this duration.  People began noticing that families who lived near the plant had numerous health problems.  The cancer rates for the exposure area were off the charts.  Tragically a great number of the children born to mothers who lived there had serious birth defects during pregnancy.

            An ex-employee of Elf Atochem had been screwed out of his retirement by the company so he blew the whistle on them.  A massive Toxic Tort Claim Action suit was filed in Federal Court in Houston.  Many members of the Class happened to be clients of mine, so they hired me to represent them in court.

            When I realized there was a connection between Elf Atochem and the dead crawdads and the poisoning of Bryan Municipal Lake I almost came unglued.  I thought about myself and all the other children playing in that poison lake and I became very angry. You might even say over the year I went mad; because the case became an obsession with me.

            Besides representing a number of individual claimants, I was named as Class Counsel for the cancer victims in the Class. I spent years and years working on the case trying to get justice for the families who had been needlessly devastated by this criminal toxic exposure.


There were at least two massive obstacles in the case.

1. Since there had never been so much arsenic exposure before there was no basis for comparison and virtually no research to show the results of a massive continuous exposure.

2. Because of the myths of “Tort Reform” being sold to the public; the court favored corporate wrong doers like Elf Atochem and would protect them for the people they injured.

            Even if a lawsuit were successful there would be years and years of appeals with the spectra of corporations and their insurers going out of business before any money could be recovered.

            The defendants hired powerful and talented law firms from across the country in addition to the famous Vinson Elkins firm in Houston. As a tail grabbing street lawyer from Bryan, Texas I was impressed with the quality of my competition. After a while I got tired of them repeating the line that we couldn’t prove that arsenic exposure was harmful to people’s health. No scientific evidence, blah, blah, blah.

            Finally at one of the settlement conferences, I heard that line once too often and I told that Silk Stocking, big Dawg how I really felt:
 

Phil: I want to know if you will be willing to put your asshole where your mouth is.

Yankee Big Dawg Lawyer: I beg your pardon.

Phil: You don’t think arsenic can hurt you, come on down to Bryan and we will give you an Arsenic Water Enema and see what happens.

Yankee Big Dawg Lawyer: There is no reason to be uncivilized.

Phil: I think it was pretty F_ _ _ ing uncivilized for your people to poison our town.

            The case was finally settled in 2001; we decided to recover what we could for the people in the Class, not what they really deserved.  In the years since, I have come to believe that we made the right call; because a whole lot of people getting something is better than all of them getting nothing.

            In retrospect I am extremely proud of my work on the Elf Atochem cases. It isn’t often you get to hold corporate criminals responsible for things they did in your childhood.           

- Phil

Last night, Amy was one of the TV Auctioneers for the local public access channel (KAMU-TV)'s fundraising auction. Members of the Brazos County Bar Association manned the phones and provided the on-air talent for the fundraiser. It was a great event, great fun, and we raised a bunch of money to help continue to bring wonderful programming to the area on KAMU-TV. It was an honor to participate! Baby Philip even made his TV debut! Special thanks to all the friends and family that watched and called in to bid.