Fort Worth Star-Telegram
April 28, 1991
Plaintiff played David to win Goliath award
By Barry Silachter
Fort Worth Star-Telegram reporter
WACO – There’s the piano, the flower-patterned furniture and the painting of Texas bluebonnets.
But what wets the living room of former McLennan County District Attorney Vic Feazell apart from his neighbors’ are 25 cardboard boxes of files scattered about and scores of folders spread on a long table. Then there’s the copy machine on the piano stool.
The room was Feazell’s command bunker during the six weeks when he took on Dallas’ WFAA/Channel 8 and its former investigative reporter, Charles Duncan, in a successful libel action that might make judicial history.
‘I’ve always wanted new towels,” said Feazell’s second wife, Berni, a tall red-haired woman. Berni Feazell, can crack a joke as well as a stand up comic, but this day she insists that’s actually what she’d buy first with the $58 million judgment, the biggest in U.S. history. “You know, the matching kind – bath towels the same color as the washrag.”
As for himself, Vic Feazell said, he’d take what’s left after paying his lawyer and move his family to Tulsa, Okla., or Austin – “somewhere near an airport” – and be more selective in the work he’d handle, perhaps civil-rights cases, national civil-rights cases.
The award, decided by a jury April 19, must be approved by the judge, who can reduce or even set aside the verdict. If he doesn’t, it may face as many as three appeals by the 180-lawyer Dallas firm, Locke Purnell rain Harrell, that represented the Belo Broadcasting Corp. TV station.
Somewhere along the line, there could be an out-of-court settlement for somewhat less than $58 million. Feazell says he’s willing to talk turkey. He’s also prepared to be patient (“I’ve got the staying power to wait five years”), knowing that the award will be earning 10-percent compound interest.
Neither Feazell nor his Tulsa-based lawyer, Gary Richardson, had any libel case experience, Feazell said. “This little ragtag team took on Locke Purnell. A real-life David-Goliath story.”
There is no mistaking that Victor Fred Feazell- a Louisiana preacher’s son and onetime Baptist preacher himself who became a police trainee, a lawyer, a populist politician and then a private attorney again – is on a roll.
In 1986, he won re-election as district attorney despite a federal racketeering indictment accusing him of taking bribes for dismissal or leniency on drunken-driving cases. Playing on a now-familiar David vs. Goliath theme, he handed out bumper stickers picturing the kind of handcuffs he wore when arrested – only those on the stickers were depicted being snapped in half.
He was acquitted of all charges in a highly publicized 1987 Austin Trial.
Feazell said he stayed on as district attorney for 18 months only at his wife’s insistence, then became a corporate lawyer until he decided to return to private practice.
Perhaps it was the threatening gray skies or the $12,000 due on his credit cards, but a week after the libel case ended, Waco’s most colorful resident was pensive, almost dour in demeanor.
Feazell – who might soon join the ranks of newly made millionaires along with Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes winners and Cowboys defensive tackle Russell Maryland – showed a world-weariness that belied not only his good fortune and his 39 years but also the public flamboyance for which he was once known.
The domed McLennan County Courthouse is clearly visible from Feazell’s ninth-floor law office. Binoculars, placed on a windowsill, enable him to spot opposing attorneys so he’ll know when to show up in court, he explained.
Next to the window is a picture of an old country church – gold on black glass – and a bookshelf containing a biography of Huey Long, the Louisiana populist-demagogue, Feazell lists Long as one of his heroes, along with Moses, David, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Baines Johnson.
A pair of broken handcuffs is mounted on the opposite wall. No, not he ones in which he was videotaped being led away four years ago, said Feazell, a man of medium height sporting a neat dark mustache and longish hair with a dramatic wisp of white above his forehead, just off center.
On television, especially in freeze-frames of the sort employed by Duncan’s 10-part WFAA series.
Feazell looks suspect, if not rakishly sinister.
In person, he exudes open-faced candor, though possibly the sort of familiar, practiced sincerity honed by those of his pulpit-and-prosecutorial background.
This morning, he is the consummate Texas criminal lawyer, starched white shirt, paisley tie, and suit pine-striped and double-breasted, his boots western and covered by ostrich skin. The look is completed by a Texas-shaped golden nugget ring.
Born June 8, l951, Feazell grew up in a half-dozen places in Louisiana, New Mexico and Texas where his father held mainly small-town church positions. He finished high school early – at 16 – in Leander, north of Austin.
Eighteen months later, according to a framed certificate on his office wall, he gave “evidence” at the First Baptist Church of Leander “that God had called him into the Gospel Ministry.”
Feazell, who pastored two churches while attending college, said he doesn’t recall providing any admissible proof of divine communication, and attributes the wording to tradition. As a Waco attorney in his mid-20s, he taught a Sunday school class of young adults, one of whom recalled that Feazell adeptly reconciled old beliefs with modern life.
The preacher’s son hadn’t been sure of attending college until an avuncular sergeant at the Austin Police Department encouraged him. He enrolled at Mary Hardin-Baylor, a predominantly women’s college in Belton where he majored in religion and sociology. He scraped by as a “campus boy,” a student who did chores in exchange for board.
An early standout, he copped the lead in the Easter pageant and became the first man to light the Baptist school’s Charter Day candle.
After law school at Baylor University, Feazell entered private practice, married, divorced and made an unsuccessful run for a Waco City Council seat.
He campaigned as an outsider, a Democratic renegade. Throughout his political career, he would remain apart from, if not antagonistic to, the local Establishment.
“We kingmakers, and Vic forgot to ask whether he could run,” said Bernadette Malchar Feazell, whom he married in 1981. She calls the kingmakers ”Old Waco” and the Ridgewood Group” referring to what she said was a particularly elite country-club set.
People are either hot or cold about Vic Feazell, colleagues candidly say “You like him or you didn’t,” said Pat Murphy, a former assistant DA under Feazell.
But annoying local power-brokers was nothing compared to what Feazell did after winning the DA’s post in 1982.
In one fell swoop, Feazell held up to public ridicule a swagger of county sheriffs and an institution of legendary fame – the Texas Rangers – whose collective reputation has yet to fully recover.
All because of Henry Lee Lucas, who entered Feazell’s life one day in 1984.
The drifter with an 84 IQ confessed to killing his mother in Minnesota, and didn’t stop there, ultimately admitting to some 600 murders, including three in McLennan County.
Feazell, tipped by Dallas Times Herald reporter Hugh Aynesworth that something was askew, found by tracking Lucas’ driving records that he had been in Florida at the time of the McLennan killings. Feazell brought Lucas before a local grand jury, which would not indict him. Lucas later recanted almost all his murder confessions.
Feazell contends that the Rangers’ parent organization, the Department of Public Safety, responded by colluding with the FBI, U.S. attorneys and Channel 8’s Duncan to nail him one way or another. But a U.S. district judge later ruled that the federal bribery charges against Feazell were not motivated by retaliation over his exposing the Lucas confession problems.
“There really is a very, very long list of people who, you say, are somehow ganging up on you, isn’t there?” John McElhaney, the TV station’s attorney, asked during the libel trial.
“I don’t think I am clinically paranoid, Mr. McElhaney,” Feazell was quoted by the Waco Tribune-Herald as replying. “You know the old joke; you’re not really paranoid if they are really out to get you.”
Duncan’s series of reports asserted that Feazell was the target of a “lengthy” FBI investigation; that he had fixed drunken-driving charges; that Waco police morale was low because of lax prosecution; and that the DA’s office was less than upright in numerous other ears.
Feazell never agreed to an on-camera interview (“I’m not going to pick up a rattlesnake and handle it”) although he said Duncan was offered, but declined, access to files.
In attempting to show malice by the WFAA reporter, Feazell’s side introduced into evidence a news script that Duncan never used. It alleged that Feazell had joined the Austin police to dodge the draft – although he was under draft age at the time.
Feazell also called witnesses, including lawmen, whom Duncan had cited as sources for his reports. Those witnesses testified that they did not supply key information to the reporter. Outtakes of video from Duncan’s reports showed that former Waco Police Chief Larry Scott’s remarks about Feazell had been taken out of context.
Feazell also used video to his advantage another way.
The jury was shown a poignant, 25-minute tape of Feazell’s career, made a 1984 appreciation dinner and brimming with tributes by former Gov. Mark White, Baylor football coach Grant Teaff and others. The Tribune Herald reported that at least three women jurors were seen dabbing away tears.
When it was Channel 8’s turn, attorneys presented only one witness in person, U.S. District Judge Walter Smith Jr. of Waco, who said that Feazell had a reputation as a DA “on the take.”
The jury came through with $4.5 million less than the 62.5 million Feazell had requested in damages. But he wasn’t disappointed. “I thought they’d come back with $35 million – no less than $35 million –to send a message,” he said later.
Feazell stood up in court to thank jurors for restoring his reputation. Then, in keeping with that flamboyant reputation, he invited them to a party at the Ramada Inn.
It was at the Waco Ramada that WFAA’s Duncan got his first tips on Feazell six years and two days before.
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