Free The Lone Star Love Triangle: True Crime by Gregg Olsen, Kathryn Casey, Rebecca Morris

an underlying uneasiness. The murder of Billy Mac Fleming would lay open a tale of love, small-town politics, and racial tension. And at the middle of the vortex was Hurley Fontenot.
    In his law office in Liberty, Hurley's brother, Walter, displayed a portrait of their blond, blue-eyed great-grandfather. Garand Fontenot, born in 1831, was the family patriarch. Walter had a plaque made to hang beneath the portrait that traced the family through Garand's migration from France to Canada, and then Louisiana. In Louisiana Garand was known as "the one-armed sheriff of Opelousas Parish." The plaque didn't mention Hurley and Walter's great-grandmother; she was biracial. In this part of Texas even in the 1980s, racial lines were still carefully drawn, and for locals, a drop of African blood was considered enough to label a family as black.
    It was Garand's son, Desilva Fontenot, who moved the family to East Texas. Other Creole, French-Canadian, and biracial families settled nearby and established a community. They were better educated than many of their black and white neighbors. Many of the families spoke French, and they tended to marry among themselves. In Raywood, a town with a population hovering around 200 residents, the Fontenots were one of the more prominent families.
    The combined school district ran like an artery through Hull, Daisetta, and Raywood, tightly binding the three little towns together. Once-bustling oil centers with much of their land and mineral rights owned by companies like Mobil, Tenneco, and Gulf, they grew rapidly in the twenties when the Hull-Daisetta oil field was discovered. In the sixties, when Hurley returned after teaching four years in a neighboring district, Daisetta's mayor, Jim Hale, vowed to bring industry to the area and widened the main highway, FM 770, to attract business.
    By the eighties, however, the streets were lined with boarded-up storefronts. The oil slump, as well as faltering rice and soybean markets, had devastated the economy. The population aged as many of the area's young people left to find jobs in Houston or Beaumont.
    HURLEY’S FATHER HAD BEEN THE PRINCIPAL while Hurley attended Woodson High, the pre-integration school for black students. In 1966 the schools were combined, and Woodson became Hull-Daisetta Junior School. Townspeople describe both father and son as strict disciplinarians who were admired by the students. But, unlike his father, Hurley Fontenot was uncomfortable with his Creole heritage, using racial epithets when referring to his black neighbors. Theresa Metoyer, who ran the small grocery store across from the school, remembered many of her light-skinned neighbors and relatives who left for California "where they could blend in and no one knows."
    For 16 years, Hurley taught at Hull-Daisetta Senior High, building a power structure within the school district. Many long-time residents talked about his success with the agriculture program. He helped students win national awards. And when they did, he submitted articles to the local newspapers along with pictures of his students and himself celebrating their successes.
    It was difficult, however, for Hurley to hide his personal problems, in particular gambling and drinking. A regular at Delta Downs in Vinton, Louisiana, he bet on the horses at least two to three times a week. Hurley never liked to talk about his wins or losses, but friends say he went into heavy debt.
    In the summer of 1980 Hurley Fontenot's life started to rupture. Students and parents filed complaints that he had been drunk at a June FFA (Future Farmers of America) program, and he was suspended for a month. In January 1981 he disappeared for three days, claiming that he had the flu. When the district's new superintendent, Kenneth Voytek, couldn't reach him by phone, he gave Hurley an ultimatum: quit drinking or be fired.
    In issuing his decree, Voytek affected the manner of a revivalist preacher. Hurley's drinking was a problem, so Voytek simply