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

missing, and school employees went to Voytek saying that Hurley hadn’t repaid money they’d lent him. By November the amount missing at the junior school had climbed to $1,500, and Voytek called in Hurley, Laura, and the school’s new coach, Bill Fleming, for questioning.
    WHEN BILL FLEMING CAME TO THE JUNIOR SCHOOL in August 1983, he was looking for a fresh start. That wasn’t unusual. In fact, Bill became dissatisfied easily, and he was often looking for a change. This time he was coming out of two disappointing years of trying to make it in a private carpet business. When he proposed the move, he told his wife, Lynda, that coaching seemed like a haven to him. Forming his argument in favor of uprooting the family, he persuaded Lynda the same way he always had. "We can be a family, with a little place in the country. . . raise some chickens, and maybe even get a horse." She wanted to believe him, but much of her trust had been lost over the years.
    Along with losing interest in jobs, Bill had a long history of losing interest in women. The truth was that Bill Fleming fell in love a lot. During their seven-year marriage, he’d left Lynda three times. A husky man with shaggy dark hair and an affable smile, Bill Fleming had an easy manner and a vulnerability that attracted women, and whenever he pursued a woman he became a torrent of romantic poetry, adulation, and passionate desire.
    On the surface everything came easy for Bill. He was an honor student who’d lettered in four sports at Galena Park High School, outside of Houston. In his 1965 school annual, he was voted most popular. One reason was that Bill had a way of telling people what they wanted to hear. At graduation he had scholarship offers from schools across the country. That fall he started at Houston’s prestigious Rice University - as close to an Ivy League school as Gulf Coast Texas gets - on a football scholarship, but after his second year he flunked out. He finished college at Stephen F. Austin while he was married to Ann, his high-school sweetheart, and they later had a son. While they were both teaching in Corrigan, a small town 100 miles north of Houston, when their boy was three, Bill began to pursue Lynda. Two weeks after they met, and while still married to Ann, he proposed to Lynda.
    Lynda, small with a heart-shaped face and short brown hair, wasn’t unlike Bill's first wife, Ann. Both were teachers and each had an ambitious nature that seemed to simultaneously attract and repel Bill. Once he was married to Lynda, he quickly turned his attention to other women. "I should have been born when I could have been a cowboy," he used to tell her. "I would have married an Indian woman, who would follow me from place to place and never talk." The bookcase in their bedroom was filled with Louis L'Amour novels, and after they moved to Hull he spent hours sitting on their screened porch staring off into the fields.
    WHEN THE SCHOOL FUNDS WERE discovered to be missing, athletic funds were among them, and Hurley said they came under Bill's jurisdiction. No charges against Bill were ever filed, and he was not asked to take a polygraph test, but the incident soured Bill on his new principal. The coach said he felt violated, and he blamed Hurley.
    Meanwhile, Laura and Hurley continued to spend weekends together, but they were little more than roommates. They sat on opposite sides of the truck on the way to the races. Tired of spending the day at the track, Laura now stayed alone in the motel room watching television. Hurley would return late at night and throw himself onto the bed to sleep, while Laura sat at the small round table in front of the window figuring the next day's handicaps on Hurley's pocket calculator. They made love less and less often, until they stopped altogether. "Hurley would say he was sorry,” she says. “He'd say that he knew there was something missing, but he was just sick so much of the time."
    A few days before the 1984 Christmas