"Texas' In Cold Blood"
Murderer of Panhandle Family
Is Spared the Death Penalty, in Lubbock Courtroom
by: Bobby McDonald
It's been almost 50 years, since the November 15, 1959 brutal murders of four members of the Herbert Clutter family, in Holcomb, Kansas. The event intrigued author Truman Capote, so much that he gathered his childhood friend, Harper Lee (author of To Kill A Mockingbird), and the two went to Kansas to interview witnesses and write about the crime. Capote wrote the best selling novel In Cold Blood, about the murders and the two ex-convicts on parole from the Kansas State Penitentiary, Richard "Dick" Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who committed them, as they attempted to rob the Kansas farmer's home. Hickock and Smith received the death penalty and were hanged, just after midnight on April 14, 1965.
Strikingly similar is the September 30, 2005 murder of a Pampa, Texas, couple, Brian and Michell Conrad, their unborn child, and Michell's fourteen year old son, Zach Doan, on their rural Texas Panhandle Farm in Gray County. Charged with murdering them was a 23 year old Pineville, Missouri, man, Levi King.
King pled guilty to the murders back in September of 2009 and a month long punishment phase of the trial ended on Tuesday of this week, in a Lubbock, Texas, courtroom. The 11-woman, 1-man jury sentenced King to life in prison without parole, citing that one lone juror would not vote for the death penalty and to hand down the death penalty sentence, it had to be a unanimous vote.
A recreation of the crimes revealed that on September 29, 2005, King, who was on parole and living in a halfway house, left and went by his father's home, and secured a gun. He left and went to a rural McDonald County, Missouri home, and murdered 70 year old Orlie McCool and his daughter-in-law, 47 year old, Dawn Burr. He left the scene driving McCool's maroon pick-up truck and traveled down U.S. 40, to the Texas Panhandle.
Randomly and some 375 miles later, King selected the rural Gray County home of Brian and Michell Conrad, about 14 miles south of Pampa, Texas. King broke into the farm home and shot 31 year-old Brian Conrad, three times, killed the family dog, and as 35 year old pregnant Michell Conrad began screaming, he shot her five times. He then killed the 14 year old, popular Pampa High School freshman, Zach Doan, a member of the school's cross-country team. King shot into the bedroom of Michell Conrad's daughter, Robin Doan, who was 10 years old, but missed her with gunfire. After the murderer had left the home, the 10 year old daughter called 9-1-1 and reported the shooting of her family.
During the trial, the daughter testified and the 9-1-1 tapes were played of her frantic call for help.
Like the characters in Capote's true crime novel, Brian and Michell Conrad were well-liked individuals in the Pampa, Texas, community. Brian, who had been reared in Cleburne, Texas, pursued a degree in agriculture in college, and upon graduation came to Gray county to farm on his family's farm. He was a local Farm Bureau County Director and heavily involved in 4-H work in the area. He met and married Michell, who had worked in the Farm Bureau office for 10 years. They were expecting their first child.
King, like his parallels in Kansas, drove to Mexico, and crossed the border, but decided to return to the U.S. and was arrested when he crossed the border, by U.S. Customs Agents, who were alerted to the stolen truck from Missouri. They found weapons and an identification of Brian Conrad, that linked him to the Texas Panhandle murders.
King was also sentenced to life in prison for his involvement in the two Missouri murders, in an earlier trial.
In Cold Blood, was first published in 1965, as a four-part serial in The New Yorker. The piece was an immediate sensation, particularly in Kansas. Random House published the book in January of 1966. Later a movie, starring Robert Blake, Scott Wilson, John Forsythe, and Jeff Corey, was based on the Capote book. Many credit Capote as using the book as the originator of the non-fiction novel and the forerunner of a major journalism movement in the U.S, with critics regarding it as a pioneering work of true crime.
Will the Gray County, Texas, murders be traced in other works that will deliver them in book and movie form?
Already they've inspired a Heavy Metal Band from Pampa, Texas, that has taken the name "Another Texas Murder Scene" that is playing in that area of the state.
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