The Tiger King, once the talk of the town, was re-sentenced to 21 years on Friday. The entire story, told in the Netflix documentary, is the biggest stockpot imaginable of just about every design flaw of the human condition.
Hubris, jealousy, lust of power, greed, vanity, self-pity, delusion, hypocrisy … you name it, it was in play with the predictable, Hindenburg-esque outcomes.
But it’s the train wreck you can’t take your eyes off of.
Over the years nearby naturally, we’ve had our own combustible locomotive collisions, but there was one of a unique bedlam that held particular fascination for the observer in its day.
The Boyce-Sneed Feud had all of those self-destructive attributes spun like the most sophisticated spider web in this truth-is-stranger-than-fiction tome. Add in a heaping helping of a defense attorney who has anchored himself a spot in history as a man who would literally do and say anything to win for his client.
In a courtroom, William P. “Bill” McLean II was every bit as exotic and eccentric and with as much flair as any character in the “Tiger King.” He was Richard “Racehorse” Haynes on the baddest-ass B-12 injection known to the modern world.
The notorious Cullen Davis affair was small time compared with the feud involving three Texas Panhandle families who, by way of circumstances, used Fort Worth as its climactic stage in January 1912. Well, one of them.
John Beal Sneed, Al Boyce Jr., and Lena Snyder all grew up together in and around Georgetown, Texas. Their families were instrumental in the founding of Southwestern University in Georgetown, where all three attended. Only Beal Sneed finished, leaving there for UT Law School, which he also successfully completed.
All three families moved to the Panhandle following the cattle and land business. (An aside: Carly Fiorina, the one-time presidential candidate and Ted Cruz’s “running mate” was a Sneed.)
Beal and Lena were married by then, while Al Boyce Jr. lived with his family down the street in Amarillo. Beal was away on business quite a bit.
You don’t have to be well-read in prime-time soaps or Fifty Shades to know where this is going. Lena and Al begin a very hot love affair, lots of steam.
Author Bill Neal splendidly covers the tragedy that ensued in his book “Vengeance Is Mine.” I highly recommend for those who are in to that sort of thing. Can buy it with one click.
As part of his plan to punish his wife for her infidelity, Beal — a disordered and sadistic personality, as it was, who intended to punish everyone involved with the sin that humiliated him — shipped Lena to the Arlington Heights Sanitarium in Fort Worth. He had her committed through a very dubious, non-judicial process, claiming she was “morally insane.”
It was for that reason that Beal was in Fort Worth, checking Lena back in to the hospital after she and Al had escaped to Winnipeg, Canada. It so happened that Al Boyce Sr., Al’s father, who went by “Colonel” or “Captain” Boyce, was in Fort Worth at the same time lobbying the district attorney to drop charges that Beal had urged be filed against Al Jr. in connection with the elopement, including stealing her jewelry. Beal also sought a federal charge of “white slavery.”
Beal and Captain Boyce found themselves in the other’s company at the Metropolitan Hotel, located on or near the site of the JFK Tribute at Main Street, a mere block from the now-doomed Fort Worth Convention Center arena.
What happened was widely disputed (the state’s best witness, Ed Throckmorton, son of the governor, died suspiciously before trial), but Beal mortally wounded Captain Boyce in the lobby, firing five bullets into the elderly man.
The incident set off two sensational trials inside the Tarrant County Courthouse.
In the end, Beal Sneed was twice acquitted in three murder trials. His first in Fort Worth ended in a mistrial. A juror or jurors were likely bribed. In between the end of that first trial and the second trial, he hunted down Al Boyce Jr. and killed him in Amarillo in September 1912.
He won acquittal in Fort Worth for the second trial in the Captain Boyce murder and in Vernon on charges of killing Al Jr.
(The craziest part of the story might be that despite it all, Beal and Lena remained married till death did them part in the 1960s. G-monetti.)
Beal never denied killing either man.
His assets in getting away with murder were a bungling prosecution trying to play ball with the best, Bill McLean, “Wild Bill,” as he was known in his industry.
Over the course of the entire two-year ordeal, McLean went 4-0 — the mistrial, the two Sneed acquittals, plus the acquittal of Sneed’s alleged accomplice in Amarillo.
McLean was the son of William P. McLean, the namesake of the Fort Worth middle school. The father was a distinguished Texas statesman with two terms in the state legislature, one term as a U.S. Congressman, as well as one as a district judge. He was also a member of the state’s first Railroad Commission, appointed by Gov. Hogg.
During Reconstruction, his state called on him to serve as part of the post-Civil War convention that wrote the state Constitution in 1876. That’s the one we use today.
He also fought on the side of the Confederacy. Let’s just keep that between us.
He moved to Fort Worth in 1893, where he was able to “realize his dream of undisturbed practice of the law.” (Another son, Jeff, then the county attorney, was murdered while taking part in a raid of a gambling house in 1907 in Fort Worth.)
A town in the Panhandle bears the “McLean” name. (It’s near Pampa).
Judge McLean assisted the defense in the Sneed trials as part of the firm McLean, Scott & McLean. (Walter Scott was the other partner.)
At his death at age 69 in 1941, Bill McLean, captain and quarterback of the University of Texas’ first football team, had successfully defended 75 defendants accused of murder over the course of 35 years as a defense attorney.
He was synonymous with the biggest murder cases across the southwest. The tactics and things he would say during trial went beyond controversial. They would oftentimes make one wince.
McLean fought for his clients and he did so with brass knuckles.
At one point during the Sneed trials, a brother of Al Boyce Jr. lunged at McLean, who harassed Annie Boyce, widow of Captain Boyce, during cross examination.
She said she didn’t know that Lena was to be “put where there are insane people,” and had she known she would have objected, adding that had Lena been “the least bit insane when this thing started, she would be a raving maniac by now.”
McLean: “But she was insane, wasn’t she?”
Annie: “No, she was not. She was nervous. Al was nervous. Everybody was nervous. There ought to have been more people nervous.”
McLean: “Why so concerned about Lena going to a sanitarium?”
Annie: “I wouldn’t have put a child of mine in a place where there were crazy people.”
McLean: You wouldn’t have put Albert there?
Annie: “No, sir.”
McLean: “Don’t you think a man running over and disgracing his mother and father and stealing another man’s wife and killing that man’s little children — don’t you think such a man is a fit subject for the asylum or penitentiary?”
At that point, Lynn Boyce, “the big westerner,” as the Star-Telegram described him, went after McLean, dropping the knife he used to whittle during the trial (can you imagine?) and jumping into the ring à la Von Erich.
The defense didn’t try to show the defendant’s innocence but rather that the murder was just, according not to the written law of Texas, but the unwritten, Natural Law.
The stone that marks the burial place of Al Boyce Jr. at the Llano Cemetery in Amarillo. “Jesus knows all about our struggles.”
McLean’s closing arguments in each of the three Beal Sneed trials included something of the same from the first:
“Every time there is a home broken up, there ought to be a killing of all who assisted in it. When that’s done homes won’t be broken up.”
He continued:
“They say that Captain Boyce was worse hurt over the fact that his son was charged with the theft of diamonds” — at Beal Sneed’s urging, the county D.A. charged Al Jr. of stealing Lena’s jewelry when they eloped — “than over his son stealing another man’s wife … I hope my two little boys will never steal, but if they do I would a thousand times rather they would steal diamonds than some other man’s wife, for diamonds I could replace, but all the wealth in the world could not replace the jewel of a woman’s virtue once it is taken from her.”
This is the defense that appealed to the Deep South Victorian values of each of the 12 men who served on three juries.
“They tell us Beal Sneed killed an old, unarmed man. Al Boyce and Colonel Boyce and Henry Boyce helped to murder those two little girls a hundred times.
“I would rather that a yellow-bellied moccasin crawled into the bed and bit my boys than know that they were disgraced for life.”
McLean held up a picture of the bullet-ridden body of Captain Boyce and pointed to Beal Sneed and the two Sneed girls (who sat in his lap!)
“For every wound in his body, I can show a thousand bullet holes in the heart of John Beal Sneed.”
If they sent Sneed to the pen, his “deranged wife” and all of his property and children would fall “into the despoiler’s hands.” Al Jr. was also disparaged as a drunk.
Sneed, McLean said, would rather be sent to the gallows than spend a month in the pen “without the power to protect the woman whom he has tried to protect so far.”
McLean added this closer: “I think I can see these little girls, in their little white gowns, saying their prayers tonight:
‘Now we lay us down to sleep / We pray the Lord our souls to keep / But let us die before we wake rather than Al Boyce our young lives take.’
“Gentlemen, let your verdict be, ‘We, the jury, declare that the homes of the country must and shall be protected.’”
Winning today is still everything, but the closer’s hard stuff, such as, “If it does not fit, you must acquit,” are Little League fastballs compared with what McLean was firing up there.
The gravesite of Captain Boyce and his wife, Annie, at the Llano Cemetery in Amarillo.
