By Kathy Williams, Herald Democrat

“I will tell you this, one of the most incredible, emotional experiences of my life will be when Betty Williams comes on the screen for the first time.” The story of the life and “Kiss and Kill” murder of his 17-year-old cousin in Odessa in 1961 stuck in Shelton Williams’ craw until he recounted the tale in his 2004 book “Washed in the Blood.”

The story, which from various angles details the ambitions and angst of “Everyteen,” is on the path to become a movie.

Betty Jean Williams was the drama queen; the aspiring actress; the intellectual who read Allen Ginsberg; the girl who wasn’t part of the in-crowd, but went where the in-crowd went, just after the “good girls’ had gone home. She was the loose Southern Baptist girl who prayed on Sunday for forgiveness of Saturday night fun; the integrationist in a segregated world; the free spirit before girls dared to dream of living by the same rules as boys.

And she was the girl who begged others to kill her. Most thought it was just drama. But one night, a popular football player, her former boyfriend, took her out to a stock pond and kissed her. She knelt in front of him and he put his 12-guage shotgun to her temple and pulled the trigger. Then he weighted her body and dragged it into the pond. Represented by one of the most famous lawyers of the era, Warren Burnett, Mack Herring was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. He still lives in Odessa.

Betty’s story resonates

Texas Monthly true crime writer Pam Colloff read “Washed in the Blood” and became intrigued. She investigated the decades-old crime and wrote the story of “A Kiss Before Dying” in the magazine’s February edition.

Stephen Hewitt is a Dallas native who now lives in Wilmington, N.C., with his wife Moira Kelly. Kelly is an actress, currently starring in and directing episodes of “One Tree Road.” She also was a regular in the first season of “West Wing.” Hewitt read Colloff’s story. Williams said Hewitt told Kelly she had to read it, which she did. Then she found a copy of “Washed in the Blood,” read that and left the following message on Williams’ cell phone voice mail:

“Hello Mr. Williams, my name is Moira Kelly and I’m an actress in Hollywood and my husband and I are looking into developing a script about your cousin Betty. We read a story in Texas Monthly, then we got your book, ‘Washed in the Blood,’ and we are just compelled by the story. And we were hoping to maybe get to talk with you a little bit and see if you had some information that could help us in our research. Our home number is...”

That began a series of conversations and visits between Wilmington and Washington, D.C., where Williams lives with his wife Janell in semi-retirement from AC.

“One day, standing in our apartment in Washington, they said, ‘If you don’t mind, we would like to ask you if you would be willing to be involved with the development of the screen play, casting of the actors and production of the film.’ And I said, ‘Oh, no, no, I don’t mind, (that vision-of-sugar-plums gleam of joy in his eyes) I’d be happy to,’” Williams said.

At that time, it was becoming clear that the dream of his book’s becoming a movie and Betty’s dream of being a star on the silver screen, could become reality.

“Seeing her on the screen, that moment is what the last 25 years have been about,” Williams said. “That’s what she wanted and that’s what I hope my gift to her will be.”

Betty Jean Williams

Shelton Williams was practicing Odessa’s second sport, baseball, on the field at Permian High School March 22, 1961, when his mother came onto the field. She was so emotional she could not speak. He writes in “Washed in the Blood”:

“Mama, calm down. What is it? Are you OK? Is Daddy OK?” At the mention of my father’s name, she got control.

“Shelly,” she said. “They have killed Betty!”

I couldn’t take it all in. My cousin went to school across town, the old school, Odessa High. Mention of her name did not belong at Permian. She had no connection to baseball.

“Betty who?” I asked. “Betty who?”

“Betty Williams,” she blurted. “Betty Williams!”

“Betty’s dead?” I stammered.

That could not be. Not that the thought of death and Betty were inseparable. She had mentioned it frequently. She wanted to die, she said. Dying was preferable to life in West Texas, she said. She had tried to kill herself once before, with four aspirin. She was not called the ‘Drama Mama’ for just being the star in three OHS stage productions her junior year. Everything was drama with Betty.

The beat goes on

The story does not end with Betty’s death and Mack’s acquittal.

As the events turned over in his head, year after year, Williams decided to write them down. In the 1980s he learned that a Dallas writer, a former lawyer, was working on the story.

“I assumed that I could not tell the story,” Williams said. “because I wrote political science and international relations books and articles. But I didn’t think I had it in me to write this. (The lawyer) had written two, 300 page manuscripts that fictionalized the story, but he had never gotten them published. I had a passion to tell the story.”

Williams took a sabbatical from AC in 2003 to write a screenplay of a Vietnam story he had worked on since the late 1970s, “Three Days at Da Lat.” When he finished “Three Days at Da Lat” he decided he had to revisit Betty’s story.

“I had written the first chapter in 1995 and I kind of liked it,” Williams said. “I thought I’d go ahead and try to write the rest of it. At the time I was writing it, I was writing it for myself. I had no idea anybody would read it. But it got to be a major project.”

Williams said he started it as a screenplay because he had just finished one.

“You know I’ve always heard people say silly things like this, the book wrote itself. But that’s what happened: The book wrote itself.”

Shelton and Janell Williams had gone back to their home town in the 1980s for high school homecoming. They learned from old school chums who had stayed in the area that Betty had become legend, a kind of patron saint of theater students and other outsiders.

As they sat with then-current students, they learned that teenage haunts had taken on a specific meaning to OHS students who believe that Betty Jean Williams’ ghost lives in the theater on whose stage she once starred.

He asked students who Betty Williams was.

“The Original Drama Mama!” “The Ghost of OHS!” “The girl who asked a football player to shoot her!” they shouted back.

When Williams began in 2003 to write Betty’s story, he wanted to check his memory against other sources. He went back to Odessa to regain a sense of the place. With him was Dan Setterberg, media studies professor at Austin College and a photographer. They traveled around looking at the old hangouts in Odessa, including Tommy’s Drive-in, the focus of teen life circa 1961. The building now is a record store and head shop called Endless Horizons.

They visited the place where they believed Mack stole Betty’s life that night, the pond bulldozed over. Setterberg shot stills depicting the drive-in, Williams’ and Betty Jean’s homes, the theater legend has it she haunts. They have since learned that the Kiss and Kill murder happened at another pond that still exists.

New information

Since Colloff’s story appeared, Williams has confirmed some theories and dropped others about the events of March 20, 1961.

Seeking an explanation of the relationship between Betty and Mack or why she was so unhappy, police at the time had inquired about a diary. Betty’s parents told them she didn’t keep one.

Gayle Guffey was Betty’s best friend. She was living in Denver, and like Hewitt, she kept up with her home state ties by reading Texas Monthly. When she read Colloff’s story, she contacted Williams. She sent him a copy of a five and a half page letter from Betty. Williams said he learned that speculation that Betty wanted to die because she was obsessed with Mack was untrue. In fact, Betty was dating a boy named Ike Nail and Gayle was dating Mack, which was completely OK with all parties. Also, Williams said, Gayle confirmed his belief that Betty fully intended to attend Indiana State University and put Odessa and all its frustration and pain behind her.

He also learned that Dixon Bowles, one of Betty’s acting friends, had told Guffey that Betty’s father had found her diary. When he read of her sexual conquests, he had become enraged with her. And that was what had precipitated the crisis that led to Betty’s asking people to kill her.

“In my opinion Betty was the first modern woman in the sense of the women’s revolution that we subsequently had, but she was five or six years ahead of her time and also suffered for it,” Williams said. “She thought she was a bad person for what she did. She was both happy to be different and traumatized to be different.”

He said the reason people find Betty’s story so compelling is that she ultimately dies from just being herself.

“Betty wanted what we all want,” Williams said. “She wanted to be totally unique and completely accepted.”

Turning over the baby

Asked how it feels to create a story as personal as this one and turn it over to people who were strangers until a few months ago, Williams said he puzzled over that for awhile. He and another man were in the process of developing a screen play when he got Kelly’s phone call. He had to decide whether two untried screenwriters had a chance to get the story out or whether two people who had a track record like Kelly and Hewitt, but whom he didn’t know, could be trusted with his story.

Two things brought him to the decision to option his story to “an actress in Hollywood” and her husband.

“I’ve always thought of it as a woman’s story. It was a woman’s story. But then it’s become a ‘woman’s story.’ And that’s what Moira has felt. Unlike Betty and me she was more private, she’s more like Janell in that regard. But I can’t tell you how many women have said, ‘There’s so much of Betty in me.’”

But isn’t it a real leap of faith to let someone else write the screenplay?

“Yeah, well, I now have complete confidence that Moira and Steve will tell the story accurately and truly. I envision that there may be times when we have differences in “artistic vision” as they say, but they have the passion to know and tell the story as accurately as possible. “

He said Kelly wanted to know what perfume Betty wore and what their houses looked like; what were the differences between his father and hers.

“And I think actually the thing that put it over the top for me: They are in no way, shape or form going to say that Odessa, Texas, killed Betty Williams. And I don’t know about you, but I’m getting sick and tired of seeing films that depict Texas or the South as nothing but a bunch of weirdoes with deviant behavior and responsible for events that other people in other parts of the country don’t have.”

Scouting the movie

The third week in October, Hewitt, Shelton and Janell Williams and Setterberg went back to Odessa. They shot pictures of every scene. They followed the “drag” route teens in Odessa took from drive-in to “parking” places out in the country. And they found Dead Girl’s Pond. The real one. Williams said it is his hope, and as far as they can commit currently, Kelly and Hewitt’s intention, to film much of the movie in Odessa.

The owner of the land Dead Girl’s Pond sits on has agreed. And Hewitt promised to take great care. Kelly had intended to scout locations too, but was called back to filming her television show, “One Tree Hill.”

Williams talked about the possibilities with great enthusiasm. How many people get the chance to recreate long-gone buildings, places and scenes from their youth? “You know we’ll have my dad’s car wash; we’ll have Roy Orbison bring his blue Cadillac into the car wash.”

There are no guarantees that anything more will happen. But the timeline is to develop the screenplay in the next few months; cast it in the spring and film it next summer.

The collaborative aspects are important to Williams, he said, but what has been paramount in the experience is that collaboration has happened with friends from Austin College and high school. The book “Washed in the Blood” contains Setterberg’s photos of all the locations they have found so far. The book ends with Austin College Chaplain John Williams’ song of the same name. And John Williams, who’s no relation to Shelton, has recorded the song with Sherman eighth-grader Brittany Ann singing the lyrics. Brittany Ann’s mother works in Ida Green Theater at AC.

“Betty and I were both big on making human connection and this is one of the ways I see it playing out,” Williams said. “I will be just as excited as I can be if the opening credits roll out and you see Dan Setterberg’s images and hear John Williams’ song. That would be pretty powerful.”

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