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and justice for whom?

A murder, a trial and the longest-running legal battle on record
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■As he talks, his large frame is slumped over a Styro-foam coffee cup. An unruly lock of white hair flops downon his ruddy forehead, and, almost involuntarily, a handdarts up to smooth it back. He speaks in loud, boomingphrases, then mutters almost inaudibly, with that sameweathered hand cupped over his mouth. He tells hisstory in non sequiturs.

■”There’s just a massive amount of litigation here. Why,my name probably appears in the lawbooks more thanmost judges’. But what’s on the surface in this case andwhat’s beneath it are two different stories.”

■Robert Vernon Bruce is the central figure in what maybe the longest-running case in legal history. What beganas a routine homicide evolved into a mire of litigation involving sanity issues, a make-believe shrink and achanging cast of attorneys. In the end, Robert Brucebecame his own best advocate.

■”You know, I met Jack Ruby when I was in the county jail. He saw me down in the basement when I had drawn D and C-that’s drawers and concrete. They strip you to the drawers and throw you on the concrete. I’d been there for 72 days. So Jack’s down there one morning, and he says, ’Hey, man, don’t you have a mattress?’ And I said, ’Hell, no!’ They say Jack Ruby was a no-good bastard and he probably was, but here’s why I like him: He refused to cooperate with the FBI-said he’d go to the press-if they didn’t get me a bed!

■”But every time I tell some of these things, they get alltwisted later on. The prosecutors always grab things andtwist them in a trial. Like if I tell you I once worked at aSears automotive store; it comes out that ’One morningat Sears Roebuck, the police were called and you, sir,tried to kill a man with a motor. We have records here[that] we’re gonna show the jury. And we have six people here who say you were gonna kill your wife. We haverecords here. May we see the records, please? Show thejury the records, please.’ And it’s the same goddamnedpiece of paper they have their lunch order written on . . .”

■The story that Robert Bruce has told and retold is convoluted, controversial and bizarre. It’s a tale of protracted litigation that spans nearly 20 years; a tale that pits lawyer against lawyer, doctor against doctor, family against family. The case of Robert Bruce involves legal ethics, judicial politics and the intractability of the wheels of justice once they begin to roll. It’s a story of good guys that turn out to be bad guys, and vice versa. It’s a story that doesn’t really end.

It began on the morning of December 22, 1964, when Robert Vernon Bruce shot and killed his wife, LaVera. The two-paragraph story buried in the back pages of the Christmas Day edition of The Dallas Morning News reported that police theorized that the shooting had occurred during an argument over Bruce’s excessive drinking and was a result of his being fired from his job with a trucking firm. Bruce, 34, was charged with murder and was jailed in lieu of a $10,000 bond.

There was, at first blush, nothing about the case to distinguish it from the hundreds of other homicide cases that make their way into the criminal justice system each year. For a while, at least, the system worked just the way it was supposed to. In a state of shock after an unsuccessful suicide attempt in jail and unable or unwilling to communicate with his attorney, Bruce was pronounced mentally ill by two physicians hired by the family to examine him. Each doctor recommended long-term hospitalization for Brace’s safety and for the safety of others. One week later, the Dallas County Probate Court agreed, ordering his involuntary commitment to Terrell State Hospital. In the meantime, the grand jury investigating the shooting was informed of Brace’s commitment and opted, on March 1, 1965, not to indict him for the death of his wife.

*A: Well, 1 decided, trucking business gets pretty rough sometimes and 1 decided to get out the pistol and I ran in to get it out of the closet; she went to stop me to keep out of trouble and that is how she lost her life.

Q: Now, will you describe to the jury how you went and got the pistol and where she was during the whole event?

A: I jumped out of the living room and went up the hall into the closet, she followed after me; she said, “Robert,” she hollered at me, I believe, something, so I met her headon into the closet. She either reached for it and I jerked it away, it was all over in just a second.

Q: Well, now, did you reach into the closet and get the gun?

A: No, sir, I went to the back of the closet and got it off the shelf.

Q: Where was your wife, at that time?

A: She was coming into the closet.

Q: Did you hear her behind you?

A: I heard her holler at me, I believe, but I didn’t hear her coming, and I turned around and we met head-on into the entrance of the closet.

Q: Did you have the gun in your hand, at that time?

A: Yes, sir.

The consequences of killing his wife were not to end with Bruce’s confinement at Terrell. Had he stayed there, he might have eventually emerged a cured, free man. As it happened, a freak occurrence set in motion a chain of events that would consume him for the next two decades.

While at Terrell, Bruce was treated by a Dr. Reid Brown, who, after less than two months, apparently decided that his patient had made a miraculous recovery and authorized Bruce’s discharge from the hospital. At the time, no one knew that Brown was neither a physician nor a psychiatrist, but a first-rate impostor named Freddie Brandt. Brandt had lied his way into Terrell and later was sentenced to five years in prison for practicing medicine without a license.

When the relatives of LaVera Bruce learned that Robert Bruce was free, they went to the district attorney and demanded Bruce’s indictment. Seeing that Bruce hadn’t kept his part of the bargain that required a long-term commitment, the grand jury decided not to keep theirs. On May 24,1965, Robert Bruce was formally indicted for murder with malice.

Q: Did the gun go off by itself?

A: No, sir.

Q: What made it go off?

A: I caused the trigger to be pulled.

Q: You caused the trigger to be pulled?

A: (Witness nods head.)

Q: How did you cause it to be pulled?

A: I probably jerked it with my hand.

Q: Down at the ground, you mean?

A: Yes, sir, I closed my hand, I was mad, I wouldn ’t insult your intelligence by telling you it went off by itself but 1 didn’t mean to. I didn’t intend for it to.

During his trial in September 1965, Robert Bruce took the witness stand in his defense. The question of whether he could comprehend the proceedings was to become the core of the legal odyssey to come.

At the time, Joe McNicholas, who had represented Bruce up to this point, was convinced that the fects cried out for the insanity defense. But Bruce and his father disagreed, fearing that such a defense would “reflect on his children.” As a matter of trial strategy, they believed McNicholas could convince a jury that the shooting had been an accident. When McNicholas persisted in his belief, he was fired.

A new attorney, Hugh Snodgrass (now a retired district judge), was hired by the Bruce family, who gave him explicit instructions not to raise the insanity defense. Snodgrass also believed that the accident defense was his client’s ticket to acquittal. As he stated in an affidavit two years after the trial, “We felt that any punishment assessed with inconsistent pleas [i.e., accident and insanity] would probably be increased in the event the jury rejected both.” Perhaps Snodgrass also feared that had he pressed for the insanity plea, he would have joined Mc-Nicholas on the sidelines.

Not only did Snodgrass refuse to raise the issue of sanity at the time of the shooting, but he also failed to explore the issue of his client’s sanity at the time of trial. Snodgrass was aware of Bruce’s earlier confinement at Terrell and of his irrational behavior. But Snodgrass would later testify that he truly believed that Bruce was competent to stand trial.

The task of prosecuting Bruce fell to Assistant District Attorney Charles Caper-ton. A criminal defense attorney since 1968, Caperton today says that he is “almost positive” that he had not been told of Bruce’s earlier mental problems and of his confinement at Terrell. “Hell, if I thought for a minute that he was nuts,” Caperton says, “I’d have had him shrunk in a minute.” What Caperton is positive about is Bruce’s demeanor during the trial. “He was as mean as a junkyard dog. He did exactly what I’d hoped he’d do, sitting on the witness stand gritting his teeth and clenching his fists. Every time he’d do that, I knew the jury would give him another 10 years.”

The only mention made during the trial of Brace’s mental condition came when his mother testified that her son “had some nervous problems,” that he had been ill in the Marines and had “come out much worse” than he had gone in. During cross-examination, Brace denied that he had ever been treated for a nervous condition and even managed to withstand the grueling questioning by Caperton. But when Brace’s 12-year-old daughter told the jury that her mother had threatened to put him in an alcoholic hospital shortly before the shooting, Brace stood up and screamed at her to tell the truth.

THE DEFENDANT: Susie, she never said that.

THE COURT: Sit down and be quiet.

THE DEFENDANT: Why, hells-bells, man.

THE COURT: Sit down and be quiet or I will have the Sheriff put a gag on you. Go ahead.

MR. CAPERTON: Wait just a minute, could I wait just a minute. Your Honor, this is not a witness, this is her housemother at the home. Can she talk to her just a second?

Q (continuing): Susie, lam going to have to ask you just a few more things now. What you just told the jury, what your mother said that night-all right, well, we will go on to something else, Susie. This is kind of a hot glass, you can get a drink of water. Can you tell the ladies and gentlemen of the jury how long in years or months had your mother and father been fighting ?

MR. SNODGRASS: Now, Your Honor, we object to that. There has been no testimony about a fight.

THE COURT: Ask her what the situation was, don’t suggest.

Q: Did your mother and father ever have arguments?

A: (Witness nods head.)

Q: Never did?

A: He wasn’t fighting with her.

Bruce’s outbursts during his daughter’s testimony would later become critical to the issue of his ability to comprehend the trial. At the time, the court believed that it was simply the defendant’s way of blowing off steam in the heat of an emotional trial. “I’ve seen hundreds of defendants do the same thing when the testimony of a witness is hammering them down,” Caperton says.

Bruce alleges-and is supported by his daughter-that Caperton coerced Susie into giving false testimony. They claim that the prosecutor visited Susie at her foster home, misrepresented himself as her father’s lawyer and told her, “If you do as I say, Daddy will be home tonight.” Insists Bruce: “All I said during the trial was, ’Honey, tell the truth.’ “

After all was said and done, the jury was unimpressed with Bruce’s version of the events and rejected the accident defense. After finding him guilty of murder with malice, they took less than an hour to sentence him to life in prison. On April 27, 1966, less than a year after his indictment, Bruce’s conviction and life sentence were affirmed by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s court of last resort for a criminal case. When Bruce entered the Wynne Treatment Unit of the Texas Department of Corrections during the fall of 1965 to begin serving his life sentence, it appeared that the case of Robert Vernon Bruce vs. the State of Texas had come to an end.

But, in fact, it was only the beginning. For the next 10 years, Robert Bruce would fight to overturn his murder conviction on the grounds that he had been incompetent to stand trial.

WHILE IN PRISON, Bruce was attended by two staff psychiatrists, who, according to an opinion published by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, diagnosed his condition as “schizophrenic, chronic, undifferen-tiated.” He was treated with anti-psychotic medication. Psychiatrists would later testify that his condition stabilized under the control of a structured environment.

By the end of 1966, Bruce had mastered enough legal know-how to apply, unaided, for a writ of habeas corpus (an order to appear before the court to determine the legality of detainment). Judge Sarah T. Hughes (then a State District Judge), first granted his writ; then inexplicably reversed her action and denied it, according to Bruce. The Federal District Court, the next level up the judicial ladder, also refused to consider the case.

At this juncture, the Fifth Circuit Court entered the first of what would be several attempts to reverse the direction of Bruce’s legal plight. It ordered the convicting state court to hold an “after-the-fact” hearing to determine Bruce’s competency during the trial.

PROSECUTOR: I suggest right now [that] he is thinking . . . he knows that they have already said he was sane in ’64 . . .already sane now… you find him insane at the time of his trial, he goes free. I think he knows that he can’t be tried again. I think he knows the memories have faded and the evidence dissipated in the intervening four years. That’s what I think he knows. This is your county. If you want him walking the streets, you go ahead and let him out; find him insane at the time of his trial and you will have effectively let him out of prison . . .

In the prosecutor’s ring was John B. Tolle, then assistant district attorney, now a federal magistrate. Assisting Bruce was a court-appointed attorney, John Allison. Tolle premised his case for competence on the testimony of two witnesses: Hugh Snodgrass, Brace’s trial counsel in 1965, and Dr. James P. Grigson, a Dallas psychiatrist and frequent state witness, who had been appointed to examine Bruce.

Snodgrass testified that he “believed his client had been able to assist him and understand the nature of the trial.” When Bruce had become emotional and erratic during the two occasions when he interrupted the trial during his daughter’s testimony, Snodgrass said, Bruce had been unable to assist him in the conduct of the proceedings. Dr. Grigson, the state’s expert witness, stated that on the basis of a one-hour interview with Bruce in the Dallas County Jail in February 1969, he believed Bruce to have been competent in September 1965.

Two psychiatric witnesses for the defense, one of whom had seen Bruce daily for a period of six weeks, disagreed. They concluded that Bruce was a paranoid schizophrenic. Attorney Joe McNicholas, who had been dismissed from the case in its earliest stages, testified that, in his opinion, Bruce was “a very sick man.”

The medical records themselves cast dark shadows over Bruce’s past. His tenure in the Marine Corps had ended in a medical discharge for “psychiatric reasons’- specifically, one night when, according to Bruce, “I run everybody out of the barracks about 2 o’clock one morning when I was drinking and I decided it was time to start fightin’ the war. I slammed the bolts shut on an M-l. I remember one guy saying later that he’d seen 16 months of combat and now, by damn, he was gonna be shot by a fellow Marine 80 miles from home!”

But when all the evidence was in, the jury didn’t buy Bruce’s argument. They concluded that Bruce had indeed been competent to stand trial for the murder of his wife.

Again Bruce appealed, and again, he was defeated at every turn. That is, every turn, but the Fifth Circuit Court, which, for the second time, interceded on his behalf by declaring in September 1973 that the state hearing had been “fundamentally unfair.” Besides concluding that the jury had been hopelessly confused, the court declared that the prosecutor’s closing arguments were “highly inflammatory and prejudicial . . . [with] rhetoric reminiscent of a television drama.” The case was sent to federal court for another competency hearing.

This time, Grigson told the court that Bruce was not insane but was a sociopath, an otherwise mentally well individual who frequently commits aggressive antisocial acts. The doctor had decided that Bruce was a faker after Bruce admitted during the 1969 examination that he had feigned mental illness in the hopes of being pronounced mentally unfit. Grigson dismissed Bruce’s outbursts at the trial as attempts to destroy damaging testimony and, with characteristic modesty, assured the court that he was the only physician truly qualified to correctly evaluate Bruce.

Dr. Marilee Cannon, testifying for Bruce, believed that he had been suffering from schizophrenia at the time of his trial and listed no less than 16 reasons why. Although she admitted that a sociopath could have engineered the disturbances leading to Brace’s discharge from the Marines, she thought it was more easily explained as a dissociative reaction characteristic of primary schizophrenia. If Grigson were correct, she asked, why had Bruce been medically treated for schizophrenia?

Judge Eldon Mahon, in a detailed opinion filed after the trial, resolved the experts’ conflict in favor of Grigson’s diagnosis of sociopathy. Bruce’s early pattern of antisocial behavior, his faking and the court’s own examination of the 1965 trial transcript convinced the judge that Bruce had been competent to stand trial.

On appeal, Bruce faced an almost impossible task of attempting to convince the Fifth Circuit Court that Judge Mahon had believed the wrong side. Ron Hinds, a member of District Attorney Henry Wade’s appeals bureau from 1974 to 1982, today says that “When the arguments were over, I felt sure we were going to win, three-zip.” Hinds had the score right, but the result wrong. When the court handed down its unanimous decision on August 9,1976, it concluded that the lower court judge had clearly “erred.” In light of Bruce’s military record, the death of his wife, his visual hallucinations and his escape from Terrell, the court wrote, what emerged was “a profile of a defendant with a severe psychiatric disorder that most probably caused him to misperceive important elements of the proceedings against him and likely interfered with his ability to relate the true facts to his counsel.”

Seven years after the fact, Ron Hinds still cannot believe that he lost. “I believed then and I believe now,” he says today, “that the Fifth Circuit was flat-wrong. No appeals court should ever overturn a trial judge because they think he believed the wrong witness.” Regardless of who was right and who was wrong, Robert Bruce succeeded-10 years after he began-to overturn his murder conviction. The Fifth Circuit Court gave the State of Texas 90 days to retry him or set him free. The district attorney took it right down to the wire, then filed an 11th-hour request for another 90 days. Ten weeks later, the case was again called for trial.

Q: Now will you tell the Jury, please, what happened in regard to this Defendant and that gun on December the 17th, 1964?

A: He brought back the gun, returned it on the 12th [month] 17th of ’64.

Q: Do you know what time of day it was?

A: No, I do not.

Q: You don’t remember?

A: No, sir.

Q: He brought it back and what happened then?

A: He made the comment that, he said, Ray, do you know what I was going to do with that gun, and I said, no, you know. And he said, well, I was going to shoot my wife with it or something to that effect, not those words but something to that effect and we returned his money and that’s it.



TWELVE YEARS AFTER the death of LaVera Bruce, the Herculean task of picking up the pieces of the prosecution’s case fell to Assistant District Attorney Robert Whaley. Whaley quickly found that memories had faded and witnesses had disappeared while the case was being litigated in federal court. But Whaley’s perseverance paid off when he located a key witness who had not been called at the 1965 trial: Capt. J.C. Bowles of the Dallas Police Department. As a sergeant in the communications division, Bowles had managed to keep Bruce on the telephone during the minutes immediately after the shooting until uniformed officers arrived at the scene. As the days ticked off and it became evident that Bruce would again rely on the accident defense, Bowles’ testimony would prove to be the most important part of the prosecution’s case.

Q: At any time while you were talking to this Robert Bruce on the telephone, did he say anything to you in any way that would lead you to believe that it was an accident that he had shot his wife?

A: No, sir.

Q: He never once said anything like accident?

A: No, sir.

Even with Bowies’ testimony, the statements of the gun dealer and a grueling cross-examination of Susie Bruce (then 23), Bruce and his attorney, Mike Maness, believed that the evidence against him was “extremely equivocal.” After recessing for the night with the prosecution’s case closed, the defense team decided that Bruce would take the stand on his own behalf. It was a fatal mistake. Maness says now that Bruce came across as a violent man entirely capable of committing murder.

The jury took less than an hour to find Bruce guilty of murder. They took a little more than 90 minutes to give him life. “I’ve tried a lot of cases as a lawyer,” Maness says, “but when the jury came back with life, I was devastated.”

In July 1980, on the final day of the court’s term, the Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed Brace’s conviction and life sentence in a brief opinion that would not even make the lawbooks. But it really didn’t matter. After serving 15 years in prison, Robert Brace was paroled.



IS BRUCE A victim of an uncaring judicial system or the recipient of due process in the law? Did he get the short end of a stick that is wielded ruthlessly by the local district attorney, or was he wronged by a defense attorney who failed to raise the issue of his competency to stand trial?

Brace is a free man now. In an almost painful irony, he spends most of his working hours in the courts. Like the Birdman of Alcatraz, Bruce came out of prison with a skill he lacked when he went in: law. Says attorney James Pleasant, who worked on the Bruce case for his firm, Gardere & Wynne, “He probably knows as much criminal law as anyone in this town.” The law will never allow Bruce to practice, but he works as a legal clerk for a firm in Irving. Now in his 50s, he has remarried.

Robert Bruce will not give up. His recentappeal to the Supreme Court was quashedwhen they refused to hear the case, but he’salready at work on a new writ of habeas corpus in the state courts. Bruce is motivated bya desire to rid himself of the invisible chainof life parole. “You know, I could be mistaken by a security guard. Or say you didn’tlike me, and you called up my parole officerand said I attacked you in the parking lot. Ifthat happened to someone else, there wouldbe an investigation; maybe the D. A.’s officewould even drop the case. But me? They takeme downtown and lock me up. The nextThursday morning, they put me on the truckand take me back to the penitentiary. If I say,’Look, I didn’t do it,’ they say, ’Tell theBoard of Pardons and Parole about it whenyou get there.’ And that’s that.”

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