Bernadette Feazell says an audio file among 300 hours of such records held by ex-“New Yorker” writer Frederic Dannen details how her ex, former DA Vic Feazelle, and Lt. Truman Simons plotted the murder for hire of a federal witness scheduled to appear against him.
Waco – Bernie Feazell has come forward to assist in reopening an investigation into the Lake Waco Murders case because her status as the woman a man left behind leaves her literally outlawed – placed out law by a system that favors men’s systematic method of replacing their women with little recourse for ex-wives.
“I don’t have anything left to lose,” she says.
One of her chief allegations is that a tape made surreptitiously in a phone call between her ex-husband former McLennan County DA Vic Feazell and his investigator, Lt. Truman Simons, clearly shows that they plotted the murder for hire of Richard Bowers, a heroin dealer busted during the investigation.
Bowers was a confidential informant in the FBI case against her husband for bribery. When the DA prosecuted him, he seized $60,000 in cash as well as other goods. The prosecution used the money to establish a Special Crimes Unit in the Liberty Building at 100 W 6th St. on the Courthouse Square, and to pay Simons’ salary as the gumshoe who would build the cases against a quartet of men charged with the murder conspiracy that led to the deaths of three area teenagers in 1981.
David Wayne Spence was executed; Gilbert and Antony Melendez died behind prison bars; and Mohammed Muneer Deeb did ten years on Death Row before an appeal he wrote to the Court of Criminal Appeals remanded his case back to the Court at Cleburne where he was convicted largely on hearsay testimony of a jailhouse snitch. Thus acquitted in a subsequent new trial, he lived out the remainder of his life in freedom before succumbing to cancer.
No one survives today who were allegedly part of the murders, and their survivors are seeking a redress of what they see as wrongful convictions for the crimes. Dallas lawyer Jay English is preparing the case on behalf of Jason Spence, the son of David Wayne Spence, who witnessed his father’s execution at the man’s invitation, the heirs of the Melendez brothers, and relatives of Deeb.
In this half-hour interview, Bernie Feazell gives the name of the man alleged to have murdered Bowers for money by his taped confession, which claims is also available, and declares that the DNA evidence collected from the victims of the lake murders will be analyzed in a lab controlled by a member of the Texas Forensics Commission.