KWTX INVESTIGATIVE REPORT TONIGHT PAUL GATELY
I found out that the “cigar” which is the evidence containing the DNA was put out ON her. I have lived 40 years without knowing that.
When Vic was DA he gladly had J.L. Crawford or Willie Tompkins call Ft. Worth from time to time to see what was going on in the Lillie Hefele murder case. He wasn’t DA when it happened but, the very night he and I met, I was with Ninfa Morales Romanenko, Lillie’s sister. Lillie’s unsolved gruesome murder is a canopy that covers each and every relationship we all had and have now. From seeing one another practically every other day, it went to never seeing one another again for twenty to forty years. Most of the people I knew with and through them were gathered together one last time, not at a barbecue, not at a Christmas party, not even at a coffee shop, we were all there together with him (Gerry Hefele, her husband), at her funeral and huddled together at her open grave with her poor mother, her daughters, and her beloved “Jessica”, her granddaughter.
Now that our own son died in Mexico having Vic tell me Paul Gately was looking for a murder to dig into and he had suggested Hefele was more than music to my ears. I was plunged back into my bathroom with a heating fan on Lake Jackson to 1983 when there was a we and “we” were close.
That tiny bathroom was safe for me or maybe Feazells just like to fight, I don’t know. The invitation to have one more last go on Hefele and a chance to return to that bathroom with my BFF wasn’t even a choice.
We fought it out, don’t get me wrong. I was wrong, he was wrong, but we were off the waiting list for “the call”. We’ve had the worst thing that can happen. We lost our only son, and today 92 other sets of parents will feel the same, to heroin overdose.
Writing that, my mind clicks forth a picture of tiny, bony hands in a coffin dressed in a frilly way too pink negligee. So strange. Those hands had fought someone she knew, she died in fear of someone she knew and tried to protect her 90 pound self in her hours before death. I think of how scared she was.
This is to thank Paul Gately, KWTX, Vic Feazell, and those in law enforcement who feel personally about such things, and those of you who will see walk off seeing how those who committed this crime really got away with murder and were easily more clever than law enforcement.
Harry
