Outsiders donated a Corpus apartment to the couple when it was reported that they were being threatened by the accused. At the height of his power, George Perham Parr, a dapper little man with cold green eyes, ruled with an iron hand in the oilrich brush country. He, after all, has been banished from home. The gang rape has forced the town to confront its corrupt past. a TIME subscriber. Seven cronies received prison terms. The bond revocation hearing was called, on allegations that Mr. Parr was carrying a weapon and might be a danger to the community. He failed to report a $25,000 bribe from a road-building contractor. Payo Briones, a lumbering man with a dazed look and a large growth on one side of his face, had drifted out of the cockfight and approached Garza while he was assaulting the woman. One young man who had ridden to the cockfight on his bicycle took his turn, then bicycled back home. marshals, and Texas Rangers was closing in on its man. Shepperd was a political advisor to Johnson even as he attempted to bring indictments against Parr. Hispanics lined up behind one man whose loyalty had never wavered: Archer Parr. Habitues of a local drive-in run by two brothers who opposed Parr were often arrested for drunkenness by Parrs deputy sheriffs. When their heretofore political ally Robert Kleberg, Richard's brother, refused, George replied in anger. George Russey Parr III was born October 23, 1940, in Amarillo, Texas, to George Russey Parr Jr. and Zua Gae Warner Parr. Archer (Archie) Parr grew up on Matagorda Island. Parrs Chrysler, the bloodstains cleaned away, sits in the garage with hundreds of deer mounts, triumphs from his hunting trips. Sign up for service and obituary updates. Then as now, the two places to work were the county courthouse and the school district. Threading her way through the crowd, a baby on her hip and Frankie Junior toddling beside her, she could be any mother out with her family on a Friday night. The town remained one of the poorest in Texas, so controlling the vote (and in turn the jobs) remained the consuming passion as power passed from the Carrillos to the Urestis to the Garcias. Visitors can explore rooms devoted to medical history, famed political boss", "Cowboy from Matagorda founded political dynasty", "George Parr inherited his father's political dynasty", https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=George_Berham_Parr&oldid=1147908956, Duval County Museum displays some artifacts from his life, Thelma Duckworth (m. 1923-divorce, remarried late 1930s, div. He enjoyed traveling to Europe and ocean cruising. . But there was a darker side to Parrs power that increased as his grip tightened on the town. This memorial website was created in memory of George Parr, 73, born on September 14, 1892 and passed away on June 0, 1966. I suggest to Frankie that we leave, and he agrees, reminding us that Torres was once in a knife fight with a kid at school. [citation needed], George's father Archie Parr founded the Dynasty of Duval County. Garza, Torres, and Vela loitered on the west-side steps. Discover your family history in millions of family trees and more than a billion birth,marriage, death, census, and miltary records. George Russey Parr III was born October 23, 1940, in. Frankie was a spindly guyeven his moustache refused to grow in fullybut he knew how to tell a story and would do so at the slightest request and for as long as he could hold a crowd. A white horse, loose from the field, poses no inconvenience as it prances down a main street; instead cars fall into line behind in an impromptu parade. In San Diego he belonged. San Diego is under pressure, the DAs investigator told me, and indeed it had been a difficult spring. He walked up to her and asked for a light; Linda reached into her pocket and produced a handful of lighters for him to choose from. Your California Privacy Rights/Privacy Policy. On the night of Sept. 8, 1952, Floyd received a warning call from a lawyer connected to Parr who told him that two hit men had been paid to kill him. The neighbors began to crowd around Frankie and threaten him. Ruben Velas mother worked as secretary in the sheriffs office. But he wants the accused to know he has their number. Most days she minds the children and waits for Frankie to come home from his donated job at a department store so she can eat and sometimes go to the counseling crisis center. They eventually got a 10% raise and their workday was reduced from 10 hours to 9. Just last week Orlando GarzaHim too?had offered to help Frankie fix his van in exchange for a tattoo. Her parents split up after they moved to a ranch near San Diego; her father runs a bar in Benavides. Archer Parr passed away at age 75 years old on November 2, 2000. Now, in the town of the Parrs corrupted, a savage gang rape has resurrected the old ghosts of lawlessness, fear, and betrayal. A funeral procession leading from the ranch to Benavides Cemetery included 150 vehicles and a thousand friends, relatives and cronies of el patron grande, the second Duke of Duval. Luis Elizondo, a justice of the peace, ruled that the death was a suicide. [citation needed] Political support came from the southernmost counties in Texas. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. Send flowers, find service dates or offer condolences for the lives we have lost in maryland. Few of the men who had been at the cockfight would even admit to being there, much less offer themselves up as witnesses to or participants in a gang rape. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. One of the oldest towns in Texas, San Diego is a place shaped by violence, oppression, and domination: first, as Anglo and Hispanic settlers battled bitterly for control of the landMy grandfather killed her father, a resident told me, her way of introducing a character into her family narrativeand later, as the people of San Diego fell under the spell of Archer Parr and his son George. There was, however, a glimmer that all might not go as predicted. It is possible that he will not be the prosecutor for all the rape and kidnapping cases; the Duval County DA lost to a man from Starr County in the last election, so come January Gutierrez will most likely be out of a job. The boy had been spending the night at a friends house, when on the way to buy a Coke, they saw his friends relative Alex Bear, who from a crowded car invited the boys to the cockfight. Hearing the news, Frankie walked out the door into the street, and yelling loud enough to wake anyone who dared to sleep, swore that he would get even. A young man in aviator glasses is walking towards us; he has the long-legged gait I recognize from television clips. The gang rape was the final, most primitive extension of that bond; to refuse to participate made one less of a man, and also less of a brother. But what looked like another victory for the Anglos was actually the beginning of the end. But now here was his mother, giving him nothing but a confused look, and no Linda. Finally, when her husbands fury seemed more menacing than her attackers threats, Linda Gaitan told him she had been raped. Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. HBO Maxs Love & Death Needed a Home for an Axe Killer. A deputy sheriff, responding to a call at Garzas house, recalls that he arrived to find the man brandishing an ax. After telling me that he had no intention of trying the case in the newspapers or of smearing Linda Gaitans reputation, Alaniz offered a preview of coming attractions, as he had done for several other reporters and countless coffee drinkers in town. We settle on some concrete bleachers north of the Holiday Inn and watch the color drain out of the sky. Him too? was all Frankie could say, as he sobbed along with his wife. Garzas criminal record begins with a 1983 theft indictment. Eventually ten men, mostly in their twenties, and one juvenile were arrested: Ruben Vela, Roel Torres, Jose Carlos Payo Briones, and the fourteen-year-old boy were charged with sexual assault. Criminal prosecutions of Parr and allies were blocked by control of the prosecutorial and grand jury process. If his father had won the hearts of the townspeople because he tried to understand them, George, a burly young man whose smile glistened with mischief, captivated the people because he was one of them. The mesquite and prickly pear form a curtain along the roadside; it is barely possible, beyond a rise a few miles outside of town, to make out a small colonia of shacks and treeless lots off the main road to the left. Coke Stevenson and Lyndon B. Johnson. Go to SOURCE above . Many people assumed it was a neighborhood thingnot a good neighborhood at thatsomething best left alone. Orlando Garza, who seems to have provided the spark that ignited the incident, was well known to peace officers for his violent behavior. Others who did took their lives in their hands. In the meantime, another man had strolled back to the car. On April 25, 2023, our beautiful mother Julie Parr passed away peacefully surrounded by her loving children Mary Kalec (George), Elizabeth Thomas-Bailey, Jim Thomas (Barb) Ann Thomas-MacDonald (Bill) and Paul Thomas (Amy). For the sake of the war effort, Stevenson appointed a different candidate.[11]. [2][6][7], For a time, Parr and his friends were enthusiastic and accomplished polo players, albeit on cow ponies with western saddles. There were people who asserted that this gang rape wasnt as brutal as the 1983 gang rape of a woman in New Bedford, Massachusetts (it was more so), and they complained that rapes occur in Corpus Christi and Houston on wealthy American college campuses without receiving this much media coverage. 46% alc./vol. The average age of a Parr family member is 71. If your aunt was sick or your son needed money for schoolbooks, you went to Mr. Parr. The discovery of oil in Duval County also created ample opportunities for patronage, allowing Parr to amass a small fortune. Also that year, George's father appointed him to complete the term of George's brother, Givens Parr, as Duval county judge. Works 1724 mezzotint of Sir John Coke, after unknown artist. Deftly, Alaniz told a tale highlighting that crucial element, reasonable doubt. From his Texas certificate of death Name: George Berham Parr Death Date: 01 Apr 1975 Death Place: Julian Windmill, 14 miles S.E. George was machohe hunted and whored and was afraid of no one. The truth will come out at the trial, I was told with great assurance by defense lawyers and other champions of the accused, a curious sentiment for a town that has always viewed the law with a jaundiced eye. I just dont know what happened.. While there were San Diegoans, mostly women, who were outraged by the crime, many followed their first instinct, which was to protect the town by downplaying the episode. The deputy was convicted and later hanged himself in prison. Frankie, his chest and arms covered with his own tattoos, has a face that is deeply lined for his age, a combination of sun, cigarettes, and hardship. When that was violated he was sent to the El Reno Reformatory in Oklahoma, where he served nine months and while there worked in the prison library. She had married Parr when he was in his fifties and she was fifteen, the courthouse janitors daughter. In his statement, Frankie told law-enforcement officials that Ruben Vela bragged to him and Roel that he had had sex with a woman at the Gallegos ranch. His mother misses him, and he misses his friends, who thought of him as kookya sweet guy.. The Box 13 notoriety followed by the Jake Floyd Jr. assassination brought a lot of attention to Parrs machine. Cocks and dogs have the run of their blocks, where ancient adobe houses graciously permit frame bungalows and trailers on adjoining lots. In Corpus Christi he is just another Mexican, an anonymous stockboy made all the more anonymous because his coworkers do not know why he is there. These were men he had grown up with, gone to school with, gone drinking with, gotten into trouble with. Later that morning, tearful and disoriented, Linda stood before an elderly justice of the peace and named her attackers so that warrants for their arrest could be issued. Shortly thereafter, the boy says, he became the subject of threats. Linda did well in school in Irving but was more distracted in South Texas (Boys, she says sourly. If it was more wrenching for the town to choose between the woman and the accused, people slowly found the wherewithal to make the decision. But then, in a mysterious plague, the sheep began to die, taking with them the towns vision of a glorious future. Wow, a faisait longtemps que je n'avais pas eu autant de plaisir avec un whisky qui n'est pas une licorne. If rape was misunderstood, so too was the difference between it and gang rape. (This article is combined from two columns which ran in the Caller-Times on Aug. 31 and Sept. 7, 2011.). Once, when some of his coworkers learned he was from San Diego, one of the men teased him about being one of the rapists. Amarillo was home to George for 81 years until the morning of April 5, 2022, when he succumbed to terminal cancer while still a patient in Five Points . To hear Alaniz talk, the entire case was concocted by outsiders. Parrs heir apparent, his son George B., graduated in 1921 from Corpus Christi High School. Onto the old culture of refinementSpanish spinsters once gave croquet parties on the lawn of the towns only hotelwas grafted a culture of violence, where due process was dismissed in favor of shoot-outs and impromptu hangings. Nonetheless, the family and its network remains influential so that the county has remained one of the strongest and most consistently Democratic localities in Texas, frequently giving both national and local candidates victories greater than 70 percent. A postelection day correction of the Southeast Texas vote gave Mr. Johnson a margin of 87 out of almost a million votes. Roberto Perez, who dumped Linda Gaitan by the railroad tracks, had been indicted in 1980 on a charge of aggravated assault for shooting a man with a .22 rifle. Marked by history, they had only one place to feel at home. George Parr attended several colleges and at least one trade school before studying law at . In 1958, Parr was found guilty of mail fraud by a federal jury and given a 10-year sentence. His funeral. After a group of Anglos shot down three local Mexicans on election day in the dusty main street of San Diego, Archie Parr, who spoke Spanish, took the side of the Mexicans. His family has been in San Diego for generations, and a brief job in Irving served only to convince him that San Diego was the place for him. This site is provided as a service of SCI Shared Resources, LLC. He was convicted of tax evasion in March, 1974, for failing to list $287,000 in income between 1966 and 1969. Eventually the boys mother took him out of school, and he was put into a home-tutoring program. Bald palm trees lean in toward the house; a brick fence encloses a swimming pool. Any land held by the old Mexican families was too much for the restless Anglos who coveted it. Archer Parr of Alice, Jim Wells County, Texas was born on October 3, 1925. But the curse of San Diego is found not in the cruel mixture of poverty and passion but in its own hunger for accommodation. The appeal was turned down last week by the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit at New Orleans. At thirteen he served as his father's pageboy in the Texas Senate. Long ago she made peace with the conceit that the man of the house was also just another child to be pampered and soothed. In 1950, Parr had become a thorn in the side of Governor Allan Shivers and Attorney General John Ben Shepperd. That year he was elected county judge of Duval County. Then, on the sixth day after the election, Precinct 13 in Jim Wells County reported an amended return, with 202 additional votes, 200 of them for Johnson. There are people on the sidewalk, kids on skateboards, two bearded, heavyset men lolling against a Cadillac parked behind us. Friend turned against friend, brother against brother; one learned to go along or face expulsion. Parr exercised his political power in the Senate runoff election between Lyndon Johnson and Coke Stevenson in 1948. George Rembert Parr, Jr. Moncks Corner - George Rembert Parr, Jr., 63, of Moncks Corner, South Carolina, husband of Kathleen Barrett Parr, died Friday, December 22, 2017. Eva, This page was last edited on 2 April 2023, at 23:34. The pardon, restoring Parr's civil rights, was granted on February 20, 1946. According to Dudley Lunchs history, The Duke of Duval County, Anglo powers paid off the crucial witness, and the men were acquitted. Julie was preceded in death by her infant son, Tommy, her parents, and her husband Ed. Instead, the men formed a line as the cockfight ended. Whatever it was, she had fun with it. He entered the University of Texas Law School in 1923 as a special student, but again left without taking a degree. Visiting Hours at the Alfred D. Thomas Funeral Home, 326 Granite. Built by shines & jecker labs, A new East End bar opened this week. Thats Roy, he says slowly under his breath. Born in 1512, Katherine Parr was Henry VIII's sixth and final wife, who is often remembered for being the 'lucky' one to have survived the monarch who famously beheaded two of his wives. The Lopez convenience store and El Mercado supermarket indicate how little this insular and isolated place has in common with the small towns that line the interstate highways to the north, towns that are little more than far-flung suburbs with their own 7-Elevens, multi-cinemas, and strip shopping centers. Once there, the boy noted the arrival of Garza and the others and saw Linda Gaitan struggling to get away. In person Linda is neither the shy saint her in-laws have fashioned for the media nor the sinner the town rumor mills have generated in response. Parr was robbed and his car was stolen. Here, late in the evening of March 26, an illegal cockfight scheduled as the nights entertainment did not go as planned. Mr. Parr's nephew, Archer Parr, 48, was convicted in Federal Court last year of lying to the grand jury that indicted his uncle. Just as the two were drifting off, there was a knock on the door. Scheduled for deportation, Chew was out on bail at the time of his arrest for the rape of Linda Gaitan. Early life [ edit] I never gone to one of those rapes before, he says with a shudder, as if it were something he expected to get used to. Johnson won the nomination by 87 votes, tantamount to election in an era when Republicans were not competitive in the South, and prompting the sobriquet "landslide Lyndon. After the Caller-Times wrote a story about the boy, he too became the recipient of donations and letters of supportonce more, from out of town. Frankie drinks a beer, studies the water, and then squints down the sidewalk. Learn more about the benefits of being It is the only way to pay off liens against the estate for back taxes. A portrait of the couple hangs over the bed. (Johnson's college student son, Lyndon, also attended.) Given her pick of restaurants, Linda opts for Chuck E. Cheese because the kids like it. March 2023 Reader Quiz: What Did You Learn? It is a place rich only in time: the oil boom that fleetingly livened the South Texas towns of Freer to the west and Alice to the east bypassed San Diego. One probable motivation was that Parr felt obligated to Johnson, who had helped him obtain the 1946 presidential pardon. Parr filed bankruptcy. However, political candidates would from time to time make Parr an object of their reforming campaigns. Mr. Parr was born in Eutaw, Alabama and put himself through University of . I'll get you. He applied for a presidential pardon in July 1943; U.S. Attorney General Francis Biddle blocked it in part because Congressman Richard M. Kleberg opposed the pardon. Later Frankie gave his wife a tattoo on her shoulder, Soy GaitanIm a Gaitanit said, over a rose that bloomed. (In 1934 Archie's reelection to the Texas State senate was in doubt and he hoped that building a road to Corpus Christi across the King Ranch, which was owned by the Kleberg family, would save his political career. Garza told the judge he could not afford to pay the damages; revocation was requested when it was discovered he had easily come up with a cash bond for a friend in San Antonio.