Craig v. State

• Decision Date: 10 May 1961
• Docket Number: No. 33250,33250
• Citation: 171 Tex.Crim. 256,347 S.W.2d 255
• Parties: Dee CRAIG, Appellant, v. STATE of Texas, Appellee.
• Court: Texas Court of Criminal Appeals

Page 255

347 S.W.2d 255

171 Tex.Crim. 256

Dee CRAIG, Appellant, v. STATE of Texas, Appellee.

No. 33250.

Court of Criminal Appeals of Texas.

May 10, 1961.

Luther E. Jones, Jr., Corpus Christi, Percy Foreman, Houston, of counsel, for appellant.

J. P. Hart, special prosecutor, La Grange, J. R. Owen, Co. Atty., Georgetown, James b. Kershaw, Dist. Atty., Bastrop, and Leon B. Douglas, State's Atty., Austin, for the State.

McDONALD, Judge.

Murder with malice is the offense, with punishment assessed at thirty years' confinement in the penitentiary.

At the January term, 1958, appellant was indicted by the Bastrop County grand jury for the offense of murder with malice aforethought upon the person of his wife, Grace Craig, on August 25, 1957. He was first tried in Bastrop County in May, 1958, but the trial resulted in a hung jury.

Upon a change of venue, the trial was transferred to Fayette County, where appellant was tried in April, 1959, and found guilty, with punishment assessed at fifty years in the penitentiary. This judgment was reversed (Craig v. State, Tex.Cr.App., 331 S.W.2d 925).

The instant trial was had in Williamson County in October of 1960, upon a change of venue.

The facts, as adduced from the state's witnesses, reflect the following:

Appellant and the deceased were fishing in a boat on the Colorado River approximately two and a half miles sough of Bastrop on the afternoon of August 25, 1957. They were the only occupants, and no witnesses were present at the site where Grace Craig met her death.

Appellant took the stand and testified at the first trial in Bastrop County that deceased was killed when a .410-gauge shot-gun in the boat discharged accidentally. He did not testify either at the trial of the case in Fayette County nor at the trial in Williamson County.

The state's case was built entirely upon circumstantial evidence. The theory of the state and the proof adduced in support thereof was to the effect that appellant killed his wife to collect on insurance policies taken out on her life shortly prior to August 25, 1957. This evidence, together with proof of contradictory exculpatory statements made by appellant to several witnesses after his wife's death, and the physical evidence in the boat--particularly the location and descending angle of the fatal shot, was submitted to prove murder with malice aforethought.

In establishing motive, the state's testimony reflected that appellant had married the deceased in April, 1957, prior to purchasing a $500 life insurance policy on her life, to become effective on July 6, 1957, issued by the Rockdale Insurance Company, through Don Luckey, an officer of the company. Appellant was named beneficiary therein. On July 23, 1957, the deceased, in appellant's presence, signed an application for change of beneficiary from deceased's two adult children to the appellant, on a $1,200 accidental-death policy with Combined American Insurance Company, of Dallas, Texas, to become effective on July 31, 1957, the children referred to being by a former marriage. This policy, then, was in effect on August 25, 1957.

On July 23, 1957, Texas Central Life Insurance Company of Bryan, Texas, issued a $5,000 sportsman policy on the life of Grace Craig, and appellant was named beneficiary therein. This policy provided that upon proof of the insured's death due to accident while fishing, hunting, or engaged in certain other sports, $5,000 would be paid the beneficiary.

The witness Luckey testified that, shortly after the death of Grace Craig, appellant went to Rockdale and talked with him, and that when he offered to pay the claim upon proof of death appellant indicated he was not ready and would return later to collect.

No claim was made under the Combined American Insurance policy until after the second trial in April of 1959 in Fayette County. Subsequent to that trial and prior to the third trial in Williamson County in October of 1960, claim was made through appellant's representative for benefits payable under the $5,000 policy issued by the Texas Central Life Insurance Company.

The state offered several contradictory statements made by appellant after the death of his wife, the state's contention being that such statements were incriminating and tended to show appellant's guilt, not only since they were contradictory in nature but in many respects were refuted by the physical evidence found in the boat as to the position and location of the deceased immediately prior to and subsequent to her death.

Following is a resume of the claimed contradictory statements:

The witness Schaefer, whose nickname was 'Honey,' testified as follows: He was at his fishing camp at the boat dock about two miles down the river from Bastrop when Dee Craig (appellant) came up in a fishing boat, around 5:30 or 6 o'clock on the afternoon of August 25, 1957. Billy Voight and Ben Simmons were with the witness at the time, cleaning some fish. As appellant's boat came in closer, the witness heard him say: "Honey, please help me. Honey, help me." The witness pulled the boat into the dock, and saw Mrs. Craig (the deceased) lying there on the seat, 'the same seat that the steering wheel was on.' In relating the conversation between him and the appellant at that time, the witness said he asked appellant 'what in the world happened' and appellant replied that 'his wife had gotten shot down the river.' When Schaefer asked where it happened, appellant told him, "Between here and Camp Ground Ford [a creek]." When the witness again asked appellant what had happened, he replied that 'his wife had caught one fish and had taken it off the line, and she had a bite and stood up to jerk the pole, and when she did, she fell over backwards * * * and the gun must have went off and shot her.'

The witness Billy Voight testified that 'Honey' Schaefer asked appellant what had happened; that appellant said his wife 'got shot'; that when Schaefer asked how it happened appellant said his wife 'had caught a fish and he taken it off and rebaited her hook and threw her line out, and * * * she fell over backwards, and the gun went off'; that this occurred 'down at the mouth of Little Creek between Honey Schaefer's place and Camp Ground Ford.'

I. R. Hoskins, Bastrop County sheriff, testified that he had a conversation with appellant about 6:30 o'clock on the evening of August 25, 1957, as he (appellant) sat with C. A. Long in the latter's car, in front of a Bastrop hospital; that when he (the sheriff) asked appellant what had occurred appellant replied: "I don't know." The sheriff further testified that he then asked appellant: "Dee, what happened? Did somebody shoot her?"; that appellant's reply was: "I don't know what happened. I didn't even hear a shot." Testifying further, the witness said that appellant, accompanied by his (appellant's) son and a brother of the deceased, came to his office a day or two after the funeral; that Dudley White, a Texas Ranger, was in the office at the time; that in the ensuing conversation appellant asked him if he had 'found out anything or knew anything more about it'; that he told appellant he was continuing the investigation; that when he questioned appellant further as to whether he knew any more about the matter appellant related 'that he was changing water on a little fish in the back of the boat that Mrs. Craig had caught, and he heard a shot, and he looked around, and she was lying in the boat, bleeding.'

Mrs. Laurine Beale, a niece of the deceased, testified that she had a conversation with appellant about 9:30 o'clock on the night of August 25, 1957, in the living room of her aunt's home, in which conversation appellant told her that he and his wife had gone to the river to fish, that his wife was seated in the front of the boat with her back to him and he was in the back of the boat when the deceased caught a catfish (the witness demonstrated the length of the fish), that she turned around and said: "This is the biggest fish I have ever caught in my life. * * * It has got a mate out there, and I am not going home till I get it," and that appellant replied: "Okay; if you want to stay longer, we will." The witness then testified that appellant said to her (the witness): "God, that is when the fatal shot come," in those precise words.

Parker Beale, the above witness's husband, testified to virtually the same facts as his wife had related.

Dudley White, a ranger with the Department of Public Safety for eighteen years, testified that he had talked with appellant in the sheriff's office in Bastrop on August 30, 1957; that appellant told him 'that they were fishing, and he was fishing out of the back and she was fishing out of the front, and it was something mentioned about her catching a a fish, and they had it in a wastepaper * * * basket; and he was changing the water in the fish that they had in there, and he heard a noise, and turned around, and she was laying in the boat bleeding.'

The state also read a part of appellant's testimony from the first trial in Bastrop County, at which appellant had related that he was sixty years old, had lived in Elgin for the last fifteen or twenty years with the exception of the four months he lived in Bastrop, had married the deceased on April 12, 1957; that on the day in question he and his wife had gone to deceased's favorite fishing spot. The following is quoted from appellant's further testimony at that trial:

'There's a high bank on the west side that provided shade for us, a willow that run out over the river, I'd say extended out thirty feet or more from the bank of the river * * * she sat where she could lean back with her back against the steering wheel and fish over this way * * * I was sitting * * * on the back seat where there was a fish that she'd just caught and I had taken off her line. I'd put the worms--the fish bait * * * on the hook for her, and she was doing the fishing at that time. * * * I'd shot a...