The murder at the Wichita County Courthouse: What happened to the morbid memento?
A building as old and historic as the Wichita County Courthouse holds many stories and legends, some true and some myth. The current remodeling at the 107-year-old building brings to memory another renovation at another time and an effort to save a small, albeit morbid piece of the building’s past.
The venerable structure underwent an extensive remodeling in the early 1960s, the results of which left a lingering indignation among many.
One judge attempted to preserve a piece of courthouse history from the rush to modernize.
It was a peculiar piece, to be sure – gruesome, some might say.
Just a wooden bench.
But it was no ordinary bench.
Its story began in the summer of 1941.
Harold Reynolds was a 28-year-old Wichita Falls man who went by “Blackie.”
Blackie Reynolds was arrested July 2, accused of performing “immoral relations” on a 10-year-old boy in a downtown alley.
A jury was seated on July 18 for an insanity hearing on his behalf.
The next day, Reynolds, his attorney, miscellaneous other lawyers, and jurors were waiting in the courtroom as Judge Guy McNeely arrived from his chambers.
Just then – one lawyer recalled it was exactly 8:59 a.m. by his watch – a man with a single-action Colt .45 revolver ran up to Reynolds as he sat on the bench and pumped two slugs into his chest. He was killed instantly.
A deputy wrestled the gun away from the assailant, identified as Burt Thurmon, a local barber and the young boy’s father.
He was hustled to a justice of the peace’s office where he was charged with murder. Friends raised the $1,000 bail and Thurmon was free three hours after he fired the fatal shots.
A photo in the Wichita Daily Times showed him at his shop later in the day, wrapping a hot towel around a customer’s face before a shave.
Although a bevy of witnesses saw the shooting, a grand jury decided not to indict Thurmon, and the murder charges were dropped.
Blackie Reynolds, who had been born in Oklahoma and lived in several Texas towns, was buried without much ceremony in the cemetery in Charlie. His might have been a forgotten case among the many tales of human tragedy that have found their way to the courthouse.
Except for one thing.
One of the bullets that killed Reynolds went straight through his chest, through the bench, and lodged in a wall.
Because his was the first and only killing at the courthouse -- or so it is believed -- District Judge Temple Driver in 1962 rescued the punctured bench from the jaws of progress. He had it moved from the courtroom to a hallway where it offered a modicum of comfort to untold numbers of behinds, the possessors of which were likely oblivious to its storied past.
Where the perforated furnishing is today seems to be anybody’s guess. County Commissioner Mark Beauchamp, who’s overseeing the current renovation of the courthouse, said he doesn’t know what happened to it.
Of course, things in a big old building tend to get misplaced over the course of a century or so.
Maybe the punctured pew is tucked away in some forgotten corner along with the original courthouse columns or the missing time capsule from the county’s earliest days.
Maybe it got tossed out with other artifacts that outlived their usefulness.
Or maybe it’s still providing respite for the weary behinds of visitors who are blissfully ignorant of its gory past.
Just a little gouge in the wood.
This article originally appeared on Wichita Falls Times Record News: The murder at the Wichita County Courthouse: What happened to the morbid memento?
