THE TRIAL OF ALEX HENSON

By Donald R. Ross

The Trial of Alex Henson contains the actual transcript of a high profile criminal case

tried in an East Texas town in 1953. Henson was accused of a late-night burglary of

the private residence of a prominent physician and assaulting that physician's wife

with a gun while the doctor was away on an emergency call.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BEYOND PUBLISHING
• Release date: Dec 22, 2022
• ISBN: 9781637924570

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Even as a teenager in the 1950s, I knew I wanted to be a lawyer. I do not know what instilled this ambition in me. My parents were farmers, and the only attorney in the family was a distant cousin who was a railroad lawyer. From an early age, I discovered that I just loved being in a courtroom. I liked everything about it: the judge, the jury, the lawyers, the parties, the witnesses, the court reporter, and the bailiff. I loved the atmosphere—the solemnity and drama of it all. I enjoyed seeing the adversary system in action. To me, attending a trial was more entertaining than attending a movie. In the 1950s, court sessions in the local courthouse were sometimes held on Saturdays. My farmer parents made a weekly trip to town every Saturday to shop and tend to other business. This was also the habit of the parents of my country friends. But while my friends’ parents dropped them off at the movie theater while they did their shopping, I always wanted to be dropped off at the courthouse, to see if there was a trial going on in the district courtroom. Only if the courtroom were empty would I then join my friends at the movie theater to see the next episode of a Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, or Hop-Along Cassidy series. My aspiration to become a lawyer was made considerably stronger when, at age 14, I was able to attend part of the trial of a high profile criminal case in the district courtroom. The case was the State of Texas vs. Alex Henson. It was an emotionally and racially charged case, and for weeks, it was the talk of both the Black and white communities. In the rural part of the county where I grew up, I had many Black friends, and I heard the case discussed among them and their parents as well as among my white family and friends. I even had a personal connection with the case: the victim was the grandmother of a very close friend. The closing arguments to the jury in this case were made on the Friday before Easter Sunday, and school was closed in observance of Good Friday. Having only recently received my drivers’ license¹, I was able to drive myself to the courthouse to hear the arguments. After attending that trial, I was sure I wanted to become a lawyer. Eighteen years later, my dream came true, and I found myself prosecuting felony cases in that same courtroom where I had sat many times as an observant teenager. After ten years as the elected County and District Attorney, I was appointed by the governor as District Judge, and for fourteen years sat on the same bench where the district judge sat who tried the Alex Henson case. Never in my wildest dreams could I, as that 14-year-old boy, have ever imagined that would happen.

During the time I was serving as District Judge, the official court reporter’s office adjoined mine. There was a steel vault in that office where the court reporters had been storing records for years before I became judge. My official reporter had run out of space for storing records in that vault. Because the time period for keeping most of those records had long expired, my court reporter and I took on the task of clearing that vault. In that process, a pale blue 8x10 cardboard box caught my eye. When I opened it, I discovered it contained the complete transcript of the trial of Alex Henson. I was ecstatic and astonished. I held in my hands the record from that trial I attended more than 30 years earlier in the same courtroom where I was now the presiding judge—the case that sealed my ambition to become a lawyer.

There was no way I was going to let that box go to the incinerator. I always thought that transcript would make a good book. Unfortunately, it has taken almost 40 years for that thought to become reality. To my knowledge, all the people who had direct information of the case are now dead. I did not interview any of them. I did discuss the case with two other officials in the courthouse who were living at the time the case was tried but had no direct knowledge of the facts. One related a hearsay statement attributed to one of the participants in the