The unassuming community of Carthage, Texas, close to the Louisiana line, was an abnormal spot to have gotten captivated of an individual like Bernie Tiede. Notwithstanding its obviously dominant part traditionalist populace, the home of the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame appeared to look the alternate way when it went to Bernie’s feminine side. As per an anecdote about him in Texas Monthly, his previous manager at the Hawthorn Funeral Home said that there was discussion among the townsfolk that Bernie “was a little light in the loafers.”
The youthful, heavy undertaker was so dearest in Carthage, notwithstanding, that when he murdered 81-year-old Marjorie Nugent, a rich widow he had gotten to know subsequent to directing her better half’s burial service, individuals didn’t blame him for it. Despite the fact that he confessed to shooting her in the back multiple times and keeping her body in a profound freeze in the carport for a very long time, the head prosecutor indicting him really experienced difficulty persuading people around that what he’d done wasn’t right.
The remainder of Texas found out about Bernie through that article in Texas Monthly, the remainder of the world did so by means of an element movie by chief Richard Linklater, and the killer appeared to consistently wind up absolved in the court of popular assessment. In any case, as one Texas lawyer would wind up belligerence, Bernie Tiede was not even close as supported in what he’d done as media portrayals of him would have us accept.
THE BERNIE TIEDE STORY THE SILVER SCREEN TOLD YOU
In 2011, acclaimed chief Richard Linklater delivered Bernie, an element film/narrative about Tiede and Nugent featuring Jack Black (presented above), Shirley MacLaine, and Matthew McConaughey, just as a few genuine occupants of Carthage who knew Tiede. In light of the Texas Monthly piece “12 PM in the Garden of East Texas” by Skip Hollandsworth, who likewise cowrote the content with Linklater, the film depicts Bernie as an adorable, amiable character who made a propensity for soothing the widows whose spouses he covered.
It follows Bernie and Marjorie as they draw nearer and closer, as she opens up her cool, cold heart, just as her financial balance, and he happily acknowledges, totally adoring the new great life he’s wound up in. They venture to every part of the globe, appreciate spa medicines, and Bernie even winds up assuming control over a portion of Marjorie’s accounts, utilizing her cash to purchase presents for pretty much anybody around.
Be that as it may, the liquefying of the old hag’s heart doesn’t keep going long, and she turns out to be increasingly more possessive of Bernie and his time. She compels him to tend to her in every way under the sun, purchases a rifle, and makes him use it to shoot armadillos that come into her yard. He supposedly told his sister that Marjorie was “so controlling, it simply wears me out.” When she inquired as to why he didn’t simply leave her, he said, “In light of the fact that I’m her solitary companion. I need to remain in light of the fact that I’m the only one she has.”
THE RESENTENCING JURY DIDN’T BUY BERNIE TIEDE’S DEFENSE
Bernie’s much needed refresher would just a few years. The Texas Tribune revealed that a couple of years after the fact, his endeavors to persuade Texas juries that the sexual maltreatment he purportedly experienced as a kid on account of an uncle ought to pardon him of homicide were ineffective. He was condemned to 99 years to life in jail in 2016, and endeavored to advance again from that point forward, yet without any result. Murder will be murder, they said, easy. “Today truth and equity were maintained and a Hollywood legend was at long last end up being what it was … a legend,” said Shanna Nugent.
In 2019, Chad Baruch, a lawyer who worked for the Nugent family on the Tiede case, distributed a blog entry on his law office’s site that uncovered exactly how much legend was in the film Bernie. For instance, Bernie really told investigators that he’d considered killing her in the months preceding doing it, showing deliberation. Additionally, he didn’t simply shoot her multiple times in the back prior to acknowledging what he’d done. He shot her once toward the back, at that point approached her as she lay kicking the bucket and polished her off with three additional shots at point-clear reach. He had likewise depleted her venture record of millions of dollars without her insight before he executed her, noteworthy he had a monetary intention in getting her good and gone.
