Larger-Than-Life Texas Clan Torn by Mysterious Murder

Months later, sheriff’s deputy Bill Beard could recall nothing unusual about his chance meeting with Bruce Parker that gray Sunday morning.

The two friends shared coffee and conversation at Dauna’s Store, a favorite gathering spot in this tiny Hill Country community, and Parker seemed in high spirits.

Beard knew of Parker’s problems with members of his family and that his friend had returned only recently to rejoin the ranching clan.

Like everyone else in town, Beard also knew the rumors of “bad blood” among the Parkers, an imposing family tracing its ancestry back to the Alamo.

And finally, he knew only too well the family’s history of violence.

Before nightfall that Sunday last autumn, Parker, 42, lay mortally wounded on a bluff overlooking Big Rock, a scenic and secluded area along the Little Devil’s River in the heart of Parker ranchland.

In just six incredible months, three Parkers were dead--and a fourth was charged with murder.

To some, the Parker family seemed larger than life, proud and private, linked by blood to Comanche Chief Quanah Parker and by legend to bandit queen Bonnie Parker.

And certainly they were, as one claimed, “Old West, Big Ranch.”

James Henry Parker arrived in the rolling, brittle woodlands of the Texas Hill Country in the early 1870s, accompanied by his young bride Matilda, a grandniece of Davy Crockett, a name as famous as the Alamo itself.

Soon, the couple’s original 160-acre tract grew to 12,000 acres, and Jim and Tildy produced 11 children, including a son named Jess, who in 1913 married Lorena Milam, a relative of Ben Milam, another history book hero.

In the late 1930s, Jess, called “Big Daddy,” and Lorena, “Big Mama,” moved to the remote site of the family home, now known as “Old Ranch,” and reared five children.

The four boys--Doyle, Cecil, Raymond and Aubrey--chose to ranch with their father, who set aside land for each. But even then, life was not as harmonious as Big Daddy would have liked.

Friends said the relationship between Doyle and Cecil was severely strained, and everyone suspected that the feud involved land.

After Cecil Parker died in 1968, his widow and family, which included Bruce and his two sisters, were all but banished from the ranch. It was Big Daddy himself who reluctantly urged them to leave “before something bad happens,” according to Bruce Parker’s elder son, Bart, now 24.

But at Big Daddy’s death, the old man’s will restored a parcel of Parker land to his grandchildren, and Bruce returned with a new wife and a new outlook on life.

A carpenter by profession but a cowboy by preference, Bruce Parker looked and lived the part of a man born and raised on a sprawling Texas ranch.

Handsome, hard-working and easygoing, Parker rarely dressed in anything other than boots, jeans, Western shirts and cowboy hats.

Only 19 when his father died and his family was ousted, Bruce bounced around the Hill Country working at an assortment of jobs. But always he was drawn back to Kimble County.

“It wasn’t that the land was so important, but this is where his home was,” said Linda Parker, whose 1983 marriage to Bruce was the second for them both. “Being away was like a great big empty hole in him.”

In the fall of 1986, shortly after inheriting his ranchland, Bruce guided Linda to a hilltop commanding a regal view of the countryside below.

Producing blueprints of a two-story house, he embraced her and asked: “How would you like a house like this built right here?”

“I remember telling him I would never love him as much as I did at that moment,” she said.

Bruce himself built the house, a spacious country home constructed in part with native rock, not unlike what his great-grandfather used more than a century ago.

Early one morning, as they sipped coffee and watched their horses grazing below, Bruce told Linda he was never happier, but still was troubled by something.

“I’m afraid somebody’s going to come and take this away,” she recalled him saying.

“Nobody can take this away from you,” she replied. “It’s yours.”

In both good times and bad, Linda said, Bruce was always very proud to be a Parker.

“They are wonderful, honest, hard-working people . . .,” she said. “There is nothing superficial about them. They’re either for you or against you. There is no in-between.”

And, she said, most were supportive after Bruce’s death.

On that fateful weekend last October, the couple attended a Friday night football game at Harper High School, where Bruce once played quarterback.

Bruce spent much of the weekend working on his Uncle Raymond’s ranch, where he had leased the hunting and fishing rights. He drove along Little Devil’s River, where years ago the Parker clan gathered under shade trees across from Big Rock.

They would barbecue steers and goats at the river’s edge and sing and dance to live music, often until dawn.

“This was Bruce’s favorite spot in the whole world,” Linda said.

The Parkers worked and played hard, and though they kept a low profile, they seemed eerily doomed to uncommon and often violent tragedy--”some real bad luck,” according to Kimble County Sheriff Pat Davis.

One of Big Daddy’s brothers and his wife died in a double shooting in 1935. No motive was uncovered, but a note indicated that the couple had formed a suicide pact.

Five years later, Jim Parker’s granddaughter was slain by her husband, who cut her throat. And in 1962, one of Parker’s great-grandsons was shot and killed in a dispute over a girl he was dating.

But it was an episode last summer that set the tone for the most recent violence.

Jesse (Jett) Parker, another of Big Daddy’s ill-fated nephews, was gunned down on Parker ranchland June 10, an apparent robbery victim.

Investigators said a warrant was issued for a fugitive from Mexico, but no arrest has been made.

No one professes to know who or what lured Bruce Parker to the bluff above Big Rock that Sunday last October.

There was not a hint of trouble, Linda said, and if there had been renewed friction between Bruce and any of his relatives, “I think we would have known it.”

She last saw her husband alive down at the camp house where he was working that afternoon. When she returned from an errand, he was gone.

The phone call from Big Mama, the aging matriarch of the Parker clan, came at dinner time. Lorena Parker told her something had happened to Bruce.

A sizable crowd already had gathered atop the bluff when Linda arrived. Her husband’s lifeless body, face down in a pool of blood, was sprawled along the dirt road on the driver’s side of the pickup.

Beard, the first officer at the scene, spotted a powder burn about the size of a half-dollar on his friend’s chest. He privately concluded that Bruce’s death was a homicide.

“There were too many things that didn’t add up to a self-inflicted wound,” Beard said.

Bruce’s Western hat was on the hood of the truck, which Davis considered significant.

“They said when he was mad and about ready to fight, the first thing he did was take his hat off and set it down,” Davis said. “It looks like there might be some sort of altercation.”

Linda would not totally accept that premise, but never did she embrace the theory that her husband killed himself.

The motive behind the slaying?

“Jealousy and greed,” she snapped.

Would she explain?

“No,” she replied. “All of this will come out in court.”

An investigator, speaking despite a judicial gag order, may have struck close to the truth.

“The family got larger and larger,” he drawled, “and the land smaller and smaller.”

In mid-November, a steady stream of Parkers clattered across the bridge spanning the Llano River and rolled up to the old brick-and-stone courthouse in Junction, Tex.

For two days, they and others appeared before grand jurors to answer questions about the events of Oct. 29.

Among the witnesses subpoenaed were Doyle Parker, 75, and his brother Raymond, 66, the uncle who owned the land where the shooting occurred.

Friends knew Doyle as a man with a fondness for cigars and a dedication to ranching and family. He spent his entire life on Parker land and had acquired holdings beyond what he inherited from Big Daddy.

Unlike Doyle, Raymond left the Parker conclave for San Antonio and spent 17 years in business before returning to the ranch in his later years.

After hearing two days of testimony, grand jurors returned a murder indictment accusing Doyle Parker of “intentionally and knowingly” killing his nephew.

He was arrested, but quickly freed on $25,000 bail. A trial date is pending.

Ron Sutton, the district attorney, calls his case “circumstantial and complicated,” but says he is eager to prosecute despite Doyle Parker’s advanced age.

“His mother’s in good shape at 92, and his father lived to be 97,” Sutton said. “These people live forever down there unless they get shot.”

The frost-laden northers that usher in a Hill Country winter were no match for the chill that penetrated the Parker compound in the days after the indictment.

According to investigators and others, Big Mama indirectly blamed her son Raymond for Bruce’s death. Even though Doyle stood legally accused, authorities said she felt the tragedy occurred because Raymond had granted his nephew hunting and fishing rights on sacred Parker ground.

Raymond said nothing, at least publicly.

On a Sunday night in early December, he picked up his .22-caliber automatic pistol and disappeared into the bathroom of his ranch home. Without a word or a note, he killed himself with a shot to the head.

He left behind only his grand jury testimony, secret by law.