The Killer Who Played Robin Hood - The Murder of Marjorie Nugent

January 19, 2026

Payton and Garrett unravel the chilling case of Marjorie Nugent, a reclusive woman living alone in a sprawling mansion on the edge of town. When loved ones begin to fear she’s vanished, police make a welfare check, only to uncover a horrifying secret hidden in her freezer.

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AUDIO TRANSCRIPT

You’re listening to an Oh No Media podcast.

Hey everyone, welcome back to the podcast. This is Murder with My Husband. I’m Payton Moreland.

And I’m Garrett Moreland.

And he’s the husband.

And I’m the husband.

Happy Monday. Happy life. Happy wife.

Hope everyone is doing great.

Yeah, that’s what we got. It’s Monday. We’re recording. It’s not Monday, but thank you for being here. Thank you for listening. Thank you for watching.

We don’t really have too many announcements. Nothing too crazy coming up. Guess I’ll kind of jump into my ten seconds. Been watching football. Playoffs are getting crazy. Chargers lost. I don’t know, they deserved it. That was an absolutely garbage performance.

If you don’t watch football, then you can skip this couple of seconds.

Garbage performance by the Chargers. They did not deserve to win that, honestly. So, I think I am rooting for the Bears. We’ll see what happens.

Other than that, nothing too crazy for my ten seconds. Making bagels, hanging out.

I guess I’ll ask you guys. Okay, if you were to pick a bagel, a breakfast burrito, or a donut, what would you pick? Would you pick me?

Yeah, you have to say bagel.

Oh, bagel. Okay, bagel. No, honestly, what would you pick?

This answer just changes for me so often.

Okay.

I’m just such a temporary girl. Like, I go in and out of these. So right now, I would probably pick a breakfast burrito.

I think breakfast burrito would be last for me. But there was a time where I only craved bagels all day, every day. And there’s been a time where I just wanted donuts every morning.

I just… bagels. For those who don’t know, if you are watching this for the first time, I am opening a bagel shop. More details to come. Hopefully starting construction next week. But I love bagels. Been making bagels for like four years now. They are my life. They are my soul. Besides this beautiful girl next to me.

Yeah. So that’s what I got. I’ll keep you guys updated. Nothing too crazy other than that.

So, I think on that note, we can hop into today’s episode.

Also, for those watching for the first time, just a reminder: I do not know what case my wife is telling me. I never know what case she’s telling me. I don’t know much about true crime other than when we sit here and record. We don’t talk about it afterwards. We don’t talk about it before. Everything is real, non-scripted on my end.

Yeah, we’ve been going for quite a while now. So, five years, 303 true crime cases. I know more than I did before, but it blows my mind how many cases there are that I don’t know of.

I mean, even you at this point, I feel like we are covering cases that you don’t know sometimes.

Yeah. Yeah.

Actually, I feel like a lot of the time I try not to pick cases that are so well covered or known. So it’s getting even more… but yeah, it’s so crazy to me that we started this thing just on the basement floor, headphone mics.

Here we are.

And here we are again. Thanks again. We love you guys, and let’s hop into today’s case.

Our sources for this episode are texasmonthly.com, cbsnews.com, variety.com, investigationdiscovery.com, kltv.com, texasbune.org, tribetalk.org, brunch.com, nytimes.com, telegraph.co.uk, and allthatsinteresting.com.

All right. Whether we want to admit it or not, we all make rash judgments about people. Maybe we don’t like the way someone dresses, and so we’re like, eh, not our type. Maybe someone shares a name with our old high school bully, so immediately we’re like, rubbing me the wrong way.

The point is, while it’s not the most evolved trait we have as humans, our brains naturally like to put people into boxes: mean, nice, good, evil. There’s honestly something primal about it. It’s how we spot danger quickly.

What our biology doesn’t account for is all the nuances that actually make up a person. Maybe someone is kind because they’re being calculated, manipulative, and looking to get their way. Maybe someone is more closed off or a little colder because they’ve been really hurt in the past.

It’s not until we actually give people a chance and we really get to know them that we find out what lies beneath the surface. And those boxes that we’ve put people in might not just be totally wrong — they could also be deadly.

So, let’s take a trip down to Carthage, Texas. This is a small little town of about 6,500 people, and we’re 160 miles east of Dallas, close to the Louisiana border. That is the area Marjorie Nugent had always called home.

Now, born in 1915 outside of Carthage, Marjorie’s dad ran a little grocery store. He was also a pretty prominent landowner back then, which earned the family a pretty significant reputation around the small town.

So, Marjorie grows up. She goes on to study at Louisiana Tech, where she met her husband, a recent graduate with an engineering degree named R.L. “Rod,” as they called him, Nugent.

Now, the two got married in 1937 when Marjorie was just 22 years old, and Rod’s career took off shortly after. He got a job with Magnolia Oil, that is now Mobil, like the gas station.

Mm-hmm.

And the couple became extremely wealthy over the years because he got in so early with what would become a huge company. So, after moving from Texas to Louisiana to New Mexico, they and their son, Rod Jr., moved back to the Carthage area in 1989, just to slow things down a little bit.

Rod Senior bought a controlling interest in the First National Bank of Carthage. And with that, the couple purchased a 6,000-square-foot, beautiful stone home that sat right on the border of town.

Now, equipped with a stone wall, electronic gates, and complete isolation from the rest of the world, this is what Marjorie preferred. She hardly ever left the estate, which is why whispers about who she was — and honestly, kind of her grouchy nature — started to spread through the small town.

I mean, yeah.

This family moves back, they’re very wealthy, they buy this enormous mansion, and the wife is never seen.

So people whispered that she hadn’t spoken to — that’s Payton minus the mansion and gate part.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, people whispered about her that she hadn’t spoken to her sister, who was in Carthage, like living in the area, for years, apparently over one argument about their mother’s estate after she had passed away. They talked about how Marjorie stopped speaking to her now-adult son, Rod Jr., because of one too many fights.

So basically, the rumor mill is she’s cutting everyone off in her life. People said she was snobbish, entitled, nasty, too good for Carthage — this small town — which is why she never leaves her mansion.

Even members of her own family claimed that they were scared to cross her. And at one point, Marjorie’s little sister was quoted calling her the devil on earth.

But because Marjorie hardly ever left her home, she let other people tell her story. She was made up to be this grumpy, grouchy old woman.

Mm-hmm.

But no one knew she was really just a troubled woman who seemed to battle bouts of depression.

Okay.

And that she took that pain out on other people.

Though there were some people who did get to know the real Marjorie, learned what she had gone through, who said when she loved you, she was extremely kind. She would send lovely birthday cards and shower you with gifts, and that the gossip around Marjorie had definitely been exaggerated over the years.

Have you seen Up?

Yeah.

Okay. It’s kind of feeling like the old man.

Yeah. I mean, yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Just because she didn’t go out of her way to be kind to people in her small southern town, go out to meet her neighbors, go out to see people, everyone in town judged her. They believed the rumors without question.

It must have been a pretty lonely existence for Marjorie, especially with her own husband so caught up in his work. And things got even lonelier when Rod Senior passed away from heart failure a year after they moved back to Carthage in 1990, which even further explains why she became more of a recluse.

She’s now grieving. Rod had been 76 years old when he died, leaving 75-year-old Marjorie widowed and not on speaking terms with her one and only son.

But something happened at Rod’s funeral that would actually completely change the course of Marjorie’s life.

Now, it was during those arrangements that Marjorie met 32-year-old Bernie Tiede.

Okay.

A well-loved funeral director and mortician in Carthage.

Mortician.

Now, maybe because of Marjorie’s difficult reputation, only a handful of people actually showed up to the services to offer their condolences for her husband.

And Bernie Tiede claimed he saw the sadness and the loneliness in Marjorie’s eyes that day, and he immediately knew she was more than what everyone had gossiped about.

Not only did Bernie prepare the body and make all of the arrangements for the funeral, he also sang during the services. And then he personally escorted Marjorie to her husband’s grave, offering his jacket to her.

And in that moment, that sweet gesture of kindness kind of won over Marjorie.

So, who is this Bernie Tiede who’s finally broken this little rut that Marjorie had put up?

Now, outside of being the local funeral director and mortician for the last decade, Bernie was extremely well-liked and popular around the small town. I mean, this guy was everywhere, especially when it came to the church, which is everything in a small southern town.

He sang in the church choir. He taught Sunday school. And when the minister was under the weather, he actually stepped in and gave the sermon.

And people said Bernie was a really talented performer, too. Ever since he went to Panola College, he had been very involved in the musical scene.

He became an encyclopedia for Broadway shows, was asked to direct some of the school’s performances, and even sang with a professional group called the Shreveport Chamber Singers — the Backstreet Boys.

But life wasn’t always singing in the rain for Bernie. He had had a tough childhood. He grew up about 45 minutes outside of Carthage in a town called Kilgore. And when he was just three years old, his mother died in a car accident.

Jeez.

And then when Bernie was only fifteen, he lost his father.

Oh my gosh.

To an illness. Now Bernie was left to support himself and his younger sister. And that was when he actually took a job working at a funeral home.

And Bernie found there was something about being there for people in grief that he really liked about his job. And as the years passed, he also realized he loved singing and performing. But working at a funeral parlor and volunteering at the church was a way he could sort of merge these things together.

Okay.

So in 1985, at 27 years old, Bernie came to Carthage when an opportunity opened at the Hawthorn Funeral Home. He even took up residence in a small apartment behind it. And there he did everything.

He sang at the services. He embalmed. He did the hair and makeup of the deceased. And he was a shoulder to cry on for the families that came in.

One-man show.

But people said Bernie did a lot for the community outside of that, too. He helped people with their tax returns if they needed it. He would run errands for the widows in town. He donated his time and money to causes that mattered to the people of his community.

And because Bernie put himself out there for all of Carthage to see, that’s the story everyone told. Bernie was sociable, thoughtful, he put others first. And that is obviously what Marjorie saw the day of her husband’s funeral, too.

Extremely curious where this is going. I have no idea.

So, a few days after the funeral, Bernie, who’s in his thirties, calls to check on Marjorie, who’s in her seventies, and she is flattered. Someone was reaching out to her, not just so they could peddle in silly gossip. She believed Bernie really did care about her.

Though Bernie definitely knew how much Marjorie was now worth — at least the ballpark. Somewhere between five and ten million, which is a lot now and was a lot back then. But Bernie said he didn’t treat Marjorie any differently than he treated the other widows at his funeral parlor. He always asked if they needed anything. He always helped them pick up groceries or medication, stuff around their house, just things like that.

But things with Marjorie turned out to be very different than the other widows that Bernie was connecting with.

Uh-oh.

Bernie said he could tell Marjorie was lonely, so he started inviting her to places with him. They began going to lunch, to dinner, and slowly Marjorie started opening up to Bernie. This closed-off, grumpy, elderly woman was warming up, talking about who she was, where she came from. And Bernie said he saw a side of her that people, even in her family, never got to see.

Oh, so there was a big age difference.

Huge.

Okay. He’s in his thirties and she’s in her seventies.

Little scary.

So, um, little scary. Marjorie’s family and the town is like, “This is weird.”

I mean, I think everyone would say that. Like, she’s loaded. She’s seventy. He’s thirty.

You know what? Reverse the roles. Can an elderly girl not catch a little motion? Just kidding. Don’t put that in.

Oh my god.

Bernie’s like, “I know a side of her none of you know.” They’re seen around town holding hands. Bernie said Marjorie wasn’t very steady when she walked. He’s like, “That’s why we’re holding it.”

Oh.

In fact, both of them insisted to everyone there was nothing romantic about their relationship. Actually, they say Bernie was gay. He claimed, though, that Marjorie never asked about his sexual orientation, so they never really spoke about it.

Now, whether she wanted more in their relationship or not is unclear, but that didn’t stop her from doing everything in her power to keep Bernie close and keeping this friendship-relationship afloat. Because soon, those affections for Bernie manifested into gifts.

She was buying him new clothing. A $12,000 Rolex.

Holy.

Oh, man.

First-class trips around the world to places like Egypt, Thailand, and Russia. And, of course, to go see plenty of shows in New York on Broadway, which is his dream.

And none of that stopped the rumors about what was really going on between Bernie and Marjorie.

And now I think I know where this is going.

Now, even though she was forty years older than him, whispers said that they had begun sleeping in the same room, maybe even the same bed together, when they went on these trips around the world — though Bernie denies it.

Now, it was certainly an unlikely friendship, but romance was never the direction it took, he says. Instead, Marjorie became his employer.

See, in 1993, after three years of this going on, Marjorie finally encouraged Bernie to quit the funeral business. At the time, he was only making about $24,000 a year, and Marjorie was offering a new gig that would more than double that.

For $900 a week in the early ’90s — so this is about $2,000 a week today — she asked Bernie to be her caregiver.

And for how much?

$2,000 a week.

Damn. Okay.

And her bookkeeper. She wanted him to help her with any personal stuff full-time. So that meant each morning Bernie drove to her house to run errands for her, pick out her clothes, clip her toenails — a lot of which he was actually probably already doing without a salary.

There’s no way he was clipping her toenails.

For sure. You know how hard it is for elderly people to bend down and clip their toenails?

No, because it turns out, two years prior, Marjorie had actually made a pretty huge decision. She had amended her will and made Bernie the sole recipient of her entire estate — an estate that had now kind of solely belonged to her since her husband’s passing.

So now, with this new job, he also had full access to her accounts because he was the one that was now helping her pay bills and manage her finances.

All of this to say, walking away from the funeral home was something Bernie probably felt was necessary. He couldn’t say no to her job offer and risk being taken off her will.

This is life-changing.

Plus, the job obviously came with plenty of perks — not just gifts and travel, but an advance that let Bernie purchase his own two-bedroom home only a mile away from Marjorie’s secluded estate.

And he got a new car. And then he got his pilot’s license, something he’d always wanted to do. He even bought a couple of small airplanes.

And there were some people who said they noticed a pretty positive change in Marjorie as well. Eventually, she started going to church. She even hosted a brunch at her estate for the other women at the church, which is, like, a huge first.

I was going to say, I don’t — yeah, age difference, age difference is wild. It sounds like she’s happy. Sounds like he’s happy. I mean, it sounds like it’s working out. So, all power to them at this moment.

I mean, of course, everything’s going good for the couple, but the tides are getting worse with Marjorie’s family. Because the family of the elderly person in dynamics like this always has an issue.

Well, especially when there’s this much money on the line, if you want to say, right? I mean, like, this much wealth. And anytime someone dies in general, money always causes fights. Families are torn apart. Sadly, it’s horrible.

So, in 1994, when Marjorie was 79 years old, her granddaughters actually stopped by her home to just check with her. And when Marjorie opened the door, she either pretended not to know them or she really didn’t recognize her own granddaughters.

There were sources that said Marjorie’s eyesight had started going by this point. She was demonstrating early signs of dementia. But when her granddaughter Alexandria finally convinced Marjorie to let her in, all the photos of her family in the family estate had been replaced by pictures of Bernie.

Okay, here we go.

Including every last photo of their grandfather, her late husband.

Yeah.

Was now taken down in the home.

Now, this is weird.

And maybe because of that dementia, Marjorie kind of started to venture off that property less and less over the next year or two. And by 1996, the sightings of Marjorie around town — you know, going to church, having those luncheons — came to a complete stop.

Now, at that point, it seemed like Bernie was doing just about everything for Marjorie while also finding new ways to spend his own hard-earned cash. And honestly, a lot of it seemed pretty generous.

For example, when a friend of his asked for help opening a new western wear shop in town, Bernie gave him the money. And when the church wanted a new wing, Bernie donated a hefty sum. And when a local trophy store was floundering, Bernie gave them a loan so students at the local school wouldn’t miss their trophies that year.

He bought cars — not just for himself, but for ten other people. He bought a house for a young couple in need. He provided scholarships to local kids who couldn’t afford college.

But all the while, people are curious.

Yeah, we get it. You’re working for Marjorie, obviously, but how is she? They hadn’t seen her in a while.

And Bernie was assuring everyone, you know, she’s fine. She’s just out of town visiting her sister. She’s at home taking a nap. She’s temporarily in a nursing home recovering from a stroke.

And still, no one really questioned it, at least out loud. The maid was still coming to clean the house. The gardener was still showing up to water the lawn. It was pretty much business as usual, the same as it was before Marjorie’s husband had even passed away.

Many assumed she had just become reclusive again. And you have to remember, she doesn’t really talk to anyone else in her family. She and her younger sister don’t speak. She barely would let her grandkids into her home. And even her own son, now a successful pathologist, hadn’t seen or really even spoken to her in years.

Honestly, it wasn’t even until the spring of 1997 that people really started to wonder, “Is Marjorie okay?”

Her stockbroker, one of the few people she was close with outside of Bernie, said he had been worried about her ever since Christmas. He’d sent Marjorie a turkey, and she never called or wrote to him to thank him — and that just wasn’t like her.

But he wasn’t super concerned until Marjorie missed an appointment to sign some important documents.

And then, shortly after that, in July of 1997, another local woman actually called the police out of genuine concern. She said that no one she knew had seen or heard from Marjorie lately and just recommended that they go look into it.

It took them a month, but they finally showed up.

They first called Bernie, who said he was in Las Vegas singing at a friend’s wedding. He claimed Marjorie was in a hospital under an assumed name because she didn’t want to be bothered. And he didn’t offer more than that.

So the police begin calling around, and no one has a woman in their care matching Marjorie’s description.

So they phone her estranged son next.

This is crazy.

And on August 19, 1997, Rod Jr. accompanies police to his mother’s home.

Now, by this point, Marjorie hadn’t been seen for about nine months by anyone other than Bernie. So when they get inside, they start looking for any clues of where she might be. Is there a piece of mail, a hospital bill, a phone number — anything that could lead them to her?

And they take advantage of the fact that Bernie’s not there by scanning every single inch of that place, including a chest freezer in a utility room.

There’s no way.

That’s insane.

They open this large freezer up, and inside they see frozen corn, some meat, fish, some chicken pot pies. And then, beneath it all, wrapped inside a blanket, is the body of 81-year-old Marjorie Nugent.

That is, like, mind-blowing.

So terrified of destroying evidence, the sheriff had the entire freezer taken to Dallas to remove her there for her autopsy.

It took Marjorie two days to thaw out before they could even begin the autopsy. And her cause of death — well, she was shot four times in the back.

Holy crap.

With a .22 caliber rifle.

So if there was any, like, “Oh, she got old and I just couldn’t handle it and I went a little crazy and she died naturally and I just couldn’t let go of her,” all that is out.

I’m also curious to see what happens, because if he really was on her will, like, why kill her, right? That doesn’t make any sense.

So there’s one person who obviously police are like, I think we only have one suspect here. Because there’s only one person who’s said that he’s seen her while she’s obviously been dead.

But police hate to admit it.

It is the local good man, Bernie.

Look, I have come to realize if things are too good to be true, they are too good to be true.

He is the one who told them Marjorie was in a hospital. He was the one who had access to her home, her bank account, her entire life. He was the last one who saw her.

So they begin looking for him. And they find him just as he’s about to take a local Little League team and all of their parents out to dinner.

The police are prepared to fully investigate this case, but it ends up being even easier than they imagined because right after they take Bernie in for an interview, he confesses.

Yeah, I killed her.

He admits it.

Okay.

And when they’re like, “Well, why?”

He says, “Because Marjorie was a very hateful and possessive woman, and I felt trapped.”

And he goes into more detail during this interrogation.

Bernie says that after their first five years together, traveling the world and making memories, things between them had started to sour. That Marjorie was getting more emotionally and mentally abusive.

It started small. If Bernie was even a minute late to lunch, he claimed Marjorie would call and page him incessantly until he called her back. If he spent time with someone else, he had to call her and check in repeatedly or she would, quote, “give me living hell.”

And he said it only got worse when Marjorie started getting dementia. He claimed that she had Bernie buy a gun to shoot any armadillos that stepped into her yard, and she would follow him around yelling at him while he shot them.

Now, over time, she expected him to be there for her around the clock. She wanted him to always be obedient, do everything for her at the drop of a hat, to be her constant servant.

And Bernie claimed there were times when he literally tried to leave the house, but Marjorie locked the gate before he could get away, physically trapping him inside.

And when he was asked, “Okay, why didn’t you just quit?” he gave a sob story about how he felt like he was the only person in Marjorie’s life who cared about her.

The reality was he was probably afraid he would get cut out of her will.

Plus, don’t forget, he had access to her accounts. So all of that money he was sharing around town for scholarships and cars and businesses to stay afloat — it wasn’t the advance or the salary Marjorie was paying him weekly.

It was deducted straight from her own accounts and handed out. Basically, Bernie was trying to be the town Robin Hood in a way.

Yeah, but you can’t kill an innocent woman.

It’s estimated that he stole about two million dollars of her money to give as handouts around town.

So he was — I mean, he gave two million dollars to people.

Now, of course, police take his sob story with a grain of salt, especially since Marjorie is no longer around to even defend herself.

I was going to say, that’s the other thing. You’re only actually hearing one side of the story, and considering he just killed someone, he could be lying about everything.

Is it totally possible she was a big pain, that she was elderly, she was losing her mind a little, and maybe taking it out on him? For sure.

Even so, people have bosses they hate. I mean, but you don’t go around killing people. If you don’t like someone, you simply remove yourself from their life. Easy peasy.

But they still find it hard to believe that the town’s most beloved philanthropist, this nice guy, could be guilty not just of murder, but then stuffing an elderly woman in a freezer and lying about it for nine months.

Even when Bernie confesses how he did it, police find the story hard to swallow.

But here’s what Bernie says next. He claimed for months he thought about hitting Marjorie with a baseball bat to end things once and for all, but he couldn’t bear the thought of her suffering. That’s what he said. So he considered other gruesome methods.

And then, on the morning of November 19, 1996 — a couple days before I was born, by the way — the 38-year-old Bernie was ready to act.

That morning, around 7 a.m., he went to Marjorie’s house, made her breakfast, just like he did every day. But before he went back to his house to take a quick shower, he noticed something. The rifle that Marjorie made him use to kill those armadillos.

He gets an idea.

He moves the rifle into a bathroom near the garage. And then when he came back later, he told Marjorie he would give her a ride to the dry cleaners to pick up her things. He followed her out into her garage, went and grabbed the gun, and then shot her once in the back.

Now, when he realized that elderly Marjorie was still breathing, he shot her three more times.

And then he began looking for ways to get rid of her body. And that’s when it dawned on him — the freezer in the utility room.

He dragged her body down the hall and removed enough items to fit the 5'2", 81-year-old woman, now wrapped in a blanket, inside. He placed the frozen items back on top, cleaned up the blood, and then just went about living life.

Crazy.

What’s weird is — crazy. Why did Bernie just leave her in the freezer for nine months? Like, what was his plan? What was he going to say to people?

I don’t think at that point you have a plan. I think he probably was just — I think he was probably hoping no one would ever check the home.

But I mean, I agree — not agree. I will say that, yeah, if her body was somewhere else or they could never find the body, he probably would have never gotten caught.

Yeah, but everyone would have suspected him for sure.

But what I mean is, would he have gotten convicted, though? Probably not. There was more, like, “Oh, she must have just gotten dementia and ran away.” Like, there were more logical ways he could have gotten away with it. Not that we want that. I’m just saying that.

But you’ve got to remember, everyone in town loves this guy. Like, loves this guy. Including the police.

I mean, of course they do. He just gave two million dollars to all of them.

And Marjorie has kind of always had this bad reputation.

Yeah.

So her road to justice is already…

I’m actually really curious to see how this trial goes.

So he tells police, he’s like, “Yeah, I know. Like, if I had just gotten rid of her, maybe I would have gotten away with it, but I couldn’t bear the idea of not giving her a proper burial. After all, I was a mortician and a funeral home director most of my life. So I just waited too long to do it.”

But what came next was maybe even more baffling.

Once Bernie’s bond was set for the murder charges at 1.5 million, a bunch of women in town came together to try and fundraise for his release.

Man, this is going to be a nightmare.

The DA actually had to go to the Justice of the Peace and add theft charges to get his bond price raised to 2.7 million in hopes of keeping this fundraiser from succeeding.

The local reverend called for people in the church to pray for Bernie.

Oh god.

Bernie’s friends hired a famous criminal defense lawyer for him named Clifton “Scrappy” Holmes.

All to say, it was like the entire town of Carthage basically rallied around Bernie regardless of whether he was guilty or not, regardless of the heinous crimes he admitted to.

I mean, it’s got to be — I mean, as much as maybe people don’t want to admit, it’s because he’s helped so much financially. And so people are like, “Well, she didn’t help us. He helped us. She didn’t use her money. He used her money.”

Correct.

To them, their minds were made up. Bernie was the Robin Hood, and Marjorie was the wicked witch that he had put an end to.

The justice system would see it completely differently, though. Because there were so many people around Carthage who knew the case and were already obviously siding with Bernie, the trial had to be moved fifty miles away.

The 1999 trial lasted under a week, where Bernie’s defense claimed he had killed Marjorie in a sudden act of passion. They said the crime was not premeditated, even though Bernie had already admitted to this when talking to police.

And after only twenty minutes of deliberation, the jury came back with their verdict. Bernie was guilty of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to life in prison.

Wow.

But, I mean, yeah — Bernie’s story actually doesn’t end there. In fact, it’s kind of really just heating up, because a famous filmmaker had caught wind of Bernie’s salacious case and was like, “Oh my gosh, this Robin Hood, like, killed her and then spent her money,” and this filmmaker wanted to turn it into a scripted feature.

His name was Richard Linklater. You may know him as the writer-director of Dazed and Confused.

Now, in 2011, he released Bernie’s story, aptly titled Bernie, onto the big screen. The feature starred Jack Black as Bernie and Shirley MacLaine as Marjorie.

How have I never seen this? Have I seen this?

Well, here’s the thing. The depiction of Marjorie didn’t exactly make her family happy. It seemed like he kind of shared a similar mentality with the people of Carthage — that Bernie was a hero for all of this and Marjorie was controlling, manipulative, abusive, and deserved what happened to her.

Wait, I think I’ve seen this.

It certainly didn’t help that the movie was written as a dark comedy, kind of making a joke.

Yeah.

And the worst part was that it actually influenced the real Bernie’s fate. Because after the movie came out in 2011, an attorney named Jodie Cole got very interested in Bernie’s case, because this movie really made everyone hate Marjorie.

And she met with him and filed an appeal stating his rights were violated. She said he had been coerced into confessing and that he was bullied into signing that confession without a lawyer present. He also said that the officers threatened to expose his homosexuality if he didn’t cooperate with them.

Now, also in this new statement, he claimed that Marjorie’s abusive nature had triggered kind of a post-traumatic stress response. Almost like, you know, because he had been sexually abused as a child, he was in a dissociative state when he committed the murder, which was backed by analysis from a forensic psychiatrist.

So basically, this new lawyer comes in and is like, look, you can only take so much abuse from someone. And due to the history of abuse that happened as a child, his child brain took over, went into a dissociative state to, like, save itself and to survive — and killed her.

Interesting.

Okay.

So they’re kind of comparing it to, I mean, any abuse in general. Like, if a man or a female in a relationship, someone is abusing the other, and the other person kills that person.

And I mean, yeah, kind of like a PTSD defense.

Okay.

Now, Jodie Cole brought all of this to the DA, who bought it — hook, line, and sinker. The DA threw out the life sentence and ordered a new trial.

Bernie was then released from prison in 2014 until that new trial could take place. And with nowhere really to go, he got in touch with one person who had previously offered to help — writer and director Richard Linklater, who had made basically the movie based off of Bernie’s life.

And between 2014 and 2016, Bernie actually lived in Richard’s garage apartment in Austin.

And naturally, Marjorie’s family is pissed.

Oh, yeah.

I’m sure. This new movie, that’s crazy. It really, whether true or not, painted her in a horrible light and then actually affected her real-life killer’s sentence.

If the movie was never released, there would be no question about Bernie’s future. He would still be behind bars.

And now there was a possibility that he could be walking free for good and maybe go on and take advantage of another rich elderly widow, which is how they saw it.

So they held their breath as they waited for the next trial, which began in April of 2016.

Suddenly, old witnesses were called to the stand. Family members were forced to reopen old wounds. And Bernie sat there quietly, waiting to see if his fate would change, or if he had just received a temporary vacation from prison.

The jury decided it was the latter.

On April 22, they came back with the verdict. Bernie was still guilty of first-degree murder and would go back to serving life behind bars.

Wow.

However, Bernie would now be eligible for parole again in a few more years. In August of 2029, when he is 71 years old, he will be eligible for parole.

Now, since then, Marjorie’s granddaughter, Shauna, has started a nonprofit to educate people on the signs and dangers of elder financial abuse. Because remember, this isn’t, like, a rarity. This type of con happens often.

It’s just whether we believe this was a con or not.

As for Marjorie, she did get the proper burial she deserved in a small cemetery just outside of Carthage. Many of the family members who she hadn’t even spoken to for years prior to her death came to pay their final respects, including her estranged but certainly loved younger sister, who had seemingly decided that maybe Marjorie wasn’t the villain in her story after all.

And that is the murder of Marjorie Nugent.

That’s crazy.

I can’t believe there’s a movie on it. I’ve seen the cover art, but I’ve never seen that movie. And I’ve seen a lot of Jack Black stuff, so that surprises me.

But yeah, I mean, here’s the thing. I think that I like looking at it from the justice system. You can’t kill people.

Here’s my thing.

Yes.

Yeah. You can’t kill. You can’t do that. You cannot kill.

Let’s say even if all that stuff is true, right? Let’s say everything that they’re saying is true — you still cannot kill people. You have to take accountability.

Yeah. I don’t know. I don’t know, because there’s just so many excuses. Maybe I’m a little biased, because I don’t think I believe he was being abused. Sorry. Like, I just — I don’t know. I don’t think he was.

It’s not like the other DV cases we’ve covered, where the guy or the girl is beating someone in their relationship for years and years and there’s marks and there’s pictures and it’s insane and it’s crazy. Like, this is a very different situation in my mind.

And yeah, crazy.

I don’t know. Listen, I’ll be the first to admit that sometimes old people can be cranky and annoying, for sure. Granted, they’ve had to be alive for a long time, so I don’t really know if this is justified or not. But I’ll be the first to admit that they cannot be the most fun to be around. Like, sometimes it can be a miserable experience.

They’re very entitled sometimes when they get in this state of mind, which again is why it’s your responsibility to either remove yourself from their life, or figure out a way for them to be taken care of, or just deal with it.

Yeah. We don’t just go around killing people.

Also, you can’t tell me that he didn’t want her money.

Well, I mean, truly, truly, truly, if he was unhappy, he probably — I mean, she wasn’t strong enough to keep him there physically. So, you know, he could have just simply left.

Yeah, but he was Robin Hood.

That’s crazy.

This is a crazy case.

I mean, he had all this money he needed to give to people. Insane. That’s wild.

I don’t know. I think it’s just so complicated because of what he did with the money.

But yeah.

All right, you guys. Thank you so much for joining us for today’s episode, and we will see you next week with another one.

I love it.

I hate it.

Goodbye.

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