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Bill Neal, a native of Quanah, Texas, is a rancher, former newspaper reporter, retired trial lawyer, and an author. In 1964 he graduated with honors from the University of Texas Law School where he served as Comment Editor of the Texas Law Review. Following graduation he also served as a Briefing Attorney for the Texas Supreme Court before returning to his hometown where he practiced law for forty years – twenty years as a District Attorney and twenty years in private practice with a focus on domestic relations and criminal law.
Always interested in history, Mr. Neal wrote two local history books while in active law practice: The Last Frontier: The Story of Hardeman County, Texas and a collection of oral histories of settlers in the Medicine Mound community where he still ranches entitled Our Stories: Legends of the Mounds.
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Since retirement from law practice, Mr. Neal has capitalized on his forty years experience in criminal law to write fascinating tales of early-day murder trials in Texas and the Oklahoma Territory. Researching old court records, newspaper files, and other documents as well as conducting interviews with local historians, Mr. Neal has unearthed stories of frontier justice in action—many of which were never told before.
He combines a natural talent for storytelling with meticulous and well-documented research, all of which has resulted in a trilogy of books that not only brings to life a number of notorious killings and celebrated murder trials of yesteryear, but also illuminates the life and times of the larger-than-life characters who populate his yarns.
Published by Texas Tech University Press the titles are: Getting Away With Murder on the Texas Frontier: Notorious Killings & Celebrated Trials (2006), From Guns to Gavels: How Justice Grew Up in the Outlaw West (2008), and Sex, Murder, and the Unwritten Law: Courting Judicial Mayhem, Texas Style (to be published in September 2009). |
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