From the 1880s until long after World War I, the Texas Legislature enacted laws aplenty prohibiting most every imaginable variety of sexual misconduct. One law even granted husbands free shooting rights to bag any reprobate caught between the sheets with his wife. Still, that wasn’t enough to satisfy the typical Texan of that day who felt free, duty-bound even, by the Old South’s Code of Honor (“the unwritten law”) to kill, or at least maim, any libertine who had, by word or deed, somehow sexually dishonored his wife or, for that matter, any female relatives of his family.

Illicit sex is the catalyst in all the Texas murder trials recounted in Sex, Murder, and the Unwritten Law. In each story the victim, at least in the perception of the defendant, had committed some sexual transgression. In every case the defendant opened fire with premeditated intent to kill. And in all the resulting trials, the defense relied at least in part on the unwritten law. Bill Neal explores the imaginative tactics of defense lawyers who extricated obviously guilty clients when there appeared to be no legal basis upon which to peg a defense. Somehow, in each case, defense lawyers managed to outmaneuver prosecutors and judges, whose efforts to rein in excesses met with little success. Neal’s storytelling mastery make these courtroom triumphs and the underlying strategies fascinating to lawyers, historians, and general readers alike.