The title of this volume is a touch misleading. Longtime Abilene attorney Bill Neal does indeed fill the book with tales of justice miscarried, manipulated, and mangled, and he does chronicle more than a half-dozen instances of cold-blooded murderers walking away scot-free. But the book isn't so much about getting away with a crime so much as it describes a legal system of out whack. It demonstrates that, in America, any country lawyer worth his whiskey can, with a bit of flair and a modicum of intelligence, outfox a judge and jury. Additionally, Neal's area of focus is not on what most people regard as the "wild frontier", not even in Texas, although in most respects it pretty much was at the time most of these trials took place. Still, even to those involved as witnesses, victims, and even perpetrators of the heinous crimes he outlines, things around them were fairly civilized. Murder was always shocking. It pretty much still is.

In this neatly appointed volume, Neal offers a light-hearted romp through some of the most absurdly comedic capital court cases to appear in that particular part of Texas - the multi-county area surrounding Abilene. Ranging from point-blank shootings to sneaky revenge killings to convoluted stories of true love gone fatally wrong, these accounts are packed with jaw-dropping details of desperate people committing outrageous crimes and then, astonishingly, walking away without so much as a guilty stain.

The book begins with an audacious if somewhat ill-conceived scam involving the Wells Fargo office in the Panhandle, then moves adroitly to the well known 1896 Wichita Falls bank robbery. Neal soon is dealing with feuding families shooting it out in front of a small-town picture show, then comes the unaccountable gunning down of one partner by another, and along the way he adds knifings, poisonings, bushwhackings, and harrowing posse pursuits through the wiles of Oklahoma Territory. There are also deliberate murders during a trial and one almost comic shootout on a lover's lane. Most of the time, rapid arrests are followed by elaborate defense schemes to gain mistrials, appeals, and excuses for acquittals. Sometimes, they are crouched in legal wrangling. Sometimes, they're the result of nothing more than a juror's holding out for innocence on the grounds that the defendant owed him money and he feared a conviction would thwart collection. Overall, these criminal anecdotes leave the reader unsure of whether to laugh at the farcical antics of the players or weep for the sad state of American justice.

For the most part, and with only brief sojourns in western Oklahoma, Neal focuses on several Texas counties that the residents call "west" and the rest of the state calls "north central" : principally Hardeman, Childress, Foard, Wilbarger, King, and Knox. He spans the period from roughly the mid-1880's to the 1930's, an era that saw all of these counties settled and organized. It was, for the most part, a transitional period, moving from the free-range, cowboy and rancher culture of the post-Civil War era into a more modern 20th-century point of view.

This was still a raw land, never mind the advent of the advent of the automobile, electric lights, and the telephone. Men and women still relied on horses and buggies for transportation over roads that were little more than cattle trails. Men and women went around well armed, ready for personal combat. Victorian ideals and values dictated a profound sense of 19th-century codes of honor and decorum ; and, in spite of written laws laws and statutes, common sense and practical wisdom often trumped legalistic notions of absolute justice.

The population of Texas then was somehow more naive, more willing to extend credibility to anyone who was willing to swear and tell the truth, no matter how clear it was that he was manipulating the facts to suit his purpose or to justify his payoff. To a great extent, the trials were far less about the crimes and criminals than they were about the pageantry and theater of their spectacle. Attorneys would go to any lengths to circumvent the letter of the law and to build their own reputations. As a result, trials, especially murder trials, were often the highlight of of a town's entertainment calendar, and pontificating barristers vying for dominance through a mixture of frontier platitude and Ciceronian eloquence - all mixed with a heady formula of audacity and brash displays of ego - were the stars of the show.

Perhaps the best example of this theatricality was a moment when Temple Houston, son of the famous Sam, emptied a revolver loaded with blanks at the jury. As the terrified panel scrambled for exits and jumped out of windows, Houston successfully moved for a mistrial. The jury had been sequestered and forbidden to leave the courtroom unescorted.

Neal's chapters unfold with the easy charm of a writer comfortable with his subject, both a virtue and a fault of the volume. Clumsy phraseology clutters the prose too often to recommend that a reader take him too seriously. Phrases such as "he coated the butter a bit thick on the bun" or "he took a permanent vacation" or "an aggravated case of cold feet", or describing an alibi as being "thin as a bowl of bus station chili" are too precious, as is the statement "Texarkana had about as much in common with El Paso as Peking does with Peoria". Such folksy inserts might might work better if they were original with Neal, but astute readers will attribute some of his expressions to Texas-born former CBS news anchor Dan Rather - indeed, some have been dubbed "Ratherisms" by media pundits, and not all of them were original with Rather, either.

Other painfully countrified terms such as "a'dangling", "a frog's hair distinction", "warts and all", "scarce as hen's teeth", "head to heel", and an occasional mild oath and jarring use of exclamation points and italics to express shock undermine Neal's authorial stance and, from time to time, self-asserted academic objectivity. Additional missteps such as mistaking "besotten" for "besotted", "teatotalling" for "temperance", and not knowing the difference between a felon's being "hanged" and "hung" also bespeak a stylistic carelessness out of tune with a a well-researched volume such as this.

On the other hand, Neal's voice is very much in tune with the folks he's writing about. For the most part, these are irascible and unconscionable killers appearing before no-nonsense, politically-savvy circuit court judges. Whether they were notorious outlaws or leading pillars of the community, crusty old ranchers or gray-haired mothers, slick confidence men or state senators, one way or another their lives are connected through heinous crime and travesties of justice.

Neal notes that more men are killed in Texas than in any country in the world, but as one attorney pointed out, "more men needed killing in Texas than in any country in the world". And killed many were, while their killers were released often after being defended by self-educated, country lawyers whose natural sense of eloquence and talent for dramatic declamation often prevailed in the face of irrefutable evidence and eyewitness accounts to snatch a not-guilty verdict out of what should have been an open-and-shut case. Although most of these rustic mouthpieces had never seen the inside of a law school, their canny ability to manipulate the still-forming codes of American criminal law into their client's favor offers an instructive lesson in both the flexibility and the evolutionary nature of the Constitution.

Although Neal boasts no scholarly credentials in legal history or theory, he has years of experience as both prosecuting and defense attorney. He concludes each account with an analysis of the missteps taken by judges, juries, and appeals courts. He notes where the errors were made an loopholes exploited, where the letter of the law was often bent completely out of shape because fail-safes were lacking. At the same time, he points out that the official records of the trials seldom tell the entire story of the crimes being adjudicated and suggests on several occasions that justice might well have been better served by its miscarriage rather than by its enforcement.

Overall, Getting Away With Murder On The Texas Frontier is a delightful read, a worthwhile visit to a time and place in Texas where transition in the social order were being painfully worked out. Because the accounts are all factual, involving real people whose descendants are still alive and possibly living in the area, these stories take on an almost ghostly quality, one that lingers long after their chapters are closed. Bill Neal has offered something special in this collection of legal anecdotes : a snapshot of our nearer history and a reminder that, perhaps, we haven't come so far after all. When one considers the sensational trials of O.J. Simpson or the Rodney King assailants, one realizes that there is more at work in a court of law than weighing evidence and seeking justice.