Terry Bevill said he was only telling the truth when he said under oath that he didn’t think a friend could get a fair trial in Wood County in East Texas. Bevill’s life and career have been shattered in the seven years since.
Bevill, 64, is about to get his day in court, where a federal jury will hear his claim that he did nothing wrong.
Bevill, a former police captain in Quitman, the seat of Wood County, was fired after signing an affidavit saying he did not believe a friend could be fairly tried in the county because of the close relationships among the county’s district attorney, its state district judge and its sheriff.
The state judge in question, Jeffrey Fletcher, one of the defendants in a federal lawsuit filed by Bevill, called him reprehensible and a liar from the bench. Bevill, a 20-year law enforcement veteran, was charged with aggravated perjury, a felony. The charges were later dismissed when a Wood County grand jury refused to issue an indictment against Bevill, but the one-time police captain lost not only his livelihood but his health insurance, even as his gravely ill wife was battling a rare disease requiring intensive and expensive medical treatments.
“He has paid a very high price for telling the truth,” Bevill’s lawyer, Laura Benitez Geisler of Dallas, said in an interview. “Terry’s really excited about finally having his day in court. It’s been a long time coming.”
On Monday, Bevill’s civil suit is scheduled to go to trial before a jury in the court of U.S. District Judge Amos L. Mazzant III in Sherman in the Eastern District of Texas. Bevill’s suit, filed in June 2019 and amended in August of that year, contends that he “became the target of retaliation and punishment” for speaking out against prominent local officials in Wood County, including, in addition to Fletcher, Wood County’s district attorney at the time, James Wheeler, its sheriff, Tom Castloo, and David Dobbs, then the mayor of Quitman.
Bevill’s lawsuit seeks unspecified compensatory and punitive damages. Geisler said her client will be the first witness in his case. He could take the stand as soon as Monday afternoon.
Bevill is represented by, in addition to Geisler, Jody Leigh Rodenberg, Rebecca Neumann and Sean Joseph McCaffity of Dallas.
Dobbs, the former Quitman Mayor, is represented by Lance Vincent and Douglas Alan Ritcheson of Tyler. Castloo, the former sheriff, is represented by Robert Scott Davis and Robin Hill O’Donoghue of Tyler. Wheeler, the former Wood County DA, is represented by Grant David Blaies of Fort Worth. And former Judge Fletcher is represented by Brianna Michelle Krominga of the Texas attorney general’s office.
Attempts to reach counsel for the defendants were unsuccessful. In their responses to Bevill’s amended complaint, all generally denied the former police captain’s allegations.
According to his suit, Bevill’s troubles began when he agreed to sign an affidavit for a friend, David McGee, a jailer in the Wood County sheriff’s department who was charged with tampering with a governmental record to facilitate the escape of a county jail inmate — a woman charged with driving while intoxicated with a child passenger, and a woman with whom, according to court records, McGee had had a sexual relationship.
McGee asked Bevill to affirm in writing that, in Bevill’s opinion, McGee could not get a fair trial because of the improperly close relationships involving Judge Fletcher, District Attorney Wheeler and Sheriff Castloo.
Bevill did so, writing in his sworn affidavit, filed in state district court in June 2017, “I believe it will not be possible for David McGee to get a fair and impartial trial in Wood County, Texas due to the pretrial publicity involved in this case and the personal relationships between the Sheriff, the District Attorney, and the Presiding Judge in this matter. I am very familiar with the close relationships between these influential persons, and David McGee will be greatly prejudiced having a trial in Wood County.”
By all accounts, when Bevill’s affidavit was made public, the shit hit the fan.
“Bevill’s affidavit was filed with the Wood County District Clerk at 3:03 p.m. on Friday, June 2, 2017,” Judge Mazzant wrote, summarizing Bevill’s contentions, in a pretrial order last May. “By 5:38 p.m., Wheeler sent Castloo a text with Bevill’s affidavit and within a few minutes, Castloo forwarded Wheeler’s text to the Quitman City Secretary. … Over the weekend Defendants were in communication and conspired to retaliate against Bevill and agreed he would suffer an adverse employment consequence for speaking out against a sitting judge, district attorney and sheriff.”
According to Bevill’s suit, when he ran into Castloo at a gas station, the sheriff “expressed to Bevill his anger and frustration with McGee and the crimes McGee was alleged to have committed.” The sheriff, according to the complaint, “told Bevill he hoped McGee would be convicted and put ‘under the jail’ for a long time.”
Bevill’s lawsuit claims the sheriff, the judge and the district attorney “threatened to retaliate against the City of Quitman and its residents by withholding Wood County resources and support for the Quitman Police Department if Bevill was not fired in retaliation for the affidavit.” Bevill was fired on June 21, 2017.
McGee’s motion for a change of venue was denied. He was convicted in a two-day trial and sentenced to two years in prison.
At the conclusion of McGee’s trial, Fletcher, who presided over the criminal case, announced that he was issuing a warrant for Bevill’s arrest, alleging that Bevill had committed aggravated perjury, a felony. The judge called Bevill’s affidavit a “lie, pure and simple.”
The criminal case against Bevill dissolved when a grand jury refused to indict him, but by then, his lawsuit contends, “he was unable to work in any law enforcement capacity.”
Geisler said her client has since supported himself by working in “manual labor jobs,” operating construction equipment while continuing to care for his sick wife.
The Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in May of this year that “Bevill suffered a violation of his clearly established constitutional rights” under the First Amendment.
Wheeler resigned as Wood County district attorney after the Texas Rangers opened an investigation into his conduct in October 2018. In a Jan. 9, 2023, sworn declaration, Angela Albers, who is now the Wood County district attorney, said that when she worked for Wheeler in 2018, he made “repeated and unwanted advances” toward her. Albers said she feared retaliation for rebuffing Wheeler’s advances in part because, in her opinion, Bevill “likely” had been retaliated against as a result of “the close relationship” between Wheeler, Castloo and Fletcher.
Albers is listed as a plaintiff’s witness in next week’s trial before Judge Mazzant.
Fletcher left the bench in 2020. He was publicly reprimanded by the State Commission on Judicial Conduct in 2021 in a matter unrelated to Bevill’s case and was an unsuccessful candidate earlier this year in the Republican primary for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives. Fletcher, whose largest campaign donation in that race was from his mother Nelda for $10,000, received only 19.3% of the vote in his attempt to unseat District 5 incumbent Cole Hefner. The former state district judge is now in private practice in Mineola.
Castloo lost the Republican primary race for Wood County sheriff in 2020 by a wide margin to former Quitman Police Chief Kelly Cole. It was Cole who presented Bevill with the findings of the city’s investigation in June 2017 that ultimately led to the former police captain’s termination.
Dobbs remains a member of the Quitman City Council, though he is no longer mayor.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the employer of Brianna Michelle Krominga. She is an assistant Texas attorney general.