Word: harrelson
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...assassinated in this century. That single shot triggered one of the most extensive federal investigations and prosecutions in U.S. history. The three-year investigation cost $5 million. Last week the work paid off: after an eleven-week trial, a San Antonio jury found the Government's suspect, Charles Harrelson, 44, a twice-indicted and once-convicted contract murderer, guilty of killing Judge Wood. Harrelson faces a mandatory life sentence...
Unlike many accused felons, Charles Harrelson did not try to depict himself as an upstanding citizen, even while proclaiming his innocence. On trial in San Antonio since late September for the 1979 assassination of Federal Judge John H. Wood Jr., Harrelson, now serving a 40-year sentence on drug and gun charges, testified last week that he could not possibly be guilty. Reason: on the morning the judge was shot dead in front of his San Antonio town home, said Harrelson, he had been in Dallas, running some extraordinary errands: returning a golf putter he had borrowed to determine...
...going to kill Judge Wood,' " she wrote, adding that she did not take the threat seriously. That summer, she wrote, her husband asked her to deliver some money to Las Vegas. "He said that this was for the payoff for your husband's murder." Harrelson's attorney, Thomas G. Sharpe Jr., says he will prove that the Harrelsons were 270 miles away in Dallas when Wood was killed...
With U.S. District Judge William Sessions presiding over the trial for his colleague's murder, three defendants face charges: Charles V. Harrelson, 44, a convicted contract killer accused of shooting Wood for a payment of $250,000 from Jimmy Chagra; Harrelson's wife Jo Ann, 42, who allegedly bought the murder rifle; and Jimmy's wife Elizabeth, 28, who is charged with covering up the crime. Jimmy will be tried separately later. The final defendant was to have been the youngest Chagra brother, Joseph, 35, an El Paso lawyer. But last month he agreed to plead guilty...
...points out that Chagra's own lawyer had requested that Wood excuse himself from the case, citing bias, but Wood refused. According to the prosecution's scenario, Jimmy and Joseph then agreed to have the judge murdered, and in the spring of 1979 Jimmy met Charles Harrelson in Las Vegas and offered him the job. Jahn plans to introduce tape recordings made secretly by the FBI when Joseph visited Jimmy in 1980 in the federal prison in Leavenworth, Kans. On those tapes, says Jahn, the brothers discuss the murder...