Charles Harrelson (left) in 1960 and his son Woody in “Natural Born Killers.” (
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Run, Brother, Run
A Memoir of a
Murder in My Family
by David Berg
Scribner
It wasn’t an act — Woody Harrelson’s father was a real killer.
A new book by Texas trial lawyer David Berg has unearthed evidence that he says pins the unsolved 1968 murder of his brother on the actor’s “hit man” dad.
“Run, Brother, Run” alleges that a rival businessman hired Charles Harrelson — who was connected to more than a dozen contract killings — to knock off Alan Berg, a carpet salesman and gambler, after business dealings turned “vicious.”
Berg is “confident” that Harrelson “kidnapped my brother and murdered him for $1,500.”
According to the book, Harrelson’s girlfriend, Sandra Sue Attaway, lured Berg to the Brass Jar, a Houston bar. Harrelson forced Berg into the car with a gun and told Attaway to drive to a remote location. There, he got out and shot Berg in the temple. Harrelson reportedly strangled Berg after the gunshot failed to kill him.
Harrelson, 32, was acquitted of Berg’s murder during a 1970 trial, but the victim’s family has uncovered new documents — among them evidence that Harrelson’s alibi was bogus, statements from a witness whom Harrelson confessed to, and interviews with Attaway outlining each step of the crime — that they say prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Harrelson was the killer.
Despite his dad’s murderous ways, Woody loved him.
“If you sit down and rap with the guy, the main thing you’re probably going to do is laugh,” Woody, who did not return calls for comment about the book, said in a 1994 interview.
Even David Berg describes the elder Harrelson in the book as an “avid reader” with an “impressive” vocabulary; a man who could sometimes be “gentle and romantic.”
At the time of Harrelson’s trial for Berg’s killing, local newspapers described him as a “pretty boy” and a “big spender.” One woman who knew him commented, “Even if he did kill somebody, I still like him.”
But his associates knew him to be a cunning and remorseless killer.
It’s no wonder that director Oliver Stone reportedly urged Woody to play the sadistic but celebrated Mickey Knox in 1994’s “Natural Born Killers” “more like your father.”
Charles Harrelson was first arrested for robbery (his day job was selling dictionaries) when Woody was just 7 and disappeared, leaving his three sons with their mom in Texas.
He made his money as a card and pool shark. Woody once boasted of his father that there’s “maybe a handful of people in the world who can do what he can do with a deck of cards.”
But his gambling debts hooked him in with members of the Sicilian mob. To make good on what he owed, he began contract killing.
Woody only learned of his dad’s notoriety when, at 12 years old, he heard his father’s name mentioned as the suspect in the for-hire assassination of US District Judge John H. Wood Jr. outside of his home in San Antonio, Texas. Harrelson was hired by drug kingpin Jimmy Chagra, who was scheduled to appear in court for drug trafficking before Woods.
“I’m sitting there thinking there can’t be another Charles V. Harrelson. I mean, that’s my dad! It was a wild realization,” Woody told the Guardian in 2012.
Harrelson shot Wood point blank in the back of his head — the first American judge to be murdered in the 20th century.
After two years on the lam following the slay, he was apprehended in Texas, high on cocaine, where he admitted not only to Wood’s murder but bizarrely claimed he was an accomplice in President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
Still, Woody, who reconciled with his father during the Wood trial in 1981, spent “millions” trying to secure a retrial. But it was all for naught — in 2007, Harrelson died from natural causes in prison at the age of 69.
Woody, according to reports, was “devastated.”
“How do I feel about him? Well I love him. I definitely love him. Very fond of him. I mean, there’s probably a lot of people who should be behind bars. I don’t necessarily think he’s one of them,” Woody said in a TV interview before his father’s death.
Author Berg had a different perspective: “I couldn’t stomach . . . his capitalizing on his father’s past.”
But Berg didn’t write the book for revenge. Instead, he writes, he aims to “set the record straight” about his brother’s murder and “lay out in writing the injustices he suffered.”
scahalan@nypost.com