(AP)
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A sweet man who could select the perfect gift basket for a widow in mourning, Bernie Tiede was the murderer you could bring home to mother.
Tiede, as played by Jack Black in the new Richard Linklater film “Bernie,” was a closeted gay assistant funeral director so beloved by the otherwise conservative residents of Carthage, Texas, that even after murdering 81-year-old Marjorie Nugent and stuffing her body in a freezer — where it remained for nine months — almost no one in Carthage wanted him convicted.
“One lady was talking about how much [Marjorie] was disliked,” says director Linklater of the town’s notoriously wealthy and nasty widow. “And she goes, ‘Honey, there’s people ’round here that would have shot her for five dollars.’”
Tiede met Nugent at the funeral of her husband, who had owned the local bank. After calling on her several times — something he regularly did for new widows — they developed a friendship, and he became her assistant.
But while Tiede was the nicest man in town, doing everything from singing at people’s funerals to helping them with their taxes, even he could only tolerate so much of Nugent’s cruelty.
Browbeating him into wearing a beeper, Nugent kept him on a virtual leash, sometimes beeping him almost 100 times a day, and erupting on him when he was late to respond. In one scene depicted in the film, Tiede tries to leave, but she closes the electronic gate to her property, trapping him inside.
This kept on until one day, on impulse, Tiede grabbed a gun and shot her four times in the back.
“When a wife shoots the husband while he’s asleep, it’s like, why didn’t you leave? ‘I couldn’t leave. I liked him too much.’ This was a twisted version of that,” says Linklater. “She was this little old lady who had nobody. He felt sorry for her, and it was a battle between trying to do good, and this darkness. You just get the sense that he couldn’t leave her. She had to leave him.”
Linklater, who first portrayed the peculiarities of his native East Texas in 1991’s “Slacker,” was fascinated by the case after reading about it in a 1998 article in Texas Monthly. The townspeople’s reactions resonated so deeply with him that he structured the film so that while Black and Shirley MacLaine, who plays Nugent, depict the tale, actual Carthage townspeople provide commentary as a kind of down home Greek chorus.
“The eternal contradiction attracted me so much,” says Linklater. “These towns are real law-and-order, lock ’em up and throw away the key. Yet this case shows you how life is a popularity contest. If you’re really well-liked and you’ve done good things for people, you can transgress. If you’re really hated, then when bad things happen to you, no one cares.”
Linklater remains in touch with Tiede, who is serving a life sentence in the Telford Prison Unit in New Boston, Texas, and says that Tiede’s essential goodness allowed him to give this murder tale the light-hearted touch it deserved.