Blood and Money on Horseshoe Bay

Produced by Jay Young and Jenna Jackson

This story originally aired on Nov. 1, 2008. It was updated on May 29, 2010.

In the Texas Hill Country, just outside Austin, sits a little piece of paradise called Horseshoe Bay. Police Chief Bill Lane has patrolled these waterways for years and he says being assigned there is like dying and going to heaven.

The area is tranquil, beautiful and mostly affluent.

But the serenity of this tranquil setting was shattered in November 2005, when police were dispatched to the lakeside mansion of one of its most colorful, eccentric citizens, millionaire Charlie White.

"We felt, the night that we found the body, that this could be a very broad investigation," Lane tells "48 Hours Mystery" correspondent Peter Van Sant.

So Lane turned to a legendary band of lawmen, the Texas Rangers, and veteran Ranger Joey Gordon.

What did Gordon and an officer see, as they made their way into the house? "It looked very orderly. There was nothing out of place. But as we entered into the living room, we began to detect the odor of a decomposing body," the ranger remembers.

It was clear to Gordon that White had been brutally beaten. "We found that his ribs had been broken, he had received several blows into the jaw and head area," he recalls.

Gordon believes a large liquor bottle was used to smash Charlie's face. "To knock a tooth completely out and across a body and half way across a room takes significant amount of force," he explains.

The crime scene: See footage taken by police investigators inside Charlie White's mansion

An extension cord was also found wrapped several times around Charlie's neck.
Asked what ultimately led to his death, Gordon says, "The M.E,'s office listed blunt force trauma and strangulation as the cause of death."

Charlie's friends Rosanne and Jerome Davis, Carol Noble, Liz Taber, and Kathy Turner, soon learned of Charlie's fate. "It was horrible. We live in this beautiful community. These things aren't supposed to happen," Noble says.

It was hard to imagine that this larger-than-life man was gone. Besides his friends, Charlie left behind a family and an ex-wife.

"I wanted to go to college but I guess I wanted to marry him more," says Gerta, who was 16 when she first met Charlie at his military school prom.

"He was tall and good looking," she remembers. "We danced once. And I went home and told my parents that I had met the man I wanted to marry."

Charlie and Gerta went on to have five children. Darin was the youngest. "A lot of the memories came from his Little League coaching," Darin remembers. "I was the 7-year-old on the 8-year-old team. I remember one game where he sent me in the middle of the line with all the big kids and that was quite fun. And I came back with a big grin on my face."

Charlie made his fortune building a profitable chain of beauty schools throughout the Southwest. But the more successful he became, the more his marriage began to unravel.

Darin admits that he doesn't have any fond memories of his parents living together as a married couple.

So no one was surprised when in 1975, Charlie and Gerta got a divorce. But a far more serious tragedy was about to unfold. That same year, their 11-year-old daughter was struck by a car and eventually died. And in 2001, another son committed suicide. Charlie's friends say he never got over losing two children.

But Charlie moved on, eventually retiring to a life of leisure and luxury. "There was not enough time in the day to do everything Charlie wanted to do," remembers Liz Taber.

Asked what Charlie's passions in life were, Kathy Hasting tells Van Sant, "Women. Money, sports and women. "

Some of those women Kathy Hastings says were dates, many others were paid to party - high priced prostitutes.

How did she know?

"He told me," Hastings said. "Charlie would have sex with one girl on Thursday and maybe on the weekend he'd have sex with someone else. And he didn't keep it a secret."

Chief Lane says Charlie lived a life on the edge, one that he would consider risky. Police wondered if that risky lifestyle could have something to do with his murder.

"It could be that a hooker deal gone bad. Maybe the prostitute or the pimp took revenge on Charlie," Ranger Joey Gordon wonders.

At the crime scene, investigators continued piecing together the evidence. "He had a briefcase that he kept a lot of his business papers in. And this briefcase was open and dumped on top of his body," Gordon explains. "Somebody's making a statement with those papers. Could it be a bad business deal?"

There was a tantalizing clue found inside Charlie's chest: a defibrillator, which monitors and regulates the heart.

Nick Lubbers works for Boston Scientific, the manufacturer of Charlie's defibrillator. He is able to tell what Charlie's heart was going through at the time of the attack. "The heart was in normal rhythm. The device detects that it is now in an unstable rhythm and needs to treat it. It delivers its first shock - boom - right here. Charlie White got shocked eight times during this episode."

"There was nothing it could do to save Charlie White," Lubbers adds.

Charlie died at 9:38 p.m. on Nov. 11, 2005.

This information, coupled with credit card receipts found at the crime scene, placed Charlie at a Wal-Mart just two hours before his death. And a surveillance tape revealed he wasn't alone. "When that second individual got out of the car, our hearts started beating faster. We said bingo. We got someone with Charlie just prior to his death. Now let's ID who that someone is," Lane explains.

Texas cattleman Jerome Davis typically keeps his emotions to himself, except when it comes to his good friend, Charlie. "It broke my heart. It broke my heart. To know that the reason he's gone was not at the hands of God. It was at the hands of someone else."

But Adrian Ramos, a White family friend for more than 25 years, says Charlie had a darker side. "He's a son of a bitch," Adrian says. "Anybody that knew both sides of Charlie White knew he was an evil person."

Adrian witnessed firsthand "the other Charlie" at a golf tournament just outside Austin, and provided "48 Hours" with photos of the event. "It was sponsored by a strip club. And they had the dancers out there, basically running around the course topless," he remembers.

Charlie had invited some business associates and friends to join him, where the term "foursome" took on a whole new meaning.

What were these women doing? Adrian says a lot of things that they shouldn't have been, including having repeated sex with Charlie right on the golf course.

The strippers and exotic dancers on the golf course were just a small sampling of the women in Charlie's social life. After he died, police discovered a list of more than 1,000 such women, complete with Charlie's own handwritten descriptions.

Adrian claims Charlie was also an alcoholic. "When he drank, it was a different person. Charlie just got mean," he says. "You didn't want to get in his way when he was upset. He would be very intimidating."

And threatening: as he once was with Adrian's brother, after the two began arguing on the deck of Charlie's house. "Charlie had walked into the house, grabbed the shotgun, loaded it and started pointing it around," Adrian recalls. "True story. He pointed that shotgun at everybody there."

Charlie's youngest son, Darin, defused the situation by taking the gun away from his father. Adrian says it was Charlie's drunkenness and temper that ultimately ended their friendship.

"There were a lot of people that wished Charles White dead. I used to dream of doing it, to be honest. But I never had the nerve," Charlie's ex-wife, Gerta, admits.

She says living with Charlie was a living nightmare. "I don't know how you could supposedly love somebody and call them the names that I was called throughout the marriage. Those things stick in your mind and you have very low self esteem."

Gerta says Charlie could also be cruel with his children. "He seemed to find a certain bliss in taking the kids to the back room and beating them with his belt."

But no one, she says, endured more pain and humiliation than Darin, who lived on and off with his father right up until his death. "It seemed like all he knew how to do was bitch and moan and criticize and destroy people," Darin admits.

Asked what he thinks about when he thinks of his father, Darin says, "Extremely violent."

Darin White describes his relationship with his father

Darci, Darin's ex-girlfriend, says, "I saw times when Charlie would slap Darin on the head and tell him he was a no good piece of crap, basically. He would just kind of cower and walk away."

Darci says Darin was the polar opposite of Charlie. "He's just the most kind, sweet, gentle person I've ever met," she says. "He was just an easygoing guy."

But Darin's "easygoing" attitude became a major source of friction between him and his hard charging ambitious father.

Darci says Charlie enjoyed abusing and embarrassing his son. "Everything Darin did, he would put him down," she says. "Over and over…. Every day."

Darin had difficulty holding down a job and spent his time jockeying back and forth between parents. The older he got, the more he relied on his father. That's when he says he became more of a servant than a son.

Darin says he was charged with making sure all his father's needs were fulfilled. "It was just like I was a supplier of his girls," he explains.

"Charlie and Darin would go to a bar, and Darin would be the one that would have to pick up the women, because Darin was young and good looking. And it made him sick," Darci says.

The way Darin tells it, no woman was off limits: even Darin's own girlfriends. He says his father had sex with one of them.

Darin's troubled relationship with his father caught the eye of authorities.

Asked what Charlie's friends told investigators, Ranger Gordon says, "Well they were telling us that we sure needed to be looking at Darin."

So Texas Ranger Joey Gordon decided to reach out to Darin, who voluntarily came in. "He was very cordial. But he was protective," Gordon remembers. "I told him, 'The ball's in your lap. What do you wanna do?'"

After about an hour of questioning, Darin revealed he was with his father at the Wal-Mart that night. Darin was the mystery man seen in the surveillance video.

What followed was a remarkable story: Darin admitted that after returning home, he and his father got into an argument. "He tells me that his dad then began to swing at him and that, in his words, 'I had to respond,'" Gordon explains.

"He threw, just threw everything at me," Darin says. "Cases of beer and just everything that was in his vicinity, started just coming at me."

Darin says his father was also hitting him. "As he was throwing he tried to bulldoze on his way to the playroom where the guns were kept. That's when I started trying to keep him from going there."

Darin says he and his father were exchanging blows at that point.

Asked if he thinks his father would have killed him that night, Darin says, "Absolutely. Without a doubt."

"Did you pick up anything and hit your father?" Van Sant asks.

"One of the last things I did… about an inch or so left in the bottle. I gave him one last drink as I was knocking his teeth out with it," Darin says. "The next thing I knew I was getting an extension cord out of the garage.

"So I tied it around just his leg and just wrapped it around the sofa so if he did get up he'd just trip or something. And I decided that it looked better around his neck.

"I put my foot on one end of it and I put my foot on the other end of it. And I wrapped it probably 5 or 6 times around his neck," Darin says.

At the time, he says Charlie was bleeding. "He kept reaching up at me, trying to grab hold of my arm."

"Can you imagine what he went through as he watched his own son end his life?" Van Sant asks.

"Yeah, and the thing that I get to remember is the last thing he did say was, 'Son, I do love you.' So I'll have that for the rest of my life to remember too," Darin says.

Incredibly, Darin then walked upstairs and went to bed. The next morning, he drove to his mother's home in New Mexico. "I got up and immediate, immediately went and hugged her. And she could feel my heart beating," he remembers.

"It's just like being in another world. My son just told me he killed his dad," she remembers.

Asked if there was a sense of relief once he realized his father was gone, Darin says, "Oh man, you would not believe my life since. I have never felt better in my life. Never felt so relieved."

But Texas Ranger Joey Gordon isn't buying Darin's story: "I found no sign that there was anything thrown around that room."

In fact, Gordon found no evidence to show 73-year-old Charlie put up a fight at all.
"We photographed Darin and had him take off his shirt. Aside from a small little scratch, that was the only injury that we observed on Darin White," he says.

Gordon says he doesn't believe that Charlie had actually physically threatened his son that night. The ranger's theory: "I think that he got upset at his dad. And once he started, he didn't quit.

Seven days after Charlie White's body was discovered, authorities arrested Darin White and charged him with the murder of his father.

Prosecutors Tom Cloudt and Sam Oatman say Charlie's killing is not some kind of justifiable homicide. "This is a case about murder. It's about murder without a valid excuse under the law," Oatman says.

But one man is riding to Darin's defense: Texas attorney and rancher Eddie Shell says he will argue Darin acted out of "sudden passion," where in the heat of the moment he lost control.

"Darin exploded. He killed his father in a fit of rage. What caused that fit of rage? It was the years of torment and physical abuse and treating Darin like a dog," Shell argues.

A crime of sudden passion carries a much lighter sentence. But to prove it, Shell must argue Darin was abused. And he says one witness - a recluse living alone in the California desert - holds the key to this case.

A thousand miles from where Darin's trial is about to begin, amid a wind farm near Palm Springs Calif., lives a mysterious man in a broken down shack whose secrets may hold the key to Darin's freedom.

Private investigator Bill Talley has been hired by Darin's defense team to find this man and serve him with a subpoena to testify.

The man living in that pile of junk could actually be living in a mansion if he chose to: he's one of the heirs to a multi-million dollar estate. Sound intriguing? His name is Ronnie White, one of Darin's older brothers.

"Ronnie White left the family as far as everything I know because of the way Charlie White Sr. treated him and everybody else in the family," defense attorney Eddie Shell says.

Shell believes Ronnie can back up his brother's claims of abuse at the hands of their father. "Ronnie could add a lot of pieces to this puzzle. Ronnie would be an awesome witness for us, if we could just get him," Shell says.

But clearly Ronnie doesn't want to be found. "48 Hours" went with Bill Talley as he entered Ronnie's property. A note posted read: "You're about to experience a great deal of pain. You have a few seconds or a few minutes to leave. Use it wisely."

Talley was never able to serve a subpoena, and Ronnie's secrets, like his life, remain barricaded away.

Facing overwhelming evidence, and never denying that he killed his father, Darin pleads guilty. He throws himself on the mercy of the court, choosing to have a jury decide his sentence, which, in Texas, is its own trial. "It's risky but with a jury we've got a shot at Darin being able to walk out the courthouse," Shell explains.

Shell will stick with his argument of sudden passion, a strategy that prosecutor Tom Cloudt thinks is absurd. "Sudden passion implies a lack of control. And that's not present in this case," he argues. "He stops for a minute and thinks about what he's going to do before he goes out to the garage and gets the extension cord, comes back and wraps it around his father's neck and strangles him to death."

"This was a pre-meditated murder," he adds.

At trial, prosecutors remind jurors of the brutality of the crime, but the defense wants to keep the jury focused instead on what Charlie did to Darin.

The defense paints a picture of perversion inside Charlie's house. "I came downstairs and heard Charlie's TV was on. So I walked into his room and he was having sex with Darin's girlfriend," Adrian Ramos testifies.

Then, Darci's father, William, describes meeting Charlie for the first time. "He pointed over to a hot tub where there were two or three girls in bikini bathing suits, pointed to them and said, 'If you want any one of those girls, let me know and I'll take care of it for you,'" he testified.

Now, with his life in his own hands, it's Darin's turn to testify.

Asked by the defense what his father's pet names were for him, Darin said, "There's several. There's dumb f…, p…., dumb ass, d… bump, there was quite a few of them."

Asked if he loved his dad, Darin said, "Absolutely. I loved my dad."

"How could you do that to him?" Shell asks.

"I have no idea," Darin replies.

"If you were so abused by him, why did you go back and live with him, time and time again? It doesn't make sense," Van Sant asks.

"It's like, why didn't I leave, you know? I felt like a hostage," Darin says. "You just fool yourself into thinking that things are gonna be fine between son and dad."

Prosecutor Oatman's theory on why Darin came back? "The golden egg. His dad provided the money. His dad provided all he really wanted."

But defense attorney Shell says Darin's reasons had nothing to do with money. "Why do women that are battered go back to their husbands? Why is it such a leap to believe that 'Well, I just couldn't leave. He had a hold on me. It was my father.' Of course he had a hard time of just leaving."

As Darin steps down, this sentencing trial is about to take one final dramatic turn. Another brother, Charlie Jr., has decided to testify. But will he defend his brother or his father?

The prosecution calls Charlie Jr., hoping he will undermine Darin's defense that his father drove him to kill. "Well, if you made him mad, he'd let you know it. It's hard to explain. I got along pretty good with him most of the time," Charlie Jr. said in court.

"It's important to know that there are people who were raised by Charlie White who adjusted just fine," prosecutor Cloudt remarked in court.

And if Darin was hoping for brotherly support from Charlie Jr., he didn't get it. Charlie Jr. also testified that he saw Darin lose his temper, and that he saw him drink. "He got a little more belligerent, just kind of, it was hard to be around him when he drank very much."

What's more, Charlie Jr. says Darin could be just as perverse as his father. "He just told me on a couple of occasions that he had sex with my dad's girlfriends," he said.

Asked if it has helped or hurt his case, prosecutor Oatman tells Van Sant, "I don't think it's hurt our case at all. I think his credibility will stand up and I think it will help us."

When Shell gets his chance to cross-examine Charlie Jr., he treats him with kid gloves.

Charlie Jr. does say he believed he had a dysfunctional family, and that he does love his brother.

In closing, Shell keeps attacking Charlie Sr. and asks the jury to show Darin mercy.

"You can recommend probation. And if you do that, then Charlie White the long end, the controlling had of Charlie White will not be reaching from the grave, doing one more injustice to Darin White," he argues.

But for prosecutor Sam Oatman, probation for Darin isn't an option. "He killed his dad," he points out. "He murdered his dad. And all we have to prove is that Darren White killed his father and wanted him dead. That's all we have to prove."

The jury deliberates late into the night. One hour passes, then two, then six. Finally, at 4:30 a.m., the jury agrees on a sentence: 20 years behind bars.

The jury decides sudden passion does not apply. "I was surprised at the 20 years. I thought it would be more years in the penitentiary than that," Cloudt says. "I think that Darin White deserved more."

"We just held each other. And then he told me that he loved me and I told him I loved him. I think I kissed him and gave him one more hug," Darci says. "Charlie did not deserve to die. But Darin did not deserve to be treated like that his whole life."

Six months later, Darin says, "I've never been more at peace. I'm sorry it all happened but it's done."

"I'm moving on and things are going to be better," he adds.

And in one final twist to this story, Darci has made a commitment to Darin, and the couple got married.

"This man killed his father. Something ain't right," comments Jerome Davis. To him, the idea of Darin experiencing any kind of happiness is an insult to the memory of his good friend. "It's cut and dry. He's guilty and he didn't get what he deserves. I felt like he should have gotten life. That's my story and I'm stickin' with it."

Darin White will be eligible for parole in 2018.