2. Allan Gore
Allan Gore was Betty Gore’s husband and father to their children. His relationship with Candy Montgomery was a point of interest in the case.
Allan Gore married Betty in January 1970. They had two daughters and a life that looked steady from the outside — small-town Wylie, church potlucks, and a modest home that fit the map of middle-class Texas. But by the late 1970s, cracks showed. Allan had fallen into an affair with Candy Montgomery, another church member. It ran quietly from 1978 to 1979, ending about a year before Betty’s death.
On June 13, 1980, while Allan was away on business, Betty confronted Candy about the affair. Inside the Gore home’s narrow utility room — washer, dryer, freezer, children’s things crowding the space — the argument turned violent. Candy struck Betty 41 times with an ax while Betty’s baby slept in the next room. The town could barely process the brutality.
Candy admitted to killing Betty but claimed self-defense, saying panic and buried trauma took over. Allan testified that the affair was long finished, helping the defense argue that the killing wasn’t planned. After less than four hours, the jury acquitted her. Wylie split in two — some furious, others convinced she’d simply snapped.
Allan never took custody of his daughters; relatives raised them. He later married a woman named Elaine Clift, but that, too, ended. Since then, he’s kept out of sight, avoiding the attention that still clings to his name.
The story keeps resurfacing. Hulu’s Candy (Jessica Biel) and HBO’s Love & Death (Elizabeth Olsen) both cast Allan as the quiet man trapped between a failed marriage, an affair, and a murder that defined them all.
