4. Don Crowder
Don Crowder was one of Candy Montgomery’s defense attorneys during the trial.
Before 1980, Don Crowder was known around Collin County as a steady personal injury lawyer — civil cases, local clients, the kind of attorney people trusted for car wrecks and workplace disputes. Then came Candy Montgomery. With no criminal defense background, Crowder took her case and walked straight into a national spotlight he never fully escaped.
In court, he built a defense that felt radical for its time: Candy hadn’t planned to kill Betty Gore, he argued — she’d snapped in fear, caught in a dissociative state triggered by old trauma. The courtroom filled with talk of hypnosis, psychology, and suppressed emotion. Crowder’s pacing and interruptions, his mix of showmanship and sincerity, kept prosecutors off balance. After eight days, the jury came back with two words no one expected: not guilty.
The verdict made Crowder famous — and infamous. Some praised his nerve; others said he’d gamed the system. Either way, the Candy Montgomery trial turned him into a Texas household name. He leaned into the notoriety for a while, even running for governor in 1986, but the case never stopped shadowing him. The attention that had made him now weighed him down.
In later years, friends said the pressures of that fame and the constant association with the Montgomery story wore him out. On November 10, 1998, at 56, Don Crowder took his own life — a grim end for a man who once seemed unstoppable.
He had started as a small-town lawyer known for empathy and persistence, and he ended as a symbol of how one sensational case can define — and consume — a career.
