Richard “Racehorse” Haynes, a flamboyant Texas lawyer with a spellbinding courtroom style who won acquittals in several high-profile murder cases and was acclaimed as one of the country’s foremost defense attorneys, died April 28 at his home in Trinity, Tex. He was 90.
His death was announced by a family spokesman, lawyer Chris Tritico. The cause was not disclosed.
Mr. Haynes was a scrappy onetime boxer with a folksy manner and a dogged, counterpunching style of advocacy. A series of sensational Texas murder trials in the 1970s and 1980s made him a star of the legal world, as he prevailed in seemingly impossible cases.
“There’s nobody I couldn’t defend,” he once said.
One of his first celebrated trials came when he defended a Houston plastic surgeon, John Hill, who had been charged with killing his high-society wife in 1969. Specifically, he was accused of withholding medical attention after she developed a mysterious illness. (Some people suggested that Hill had injected bacteria into his wife’s dessert pastry.)
During the trial, Hill’s second wife — the surgeon had already remarried and divorced — testified that her former husband had killed his first wife by using a syringe. Mr. Haynes won a mistrial on the grounds that the defense had not been prepared for a direct accusation of murder from the witness box.
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Before Hill could be tried a second time, he was shot and killed at his Houston mansion. The scandal became the subject of a best-selling book by Thomas Thompson, "Blood and Money," which was made into a 1981 film, "Murder in Texas."
An even more notorious series of cases emerged in the late 1970s, after multimillionaire T. Cullen Davis was charged with entering his $6 million Fort Worth mansion and killing his wife’s lover and her 12-year-old stepdaughter. Two other people were wounded, including Davis’s wife, Priscilla — who was shot between her silicone-enhanced breasts, the testimony revealed.
Mr. Haynes’s defense strategy was to put everyone on trial but his client. He portrayed Priscilla Davis as an unfaithful, promiscuous, drug-using wife who wore a necklace that spelled out “rich bitch” in diamonds. Mr. Haynes described sex parties and showed a photograph of one of Priscilla’s lovers clad only in a Christmas stocking.
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Ultimately, after two separate trials, Davis was acquitted in 1977. A year later, however, he was charged with hiring a hit man to kill the judge who was overseeing his divorce case against Priscilla. The supposed hit man went to the FBI.
The assassination of the judge never took place, but the would-be killer showed Davis pictures purporting to be the murder scene and spoke to him while wearing an FBI wire. Davis appeared to thank him for doing the job — and seemed interested in hiring the hit man for as many as 15 other jobs.
Despite the evidence, Mr. Haynes made Davis a sympathetic character. He charged the FBI with botching the investigation, telling the jury, “If they worked for you, you’d fire ’em. Come to think of it, they do work for you.”
The trial ended in a hung jury. At a second trial, Mr. Haynes and the prosecutor almost came to blows in the courtroom and had to be physically restrained by the judge. That trial resulted in an outright acquittal.
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Mr. Haynes was reportedly paid between $5 million and $10 million by Davis, prompting some observers to say that, with enough money, people in Texas could get away with murder.
But Mr. Haynes's mastery of courtroom theater earned him widespread renown. He was named by Time magazine as one of the country's top defense attorneys, along with Edward Bennett Williams, F. Lee Bailey and Mr. Haynes's Houston mentor, Percy Foreman.
Share this articleShareIn a 1979 interview with Texas Monthly magazine, Mr. Haynes recalled his first victory in a felony case, when his client was acquitted of theft.
“As soon as we heard those words ‘Not guilty,’ ” he said, “ol’ Jesse was hugging me, his big fat wife was hugging me, his eight kids were hugging me, his relatives were slapping me on the back. ... Everyone’s saying ‘Good going’ and ‘Attaboy!’ You don’t get that feeling winning money from an insurance company.”
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Richard Michael Haynes was born April 3, 1927, in Houston. His father was a plasterer.
Mr. Haynes acquired his nickname “Racehorse” as a mock compliment from a football coach, who said he couldn’t carry the ball through the opposing team’s line but ran toward the sideline like a racehorse.
The 5-foot-7 Mr. Haynes may not have been a standout on the gridiron, but he was an excellent boxer and was the Texas amateur welterweight champion in the 1940s.
He served in the Marine Corps during World War II, graduated from the University of Houston in 1951, then served as an Army paratrooper during the Korean War.
He graduated in 1956 from what is now the University of Houston law school. Early in his career, he often handled drunken-driving cases and at one point won 163 acquittals in a row.
Mr. Haynes was known for his cowboy boots, his ever-present pipe and a gift for oratory, but he said the secret of his legal advocacy was in being prepared for any possible question the prosecutor or judge might ask — and in being prepared to change the subject. He humorously described his approach in a 1978 speech to the American Bar Association.
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"Say you sue me because you claim my dog bit you," he said. "Well now, this is my defense: My dog doesn't bite. And second, in the alternative, my dog was tied up that night. And third, I don't believe you really got bit. And fourth, I don't have a dog."
In the early 1980s, Mr. Haynes established battered spouse syndrome as a legal defense in Texas after he successfully defended Vicki Daniel, who had been charged with killing her husband, who was a onetime speaker of the state House of Representatives and the son of a Texas governor. Mr. Haynes was prominently featured in a 1987 book about the case by Steve Salerno, “Deadly Blessing,” which was the basis for a 1992 television movie, “Bed of Lies.”
Mr. Haynes’s wife of 63 years, the former Naomi Younger, died in 2013. Survivors include three children; eight grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.
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As a young lawyer, Mr. Haynes said, he sometimes had his clients thank the judge and jury after an acquittal. He decided to abandon the practice after one of his clients, in a moment of exuberance, said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank each and every one of you. And I promise you that I will never, ever do it again.”
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