Flowers on a Court Opinion

• Author: Christopher William Patton
• Pages: 18-24

Published in Litigation, Volume 48, Number 2, Winter 2022. © 2022 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not

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Flowers on a

Court Opinion

How the Trial of My Great-Grandmother’s

Murderer Changed Me, My Family,

and the Law

CHRISTOPHER WILLIAM PATTON

The author is a partner with Lynn Pinker Hurst & Schwegmann LLP in Dallas, and an associate editor of Litigation.

In 1949, my great-grandmother, Mary Sauls Patton, was mur-

dered on the banks of the Colorado River. Her body was never

found. Mary’s killer was her fifth husband, an ex-convict named

Ray Cullen. It was a double homicide. Cullen also killed Mary’s

frail stepfather, Daniel Boyer, at roughly the same time. Cullen

claimed innocence and pushed a scattered but unyielding de-

fense throughout the long trial and appeal. The story captivat-

ed the Southern California news media. Papers in Los Angeles,

Riverside, and San Bernardino Counties eagerly followed the

case as it unfolded: the stymied police investigation, the killer’s

bizarre explanations of what happened, and the baffling disap-

pearance of the bodies.

Mary’s murder was by no means a secret in my family. I’ve

known about it ever since I was old enough for it to be deemed

appropriate for my ears. It was always just a vague story to me,

a Patton family curiosity buried in what to a child seemed like

the ancient past. Later, as an attorney, I had never considered

this bizarre family tragedy from a trial lawyer’s perspective, be-

ing busy with a commercial trial practice in Texas and having no

particular interest in criminal law. That changed. A few years

ago, I stumbled on a 1951 California Supreme Court case, People

v. Cullen, upholding Cullen’s conviction and discussing the trial in

broad outlines. It was fascinating. I had known that Cullen died

in San Quentin in the 1950s, but I didn’t know his case forged an

important precedent that still stands today.

Out of both professional and personal curiosity, I recently ex-

humed 3,200 pages of trial transcripts from the California State

Archives. It made for grim reading, but one thing surprised me.

I learned that my grandfather, Bill Patton—Mary’s youngest son

and a man I was close to until his death in 2015—was the relent-

less force behind Cullen’s conviction. Indeed, my grandfather

was both the prosecution’s star witness and the chief target of

the defense’s broadsides. I’d never seen this side of him before.

Scrutinizing trial transcripts, I caught a glimpse of the 24-year-

old Billy Patton, a man who faced his mother’s killer in court,

listened to his lies, waited for Cullen to crack, and hoped for

the chance to give his mother a proper burial. Through his six

days on the witness stand—including an extremely hostile cross-

examination—I saw that even in grief, he was cool under fire and

single-minded in his pursuit of justice.

My grandfather’s resolve didn’t move Cullen, but it moved the

jury. Seventy-one years later, it moved me. It changed my view

of the legal tribunals before which I regularly appear. Reading

the transcripts of my grandfather’s testimony was like taking a

core sample from the psyche of people who find themselves en-

meshed in our legal ecosystem. It opened my eyes to how these