Cleburne officer, known as a people person, passes away

By Pete Kendall/reporter@trcle.com

Former Cleburne police officer Bill Hudson, who died Thursday at 79, was one for two in homicide investigations during a distinguished 28-year career that took him from patrol officer to detective lieutenant before he retired in 1992.

Mostly, he was known as everybody’s friend.

“He was real laid back, real easy-going,” said former district attorney John MacLean. “When he gave you a ticket, he was very much the gentleman.”

“He was a heck of a nice guy,” said retired Johnson County detective David Cole. “He would help you with anything. He was soft spoken. He didn’t talk tough like me.”

“He was good to work with, pleasant to be around,” said Cleburne Police Commander N.H. Laseman. “He got along well with everybody. He treated criminals fairly. He was pretty conscientious about how he treated people. I learned a lot from him. You always learn from people older than yourself. I learned how to deal with everyday situations and people. Bill was a people person.”

His funeral is scheduled for 2 p.m. Monday at First Baptist Church at 401 E. Criner St. in Grandview. Interment will be in Grandview Cemetery. He will lie in state from 9 a.m to 4 p.m. Sunday at Lucas & Blessing Funeral Home at 518 S.W. Johnson Ave. in Burleson, and noon to 2 p.m. Monday at the church.

Lucas & Blessing Funeral Home is in charge of arrangements.

By all accounts, Hudson was an able cop.

“He investigated some DWI cases when I was county attorney and some burglaries when I was D.A.,” said MacLean, now a Cleburne attorney. “He was an active officer. If you required additional information on a case, he was always willing to go dig it up. He was good at that.”

“He’d already been on the force for about a year when I joined,” Laseman said. “We worked patrol together. Then he made sergeant, and he was a detective for probably three years. Then he made lieutenant, and he was over crime scene and property room and I think over the records clerk.”

Hudson may have spearheaded Cleburne PD’s first narcotics unit, Laseman said.

“Bill probably did,” Laseman said. “He may have supervised Ronnie Martin. Ronnie was our first narcotics officer.”

Hudson was not incapable of stubbing his toe occasionally. That made him more human to the people he worked with, and to those he was hired to serve and protect.

“One case I remember was known around town as the Keystone Kop case,” MacLean said. “It was in about 1968. Billy Hudson was a pretty young cop at the time. He was involved in a high speed chase with this kid all over town and out on Farm Road 4. C.R. Covington, the constable, got involved in it. He set up a roadblock with his vehicle out by Bono. The kid came over the hill with Billy in hot pursuit. The kid went around the roadblock. Billy crashed into it. That was the end of the chase.”

Laseman and Hudson tag-teamed a 1975 case in which Keene resident Cindy Rees was murdered and buried in a shallow grave west of Lake Cleburne.

While the case was unfolding, the suspect kidnapped a woman and drove her to New Mexico.

When the suspect was arrested and returned to Cleburne, he confessed by writing a statement on a piece of yellow legal pad paper. The day before the trial, he hanged himself to death.

“We got a SWAT team to arrest him out near Taos,” Laseman said. “We originally worked that case as a missing person. We got the suspect to agree to a polygraph test. He was pretty weak after that. Before he confessed, he had told me the gun would be of interest. I recovered the gun. After he confessed, he showed us where he’d buried Cindy.

“He actually dug two shallow graves, one on the east side of the lake and one on the west side. He used the real shallow grave on the west side. He threw away her purse, glasses and cigarette lighter. Cindy actually had a new car at the time. It was sitting up on East Henderson.

“When she disappeared, we tried to establish that she had been with him. It turned out she had gotten in the car with the suspect and another subject. She felt comfortable around the other subject but didn’t know the suspect. The suspect told us he had let Cindy out in the mall parking lot up on North Main where the Sears used to be.”

The homicide case Hudson and Laseman were never able to crack was the Bill Randolph murder in 1975.

Of course, they had a lot of company. The best and brightest have swung and missed on Randolph for more than 30 years.

Randolph was shot to death on the porch of his residence at 512 W. Wilson about 20 minutes after he closed his east side grocery store.

Randolph’s body wasn’t found until the next morning when a passerby called police at 7:08 a.m.

A police unit including patrol Sgt. Travis Prine was dispatched and determined Randolph had been shot seven times.

“It was kind of weird how it all came about,” Prine remembered this week. “We were just going on day shift, and somebody came in the police station and told us they’d seen a man crumpled down by his front door. We got the address and took off. There weren’t any spent shells, so we thought the weapon had to be a revolver.”

The weapon, never recovered, was later said to be a German-made, .32-caliber, seven-shot Arminius.

“When they shot him, they got him on his knees,” Prine said. “There didn’t appear to be any kind of struggle. Indications were somebody had been hiding in the shrubs on the side of the house. I talked to a guy up the street. He heard the shots, but it didn’t register with him that somebody might have been shot. I talked to another guy no more than 100 yards from the scene. He thought he heard shots and went back in his house.”

Prine found an indentation in the soil by the porch, indicating that somebody clad in denim jeans had been kneeling in wait. Footprints were also found and cast. Officers roped off the area for investigators.

“Bill [Hudson] and Claude more or less took over the crime scene because it was such a big thing,” Prine said. “We hadn’t had anything like the Randolph murder in quite a while. They wanted to make sure every ‘I’ was dotted and ‘T’ crossed, [Detective] Rick Goon also worked on it. Bill worked that case really hard.”

Hudson had his eye on one particular suspect, Prine said.

“He was never convinced the suspect didn’t do it or didn’t have it done, but he couldn’t get it nailed down,” Prine said. “That case got to Bill from day one. He knew Randolph. I guess everyone in Cleburne knew Randolph. When folks in the country came to town from Grandview and Alvarado, the first place they often stopped was Randolph’s store.”