Inteview: Bill Neal
Interviewee: Bill Neal
Date: July 28, 2009
Bill Neal falls back on decades of experience as a trial lawyer to write his books, which deal largely with criminal law in Texas’ yesteryears. The books chronicle real-life cases and crimes during frontier eras, spanning not only Texas but also Mississippi, Montana, New Mexico, and the Indian Territory.
In 2006, Texas Tech University Press published Bill Neal’s Getting Away With Murder on the Texas Frontier: Notorious Killings & Celebrated Trials. It went on to win the West Texas Historical Association’s Rupert Richardson Award for Best Book on West Texas History. Furthermore, the National Association for Outlaw and Lawman History recognized it as its Book of the Year.
From Guns to Gavels: How Justice Grew Up in the Outlaw West followed in 2008. Like its predecessor, the book earned a Rupert Richardson Award for Best Book on West Texas History in 2009. It was also the Nonfiction Book Of The Year at the 2009 North Texas Book Festival.
Yet another crime anthology, Sex, Murder and the Unwritten Law: Courting Judicial Mayhem, Texas Style, arrived in 2009.
Bill Neal wrote two Texas history books before he retired from practice. Our Stories: Legends of the Mounds collates oral histories of the state’s early settlers. It was published in 1997.
Prior to Our Stories, Bill Neal penned The Last Frontier, published in 1966. The book recounts the history of Hardeman County, Texas, one of the last places to be settled in the state. Bill Neal procured his JD with honors in 1964 from the University of Texas, where he joined the Texas Law Review as an editor. Upon graduating, he entered the Texas Supreme Court as a briefing attorney. He served thereafter as district attorney for 20 years. He then practiced in private for another 20 years.
Bill Neal grew up near Medicine Mound, Texas, a small community in North Central West Texas. He now resides in Quanah, Texas.