A family tragedy: The troubled life of Woody Harrelson

Woody Harrelson is, by his own admission, a wild and crazy guy. On the one hand, he is a bleeding-heart Hollywood liberal straight out of central casting: a vegan, a peace activist, a warrior for the environment and an agitator for the decriminalisation of marijuana. On the other hand, he has quite a temper and a track record of drinking and brawling.

During one stint on the London stage five years ago, he got into a shouting match with a taxi driver, ripped out an ashtray and smashed the door to override the central-locking system. (Charges were dropped after he agreed to pay for the damage.) Last year, he grabbed a paparazzo by the neck outside a Hollywood nightclub and, according to a subsequent complaint, broke the viewfinder on his camera.

Just a couple of weeks ago, he got into a fight with a bouncer at a trendy watering hole in Venice, California, after he was told he could not leave the premises with a glass of wine in his hand. Two traffic cops writing a parking ticket on the other side of the street slapped him in handcuffs, but eventually let him go with a warning after it became clear he had damaged himself more than the bouncer. (He cut his hand on a broken wine glass.)

The troubled times of Woody Harrelson are nothing, though, compared with the extraordinary life story of his father, Charles Voyde Harrelson. Harrelson Snr was a drifter, a serial monogamist and a self-admitted professional gambler who also, according to the best information available, developed a talent as a contract killer. In the mid-Seventies Charles Harrelson served five years for the murder of a Texas grain dealer, for which he was allegedly paid $2,000. In 1983, he received two life sentences for the murder of a federal judge in San Antonio - a crime that sensationalised west Texas at the time, since no other federal judge had been murdered anywhere in the United States since the 19th century.

The case had more than its share of murkiness, involving a complex relationship between Harrelson and a family of corrupt lawyers from El Paso called the Chagras, but the conviction and sentence were serious enough to keep Harrelson behind bars for the rest of his life. After a botched escape attempt in the mid-Nineties, he wound up in the so-called "Supermax" - the highest security federal prison in the US in Florence, Colorado, which has been home to the likes of Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber; Ramzi Yousef, responsible for the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993; and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.

Harrelson long ago resigned himself to the fact that he would die in the Supermax and that is exactly what has just happened. According to the county coroner, who announced the news, he died of a heart attack in his sleep nine days ago.

Relationships between fathers and sons are complicated things. Woody, for his part, has always claimed to have been minimally affected by his father's inglorious career. But it is hard not to be intrigued by the relationship between the two of them, and the odd points of convergence between Charles's criminal history and Woody's path through the Hollywood snakepit.

Consider: Woody first made his mark in feature films in the notorious Oliver Stone movie Natural Born Killers, a story that looks explicitly at a pair of runaways who view murder as an entirely amoral exercise. Charles, meanwhile, has been described by the Texas Ranger who spent more time than anyone pursuing him, as a man who killed not because he was crazy but because he could do it for money without losing any sleep.

Stone, meanwhile, had previously made JFK, a potboiler that played fast and loose with conspiracy theories about the president's assassination. Charles Harrelson, intriguingly, once claimed to have been in on the assassination, and even hinted at one point that he might have been one of the triggermen supposedly firing from the "grassy knoll" above the roadway at Dallas's Dealey Plaza.

That claim now appears, to the best of our knowledge, to have been pure hyperbole - much like the contentions in Stone's film. Harrelson's main claim was to have been one of three vagrants photographed and arrested in Dealey Plaza moments after the shooting. The Dallas police finally named the three vagrants in 1992 - almost 30 years after the assassination - and established that Harrelson was not among them. Harrelson himself later retracted the story, said he was having lunch with a friend in Houston at the time of the shooting, and added that he would never have accepted a contract to kill the president for fear that he would end up dead, just as Lee Harvey Oswald did.

Hyperbole and extremes of behaviour are nevertheless things that run through the entertainment business, just as they do through the criminal world. It's certainly something that father and son have both been guilty of. Woody Harrelson once claimed that, as an emerging star on the hit comedy series Cheers, he picked up and slept with three women a day. He has claimed, at different times, to be either completely sober, or completely drunk and stoned.

To his credit, Woody has never sought to trade off his father's story - either to generate sensational publicity for himself, or to elicit pity for his unorthodox upbringing. Even stripped of the hyperbole, though, it is quite some story.

Charles Harrelson was born in 1939 near Huntsville, the small town north of Houston that is home to Texas's well-used execution chamber. He came from a family of policemen and prison wardens, but quickly moved in a very different direction. As a young man he moved to California, where he sold encyclopedias and developed a taste for armed robbery - the crime for which he served his first stretch in prison. Next he moved back to Texas, and sold dental equipment for while before becoming a full-time gambler and card shark.

By the time he divorced Woody's mother in the mid-Sixties - Woody was born in 1961 - he had developed a notoriety as a "card mechanic", which meant he could stack a deck even when his unwitting victims had shuffled it themselves. His career choice brought him into contact with all sorts of unsavoury characters, at least some of whom were connected to the underworld of organised crime.

By 1968, the Texas Rangers were after him for murder. He was acquitted of the slaying of a bookie called Alan Berg, and almost beat the rap for the killing of grain dealer Sam Degelia after a nightclub singer made a surprise last-minute appearance in court and testified that she had been with him at the time of the murder. Eleven jurors refused to believe the singer and voted for conviction, but one juror was swayed and the case had to be retried.

The next time, though, Harrelson's prosecutors were ready - threatening the nightclub singer with an arrest warrant on perjury charges if she decided to show up in court. She did not, and Harrelson got 15 years, of which he served just under one-third. Then, in 1979, came the murder of federal judge John Wood - gunned down with a high-calibre rifle in the car park of his San Antonio condominium complex on the eve of a major trial in which a suspected El Paso mob leader, Jimmy Chagra, was facing federal drug-trafficking charges. Wood, nicknamed Maximum John, was known as a tough sentencer of drug offenders, and the Chagra family quickly came under suspicion.

It wasn't until several years later that Texas Ranger Jack Dean pinned the crime on Harrelson, who knew the Chagras through his gambling activities. Jimmy's wife and brother were both convicted for their involvement in Judge Wood's death but Jimmy himself, incredibly, was acquitted after his lawyer argued that Harrelson had killed the judge on his own initiative and then sought to extort money from Jimmy Chagra by threatening to pin the killing on him.

Harrelson, meanwhile, made a parallel argument, telling the jury in his separate trial that he only boasted of the murder as a means of forcing money out of the Chagras, but had not actually committed it. That argument failed.

Woody Harrelson, meanwhile, was only peripherally involved in these extraordinary events. He and his two siblings had been raised by their strict Presbyterian mother, first in Texas and then in Ohio. He went through drama school, moved to New York and then landed his first big break when one of the lead actors on Cheers, Nicholas Colasanto, died suddenly and had to be replaced. Colasanto had played Coach, the straight-guy bartender to Ted Danson's more clownish Sam. Harrelson's character, called Woody, fulfilled a very similar function but did it with sufficient verve to help keep the show going for several more years.

Harrelson's film career took a while to get going - not until Indecent Proposal, in 1993, did he attract much critical or popular attention. Natural Born Killers put him definitively on the map and that was followed by Kingpin, the Farrelly brothers comedy; The People vs. Larry Flynt, in which he played the eponymous wheelchair-bound publisher of Hustler magazine; and Wag The Dog, in which he played a mythologised soldier lost behind enemy lines in a non-existent war in Albania.

Harrelson attracted ever more attention, meanwhile, for his off-screen activities: lowering a banner off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco to protest against clear-cutting of California's redwood forests; advocating biodiesel fuel made from hemp; turning himself into the poster-child for the legal marijuana movement; and opening a raw food oxygen bar in West Hollywood, at which patrons were invited to inhale scented gases pumped in from Sunset Boulevard and purified to heighten their oxygen content. That venture was not a success.

He also bankrolled an extensive effort in the late Nineties to have his father's case reopened in the appeals courts. "I can't attest to whether he's guilty or innocent," he said at the time. "But a lot of sources lead me to believe it wasn't a fair trial." The courts, however, did not agree, and Charles Harrelson was left to rot in prison. His son visited regularly, and they appear to have got along just fine. Following Charles's death, Woody has issued no statement or public comment. It's not often a movie star can claim to have a contract killer for a father, but Harrelson appears to have decided, once again, not to make hay of it.

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