Jimmy Chagra was tried separately, in Jacksonville, Florida. He was acquitted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder but convicted of conspiracy to obstruct justice and conspiracy to possess marijuana. He received 15 years and a fine. In a subsequent plea deal with federal prosecutors, he eventually admitted his role in Wood’s murder and in the attempted murder of an Assistant U.S. Attorney named James Kerr. He died of cancer in 2008, having been released from prison for health reasons in 2003.
The verdict against Charles Harrelson stood through all subsequent appeals, including a final Supreme Court rejection in 2004.
## The Prison Years and What Woody Knew
December 14, 1982 — the date Charles Harrelson was convicted — was the day that the son and the father’s relationship took a form that would define it for the next twenty-five years: the son on the outside, building a career; the father on the inside, serving consecutive life sentences.
At the time of his father’s conviction, Woody Harrelson was twenty-one years old. He had just graduated from Hanover College in Indiana — a small Presbyterian liberal arts school where he had studied English and theater, joined the Sigma Chi fraternity, and, according to records of that period, counted among his college friends a young man named Mike Pence, the future Vice President of the United States. The cultural distance between the Hanover College of 1979 to 1983 and the federal trial in San Antonio of 1982 was, in physical terms, roughly 1,300 miles. In terms of the worlds they represented, the distance was considerably greater.