Material uncertainties: The precise amount paid to Charles Harrelson for the Wood killing — reported as $250,000 across multiple sources — is attributed to the prosecution’s case and Joe Chagra’s testimony; it was not independently verified outside the trial record. Jamiel Chagra was acquitted of murder conspiracy at his own trial, so the payment figure represents the prosecution’s claimed amount rather than an established fact beyond dispute. The total cost of the FBI investigation is reported variously as “more than $5 million” and “$5–10 million” in different sources; the range reflects the variation in contemporary reporting rather than a verified final figure. Woody Harrelson’s statement that he spent “a couple of million” on appeal legal fees is attributed to his own public statements and is taken at face value as his estimate. Charles Harrelson’s claimed involvement in other murders-for-hire (reportedly dozens, according to in-prison memoirs) is noted as an unverified claim attributed to Charles himself and is explicitly not treated as established fact in this article. The JFK assassination claim is treated as unverified conspiracy theory, consistent with the conclusion of investigators at the time and subsequent historical analysis.
## The Country Between Midland and Lebanon
The geography of Woody Harrelson’s early years is the geography of working-class American mobility in the 1960s and 1970s — not upward mobility in the conventional sense, but lateral movement, the kind driven by family need rather than opportunity. Midland, Texas, where he was born, is an oil city in the Permian Basin: flat, sun-blasted, organized around the economics of petroleum extraction. It is not a city that people from the coasts tend to know well, though it has produced politicians and oilmen and, apparently, at least one future Hollywood actor. Woody was born there in 1961, and the family was there because Charles Harrelson was there, in whatever iteration of his life he occupied in 1961.