Woody Harrelson is still making films. He appeared in the fourth season of True Detective in 2023, returning to the character of Marty Hart in Night Country. He continues to be cast and to work, which is the most basic fact about a professional actor’s career: the work continues, or it doesn’t. His work continues.
The father’s story ended in 2007 in a cell in Colorado. The son’s story is ongoing, organized around a life in Maui and a career in film and television and a set of commitments — to environmental sustainability, to marijuana reform, to his family, to his craft — that have nothing to do with the specific facts of what Charles Harrelson did in the parking lot of a San Antonio townhouse on May 29, 1979, and everything to do with the choices that Woodrow Tracy Harrelson has made across more than forty years of professional and personal life.
The birthday they shared — July 23 — comes around every year. The actor who found it “mind-blowing” to see how much he and his father had in common has been living with that similarity and that difference for more than four decades now. Whatever the similarity amounts to, and whatever the difference amounts to, is something the biographical record can point toward without fully reaching.
It remains, like most of the significant things in a life, partly in the dark.
## The FBI’s Investigation: Scale, Methods, and What It Took to Build the Case
The Wood murder investigation is worth examining in some detail, both because the case itself is historically significant — the first assassination of a sitting federal judge in the twentieth century — and because the specific methods used to build it illuminate the specific claims that Woody Harrelson later made about the fairness of the proceedings against his father.