The Sam Degelia Jr. case produced a different outcome. Degelia was a grain dealer and father of four in Hearne, Texas. He was killed in McAllen, Texas, in 1968. Harrelson was allegedly paid $2,000 to carry out the killing — a figure that is striking in its modesty when placed against the $250,000 he would allegedly later receive for the Judge Wood contract. The first trial ended in a hung jury. The accomplice, Pete Scamardo, received probation. Harrelson was retried in 1973, convicted, and sentenced to fifteen years.
He served approximately five years and was paroled in 1978 for good behavior. This is a fact worth pausing on: a man convicted of murder for hire, sentenced to fifteen years, walked out of prison five years later. The parole system of the 1970s operated under a different set of assumptions than the mandatory minimums and truth-in-sentencing requirements that would characterize later decades of American criminal justice. A murderer with good behavior could be paroled in a fraction of his original sentence. Charles Harrelson was paroled.
He was free, in 1978, for approximately one year before his alleged involvement in the killing of Judge Wood.
The trajectory of his criminal career — from robbery, to murder for hire at $2,000, to murder for hire at $250,000 — follows a specific kind of professional logic. Each case escalated the stakes: the targets, the fees, the consequences of getting caught. The Sam Degelia murder, if the conviction accurately reflected his guilt, was the murder of a private citizen with modest professional standing. The Judge Wood case was the murder of a federal judge. The difference between those two crimes, in terms of the investigative resources that would be brought to bear on finding and prosecuting the perpetrator, was enormous.