She Took 41 Swings… And Said It Was Self-Defense | Candy Montgomery Case

She was a churchgoing mother. A wife. A friend.

Someone who blended into her community so well, no one would have ever expected what she was capable of.

And then she picked up an axe… and didn’t stop.

In this episode of GBRLIFE Of Crimes, we break down the case of Candy Montgomery — a woman whose life looked perfectly controlled on the outside, but underneath, something much darker was building. What makes this case so unsettling isn’t just the violence. It’s how ordinary everything seemed right up until it wasn’t.

This isn’t just a story about an affair gone wrong.
 It’s about repression, emotional detachment, and what happens when someone reaches a breaking point they didn’t even realize they were approaching.

In This Episode:

• Who Candy Montgomery was before the crime — the life, the marriage, and the image she maintained
 • The affair that set everything in motion — and how calculated it actually was
 • Betty Gore — not just the victim, but the emotional center of the story
 • The confrontation inside the house — what really happened that day
 • The brutality of the crime scene — and why it shocked investigators
 • The self-defense claim — and how it held up in court
 • The role of memory, dissociation, and emotional repression
 • The verdict that divided public opinion
 • The psychology behind it all — what pushes someone from control to chaos

Resources & Links:

Explore more episodes of GBRLIFE Of Crimes:
 • https://gbrlifetransmissions.buzzsprout.com
• GBRLIFE Transmissions

Want more stories including the companion blog for this episode? https://www.gbrlife.com/blog/when-the-lid-finally-blew-off

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Transcript

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Kaitlyn:
It's Friday the 13th, 1980, in Wiley, Texas, a small suburb north of Dallas.

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Kaitlyn:
Ranch-style homes, good lawns, a church on almost every corner.

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Kaitlyn:
The kind of community where people knew each other's names, watched each other's

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Kaitlyn:
kids, and borrowed each other's casserole dishes.

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Kaitlyn:
And at 8.30 in the morning, a woman knocked on her friend's door.

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Kaitlyn:
She's blonde, petite, 30 years old.

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Kaitlyn:
She's there to return a swimsuit. Her friend's daughter spent the night,

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Kaitlyn:
and she just needs to drop the bathing suit off before Bible school starts.

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Kaitlyn:
It should take five minutes. The door opens, and what happens next?

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Kaitlyn:
Inside a small utility room off the kitchen is something that seasoned homicide

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Kaitlyn:
investigators would later say they could not look at for more than a moment

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Kaitlyn:
before having to close the door, because there were 41 blows.

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Kaitlyn:
40 of them landed while Betty Gore's heart was still beating.

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Kaitlyn:
28 of them were to her face and head.

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Kaitlyn:
The woman who did it went home. Then she showered, changed her clothes,

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Kaitlyn:
cut up her bloody sandals with a pair of shears, went to lunch with friends,

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Kaitlyn:
and then went back to church to pick up the children. Her name? Candy Montgomery.

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Kaitlyn:
And three months later, a jury of nine women and three men would find her. not guilty.

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Kaitlyn:
Welcome to GBRLIFE Transmissions. I'm your host, Kaitlyn, and you're listening

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Kaitlyn:
to GBRLIFE of Crimes, where we explore not just what happened in crimes committed by women.

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Kaitlyn:
Why they happened, and the psychology behind them.

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Kaitlyn:
Today, we are going to talk about the case that has never, in more than 40 years,

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Kaitlyn:
stopped being asked about.

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Kaitlyn:
Because it's not just a murder story.

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Kaitlyn:
It's a story about what lives underneath a perfect life when no one is looking,

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Kaitlyn:
and what happens when it finally comes out.

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Kaitlyn:
To understand what happened in the utility room on June 13th,

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Kaitlyn:
you can't start with the church or the suburb or even the axe.

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Kaitlyn:
You have to start with a little girl who learned, very young,

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Kaitlyn:
that her feelings were a problem.

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Kaitlyn:
Candace Wheeler was born in 1949. Her father was a radar technician in the U.S.

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Kaitlyn:
Army, which meant the family moved constantly, base to base,

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Kaitlyn:
state to state, the kind of childhood where you're always the new kid,

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Kaitlyn:
always starting over, always needing to figure out the rules of a new place fast.

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Kaitlyn:
You learn to read rooms. You learn to be likable on short notice.

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Kaitlyn:
You learn that fitting in is a survival skill, not a luxury.

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Kaitlyn:
These are the children who grow up to be the most

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Kaitlyn:
socially gifted adults in any room and also

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Kaitlyn:
sometimes the most disconnected from their own interior world because when you

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Kaitlyn:
spend your entire childhood adapting to other people's environments there's

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Kaitlyn:
not a lot of space to figure out what your own environment actually feels like

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Kaitlyn:
at least not from the inside and here's the moment that matters.

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Kaitlyn:
Cindy is four years old. She's on an examination table at the doctor's office

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Kaitlyn:
because she's hurt, and she's screaming. And her mother leans down.

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Kaitlyn:
Shush, her mother says. What will people in the waiting room think?

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Kaitlyn:
One sentence, one moment. It probably lasted five seconds.

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Kaitlyn:
And here's what a four-year-old brain hears in that sentence.

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Kaitlyn:
Your pain is inconvenient.

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Kaitlyn:
Your feelings are louder than they should be. The most important thing right

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Kaitlyn:
now is not what you're going through.

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Kaitlyn:
It's how we look to the people outside the door.

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Kaitlyn:
Children do not process these moments philosophically.

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Kaitlyn:
They process them as instructions, as information about how the world works

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Kaitlyn:
and what their role in it is.

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Kaitlyn:
And the instruction Candy received over and over and over in different ways

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Kaitlyn:
throughout her childhood was contain yourself, be pleasant,

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Kaitlyn:
Do not make your emotions other people's problems.

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Kaitlyn:
And she was really good at following that instruction.

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Kaitlyn:
By the time she was a teenager, Candy Wheeler was known for being warm, funny, easy, magnetic.

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Kaitlyn:
She could walk into a new school in a new state and within weeks have a circle of friends.

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Kaitlyn:
She had what people called charisma, which is often just another word for the

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ability to make everyone around you feel comfortable, which is itself a skill

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Kaitlyn:
built from years of needing to.

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Kaitlyn:
She was also underneath all of that warmth, learning to put things in boxes.

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Kaitlyn:
Anger, a box, close the lid, smile, move on.

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Kaitlyn:
Psychologists who have studied this pattern call it emotional suppression.

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Kaitlyn:
It's not the same as not having feelings. That's the part that is crucial to understand.

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Kaitlyn:
Candy Montgomery felt many things.

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Kaitlyn:
She felt them deeply. She simply became extraordinarily skilled at not letting them out.

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Kaitlyn:
That kind of suppression does not disappear. It accumulates like pressure in

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Kaitlyn:
a sealed container. And the longer it builds.

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Kaitlyn:
The more efficiently the lid is maintained. But the less it takes,

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Kaitlyn:
and at some unpredictable future moment, that lid will blow off entirely.

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Kaitlyn:
By the early 1970s, Candy Wheeler had married Pat Montgomery,

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Kaitlyn:
a steady and promising electrical engineer at Texas Instruments.

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Kaitlyn:
They moved to Collin County in Texas, into what Candy called her dream house. They had two children.

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Kaitlyn:
They were active members of the Lucas United Methodist Church.

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Kaitlyn:
From the outside, this was the life that had been advertised.

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Kaitlyn:
And Candy was, as she had always been, very good at the life that was advertised.

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Kaitlyn:
She organized church events. She taught Sunday school.

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Kaitlyn:
She was warm and funny and easy to be around. The kind of woman who remembered

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Kaitlyn:
everyone's birthday and made new people feel welcome. Remember, she's charismatic.

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Kaitlyn:
And she was in the language of that world. An extremely good wife,

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Kaitlyn:
a great mother, a perfect neighbor.

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Kaitlyn:
But here's the thing about lives built entirely on performance.

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Kaitlyn:
They're exhausting and they leave no room for the person underneath.

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Kaitlyn:
Candy was bored. Not bored in the small manageable way, bored in the deep way.

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Kaitlyn:
The way that starts to feel like slow disappearance.

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Kaitlyn:
She was intelligent and social and driven by genuine human connection and the

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Kaitlyn:
life she was living as good as it looked did not quite fit the shape of who she actually was.

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Kaitlyn:
And Pat, he was a good man. He was reliable and kind.

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Kaitlyn:
He was also emotionally largely absent in the way many men of that generation

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Kaitlyn:
had been taught to be. And she wanted more.

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Kaitlyn:
She didn't know exactly what more looked like, but she was watching. And his name? The More.

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Kaitlyn:
Was Alan Gore. But Alan was also married. Thing is, he was also a Texas Instruments

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Kaitlyn:
engineer, and he was also a regular at the Methodist Church in Lucas, but he was tall,

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Kaitlyn:
steady, and well-liked, and he was absolutely not looking for an affair.

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Kaitlyn:
When Candy first approached him in late 1978, after their arms collided during

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Kaitlyn:
a church volleyball game, he said no.

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Kaitlyn:
He actually said no several times. He told her he loved his wife,

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Kaitlyn:
but Candy pursued him for months, and eventually Alan Gore said yes.

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Kaitlyn:
What happens next tells you everything about who Candy Montgomery had become.

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Kaitlyn:
Because when Candy and Alan finally agreed to begin an affair,

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Kaitlyn:
and it was like that, it was, yes, I agree, let's do this.

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Kaitlyn:
They didn't just fall into it. They truly negotiated it.

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Kaitlyn:
They sat down, these two church-going suburban parents in 1978 in Texas,

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Kaitlyn:
and they established ground rules.

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Kaitlyn:
This was not going to be emotional. It was not going to threaten their marriages.

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Kaitlyn:
And it was going to be physical and finite and compartmentalized.

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Kaitlyn:
And they would meet when they could.

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Kaitlyn:
And they would be discreet. And they would not fall in love.

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Kaitlyn:
And for a while, it worked exactly as designed.

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Kaitlyn:
Now, I want you to hold on to that image for a moment, as I usually do at some

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Kaitlyn:
point during these podcasts.

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Kaitlyn:
But in this case, it's because of what Candy was doing here psychologically.

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Kaitlyn:
Compartmentalization. I'm sure you knew that's what it was. And it worked for a long while.

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Kaitlyn:
She was having an affair and teaching Sunday school and making her husband dinners

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Kaitlyn:
and showing up to church volleyball and feeling, by most accounts,

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Kaitlyn:
genuinely fine about all of it.

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Kaitlyn:
And for Candy, you might be thinking she's a sociopath.

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Kaitlyn:
No, because that's a sign that she had felt nothing. It's actually,

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Kaitlyn:
in a strange way, a sign of how thoroughly she had learned to manage her own

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Kaitlyn:
inner world, to put the uncomfortable things in a box and close the lid and go on with the day.

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Kaitlyn:
That skill, the ability to shut down and move on, will matter enormously in

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Kaitlyn:
about 18 months because the affair itself lasted roughly seven months.

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Kaitlyn:
And it did not end because of guilt or discovery, but because Betty Gore had

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Kaitlyn:
a difficult pregnancy with their second child and Alan decided he needed to focus on his family.

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Kaitlyn:
So he ended it cleanly, as cleanly as these things can be ended.

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Kaitlyn:
And Candy, to all appearances, accepted it. And life went on.

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Kaitlyn:
The two families continued to see each other. Candy and Betty remained friends.

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Kaitlyn:
Their children played together. The Montgomerys and the Gores attended the same

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Kaitlyn:
social events, sat in the same pews, smiled at each other across parking lots,

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Kaitlyn:
and from the outside it looked like nothing had ever happened.

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It did. And when it comes to Betty, because she usually gets reduced to a footnote in her own story,

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Kaitlyn:
she was a middle school teacher, and she was much more quiet than Candy and

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Kaitlyn:
more reserved, the kind of person who felt things deeply but struggled to express them.

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Kaitlyn:
She and Alan actually met in college and married in 1970, and by all accounts,

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Kaitlyn:
she loved him genuinely and completely, which is, in its own kind of way, its own vulnerability.

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Kaitlyn:
After all, their second daughter, Bethany, was born in 1979,

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Kaitlyn:
and Betty developed what sounds very much like postpartum depression.

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Kaitlyn:
She was anxious, struggling, more emotionally fragile than usual,

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Kaitlyn:
and Alan was traveling for work, or was he?

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Kaitlyn:
Either way, the house felt large and quiet in ways that it hadn't before.

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Kaitlyn:
And then sometime in early 1980, Betty did find out about the affair.

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Kaitlyn:
She found out, not from Candy, and not from Alan, but through a mutual friend

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Kaitlyn:
who had apparently known and said something.

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Kaitlyn:
And what Betty did with that information is heartbreaking in retrospect.

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Kaitlyn:
She tried to hold everything together. She and Alan talked, and they were actively

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working on their marriage, planning a trip to Europe, trying to rebuild.

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Betty wanted the life she had. She wanted her husband and her daughters and

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Kaitlyn:
her home and church, and she was willing to fight to keep them.

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Kaitlyn:
So on the morning of June 13th, 1980, Alan left for a business trip to Minnesota.

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Before he boarded his plane in Dallas, he called Betty, but she didn't answer.

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Kaitlyn:
He tried again from his hotel in St. Paul, still no answer.

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And he kept calling through the afternoon, but nothing. By evening, he started to get cold.

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Very scared, so he called a neighbor and asked to have them check on her.

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Three men walked up to the Gores' driveway that night. They found the front door unlocked.

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They heard crying inside and followed it to a bedroom where 11-month-old Bethany

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was alone in her crib, soiled and screaming.

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She had been alone for hours.

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They followed the blood down the hallway that they noticed, and then they found

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Betty in the utility room. One of the men, a Collin County Sheriff's deputy

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named Steve, would later say the scene looked like something from a horror film.

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He said, and I'm quoting here, It was Friday the 13th.

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Our thought was that we had a copycat of The Shining, that movie that had been

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Kaitlyn:
in theaters for just six weeks.

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Kaitlyn:
Betty Gore was 30 years old, and she had been dead for more than 13 hours.

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Kaitlyn:
So let's go back to that morning. Candy arrived at the Gores' house at approximately 8.30 a.m.

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Kaitlyn:
To return Alyssa's swimsuit.

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Kaitlyn:
Alyssa, the Gores' five-year-old daughter, the older one, while she had spent

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Kaitlyn:
the night at the Montgomery home for a Bible school event, the families were friends.

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Kaitlyn:
So, nothing strange. So what happened inside the utility room,

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Kaitlyn:
legally speaking, it's actually disputed.

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Kaitlyn:
But what's not disputed is the outcome.

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Kaitlyn:
By Candy's own account, Betty confronted her about the affair.

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Kaitlyn:
They argued. Betty, according to Candy, grabbed a wood-splitting axe from a

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Kaitlyn:
shelf in the utility room and swung it at her, striking Candy in the head with

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Kaitlyn:
the flat side and cutting her toe.

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Kaitlyn:
Candy wrestled the axe away, cutting her hand badly in the process.

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And then the dissociation, according to the defense, took over.

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41 blows. Remember, 28 were to the face and the head.

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The axe had eventually detached from the handle from the force of it.

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Forensic experts confirmed that Betty's heart was beating for 40 of those strikes.

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After it was over, Candy washed herself in the Gores' shower,

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fully clothed, trying to remove the blood, and she left Bethany crying in her crib.

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Remember, Bethany's 11 months. I just said it, but let's say it again.

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She's 11 months old. And then Candy drove home.

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She showered again, and she changed her clothes. She took the sandals that she

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had been wearing and cut them into pieces with a pair of scissors,

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and then she bandaged her injured hand, and then she went to lunch.

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She met with friends at a restaurant, and she was, by all their accounts.

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Normal, present, and completely herself.

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That charming candy! Later that afternoon, she went back to church to pick up

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the children from Bible school.

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Including Alyssa, the daughter of the woman that she just killed.

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That evening, when the police began to understand what had happened,

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the trail of evidence started pointing towards the last person who had been

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known to have been at the house.

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So they went to go talk to Candy.

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She was calm. She cooperated. She initially claimed that she was only there

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briefly, but the evidence was already there.

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Because a bloody thumbprint on the freezer door that matched Candy's,

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footprints consistent with her shoe size, and traces of blood in her car.

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So on June 27, 1980, two weeks after Betty's death, Candy was charged with first-degree

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murder, but she was released on a $100,000 bail.

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Her church rallied around her, and her lawyer, a man named Don Crowder,

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who had never handled a murder case in his life, started building what would

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become one of the most unusual defenses in Texas legal history.

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Don was a civil attorney, but he was also the member of the same church as Candy Montgomery.

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And he had never been near a murder trial. So when she called him,

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he said yes anyways, but he was a little bit nervous, to say the least.

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But what he built, with the help of a psychiatrist named Dr.

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Fred Faison, was a defense that hinged on a single word.

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Shush! In the months before trial, Crowder arranged for Candy to undergo hypnosis

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sessions with Dr. Faison in Houston.

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The goal was to recover whatever memory Candy had of those moments in the utility

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room that she had claimed were missing or distorted. Under hypnosis.

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Candy did recover something. She recalled the moments just before the violence escalated.

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She recalled Betty telling her in the middle of their argument to shush.

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And according to Dr. Faison's testimony, that word, that specific sound,

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had triggered something very, very deep.

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When Candy was four years old, she had been injured and was screaming in pain

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on an examination table.

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We know the story. What will people in the waiting room think?

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The message delivered to a four-year-old girl.

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Well, Dr. Faison testified that Candy had spent 26 years quietly obeying that instruction,

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hiding her anger, closing the lid on anything too loud or too messy or too much,

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compartmentalizing, to use the term we talked about earlier,

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with extraordinary discipline.

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And when Betty Gore said shush in the utility room, something in Candy Montgomery's

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nervous system heard her mother's

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voice, And 26 years of suppressed rage finally came out of its box.

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The term Dr. Faison used in the court was disassociative reaction.

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It's what happens, clinically speaking, when a person's conscious mind eventually

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steps back from an unbearable experience.

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Memory fractures, awareness narrows, the body continues to act,

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but the person is not fully present for what they're doing. It explains,

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the defense argued, how you can swing an axe 41 times and then go to lunch and feel fine.

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Not because you feel nothing, but because the part of you that was in the room

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is locked in a completely separate container and you haven't opened it yet.

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Now, I want to be clear that the science of hypnosis for covered memories is genuinely contested.

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In the years since 1980, the legal system has become increasingly skeptical

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of hypnotical refresh testimony precisely because the brain is so suggestible under hypnosis that.

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So open to the therapist's framing

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that what gets recovered may be as much construction as recollection.

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The prosecution brought their own expert, who testified that dissociation simply

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did not work the way that Dr.

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Faison was describing, and that you cannot attribute the specific number of

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blows to a triggered trauma response, that this was violence,

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not pathology. But Crowder had done something smart.

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He had never hired a criminal defense attorney because he had never wanted someone

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who would treat this whole situation like a normal case.

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He treated it like an extraordinary human story. But it was.

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And he understood that jurors are not logic machines.

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Kaitlyn:
They're people. And what he gave them was a story about a woman who had spent

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her entire life holding everything in and who had built a life of perfect exteriors

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Kaitlyn:
and who had finally and catastrophically broken.

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They could understand that. Most of them had felt something like it in a smaller, safer key.

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Kaitlyn:
The trial ran for eight days in McKinney, Texas.

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Kaitlyn:
National Press was there. The courtroom was packed every day.

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Kaitlyn:
And Candy testified for three of those days. she demonstrated the positions of the struggle.

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She explained her fear. She did not look at the axe when it was brought into

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the courtroom as evidence.

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Kaitlyn:
The prosecution's argument was simple and logical. You cannot hit someone 41 times in self-defense.

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Kaitlyn:
The number of blows indicates intense. It indicates rage.

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It indicates overkill in the most literal sense. And the jury deliberated for three hours.

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Kaitlyn:
And on October 30th, 1980, Candy Montgomery was found, not guilty.

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Kaitlyn:
The crowd outside the courtroom screamed, murder, murderer.

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The verdict divided Wiley, it divided Texas, and honestly has not stopped dividing people since.

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One juror said the prosecution never had a case.

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Another said it took six secret ballots to get there.

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One juror said the number of blows was never the point, that whether it was

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one or a thousand, what mattered was the state of her mind in that moment.

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Candy walked out of that courthouse and told reporters she wanted to get all

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of this behind her and be normal again.

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Three months later, she and Pat moved to Georgia. They stayed married for four

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more years before divorcing.

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Candy went back to her maiden name, Candace Wheeler. She became a mental health

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counselor. I know, that's, it's pretty ironic.

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And she lives quietly, as far as anyone can tell, still in Georgia.

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She has declined every interview request for decades.

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When the Dallas Morning News reached her on the 20th anniversary of Betty's

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death, she said, and I'm quoting, I'm telling you in big, bold letters, I'm not interested.

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Don Crowder, the lawyer who had won the case of his career, basically,

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Kaitlyn:
struggled for the rest of his life with what that meant.

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He went on to serve as a city attorney for 22 years, ran for governor and lost, not surprising.

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And in the late 90s, after his brother died, his mental health collapsed.

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And he told reporters in Montgomery that the Montgomery case was maybe the zenith

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of an extraordinary successful career or the demise of what could have been.

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And he died by unaliving himself in 1999.

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Kaitlyn:
And I've been sitting with this case for a long time. And I wanna tell you what

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I think because I think the easy version of the story misses the most important part.

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Kaitlyn:
The easy version is this. Did she get away with murder?

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Kaitlyn:
Was the self-defense claim real? Was the disassociation real?

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Kaitlyn:
That's the version that the television should love because it's a clean,

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Kaitlyn:
binary answer to Chase. But I don't think those are the right questions.

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I think that the right question is, what does it do to a person who spent a

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lifetime closing the lid on everything that is too big, too loud,

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Kaitlyn:
and too inconvenient? Is it too much?

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Kaitlyn:
Kandi Montgomery was not a violent person. There's no record of violence before

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Kaitlyn:
or after June 13th, 1980. And she wasn't cruel.

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Kaitlyn:
She was not calculated in the

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Kaitlyn:
way that many of the women we have discussed on this podcast have been.

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She did not plan what happened in the utility room.

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Nobody who has looked seriously at this case believed that she walked up that

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driveway intending to kill Betty.

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Kaitlyn:
What she was was someone who had become extraordinary at not feeling things,

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Kaitlyn:
at separating herself from her own discomfort,

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Kaitlyn:
her own anger, and her own needs, and who built a life of such a careful performance

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Kaitlyn:
that there was almost no room in it for anything that was genuinely hers.

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And the affair with Alan was the first time in years that she had done something

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Kaitlyn:
purely because she wanted to.

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Kaitlyn:
And even that, she managed, she negotiated, she put it in a box and then she put a lid on it.

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Kaitlyn:
And then Betty Gore, in a moment of raw pain and betrayal, told her, it's a shush.

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Kaitlyn:
And something that had been locked away for a very long time came out all at once.

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Kaitlyn:
And I'm not asking you to excuse what happened with my explanation.

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Kaitlyn:
Betty was 30 years old. She had two daughters and she had done nothing wrong

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Kaitlyn:
except for love her husband and won her life back.

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Kaitlyn:
That wasn't wrong. She deserved to live. The violence done to her was real and

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Kaitlyn:
catastrophic and permanent.

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Kaitlyn:
But I am asking you to think about what Candy Montgomery and her case reveals

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Kaitlyn:
about the cost of a certain kind of femininity. the good wife,

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Kaitlyn:
the good mother, the good neighbor, always warm, always composed, always appropriate.

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Kaitlyn:
What happens to everything that doesn't fit that description? Where does it go?

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Kaitlyn:
And in 1980, the answer was, it goes in a box.

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Kaitlyn:
You close the lid, you go to church, you make casseroles, you smile at the woman

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Kaitlyn:
whose husband you slept with, and you say good morning, and you borrow each

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Kaitlyn:
other's children for Bible school and you manage until you don't.

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Kaitlyn:
And Candy Montgomery's case is not just a true crime story. It's a story about repression.

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Kaitlyn:
About performance, and about what it costs to maintain a self that has been

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shaped entirely around other people's comfort.

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Kaitlyn:
It is honestly a story that belongs as much to psychology textbooks.

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Kaitlyn:
As it does to a crime record. Candy is still out there somewhere in Georgia,

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Kaitlyn:
in her mid-70s, not talking to anyone, living the quiet life she had asked for

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Kaitlyn:
on the steps of that courthouse.

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Kaitlyn:
And Betty Gore is buried in Wiley, Texas.

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Kaitlyn:
Her daughters grew up without her. And the house on Dogwood Street,

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Kaitlyn:
the one where it all happened, it's still there.

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Kaitlyn:
People have lived in it since. They bought new furniture, new lives,

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Kaitlyn:
new routines. But the story, as anyone in Wiley will tell you, never really left.

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Kaitlyn:
This has been GBRLIFE of Crimes, part of GBRLIFE Transmissions,

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Kaitlyn:
and I'm Kaitlyn, reminding you that understanding the darkness helps us appreciate the light.

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Kaitlyn:
Join me next time as we uncover another case that challenges everything we thought

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Kaitlyn:
we knew about the criminal mind.

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Kaitlyn:
Hey, it's Kaitlyn. If you stayed this long, thank you. But a quick ask to like

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Kaitlyn:
and subscribe each time you listen to GBRLIFE Transmissions.

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Kaitlyn:
And don't forget to check out the reviews or blogs on gbrlife.com.

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Kaitlyn:
Can't wait to see you there.