The father of the famous and talented Hollywood actor, Woody Harrelson, was a hit man charged in three Texas murders-for-hire.
Charles Voyde Harrrelson (1938-2007) was a lifelong criminal, most famously sentenced to two life terms for the 1978 murder of federal judge John H. Wood Jr. By that time he was already a convicted armed robber and hit man. One of his contract murder victims was a grain merchant from the Italian community near Bryan.
In 1968, Charles Harrelson killed two men for pay in Texas. First, he brutally murdered a carpet executive from Houston named Alan Harry Berg on 28 May 1968. Then on 6 July, he committed another contract killing: this time the victim was a grain dealer from Hearne named Sam Carmelo Degelia Jr.
Harrelson’s total haul for these two murders was $3,500 (about $29K in 2025).
Charles Harrelson was the youngest of five children, born in 1938 in Lovelady, Houston County, Texas, a town whose sole claim to fame is the Eastham prison, the first maximum security prison in the Lone Star State. He grew up in Huntsville, about fifty miles east of Bryan. His mother’s family lived in Houston County and his father, Voyde Harrelson, was born in nearby Bedias.
Charles V. Harrelson and two of his victims grew up outside of Houston, Texas.
Harrelson had a series of romantic relationships, including four legal marriages. From 1959-1964, he was married to Diane Lou Oswald (1937-), with whom he had three children, two of them Woody and Brett Harrelson, who are both actors. The coincidence of a shared surname has led Google AI into telling me, with full confidence, that Diane was the niece of John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. (This is false.)
Charles Harrelson left Diane Oswald and their children years before their official divorce. By 1968, he was living with his girlfriend, Sandra Sue Attaway. Attaway was charged with accessory to killing Alan Berg: she was the one who lured him out by pretending to be an admirer, and drove the car that abducted him to his brutal death.
At the end of June Attaway, who was just twenty-five, left her relationship with Harrelson after a beating that blacked both her eyes. Her grand jury testimony in November 1968 cracked the Berg and Degelia cases wide open. Attaway took the stand against Harrelson in trials for each of the murders.
Alan Berg, 31, was in the carpet business in Houston with his father, Nathan. A successful executive, he made $300 or even $500 a week: an annual income between $129-215,000 in 2025, adjusting for inflation. The man who was accused of having Alan Berg killed was the owner of a rival carpet firm: Frank Joseph DiMaria (1938-).
Berg’s body was found in Brazoria County, forty miles south of Houston. Opinions on motive in the Berg killing were at first split. Charles Harrelson and Brazoria County authorities tended to agree that DiMaria got the losing end of a carpet business deal involving Nathan and Alan Berg. Harrelson and several witnesses for the defense contended this was the reason DiMaria wanted Alan Berg killed.
However, there was another theory, one that revolved around the late man’s high-stakes gambling addiction. Alan’s wife told the press her husband had lost thousands of dollars on college basketball games over the years. Days after his disappearance, she received a call at home from a bookie who wanted $2,000 for Alan’s gambling debts. Alan’s father knew the FBI had questioned his son, but not why; their attention convinced him his son was killed after passing a bad tip to Mafia gamblers.
Alan Berg’s remains were not discovered until November. Charles Harrelson’s name wasn’t raised until Attaway testified before the county grand jury, days later. From May to November, Harrelson traveled in and out of the area, being spotted as far away as Kansas City. But his next murder-for-hire would bring him right back.
Hidalgo County, where Harrelson’s next victim was killed, is 300 miles down the Gulf coast from Houston to the southern tip of Texas, on the Mexican border. The victim, Sam Degelia, was a cotton and grain dealer from Hearne: about 70 miles due west of Huntsville, and twenty miles northwest of Bryan.
Bryan, Texas is the hub of an Italian farming community whose pioneering families came from a few towns in Palermo and Agrigento: Corleone is well represented here. Most famously, the Morello-Terranova family tried their hands at cotton farming in Bryan before returning to New York City and forming the crime family known today as the Genovese. Bryan is also where narcotics trafficker Luke Mauro was born. In 1937, Mauro was arrested in a narcotics import and distribution conspiracy involving some of the biggest gangsters in Texas: Vincent Vallone, Sam Maceo, and “Big Angelo” Angelica.
Sam Degelia, to be clear, was not part of these circles. He and his family were, as far as I can tell, honest farmers of no relation to the networks of known and suspected organized criminals I’ve written and talked about. (For more on these networks, see my presentation, available on Patreon and to Italian Genealogical Group members, titled Leoluca Petranella’s Pallbearers.)
For his second contract killing, Harrelson kept some of the same elements of the Berg hit, but changed up the lure and the players. Degelia was a church-going family man with four children and business concerns that served the vital interests of his neighbors. He was not the same kind of recreational risk-taker as a high-stakes gambler like Berg, but agriculture brings its own risks, ones Degelia was prepared to take for his business. So Harrelson pretended to be a grain buyer with a proposition. Jerry O. Watkins, who Harrelson brought along, ended up testifying against Harrelson, the same as Attaway.
And so begins the part of the story that requires our suspension of disbelief, because what followed were several accusations, not all of them contradictory, that the men involved—including the victim—were no strangers.
Harrelson was hired by Degelia’s business partner and long-time friend, Pete Thomas Scamardo (1938-2016). Scamardo was born in Hearne to two locals: Marion P. Scamardo, whose parents were born in Poggioreale, Trapani, Sicily, and Lucille Cotropia, whose parents were born in Corleone.
Degelia was born in Falls County, Texas, sixty miles northwest of Bryan, and grew up in Hearne. His father, Sam Carmelo Degelia Sr., was born in Steele’s Store, eleven miles west of Bryan, to immigrants from Corleone. Sam Jr’s mother Beatrice Amos was also a Texas native.
Sam and Pete were less than a year apart in age and grew up on home farms in the same area. Through their shared corleonese roots, Degelia and Scamardo were distantly related: fifth cousins, twice removed. As young adults they formed a grain concern, though the partnership dissolved after a couple years. Scamardo held onto a life insurance policy on Degelia with a $50,000 payout, intended to protect their shared business interests. The policy remained active a year after their partnership ended, when Scamardo decided to pay Harrelson two thousand dollars to kill Degelia.
The men had not had a public falling out: that much is evident from how Scamardo behaved after Degelia’s body was found. He comforted Sam’s grieving wife and served as a pallbearer at his funeral.
Once the investigation focused on Scamardo, however, the stories grew wild. Sandra Sue Attaway testified that her former boyfriend owed Scamardo a favor for having lost $10,000 worth of heroin when police stopped him in Kansas City, where he’d intended to sell the drug. Scamardo had smuggled the heroin into the US from Mexico, said Attaway, and given it to Harrelson to sell.
Harrelson claimed Jerry Watkins, who’d come with him when Harrelson killed Degelia, had been introduced to him as a CIA agent whose mission was sourcing guns for an anti-Castro militia, and that Watkins and Degelia had a gun-running operation with some men from Houston, bringing weapons into the country from Mexico.
Percy Foreman, the attorney who defended both Harrelson and Scamardo, claimed Degelia once employed Harrelson as a debt collector for his grain and cotton business. Foreman said Scamardo wanted nothing to do with Degelia’s weapons activity, and their business partnership fell apart over this difference. Hidalgo County DA Oscar McInnis, for the prosecution, claimed nearly the opposite: that it was Degelia who wanted distance from Scamardo’s heroin smuggling, and this precipitated the split.
This part of the trial quickly descended into ethnic profiling, as it was noted there was a crop dusting airstrip near the Westbrook Valley Gin, which might have conceivably been used for illicit activity, and was owned by Joe Copora, a member of the large Italian American community in the Hearne area. “Foreman… could not say whether the ancestors of the Italian-Americans in that area had come from Sicily.”
Yet none of these accusations fit the story Watkins told of how Harrelson killed Sam Degelia. Posing as a grain buyer, Harrelson called Degelia and arranged to meet him in a cafeteria parking lot in the border town of McAllen, where Degelia was in the area buying grain. But this ruse could not have worked if Degelia already knew Harrelson.
Sam Degelia brought his wife and four children with him on this business trip. They were staying in a hotel in nearby Hidalgo County. Harrelson invited Degelia to join him and Watkins in Reynosa, Mexico, twenty miles away, for drinks. Soon after they left, Harrelson pointed a gun at Degelia and ordered Watkins to drive them to a pump house. Degelia’s hands were tied with rope and he was led inside. Watkins heard the report of a gun, twice, and Harrelson emerged alone.
Chuck Harrelson improved his methods between the murders of Berg and Degelia. When he shot Berg, it was on a dirt road near a dump. He tried to dig a grave for Berg but found the ground too hard packed. He abandoned the plan, leaving behind a shallow, bloody grave for a sheriff’s deputy to find later that day. Perhaps the worst detail of Berg’s death, as told by Attaway, was when she heard a “gurgling” sound issue from the hole Harrelson was digging, and asked what it was. Harrelson replied that Berg wasn’t dead and would have to be strangled. Berg’s skeleton, when it was found in November, had a cord around its neck of the type used in venetian blinds. His body was dumped in a marshy area and left there, through the hot Texas summer and fall, for six months. His remains were identified from a dental impression.
Pete Thomas Scamardo was found guilty as an accomplice to Degelia’s death. His sentence, however, was just seven years probation. Watkins, who was initially charged along with Harrelson in Degelia’s murder, was granted immunity when he became a witness for the prosecution.
After Sandra Attaway left Harrelson, she took up with Dennis Weadock, an alleged mob enforcer and debt collector known as “Dennis the Menace.” When Harrelson called Attaway in November, saying he was on his way to kill her, she and Weadock fled to Los Angeles.
Attaway testified at first that Berg owed DiMaria a debt of $7,000, and DiMaria would pay Harrelson $2,000 to collect it. Later, she said Harrelson got only $1,500 cash for the hit. Attaway, it was eventually revealed, told Weadock about the murder and Weadock, in turn, told Robert Leonard, a private investigator hired by Nat Berg, the location of Berg’s remains. Based on this information, Leonard was able to find Alan Berg’s remains, and Attaway received a $10,000 reward put up by the victim’s father.
In a strange twist, Claude Harrelson, a polygraph operator who was called as a witness before the grand jury investigating Berg’s death, turned out to be Charles V. Harrelson’s estranged older brother. Born twelve years apart, they were the sons of Voyde (or Void) Harrelson, a farmer turned prison guard. Claude followed their father’s path and became a Houston police officer before working for a private investigation firm. Later, he was employed by the Baylor College of Medicine as a security guard. It was in this last capacity that he was killed on duty, in 1990, by a disturbed 23-year old who wrestled Harrelson’s service weapon from him. Claude Harrelson was 63.
Charles Harrelson was a complicated man. His son, Woody, described him in a 1988 interview as “articulate” and “charming,” but at the same time, as someone he was not sure deserved his loyalty or affection.
Harrelson was acquitted of the murder of Alan Berg, because the jury was deadlocked. Consequently, charges against Frank DiMaria, as an accomplice in the murder, were dropped. DiMaria is still living, in his eighties, in a $1.5 million home in Houston.
Scamardo, after his parole, moved to McLean, Virginia, with his wife Andrea, and became an influential executive. The couple were officers in more than a dozen real estate businesses. Pete died in 2016.
Harrelson’s first trial for Sam Degelia’s murder ended in a mistrial. A second trial in 1973 led to his conviction and a sentence of fifteen years in prison. He was released after five years. In 1981, Harrelson was convicted in the shooting death of a federal judge, John H. Wood, Jr. in San Antonio in 1979, and sentenced to two life terms in prison. Harrelson skipped bail and was apprehended on 1 September 1980 after a four-hour police standoff in which he was allegedly under the influence of injected cocaine. He confessed to the murders of not just Judge Wood but also President John F. Kennedy.
After an escape attempt in 1995, Charles Harrelson was transferred to a supermax prison. He died of a heart attack in 2007 while incarcerated in Florence, Colorado. He was 68.
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