Non-graphic · Sensitive events discussed without explicit detail.

41 blows and an acquittal: The 1980 axe killing that shocked Texas

On the morning of June 13, 1980, Candace Montgomery drove through the quiet streets of Wylie, Texas, and pulled up to the home of her neighbor Betty Gore. What happened inside that house over the next hour would end one woman's life, send shockwaves through a tightly knit suburban community, and launch one of the most polarizing criminal trials in Texas history.

The Gore home in Wylie, Texas

The Montgomery and Gore families had been neighbors and friends since the mid-1970s. Both couples had settled in Wylie, a small town northeast of Dallas, and found their social footing at the First United Methodist Church of Lucas. Betty Gore, 30, raised her children at home while her husband Allan worked as an engineer. Candace Montgomery, 30, and her husband Pat appeared by all outward measures to be a conventional suburban family. The two women knew each other well enough to exchange favors, swap childcare, and worship in the same pew.

Betty Gore with her family

But beneath that surface, something had gone badly wrong. About eighteen months before the murder, Candace Montgomery and Allan Gore had begun a covert affair. By early 1980, Allan had ended it — he wanted to repair his marriage to Betty. Whether Betty knew the extent of her husband's infidelity on June 13 remains one of the case's enduring ambiguities. What is known is that on that Friday, Allan was out of town on a business trip, and Candace came to the house.

According to Montgomery's account, the two women met in the utility room of the Gore home. Something in that room — a word, an accusation, a look — ignited a catastrophic confrontation. When it was over, Betty Gore lay dead, struck forty-one times with a woodcutter's axe. The violence was so severe that responding law enforcement officers, hardened by years of homicide work, were stunned by what they found. Betty's daughter Bethany had been asleep in her crib in another room during the entire attack.

The body was not discovered until that evening, approximately thirteen hours after the killing. When officers arrived, little Bethany was still in her crib — alone in the house for hours. The image of that child, waiting in the dark for a mother who would never come, became one of the most haunting details of a case already full of them.

Candace Montgomery was quickly identified as the prime suspect. She confessed to the killing but maintained from the beginning that she had acted in self-defense. Her account held that Betty Gore had confronted her about the affair and swung the axe at her first. Montgomery claimed she had seized the axe only after Betty attacked, and that the violence that followed was the terrified reaction of a woman fighting for her life.

Candace Montgomery

The prosecution saw it differently. Forty-one blows, they argued, is not the product of fear — it is the product of rage. They contended that Montgomery had arrived knowing a confrontation was likely, that she had chosen a moment when Allan was conveniently absent, and that the sheer ferocity of the attack demolished any credible claim of proportional self-defense. Medical examiners and forensic analysts testified, crime scene photographs were entered into evidence, and Candace Montgomery took the stand herself to describe the terror she claimed to have felt.

After roughly four and a half hours of deliberation, the jury returned a verdict of not guilty.

The acquittal landed like a detonation. Critics argued the verdict exposed a double standard — that a churchgoing white woman in suburban Texas had been excused for a killing that would have sent a less sympathetic defendant to prison. Others pointed to the specific facts the jury had weighed, noting that the legal threshold for self-defense in Texas does not require perfect proportionality, only a genuine and reasonable belief that one's life was in danger.

The Montgomerys quietly rebuilt their lives after the trial, eventually leaving Texas. Allan Gore raised his children largely on his own, including young Bethany, who as an infant had been asleep in the house when her mother was killed.

More than four decades later, the case refuses to fade. The 2022 Hulu limited series Candy, starring Jessica Biel as Candace Montgomery, brought the story to a new generation. The following year, Love & Death, an HBO Max production starring Elizabeth Olsen, offered its own interpretation of the same events. Both productions reignited arguments about what really happened in that utility room in Wylie, Texas — arguments that remain unresolved, because the only two people who know the full truth were both present when the axe fell, and only one of them survived.

Today in True Crime by Case Bound — 2026-06-13