Jr Phillip Crawford

Railroaded Jr Phillip Crawford

Was a Texas youth convicted for a horrific crime because he's gay?

In Railroaded: The Homophobic Prosecution of Brandon Woodruff for His Parents' Murders author Phillip Crawford Jr. details how anti-gay bias rather than relevant evidence drove the case against a young defendant.

In October 2005 nineteen-year-old Brandon Dale Woodruff was charged with murdering his parents in a rural northeast Texas town in the heart of the Bible belt. Dennis and Norma Woodruff had been sitting together on a sofa before the television set on a Sunday evening in their double wide manufactured home in Royse City, and both were shot and stabbed multiple times in their faces. It was a bloodbath.

There was no direct evidence tying the couple's son to the gruesome crime to warrant his arrest - no eyewitnesses, no murder weapons, no bloody prints - but investigators were convinced the teen boy was living a double life who killed when his two worlds supposedly collided. Brandon was a horse wrangler and attending Abilene Christian University, and he also was a porn actor and dancing at Dallas gay clubs. There was no double life; just a boy coming out.

At trial in March 2009 the prosecution took a coming out story and turned Brandon into The Talented Mr. Ripley. Prosecutors claimed because the boy still was in the process of coming out that he was a duplicitous character which constituted evidence of guilt. The prosecution also entailed investigative blunders, dirty tricks and questionable evidence which further deprived Brandon Woodruff of a fair trial. Eight jurors believed "that being homosexual or gay is morally wrong," and the jury convicted him after deliberating only five hours. Brandon Woodruff was railroaded with a homophobic narrative, and is serving a life sentence without parole.