Renaissance, Texas

Back in 2004, as Brandon Smith and his family made their way through the bustling gates of the Texas Renaissance Festival late on that October morning, they had reason to want a little fantasy in their lives. Smith’s father had died of a heart attack when he was just six; one of his brothers drowned in a swimming pool in 1980; another brother had died the year before in a four-wheeler accident. So, with just a few days of Brandon’s leave from the Navy to be together, he and his younger sister Kristen were eager to enjoy some puppet shows and turkey legs.

But Smith apparently couldn’t leave his sense of duty far behind. When Brent Noland, a wiry, 19-year-old with short dark hair approached them for help, Smith was happy to oblige. Noland told them he’d come to the Fest with a group of buddies from his nearby hometown of Montgomery, but gotten separated from the group. He asked if he could borrow a cell phone call them, because he didn’t have one on him.

Noland had already been partying despite the early morning hours – smoking some weed, washing down a couple Xanax with a beer. Sensing the younger man could use some direction in life, Smith began extolling the virtues of the Navy, and jotted down his name and number should Noland ever want to pursue it. “He was a 24-hour-a-day recruiter,” Smith’s friend Betsy Barricklow later told the Houston Chronicle, “This was a young man who, I think, was going to be in the military until retirement.”

After Noland and the siblings parted ways, Brandon and Kristen made their way across the grounds, where 3,000 colorfully-costumed characters were there to mingle, jabbering in broken Old English and performing period festivities on 21 scattered stages.

There were mud fights, wandering lute-strumming minstrels, teams of jugglers, and goofy comedians like the “PeeBodies,” two men who dressed as though they were soaked in urine. Self-described “beer wenches,” who’d deliver tankards of ale.

Coulam promoted a free-loving atmosphere — and with all the drinking and dancing and leather clothing, things tended to get debauched easily. “Every girl has a little naughty in them,” Melba Tucker, the TRF’s marketing director, told me in 2004. “This is a chance for them to let it out.”

For a small fee, patrons could use their teeth to pull a variety of shrewdly-placed knickknacks from a given beer wench’s cleavage. “I put a plastic straw in mine,” said Melba’s 19-year-old daughter Blair. “I tell the guys I’m a live blow-up doll.”

While Coulam’s fantasy world is a vacation for most visitors like the Smiths, it’s everyday life for the several hundred Rennies who joined King George to make Todd Mission their home. For the past 20 years, they live year-round in a makeshift village that Coulam provides for them, selling each of them one-acre plots for ridiculously cheap prices so they could create their own inspired homesteads.

During my visit, one was in the shape of a giant brown pirate ship with masts and portholes; another looked like a tree house from the Hobbit shire. Laurie Watson, an earnest, 48-year-old fortune teller with wide eyes and long dark hair, operated out of a day-glow orange shack in a lot with a wooden sign that read, “The Sun and Moon Hideaway.” Headless mannequins draped in Mardi Gras beads lined the fence. As we spoke, a chubby, bearded man wandered around her yard blissfully, twirling three, small crystal balls in his hands.

“This is a way to keep the last taste of gypsy magic,” Watson told me. “I love George. If we didn’t have this, we’d have nothing. George has an appreciation of art, he’s a naturalist, he’s kind … ” She choked up while explaining, and a tear ran down her cheek.

“We weren’t meant to work in air-conditioned cubicles,” she went on, “We were meant to make love! We were meant to be free!”

“George has a real vision,” agreed Mark “Coop” Cooper, a 56-year-old who told me he had given up his seat on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange to follow King George down here.  “We’re all riding on George’s dream,” he said.

The dream was to live and work as free-spirited artists.

Cooper and the others called the neighborhood Toontown, after the fictional cartoon neighborhood in Los Angeles from the 1988 film “Who Framed Roger Rabbit.” “We’re the crazies living on the other side of the railroad tracks,” he joked.

Charles Prince, the one-time head of the Houston Chef’s Association who in 2004 was running the largest restaurant at the festival, The King’s Feasting Hall, agreed. “George has been king of the hippies for a long time now,” he said.

Following Brandon Smith’s death, King George’s reign came under question as reports spread that the Festival had failed to provide adequate security.

When pressed by a Houston Chronicle reporter, Coulam pushed back. “It was a tragic mistake that happened out there. You can’t blame that on our security — we had plenty of security out there.”

During the investigation, however, Sheriff Sowell learned the festival only had 15 people working security for a crowd in the tens of thousands, and two of them had been sent home early. There were no security guards at all in the parking lot at all.

After deputies quickly matched the car outside Noland’s home to the witness reports of the one seen speeding away from the crime scene, Noland arrived at Sheriff Sowell’s office the day after the murder to turn himself in. In the trial two years later, Noland’s attorneys alleged that he had acted in self-defense. “I think if you look at the evidence and listen to Brent Noland you see what was in his heart,” he told the jury, “He isn’t the type of person to do what they say he did unprovoked.”

The jury didn’t agree.

On May 16, 2006, Noland was sentenced to 55 years in prison for the murder. His friend, Joshua Damuth, who had kicked Smith in the head while Noland stabbed him, pled guilty to aggravated assault, and was sentenced to 100 days in jail.

The murder soon became the talk of the RenFaire forums. On Renaissancefestival.com, a poster nicknamed “Sir Martin” lamented the stain on the TRF’s storied history. “The important thing for all of us to remember,” he wrote, “is that this is the only incident of this magnitude in the 35 year history of our great faire.  In the past few years, security has been increased and TRF attendees can be confident that they are in a safe environment.”

Another, Captain Killian, addressed the irony that when real violence came to the Faire, it wasn’t period-appropriate. “No one pulled forth the sword on their hip and went to town, no battle axe mayhem, no black powder flintlock executions….just some Shiner Bock and a knife,” he wrote, “Drink, weed, and stupidity can mix anywhere.” He went on to proclaim, “Huzzah to our Faire, and the staff and police that help keep it safe…because as was told to me on my very first visit, Where else can you walk around with 42 inches of razor sharp steel, walk into a pub, and the only thing the cop at the door might say is…’nice sword’.”

In the Todd Mission dream world, no one lives as well as the King. For the past 38 years, Coulam has lived in a sprawling estate, which he calls Stargate Manor, of his own elaborate design. Tucked away across the street from the festival inside the sprawling, loblolly pine forest, unicorn statues line his driveway and, across the grounds, there’s a cathedral, a meditation garden, and the mausoleum where he will be buried some day.