Renaissance, Texas
Written by David Kushner, Disruptor
Sunday September 26th, 2021
Fantasy and murder at the world's biggest Renaissance festival.
Brandon Wayne Smith came to the Texas Renaissance Festival on October 16, 2004 for the same reason as anyone: to party like it was 1599. A clean-cut 23-year-old Second Class Petty Officer in the Navy, Smith had grown up as a Boy Scout in nearby Spring, Texas. After having served six months at sea on the USS Gonzalez and being stationed in Norfolk, Smith was home visiting family for some much-needed R&R.
They drove 40 miles through the back roads northwest of Houston to the two-square mile town of Todd Mission to attend America’s largest Renaissance festival.
In a lot of ways, the town of Todd Mission resembles the sort of rugged cowboy country one might expect northwest of Houston: There was a boarded-up roadhouse called the Museum of a Thousand Horns, once a bar notorious for its patrons’ habit of carrying concealed deadly weapons and its motto, “The horniest place in Texas.” Off the roadside, a junk dealer named Al sat glowering in a rickety armchair on his scrap-strewn lawn, the words “Fuck You” tattooed across the top of his bald, weathered head.
But tucked in the woods off of the main roadway, Farm Road 1774, was a 55-acre working recreation of a 16th-century European village. Manicured marigold gardens and cobblestone pathways spread across the lush property, which included a full jousting arena modeled after the Roman Coliseum rising alongside a lake. There were alehouses, blacksmith stalls, and puppet booths. The public pillories in the center of the festival were among the more popular photo ops.
After a long day of eating turkey legs and watching jousting competitions, Smith and his family headed out past the reenactors in their long, regal robes for the village exit shortly after 7:00. The nightly fireworks display was about to begin, and they wanted to grab a good viewing spot in a field nearby.
They never made it.
Soon after, Grimes County Sheriff Don Sowell was notified that a man — Smith — had been stabbed dozens of times and was dead. Sheriff Sowell, a stocky, gray-haired Texan who wore a white cowboy hat, had grown up nearby, and decorated his office with black-and-white photos and bobbleheads from “The Andy Griffith Show,” a sixties-era TV show about the sheriff of a small town in North Carolina not unlike Todd Mission.
Most crimes around the RenFaire were small things — a kid recklessly driving a four-wheeler, a petty theft. Smith’s death was the first violent crime, and the killer was still at large. And Sowell didn’t know what to make of the crime, let alone the Rennies who call Todd Mission their home. “They just travel around the country following Renaissance festivals, it’s like a carnival,” he tells me. “A carnival cult.”
When a reporter from the Houston Chronicle asked George “King George” Coulam, the eccentric 67-year-old founder of the Texas Renaissance Festival and the mayor of Todd Mission, for comment about the murder, Coulam cited the long history of peaceful coexistence between the town and the festival. “We have been operating for 30 years and never had a problem,” he said, “The sheriff’s happy with us. We run a good show.”
On the day of Smith’s murder, I had spent several hours at the festival trailing Coulam as he tended to his flock. At about 7:30 p.m., I was heading out to my car when I saw a scuffle break out about 10 yards away I didn’t know until the next day that someone had been murdered.
Now, with the 47th annual Texas Renaissance Festival beginning on Oct. 9 — the Delta variant be damned — I started thinking about it again, going through my notes and interviews. I wondered what happened that night, what became of “King George,” now 83, and the fantasy world he’d created.
An avid student of art and architecture, Coulam bought up land in Todd Mission 47 years ago to fulfill his dream of creating a permanent theme town devoted to his favorite period in art history. “The Renaissance was a great and meaningful period, a time unequaled in science, art, and education,” he told me in 2004.
Coulam was gangly and ornery, chewed a lot of gum, and had wavy salt-and-pepper hair. He preferred his feathered Tudor cap, pointy leather boots, and zebra-striped leggings to the more typical dungarees and 5-gallon hats the local cowpokes wear. “We need to go back and rejuvenate the enjoyment of beauty, the glorification of our surroundings,” he said, “That’s why I created this festival here,” he said of the spectacle he’d first opened to the public in 1974.
Ever since, for eight weeks every fall, this town hosts the Texas Renaissance Festival for an estimated 500,000 tourists and self-described “Rennies” — Deadheads of the Ren fest circuit. The TRF, as fans call it, employees 3500 people each season, many of whom roam the grounds in period garb.
But what separates the TRF from the garden variety Ren faire is that, after the festival ends and the visitors go home to sleep off their mead and turkey leg hangovers, several hundred Rennie artists, craftsmen, psychics and jugglers remain. They live behind the festival grounds in their own makeshift neighborhood called RenFaire Village. “George started this project, so it’s kind of like an artist community back there,” TRF general manager Jeff Baldwin tells me, “He sold lots to artists for cheap.”
Coulam — or as friends all call him “King George,” or just “The King” — is the inspiration for these modern-day would-be Lords and Ladies, drawing them to his odd oasis deep in the heart of Texas. For those who live the full time Rennie lifestyle, Todd Mission felt like a safe haven for their Medieval fantasies, no matter how freaky that life seemed to the cowboys nearby.
But, as I’ve learned in returning to this old story of mine, the sanctity of Todd Mission, a town of just 107 people, has been shattering again.
Last October during the faire, 19-year-old Isabella Cimetta was shot to death in the Festival campgrounds. #MeToo came knocking as well, with two lawsuits in the last three years accusing King George of sexual harassment and discrimination. The suits were settled out of court.
“There’s always disgruntled employees,” Baldwin says of the lawsuits (Coulam declined an interview request). “I’m not really privy to all the information about those suits,” Baldwin goes on, “but George, he’s trusting and loving to a fault.”
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.