By MATT CHANDLER
mchandler@bizjournals.com | 716-541-1654

Sometime after midnight I drifted into sleep, only to be suddenly awakened by something pulling my hair. I jumped up from the bed and a large rat flew from my head.

I realized that falling asleep made me vulnerable to the rats, which were probably as hungry as I was. I drifted back to sleep, and within a few minutes, I was startled by a rat chewing on the top of my head; this time I felt his sharp teeth. I crashed the top of my head into the steel wall hard enough to smash his head, and then I kicked it until it quit moving. I kept his battered and bloody body on the floor of my cell for his comrades to view and finally got some sleep.

If that sounds like a scene from a late-night movie on cable, it isn't. It's an excerpt from the all-too-true life story of former attorney Bobby Wilson, as told in his new book, "Bobby's Trials."

Wilson spent years working as a trial attorney before retiring in the 1990s and moving to Arizona. But it is the events of his young adult life, spent in rural Oklahoma in the early 1960s, that serve as the backdrop for his first literary effort.

Wilson, then an 18-year-old student preparing to leave for basic training and what he planned to be a lifelong military career, was arrested and charged with murdering his mother and sister, then setting their home on fire. It was a crime that captured the attention of rural Choctaw County and one that took multiple trials and a decade of Wilson's life to resolve. The story also offers a look at the criminal justice system of the 1960s and what led a young man from defendant to defender.

"It (the case) has always been a real controversial topic of conversation for the last 40, 50 years, and nobody really knew what happened," Wilson said. "They tried to make a double murder out of the case, but of course it just wouldn't fly; the facts just weren't there. Basically, two people were dead, the house got burned, so somebody had to do it. Other than that, they didn't have anything."

As Wilson tells in his book, what authorities did or didn't have was of little consequence as the teenager was jailed and subjected to malnutrition, threats to his life and abuse the likes of which most folks could never fathom. Those accounts are a central part of his book, and Wilson said stories such as those coming out of Erie County disturb him.

"I'm not into humiliating people, especially people who are in jail. A lot of times people at county jails are awaiting trial and they haven't been convicted of anything," he said. "Don't abuse somebody who could be completely innocent and just doesn't have the money or wherewithal to get out of jail. That happened to me. I had no money, no relatives, no friends - nothing at all. I can sympathize with people in that situation."

Wilson, whose legal career included handling a case that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, had no designs on a life in the legal field while growing up in rural Oklahoma.

"I had planned to be a career military officer. It wasn't until I got involved in the legal system, with the lawyers and prosecutors and the actual nuts and bolts of criminal cases, that I realized that maybe this was something I wanted to make a career out of," he said. "I had so much ambition and I was looking forward to getting out of school and making a life for myself. And then, all of a sudden, I end up locked away in basically solitary confinement, treated like an animal and being accused of the most horrible thing anybody can be accused of."

Nearly four decades removed from his final trial, some might wonder why Wilson waited so long to share his sordid tale of abuse, accusations of double murder and surviving three trials to clear his name.

"I didn't want to stir up a lot of controversy and stuff while I was practicing law, but now I thought, ‘I'm 65 years old, I'll be 66 this September and, you know, if I don't ever put this in writing, no one is ever gonna know what happened,' " he said.

It has been said that sharing a traumatic life event with the world can be therapeutic at its root. After carrying the burden of what happened in his family farmhouse 47 years ago, losing his mother and sister, as well as a decade of his life, did Wilson find a cathartic release in writing the book?

"It was therapeutic in one sense to get it all out there, but at the same time it dredged up a lot of traumatic events," he said. "If you talk to my wife, she would say I was like a caged animal every night because all of those emotions and feelings came rushing back in when I was writing the book."

Among those emotions, Wilson addresses what happened in his house that night. Three people were there, two ended up dead and he was found outside, claiming no memory of what occurred. Though he ultimately was cleared of the charges, there is more to the story and, decades later, Wilson is ready to tell what really happened that night back in 1963.

"I had bits and pieces of a memory in there back then, but it was so sudden and so traumatic and violent, I guess according to a psychiatrist that was involved in the case, it was something I couldn't deal with emotionally," he said. "When you get to the very end of the book, I tell what happened."

Though he earned his living as a lawyer and today operates a private detective business in Arizona, Wilson says he plans to pen at least two more books about his life experiences.

"I think a lot of people would have been extremely bitter and emotionally broken and turned to drugs or alcohol or a life of crime," Wilson said. "It was tough, but you just had to say, ‘I want to put one foot in front of the other and try to make a decent life for myself.' "

"Bobby's Trials" is available at www.amazon.com or by visiting www.bobbystrials.com.