Bernie Tiede hugs attorney Jodi Cole after both sides in his trial rested Friday in Henderson. Cole took on Tiede’s case after seeing the Richard Linklater movie about him. (Kevin Green/The News-Journal via AP)

HENDERSON – Bernie Tiede, the East Texas widow murderer made infamous by a hit movie, will return to prison after a jury sentenced him late Friday to 99 years or life for the 1996 murder of 81-year-old widow Marjorie Nugent.

Tiede, dressed in what has become his trademark brown jacket and plaid shirt, hung his head and dabbed at tears as the judge pronounced his sentence. After two years of freedom, he will head back to prison and probably won’t be eligible for parole for more than a decade.

Shanna Nugent, one of the widow’s granddaughters, told Tiede after the jury left that he was the worst kind of criminal: a con man.

“You sir, are nothing to me,” she said, standing in the front of the courtroom. “You took my grandmother’s life. You took the last years of her life and you stole her money, but you know what her legacy is? It’s my family.”

Tiede was convicted in 1999 and sentenced to life for murdering Nugent in the small East Texas town of Carthage. He shot her repeatedly in the back, wrapped her corpse in a Land’s End bedsheet and stowed her body in a freezer for nine months while he spent her sizable fortune.

The strange crime took on a life of its own after the release of Richard Linklater’s 2011 movie Bernie.

Tiede secured a second chance at freedom in 2014 after a new lawyer found evidence he suffered sexual abuse for years as a boy at the hands of an uncle, a factor that didn’t come up in his first trial. The courts gave Tiede a second sentencing trial to decide whether the trauma caused by that abuse contributed to his crime and should result in a lesser punishment than life.

The new jury of 10 women and two men deliberated more than four hours before rendering the sentence. The panel was not charged with re-evaluating Tiede’s guilt. The sentencing was heard in Henderson after the court determined an impartial jury couldn’t be seated in Carthage.

Tiede’s lawyers, Jodi Cole, who decided to investigate the case after seeing Linklater’s black comedy, and Mike DeGeurin, said they plan to appeal the jury’s decision.

“This is just another moment on a four-year journey that’s continuing on,” Cole said.

DeGeurin said that Tiede, 58, was crying as he left to return to prison but that the former mortician was prepared for the outcome.

Cole successfully argued to Texas’ highest criminal court that his sentence should be reconsidered. But in closing arguments Friday, state lawyers told jurors Tiede didn’t deserve another shot at freedom.

His crime, they said, had nothing to do with the sexual abuse he suffered. They painted Tiede as a con man who feared his scheme to steal millions from Nugent was about to unravel.

“We have no qualms about it. We are asking for a life sentence in this case, because that is what this crime is worth,” said Jane Starnes, an assistant attorney general prosecuting the case.

Tiede’s lawyers presented psychiatric experts who testified that Tiede suffered from a dissociative episode sparked by the cumulative effect of his childhood abuse and the demeaning treatment of Nugent.

The 17 years he has already spent imprisoned was enough punishment, Tiede’s lawyers said. Tiede has been out on bond since 2014, living in Austin while awaiting his new trial. Several friends of Tiede’s who attend church with him in Austin and have known him since his release told jurors that he was kind and generous, someone they believed would not be a threat in the future.

“You’re not giving him a free pass,” Cole told the jury, pleading with them to allow Tiede to re-enter society. “He’s served two decades.”

The jury decided Tiede’s fate after three weeks of court testimony marked by contentious legal wrangling, often baffling discussions about financial affairs and fiery outbursts from lawyers and witnesses. Late in the third week, the jury’s patience had worn visibly thin with the extensive proceedings in the bizarre two-decade-long murder saga.

Marjorie Nugent met Bernie Tiede when her husband died in March 1990.

Prosecutors from the state attorney general’s office portrayed Tiede as a greedy con man who killed Nugent to cover up his swindling of millions from her. State prosecutors contend that Tiede stole some $3.8 million from the widow, who thought he was wisely investing her money. They argue his sentence should befit that crime.

Tiede and Nugent met in 1990 at Hawthorn Funeral Home, where he worked. Nugent’s husband had just died, Tiede befriended her. By 1993 he had become her full-time companion and business manager. The two traveled, shopped and attended local events together.

“Y’all have seen the real facts, and the real evidence and not the Hollywood version of it,” Starnes told the jury. “She was an 80-year-old lady who had the means and desire to live the full extent of the rest of her life. She was trying to do that.”

Tiede’s lawyers said he did not steal from Nugent, whom he considered his dearest friend, but that she gave her money to him freely and enjoyed the travel and shopping they did together. Their relationship began to fall apart, they said, when Nugent became possessive and controlling.

“Bernie got put in jail for life for having a mental break,” Cole said. “But we didn’t understand what happened, and we have a better picture now.”

The jury could have issued a sentence ranging from community supervision to life in prison.