Clyde Wilson… the name has special meaning to the citizens of Houston, Texas. He is fondly remembered by many…and by many, many others, the name strikes fear into their hearts. A colorful and storied private investigator, Clyde Wilson spent more than 30 years making history and solving some of Houston’s toughest cases.
Clyde Wilson started making a name for himself at a young age. Born in Houston in 1923, he moved to Austin as a child after his father passed away. He only made it to the ninth grade, he was drafted into the army in the early 1940s and fought in World War II. Displaying his strength of character even then, Wilson was awarded two Purple Hearts for his heroic efforts. In 1942 he met his wife, Agnes, and they were married in early 1943. Together they had 7 children.
Wilson opened his first office as a private investigator in Houston in 1957. Working out of a makeshift office in a funeral home and using an overturned coffin as his desk, he began his illustrious career exposing corruption within the police and justice departments of “the best cities.” “Lufkin’s. . Wilson investigated and discovered evidence that payments were being accepted, resulting in the arrest of the boss, the assistant boss, and a local judge. A year later, he discovered similar activities in Polk County, resulting in a grand jury indictment against the county judge and 4 county commissioners.
The persona Wilson fashioned for himself, “a character made up of Westerns, TV detectives, and children’s adventure stories,” served him well. In favor of cowboy boots and jeans, Wilson never pretended to be something he wasn’t. His world was based on friendship (with friends in high places and low) and helping those friends when they needed help, just as much as it was based on fear. Once upon a time, his business card supposedly read, “Dirt can’t hide from Electrified Clyde” and that turned out to be true. In the ’60s, administrators at the University of Houston suspected their school was being corrupted by gays and student radicals, so they hired Wilson to find the dirt. He found it. In the 1970s, Wilson was hired by Tenneco’s head of security to find and rescue 5 of the company’s employees kidnapped in Ethiopia. Check. Ash Robinson wanted to find the ‘dirt’ on his son-in-law, John Hill, and Wilson was his man. (This was the case that ended with the murder of Houston society matron Joan Robinson Hill, and was later immortalized in Thompsons book Blood and Money.)
It wasn’t always roses for Clyde Wilson. It has been said that he sometimes went too far, sometimes played by his own rules and sometimes made up those rules as he went along. In 1973, Wilson had his own tte–tte with the other side of the law when he was charged in Federal Court with tapping the phones of six Hunt Oil Company employees while working undercover for Dallas oilmen Nelson and Herbert Hunt. He entered a ‘No Contest’ and received a two-year suspended sentence. In 1977, President Ford granted Wilson a formal pardon on his last day in office. Speaking of friends in high places…
Although Wilson sometimes broke the rules, he did it with a pure and good heart, and he did it to catch his bad guy. In the early 1980s, after bragging that he could crack the Hermann Estate case in a day, he “ambushed the prime suspect at a luncheon at the Warwick Hotel and then obtained a bragging confession about the scope of the investigation from he”. When the Hermann Estates board of directors asked Wilson to find the ‘dirt’ on who was stealing money from them, he did exactly that. When he traced corruption and fraud to the top, some board members told him to back off. Instead, he took the case to the district attorney and had those members investigated and exposed. A few years later, the mishandling of the Moody Foundation’s funds made headlines, and Wilson discovered that someone was stealing from the inside. Shern Moody Jr. was found to be the guilty party and Wilson turned him over for investigation by prosecutors in Galveston and Houston, as well as state and US attorneys general. “One of Wilson’s true gifts was his ability to track information and create a profile on the subject he was investigating,” said Houston attorney Richard “Racehorse” Haynes.
A few years after a high-profile murder case in Houston went cold, Wilson used a private investigator to go undercover and lure the suspect into confessing. One of Clyde Wilson’s most publicized cases was won by tracking down and befriending a maid at a hotel: Atlantic City’s Trump Plaza. Wilson’s search skills found Marla Maples’ love nest, proving that even Donald Trump wasn’t immune to Wilson and his tracking abilities.
These are just a few of Clyde Wilson’s moments as Houston’s best and most public private detective, but with 7 children and 25 grandchildren, you can bet he was as much a family man as he was a colorful investigator. More than one son has followed in his footsteps, and he has traveled the same path of his profession. We can all be sure that Clyde passed down his IP gifts, his talents, and I’m willing to bet some of Houston’s best-kept secrets, to his successor, his youngest son, Tim Wilson, who now runs the investigative agency and has even expanded with offices in all countries and concerns abroad.