Lawyers always seem to have the most creative stories to tell police. Michael Howard came up with an interesting one. His own attorney is going to have a really tough time convincing a jury to believe his client’s version of events. If he did accidentally shoot his disabled son, thinking he was “an intruder,” he should have called the cops right away. What he did next has law enforcement convinced he’s a cold blooded killer. He’s still entitled to his day in court.
Police call it murder
Police are calling it murder, no matter what the suspect says. Houston attorney Michael Howard freely admits shooting his son and calls it a horrible accident.
Transporting the body to a custom built funeral pyre in the back yard wasn’t an accident, by any stretch of the imagination. Cops like to call it “tampering with evidence.” They charged him with that, too.
Over the weekend, 68-year-old Howard and his son, Mark Randall Howard, were “at the family’s east Texas lake house.” Mark, age 20, “was diagnosed with Down syndrome.”
According to the suspect, whatever happened allegedly happened Sunday night, December 1. After shooting his son “thinking he was an intruder,” he didn’t alert the police.
According to investigators with Sabine County, Texas, Michael called a deputy on Monday. He told them about the shooting then casually mentioned that “he took his son’s body and put it in the front loading bucket of a backhoe tractor.” Those are handy to have around. Next, he “put Mark’s body on a woodpile and set it on fire.”
It takes an awful lot of wood to properly cremate a body. Michael managed a rather thorough job of it. When police got there, he “showed them the shotgun he claimed to have used during the shooting the night before.”

Not much left
Deputies called in the Texas Rangers for this one. After explaining his version of what happened to police, “Michael then led them to the woodpile, where they say they found what they believe to be charred body parts and bones.”
Since they weren’t sure enough to say so conclusively means there isn’t a whole lot left for detectives to examine.
As related by the police, Michael is being held with a bond set at “$10 million on each charge.” A more recently published update provides some more crucial information.
For instance, details like “Howard didn’t contact the sheriff’s office until Monday afternoon, approximately 17 hours after he had used a tractor backhoe to transport his son’s body.”
Another juicy tidbid notes that while the cremation happened on the property, the lawyer owned a huge chunk of land. He used the backhoe to move the body “about 2 miles away to a remote area on his over 2,500-acre property.”
It appears that the two men arrived at the rural location either Thursday or Friday. Howard also told police that he “cremated his son in accordance with what he felt his son would have wanted.” He also cleaned the crime scene.