BROTHERS IN HARMS
Inside the incredible story of how Matthew McConaughey and best pal Woody Harrelson might share same mass murderer dad
OUT of his mind after injecting cocaine, contract killer and fugitive Charles Harrelson was finally cornered by armed cops.
Shirtless and draped in gold chains, the unhinged outlaw raised his own gun to his chin, wildly claiming to the officers that he had killed US President John F Kennedy.
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The Texas stand-off would later see hallucinating Harrelson, rumoured to be responsible for as many as 50 murders, caged for the slaying of Judge John Wood.
Years later the assassin’s son — Woody Harrelson — would become a Hollywood star, often playing killers and psychopaths similar to his father, most notably in 1995’s Natural Born Killers.
Now, in a twist worthy of a cinematic potboiler, Oscar-winning actor Matthew McConaughey has told how he believes he may also be the son of the mass murderer.
So could two of the most sought-after leading men of their generation really be brothers as well as friends?
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Photos of the Texas-born pair together — who both starred in acclaimed 2014 US TV series True Detective — undoubtedly reveal an uncanny resemblance.
Both have pronounced Roman noses and lantern jaws.
Dallas Buyers Club star Matthew, 53, has said of Woody: “You know, where I start and where he ends, and where he starts and I end, has always been like a murky line.
“My kids call him Uncle Woody. His kids call me Uncle Matthew.
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“And you see pictures of us and my family thinks a lot of pictures of him are me. His family thinks a lot of pictures of me are him.”
This week Woody revealed in an interview that “Ma” Mac — Matthew’s mother Mary — had told him: “I knew your father.”
Bloody fight
Woody said the comment — complete with what his interviewer called a “pregnant pause” — was “filled with innuendo”.
The 61-year-old star added: “The year of Matthew’s birth, nine months before, she was on a sabbatical from her relationship with his supposed father, Jim.”
A week earlier, Matthew had said there were “places out in West Texas where there might have been a gathering, or a meeting, or a ‘knew’ moment.”
Such is the speculation swirling around the claims that both men are considering taking DNA tests.
It comes as they have just finished making another series together called Brother From Another Mother.
The Apple TV+ comedy sees the pair play fictionalised versions of themselves living on a Texas ranch.
So is the paternity claim simply a clumsy piece of Tinseltown PR — or did blood-soaked Harrelson Senior really father Matthew too?
His “official” parents’ marriage was certainly a stormy one. They divorced twice and married three times.
Matthew David McConaughey was born on November 4, 1969 in the small town of Uvalde — renowned for its honey — in the Texas Hill Country.
His supposed father was 6ft 2in former college American football star James Donald “Jim” McConaughey, who later ran an oil pipe supply business.
Jim wed Mary Kathleen McCabe, a kindergarten teacher who went on to become a published author.
In his 2020 memoir Greenlights, Matthew recounted how a bloody fight between his parents ended with them making love — and he speculated that his mum’s “extended holidays” were actually the periods when the couple had divorced.
He once said of his mum and dad: “They were, at times, violent. As I say in the book, that is how they communicated.”
His dad Jim died in 1992 — in bizarre circumstances. Widowed Mary later explained: “My husband died making love to me. And I remember saying, when he fell back, What’s the matter, big boy? I wear you out?’
“No response, no response, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God, something’s wrong.’” Mary said she ran to the neighbours for help, adding: “I had no idea that it was too much.”
Matthew, who won the Best Actor Oscar for his role in 2013 film Dallas Buyers Club, wrote of his father’s death: “He’d always told me and my brothers, ‘Boys, when I go, I’m gonna be making love to your mother’.
“And that’s what happened. He’d had a heart attack when he climaxed. Yes, he’d called his shot all right.”
Matthew and Woody suggest Mary may have hooked up with Charles Harrelson during one of her splits from Jim.
Woody was born Woodrow Tracy Harrelson on July 23, 1961, in the Texas oil town of Midland.
In the west of the Lone Star state, it is less than 280 miles from where Matthew was born eight years later. One of three sons, his mother Diane Oswald was a secretary, while his father Charles Voyde Harrelson was a wife-beating assassin-for-hire.
They married two weeks after meeting on a plane.
A charming and intelligent womaniser, Harrelson Sr was described by a Texas Ranger as “a con man with personality”.
The sister of one of his murder victims was unsurprisingly less charitable, calling him “cold as ice . . . there was nothing in his eyes”.
Harrelson even shockingly claimed to have shot JFK from the so-called “grassy knoll” site of the presidential assassination in Dallas in 1963.
Known as Chuck, Harrelson was born in Lovelady, Texas, in 1938 and had a stint in the Navy before embarking on a life of crime. A year before son Woody was born he was convicted of armed robbery.
When Woody was asked in an interview if his mum knew what his dad did for a living, he said: “Oh yeah, she was pretty hip to all that.
Shot him in the head
“Well, no, she was well out of love with him. You know, I’ve got to give her credit because she never really soured us on him, she didn’t talk negative about him, never, ever.
“And she could have — he wasn’t the greatest husband. Or father.”
Woody recalled of the marriage: “I think they separated when I was seven. But he was gone a lot before that, in prison.
“Away and back. Away and back. It wasn’t like he was there all the time prior to that.” It hardly seems surprising considering his rap sheet — a grisly list that might stretch to as many as 50 killings.
He once said a human head was “just a watermelon with hair on it”.
Harrelson Senior faced trial for the 1968 murders of grain dealer Sam Degelia Jr and carpet salesman Alan Berg.
The hitman’s then-girlfriend Sandra Sue Attaway testified against him at his trial for murdering Berg.
She claimed she lured Berg to a bar where Harrelson forced him into a car at gunpoint and shot him in the head.
The salesman’s remains were found in a ditch six months later.
However, a jury found Harrelson not guilty.
In 1970 his first trial for Degelia’s murder — said to have been ordered by a business partner who wanted to collect the life insurance — ended with a deadlocked jury.
While on remand, Harrelson is said to have bribed a guard so that he could have sex with another prisoner’s sister.
When he was re-tried in 1973, an accomplice to the shooting is said to have heard Harrelson say: “Isn’t it hell when your buddy kills you to collect the insurance?”
This time he was found guilty and jailed for 15 years. He was released after five for good behaviour.
Then, in 1979, Harrelson is said to have been paid $250,000 (£200,000) for the killing of Judge John Wood. He was shot in the back with a long-range sniper rifle.
The judge was about to begin deliberating over the trial of Jamiel “Jimmy” Chagra, who was the US’s biggest marijuana trafficker in the 1970s.
Mr Wood had earned the nickname Maximum John for regularly handing down the longest-possible sentences to drug dealers.
Harrelson was finally arrested for the killing after a six-hour armed stand-off.
At his 1982 trial the prosecutor said: “Charles Harrelson damaged everyone he came in contact with.”
He was sentenced to two life sentences and died from a heart attack 25 years later in the Florence super-maximum-security prison in Colorado.
Woody — who visited Harrelson Sr in prison — said of the court case: “My father was no saint, but a lot of sources led me to believe it was not a fair trial.” He has also claimed his father was a secret CIA operative.
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His father’s confidant — former Mafia “associate” Kenny Gallo — denied Harrelson Sr had killed 50 people.
He said: “He may have been involved in that many killings, maybe driving the car or something, but he only carried out maybe six killings himself.”
Now, as Matthew McConaughey ponders a paternity test, he must prepare for a deadly legacy.
As his potential brother, Woody said: “We want to go and (do a DNA) test, but for him, it’s a much more big deal.”
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For as well as gaining a brother, he might find a new father — Chuck Harrelson, a natural-born killer.
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