Candy Mossler: The Affair, Miami Murder Trial, and Verdict

Candy Mossler was a Houston socialite and philanthropist who, with her nephew and lover Melvin Lane Powers, was tried and acquitted in 1966 for the murder of her wealthy husband, Jacques Mossler, who was bludgeoned and stabbed to death in his Key Biscayne, Florida, apartment in June 1964. The seven-week Miami trial became one of the most sensational courtroom spectacles of the decade, and Candy walked out of it a free woman and a very rich one.¹

Who Candy Was Before The Trial

Candace Weatherby was born in 1920 in Buchanan, Georgia, the sixth of twelve children in a home without electricity or running water. Her mother died when she was twelve; her father left soon after. She married Norman Johnson in 1939, had two children with him, and divorced in the mid-1940s. She moved to New Orleans, worked as a fashion model, and opened a modeling and self-improvement school that gave her a foothold in the city’s social and arts scene.¹

In May 1949 she married Jacques Mossler in Fort Lauderdale. He was 25 years older and already wealthy. The couple moved to Houston around 1950 and built a 28-room mansion in the exclusive River Oaks neighborhood, where Candy reinvented herself as a philanthropist and society hostess. She threw lavish charity fundraisers, donated to arts organizations, and in 1957 she and Jacques adopted four children. Blonde, jeweled, and breathy-voiced, she cultivated the image of a devoted mother and generous benefactor.¹

Her Husband Jacques Mossler

Jacques Mossler started as a car mechanic, moved into used cars, and built a $33 million banking and loan empire with operations in Houston, Miami, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and beyond.² He controlled banks in Miami, Coral Gables, South Bend, and Chicago, and had interests in insurance firms and high-interest consumer credit companies. His personal estate at the time of his death was estimated at a minimum of $7 million, roughly $60 million in today’s dollars, and some accounts placed it higher.¹

Jacques preferred anonymity and rarely appeared at Candy’s charity events. His own lawyers would later describe him to a jury as “as ruthless in business as any pirate who ever sailed the seven seas.”²

The Affair With Her Nephew

In 1961, Candy’s sister asked the Mosslers to take in her son, Melvin Lane Powers. He was around twenty, recently out of the Navy, and had just finished a 90-day jail sentence for swindling.³⁴ Powers moved into the River Oaks mansion, and by spring 1962 he and Candy had begun a romantic relationship. Investigators later recovered love letters and photographs of the two together at a nightclub.¹

The affair surfaced in June 1963 when a member of the household staff spotted them together. Jacques fired Powers from his company, had him escorted from the mansion, and moved to his condominium on Key Biscayne. He reportedly considered suing Powers for alienation of affection but dropped the idea for fear of publicity.⁵ Candy denied the relationship for the rest of her life, calling the accusation “absurd” and insisting her affectionate letters were just how she wrote to family.

The Key Biscayne Murder

In the early morning hours of June 30, 1964, Jacques Mossler, then 69, was killed in his oceanfront apartment on Key Biscayne. He had been bludgeoned over the head with a blunt object and stabbed 39 times in and around the heart and lungs with a long-bladed knife. His body was found wrapped in a blanket on the living room floor.¹

Candy told police she discovered the body around 4:30 a.m. after returning with her children from a hospital, where she said she had received an injection for a migraine. She reported that several hundred-dollar bills, a gold-and-diamond wristwatch, and Jacques’s wallet were missing, and the Dade County Sheriff’s Department initially treated the crime as a robbery. She also suggested to detectives that her husband had been killed by one of his “closeted” male lovers.¹ Neighbors reported hearing Jacques scream, “Don’t! Don’t do this to me!” and seeing a man flee in a white car around 1:00 a.m.⁶

Detectives soon uncovered the affair. They also learned that Powers had flown from Houston to Miami on June 29 carrying a briefcase, and had been spotted at a lounge near the crime scene ordering a double scotch and asking for an empty soda bottle.¹ A palm print belonging to Powers was found on a kitchen counter inside Jacques’s apartment.⁷ On July 21, 1964, a Dade County grand jury indicted Candy and Powers on capital murder charges. Powers was arrested in Houston.⁸

The 1966 Miami Trial

The trial began on January 17, 1966, in Miami before Judge George E. Schulz. Dade County State Attorney Richard Gerstein argued that Candy had seduced Powers and steered him to Miami to kill Jacques while she built an alibi at the hospital. The motive, Gerstein said, was Jacques’s fortune and the couple’s fear that a divorce would cut them off from it.⁶

The prosecution’s case was entirely circumstantial. There was no murder weapon and no physical evidence directly placing Powers in the apartment at the moment of the killing. The defense argued the palm print in the kitchen could have been left days earlier.⁴ A white car found at the airport had no blood in it; neighbors said only that it looked “similar” to the car that fled. A bloody handprint on Jacques’s body could not be identified.⁶

To fill the gaps, prosecutors leaned on ex-convict witnesses. Freddie Duhart testified that Powers had offered him $10,000 to find a hired killer. Edward Diehl said Powers solicited him with a $5,000 promise. Billy Frank Mulvey claimed Powers had confessed to the murder in a jailhouse conversation and that Candy had paid Mulvey $7,000 as a down payment for an earlier, failed attempt on Jacques’s life. When Mulvey made his accusation on the stand, Candy shouted, “I’ve never seen or heard of this man,” drawing a rebuke from the judge.⁷

Percy Foreman’s Defense

The defense was led by Percy Foreman, widely considered the greatest trial lawyer in Texas history. Standing six feet five and close to 300 pounds, he had defended more than 1,000 accused murderers over six decades and lost only one client to execution. His guiding rule was blunt: “You should never allow the defendant to be tried. Try someone else — the husband, the lover, the police or, if the case has social implications, society generally.”⁹

Foreman put that rule to work. He painted Jacques as a ruthless businessman hated by “thousands” and introduced testimony describing him as a “depraved homosexual” with sexual “perversions,” implying a scorned male lover had done the killing.⁷ He steered jurors toward Fred Weissel, an interior decorator who owned a white car and had been found beaten and bloody six miles from the crime scene the night of the murder, and suggested police were shielding him.⁶ Arthur Lundeen, a Florida banker and friend of the Mosslers, pushed back on the homosexuality claim, testifying that Jacques had “deeply loved, even ‘idolized,’ his wife.”²

Foreman called no defense witnesses at all. Under Florida law at the time, that entitled him to deliver both the opening and closing arguments and limited the prosecution’s cross-examination opportunities.⁶ He also got Powers’s initial statement to police thrown out because Powers had been held incommunicado by Texas Rangers after his arrest. Then he took the prosecution’s convict witnesses apart, producing their own wives to testify against their credibility. He called Mulvey a “heroin junkie” who was “pathologically incapable of telling the truth” and accused police of buying testimony from “lifetime thieves and other ex-convicts.”⁷ His closing lasted over five hours and ended with a biblical appeal: “Let him among you without sin cast the first stone.”

The Verdict

On March 6, 1966, after roughly 16 hours and 44 minutes of deliberation, the all-male jury returned a verdict of not guilty. Jurors reportedly spent much of their time debating the possible guilt of Fred Weissel. Candy and Powers went on to inherit approximately $28 million of Jacques’s estate.⁶

Most observers credited Foreman. Journalist Lewis Lapham later wrote that Foreman simply “told a far better story” than the prosecution could match.⁴ Others faulted Gerstein’s choice to try Candy and Powers together, since the jury had to find both guilty or acquit both.

Why The Media Couldn’t Look Away

The New York Times called the trial “one of the most spectacular” courtroom dramas in American history.¹ Reporters from Time, Life, Look, Newsweek, the Saturday Evening Post, and the Chicago Tribune packed the courtroom. Spectators, mostly women, lined up as early as 5:00 a.m. for seats. Candy arrived on opening day in a white trench coat and white silk dress, blowing kisses to the crowd behind velvet ropes. She reportedly held a reception for journalists in her hotel suite.⁴

The case was described as a real-life Peyton Place, soaked in “love, heat, greed, savage passion, intrigue, incest and perversion.” One observer claimed Candy could “knock Jackie Kennedy off the front page.” Asked once how she felt about being accused of incest, adultery, and murder, she answered, “Well, sir, no one is perfect.”⁴

What Happened To Candy And Powers After

The acquittal did not bring calm to Candy’s life. In 1971 she married Barnett Garrison, a self-employed electrical contractor 19 years her junior. In August 1972, Garrison suffered brain damage after falling 40 feet from the roof of the Mossler mansion onto a concrete patio. Police reported he had been wearing a pistol in his belt and was groping for Candy’s third-floor balcony window when he lost his footing. The fall was ruled accidental, and Garrison spent the next 25 years in a nursing home.¹⁰⁴ The couple divorced in November 1972, three months after the fall.

Candy died on October 26, 1976, at 55, in her suite at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach. The New York Times reported she died in her sleep; the Dade County Medical Examiner’s office said no foul play was suspected but had not determined an official cause of death at the time of the initial report.¹⁰ Another account described the death as an apparent overdose of painkillers and sleeping pills.⁴ She was buried beside Jacques at Arlington National Cemetery; Jacques had qualified for burial there as a World War I veteran.¹¹

Melvin Lane Powers returned to Houston and went into real estate, reportedly worth $200 million by 1979. The Houston oil bust caught up with him and he was forced into bankruptcy in 1983, going in and out of it several more times over the years as he moved through mobile homes, townhouses, financial services, a tile company, and oil and cement ventures.⁵ He died on October 8, 2010, at his home in Houston, aged 68.³

The Mossler case was revisited most recently in Skip Hollandsworth’s 2025 book, She Kills: The Murderous Socialite, the Cross-Dressing Bank Robber, and Other True Crime Tales.¹

1
Texas Monthly. The Notorious Mrs. Mossler
2
Houston Chronicle. Mossler Case Was Sensational Story of Murder
3
Los Angeles Times. Melvin Lane Powers Dies
4
CrimeReads. Candy Mossler True Crime Miami Murder
5
New York Times. Melvin Lane Powers, Acquitted in Sensational 1966 Trial, Dies
6
Time. Trials: Mesmerism in Miami
7
Encyclopedia.com. Candace Mossier and Melvin Lane Powers Trial, 1966
8
New York Times. Trial to Open Tomorrow in Mossler Murder Case
9
Texas Monthly. The Great Defenders
10
New York Times. Candace Mossler Garrison Dies; Was Tried in Murder of Husband
11
New York Times. Candace Mossler to Be Buried in Arlington National Cemetery