Tragedy in Eden: Murder of Ken Featherston

Artist was on the rise when shot down outside the Armadillo 48 years ago today

Ken Featherston at work. Photo from the AusPop archives.

Ken Featherston was just twenty-three on November 10, 1975 when he was shot to death in the Armadillo parking lot by a drunk customer who had earlier been prevented from leaving with a bottle of booze he’d brought in with him. Just three months earlier, Featherston landed his first major label album cover design—Marshall Tucker Band’s platinum-selling Searching for a Rainbow. That cover was based on a poster Featherston made for the Tucker Band’s Armadillo show in June ’74.   

As a team player and former UT football recruit from Corpus Christi, Featherston filled in as a bouncer at the venue because the muscular half-Filipino was an imposing figure. But a sweeter, more gentle soul never walked through that door. The murder was not only senseless, but cruel. There was sobbing at the Dillo for days.

Who killed Ken? The shooter had vowed to come back and do what he did, but nobody had seen him before. Wait a second, Dillo security chief Dub Rose thought. About a year earlier he had a scuffle with a man who fit the killer’s description and turned him in to police. Earlier that night, house photographer Burton Wilson had taken a picture of Rose in his new cowboy hat, which he remembered removing before the physical encounter. If the date of that photo could be found, there would be a mug shot from that night. Wilson’s organization was so precise, he easily found the dated contact sheet, and the twenty-two-year-old killer John Randolph Bingham, who lived on W. 33^rd St., “Hippie Row,” with his mother, was identified through his police mug shot. Bingham escaped out the back door and hopped on his bicycle when the cops came banging on the front door.

Both incidents with Bingham at the Armadillo were on nights the Pointer Sisters performed. Featherston did the poster for the first show on November 10, 1974, and was gunned down exactly a year later.

While Bingham was on the lam, Jim Franklin visited mother Grace Bingham, a Dillo semi-regular, who told him more than she told police. Her son had close relatives in Waco, she said, writing down the address. Franklin called it in to Waco police, who arrested Bingham three days after the murder. Grace Bingham testified at the May ’76 trial that her son was having serious mental problems and she begged for psychiatric help, but her calls were met with indifference. “Something was going to explode, was the feeling I had.”

Declared unfit for trial due to his mental state, plus “amphetamine intoxication,” Bingham was sent to Rusk State Hospital for the criminally insane. But what was really insane was that the man who pierced the armory of trust and innocence on Barton Springs Road was seen walking down East Riverside just 16 months later!

Aside from a 1994 conviction for indecency with a child, that sent him to prison for a two-year term, Bingham lived in Austin until 1999, when he died at age 46. He lived twice as long as the kind, brilliant, beautiful man he murdered. And nobody seemed to care how this crazy person got a gun.