Individual Details

Death

Couple found dead after house fire
Relatives, neighbors say they died together just as they had lived
12:24 PM CST on Sunday, February 6, 2005
By CHRISTY A. ROBINSON / The Dallas Morning News

NEVADA – Twenty years ago, Kenneth T. and Gertrude Furr chose the countryside of southeastern Collin County to grow old together, hand in hand.

Photos by SMILEY N. POOL/DMN
Don and Treon Smith of Quinlan visit the site of a fire that killed Ms. Smith's aunt and uncle, Kenneth and Gertrude Furr. The Furrs were found just inside a bedroom window. 'To be so close and not be able to get out, it's just terrible,' Mrs. Smith said. It was a good place for Mr. Furr, 78, to raise goats and guinea fowl while Mrs. Furr, 81, canned preserves and ran a one-room beauty parlor behind their home.

Late Friday, fire swept through their white ranch-style house, ending the couple's lives the same way they had lived: hand in hand.

"They were found holding hands at the bedroom window," their daughter-in-law and next-door neighbor, Judy Furr, said Saturday. "They loved each other dearly."

The Furrs' home is on the edge of Wylie's fire district, but it is quite a distance from any fire station.

Mr. Furr's son Kenneth M. Furr and a host of neighbors from the rural, close-knit neighborhood tried to save the couple while fire trucks from several departments were en route. But the smoke was too thick, Kenneth Furr said.

Another of Mr. Furr's sons, Danny Furr, lives in Dallas and said he found out about the fire from television reports.

A Collin County sheriff's deputy and a Lavon police officer attempted to rescue the couple. The deputy was able to make his way to the bedroom where the bodies were found, but heavy smoke drove him out of the house, Collin County Fire Marshal Steven Deffibaugh said.

"He probably came within a couple of feet of them," Mr. Deffibaugh said.

He said the fire appears to have started near the home's heating and air conditioning unit and that the couple likely died from smoke inhalation. Autopsies were pending Saturday.

According to relatives and friends, Mr. and Mrs. Furr met in the 1960s while out dancing in Dallas. They wed in 1966, a second marriage for both.

In the 1950s, Mrs. Furr earned diplomas from three cosmetology schools in the United States and in Europe.

More than 20 years ago, she and Mr. Furr, a farmer and trucker, decided that a slower life in this Collin County hamlet 31 miles from Dallas would ease their health problems. Family members expanded part of a 100-year-old bois d'arc home next door to Kenneth and Judy Furr's house for the elder Furr couple.

Gertrude Furr, or "Trudy," thought moving outside of Garland, where they had lived, would reduce her clientele. But the older ladies whose hair she coiffed found her and regularly made the trip to Trudy's Salon to get their hair done, her daughter-in-law said.

"She always said, 'I'll be doing this until the day I die,' " Judy Furr said. She added that her mother-in-law saw customers just hours before the fire.

Kenneth M. Furr said his mother enjoyed decorating and cooking.

"She cooked green pepper chili, okra gumbo, coconut pudding," he said. "If you came to her house hungry, you didn't leave hungry.

While surveying the fire damage at the Furr home Saturday, neighbor Connie Tipado, whose husband and son also tried to rescue the couple, said they were like the grandparents of County Road 485.

Mrs. Furr picked figs for Ms. Tipado and gave her canned produce to send to her son while he worked on his doctorate overseas.

She said she enjoyed Mr. Furr's stories about his days in the Navy.

"My husband and I are the only African-Americans on the street, and they treated us so wonderfully. They welcomed us with open arms when my husband and I moved out here," she said. "I love them a lot."

Among the ashes Saturday was a scorched piano that Mr. Tipado sometimes played for Mrs. Furr, along with figurines and antiques Mrs. Furr liked to collect. Canned and jarred items mixed with ash spilled from the burned refrigerator.

A trucker cap lying on the ground outside the house with other debris from the fire read "Furrs Sheep and Goats." The fire also reduced to ruin a console television, couch and hair-dryer chair in Mrs. Furr's one-room salon.

Attached to a mirror in the salon was a yellowed piece of paper that read, "Hands that help are holier than lips that pray."

"That sums up the kind of woman she was," said Chris Ballew of Quinlan, Judy Furr's cousin.

The couple lived and breathed each other, relatives and neighbors said. They sat quietly together in white rocking chairs on their porch. Mr. Furr drove a red and white pickup, but the couple took the immaculate Lincoln they kept in the garage when they got dressed up to go into town on the weekends.

Last summer Mr. Furr spent four months in the hospital recovering from a bypass and pneumonia. His wife, herself frail from a stroke and cornea transplant, didn't miss one day visiting him.

"You never saw one without the other," Judy Furr said. "If it had to happen like this, I'm glad they went together."
The Dallas Morning News, Dallas, Texas, February 6, 2005