Sex Toy Story

Joanne hadn't been proud of her body until she married Chris. Her mother had died when Joanne was 13, and her sense of confidence had floundered. Joanne thought her hips too big and her breasts too flat. "I hated my legs," she says. "I got out of gym and into band so I didn't have to wear shorts that showed my white legs."

But Chris adored every inch of Joanne and made sure she knew it. Short skirts, she says, "make me feel more self-confident. More than anything, my husband likes them. It's one of the basic things he asks me to do."

For her, Chris got contact lenses. He flaunted his diminutive but muscular body in the sizzling Texas summers by wearing boots and a cowboy hat with short cut-offs and sleeveless shirts. Joanne thought he looked hot.

After working for his uncle's construction firm, Chris started his own company and did so well that by 1997, Joanne no longer needed to teach. A year later, Joanne was chosen to be an ambassador for the chamber, where the membership had soared from 451 in 1997 to 1,025 by 2001. She was one of the chamber's best recruiters.

The Webbs' lives revolved around the chamber and Cana Baptist Church. Joanne sang in the choir and chaired an important church committee. Chris taught a popular adult Sunday school class and served on the pastor's three-man accountability team.

And, in his quest to build the self-esteem of the world's women, Chris had continued to flirt. "A kind word can have a powerful effect on people," Chris says. But some Burleson men didn't appreciate his flattering comments to their wives. Chris appeared a little too interested in them. And if some women were offended, others may have seemed a bit too pleased.

Despite their eccentricities, by 2000 the Webbs had gone from strangers in a community dominated by a handful of old families to leaders. In 2002, Joanne was chosen to present hometown American Idol star Kelly Clarkson with an award from the chamber.

But beneath the façade of friendliness burbled malicious gossip. Did you see Joanne's new tits? I heard she bent over at Wal-Mart and you could see her panties. They're always throwing wild parties. Did you hear they got kicked out of Cana Baptist?

In whispers at the Country Café, at the Safari Hair and Tanning Salon and in the pews at churches, people began trading tittle-tattle about the couple's sex life, their "alternative lifestyle." When word got out that Joanne was selling "sex toys," Perkins and a handful of decent people knew something had to be done.

Nasty Little Town

From its inception, Burleson has seen schisms between conservative and liberal Christians.

The town was founded in 1881 by Parson Henry Carty Renfro, who named it after his mentor, Rufus Burleson, president of Baylor University. But late in life, Renfro embraced "free thought," brought to Texas in the mid-1800s by German intellectuals seeking liberty from political and religious oppression. "Freethinkers" refused to accept the authority of church leaders or scripture. Accused of "advocating and preaching the doctrine of infidelity," Renfro was booted out of the ministry and the Baptist church in 1884.

Even after his death a year later, Renfro was controversial. Though the Baptist hierarchy insisted that Renfro had renounced his liberal heresies before succumbing, his family claimed otherwise. But Baptists had the last laugh. Today, of the 55 churches in Burleson, 18 are Baptist, far more than any other denomination.

Burleson has always been a conservative town, but city leaders privately admit that in the past, it also had a reputation as a racist town. People joke that the only high school football game in Texas with no black players on the field is when teams from Burleson and nearby Joshua compete.

Those outside the usual Christian denominations can also feel like outsiders. Spears, a Mormon, says she's experienced religious discrimination. In the 1990s, fundamentalists, led by Gloria Gillaspie, tried to ban some textbooks. Others on the school board tried to control twirlers' uniforms and even dictate a sculptor's art. Some critics deemed the genitalia of a bronze elk in front of the new high school too large and lifelike.

One longtime resident says she got so sick of Burleson's narrow-minded powermongers that she moved to Joshua. "Burleson is a nasty little town," she says. "If you're not one of the chosen people, they're going to do everything they can to get rid of you. It's a competitive viciousness, like a virus. It's in the churches, in the schools, in the chamber and in the town. It's eating away at them."