BRYAN, Texas—About 140 prospective jurors assembled Monday as trial got under way for the second of two men accused in the notorious murders of five people abducted from an East Texas Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant a quarter-century ago.

Darnell Hartsfield, 47, went on trial almost a year after his cousin, Romeo Pinkerton, took a plea bargain midway through his own trial on five capital murder charges for the 1983 fatal shootings outside Kilgore.

If convicted, Hartsfield faces an automatic life prison term because prosecutors have said they won’t seek the death penalty. The convicted burglar and drug dealer from Tyler already was serving life for perjury when DNA testing tied him to the KFC killings.

He traded his prison whites Monday for a white open-collar shirt and black slacks as he sat at the defense table in a courtroom in Bryan, facing prospective jurors as State District Judge Clay Gossett qualified them and considered reasons why they may not be able to serve.

Gossett introduced the defendant and the lawyers in the case to the prospective jurors. Hartsfield rose briefly but said nothing.

The case was moved to Bryan from Henderson, about 150 miles to the northeast, because of publicity in East Texas.

Gossett said some 600 Brazos County residents had been summoned as possible jurors. Less than a quarter of that number showed up and of those who did, only eight were black. Hartsfield is black.

So the judge ordered Brazos County sheriff’s deputies to seek out remaining potential jurors and order them to appear in court, although Gossett did not demand that deputies physically bring jurors to the courthouse. Gossett, who said he didn’t believe all races adequately were represented among those who appeared Monday, instead asked that deputies make every reasonable effort to contact people who ignored the jury summons and have them report Wednesday morning.

At Pinkerton’s trial that had been moved last year to New Boston in far northeast Texas, Gossett asked for a second jury pool when not enough jurors could be selected from the initial pool.

“I understand this is not something you like to hear or want to hear,” he told jurors who were in court Monday, advising them the trial could last up to five weeks. “It’s just the reality of this.”

A panel of 14, including two alternates, likely would be selected by Friday, the judge said. The jury prospects filled out 13 pages of questions and were asked to return Thursday for additional questioning by lawyers.

Gossett said attorneys would deliver their opening arguments on Sept. 15.

The five victims were found dead along an oilfield road about 15 miles from the KFC restaurant in Kilgore where they were abducted during a holdup the previous night, Sept. 23, 1983.

Killed were David Maxwell, 20; Mary Tyler, 37; Opie Ann Hughes, 39; Joey Johnson, 20; and Monte Landers, 19. All but Landers worked at the restaurant about 25 miles east of Tyler and 115 miles east of Dallas. Landers was a friend of Maxwell and Johnson and was visiting them as the restaurant was closing for the night.

Hartsfield, then 22, was arrested for aggravated robbery in September 1983 in another case and sentenced to 25 years in prison. Prosecutors contend that three days before his arrest, he was one of the men participating in the Kilgore killings.

Pinkerton faced a possible death sentence if convicted when he took the plea deal last year for the five life terms. The agreement, however, did not require him to testify against Hartsfield.

Since 1995, Hartsfield has been serving a 40-year sentence out of Smith County for delivery of a controlled substance and engaging in organized criminal activity. He also had the burglary conviction from 1983, at least two parole revocations and then three years ago was convicted of perjury in a KFC-related case and given a life term.

His cousin, Pinkerton, had been to prison at least five times and had been out of prison just two days when the Kilgore murders occurred.

At Pinkerton’s trial, Lisa Tanner, an assistant Texas attorney general and lead prosecutor in both trials, disclosed for the first time that DNA evidence confirmed the involvement of a third person who raped one of the victims. The rape also was a detail authorities never had disclosed over the year as the slayings case became one of the state’s oldest unresolved mass murders.

Authorities have refused to disclose any progress in their hunt for a third suspect, citing a gag order imposed by Gossett.

DNA technology not available until recently showed Pinkerton’s blood on a napkin at the restaurant crime scene and blood from Hartsfield on a box of cash register tapes. A former FBI agent hired as a special investigator for the Rusk County Sheriff’s Office in 2000 to look into the long-stalled case found the items among evidence that had been kept. The DNA testing led to the arrests of Pinkerton and Hartsfield.

The jury was questioned Monday in the same Brazos County courtroom where white supremacist Lawrence Russell Brewer was convicted and condemned in 1999 for his part in the murder of James Byrd Jr., the black Jasper man abducted and chained by his ankles to the back of a pickup truck, then dragged for three miles down a winding bumpy East Texas road to his death.