“At approximately 7:00 A.M. on October 31, 1981, the nude body of the victim was found on the floor of her room in St. Francis Convent by a nun who had noticed the deceased missing at chapel earlier that morning.” So reads the opinion of the Potter County Court of Appeals. The opinion continues: “Another nun testified that she passed by the deceased’s open bedroom door at midnight the night before and heard her breathing. She further testified that although there was blood on the deceased’s face when the body was found that morning, the nuns did not suspect foul play and had the body removed to a funeral home.”
So unthinkable was the crime—the murder of a nun—that when the sisters of St. Francis saw the body, naked on the floor of her tiny cubicle, they could not grasp what had happened. They took it for granted that Sister Catherine had died of natural causes. So heinous was the crime that the appeals court could not find it in its heart to spare Johnny Frank Garrett’s life, even though he was but seventeen, a juvenile, at the time of the murder.
Five years after the murder, in June 1986, Jonathan and I would come to Huntsville, Texas, to study juveniles condemned to death. There we would examine Johnny for the first time. And like just about everyone else who had seen Johnny before us, we would fail to understand the murderer or grasp the forces that came together that night and generated the grisly act. What we thought we saw was a schizophrenic fellow, convinced that he had been placed on earth to save the Native Americans from extinction. Johnny hallucinated; voices whispered reassurances. He, Johnny, like the braves of old, would be saved from death. Sometimes Johnny’s Aunt Barbara, long dead, came to him in his cell and soothed him. Suddenly she would appear; just when he felt all was lost, he would find her perched at the foot of his cot. Gently she would approach him and breathe words of comfort in his ear. “You’re not gonna dah, Johnny. Ah won’t let that happen.”
Johnny Frank Garrett heard voices; he saw visions; he had delusions. Jonathan and I agreed that Johnny was psychotic. This was also one of the few instances in which our diagnostic opinion was in agreement with the prison staff’s. Even the prison psychiatrist called Johnny schizophrenic. We have learned over the years that you have to be really crazy to be called schizophrenic by a death row psychiatrist.
Johnny was also brain damaged. There was no question about that, either. According to medical records, his brain had been oxygen deprived at birth. The number of functioning neurons that remained under his calvarium after his traumatic entry into the world had been diminished further by a series of injuries. By the time Jonathan and I met Johnny, there was no way for us to distinguish the relative effects of birth trauma and the effects of repeated blows delivered to his head by a sequence of unfriendly stepfathers. Thus, in addition to his psychosis, Johnny had the impulsiveness, labile moods, poor judgment, and paranoia of a prizefighter who has weathered too many rounds. But as we were to discover many years later, neither his psychosis nor his brain damage accounted entirely for Johnny’s murder of the aged nun in the Convent of St. Francis. However, in 1986, we thought they did, and we said so.
Johnny was a research subject, but his deficits were so severe and pervasive that I felt it my duty to furnish his lawyer with a clinical report of his condition. Johnny was the sickest death row inmate I had ever examined. I figured that his lawyer would be able to make use of our findings in the course of the appeals process.
I felt confident about my grasp of Johnny’s neuropsychiatric condition. But what never quite made sense to me, what continued to puzzle and trouble me long after our return from Huntsville, was Johnny’s choice of victim. Had Johnny killed a man—someone who reminded him of his brutal stepfathers—I could have made sense of his crime. But why kill a harmless old lady? And then there was the rape to explain. What would make a seventeen-year-old boy sexually assault a seventy-six-year-old nun? I just couldn’t see it.
The nuns, who at first attributed Sister Catherine’s unexpected demise to a heart attack, and we doctors, who at first attributed Johnny’s behaviors to a combination of psychosis, brain damage, and batterings by some less than nurturing stepfathers, were doing exactly what we all do every day of our lives: we see what we expect to see. With a little ingenuity we manage to fit new data into old mind-sets. Anything that doesn’t fit we filter out as extraneous noise.
When an event is frightening and bizarre, when it challenges our notions of reality and assaults our sensibilities, it blinds us. We block it out. Had we paused, reconsidered—had Jonathan and I taken a second look—we might have begun to see the picture. When we don’t even believe that something is possible or that it exists, we fail to see it at all. That is exactly what happened to us in the case of Johnny Garrett.
The nuns were quicker than we to rectify their error. The body of Sister Catherine was already at the funeral parlor, and plans for a requiem mass were well under way, when the nuns first began to suspect foul play. A couple of facts did not sit right with Sister Agnes. She paused. Reconsidered. If Sister Catherine had succumbed to a heart attack, she reasoned, why was so much blood splattered about her room? And why was she naked? Surely, had she been on her way to the bathroom, she would have taken the time to put on a robe, no matter how urgent her calling—Sister Catherine was known for her modesty. Sister Agnes, a ruminative soul, was reluctant to dismiss her friend’s sudden death so easily. She paced the convent halls. She stopped from time to time to gaze out the windows and reflect on the horror of the previous night. Sister Agnes was, therefore, the first to notice the broken pane of glass and the cut window screen in the recreation room. Someone had broken in. Her ability to wait, reflect, take a second look at an event that at first had seemed simply an act of God brought to light the murder.
Years would pass between the time Jonathan and I first examined Johnny and our pausing to take a second look. The first time we saw Johnny we were in a hurry. There were seven condemned juveniles in Huntsville who had to be examined. We had no time to sit around and think. Besides, in Johnny’s case, the clinical picture was pretty obvious. Johnny was schizophrenic. Sadly, we had not yet learned to practice what we preached. For years we had been teaching doctors in training about the dire consequences of being in a hurry. We had stressed the importance of asking questions thoroughly, in many different ways and contexts. We had taught our students the extraordinary responsibilities inherent in evaluating delinquents and criminals, how easy it was to miss a diagnosis and dismiss a disturbed inmate as a mere sociopath. And yet Jonathan and I allowed ourselves to hurry.
It did not take a psychiatrist to recognize that this crime was not the work of a brilliant criminal mind. Minutes after the police arrived at the convent, a blood-covered serrated knife was found beneath the bed of the deceased. Not long thereafter, a second knife, the kind usually used to cut tough meat, was discovered outside, in the convent driveway beneath a broken window. Its condition suggested it had been used to cut the screen. Fingerprints on the headboard of Sister Catherine’s bed matched those on the bloody knife found under the bed and on the handle of the knife beneath the window. Whoever had visited Sister Catherine during the wee hours of the morning was either unconcerned with the possibility of being caught or ignorant of such fundamental forensic procedures as fingerprinting. What kind of monster would break into a convent, cut through a screen with one knife, drop it on the ground, climb to the living quarters, rape a helpless, devout, senior citizen, stab her with a second knife, and take off into the night? What kind of moron would leave both knives behind and not even bother to rub off his fingerprints?
Shortly after the knives were discovered, Johnny Frank Garrett, a scrawny teenager who lived close by, was arrested. Just a few weeks before the crime he had been released from a state school for delinquents. On the day prior to the murder, he had been seen skulking around the premises of the convent. Finally, his fingerprints matched those on the two knives, as well as those on Sister Catherine’s headboard.
The detectives who interrogated Johnny swore that they had apprised him of his rights. The Potter County opinion states emphatically, “It is undisputed that appellant was given Miranda warnings prior to interrogation.” “You have the right to a defense attorney,” he was told. For two hours after receiving this offer, Johnny said nothing. He sat silently before his accusers, staring into space; his lips moved occasionally but no sound emerged. A couple of times he asked to talk “to a district attorney,” but this request was refused. There would be time enough for Johnny to get acquainted with the D.A. It never occurred to the detectives, or the lawyers who were called upon later to represent Johnny, much less to any of the appeals courts through which his case slowly made its way, that when Johnny asked to speak with a “district attorney” he was responding directly to the Miranda admonition, “You have the right to an attorney.” The fine legal distinction between a defense attorney and a district attorney had escaped “appellant’s” limited powers of reasoning.
Then, out of the blue, to the interrogators’ surprise, “appellant” did an about-face. He confessed. The Potter County opinion reads as follows: “Later appellant admitted going to the convent, breaking the window, and going inside.” Johnny dropped the aw-shucks, hayseed facade he had maintained since his arrest and, in chilling detail, described the crime. What a switch! The detectives breathed a sigh of relief. One of the ugliest murders in the county proved one of the easiest to solve.
A cynic might say that the police chose to misunderstand Johnny’s request to speak with an attorney. After all, following his confession, they caught on pretty fast. Now they got it. Johnny wanted a lawyer? Sure. And, presto, a public defender materialized. On the other hand, as Jonathan and I would learn eventually, it was not always easy to understand Johnny Garrett. He was forever changing.
For example, according to the records, shortly after confessing to the murder, Johnny did another about-face. With a childlike innocence that apparently fooled no one, he insisted, as he had at the start, that he had nothing to do with the murder. Hence, he refused to sign the confession he had just provided. What was going on? The detectives figured that the kid had suddenly wised up. But to the lawmen who had witnessed Johnny’s sudden change of heart, it made no difference. The stenographer had taken it all down; Johnny’s account of entering the convent matched the facts of the case. What is more, the treads of Johnny’s boots had imprinted the soft mud outside the convent window, leaving a cuneiform signature at the scene of the crime. Later on, the autopsy revealed that hairs found between Sister Catherine’s legs matched those plucked from Johnny’s pubic region. And, of course, there were the fingerprints. Authorship of the work was never in question. Given this overwhelming body of evidence against him, Johnny’s subsequent protestations of innocence came across as ridiculous.
From then on Johnny stuck to his guns. Throughout his trial, he insisted that he had been framed. Somebody else had killed Sister Catherine and, as usual, he was the patsy. Sure, Johnny admitted, he had wandered around the convent grounds the day before the murder. He had never denied that. Johnny loved to go “creepy crawling,” as he put it—to slip into places, unseen, and steal things. But he never hurt anyone. He was sure of that.
This was not the first time that Johnny had been blamed for things he had not done. Ever since he was a little kid people had been picking on him. Someone kept setting him up. Johnny never forgot the time he got sent to reform school. The teachers at school said he threw a water glass at a kid’s face and almost killed him. Johnny knew that he didn’t do it, but as usual he took the heat. Things like that were always happening to him. Someone had to be going around pretending to be Johnny Garrett, deliberately getting him into hot water. Sometimes he was convinced he had a double. Johnny sat in his cell thinking maybe they should do one of those lie detector tests he had seen on T.V. It would prove he didn’t kill that nun. Everyone knew that Johnny didn’t do things like that. Sure he was kind of sneaky; he would be the first to admit that. But he wasn’t violent.
And, in fact, had a lie detector test been administered, Johnny probably would have passed with flying colors. There were times when, if hooked up to the machine and asked whether he had killed the nun, Johnny could have said no, and his response probably would not have raised an incriminating blip.
The trial court, unlike Johnny’s own lawyers, had no problem understanding Johnny’s ever-changing stories. He was a liar, pure and simple. A stupid one at that. But such glaring lies! The boy didn’t seem all that retarded. He should have known that no one would believe him when he changed his story so many times. Now I did it. Now I didn’t. Now I did it. Now I didn’t. His chances might have been better had he just pleaded guilty, looked contrite, and thrown himself on the mercy of the court. After all, he was only seventeen years old. His youth and a little remorse could have gone a long way toward softening the hearts of a judge and jury. But to rape a nun, choke her, stab her, leave cutlery monogrammed with his bloody fingerprints all over the place, and then deny everything—that was just too much. Johnny Frank Garrett, thief, rapist, murderer, liar, was not crazy. He was bad.
The verdict: guilty. The sentence: death. Johnny was dispatched to death row in Huntsville to await execution. And that’s how things stood until 1986, when Jonathan and I visited death row in Texas for the very first time. By the time we examined Johnny, we had done research on violent inmates in Connecticut, Florida, California, and states in between and we could easily have written a Michelin Guide to Death Rows and Detention Centers in the United States.