PREFACE

Pamela Perillo and I worked on this project from 2010 through 2017. The background for this collaboration is remarkable.

In the mid-1990s, a bid request appeared in our local paper for an independent firm to read the water meters once a month in an adjoining town. This job sounded like a perfect opportunity for “Jerry” and me to work together. Jerry lived nearby in the same neighborhood I did. He was smart, good with his hands, and unemployed except for odd jobs. And a big plus: I knew he would be trustworthy and reliable, not only from my own intuition, but because he was well-known and an avowed Christian who openly helped the homeless. He could read the meters, and I could supply a corporation, truck, insurance, bond, initial financing, and paperwork. A perfect match. After obtaining the necessary forms, I planned to approach Jerry with this idea, get his approval, and obtain a performance bond.

On a beautiful spring afternoon, I was fishing from the shore of a lake close to both our homes. A tree-lined bank about three feet high rose behind the shore where Jerry surprisingly appeared as if I had called him.

“Doinganygood?” he clipped.

“No, not really,” I replied. After a few minutes of chit-chat, I made the proposal: your hands, my brains.

His response sounded like an electric typewriter, one word per stroke, far too fast for my aged mind to digest and not particularly on the subject. I tried to check the size of his pupils, but the sun was behind him, and I was unable to confirm my suspicion.

I had learned about looking for this pupillary phenomenon from years past when a young man came up to me while I was pushing a lawnmower, jerked it from my tightly held grip, and said,

“I’lldothat. Youdon’thavetopaymemuch.”

That young man stared at me with dazed blue irises encircling little black ink dots for pupils. Pinpoint-sized pupils, I later learned, are one of the effects of speed (methamphetamine)—that and talking in a time warp.

Something didn’t click at that point next to the lake between Jerry and me. Something was reminiscent of my conversation with the lawnmower guy, so I let my offer die on the table. Jerry moved away shortly after that.

In 2010, about fifteen years later, I heard from Jerry’s ex-wife that he had been tried for capital murder following a drug-induced rage that ultimately ended in several homicides. The state where the crime occurred, similar to Texas, used a bifurcated trial: one for conviction, the other for punishment. Jerry enjoyed an extensive rifle and pistol collection, including automatic weapons. This was, of course, brought out during his conviction and played a major part in his punishment. The jury returned a verdict of death by lethal injection. As of this date, almost twenty years later, Jerry still waits on Death Row in painful apprehension as his appeals twist through the court system, and the state scampers to find the necessary drugs for his death.

Does Jerry deserve the death penalty? I don’t think so. Narcotics deserve the death penalty, but of course, one cannot separate the drugs from the person who uses them. Although the legal system has become more enlightened to the defense of mitigating circumstance in the punishment phase, nonetheless, Flip Wilson’s famous argument that “the devil made me do it” doesn’t seem to impress a jury. Prior to Jerry’s trial, I, like so many others, was non-pulsed about applying the death penalty. Jerry’s experience changed my thoughts and touched my life.

How many people have been touched by alcohol or drug addiction? An overwhelming number, almost two-thirds of our adult population. In my youth, the problem was alcohol. Somewhere in the 1960s, narcotics “exponentiated” as the predominant source for addiction. One of the key findings in a 2004 survey of 801 U.S. adults conducted by the Peter D. Hart Research Associates was: “Some 63 percent of U.S. adults surveyed said that addiction has had a great deal or some impact on their lives.”(1) Certainly it has had an effect on my own family; a close relative passed away from a drug overdose. With such high probability that you, the reader, have been affected by addiction, let me pose a question to you. What if your loved one were so under the influence that he or she committed such an extreme act as that of Jerry or Pamela? How would you feel then about the death penalty? Not to pontificate or condemn, but another question: Are you under a dangerous addiction at this moment?

I wrote to Jerry, and we readily agreed to collaborate on his story in the hopes that it might help others. We had barely started before Jerry realized that because the penal system in his state (and all others) scrutinized every page of correspondence, the details of his life and the homicides could endanger his appeals. We placed the project on hold.

Still, the execution of someone who had been possessed by narcotics while committing a criminal act haunted me. As a fiction writer, the thought occurred: The novel’s the thing to place before the conscience of the people (Hamlet paraphrased). Yes, a thought-provoking Great American Novel about the injustice of the death penalty, especially in my native state, Texas. I decided that my central character would be female. Midway through the novel, it was evident that I needed a description of the female Death Row Unit in Mountain View. On the Internet, I found an old prison pen-pal request from Pamela Perillo. After several letters and telephone conversations, Pam and I realized that we had the same purpose for sharing her story as that which Jerry and I had intended, a plan for a book born of a hope that it might help others.

John T. Thorngen