JUST A JOB
“The death penalty is unfair, arbitrary, capricious and fraught with racial discrimination and judicial bias.”
Bianca Jagger, anti-death penalty campaigner
“One thing he kept saying to me was, ‘I’ve killed three people and I’m going to kill you…’”
Lisa Blackburn, Gary Graham’s final victim
After Kate Winslet filmed The Life of David Gale in Huntsville in 2001, she gave an interview in which she called the city “one giant prison” and talked about its “pervasive sense of death.” That was deeply dishonest. To be more blunt, it was ridiculous bullshit. I very much doubt she spent much time in Huntsville. I don’t recall seeing her in line at Whataburger, and the filmmakers certainly didn’t do much research. We only saw Kate once, when she was filming the final scene. In it, she runs what in real life would have been about 30 miles from death row to the Walls Unit, throws herself on the ground and starts yelling and screaming for them to stop the execution. I was standing there, shaking my head in disbelief. At one point, Kate got upset that there were too many of us watching and everybody had to scatter. I think we were cramping her art.
I took the criticism personally, because the city had been good to me. Huntsville, population 38,548 at the last count, is situated between Houston and Dallas, which is one of its main selling points. But it is a beautiful city in its own right, set among rolling hills and the trees that make up East Texas’s so-called Piney Woods. Huntsville is so picturesque that if you stopped off without knowing that it was home to seven prison units and had been dubbed “the execution capital of the world” by the European media, you could spend a pleasant day there and leave none the wiser. There is no heavy, negative energy in Huntsville that clings to the place like a black fog, it’s just a typical American city, with fairy lights decorating its downtown square at Christmas, American flags lining the streets during patriotic holidays and churches everywhere. When I moved to Huntsville, it was my intention to stay six months before moving to a bigger city. But that six months turned into a year, which turned into five, which turned into ten. Now it’s been 20 years and I’m quite content.
The Walls Unit—more properly called the Huntsville Unit—was opened in 1849, making it the oldest state prison in Texas. Before 1924, hanging was the preferred method of execution in the state, and individual counties were responsible for carrying them out. But since 1924, every execution in Texas has taken place in the Walls Unit’s death chamber. Between 1924 and 1964, 361 offenders were executed by “Old Sparky,” otherwise known as the electric chair. Charles Reynolds of Red River County was the first to go that way, and Joseph Johnson of Harris County the last. In 1972, the Supreme Court declared the death penalty to be unconstitutional, on the grounds that it was a cruel and unusual punishment. But Texas reinstated it less than two years later and adopted lethal injection as its new means of execution in 1977. In 1982, Charlie Brooks was the first offender to be executed by this new, less dramatic method.
Because the Walls Unit was built so long ago, the town grew up around it, and the prison system is the biggest employer in the city. The second would be the university, and even that has a significant focus on criminal justice—people come from all over the world to study corrections at Sam Houston State. They say that during the Great Depression, Huntsville was the only community in Texas that wasn’t affected, because they were still locking up a whole bunch of people, perhaps even more than usual, because poverty breeds crime.
If you don’t work for the prison system, it’s likely somebody in your family does. Around Huntsville, you bump into people all the time who work for TDCJ, or whose husband or wife or brother or sister works for TDCJ. You see officers all over town wearing their distinctive uniforms—all-gray, or gray pants and a blue shirt with a state seal on it. Stores offer discounts to prison employees and even cater to inmates who have just been released. When an inmate gets out on parole, they’re given street clothes, and they’re usually pretty crappy. But they’re also given a $50 check, so businesses will offer to cash that check and stores will sell cheap T-shirts, tank tops and bandanas, pretty much anything that inmate needs.
Even though Huntsville isn’t far from College Station, where I went to college, and I was aware that Huntsville was where executions took place, I’d never given the death penalty much thought before seeing Javier Cruz die on the gurney. In fact, I didn’t give the death penalty much thought after seeing Javier Cruz die on the gurney. I was pro-death penalty and thought it was the most appropriate punishment for certain crimes, such as rape and murder and killing children. If you rape and kill a child, there’s something fundamentally wrong with you, you can’t redeem yourself. Yet despite Texas having the death penalty, there’s not a lot of discussion about it. Like a lot of social issues, people tend not to engage with it unless it directly affects them. For most Texans, the death penalty is an abstract concept, occasionally debated at dinner parties.
But it became far more real for me when I took over the prison beat for The Huntsville Item in January 2000. George W. Bush had become Governor of Texas in 1995, and after a slow start—three people were executed in the state in 1996—the death house sprang to life again. In 1997, 37 inmates were put to death, followed by 20 in 1998 and 35 in 1999. But I couldn’t have predicted what would happen next. In my first month on the prison beat, I witnessed five men die. In 2000, 40 men and women were executed in the Huntsville death house, a record for the most executions in a single year by an individual state, and almost as many as the rest of the United States combined.
The first execution I witnessed in my new role was that of Earl Carl Heiselbetz Jr., who murdered a mother and her two-year-old daughter in Sabine County in 1991. His last words were, “Love y’all, see you on the other side.” But when I look up those early executions in my journal, it’s the mundane details that jump out at me. Heiselbetz was “still wearing his glasses”; Betty Lou Beets, who murdered two of her five husbands and shot another in the back (and was only the second woman to be executed in Texas since the Civil War) had “tiny little feet”; Jeffrey Dillingham, a hitman who had slashed the throat of a woman in Fort Worth, “had these dimples and actually was a very good-looking man.”
Quite a few of the inmates reminded me of other people. Spencer Goodman, who murdered the wife of ZZ Top manager Bill Ham, “looked like a friend of mine, Jeremy Johnson—they had the same build and there was something similar about their ankles and feet”; Odell Barnes Jr., who was executed for a 1989 rape and murder in Wichita Falls, “looked like the star of the sitcom Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper”; Orien Joiner, who murdered two Lubbock waitresses in 1986, “reminded me a whole lot of the Penguin from the movie Batman”; Thomas Mason, who murdered his estranged wife’s mother and grandmother in Whitehouse in 1991, “looked JUST like my grandfather… he kept doing this blinking and twitching that my grandpa does.” Also like Mason, my grandpa was from Tennessee and a tough old gun-toting guy who was always threatening to shoot someone. One difference: Grandpa never did.
A psychologist would probably have something to say about all these lookalikes I saw strapped to the gurney in the Texas death house—maybe that I was subconsciously trying to humanize these people who had done terrible things in order to soften the impact their execution might have on me, but I honestly think I was just being a blasé kid. It didn’t bother me that Thomas Mason looked like my grandpa—I wasn’t crying about it, because it wasn’t actually my grandpa.
When I started living alone, before I started witnessing executions, I was afraid of coming home and finding someone hiding in my closet, to the extent that I used to get really freaked out about it. People would say, “that stuff doesn’t really happen.” But one of the first executions I witnessed, that’s exactly what the guy did. James Clayton broke into a stranger’s apartment, hid in the woman’s closet and when she got home, he killed her, apparently because his girlfriend had threatened to break up with him. But straight after seeing Clayton die, I went off, wrote my story and hit the bar.
Another time, the inmate’s family turned on us reporters in the witness room, telling us we were part of “this killing machine.” But that didn’t bother me either, because that’s not how I saw it. I was just a reporter, writing down what I was seeing. I didn’t think I was part of anything. Being young was a huge advantage in that job. I was only 24 when I took over the prison beat, and that meant I was much better at removing myself from situations and compartmentalizing the things I’d seen.
Friends would joke with me about my job, send me inappropriate emails and texts. But on the other hand, Houston cops covering homicides—people shot up and stabbed and dismembered—would tell me they wouldn’t be able to watch an execution if you paid them. My brother, who saw far worse during his two tours of Iraq, didn’t understand how I could walk into that death chamber and watch men die, again and again. But—and I don’t mean this to sound flippant—I never would have been able to cut hair for a living. If I see a stray hair when I’m eating, I want to gag. One of my best friends was a hairdresser, and I’d say to her, “How can you do what you do?” I guess everybody has their own poison, and maybe everybody is uniquely programmed to do the job they do.
Once they got to know me and realized I had the stomach for it, correctional officers would show me pictures of inmates who’d killed themselves, including one death row inmate who had slit his own throat, so that his head was almost hanging off. And it didn’t bother me. When you’re a journalist, or at least a good journalist, you’re built to be able to detach from proceedings, be dispassionate and discerning. Witnessing executions was just part of my job, and once I clocked off, I was able to forget about it.
But there are clues throughout my journal that I wasn’t coping quite as well as I thought I was. In fact, I sounded almost paranoid at times. After a handful of executions, I started fretting about the smell of the death chamber. I could smell it in my dad’s office, when I opened a bag of Cheetos and, after one execution, I started worrying that the smell had somehow seeped into my chewing gum. I thought it might have been the actual chemicals I could smell, the three they used to execute the inmates. It couldn’t have been, because the chemicals were sealed in syringes. But after one execution, I sounded almost panicky: “I wonder if MY lungs could collapse just from smelling the chemicals?” I hated that smell. I’ve never smelled anything else like it and I never want to smell it again. That’s why I liked it when someone smuggled in a cigarette for an inmate’s last meal, because you’d smell the lingering smoke instead.
It’s a good thing I kept that journal, otherwise I’d be sitting here now, telling everybody that witnessing executions as a young reporter never moved me in the slightest. My journal contains evidence of empathy, whose existence I denied for so long. Billy Hughes was the first inmate I interviewed on death row, and the first inmate I’d interviewed that I later saw executed. He was very articulate and smart, very, very likable and accomplished a lot of things during his 24 years in prison (which was, at the time, the second-longest stay in Texas death row history). He earned two college degrees, translated books into braille, ran a greeting card business, published a travel guide for horse riders, created a cartoon strip and worked from his cell as a registered anti-death penalty lobbyist.
Before his execution, his spiritual advisor told me that Hughes had liked the article I’d written about him, and, at least according to my journal, my eyes started burning. I guess I felt weirdly proud that my article had been one of the last things he’d read. But after the execution, the victim’s mother called Hughes “manipulative,” and I wondered if I’d been manipulated, too. Later, Larry told me that Hughes thought he didn’t deserve for me to be so nice about him, which made my heart sink. Although there was a theory that Hughes took the hit for his wife, he was convicted of and executed for killing a state trooper, and it was my responsibility not to simply write down everything an inmate told me.
There was also William Kitchens, who was executed for the 1986 rape and murder of Patricia Webb in Abilene. According to my journal, I welled up during his last statement, apparently because his apology seemed so sincere. And there was Oliver Cruz, who was the second of two inmates to be executed on the same night—what they call a “double-header” in the prison trade. The first, Brian Roberson, who had stabbed his two elderly neighbors to death, was an asshole. Just before the drugs kicked in, he turned to his victims’ families and said, “Be careful when y’all are driving home—don’t have no wreck and kill yourselves…” They were his last words on earth. Twenty minutes later, we were back in the death chamber and Cruz was tearful and apologizing to his victim’s family. He looked so small and young and had this thin moustache, like Hispanic teenagers have when they’re trying to look like a man. His victim, a US Air Force officer named Kelly Donovan, had been out walking when she was abducted by Cruz and an accomplice. After raping Donovan, Cruz stabbed her to death. A priest, Father Emmanuel McCarthy, who was in town for the execution, told a reporter that because Donovan was wearing short shorts, “nothing good was going to come of that.” In other words, the man of God thought she was asking for it.
Having turned himself in, Cruz admitted to killing three other people. But watching him plead for forgiveness on the gurney, I felt sorry for him. In fact, according to my diary, “I felt sorry for him in a way that is difficult to put into words.” I just appreciated it when a condemned man admitted his guilt, rather than lying to the bitter end.
There are other entries in my journal that make me cringe, because I sound stupid, immature and smug. As someone who has always felt very strongly about owning their behavior, some of the things I read from that period make me extremely uncomfortable. After the execution of Stacey Lamont, on November 14, 2000, I wrote, “Here’s the deal: if you’re going to do this job, you better be at least a little tough. I’m not a mean or cold person. I cried when I saw Titanic and when my hamster died. It’s just that this is my job. Pansy-asses. That’s all I have to say.”
I had no right to be so self-righteous, because I knew almost nothing about life and death. I was an adult, but I was still a kid in so many ways, and because I was still a kid, everything was cut and dried. I remember Mike Graczyk of the Associated Press, who had witnessed hundreds of executions, being asked by a TV crew how he felt, having just witnessed yet another one. Graczyk stopped typing, looked at them and said, “My only thoughts are about getting this story out.” That impressed me. Reporters were supposed to be dispassionate, detached from the action, because we were just doing a job.
After one execution, a female reporter ran to the bathroom crying, and I remember listening to her and her friend and thinking, “I’m going to freak out on these people…” There was a female journalist from England who started crying because the inmate looked like her boyfriend. I just thought those chicks were weak. As a journalist, you’ve just got to suck things up. But I could be callous and insufferable in those days—“oh, I’m so much tougher than you…”
At other times in my journal, I sound like a moody teenager. For whatever reason, Paul Nuncio gets it both barrels: “This little man got on my nerves so very badly. First of all, he couldn’t make sense to save his life. Secondly, he was so disrespectful to the victim’s relatives. Thirdly, he just had a stupid look on his face.” To be fair, Nuncio did rape and strangle a woman to death, and I suspect anybody would cringe at some of the things they wrote in their journal when they were 24. That said, my entry on Tommy Ray Jackson makes for almost unbearable reading. Jackson, who was executed for the 1983 kidnapping, rape and murder of University of Texas student Rosalind Robinson, delivered a rambling last statement which went on for nine minutes, way longer than normal. The whole time he was talking, I was getting more and more irritated, because I wanted to get my story written and hit the bars for the celebration of Cinco de Mayo. So this guy is lying on a gurney, trying to prolong his life for a few precious extra minutes, while I’m getting annoyed that he’s eating into happy hour. What a dick. That’s ugly and makes me feel embarrassed and ashamed.
In my defense, it’s no surprise I was already showing signs of fraying, even if I didn’t acknowledge it at the time: in the first six months of 2000, I witnessed 22 inmates die, including seven in May alone. And a few of those executions qualified as bona fide circuses.
On the day of his execution, Billy Hughes said to Larry Fitzgerald, “I’m really sorry for everything that’s gonna be happening out there,” but didn’t go into any more detail. When I arrived at the Walls Unit, there were tons of uniformed state troopers on one lawn, which would always happen when a law enforcement officer was murdered (Hughes had killed a state trooper). But at the other end of the street, there was a scoreboard which read, “George 117–2 Jeb,” a reference to the number of executions that had taken place under the governorships of George W. Bush in Texas and his brother Jeb in Florida. There was also a marching band and some cheerleaders, in letter-sweaters and pleated skirts, chanting stuff like, “Texas is good, Texas is great, we kill more than any other state!”
The whole thing had been set up by documentary maker Michael Moore for his TV show The Awful Truth. Almost any other execution, fine. But when you’ve got a whole bunch of state troopers standing stoically, all in uniform in honor of their fallen colleague, that’s kind of awful. It was Hughes who almost made me laugh out loud during his last statement, when he said, “If I’m paying my debt to society, I am due a rebate and a refund.” I snickered and then thought, “Oh my God, I’m not supposed to do that. Not here, not now…”
Ponchai Wilkerson, the son of a retired sheriff’s deputy, shot and killed a jewelery shop clerk in Houston in 1990. The murder of Chung Myong Yi was the culmination of his month-long crime spree, which included drive-by shootings, robberies and car thefts. Wilkerson was also one of the liveliest inmates Texas death row had ever hosted. On Thanksgiving night 1998, he attempted to escape from death row with six other condemned prisoners. Wilkerson and five others surrendered when officers started shooting at them, but Martin Gurule kept going. What did he have to lose? A week later, Gurule—who was the first person to break out of Texas death row since the Bonnie and Clyde era—was found dead in the Trinity River, presumably having drowned. He had magazines and cardboard under his clothes, which acted as a suit of armor, enabling him to roll over two razor-wire security fences.
My introduction to Wilkerson came in February 2000, when he and another inmate, Howard Guidry, took a female guard hostage at the Terrell Unit (later renamed the Polunsky Unit) in Livingston, where Texas death row had recently been moved after Gurule’s breakout. Wilkerson had somehow opened his cell door, overpowered the guard and shackled her in a day room. He and Guidry were armed with sharpened pieces of metal. When I found out what was going on, I hopped in my car and eventually found the unit at the end of a dark, remote road. I arrived to discover that it had been shut down and there were journalists all along the street and ditch outside, because they couldn’t get near the parking lot. Suddenly, Larry Fitzgerald came striding down the road in his hand-tooled cowboy boots, and I remember thinking, “This guy is such a badass.” I’d met him before at a couple of executions, but hadn’t really gotten to know him. But now, amid all that chaos, he was the coolest, calmest person there, and exuded charisma. To a kid who was new in the job, he was very impressive. He gave the media a briefing and set up a plan, which is exactly the way you should do it: if you’re not transparent with journalists, they’ll make shit up.
Larry Fitzgerald
My background was broadcasting. I was a disc jockey for a while—me and my wife Marianne didn’t have much money, but we had all the records we could eat. I worked for radio stations all over Texas—Taylor, Bryan, Dallas—before becoming a news reporter. There was just so much going on back then: the assassination of JFK, Vietnam, Black Power, hippies, women’s lib, Watergate and the resignation of Nixon. I loved that world dearly.
When I was working for KXOL in Fort Worth, they had this big peace march at the University of Texas, and they were covering our mobile news unit with flowers and handing out marijuana to everybody. When I got home, Marianne said to me, “Did you smoke some and go on air?” And I said, “No, not me…” Me and Marianne met in 1959, at a beer joint in Austin called Dirty Martin’s. That was back in the days of car hops, and if you knew a crazy guy called Doc, he’d sell you beer if you were underage. After we were married, we lived in a scary-looking two-story apartment in Taylor, Texas. I took Marianne to see Psycho, when she was pregnant. She was terrified, so when we got home, I switched all the lights off and stood at the top of the stairs, making the slashing sound from the famous shower scene. She saw the funny side, eventually.
I shared a jail cell with Jane Fonda in Fort Hood. She was protesting about the soldiers leaving for Vietnam, I kept sticking my microphone in her face, and we both wound up getting arrested. She did not shut up the whole time we were in that cell together. When I joined the prison system, it turned out one of the wardens was the cop who arrested me that day. I got into trouble sometimes with the bosses, and quit one radio job because the owner was an asshole. One Austin station I worked at was owned by future president Lyndon B. Johnson, who was a senator at the time. I recall he’d come around turning off the lights, to save on electricity.
It wasn’t always good being my wife. We had two small kids, I never changed a diaper in my life, and Marianne never knew what was going to happen next. Somebody had to keep putting bread on the table, and she must have worried that I was never going to settle down. But I had an optimistic outlook on life, always thought something would come up, and it always did.
When I moved up to be a news director in Fort Worth, I really got to know the movers and shakers in the community, the people who were creating the news—the lawyers, the judges, the politicians. I liked being on the inside, seeing things most people didn’t, having a preview of what was going to happen. More than anything else, I liked being able to ask difficult questions. It was that curiosity that made me a good journalist. I wanted to tell people what was going on, and I was good at telling stories and painting pictures on the radio. That was my talent. If there was a catastrophe—a car wreck or a train crash—I’d be there. There’s a certain adrenalin flow that comes with that sort of stuff.
In those days, there were no cell phones or computers, so you had to go in person to the cop shop to get stories. I had a car fitted with police radio, and one time, when I was driving home from work, I got wind that a shooting was taking place in a bar in Mansfield. I pulled up in the parking lot at about the same time as the sheriff’s deputy, and there was still gunfire going on inside. When we finally made it in there, there were dead people all over the floor, and it turned out a gentleman had walked into this bar and started shooting people at random. He ran into a restroom and some of the survivors followed him in with knives and killed him as he was trying to reload his .45. Yeah, that was pretty exciting.
When I was working for KCLE in Cleburne, there was an under-ground explosion near the town. It turned out it was the site of a top-secret factory, making bombs to drop on Vietnam. There was also the time some prisoners escaped and were hiding out in the hills of West Texas. Everyone with a rifle was out there hunting for them, but all I had was a notebook. When I was working for KXOL, in the city of Hurst, we stumbled upon a shootout at an illegal gambling den, on Fort Worth’s east side. We were there before the cops, and were lucky not to get shot. But I just wanted to be where the action was, no matter what was going down. I also covered the case of Thomas Cullen Davis, the Texas oil heir who stood trial for the murder of his stepdaughter. I had to shave my beard off, because people kept confusing me with the boyfriend of Davis’s wife. Davis was acquitted, before standing trial again for conspiring to murder his wife and the judge overseeing their divorce proceedings. Guess what? Davis got off again. In Texas, it’s often said, “If you don’t have the capital, you get the punishment,” and the opposite is true, too. It wasn’t all bad news, like the time an 18-wheeler turned over on a freeway and hundreds of chickens escaped. Every person in the vicinity who owned a gunny sack was out on that freeway catching dinner.
After falling out with one of the station owners, I had a spell as a truck driver, working for a guy named Bo Powell, who owned a company called Anything Anywhere After Midnight. I did a lot of strange hauls, I can tell you, until one of the trucks, which was carrying oil, caught fire in Tyler. After that, I decided driving trucks wasn’t really for me. In 1978, I joined the State Bar of Texas, as director of communications. I think Marianne was relieved, because she knew I was going to get a pay check every month.
I had a way of getting things out of people, so I heard a lot of important people spill their guts. But it was an overwhelming job, and that’s when I really started drinking. Why do you think they call it a bar? If I walked into pretty much anywhere and saw a media type I knew, I’d pick up the tab. I’d have a $3,000 American Express bill every month, and it did my liver no favors at all. You find out a lot of things in bars, and drinking relaxed me, was a crutch, made it that I didn’t have to think about the pressures of the job. But it also meant I wound up in Alcoholics Anonymous.
After leaving the Bar of Texas in 1991, I went to work for the Texas Department of Commerce as a location scout. Me and the cameraman Jim would drive all night long to destinations the length and breadth of Texas, covering shrimp fests in Port Aransas and catfish fests in Conroe. I did media for Bill Hobby’s run for lieutenant governor and Ann Richards’ second campaign for the governorship of Texas. When the David Koresh thing was going down in Waco, and the Branch Davidian cult went up in flames, Richards was releasing a falcon in Big Bend Park. A reporter asked her about Koresh and she didn’t know anything about it. I got it both barrels, and she didn’t get re-elected.
A guy named Larry Todd managed the public information office at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and was an old friend of mine from our days in Dallas-Fort Worth radio, and when he asked me to apply for a job as a spokesman, I jumped at the chance. I didn’t really ask any questions, because I was out of work and needed money. That’s the only reason I applied. At my interview, I was asked how I felt about executions, and replied, “I’m ambivalent.” It was only later I discovered that it was part of my job description to witness so many of those damn things. I honestly thought I was being hired as a technician, to work with the Texas legislature on prison matters. Marianne thought the idea of me witnessing executions was terrible.
I also assumed that the job would be based in Austin, which is where I lived, so when they told me I’d be working out of Huntsville, I thought, “Huntsville? That’s the sticks, man, I don’t wanna live in Huntsville!” I came out of Austin, which is a pretty liberal town, and I’d always vowed that I’d never end up living east of Interstate 35. I had no idea what to expect living in East Texas. But I didn’t have a choice, I was just an old media man who needed a job.
I started work for TDCJ in January 1995, and was soon asking myself the question, “How in the hell did a guy like me ever get hired by TDCJ?” Huntsville is a pretty town, full of friendly people. But it’s a conservative community, behind East Texas’s Pine Curtain, on the buckle of the Bible Belt. The Baptists and the Pentecostals have a big presence, and it’s not unusual to see people praying over their meals in a restaurant. If Huntsville is conservative, TDCJ is on another level entirely, to the extent that I was a little bit taken aback by it. I wouldn’t describe myself as a liberal, but I would have been identified as a Democrat. I guess being a Democrat in Huntsville is the same as being a liberal.
Because I came from Austin, the administration also thought I was a politician, which is the worst thing you can be in the prison system. Those early days were tough. There were a lot of phone calls that didn’t get returned and it was a nomadic life, living in a motel in Huntsville and driving back to Austin every weekend. But after a couple of months, I was given state housing, which meant going back to Austin every two weeks. I started getting invited to barbecues and drinks and meetings with the people in charge, and eventually, after about a year, I was accepted. I could see people thinking, “Well, he’s actually an okay guy.”
I knew nothing about prisons when I started, and had never spent much time around convicts. I thought they just locked ‘em up and threw away the key. I also hadn’t really given the death penalty much thought. I was a total neophyte. But TDCJ wanted a gray beard, somebody who had been around the block a few times, which I had. They also needed someone who could deal with media pressure, although I had no idea how great that pressure would be. But I had been armed with one piece of advice that served me well. A friend of mine, who I’d worked with at the State Bar of Texas, told me, “Larry, if you go down there and treat the offenders with respect, you will have the best job in the world. But if you go down there and are an asshole, you’ll hate it.” So I decided I was going to treat those people with respect…
Wilkerson and Guidry eventually surrendered, and less than a month later, the former was scheduled to be executed. But that hostage situation at Terrell wasn’t Wilkerson’s last stand. When he refused to leave his cell on death row, he was eventually gassed out, and he had to be carried to and from the van that taxied him to Huntsville. A five-man extraction team then dragged him from the holding cell to the death chamber, before they pinned him to the gurney using extra Velcro strapping and a bandage across his head. I was stationed in the victim’s witness room, with Larry and Mike Graczyk, when Wilkerson gave his last statement, the chemicals started flowing and everything seemed to be going as planned. Suddenly, Wilkerson started twisting his tongue around in a weird circular motion. I saw something metal and thought he was trying to spit out his retainer. Then I realized he was saying something and I saw this little key pop out of his mouth, at the exact moment he died. The stand-in warden, Neill Hodges, stepped forward, snatched the key off Wilkerson’s chin and stuck it in his pocket. We were all just standing there in shock. Eventually, I scribbled “KEY?” on my notepad, showed it to Larry and he nodded. Holy shit.
“For a few seconds, I had the crazy thought, ‘He’s going to get off that table and kill us.’ It was a kind of Silence of the Lambs moment, the part where Hannibal Lecter spat the paper clip out and you knew the guards were in trouble.”
Michelle’s journal, March 14, 2000
Afterward, all us reporters were scrambling around, trying to find out where the hell this key came from. We asked the chaplain, Jim Brazzil, what he said just before the key popped out of his mouth, and Brazzil said, “The secret as of Wilkerson.” Apparently, Wilkerson had been jacking with the officers all day, telling them he knew something they didn’t. Their response was, “Whatever, Ponchai…” Presumably, his secret was that he had this handcuff key.
Later on, when they did the incident report, what they determined probably happened was that he’d planned to escape from his handcuffs on the way to Huntsville and either hijack the van or jump out of the door. What he didn’t count on was that death row inmates have more than one set of handcuffs on them when they are being transported for their executions. So even if he had been able to remove one set, he wouldn’t have been able to remove the other set. But it triggered a huge investigation, they did a big toss of the unit, and came up with more keys. It was Wilkerson’s one last victory, him saying a big “fuck you” to the system, which was what he seemed to have been put on earth to do. A few years later, when Hodges became the warden full-time, he had that key in a little frame in his office.
Betty Lou Beets also attracted a lot of media attention, simply because she was a woman. But the main event of 2000, by far, was the execution of Gary Graham, or Shaka Sankofa, as he preferred to be called.
I never understood why certain inmates ended up being cause célèbres, while inmates who perhaps should have been weren’t. We had an inmate named James Allridge, who was on death row for murdering a convenience store clerk in Fort Worth in 1985. Allridge corresponded with the actress Susan Sarandon for years, and she even came to visit him a couple of weeks before his execution. Because I was the only woman around, they got me to walk her in and she bought some of his artwork. It never made sense to me. Allridge and his brother, who was also executed, went on a crime spree that resulted in the deaths of at least three people. Yes, Allridge had earned himself a degree in prison, but so had other people. And why did Gary Graham get all that attention? He was not a sympathetic character. He should not have been a poster child for the abolition movement. He, too, had gone on a horrible crime spree, robbing 13 different victims in nine different locations in less than a week. Two of his victims were pistol-whipped, another was shot in the neck, another was struck by the vehicle Graham was stealing from him. His final victim, Lisa Blackburn, was kidnapped, robbed and raped repeatedly over a period of five hours. None of this is disputed, because Graham pleaded guilty to all charges. The only crime he claimed he was falsely convicted of was the murder of Bobby Lambert at the start of his rampage.
Graham’s argument was that he was convicted on the testimony of a single eyewitness. But that single eyewitness was black, like him, so it was difficult for his supporters to make it about race. Graham burned through 20 appeals in almost 19 years, which were reviewed by 33 judges and all of which were rejected, and he was granted four stays of execution. But despite being under intense pressure, from all over the world, Governor Bush wouldn’t yield. Bush’s support for the death penalty carried no political risk, given that about two-thirds of Americans supported it. But Bush wasn’t responsible for the spate of executions anyway, because the dates were set by the courts. And he couldn’t have intervened in the case of Graham, because the Governor has very limited capabilities when it comes to stopping an execution. He or she can only grant a one-time, 30-day reprieve—anything else, including a longer stay or commutation of sentence, requires a recommendation from the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and Graham had already been reprieved once by a previous governor.
I’d interviewed Graham and I liked him. He talked a big game, said he’d fight to the death, but I got the sense he was just another guy on death row who was afraid to die. I’m not even sure he bought into everything he said and did, for example about his links to the New Black Panthers and changing his name “to reflect his African heritage.” He was the kind of guy who claimed he was on a hunger strike and yet actually gained weight. To most inmates on death row, a hunger strike meant that every time the prison system brought them a meal they turned it down—but they still ate commissary. In other words, “I rejected the breakfast you bastards offered me—but I then ate six Twinkies in my cell.”
While almost every right-minded person thought Graham was guilty, he managed to attract plenty of celebrity backers. Danny Glover and Spike Lee were vocal in their support, and Kenny Rogers offered to pay for a retrial. On the day of Graham’s execution, Bianca Jagger and the Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton turned up as witnesses. I think Graham was a pawn for the activists. It was a perfect relationship: he wanted someone to save him and they needed someone to further their cause. Once the celebrities were on board, the media piled in. And where there are cameras, there are people wanting to wave placards and make themselves heard.
“Exciting” isn’t the word to describe the day of Gary Graham’s execution. It was nuts, a little bit scary and probably the longest day of my entire life. I arrived at the Walls Unit at about 7 a.m. and there were hundreds of media already there; the whole parking lot was nothing but satellite trucks and journalists. The protesters started showing up about lunchtime, including the New Black Panthers, who were toting AK47s, and the Ku Klux Klan, in their hoods and robes. As you’re probably aware, the Panthers and the KKK don’t get along too well. Jesse Jackson kept trying to get on the podium, to speak to “his people,” and Larry had to tell him to speak to his people on the street. There was a Texas Department of Criminal Justice shield on that podium, and if Larry had let Jackson stand behind it, he’d have had the KKK asking if they could get up there and speak as well.
The police managed to keep the Panthers and the KKK a block apart, until the Panthers started marching around the other side of the block, along a street where there were no barricades. So now there were Panthers advancing toward the KKK and police and journalists running after the Panthers. It felt like it was about 300 degrees, there were helicopters hovering overhead, SWAT teams standing by, everybody was miserable and angry, and it felt like the whole thing might blow up at any moment. It was a fucking zoo.
Larry had had the building across from the Walls Unit fitted with tons of sockets so that reporters could plug in their computers and file their stories. So there we all were, typing away, when we heard this loud whirring sound. Everybody looked up, and there was Geraldo Rivera’s lobster-red assistant, burned by the unforgiving Texas sun, removing sweat from the tiny talk show host’s hair with a fucking blow dryer. Geraldo was actually a likable little man, but when lobster lady was blowing him down, I wanted to kick both their asses. Even more so when we found out Graham’s lawyers had mounted last-ditch appeals, which delayed the execution by more than two hours. That’s not to say those hours were just spent waiting—the scene outside was utter chaos. From the doorway outside Larry’s office, I saw a warden get hit on the head with a bottle, a guy try to break through the barricade and get tackled to the ground by police officers, and somebody burning an American flag. And I wanted to be out there, where the action was.
Larry Fitzgerald
I remember one offender from Fort Worth saying, right before his execution, “I’m gonna fight you, it’s just my nature.” And when they tried to get him out of the holding cell, he was true to his word. With Gary Graham, they tried to surprise him and remove him from death row a day early. But Graham still put up a hell of a fight, just like he said he would. I rode over with the DPS sergeant, and I’ve never traveled so fast in a car in my life, because they thought the New Black Panthers might try to hijack the transport. Officers were literally sitting on Graham the entire way from Livingston to Huntsville.
I thought that when we got him to the death house, he’d be like a pussy cat, that perhaps he’d only fought on death row as an example to his offender buddies. They put him in a special cell, with no bunk or table, which he wasn’t very happy about, and when they swung the cell door open, he fought like a tiger, more than any other offender I ever saw. The funny thing was, I was glad he did, because I’d been afraid that if I went out there after he’d been executed and said, “Oh no, he didn’t struggle,” the media and his supporters would have called me a liar.
The extraction team, five of the biggest correctional officers I’d ever seen, went in with a shield, and managed to push him against the wall. At one point, I thought he was going to get away, but they managed to restrain him. Then they did something I’d never seen them do before: as well as straps, they put handcuffs on his hands and feet, because that was the only way they could get him on the gurney…
I find it hard to believe that if I was ever sentenced to death, I wouldn’t put up a fight. I’d be biting and kicking and screaming and doing everything in my power to prevent them from getting me out of that holding cell. But hardly any of the inmates struggled. Almost all of them walked freely into the death chamber and popped right up there on the gurney, before stretching out their arms to receive the IV lines. That was the craziest thing to me; I just couldn’t imagine being that resigned to my own death. Either they had lost their instinct to fight after all those years on death row, or they just wanted to take their punishment like a man. I honestly don’t know. So when I heard that Graham had fought like hell, I had to give him some credit.
When the time came for Graham to give his last statement, they let him ramble on for 23 minutes. I think the warden was afraid to cut him short, because of his celebrity guests, who were in the witness room with me. I thought he was going to talk until midnight, which was when his death warrant would have expired. Graham’s last words were: “Keep marching, black people. They are murdering me tonight.” He died with one eye open and one eye closed, staring straight at the Reverend Jackson.
While we waited for the doctor, Jackson and Sharpton took turns saying prayers, while Jagger wept. At 8:49 p.m., Graham was pronounced dead, and I headed back to the newsroom to craft my final story. My day had begun at around 7 a.m. and it was after midnight when I finally got home. I felt truly exhausted, right down to my soul. It wasn’t the hours, or the heat, or that I felt conflicted about his execution, because I did not. There was just so much drama and tension. All day, news was breaking all around us, so we had to remain vigilant. That was the most stressful execution I ever experienced.
The following morning, I was booked for an early interview with Katie Couric on The Today Show, which was a pretty big deal. All week, various friends had been messing around with Graham’s name, in the hope of getting into my head. People were calling him Shaka Shakur, or Shaka Sleeper Sofa, lots of irreverent bullshit like that. And, sure enough, when Couric asked me about Graham’s burial arrangements, I said his family planned to bury him under his African name, Shaka Shakur—as in Tupac. But that wasn’t the worst part. First of all, when I listened to it back, I sounded like the biggest hick ever—like Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. I think that’s when I started consciously thinking, “If I want to be taken more seriously, I really need to start losing this Texas accent.” Then my friend called me and said, “Congratulations, you’re gonna win the award for biggest bitch in America. Because when Katie Couric asked if you had a hard time watching Gary Graham die, your response was a breezy, ‘No, not really.’” I hadn’t meant it to come across that way. That was me trying to say, “I’m a journalist, and this is just what I do.” I was just young, you could hear that in my little girl Texas voice: I sounded like a child.
After that interview, I got lots of emails from people, some who supported the death penalty and thought I was doing a good job, some who were against the death penalty and thought I was awful, and some who were hitting on me (‘both my friends and I thought Ms. Lyons was very pretty…’), which was flattering and creepy, all at the same time.
A week later, Jessy San Miguel was executed for shooting to death Michael Phelan, the manager of a Taco Bell restaurant in Irving, and possibly three others. There were maybe a dozen anti-death penalty protesters outside the Walls Unit as San Miguel was led to his death. Jackson, Sharpton and Jagger apparently had more pressing engagements. As he lay strapped to the gurney, with his arms outstretched as if attached to a crucifix, San Miguel said, “Isn’t it ironic? I’m a cross…”