A FORK IN THE ROAD
“… the dignity of human life must never be taken away, even in the case of someone who has done great evil… the death penalty is both cruel and unnecessary.”
“ Pope John Paul II
“I think that the Pope and foreign countries should mind their own business. They need to worry about their own problems and leave Texas death row alone…”
Larry Wilkerson, husband of Glen McGinnis victim Leta Ann Wilkerson
On the day of an execution, I’d get to the Walls Unit at around 5 p.m. and head straight to Larry’s office, where all the reporters would assemble. In Larry’s office was a big couch, a table and two chairs, and one of those was set aside for Mike Graczyk from the Associated Press, who had been reporting on executions since 1984. I’d sit on the couch and listen to Larry holding court while he leaned back in his chair with his boots on his desk.
There was a lot of gallows humor, which was irreverent, but not meant to be disrespectful. Larry would sometimes run a pool, where we’d try to predict the time of death. We’d make up joke headlines and think of songs to suit the occasion (for example, I still have a list Larry made before the execution of an inmate with one leg, including the songs “Lean on Me” and “You’ll Never Walk Alone”). Graczyk made it his mission to make me laugh as we were entering the death chamber, because he knew it was such a fear of mine that I would. Maybe it was inappropriate, but it was just a coping mechanism, albeit a subconscious one.
There were also private jokes: Larry and Graczyk referred to the Texas prison system as “the free world’s largest gulag.” Whenever Graczyk wrote up an interview, he would always try to use the line, “the inmate said from a tiny visiting cage,” just to ruffle Larry’s feathers. Nobody ever discussed the rights or wrongs of an execution and it never got too heavy, because everybody knew what they were about to do, which was watch someone die and bear witness to their soul leaving their body. I’m told they only got burned once, just before I took over the prison beat, when it was Graczyk’s birthday and Larry brought in a cake. A reporter from the Daily Mail in the UK portrayed it as if nobody gave a crap about what they were doing and were only interested in partying, which was obviously bullshit. After that, Larry was a lot more careful about who to be real around.
“Caldwell initially told police he accidentally killed his parents and sister after they each ran into his knife during an argument. Former Dallas County assistant prosecutor Andy Beach said the statement was remembered as the ‘magic knife confession.’ We joked that Caldwell was going to have a run-in with the ‘magic needle.’”
Michelle’s journal, on the execution of Jeffery Caldwell, August 30, 2000
It was important we had that time in Larry’s office before an execution, because afterward it was business. The victim’s family would often choose to hold a press conference, at which the TV journalists would annoy the crap out of us with the same two stupid questions: “Does this bring you closure?” and “Do you feel justice has been served?” Us newspaper journalists would look at each other and roll our eyes. We knew they were stupid questions, because the answers would always be the same: “No, it doesn’t bring us closure, because it doesn’t bring our loved ones back. It’s the end of the chapter, we’re glad it happened, but it doesn’t change anything.” As for the second question, it was always a yes or no answer.
Graczyk would always ask the same question, but it was a brilliant one: “Are you glad you came?” Technically, it’s a yes or no answer. But they hardly ever said “no,” and nobody ever left it at “yes.”
“It’s hard to put anybody to death as violently as Tommy Ray Jackson put my daughter to death. It’s enough that he was put to death. But I think ‘Old Sparky’ put on a better show.”
Dr. Roger Robison, father of Rosalind Robison, murdered by Tommy Ray Jackson. Jackson was executed on May 4, 2000
Back in Larry’s office, we’d come to a consensus as to what was said in the inmate’s last statement, because the official TDCJ version would often be wrong—not just the odd word missing, but entire sentences—and get down to writing our stories. Did he look at the victim’s family and apologize? Did he ignore the victim’s family and speak to his own? What did members of the victim’s family say? What did the prosecutor say? What was his last meal?
None of us spoke to each other about what we’d just seen in serious terms. Larry was a spokesman for the prison system, so it would have been inappropriate for him to tell anyone how he felt about the death penalty. It would have been inappropriate for me to talk about it because, as a journalist, I was supposed to be neutral. It wasn’t uncommon for me, some of the correctional officers, Larry and Chaplain Brazzil—who Larry nicknamed “The Sinister Minister,” or “Sinister” for short, because when Brazzil paid you a visit, you knew you were in trouble—to go for cocktails after we’d filed our stories. I was usually the only girl there and we’d drink, as Larry liked to say, copious amounts of alcohol (except for Brazzil, who abstained). It’s not as if we’d be dancing on tables, but we’d sit around, tell stories, make fun of each other, and talk about anything other than executions. I was a kid, enjoying life. Brazzil once asked if watching men die bothered me, and I replied, “No, it really doesn’t.” And because I didn’t think anybody else wanted to get deep, I never asked them if they were struggling with it either.
Larry Fitzgerald
I was very apprehensive before my first execution. Wouldn’t you feel nervous if you were about to see somebody executed for the first time? In the days leading up to it, I had kind of an empty feeling, because I just didn’t know what to expect. Was the offender going to be violent? Was he going to be sick? Would he start pleading for his life?
I walked into the witness room and thought, “By the time I walk out of here, somebody’s gonna be dead.” I saw the offender on the gurney, a guy out of Taylor County by the name of Clifton Russell Jr. The chemicals hit and that was it. It was so clinical, like watching an ER operation, only where the patient dies. And it was so quick, over in a matter of minutes. My initial reaction was, “Is that all there is to that?” As a reporter, I’d seen people shot and cut up, so watching someone be executed seemed pretty genteel in comparison. Half an hour later, I was back in there to witness Willie Williams of Harris County go through the same process.
At that time, we were executing people starting at midnight, and the second execution finished at about 4 a.m. I went home, grabbed an hour of sleep, then had to go back to my office to catch the early news cycle. I thought I was in the wrong job, watching men die in the middle of the night. A few months later, they changed things so that executions started at 6 p.m. But I didn’t like watching men die any better; it was horrible. I remember one offender, he was black, and everyone in the witness rooms was white. I thought, “Here’s this black guy strapped to the gurney, and he’s looking over to see all these white faces looking back at him.” That bothered me.
During that period when so many offenders were being sent to the death chamber under Governor Bush, I became the face of executions in Texas, and executions became routine to me. After you’ve seen a bunch of executions, you can almost set your watch by them. Most of the offenders I saw executed were soon just names on a page, and it bothered me that I could stand there, watch somebody’s life being taken by the state—which is the ultimate bureaucratic act—walk out of that room and forget about it. But I think that was my way of coping with what I’d seen. If I’d carried the burden of every execution I saw, I’d have gone crazy in no time.
I really started having doubts about what I was doing about four years in. I started to question an offender’s guilt, which is something I never should have done. And I started thinking we might have executed people we shouldn’t have. For example, I had doubts about David Spence, who was executed for the infamous Lake Waco murders, when three teenagers were stabbed to death in 1982. Spence was convicted largely because of the testimony of prison inmates, and various investigations suggested he wasn’t a part of it. I also thought we were executing people who were mentally unstable, like Monty Delk, who I thought was crazy as a peach orchard boar, but the authorities thought was faking it.
There was a feeling of helplessness, standing behind the glass and thinking those things. What could I do about it? Not a thing. It was just part of the job I signed up for. Someone committed a murder, they were executed, and it just happened that I was there. Or at least that’s how I had to think of it. A warden once said to me, “Once you’ve seen an execution, you can never go back.” He was right, I couldn’t.
But my biggest problem was becoming too close with offenders. When death row was at the Ellis Unit, it was how you would picture a prison out of a Hollywood movie. The cells had bars and they’d have what they called “in and out,” when they would roll the cell doors and the offenders would have some recreation time on the wing. I’d sit on their bunks and talk to them. These were convicted murderers, but I never once felt threatened. I always felt safe on death row, because offenders realized I was their conduit to the media, and therefore the outside world. I wasn’t a correctional officer, I wasn’t a warden, I was somebody entirely different.
When death row was at Ellis, they had work programs as an incentive for good behavior. Some of the inmates worked on the painting crew, others worked in a garment factory, making uniforms for correctional officers. They only made one part of the uniform, otherwise the inmates would have got all dressed up as COs and walked right out of there. The factory was air-conditioned, and the inmates could smoke and had access to coffee. It was also a place to socialize. Some of the most notorious offenders in Texas were in that garment factory, and there would be all sorts of tools lying around, but I’d walk in there and chew the fat with them.
They liked the fact I treated them like human beings. I got my shoes shined in prison, my shirts cleaned and pressed. I’d sit and watch The Golden Girls with the inmates while I was having my hair cut. It kept the inmates active, and it was cheap. I’d leave cigarettes and chili sauce outside my apartment, for inmates on the trash crew to find. If an inmate didn’t have money for the bus after he’d been released, I’d give him some. An inmate named Arnold Darby made my boots. When he finally got out, after 37 years inside, I endeavored to set him up with work, but he couldn’t handle the outside world, and was soon back inside again. But at least I tried.
There was a guy on death row called Jermarr Arnold, who every officer was afraid of. He was a huge man, could have played in the NFL. Arnold killed a jewelery store clerk in Corpus Christi, fled to California and wound up in Pelican Bay, which was a notoriously bad penitentiary. In fact, it was so bad that Arnold confessed to the killing in Corpus Christi, because he thought he’d be safer on Texas death row. One time, I was sitting in the warden’s office at Polunsky and they brought him in in shackles. He said to me, “Mr. Fitzgerald, they don’t need to shackle me with you, I like you.” We had a nice conversation and left on a friendly note. Before they executed him, he requested that nobody witness him leaving death row, so Michelle and I were told to hide around a corner. As I recall, Arnold went to his death without any struggle at all.
Arnold got a guy named Emerson Rudd to kill a fellow inmate in the rec yard at the Ellis Unit, by driving a screwdriver through his temple. When Emerson got his execution date, he was in the search area and they had to put him in a little cage, in case he wanted to fight anybody. He refused to come out, so they gassed him—and, man, did they gas him. His skin was red raw when they dragged him out of that place. They slapped him on a gurney, and as he rolled past me, he looked over and gave me a thumbs-up. Call it Stockholm syndrome, call it what you want, but I liked Emerson a lot.
Offenders would tell me stories about their mothers and fathers and kids. If they wanted to talk about their crime, sure, I’d sit there and listen to them. But I made it a point not to bring it up, because I didn’t think it was any of my business. I soon learned that while a lot of death row offenders had committed really horrible crimes, they were still people. There was often drugs or drink involved, or they’d got themselves into a bad situation or made a bad career choice.
Karla Faye Tucker murdered two people with a pickax in Houston in 1983 while high on speed and liquor. When the bodies were discovered, the girl still had the pickax embedded in her chest. But I was fond of Karla Faye, and I think she was fond of me. She was a born-again Christian, and I had no reason to doubt her sincerity. I’m aware of that old saying that there are no atheists in fox holes, but she had a spirituality about her. She even married a prison minister. As far as I was concerned, she was a good person who made a terrible mistake. Brazzil told me that he had 18 guys come to his office at the Walls Unit and say, “Chaplain, please let me take her place on the gurney.” She made that kind of impact on people. I always said that if Karla Faye ever got off death row, she could move in next door to me.
Before I arrived at TDCJ, female death row in Gatesville was a real closed community and they wouldn’t do any media. But I got them to open up. Frances Newton, who was convicted of killing her husband and two small children in 1987, knitted a blanket for my mother. It had yellow roses on it, because my mother was a Yellow Rose of Texas. Frances was a good person, I liked her a lot, as I liked most of the inmates on female death row.
Just before her execution, Karla Faye said, “Mr. Fitzgerald, you’ve never lied to me before. What are they gonna do to me tonight?”
I said, “They’re gonna kill you, Karla Faye.”
She laughed and said, “I knew that.”
That was the last conversation I had with her. Karla Faye’s execution was another celebrity affair, with an extraordinary amount of media attention, because she was female and an axe murderer. There were hundreds of anti-death penalty protesters outside the Walls Unit, but also lots of people for it. When news reached them that Karla Faye was dead, they started cheering.
Karla Faye’s last meal was a banana, a peach and a garden salad. She truly was not afraid of being executed—she literally skipped down the hall to the death chamber, because she was convinced she was going to a better place. But I was pretty moved by her execution. I hated seeing her on that gurney, it drove me up the wall.
James Beathard was involved in a triple-murder in Trinity County in 1984. He always protested his innocence, but it didn’t matter to me one way or the other. On the afternoon of his execution, I asked him if there was anything I could do for him, and he said, “I’d really like some bing cherries.” Lucky for him, bing cherries were in season. So I got myself down to the grocery store, bought a couple of pounds of bing cherries, and we sat there in the death house eating them together. A few hours later, I was watching through the glass as he was lying on the gurney. I thought of past conversations I’d had with him, about the laughs we’d shared and the fact that, in a few moments, he was going to be dead. These weren’t people they just picked off the street and executed; these were friends of mine.
I was sober for a period of five and a half years after my stint at Alcoholics Anonymous. I was drinking again by the time I started working for the prison system, but watching all those executions made me want to drink more. After Gary Graham’s execution, I cried in the car on the way home, before crawling into a bottle of Scotch. People calling you a murderer will do that to you.
I had two crutches: whisky and Jim Brazzil. Brazzil was a very gregarious person and I just fell in love with him as soon as I met him. I always used to say I spent half my life in Huntsville and my best friend was a Baptist preacher, that’s how dull my life was. But The Sinister Minister was one hell of a guy, and absolutely genuine. Warner Brothers offered $2.5 million to base a television series on him, and he turned it down. He didn’t want to cheapen his role, which was to glorify God.
Me and Brazzil would sometimes talk on the phone late into the night about executions. He’d be drinking Dr Pepper and I’d be drinking liquor. I thought Brazzil had the toughest job in the whole place. On the day of an execution, he’d spend three hours with the offender, between three and six o’clock, trying to get their spiritual house in order. He made my job a lot easier, because of his openness and the rapport he had with offenders. He also presided over some of their funerals and ministered to prison staff. I provided a release for him, and he provided a release for me. It was like we were counseling each other, only he was more qualified than I was.
There is another guy who springs to mind, who stabbed two women to death in Austin in 1986, while high on Jack Daniel’s and pills. I remember his crime well, because it happened down the street from where I went to high school. It troubles me that I don’t remember his name. We grew to like each other, and when he was in the holding cell getting ready for his execution, he said to me, “Well, Larry, you knew it was gonna to come down to this sooner or later.”
I recall that the musician Steve Earle, who the offender had corresponded with, was there to witness. But there were no rock songs on the gurney. The offender was a very serious Catholic, and when he was on the gurney, he recited this long passage from Corinthians, the one that begins, “And now I will show you the most excellent way.” He had agreed with Brazzil and the warden that once he’d finished preaching and started singing “Silent Night,” the lethal dose would be administered…
“Silent Night,
“Holy Night,
“All is calm,
“All is bright,
“Round yon Virgin…”
That’s how long it takes for a man to die in Texas. Christmas was never the same…
The prison beat wasn’t just about witnessing executions, that was only a small part of the job. With that many prisons in the city, you never knew what was going to happen when you woke up in the morning. Was there going to be an escape? Was there going to be a hostage situation? Was an officer going to be stabbed or murdered? In my previous job, I’d been covering Huntsville City Council meetings, which generally weren’t too exciting. On the prison beat, there were always crazy things going on. As well as spot news and trials arising from attacks on officers, I covered administrative stuff. If TDCJ had a new director, I’d interview him and find out what his vision was. During the legislative session, when it was time for TDCJ to set its budget and discuss issues and initiatives, I’d attend board meetings, not just in Huntsville but all over the state. One month, a meeting might be in Dallas, the next it might be in McAllen, which is eight or nine hours away. Texas is a damn big place.
I’d also interview inmates on death row, usually if they had an execution date. There were some inmates who would not talk to journalists at all. Usually it was because they didn’t trust the media, but others were advised by their lawyers not to. I put in a few requests to interview Betty Lou Beets, the so-called “Black Widow,” who buried husbands in her garden as if they were dead pets. She eventually agreed but, after I had driven the two and half hours to women’s death row in Gatesville, she declined me at the last minute. That was kind of rude of her. Consequently, the first time I saw her was when she was laid out on the gurney. She was tiny, and I remember thinking, “She looks like a little old grandma. Wait a second, she is a little old grandma…” But I never heard her speak, because she declined to make a last statement.
But a lot of times the inmates did speak to me. Why wouldn’t they? They were locked in their cells for 23 hours a day, and here was a chance to have a degree of intimacy with another human being, albeit through a sheet of Plexiglass. Not only that, these were desperate men who mistakenly thought we might be able to help their case.
One of the condemned men I interviewed was Napoleon Beazley. On April 19, 1994, Napoleon and some friends carjacked an elderly couple in the city of Tyler, 130 miles north of Houston. Napoleon was only 17. They followed the couple to their home and when they pulled into their garage, Napoleon and his friends attacked them and shot the man to death. The man’s wife played dead on the floor, before Napoleon and his friends took off in their prize, a 10-year-old Mercedes-Benz. Napoleon had picked the wrong victims. The couple’s son was a federal judge, J. Michael Luttig, which made the death penalty almost inevitable, at least for whoever pulled the trigger.
Napoleon played for his high school football team, was class president, good-looking, personable and had lots of friends. His parents were upstanding members of the community, with a big house in the small town of Grapeland, about 130 miles north of Houston. Up until the night he decided to murder John Luttig, Napoleon seemed to have led a charmed existence. But 47 days after his crime, and two weeks after graduating 13th from his class of 60, a tip led the police to Grapeland and Napoleon was arrested and charged with murder. The following year, Napoleon was sentenced to death. His two accomplices, Cedric and Donald Coleman, testified against him and were given life sentences.
Because of his age at the time of the crime, Napoleon’s case drew international attention. Texas was one of 22 states that allowed the death penalty for defendants 17 or older (17 states allowed it for 16-year-olds), but Napoleon’s lawyers and anti-death penalty activists lobbied the Governor and appealed to the US Supreme Court and the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. Clemency pleas rained down from the European Union, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the American Bar Association, the judge who presided over Napoleon’s capital murder trial and the district attorney in Napoleon’s home county. Amnesty International pointed out that the United States was one of only five countries to execute “juveniles,” the others being Saudi Arabia, Iran, Congo and Nigeria. Napoleon’s supporters also pointed out that he had no previous convictions, was a black man tried by an all-white jury, and that the death penalty was sought against him because of the victim’s judicial ties.
Napoleon was a light-skinned black man who felt like he didn’t fit in—he wasn’t white enough to feel at home in the white community and he wasn’t black enough to feel at home in the black community, where some mocked him for his erudition and the way he spoke. As a result, he started running with a rougher crowd—black kids who carried guns and dealt drugs—to prove he belonged. When I spoke to Napoleon a couple of weeks before his execution date, as was my routine, my first impressions were that he was very articulate, very smart, a nice kid who fell in with some bad people. It was seven years since he’d murdered John Luttig, and he seemed to be a completely different person to how he was portrayed in the court filings and trial.
We were about the same age and his upbringing hadn’t been too different to mine, but that wasn’t necessarily why I empathized with him. When I was a freshman at Texas A&M, there was a guy who stalked a fellow student, broke into her apartment and killed her, before setting the apartment on fire to cover up evidence. He was fine to talk to when I met him on death row, polite and respectful, but I didn’t feel sorry for him at all. There were plenty of other guys who were extremely articulate on death row, and it wasn’t necessarily indicative of their education—most of them were done with school after eighth grade—but sometimes I got the overwhelming sense that they were bullshitting me. They’d tell me they were innocent, despite all the evidence to the contrary. That bothered me; I’d just want them to own it and stop wasting everyone’s time. I also understood why, because they just didn’t want to die. But that’s not how Napoleon came across. He was particularly insightful, very sincere and made no bones about what he had done. After interviewing him, I thought, “If this guy wasn’t on death row, we might even be friends.”
“I imagine [being on death row] is like a cancer. It eats away at you piece by piece, and then you get to a point where you don’t care if you live or die. It’s possible I’ll get a stay of execution, but it’s not likely. It’s like a hole-in-one in golf.”
Napoleon Beazley, as quoted in Michelle’s story in The Huntsville Item, August 15, 2001
I quickly became aware that pretty much the whole world beyond America thought it was weird that we were still putting people to death. I cannot tell you how many interviews I gave and stories were written about me—in Germany, France, Spain, Australia—because I was this young woman watching all these executions. And I could tell immediately what their angle was, because European journalists would often use the word “killing” instead of “executing.” That’s how they viewed it, that we were murdering someone, and I would feel the need to correct them. It would bug me, because it showed bias and a lack of empathy on their part.
The German director Werner Herzog made a film about life on death row, and what I liked about him was that although he was staunchly anti-death penalty, that wasn’t his angle. He didn’t even care if the inmates he spoke to claimed to be innocent, he was only interested in how inmates prepared mentally for an execution. I respected him for that, and he wasn’t the only European who took an even-handed approach to coverage of the death penalty. But a lot of European journalists weren’t so impartial. I’d watch them in the interview room, with their hands on the glass, and think, “Will you knock that shit off, that’s what families do. You don’t even know him…” It upset Larry sometimes, made him really angry. After Gary Graham’s execution, an Italian journalist, a woman, ran up to him and screamed in his face, “The culture of death! The culture of death!” Larry was standing on the steps in front of the Walls Unit, just wanting to go home after a particularly trying day at work. He used to say to me, “These people have come here with an agenda, and they’re supposed to be reporters…”
In the weeks leading up to Napoleon’s scheduled execution, I got a ton of letters and emails from all over the world. Some were downright creepy. There was one guy from Germany who was relentless. In one email, he told me he’d had a dream in which he’d been very naughty and I’d had to spank him. I got the Office of Inspector General involved and it turned out this guy worked for Siemens, although I got the feeling the other spelling was also involved. He even called the Item and asked for my father, because he was trying to establish if I was married or not and thought David Lyons might be my husband.
But mostly the letters and emails concerned the death penalty. Some were supportive, but most were scathing, especially from people in Europe. It would floor me when I got an email from someone in, for example, Sweden, telling me what an awful person I was. It drove me nuts. For a while, I took it. But then I stopped taking it and started writing back, to the extent that sometimes I would be kind of nasty. I was young, had less patience and self-control, but I was also desperate to present the other side of the argument. My reaction back then was to fight my corner: “How dare you criticize us and our justice system? What do you know about anything in Texas anyway?” There was no middle ground with me, although I was more considerate when I produced an article for the Item defending my role, in which I wrote: “‘How can you stand to watch men die?’ It’s a question I get quite a bit. And the funny thing is, I don’t think I’ve gotten any better at crafting a clever response. I never will be able to say I enjoy watching a man take his last breath. I do it because it’s my job.”
It wasn’t just foreigners who didn’t understand what we were doing. Rolling Stone published an ugly article in which they destroyed Huntsville, and Larry in particular. The writer called Larry “a boob”—and much worse—and called for Governor Bush to sack him. He called me “the young Texas A&M graduate who has seen more death than can be healthy for someone her age.” It was extremely condescending and made me angry. I was busting my ass to be every bit as good as any other reporter, and that’s how I was described. Christiane Amanpour also wielded the hatchet when she did a big piece about Napoleon for CNN. Larry was showing her the holding cell and explaining that if a condemned man hadn’t requested a last meal, they would put out snacks and punch, in case he got hungry. He described it as a “party platter,” and Amanpour said, “Oh, because it’s a party?” Larry didn’t mean it like that.
Amanpour was something else. When she interviewed me, she called me “a cub reporter” and said, “Isn’t it strange, a young woman watching all this death?” That made me angry, because although I was young, I had about seven years’ experience behind me as a journalist. What made me angrier was the fact that she was a female reporter as well, who had been covering conflicts since her early twenties. I could have said the same thing to her: “Was it appropriate for you to be covering the Iran–Iraq War, wearing your ridiculous safari jacket, when it’s 300 fucking degrees outside?” For the longest time, whenever somebody mentioned Christiane Amanpour, I’d say, “Fuck Christiane Amanpour!”
I witnessed 38 of the 40 executions carried out in Texas in 2000, missing two because I was covering prison board meetings. I don’t remember thinking we were executing too many people. It was bizarre, because we’d never seen anything like it before. But I was more concerned about the fact we had too much crime.
People say everything is bigger in Texas—it’s a place where you can order burgers in restaurants with two donuts instead of a bun—and maybe that extends to crime. Certainly, Texas crime seemed crazier than in other states. Take Lisa Nowak, a Houston astronaut who drove 900 miles to Florida—while allegedly wearing a “space diaper”—to confront a woman who was dating her ex. This was a very smart woman—she worked for NASA, for God’s sake—and she tried to kidnap this random chick, pepper sprayed her in an airport parking lot. That’s why Larry loved doing radio in Fort Worth, because Fort Worth had a reputation for crazy crime, even as far as Texas was concerned.
In Texas, you get home from work, turn on the news and there are always stories of random shootings, stabbings and rapes. It’s every day and it’s awful. One woman witnessed two executions that I saw in 2001—Jack Wade Clark and Adolph Hernandez—because in two unrelated cases, Clark killed her daughter and Hernandez killed her mom, within a year of each other. The death penalty was a symptom of all that crime. On top of that, because crime is so well documented in America, in terms of newspaper and magazine features and websites, documentaries and movies, it becomes this great, amorphous mass. To illustrate, I had a poster from the set of The Life of David Gale pinned up in my office, and one day a TV reporter came in and said, “Whoa, David Gale, I remember that case. That was a huge one, they don’t come much bigger than that.” I nodded, but must have looked at her as if she were crazy, because The Life of David Gale was entirely fictional and the guy on the poster was the actor Kevin Spacey.
It’s not that witnessing executions had become mundane, and therefore normal—watching the final moments of someone’s life and their soul leave their body never becomes mundane or normal—but Texas was putting people to death with such frequency that it had perfected it, and therefore removed the theatre. Lethal injection doesn’t have the drama of hanging or firing squad or “Old Sparky.” Execution in Texas was a clinical process; there was even a certain decorum about it, what with the chaplain placing his hand on the inmate’s knee and the warden making sure a pillow was in place on the gurney. On June 12, 2000, after the execution of Thomas Mason, I wrote in my journal: “He lay there, looking like an old man who had fallen asleep in his armchair, with his mouth slightly agape.” It was Mason as my grandpa again, doing nothing more dramatic than taking an early evening nap.
Therefore, there came a time when they all started merging into one. When you execute that many people, most of them cease to be events. Gary Graham might have generated thousands of column inches all over the world, but when Daniel Hittle was executed on December 6, 2000 for killing a police officer and four other people, including a four-year-old, not one reporter from the Dallas area, where the crime took place, came to witness. Like Larry said one time, “One day we’ve got crowds out there and they’re proclaiming, by God, it’s such a horrible thing. And the next time, I could shoot a cannon down the street and not hit anybody.”
After Jack Wade Clark was executed on January 9, 2001, I wrote one sentence in my journal, a brief description of his crime, and stopped. That was my last ever entry. I’m very organized, a big list person, and I think that journal was my way of compartmentalizing the executions, separating them from the rest of my life. But maybe I realized, on a subconscious level, that even revisiting my feelings about executions and writing them down was dangerous. It’s as if I was standing at a fork in the road and decided to take a safer route.
That was the point at which I started stowing my thoughts in a mental suitcase—and not folding them up neatly beforehand, but scrunching them up and flinging them in. As far as my job went, it didn’t matter what I felt, all that mattered was what an inmate did to be up on that gurney and what happened when he was on there, which I wrote about in dry prose for The Huntsville Item. Nobody would have thought watching all those executions was affecting me, which was why nobody felt the need to ask if I was coping okay. Even I didn’t think watching all those executions was affecting me, I thought I was absolutely fine.