THE PARTY NEVER ENDS
“[Witnessing an execution] is like going to cover a baseball game, or a basketball game, or an explosion at a chemical factory.”
Mike Graczyk, Associated Press Texas execution witness
“Strangers in the audience… dread being caught watching the utter humiliation of another human. They dread questions in the prisoner’s eyes: Who are you, and why have you come? His sins, his brokenness, his fear, his helplessness, all these are laid bare before the watching eyes of strangers.”
David Von Drehle, Among the Lowest of the Dead
Over the three days before an inmate’s execution, guards would check his cell every 10 to 15 minutes and log everything he did. It would be trivial things, like “inmate sleeping,” “inmate reading” or “inmate sitting on bunk,” and there were other things we’d leave off, because nobody wanted to know that an inmate had spent his final hours on earth furiously masturbating. I’d edit the log and make it part of the media packet, along with the details of the inmate’s crime and a printout of his last meal request.
On the day of their execution, the inmate would eat breakfast between 3.30 and 4.30 a.m., as normal, before being taken to the visitation area at about 8 a.m. He was given four hours of visits with his family and friends, having already been given eight hours over each of the previous two days. As soon as those last visits ended, the inmate was removed from the visitation area, taken back to death row and prepared for transport to Huntsville. Once ready, he was loaded into a secure van and locked in the back with armed officers, and another vehicle containing armed officers and administrators would ride in convoy. I rode in one of those convoys once and they handed me a gun. I was terrified, sitting in the back seat thinking, “All I need is for the driver to brake fast and me to accidentally shoot the person in front.”
The convoy usually arrived at the Walls Unit at about 1 p.m., and they’d back up the van to a special entrance and unload the inmate. Larry once said, “These guys have been locked up for so long, but they never look up at the sky.” He was right, they never did. The inmate would be brought inside, strip-searched, given a new set of clothing, fingerprinted and put in the holding cell, which is next to the death chamber and contains a metal commode and a bunk. When he was dressed, the warden, the chaplain and I would pay the inmate a visit.
The warden would clarify who was going to witness, who was due to take possession of the inmate’s belongings after death and what his last meal request was. I’d then tell him which journalists were due to witness and let him know that if he didn’t want to make a last statement in the chamber, he could write one and I’d distribute it to the media. The whole time we were talking to him, I’d be sizing up his demeanor, in case any reporters asked me how he seemed before he went to his death. Mostly, they were quiet, nervous and resigned to their fate. But this one guy was particularly angry that he was about to be executed. He was about my age and the only inmate who ever called me by my first name, which just isn’t done in the prison system (unless, of course, you’re Larry). I wasn’t about to correct him, demand he call me Ms. Lyons, because he was about to die. But when he said, “Michelle, I just don’t understand why this has to happen,” I replied, “Because you killed someone and there’s a price to pay.”
After we left, the inmate would be back there with some officers and a table set up with coffee, fruit punch, iced tea and snacks. Or what Larry mistakenly called “a party platter.” Fuck Christiane Amanpour… The inmate was allowed to make phone calls to anywhere in the continental United States, so a lot of them would spend their final hours calling family and old friends, which you can’t do on death row. I don’t like saying goodbye to people at parties, so how do you end a call like that? What the hell do you say to your mother or your father or a childhood friend? One time, while we were sitting in Larry’s office, Graczyk got a call from the death house and it was the condemned man wanting to talk to him. The guy was named John Satterwhite, who murdered a convenience store clerk in San Antonio in 1979. Satterwhite expressed his remorse, apologized for his crime and hung up with, “Well, I guess I’ll see you in an hour…” I was told that never once did an inmate lay down on the bunk and take a nap. Why would you, when you’re about to sleep forever?
At 4 p.m., the offender’s last meal was delivered. An inmate named Brian Price was responsible for preparing all the last meals, and he was outstanding. Price was a former rock musician who was taught to cook in prison by a classically trained chef. He made a point of not finding out what the condemned man had done until afterward, because he was worried he wouldn’t be able to do his best work if he knew the guy was a baby killer or serial rapist. A crew came in to make a documentary about him, and Price made mac and cheese, some of the best mac and cheese I’d ever eaten—and I’ve eaten a lot of it. However, if an inmate requested something the kitchen didn’t have, they didn’t get it. If it was filet mignon and lobster an inmate wanted, he might end up with a reconstructed burger patty and a fish stick, which is why most inmates kept it simple and ordered a cheeseburger.
I remember Price once saying, “I had a guy order butter beans—who the hell would ask for butter beans as his last meal on earth? Then it dawned on me: I’ll bet that was something his momma made for him.”
One inmate, who was into voodoo and witchcraft, requested dirt, because he planned to hold some kind of ritual in the holding cell. You know what he got instead? Yogurt, presumably because it kind of rhymed. Gerald Mitchell requested a bag of Jolly Ranchers, another inmate asked for a jar of pickles—and was given them without the jar—and Odell Barnes asked for “justice, equality and world peace.” Chef was all out of that, but he would have whipped him up some mean enchiladas, if only Barnes had asked.
“[Jeffrey] Dillingham had quite a last meal. He asked for one cheeseburger with cheddar, American and mozzarella cheese, no onions, large French fries, a bowl of macaroni and cheese, lasagna with two slices of garlic bread, nacho cheese, three large cinnamon rolls, five scrambled eggs and eight pints of chocolate milk. He supposedly got everything except for that much milk. I told Larry that I would have asked for exactly the same thing minus the rolls and eggs and I would have added a Dr Pepper.”
Michelle’s journal, on the execution of Jeffery Dillingham, November 1, 2000
Once the inmate had eaten his last meal, it was, in the words of Odell Barnes, “a waiting game.” The inmate waited to die, his family waited for him to be saved, the victim’s family waited for justice, the reporters waited to witness. Everybody waited.
It wasn’t as if there was a clock ticking loudly on the wall and a big red phone, so that the Governor could call in personally to halt proceedings, but in 2002, James Colburn did receive a stay one minute before he was due to be moved to the death chamber. However, that rarely happened. If at 6 p.m. there were no appeals pending, the waiting would stop. If there were still appeals pending, we’d sit and wait in Larry’s office some more, until we received confirmation. On Billy Vickers’ first visit to the death house, none of the courts would rule and we had to wait until midnight for the death warrant to expire. Another time, the courts didn’t rule until 11.23 p.m. and the execution was called off, because one of our administrators was worried we wouldn’t carry it out in time and would be in violation of the order. But usually at 6 p.m., the Attorney General and Governor’s offices would call the warden and give him permission to proceed, the warden would inform the inmate that it was “time to go to the next room,” and Larry would round up the reporters and lead them into the Walls Unit. Once you saw those reporters filing across the street, that execution was a go, and it was not going to stop for anything.
Meanwhile, the inmate, unshackled, would be escorted from the holding cell to the death chamber by a five-member tie-down team. The inmate would walk into the death chamber, which is a tiny room painted pastel green, the color of hospital scrubs, and an officer would say, “Please get on the gurney.” The inmate would step up via a little stool, lie down and stretch out his arms, so that they assumed a crucifix position. Each member of the tie-down team was assigned a body part, one for each limb and one whose job was to fasten straps across the inmate’s body.
The tie-down team would leave, to be replaced by the IV team. The IV team were anonymous—they would enter the death chamber, establish the IV lines, and get the saline solution flowing, before disappearing behind a wall with a one-way mirror. The IV team can see into the death chamber, but nobody can see them. I’ve read horror stories about inmates being strapped to the gurney for hours, waiting for the courts to make a ruling, but they’re just stories—in Texas, the execution begins very shortly after the IV lines are established. Once the inmate was on the gurney and the needles were in, nothing was going to save them. It wasn’t the movies.
The victim’s loved ones were ushered into one witness room, opposite the inmate’s head, before the inmate’s loved ones were ushered into the other, opposite the inmate’s feet. It was carefully choreographed, so that the two sides never saw each other. But because the walls were so thin, they could hear each other far too well. They were drab little rooms with no chairs and one big window overlooking the gurney, and the families would be right up against that glass. Sometimes, they’d shrink away, because suddenly being that close to their son or brother on the gurney—or the man who killed their mother or daughter—would spook them. I think they were shocked to discover how intimate it all was. They might look uncomfortable or afraid. They’d fidget, not know where to look. How do you possibly prepare yourself for that eventuality? But there were others who stood as close as possible, looking triumphant or defiant, sometimes even deliberately bumping against the glass.
The journalists would be divided among both sides and we’d pile in behind the families, hoping we could see. Even when I became a spokesperson, I had to have a good idea of what was going on, for the official prison record and in case reporters asked me for any color afterward, such as if the inmate closed his eyes or looked at the victim’s family. Usually, any emotion would come from the inmate’s side, because while the victim’s family had had a long time to process their loss and were approaching the end of the chapter, the inmate’s family were watching a loved one die. For them, the grieving process was just beginning; they were just setting out on a long, hard road. But because the walls were so thin, the victim’s family could hear everything. I always thought that was cruel and it troubled me: you’re someone’s mom watching the person who killed your child being executed, and you’ve got the added stress of being forced to listen to that person’s mom wailing in pain, because the thing that is supposed to bring you justice and peace is the most horrendous thing ever to happen to her.
One time, I could hear a woman sobbing and pounding the glass, another time I could hear a woman yelling and kicking the wall. There were moms who pleaded, moms who prayed and moms who insisted their son was innocent. A couple of moms even fainted. No wonder some inmates told their moms not to turn up.
Once all the witnesses were in place, we could hear the big metal door close on the inmate’s side, a key turn in the lock and a prison administrator would come out from the IV room and say, “Warden, you may proceed.” The warden would say, “Smith, do you have a last statement?” A microphone extended from the ceiling and rested right above the inmate’s mouth, and he would either say a few words or not. The warden would have told them out back in the holding cell that they’d be given a minute or so, and sometimes joke, “Don’t try to filibuster.” That’s why a lot of statements would end with something like, “That’s it, warden” or “I’m done.”
If you believe everything an inmate says in his last statement, then Texas has put hundreds of innocent men to death. But I never thought I saw an innocent man executed. Chaplain Brazzil told me some inmates had confessed to him that they were guilty of the crime, only to profess their innocence on the gurney. They’d say to him, “There’s no way I’m going out there and telling them I did it.” They’d ask him to pray for their forgiveness, and then go out and tell a bunch of lies. They did it because their family believed they didn’t do it, or their mother had mortgaged her home to hire an attorney. I kind of understood, it was a condemned man trying to protect his loved ones. But once you’re on that gurney and those needles are in place, you’re not getting off. All hope is lost. So what benefit do you get from lying?
Some inmates would use their last statement to confess to unsolved murders, including Billy Vickers, who claimed he was a hitman and took credit for the killings of more than a dozen people. Others would try to implicate or exonerate others and give their own version of what happened. Others would accuse the police of corruption and the state of murder. Then you’d check the records and discover that their fingerprints were all over the murder weapon and there were bloody footprints leading from the scene of the crime to the inmate’s door.
Ricky McGinn, the sight of whose mother, dressed in her Sunday best and with her wrinkled hands pressed against the glass still makes me cry, was the only inmate reprieved by George W. Bush during his tenure as governor. When I interviewed McGinn, he gave off the vibe of somebody who would sexually assault and kill his 12-year-old stepdaughter, which is exactly what he was accused of. But he swore he wasn’t guilty and insisted that DNA tests on hair and semen evidence would prove so.
McGinn was the first inmate on Texas death row to be reprieved so that such testing could take place, leading some to suspect that Bush had only allowed it to show he was a fair guy, ahead of his nomination as the Republican presidential candidate. McGinn had changed his clothes, prayed with the chaplain and even eaten his last meal—double-cheeseburger, fries and Dr Pepper—when the warden informed him his execution had been stayed. When the tests came back, they proved McGinn was guilty, but even then he protested his innocence. I don’t fault McGinn for exhausting all his options. If I was on death row, I’d do the same thing.
When he was finally executed, three months after his first date with death, McGinn didn’t mention his crime, his guilt or otherwise. He said goodbye to his family, told them he loved them and prayed that God take him home.
At the moment of their death, most inmates made some reference to God. As one told me, “You have to believe there’s something beyond this place in order to have the courage to get up on that gurney.” I think that’s why most of them just popped right up there. They wanted to believe they were going to a better place, although I think a lot of them were afraid they were about to go to hell. I have a very strong faith, so I understood why these men would try to make peace with the God they believed in at their moment of reckoning. I’m sure there were condemned men who claimed to be born-again who weren’t. But I think a lot of them were genuine, because what else did they have in their lives apart from religion? A few men died while reciting the Lord’s Prayer or verses from the Bible, and a couple even died while singing hymns.
Other inmates weren’t so Christian. The angriest last statement I ever heard was by Cameron Todd Willingham, who was convicted of murdering his three baby girls in a house fire in Corsicana in 1991. Like McGinn, and many others, Willingham protested his innocence to the bitter end. When the warden asked if he had anything to say, he directed a tirade at his ex-wife, who was behind the glass, that included every foul word you could imagine. The warden signaled for the injection to start while Willingham was still in full flow.
“… From God’s dust I came and to dust I will return, so the earth shall become my throne. I gotta go, road dog. I love you Gabby. I hope you rot in hell, bitch. I hope you fucking rot in hell, bitch. You bitch. I hope you fucking rot, cunt. That is it.”
The real last statement of Cameron Todd Willingham, February 17, 2004
Most inmates withdrew more gracefully than Willingham. A good portion of them were extremely apologetic, if not toward their victim’s family—some acted as if they weren’t present in the witness room—then at least to their own. Many pleaded for forgiveness. Some were impossibly polite. I remember one inmate speaking very eloquently about why the death penalty was wrong, before finishing off by thanking the prison system for its hospitality and his last meal, as if he was checking out of a hotel. There were plenty of shouts out “for the boys on death row.” One inmate wanted them to know that he wasn’t wearing a diaper. Quite a few last statements included a bit of light relief. One said, “Where’s my stunt double when I need him?” Patrick Knight said he was going to tell a joke on the gurney, as chosen by a member of the public. His friend put an ad out on his Myspace page and he got hundreds of submissions. A reporter asked me if I was going to participate in the frivolity, and I replied, “We take it very seriously, so knock-knock jokes are out.” Knight must have got stage fright, because instead of telling any jokes on the gurney, he got all choked up and claimed he wasn’t Patrick Knight at all.
A number of inmates just seemed relieved. There was a biker I came to know named Randall Hafdahl Sr. who used to hang out in some of the same bars as me in Galveston, though we never crossed paths in the free world. I enjoyed chatting to him about places we both knew in my hometown, as you would with anyone. He had these incredibly detailed motorcycle tattoos that he’d done himself in prison. He certainly had a bit more class than Martin Robles, who had a tattoo of a demon eating the brains of Jesus Christ on one of his biceps. I took photos of Hafdahl’s inkings before he died, so his attorney could send them to his daughter. In exchange, his attorney sent me photos of little wooden motorcycles that Hafdahl carved while he was on death row. Because he was a nomad, being confined was a living hell and he was absolutely ready to go.
There’s a singer from Houston named Robert Earl Keen, and his signature song is “The Road Goes on Forever.” It’s about a man who kills a cop and is sentenced to death, which is exactly what happened to Hafdahl, who gunned down a police officer in Amarillo in 1985 before being executed 17 years later. Hafdahl quoted that song on the gurney, “The road goes on forever and the party never ends! Let’s rock and roll!” For years he’d been locked up in this tiny room, like a bird in a cage. Now he was dead, but so happy to finally be free.
“… I’ve been hanging around this Popsicle stand way too long. Before I leave, I want to tell you all, when I die, bury me deep, lay two speakers at my feet, put some headphones on my head and rock and roll me when I’m dead. I’ll see you in heaven some day. That’s all, Warden.”
Last statement of Douglas Roberts, April 20, 2005
Perhaps the most nonsensical last statement I ever heard was by Monty Delk, who shot a man to death in Crockett in 1986 and was one of death row’s most notorious inmates. He refused to shower, smeared himself with his own feces and had to be segregated from other inmates because he smelled so bad. Delk also claimed to be 129 years old, a former submarine commander, a former president of Kenya, and to have been killed 150 times in prison. However, prison psychiatrists claimed he was pretending to be insane to avoid the death penalty. I really couldn’t tell with some inmates. Johnny Penry was convicted of a rape and murder but got off death row because the courts decided he was intellectually retarded. They said he couldn’t read or write, but he said to me once, “Did you read the story about me in Talk magazine? That was a damn good article.” I said, “You read it?” He caught himself and said, “No, I got somebody to read it to me.”
Before Delk was executed in 2002, he refused to take a shower, so the officers tried to bribe him with a Coke. He took the Coke, but his shower consisted of him simply standing under the water without scrubbing, which didn’t help the stench as much as had been hoped. His last words were, “You are not in America. This is the island of Barbados. People will see you doing this.” To me, that sounded a lot like somebody doing their best impersonation of a madman. After he had finished speaking, his eyes shot open, as sometimes happened when the drugs started flowing.
In contrast, there were last statements that were profound in their simplicity, the shorter the sweeter. David Martinez, who raped and murdered a student in Austin in 1997 before being executed in 2005, went out with, “Only the sky and the green grass goes on forever and today is a good day to die.” That was that. Other inmates just seemed slightly befuddled. They’d ask the warden if the microphone was on or who was standing behind the glass, or they’d sound slightly apologetic because they didn’t have anything to say. James Clark, who was executed in 2007, only realized anyone had shown up to witness at the very last moment, when he happened to look to his right. His last word, on seeing some faces peering back at him from the witness rooms, was an incongruous “howdy.”
I never saw an inmate pleading for his life, and I can only recall one man outright sobbing on the gurney, which will probably amaze a lot of people. Most of the sobbing had been done a long time ago, just as most of the anger had evaporated. It was about trying to take it like a man. Of course, there were plenty of inmates who said nothing at all. The warden would ask if they had a last statement and they would shake their head. The next noise you’d hear was their last breath, which was their lungs collapsing and pushing the air out, like a set of bellows.
It used to be that the warden had a signal—when he took his glasses off, the IV team would know to start the flow of drugs. But somehow word got out, and one day an inmate kept asking the warden, “Is this when you take your glasses off?” So they came up with a new method, a little controller, like a garage door opener, and when the warden pressed the button, a light went on in the IV room.
All the executions I saw were carried out using the three-drug method. The first drug, sodium thiopental, was a sedative administered in a lethal dose, significant enough to kill you even without the other two. After it was administered, inmates would become groggy, their eyes would start closing and they’d sometimes say they could taste it, and that it tasted bad. I never saw anybody say anything about feeling pain, which eventually made me think: if that were me being executed, I would try to remember to scream or start shouting about how much it hurt, because even if it didn’t halt my execution, it might at least trigger a moratorium on the death penalty. And how would anyone be able to prove that I had been lying? Apparently, one time, an inmate’s vein did blow and the IV line shot off and started spraying the walls with saline. I never saw any issues with the IV lines, although one guy, who had been a prolific drug user, had to have a needle in his neck, because they couldn’t find another usable vein. Because of the proximity to the microphone, we could hear the chemicals gurgling as they entered his body.
The second drug, pancuronium bromide, is a muscle relaxant, also administered in a lethal dose, designed to collapse the lungs and diaphragm. The noise was always different, often depending on whether they fought it or not. Anybody’s instinct is to fight and gulp for air, like a fish on dry land, but Chaplain Brazzil used to tell them to think of it as a wave, and not to fight the wave, but go with it. That way, Brazzil told them, it would be an easier transition. That last breath might sound like a cough, a gasp, a snore, a rattle, a whimper or the snorting of a horse. The third drug, potassium chloride, stopped the heart. But by the time that third drug was flowing, silence had already descended.
“I thought it was going to be harder than this…”
Last statement of Rogelio Cannady, May 19, 2010
That silence lasted five or six minutes. The warden would remain by the inmate’s head, and Chaplain Brazzil would still have his hand on the inmate’s knee. Sometimes, Brazzil would catch my eye and give me a wink, as if to say, “Sorry, but it’s gonna be okay.” He was such a sweet, kind-hearted man. I’d stand stiff behind the glass, stomach grumbling, that strange smell in my nostrils, watching the inmate turn purple.
For the longest time when I was a reporter, I’d seen Graczyk leaning forward and looking at something on the ceiling, but couldn’t work out what it was. Eventually, I realized there was a red light up there, which remained on while the chemicals were being administered and went off when the process was finished. Minutes later, the warden would fetch the doctor, the doctor would enter the chamber, check for a heartbeat with his stethoscope and announce the official time of death, which was always five or six minutes later than the actual time of death. Then the warden would lean into the microphone and repeat it, for the benefit of his secretary, who was transcribing the official account of the night’s events from an office. Brazzil would put his hand over the inmate’s face and, if they were open, close their eyes. I assume he was saying a little prayer. Then he’d pull the sheet over their face and we’d be free to leave.