A STRANGE KIND OF FELLOW
“For us, what the Americans are doing is completely incomprehensible, that such an advanced country can be involved in such an act of barbarism.”
Henri Leclerc, former president of the Human Rights League
“The girls were still being raped when Cantu whispered to Venancio, ‘We’re going to have to kill them.’ When everyone was finished, Cantu told them to take the girls into the woods, where they proceeded to strangle them. Cantu kicked Elizabeth in the face with his steel toe boots, knocking out several teeth, and he stepped on Jennifer’s neck until she stopped moving. Subsequently, they all took turns stomping on both girls’ necks to make sure they were dead.”
Texas Attorney General media advisory on Peter Cantu, sentenced to death for the murders of Elizabeth Peña and Jennifer Ertman in 1994
I had friends who loved telling people what I did for a living. We’d be in a bar, and I’d see the excitement on their face and know exactly what they were about to say: “Tell them what you do!” It always felt weird talking about it with anyone new. I was aware I had an interesting job, a different job, and I knew people would be fascinated and want to ask questions. But I didn’t want to sound too forthcoming: “Oh yeah, I watch people die. What else would you like to know?” Some people were repulsed by it, particularly one girl I’d gone to school with. The fact she felt like that really pissed me off. I thought, “You don’t really have any idea. You don’t know what I feel about it inside. You’re repulsed because I go into that room? But that’s my job, and it’s an important job, so how dare you judge me?”
I met my first husband in 2002. He was raised in Huntsville and went to Texas A&M, although I didn’t know him then. When I met him, at an A&M memorial event in Huntsville, I thought he was a good-looking man, and I liked the fact he seemed so quiet and serious. I’m not serious—at least on the outside, I joke around and say crazy things. But I thought, “I’m gonna shake this guy up.” Having grown up in Galveston, I was all rap music and flip-flops, whereas he was more cowboy boots and country music. But we hit it off, that opposites attract cliché was true in our case.
Being from Huntsville, he knew lots of people who worked for the prison system, so my job didn’t bother him, he didn’t find it weird. He thought it was interesting, like everybody thought it was interesting, but we didn’t talk about it a ton. He did ask, but I’d tell him everything was fine and change the subject. When I clocked off, I tried to leave the job behind, I didn’t want it in my home. Then again, I didn’t really think about it in those terms at the time, because I still didn’t think it was taking a toll on me.
George W. Bush became president in January 2001 and was replaced as Texas Governor by Rick Perry. Perry’s first year in charge saw a drop-off in executions—17 offenders were put to death in 2001—but the chamber got busy again in 2002, with 33 men dying on the gurney. But I can’t stress enough that witnessing executions was only a small part of the job. As well as administrative issues, which was the vast majority of what I dealt with, there were death row media days every Wednesday, which meant spending time with the inmates, which was often a fascinating experience.
People in America are disgusted by the amount of crime in their country, but intrigued by it at the same time. I watched true crime shows all the time, especially the Investigation Discovery Channel, because I wanted to know what made criminals do the despicable things they did. Here’s a riddle: At her grandmother’s funeral, a woman makes eye contact with a man across the room. She’s suddenly filled with a feeling she’s never had before, that this is the man for her. They keep staring at each other and are both overcome by emotion. The funeral ends, everybody breaks up and she loses sight of him. He’s left and gone home. Later that night, she goes home and murders her sister. Why?
If you answered correctly, the FBI thinks you might be a sociopath. Here it is: If the man knew her grandmother well enough to go to her funeral, he’d probably come to her sister’s funeral as well, which meant she would get the chance to see him again, and this time speak to him. I had two family members who got it right.
That kind of stuff fascinates me. It’s because sociopaths lack the ability to empathize that they are able to do these seemingly crazy things. Like breaking into a stranger’s home, hiding in their closet and murdering them, because your girlfriend wants to leave you. Or dangling a doll over your stepdaughter’s crib, in a hangman’s noose, like Daniel Hittle did, who also killed his adoptive parents because their dog scratched his truck. Or killing a woman, defiling her dead body and dousing her decomposing corpse with perfume, so you can defile her dead body some more, like Jose Santellan did in a Fredericksburg motel room in 1993. When he confessed, he said he wanted to lie in bed with her, to show how much he loved her. I’ll never forget the prosecutor’s comment: “Santellan is a strange kind of fellow…” On death row, I got to see these kinds of people up close.
I would sometimes sit and listen to an inmate’s interview, and after the interview was done and they were waiting to be taken back to their cell, I’d have a chat with them. If they wanted to talk for a while, I didn’t see any reason not to. They’d all done horrible things, but there was no need to be shitty to them. I quickly discovered that the vast majority weren’t the monsters I thought they might be, although there were a few who showed glimpses of their disturbed mental condition and manipulative powers.
There was Tommy Sells, who had killed the Dardeen family in Benton, Illinois, a crime that still plagued the community years after it happened. I’d interviewed him for the Item, and because he was convicted of a terrible crime in Del Rio, Texas, when a little girl had her throat slit while she was having a sleepover with a friend, and claimed to have killed dozens more, I got to know him pretty well in my capacity as a prison spokesperson, because a lot of reporters wanted to grill him.
Sells was such an ass: very rude, smug and disrespectful. One time, he was trying to justify everything he’d done by claiming he only killed when he felt threatened, so I said, “How did that two-year-old make you feel threatened?” He started sobbing. Reporters used to be able to buy inmates drinks and snacks from a vending machine, but we had to do away with that, because people like Sells started threatening to pull the plug on interviews if they didn’t get the treats they wanted. I remember Sells throwing a tantrum because he wanted a Mountain Dew, and I finally lost it. “You know you need to knock that shit off, because I don’t care if you do the interview or not.”
Another guy I didn’t get along with was Cesar Fierro. Fierro was a Mexican national who had been on death row since 1980 for murdering a cab driver in El Paso. Because some people thought Fierro was innocent, and he’d been stayed so many times, he had plenty of visits, and his interviews were sometimes conducted in Spanish. One time, he was signing his media release form and said in Spanish to the reporter, “I like this pen.” The reporter replied, “Oh, in that case it’s yours…” Fierro didn’t realize I understood Spanish. That pen belonged to a correctional officer, and Fierro could have killed somebody with it. I jumped in, told Fierro he couldn’t have it, and he went absolutely apeshit. He was screaming, calling me a whore, and spitting and banging on the glass. So I did something that was kind of mean. I made sure that nobody else could see me, stepped forward, smiled real big and mouthed: “Fuck off…” He got even madder, if that was possible. I shrugged my shoulders and said to the officers, “Why is he doing that? I don’t know what’s wrong with him…” Fierro remains on death row, where he has been mouldering for almost 38 years.
Larry Fitzgerald
I took my wife Marianne to death row once. She saw Ponchai Wilkerson and said, “Who’s that nice-looking black guy with the great body?” I said, “He’s a murderer.” I introduced her to some of the offenders I had relationships with and when we came to Kenneth McDuff’s cell, he got up off his bunk and stuck out his hand for Marianne to shake it. She didn’t. I had friends on death row, but alongside them were people I considered to be truly evil, and Kenneth Allen McDuff was one of them. McDuff was one of the worst people you’d ever want to meet.
In 1966, McDuff was sentenced to die in the electric chair for the kidnapping and brutal murder of three teenagers in Everman. The girl was raped for hours, before having her neck snapped with a broomstick, hence his nickname, “The Broomstick Killer.” According to his accomplice, McDuff told his victim, “We’re gonna wear you out.” When the Supreme Court struck the death penalty in 1972, and having already received a couple of stays of execution, McDuff’s sentence was commuted to life in prison. After he was released into the general population, McDuff became a boss. He had his own “punk,” who provided him with drugs and sexual favors in exchange for protection from some white supremacists his punk had managed to piss off. Among his other transgressions, McDuff was convicted of attempting to bribe a parole board member.
But McDuff was rare among inmates in that he was from a middle-class background, and his parents were able to hire an expensive lawyer, who pinned the murders on McDuff’s accomplice. In 1989, partly because of the efforts of his lawyer, and partly because Texas’ prisons were bulging at the seams and running out of beds, McDuff made parole, to the dismay of pretty much anybody with half a brain.
Over the next few years, McDuff murdered at least four more women in the Waco area and another in Austin. He was finally arrested in Kansas City, Missouri, after a massive manhunt and an appearance on America’s Most Wanted. McDuff has the dubious honor of being the only man in Texas history to be sent to death row and paroled, before being sent back to death row again. McDuff’s initial release and recidivism also led directly to a complete overhaul of the Texas parole system, in the form of statutes known as the McDuff Laws, and the building of billions of dollars’ worth of new prisons. McDuff made quite a splash.
When McDuff was at the Ellis Unit, I got closer to him than probably anyone. I’d read up on him, and knew he was a momma’s boy. I’d go by his cell and he’d be stretched out on his cot. He was generally withdrawn, but as soon as I mentioned his mom, he’d get up and talk to me. I’d say to him, “Have you talked to Addie lately?” and McDuff would suddenly become quite animated. But he never asked me my name, and I never felt comfortable enough to go into his cell.
To my knowledge, I only ever saw one inmate executed who had been convicted as a serial killer—as defined as a person who kills three or more people—and that was Daniel Corwin, who murdered three women in 1987, two of them in Huntsville. He abducted one at a car wash and stabbed her to death while her three-year-old daughter was watching from inside the vehicle. McDuff was only convicted of murdering two people the second time around—Melissa Northrup and Colleen Reed—but they think he did as many as 16. He was cordial with me, and didn’t act up on death row. But he was also the biggest monster I met, a picture-perfect psychopath.
McDuff generally refused media interviews, but there was this female reporter who worked for the NBC station out of Austin who managed to speak to him four or five times. She was this attractive little brunette lady, and finally I said to her one day, “You know why McDuff likes you to interview him?” She said, “No. Why?” And I said, “Because you look like his victims.” She stopped interviewing him after that.
On the afternoon of his execution, I went back there and they were fingerprinting him, which always amazed me: you’ve got to fingerprint the offender minutes before he’s going to be executed, to make sure you’ve got the right man? When they strip-searched him, I noticed that his testicles were greatly enlarged. He was standing buck-assed naked in front of me, so I could hardly miss them; they looked like goddamn baseballs. So I said, “Jesus, McDuff, what’s wrong with you?” He said it was because of all the alcohol he’d been drinking, and I said, “Damn, McDuff, you haven’t been out on the street for years, how can you have been drinking that much liquor?” He kind of laughed and replied, “You never heard of “chalk”?” “Chalk” is prison slang for home-made booze.
As I was leaving, he said, “Hey, media man, I wanna know one thing—did I draw a bigger crowd than Karla Faye?” I replied, “No, McDuff, you did not…” Because he’d managed to slither through the cracks for so long, I got the impression he didn’t think he was going to be executed, so was totally unprepared. But something happened between the holding cell and the death chamber, because his final words were, “I’m ready to be released.” When he was pronounced dead, me and one of the US Marshals who arrested him did a high-five in the witness room, which was the only time that happened.
Brazzil asked me to attend McDuff’s funeral, which took place in the prison graveyard, where some of Texas’ more famous outlaws are buried. The Joe Byrd Cemetery, colloquially known as Peckerwood Hill, is on a beautiful plot of land and laid out like Arlington, with neat rows of crosses. It’s really a tranquil place, but also sad. They’re essentially paupers’ graves, for prisoners who died in the system and weren’t claimed by their families. Most of the more recent headstones have the inmate’s name, but McDuff has a simple stone cross with his date of death, an “X” for executed and his prison number, which I’ll never forget: 999055. At McDuff’s burial, there was a young male and female there, who made a statement: “You don’t know how difficult it is to be named McDuff in this state. We’re glad to see him dead.” I wasn’t surprised, because even Brazzil had trouble digesting the crimes of some of the inmates he ministered to…
“After McDuff had put his underwear back on, they took a picture of him. He wasn’t bad-looking in his youth, but standing there in that cell in his underwear, he was a broken old man. He had no pride, no anger, had thrown it all away.
“I wasn’t for the death penalty or against the death penalty, and I didn’t want to watch those people die. But I needed to give them the best comfort I could. I treated a condemned man the same as I did a little girl dying of cancer in hospital.
“It made me appreciate life, but it took its toll. After an execution, I’d go home and cry. It made me angry at people. Trying to keep myself spiritually strong was a day-to-day struggle. Those three hours I spent with an inmate on the day of his execution were real. When you’re talking to a man that has three hours to live and is 13 steps from the gurney, he’s not playing games with you. It got really nitty-gritty.
“I was in the death chamber with 155 inmates, and I got many of them to sign my Bible. But there was one inmate who had done a horrendous crime, and I couldn’t see past it, because I was so angry. As I was trying to talk to him about God, the words were just dribbling out. I told him, ‘I need to talk to the warden outside.’ After about 30 minutes, I realized that I was looking at the inmate through my own eyes, and not God’s. It wasn’t about me, it was about the inmate and his needs. The warden said, ‘You haven’t done anything we haven’t all done. Now go back in and do your job.’”
Jim Brazzil, former Huntsville Unit chaplain
I never really felt unsafe, although inmates liked to play games. One time, I was talking to a guy and he said, “I read your dad’s column in The Huntsville Item, about you and your brother…” There was no specific threat, but that was him saying he knew things about me, to make me uncomfortable. Death row officers learned not to park on one particular side of the building, because inmates used to stand on their bunks, look out of their little windows and see which officers drove which cars. The next time they saw the officers they’d say, “Hey, how you liking that black truck?” Prison inmates are divested of their power, so that was an easy win for them, a semblance of control.
There were only a couple of occasions I looked into an inmate’s eyes and thought I saw pure evil. Douglas Feldman was a university graduate and former financial analyst who was riding his motorcycle one night in Dallas, snapped and started shooting at truck drivers. He killed two in one night, before wounding another victim a week later. While in prison, he was a serial troublemaker, and once ripped a phone from the wall before a scheduled media interview. He didn’t get any visits after that. What really pissed off the correctional officers and his fellow death row inmates was the fact he had this creepy whistle and wouldn’t shut up. The irony was, he said unnecessary noise made him violent. But for me it was his eyes.
While on death row, Feldman wrote letters, in which he compared killing humans to hunting animals. In one, he said: “I have come to hate every single person on this planet with all my heart and soul. If I had a button which would kill every single person, I would push it with no hesitation whatsoever.” And that’s what looking at him was like, as if he was a hunter and I was his prey.
Ángel Reséndiz was a rare Hispanic serial killer—serial killers tend to be white men—who was linked to a whole bunch of murders across America and Mexico. The media nicknamed him “The Railroad Killer,” because he criss-crossed the country by freight train, and he was sentenced to death for the 1998 killing of a doctor, who lived by some railway tracks in Houston. Claudia Benton was raped, stabbed with a kitchen knife and bludgeoned with a bronze statue, eight days before Christmas.
Reséndiz claimed he was half-man, half-angel and therefore couldn’t die. He was one of the strangest people I ever met, and also one of the scariest. I’d always be very honest and open with most of these men, no different to if I’d just met them in a bar, so they’d speak quite freely. The people he killed were so varied, which was unusual for a serial killer. He told me he killed Claudia Benton because when he broke into her house, she had pictures of fetuses, and he reasoned that she must support abortion, was evil and must die (Benton was actually a pediatric geneticist, specializing in childhood diseases). He said he killed a young couple because when he broke into their house, he saw a picture of the man in military uniform, assumed they must support war and therefore must die. He once told me he’d killed about 40 people, and he was just so matter-of-fact about it. I asked him, “Aren’t you evil, if you’re killing all these people?” And he answered, “No, because I’m eradicating the world of evil.” So I said, “If you broke into my house and saw something you thought made me evil, I would have to die?” He smiled and said, “Yes.”
Reséndiz might have said he was half-man, half-angel, but he was actually very smart. In summer, he’d miraculously become a “cutter” (an inmate who habitually cuts himself), because the only prison units in Texas that were air-conditioned were the medical and psychiatric units. On death row, inmates baked in their cells for 23 or 24 hours a day, and it’s amazing how well-behaved Reséndiz was in the winter months. He was cooperative with the media and knew exactly what they wanted from him. You’d see him telling reporters how to set up the mic clips on the phone, and he’d pose for pictures with his hands against the glass.
Reséndiz was also extremely creepy. When a reporter gave him a Coke—it had to be Coke, not Pepsi—he would insist on posing with it and ask them to take a picture. I’d be thinking, “Does he think he’s gonna get a commercial deal or something? ‘Coca-Cola—the preferred drink of death row inmates.’ It’s not gonna happen, Reséndiz!” He was also selling his finger- and toenail clippings on eBay. The really gross part was that people were buying them—there are actually people out there who will spend $200 on a bag of a serial killer’s fingernails! There was a guy who worked in the Houston mayor’s office who was a crusader against what they call “murderbilia,” so he contacted me, let me know about this creepy side business, and we put a stop to it. Santa Claus presumably let a few people down that Christmas.
Reséndiz would also flirt with me, told me he liked it when I wore red, so I never wore red again. One time, a reporter was buying him a snack, I asked Reséndiz what he wanted and he replied, “Anything that looks as good as you.” I said, “Ewwww! You know what? You’re getting donuts…” When I hung up the phone, he was laughing on the other side of the glass. You could have offered me a million dollars to be in a room with him and I would have refused, because I felt he would have killed me for sure.
“I spoke briefly with Reséndiz before his interview. He told me I look more beautiful every time he sees me. Thanks, serial killer…”
Michelle, death row media notes, February 20, 2002
I got why inmates would want to talk to a woman, because they didn’t get to see many on death row. There was one inmate who didn’t speak English, and spoke Spanish with lots of slang, so that I didn’t really understand what he was saying to me. For all I know, he was saying he planned to find out where my family lived and have them all killed, while I was smiling and nodding. He became somewhat enamored of me and kept making necklaces and sending them to my office. One was a crucifix, with a little string Jesus; another was a heart with my initial on it. I soon stopped talking to him. But while there was a bit of borderline flirtation from some of the men, inmates were rarely inappropriate. Most of the time we’d just chat nonsense.
One inmate, this young, very good-looking Hispanic man, admitted to his crime, and I said, “Oh, so you did it?” And he laughed and said, “Yeah, we can’t all be innocent!” He was funny as hell. Another inmate said, albeit with a huge smile on his face, “I heard you’re mean.” Apparently, someone had seen me kick out a German TV crew for not obeying the rules. The cameraman kept filming inmates without permission, I gave him three warnings and he wouldn’t listen, so I had an officer pull the microphone off the inmate he was supposed to be filming and told them to leave. As Fitzgerald always used to say, “These European journalists all understand English until you tell them ‘no.’” The reporter was almost in tears and the rumor spread that I was some kind of badass who made people cry. The inmates were like old women, gossiping over the fence.
Another inmate had heard I was a goth. I did have black hair and wear dark lipstick, and you weren’t allowed to wear white in the prison system, in case something went off and you got confused with the prisoners, but I never set out to be a goth like Robert Smith of The Cure! That cracked me up.
Rodolfo Hernandez was trafficking five illegal Mexican immigrants in 1985 when he robbed and shot them all, killing one of them. While he was on death row, he contracted diabetes and one of his legs was amputated. When he requested a prosthetic, because he wanted to walk to his death, “like a man,” the prison system scoffed at the idea, saying he didn’t need one and that it would cost too much money. So Larry and I leaked the story to the media. It just seemed like the right thing to do, and we didn’t understand why the prison system was being so unreasonable about it.
Should we have shown sympathy for his plight? Probably not, this man was a murderer. But it was the older inmates, those who had been on death row for years, I usually felt sorry for. Maybe it was because the person I saw, all gray and weathered, was so different to the person I’d seen in the mugshots. They were no longer that young, dumb kid who committed the crime. Or maybe my empathy for Hernandez was a sign that my mental suitcase was beginning to get full.
The day before Hernandez was scheduled to be executed, he had some media interviews set up, and the police also came along, because they knew he had details about some unsolved murders. It was the rule that lawyers weren’t allowed to be present during interviews, but Hernandez’s lawyer refused to leave the room, because she didn’t want him to admit to anything. Presumably she thought it would make it harder for her to get him off at the last moment. I told her she needed to leave, she and I got into it, and finally she flounced out. As she was leaving, she said to Hernandez, “You don’t say one thing!” The minute she was out of the door, Hernandez said he wanted to talk to the police. He spent a long time telling them about all these other murders he’d committed as a hitman and they stayed his execution, so that he could clear up all these cases. Afterward, he thanked me for kicking his lawyer out, because he’d been able to get those things off his conscience.
Hernandez had been really nervous before his first execution date, to the extent that he wasn’t able to eat. But when it was time for his second, he was a totally different person. He was suddenly so calm and ready, because he had nothing weighing him down any more. I said to him, “Oh, I see you’re eating this time?” And he replied, “Yeah, because I know I did the right thing.” He never did get his prosthetic leg. The media leak worked, and the prison system did try, but they couldn’t fit him for one because he had a serious staph infection.
On the day of Hernandez’s execution, I was speaking to him in Spanish when he told me I reminded him of his daughter. Then he offered me his hand, and I froze. A year earlier, an inmate named Juan Soria had been visited by a 78-year-old chaplain on death row. When Soria asked the chaplain to pray with him, the chaplain put his hand through the food tray slot and Soria yanked him in, breaking his arm in the process. Soria then tied a sheet around the chaplain’s wrist—the other end was attached to his bed—and attempted to cut his arm off with two razor blades. The ordeal went on for so long, correctional officers eventually had to gas Soria to free the chaplain. When Hernandez put his hand out, I was surrounded by officers and thinking, “God, they’re going to judge me whatever I do…” After a couple of seconds, I stuck my hand a few inches inside the bars of his holding cell and he shook it. Or at least he shook my fingertips. He was the only inmate I ever touched. I was worried that somebody might think bad of me, but a tad more worried about his infection. I spent the rest of the day scrubbing those fingertips for dear life.
“He looked up, his voice was full of emotion and I think his eyes had tears in them. He said, ‘Y’all are going to kill me tonight.’ I looked at him and said, ‘This is the part of my job I hate the most. I just work in the media office… I don’t enjoy this… I can’t imagine what you must be feeling…’ He was looking at me like, ‘Why are you leaving?’ But it was time for me to go…”
Michelle’s notes on the execution of Daniel Earl Reneau, June 13, 2002