MAYBE THE PAIN WILL STOP
“You know what my worst nightmare is? That you’ll take me over to the death house and kill me and I’ll wake up the next day and be back here on death row.”
Thomas Miller-El, former death row inmate
“I haven’t much patience with people who say our laws are barbaric.”
John B. Holmes Jr., former Harris County District Attorney
After watching Napoleon die, I cried all the way home. I thought I’d just witnessed a fundamentally good man be executed. I’d gotten too close. At least nobody knew how I was feeling, although, in hindsight, I wish they’d at least had an inkling. If the letters and emails had been scathing before Napoleon’s stay in 2001, this time they were on another level. Because I was now working for the prison system, I really shouldn’t have replied to any of them, but I couldn’t help myself. Here I was struggling with Napoleon’s execution and I was being attacked for being a heartless bitch. I thought, “You don’t know me, and you have no idea what’s going on inside my head.” Nobody knew what was going on inside my head, not even me.
A pastor wrote to me from Germany, urging me “not to sponsor this death row machinery by doing this ugly job any more.” I was mad as hell and gave him both barrels, told him that I was amazed a man of God could be so “caustic and hateful.” Someone from Norway told me I should be “denouncing the shame and barbarity” of the death penalty, rather than standing by and watching men die. I replied, “I don’t how anyone can have so much nerve as to lecture a complete stranger. YOU HAVE NO RIGHT.” I received a spidery, handwritten letter from a man named Gregory in Athlone, Ireland, who told me how “disgusted” he was that I “took pleasure” from watching executions. He signed off by inviting me over for a holiday. I knew the Irish were hospitable, but not that hospitable. Because CNN finally screened the interview Christiane Amanpour (fuck Christiane Amanpour!) did with me the previous year, in which I said I received a lot of poisonous letters and emails, I also got quite a few supportive messages. But even some of these managed to upset me, including one that stated Napoleon “got what was coming to him,” and another from a woman in the UK, who compared Napoleon to the British serial killers Myra Hindley and Rose West. Other people would be very nice, before letting themselves down by asking what I was wearing.
A month after Napoleon was executed, Robert Coulson was scheduled to die. Coulson was convicted of murdering five members of his family, as well as an unborn baby, in Houston in 1992. Coulson apparently suffocated his victims with plastic bags and trussed them all up, before setting the house on fire, so that he could claim a $600,000 inheritance. He always maintained the police planted evidence at the scene, but an accomplice immediately confessed and Coulson’s protests fell on deaf ears. We talked whenever I was on death row and he said to me once, “It’s like you bring sunshine with you.” Whatever he was supposed to have done, he seemed very nice, and that was a sweet thing for him to say. Right before his execution, he wrote me a letter that started, “If you’re reading this, they killed me…” It arrived a few days later and was a kind letter, but while I was reading it, I was thinking, “This is crazy, I just watched this guy die…”
One letter that really bothered me was from Gerald Mitchell, who robbed and shot to death two men in Houston in 1985. Mitchell apologized for not having made a better impression on me, which made me feel awful. I hadn’t thought bad of him at all, I just thought he was nervous. Reading his letter, which was written in the most elaborate, almost gothic, handwriting, I thought, “You had so many other things to worry about, you shouldn’t have been worrying about that.” I wished I had received that letter before he was executed, so that I could have gotten word to him that he came across just fine.
Because I seemed happy, I wasn’t like the people the inmates were normally around. I guess I was like a little shard of light in their otherwise grim lives. These were men who weren’t allowed to touch anybody, the only physical contact they had was when they were being escorted and two officers had their hands on their elbows. It wasn’t meant to be punitive or cruel, it was because these men had nothing to lose.
Before Martin Gurule’s breakout, death row inmates weren’t much different from the general population. They lived two to a cell, had a work program, went to church, had television, ate in the mess hall with all the other prisoners. There was a day room at the Ellis Unit, where inmates could socialize. There were televisions on the walls opposite their cells, so they could watch the Astros play baseball or the Cowboys play football. They could play chess, on boards hung from their cell doors by string, and dominoes, on blankets laid out in the walkways. But when they moved all the condemned men to Polunsky, everything was locked down. That’s why it was known as one of the hardest places to do time in Texas.
If they behaved, they’d be allowed a radio, a typewriter and one hour’s recreation a day. They’d also be allowed newspaper and magazine subscriptions, unless they contained pictures of naked women or instructions on how to escape from prison. There was also a library, so you could check out books. If they didn’t behave so well, they’d lose the radio and get three or four hours’ recreation a week. Thomas Mason once told me that if they’d been allowed TV on death row, they would have been better behaved, because knowing you might get your TV taken away is a whole different ball game to losing a radio. If they behaved real bad, they’d only be allowed legal materials in their cell and one hour’s recreation a week. But even when they were out of their cell, they still wouldn’t be able to touch anybody else. You’d see them playing “horse,” which is a basketball game where you make a shot and the other person makes the same shot from the exact same position, standing on one leg or whatever you may choose. The two inmates would have this big chain fence between them, but it was intimacy of sorts. Some of the guys had chess boards, and they’d play their neighbor by calling out their moves. Sometimes they’d lie on the floor and chat through the gap under the door. But most of them just sat and waited in their cells, flexing idle fingers.
Stephen Moody, who was sentenced in 1993 for shooting a man to death, summed it up: “Have you ever been to the zoo and looked into the eyes of the animals they have caged there? If so, you couldn’t help but have noticed the pain and confusion. All the pacing back and forth in the cage gets the animal nowhere, he just becomes a little more confused as each year passes, losing more and more of himself as he goes…” Moody was executed more than nine years later, on September 16, 2009.
Once, when the officers were searching the cells for contraband, they found a little jar full of baby black widow spiders. The inmate had been trying to figure out a way to milk them for their venom, so he could put it on the tip of a spear and stab an officer with it. Michael McBride, who was considered strange even by the standards of death row, tried to procure a shampoo bottle and some jalapeño seeds, so he could squirt the juice into the eyes of anyone who happened to be annoying him, which, by the sounds of it, was everyone. That’s what happens when you have no real incentive to behave and are going slowly mad in a tiny cell with a slit of a window for years, if you weren’t mad already. And that’s why we were always being warned to be careful around the inmates. If they weren’t planning to harm someone else, they might be planning to harm themselves, like Andre Thomas, who gouged out his own eye and ate it, having already gouged out the other in county jail, before he landed on death row.
On the outside of each cell would be little markers, so if a guy was an escapist, he’d have an “ES” sticker. There was a sticker for assault, a sticker for cutting, and some cells would be lit up with these stickers. One day, I was standing outside with the media, supervising some filming, and this guy was brought out in a wheelchair, with a spear sticking out of his neck. He was holding it, very calmly, but all I could think was, “Oh my God, they’re gonna run him into the door…” Then I thought, “I cannot possibly let the reporters see this.” Somehow, the guy was whisked away in a car without any of the reporters seeming to notice. He was a contractor, fitting cameras on death row, and inmates don’t like cameras. So one of them harpooned him with a spear made out of tightly-rolled paper and an improvised tip, probably a bit of metal broken off a bunk.
Another inmate, named Robert Pruett, landed himself on death row for stabbing a correctional officer to death with a shank at another unit, apparently because the officer had written an unfavorable report on him. Often when something like that happened, it would transpire that an officer had done something to upset the inmate months earlier. The officer would forget about the incident, but the inmate wouldn’t. He’d be sitting in his cell, nursing his grievance, until he spotted an opportunity to exact retribution.
Most of the inmates were just desperate for some contact with the outside world. Because they had no TV, they couldn’t see what people were wearing, and because the signal wasn’t great at Polunsky, they listened mostly to a local station out of Livingston. People would call in and give shout-outs to inmates, which was a very niche market. Randy Arroyo, this funny young Hispanic guy out of San Antonio, used to come to visitation wearing sweatbands around his head and wrists, as if he was in Flashdance. When he went in, it must have been a cool look, but it wasn’t as if I was going to tell him fashion had moved on.
Many of the inmates had no concept of cell phones or the internet; they were these gray-haired men, completely out of touch. Their experience of the real world stopped the day they were locked up. But a lot of the younger ones signed up to special websites, devoted to matching them with pen pals. While the inmates had no access to computers, they had no shortage of friends outside, willing to create these pages on their behalf, and those pen pals were their link to the free world. The inmates would ask for magazines or newspapers, or for money to be put on their books, so they could purchase commissary. Farley Matchett, who beat two people to death with a hammer in 1991, one of them in Huntsville, was pen pals with Brigitte Bardot. Gregory Summers corresponded with schoolchildren in Italy. Why their teacher, who wanted Summers to be buried in Pisa, thought they should write letters to a man who stabbed his adoptive parents to death is anyone’s guess.
A few inmates used blogs to flex their creative muscles, display their literary prowess and try to make some kind of sense of why they wound up on death row. When Thomas Bartlett Whitaker told his parents he’d finished his final exams and graduated from Sam Houston State, they presented him with a Rolex watch and took him out for a celebratory dinner. When they arrived home, Whitaker’s mom and brother were shot dead by an intruder. He and his dad were also shot, but both survived.
It transpired that not only had Whitaker not graduated, he wasn’t even enrolled at Sam Houston State. It also transpired that Whitaker had planned the murders. At the trial, Whitaker’s dad pleaded for his son’s life, to no avail. I felt so sad for that poor man. On death row, Whitaker wrote extensively about his experiences in a blog called Minutes Before Six, which at first was maintained by his father, and then by friends on the outside. He’d get other inmates to write stories or poetry, but it was mainly his work. There was also some lighter stuff, including recipes. He talked about making tamales, a traditional Mexican dish, using a bag of mashed-up potato chips and tinned tuna. It sounded nasty, but it gave an insight into how ingenious some of these inmates were.
Whitaker won all sorts of prison awards for his work, which only made the whole thing sadder. Like Napoleon, he could have done great things, but he destroyed lives instead, including his own. Unlike Napoleon, Whitaker was described by those who knew him as a stone-cold sociopath.
“If a person could hear their own coffin being closed over them, it would sound like a cell door. I remember standing at that door, taking in my new 10ft by 6ft cage, which would become my retirement home—where I would spend my golden years…”
Thomas Whitaker, Minutes Before Six, July 24, 2007
Other death row inmates didn’t just want a pen pal, they wanted a wife. I was fascinated by these women who claimed to have fallen in love, came over from Europe and married some guy who had killed a bunch of people. They’d get one long visit a month, so they’d come at the end of August, for example, and stay until the first week of September, to combine two visits in one trip. In some cases, Amnesty International paid for them, so it was almost as if their job was to be a death row wife. I interviewed one for a feature I planned to write, and she reckoned the attraction was the fact it was a “safe” relationship: she hardly ever saw her husband, there was no physical contact, he couldn’t cheat on her, and therefore couldn’t break her heart. And, let’s be honest, it’s easier to get a date with a man on death row than out in the real world. The relationship was very intense, because all his attention was on her, but he couldn’t do anything to harm her. Bizarre. The sick thing was, some inmates still managed to be unfaithful. One time, two girlfriends turned up at the same time and things got explosive. Proof that if someone really wants to cheat, they’ll find a way.
These relationships would have been quite sweet if they were genuine, but I questioned some of the wives’ motives. They’d often turn up to witness executions and wail and throw themselves on the floor, and it would look like a show. One wife from Germany refused to put her shoes on, because she thought it would halt the execution. We made it clear we would carry on the execution without her. I’d feel sorry for the victims’ families, or for those who were watching a son or brother die, while these women were going through the death throes of their 15 minutes of fame. Another time, a wife had this big argument with the inmate’s mom in the witness room, because his mom wanted to claim his body and his wife wanted to bury him in Europe. These wives barely knew their husbands, had never even touched them. All they’d ever done was write letters back and forth.
But one inmate who did have a genuine relationship was George Rivas, a particularly rough convict out of El Paso. Rivas was the leader of a gang nicknamed “The Texas Seven,” who pulled off the biggest prison escape in the state’s history in 2001. The inmates were working in an industrial plant at the Connally Unit in Kennedy when they overpowered some workers, stole their clothes, broke into the prison armory and drove right out of there. Rivas left a note: “You haven’t heard the last of us yet.” While on the run, they committed a ton of robberies and appeared on America’s Most Wanted, before shooting to death a police officer, who stumbled across them robbing a sporting goods store in Dallas. They made it all the way to Colorado before they were apprehended, but not before one had killed himself rather than be taken back into custody.
Because they couldn’t determine who killed the police officer—he was shot 11 times—it was a Law of Parties case, which basically means you can be convicted of murder even if it wasn’t you who pulled the trigger. It was often controversial, because it meant people were sentenced to death who hadn’t actually murdered anyone. For example, Thomas Bartlett Whitaker was sentenced to death for planning the murders of his mother and brother, but the person he hired to kill them got a life sentence instead. But in Rivas’ case it made some kind of sense. All six ended up on death row, and Rivas was the second to be executed.
The death row officers told me that while he was awaiting trial, Rivas began receiving letters from a freelance journalist. She’d seen him in the news, something about him intrigued her, and they developed a relationship—she attended almost of all the trial, and they married shortly after he arrived at Polunsky. The officers told me she was cute as could be, had her shit together and seemed like a normal person. She moved close to the Polunsky Unit, so she could see him every week, and they got married: Rivas signed off on his consent, the bride took the paperwork to the courthouse, and what you might call a “stunt groom” stood in for Rivas. Eventually they divorced, because, according to Rivas, she decided she couldn’t handle watching him die.
When Rivas was asked at his trial about the motive for the escape, he replied, “I wasn’t going to die an old man in prison.” I couldn’t really blame him. For the same reason, there were men who ordered that no more appeals be filed by their lawyer and volunteered for execution, including one of Rivas’ accomplices, Michael Rodriguez. It was strange to me that there were all these defense lawyers running around, filing appeals and coming up with all these bizarre arguments, when they knew their clients were guilty and just wanted to die.
“The hardest thing for me was to look in a mirror for 13 years and know I took a life. The memory haunts me. I say put me on the gurney and maybe the pain will stop.”
Jeffery Tucker, executed on November 14, 2001
One guy was in the holding cell at the death house, all prepared, resigned to the fact he was going to die, and when I told him that his lawyer had won him a stay of execution, he got really upset and said, “This just means there’s gonna be six more months of this shit.” I understood that most of these defense lawyers were good people, anti-death penalty to the core and fighting these cases on principle, but the reality was that Texas had the death penalty, and some of their clients didn’t want to be saved, because they didn’t want to be in prison any more. Like Napoleon said, living with a death sentence was like living with a terminal disease. Maybe that’s why there was compassion between death row inmates, the likes of which was rare among the general population. These little acts of charity between dying men were reminders that life, however awful, retained some beauty…
What’s in the brown paper bag?
By Luis Ramirez
“I’m about to share with you a story whose telling is long past due. It’s a familiar story to most of you reading this from death row. And now it’s one that all of you in ‘free world’ may benefit from. This is the story of my first day on the row.
“I came here in May of 1999. The exact date is something that I can’t recall. I do remember arriving in the afternoon. I was placed in a cell on H-20 wing over at the Ellis Unit in Huntsville. A tsunami of emotions and thoughts were going through my mind at the time. I remember the only things in the cell were a mattress, pillow, a couple of sheets, a pillowcase, a roll of toilet paper, and a blanket. I remember sitting there, utterly lost.
“The first person I met there was Napoleon Beazley. Back then, death row prisoners still worked. His job at the time was to clean up the wing and help serve during meal times. He was walking around sweeping the pod in these ridiculous looking rubber boots. He came up to the bars on my cell and asked me if I was new. I told him that I had just arrived on death row.
“He asked what my name is. I told him, not seeing any harm in it. He then stepped back where he could see all three tiers. He hollered at everyone, ‘There’s a new man here. He just drove up. His name is Luis Ramirez.’ When he did that, I didn’t know what to make of it at first. I thought I had made some kind of mistake.
“You see, like most of you, I was of the impression that everyone on death row was evil. I thought I would find hundreds of Hannibal Lecters in here. And now, they all knew my name. I thought, ‘Oh well, that’s strike one.’ I was sure that they would soon begin harassing me. This is what happens in the movies after all.
“Well, that’s not what happened. After supper was served, Napoleon was once again sweeping the floors. As he passed my cell, he swept a brown paper bag into it. I asked him, ‘What’s this?’ He said for me to look inside and continued on his way. Man, I didn’t know what to expect. I was certain it was something bad. Curiosity did get the best of me though. I carefully opened the bag. What I found was the last thing I ever expected to find on death row, and everything I needed.
“The bag contained some stamps, envelopes, notepad, pen, soap, shampoo, toothpaste, tooth brush, a pastry, a soda, and a couple of ramen noodles. I remember asking Napoleon where this came from. He told me that everyone had pitched in. That they knew that I didn’t have anything and that it may be a while before I could get them. I asked him to find out who had contributed. I wanted to pay them back. He said, “It’s not like that. Just remember the next time you see someone come here like you. You pitch in something.”
“I sat there on my bunk with my brown paper bag of goodies, and thought about what had just happened to me. The last things I expected to find on death row was kindness and generosity. They knew what I needed and they took it upon themselves to meet those needs. They did this without any expectation of reimbursement or compensation. They did this for a stranger, not a known friend. I don’t know what they felt when they committed this act of incredible kindness.
“I only know that like them, twelve ‘good people’ had deemed me beyond redemption. The only remedy that these ‘good people’ could offer us is death. Somehow what these ‘good people’ saw and what I was seeing didn’t add up. How could these men, who just showed me so much humanity, be considered the ‘worst of the worst’?
“Ever since Napoleon was executed, for a crime he committed as a teen, I’ve wanted to share this story with his family. I would like for them to know that their son was a good man. One who I will never forget. I want for them to know how sorry I am that we as a society failed them and him.
“I still find it ridiculous that we as a people feel that we cannot teach or love our young properly. I’m appalled at the idea that a teen is beyond redemption, that the only solution that we can offer is death. It’s tragic that this is being pointed out to the ‘good people’ by one of the ‘worst of the worst.’ God help us all.
“What’s in the brown paper bag? I found caring, kindness, love, humanity, and compassion of a scale that I’ve never seen the ‘good people’ in the free world show toward one another.”
Luis Ramirez was executed on October 20, 2005, for the murder of Nemecio Nandin in Tennyson on April 8, 1998.