A HORRIBLE PLACE TO BE
“It wasn’t difficult. I was kind of looking forward to it.”
Erick Martinez, on the execution of his mother’s killer Luis Salazar
“The only closure I could feel is if my son comes knocking on my door and says I’m home.”
Donald Whittington Jr., on the execution of his son’s killer Justin Fuller
Larry Fitzgerald, Larry Todd and Glen Castlebury quit on the same day in 2003, because all three qualified for a retirement incentive that was just too good an offer to pass up. I thought Fitzgerald wasn’t ready to retire. His mother was very old (she lived to be over 100) and he spent a lot of time looking after her. Their relationship was very cute. He used to take her to baseball games and put her in a little Houston Astros cap. But Larry was still young and wasn’t the stay-at-home, putter-around-the-garden type. Almost immediately, he started doing work for the Office of Emergency Management, and wild fires and hurricanes were right up his alley. But he was no longer on the front line, and I think he missed dealing with reporters and all the banter that went with it. Larry was smart; and crime reporters are smart, talking to them is not like talking to your average Joe Blow in a store.
I loved working with him and he taught me so much. Every single thing journalists complimented me about—about how open or helpful I was—I learned from Larry. He taught me what was needed to be successful in that job. For example, when I first started at TDCJ, I was petrified to do radio interviews. Television didn’t bother me at all, but radio freaked me out, because I was worried I wasn’t giving them good soundbites. For a while, I avoided it at all costs. But I listened to Larry and picked things up, and actually became pretty good at it. He would still offer me advice after he left, although I never asked for it, because I was young and headstrong and didn’t want to appear weak.
I’d see him and his wife every few months, when I was attending board meetings in Austin, and we’d chat about the old days. He’d send me funny emails and articles he’d read, often about upcoming executions and what he saw as the vagaries and absurdities of the prison system. He’d call at 5.45 p.m., knowing full well that we had an execution in 15 minutes, and say, “Hey, what’s going on? Is Graczyk there? You know, gal, what you need to do is this, this and this…” He was missing it and just trying to help, but it drove me nuts. I’d say, “I know, Larry, I know!” It was like talking to a parent, so frustrating. But I missed him terribly, because I loved him dearly. Everybody loved him, even the inmates, which tells you everything. Larry never stopped being the face of TDCJ, and he always will be.
Larry Fitzgerald
I never thought I’d work for the prison system and I never thought I’d retire from the prison system, but both of those things happened. Those first two years at TDCJ were a fun existence. Employees of the Texas prison system were often portrayed as knuckle-draggers, but that wasn’t the case. There were some people who wouldn’t have fit in anywhere, but the vast majority were just doing a job, and carried out their jobs with a great deal of respect. I made a lot of friends in Huntsville and have fond memories of the place. But it got to the stage where I thought, “This has gone on for way too long.”
I was always asked by the media, “Do you support the death penalty?” I always dodged the question by replying, “It’s not germane to the story whether I do or don’t.” I had to play it straight down the middle, because if I’d said I was against it, I’d have lost all the families of the victims; and if I’d said I was for it, I’d have lost a whole bunch of offenders on death row. Mike Graczyk had seen far more executions than me and I never knew what his view of the death penalty was either. That’s the way it had to be, and that’s what made him such a good reporter. The truth was, I did still support the death penalty. You can’t know somebody like Kenneth Allen McDuff and say you’re against it. And had I been on the jury at Napoleon’s trial, I would have voted for the death penalty as well. I got to know Napoleon real well, and thought the world of him, but the jurors just thought he was a monster.
I got to think that Texas was using the death penalty way too much. There were some people we executed who could have served a life sentence instead. There were a few people we executed I thought might have been innocent. But I also came to realize that everybody is a victim at an execution: the offender, the offender’s family, the actual victim’s family. I always maintained that there was no such thing as closure when related to the death penalty. Seeing the person who killed your loved one die might bring some immediate satisfaction, but it’s just the start of another chapter in an ugly story. I took a lot of heat from victims’ families for saying that publicly. But I just didn’t think anything was accomplished by executing somebody.
I grew weary of seeing women collapsing in the witness room, pounding the glass and kicking the wall. I vividly recall the mother of Larry Robison doing exactly that. Robison committed one of the most horrible crimes you could imagine. In Fort Worth in 1982, Rickey Bryant’s mother paid her son a visit and found him dead on the kitchen floor, his head hacked off and placed under his arm. His penis was found in the kitchen sink. Next door, four more victims had been stabbed and shot to death, including an 11-year-old boy. Robison was picked up the very next day. On the day of his execution, in January 2000, his mother really gave me grief: “You’re murdering my son!” Robison was supposed to be the crazy one, but his mother was worse. That was pretty hard to take, but I couldn’t help but feel sorry for her.
There were other things I saw in the death chamber that were just plain frightening. One inmate stockpiled his medication and tried to commit suicide in his cell the day before his execution. They flew him down to the prison hospital in Galveston, pumped his stomach full of charcoal to flush out the poison, and flew him back to Huntsville, so they could kill him. I thought that was pretty ironic. When they strapped him to the gurney, he started projectile vomiting in purple and I thought he was having a hemorrhage. It came on the heels of an execution in Florida, when they’d used a synthetic sponge and the offender’s head had caught on fire, so I was standing there thinking, “Now we’ve got our own disaster. What the hell am I gonna tell the media?” After he was executed, I ran into Wayne Scott, the executive director, and he told me that the offender had drunk a cup of punch in the holding cell and it had reacted with the charcoal, which was still in his stomach. At least I had my story. Things like that you don’t forget in a hurry, but it was the executions I couldn’t remember that bothered me most; the executions without drama; the executions that nobody showed up to watch. Those offenders died and nobody even noticed. That’s a sad thought.
Michelle is right, I did miss it for a few months. I enjoyed most of my job and think I did my job well. I was paid to tell people what went down in the prisons of Huntsville, and that’s what I did, because I thought they had a right to know. But after a while, I cannot tell you how happy I was to be gone. Prison is a horrible place to be. It changes men and takes its toll. I’d witnessed 219 executions and didn’t want to see another—except perhaps for one. I always told Michelle I wanted to come back to witness the execution of John William King, the white supremacist ring leader in the murder of James Byrd Jr. in Jasper. It was such a horrible crime, King was such a horrible man and a real asshole to deal with. We never got along, and I just felt like I needed to witness that one last execution to close the chapter for me. Unfortunately, he’s still alive and well on death row…
“I couldn’t talk to many people about my role, and no other chaplain knew what was going on in my head. But I had two or three close friends that I could really unload on, Larry being one of them. There wasn’t a day that went by when we didn’t talk. He was always there, with his crazy ideas and gallows humor. But he was also a professional and had great integrity. There was no better advocate for the inmates than Larry.
“People hated us because we worked for the prison system. Over the years, I got a whole lot of death threats, but I would not have had Larry’s job for anything. He had a difficult balance, telling the truth but telling it delicately. He became known as the face of executions in Texas, while dealing with his own ambivalence toward the death penalty.
“Larry took a lot of heat, and the struggle with life and death was hard on him. His mom was ill, he had a brother-in-law who was pretty sick, and he let his guard down at work. One day he’d be sharing a joke with an inmate, the next day that inmate would be dead.
“Larry and I talked about life and death and his own mortality on many occasions. It affected him a great deal, and he drank a lot. And when Larry broke down and cried, I did, too.”
Jim Brazzil, former Huntsville Unit chaplain
I got married in Mexico in September 2003, and while I was on my honeymoon, Larry Todd’s replacement started in the job. The expectation was that I would take over the running of the public information office, that’s what they were grooming me for, but the guy they hired was a little bit older and had stronger Republican connections in the Governor’s office than I did. I was told I’d be promoted to Fitzgerald’s old job instead, but the first time I met this new guy, I knew he was trouble. We were at a prison board meeting when he said, “Hey, I’m your new boss.” Right off the bat, he was obnoxious. He knew I’d interviewed for that job and it had come down to the two of us.
The following week, we had a meeting, and the first thing he said was, ”Yeah, I’m not gonna promote you.” I asked him why not, and he said, “I didn’t like what you had on at the board meeting. It wasn’t professional.” I was wearing khaki pants and this badass shirt from a cool boutique, but he thought I should have been more dressed up. I said, “Fortunately, that’s not your call, I will walk before I let you do that to me,” stormed out and slammed the door behind me.
I got on the phone to the executive director and asked him what the hell was going on. He said, “Yeah, I knew he was gonna do that. I told him that if you cursed at him or anything like that, I’d support him, but if you didn’t, I wouldn’t.” It had been a test and I was livid. I replied, “Let me tell you right now, he’s gonna put the nail in his own coffin. You just watch.” The executive director told me he hoped I’d help my new boss succeed, to which I replied, “Sure, I’ll help him, but it’s not going to change anything.” They let my promotion go through, but the process left a sour taste.
*
In 1995, former Beaumont police officer and sheriff’s deputy Hilton Crawford kidnapped and murdered a 12-year-old boy, the only child of his old friends in Conroe. The boy called Crawford “Uncle Hilty,” that’s how close they were. Crawford had no prior criminal convictions, but his security business had collapsed and he’d got himself in a lot of financial trouble, which led to him kidnapping the boy and demanding a ransom. When his parents realized the boy was missing, Crawford was one of the first people they called, because of his experience in law enforcement and because they considered him that good a friend. A few days later, the boy’s blood was found inside the trunk of Crawford’s car before the body turned up in Louisiana. In the wake of the child’s murder, his mom had a stroke and she and her husband divorced.
On death row, Crawford’s fellow inmates didn’t call him “Uncle Hilty,” they called him “Old Man.” Just before Larry retired, Crawford, now 64, was scheduled to be executed. He said he’d trade everything in his last meal request for some catfish, but they didn’t have it in the kitchen. So I thought, “You know what? I bet the store down the street has some.” I went down there, paid seven dollars for some catfish and told the clerk he couldn’t tell anybody. He said he understood, and would want somebody to do that for him if he was being executed.
I took the fish to the warden, and he said he’d make sure it got to Brian Price in the kitchen, so he could fry it up. But the warden was also slightly bemused, and asked, “What on earth would make you want to do that?” I paused for a moment, before replying, “Because if this is the one food item this man has missed since he’s been in prison, the least I can do is make sure he gets it, even if he doesn’t deserve it.” But afterward, I was racked with guilt. What was I thinking? He killed a child. What is wrong with you? I was also terrified he was going to mention it on the gurney: “Miss Lyons, thank you for the catfish, that was very kind of you…” He did talk about it when he first entered the chamber, but not in his last statement, thank God. Nobody had any idea, which is why the catfish doesn’t appear in official prison records. But I never did it again, because I was so ashamed and embarrassed.
At the same time as I was beginning to churn up inside, I was continuing to project a tough image. I still made fun of people who got emotional at executions, including one reporter from the Houston Chronicle, who wrote that it was the most devastating thing she’d ever seen and had ended up in therapy. I thought, “Jesus, you’re a fucking journalist, this is a pretty basic thing you’re covering, you should be able to do it without cracking up. You are such a baby!”
I really did have contempt for these people. There was a certain amount of smugness because I was a woman who could handle it and thought myself so much tougher than all these female reporters queuing up to cry in the bathroom. TDCJ was a macho environment, made up mostly of men, and I was usually the only woman backstage before an execution. Women were automatically seen as weaker creatures, so I was determined to show my colleagues that wasn’t necessarily the case.
My stop–start promotion was proof that I’d have to work much harder to get the same respect as a man performing the same role, but they didn’t want to pay me the same as they paid the men. A newspaper ran a story, comparing the salaries of all the state government public information officers, and it revealed that me and another woman, from the Texas Department of Public Safety, were the lowest-paid. At the time, TDCJ had 38,000 employees, 75,000 parolees and 150,000 inmates, and I spoke on behalf of all of those people. But I was earning less than the spokesman for the Texas Youth Commission, the prison system for juvenile delinquents. And because he claimed he couldn’t give out details on a minor, he regularly shrugged off media requests. So my bosses knew, and they didn’t do a goddamn thing about it. I’m sure they thought they were being progressive by giving me a job at all.
I can’t tell you how many inappropriate comments I heard working for TDCJ, and there were a few male co-workers I needed to worry about more than the inmates. I was driving back from one of the units with a colleague, mentioned I had a bad headache and he reached over and started rubbing the back of my neck. Instead of saying, “What the fuck are you doing?” I tensed up, got all embarrassed and said, “You know what, it’s better all of a sudden…” That happened twice, and I’m pissed I didn’t confront him. Another time, I was on a unit with a warden, we walked past a cell with some mattresses in it and he stopped and said, “You want to throw one of those mattresses down and fool around?” I liked this guy, so I laughed it off. I didn’t want to be the uncool lady who complained about “harmless banter.” But I was also thinking, “Oh my God, I could have your job in a heartbeat…” Then again, probably not.
I’d go to meetings and all the men would hug me. I didn’t want all those men hugging me. Why didn’t they just shake my hand, like they did with other men? That kind of shit drove me nuts, but I never lamented my lot, I just had to play the game, because I wouldn’t have lasted long if I hadn’t.
The reporters soon started calling my new boss “no comment,” because he just didn’t want to deal with them. He refused to go to any of the prison units, which made him obsolete, because that’s where the reporters would be. And reporters don’t take kindly to being fobbed off by email. He buried his head in admin, budget stuff that would only come into play every two years. I was setting up interviews, doing female death row every Tuesday and male death row every Wednesday, and the reporters started asking exactly what my boss was doing. The complaints went as high as the Governor’s office, and at one function, TDCJ’s new executive director, Brad Livingston, said to me, “What do you think of your new boss?” I said, “I don’t think anything of him, he’s worthless.” Eventually, Brad hauled him into his office and told him to buck his ideas up, and when he didn’t, he was transferred to another department. I was at home, getting dressed, when Brad called and said he needed me in his office at 8.15. I thought I was in trouble, but they made me acting director instead.
I acted as the PIO director for months, without the extra money and anybody helping me, which meant I was on call 24/7. When I went home at 5 p.m., journalists would still be working, so I’d spend my evenings fielding calls. When I became pregnant in 2004, and was at the doctor’s office finding out the sex of my child, I was on the phone with a warden, because there was an issue at one of the units. My husband threw a surprise 30th birthday party for me, and I kept having to wander off to answer emails. That’s what my life consisted of, it was just a constant dinging and pinging of emails and text messages, mostly mundane media inquiries but also much more significant alerts informing me that a correctional officer had been injured, an inmate had killed himself or someone had tried to escape.
There were one or two attempted escapes every year, and they were exhausting, because they never happened during the day, they would always happen at about 3 a.m. I’d get a call and somebody would say, “count didn’t clear,” which meant they’d counted the inmates in a unit and come up short. I’d immediately have to start alerting the media, because it was imperative that the public was notified as soon as possible. If the inmate killed someone, that would have come back on us. In fact, that happened once: an inmate broke into the first house he came to, killed the owner and stole their car, before we could get word out.
If the escape happened in Amarillo, for example, I’d have to look up all the Amarillo media and start sending them information, including a description of the escapee and his mugshot. But it wasn’t just about talking to the media, it was about staging the media. You don’t want media crawling all over the unit, driving around and filming things they’re not supposed to be filming, so I had to get to the unit, find a place to house them and keep updating them, so that they didn’t start making stuff up. There was an escape in San Antonio and I had to drive straight there after a board meeting in Austin. I found a Walmart at 3 a.m., bought a pillow and a change of clothes, because it was the middle of summer, and slept in my car.
When we had a hurricane, all the units around the coast would have to be evacuated, which meant I would be in a command center in Huntsville, handling media alerts while administrators were working out the logistics of moving thousands of inmates to safer ground. It was relentless. After four or five months, they finally gave me the job full-time, and I officially became the first female director of the TDCJ public information office. My first thoughts were, “Great, can I finally hire some help? And can I also have more money?”
“Good luck dealing w/the media trash and politicians on ‘you are killing them like dogs’ accusations. Fuck ’em! Btw… saw a great quote, last words of H. Bogart: ‘I shouldn’t have switched from Scotch to martinis.’
Yofitw [Your Only Friend In The World]”
Email from Larry to Michelle, March 21, 2004
It was when I became pregnant that witnessing executions ceased to be an abstract concept and became deeply personal. I had read that when a baby was in utero, it can hear, which is why people play music and try to teach them languages. I started to worry that my baby could hear the inmates’ last words, their pitiful apologies, their desperate claims of innocence, their spluttering and snoring. I’d have weird, irrational thoughts that an inmate’s evil spirit might leave his body and enter my baby’s, so that I’d end up giving birth to an evil child. I’d seen it in some Denzel Washington movie, but it still felt real.
Frances Newton, who was on female death row for murdering her husband and two children, including a daughter who was 21 months old, would ask me about my pregnancy all the time. She was always very sweet and polite, but it really made me feel uncomfortable. I’d be thinking, “You had a baby, and you killed her. Why are you asking about mine?”
I was more fearful in general, terrified of an inmate from the general population punching me in the stomach, which is the kind of thing that can happen to correctional officers at any time, for absolutely no reason. In October 2004, an inmate strangled a female prison clerk to death in a storage closet at the Connally Unit. Because the inmate had a clean disciplinary record, he’d been given janitorial duties, which meant interacting with staff. Once, I was over at the Polunsky Unit, went to the employee restroom, and when I came out of the stall, I suddenly thought, “What’s stopping me from running into an inmate in here?” My thoughts ran the gamut from natural caution to outright paranoia, but even the paranoia was rooted in the realities of my job. I had an operation in 2004, and when they gave me the injection to put me under, I started rambling about executions: “You don’t understand, I watch people die. This is exactly how it happens, and they don’t wake up…”
When my daughter was born in March 2005, the doctor picked her up and she didn’t make a sound. The silence probably only lasted for about five seconds, but it felt like forever. I was filled with sheer terror; it felt like my whole world was going to collapse. Then she started to cry. After that, the post-execution silence in the death house, when the chemicals had stopped flowing and the doctor was waiting in the wings, became excruciating. I understood that for the inmate’s family, that silence lasted forever. From that moment on, I always tried to witness on the victim’s side. I said it was because I had to get out first, so I could gather the last statement from the warden’s office and hurry to distribute it to the media, but it was mainly because I didn’t want to be standing shoulder to shoulder with unfettered grief for any longer than was absolutely necessary.
I had felt empathy for inmates’ mothers before, as with Ricky McGinn’s, but now that I was a mother myself, it was on another level entirely. I just couldn’t comprehend how those poor moms could stand there, watching their sons die. I couldn’t fathom how they must have been feeling. One inmate told me he didn’t want his mom to see him executed, and she’d said, “I was here when you came into this world, I will be here when you leave it.” I had this little baby at home that I would do anything for, and these women were watching their babies die. Suddenly, executions were things I began to dread.
Very occasionally, motherhood and prison life rubbed up against each other to produce the most beautiful sparks. At the Wynne Unit where I lived in prison housing, there was a gas pump manned by one of the inmates. He was a trustee, which meant he was going home soon, so had no incentive to run. I had a state car assigned to me and I’d sometimes fill up on my way to dropping my child at day care, and that would be the highlight of this inmate’s day. I’d roll my window down and he’d say, “Oh my gosh! What a beautiful baby!” One day when I was driving away, I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw this inmate—a huge, burly man—looking up at the sky and pointing, with this big grin on his face. I reckoned that was him saying, “God, you’re all right…” He was just so happy to have seen my little baby’s smile. That was one of the most heart-warming things I ever saw.
But those first couple of executions I witnessed after my daughter was born really messed with my head. I’d arrive at the Walls Unit, see the inmate’s family and know immediately who the mom was, because she wouldn’t be saying a word. She’d be sitting there, silent and staring, in another world. Whereas before I had to occasionally stifle a tear after an execution, now I’d be weeping all the way home.
I had a cousin who lived in California, which is all about positive vibes, and she advised me to shower as soon as I got home from an execution, to wash away all the bad energy. I took her up on it, but could never wash it away completely. I used to be terrified of lizards: if I saw one in the house, I’d demand someone get rid of it. But now when I saw a little lizard, I’d pick it up and put it outside, because I’d be thinking, “There might be a momma lizard looking for her baby.”
My beautiful baby at home made my job seem even bleaker and the executions even more ugly. But I still didn’t discuss anything with my husband, because I didn’t want all that bleakness and ugliness in my home. Was I tougher than those female reporters I used to mock for crying in the bathroom? Nah, I just held it off for longer. I’d become this giant candy-ass, just like them.