BURSTING OPEN
“I am a servant of the public… and the public, through its representatives on the press, ought to have some assurance that the details of each execution are carried out decently and in order…”
James Berry, former British hangman, 1892
“It was a creepy, furtive, and shameful affair, in which the participants could not decently show their faces or quite meet one another’s eye… I am clear on one thing. Death requires no advocates. It is superfluous to volunteer for its service.”
Christopher Hitchens, “Scenes from an Execution,” 1998
Losing my job at TDCJ was the worst break-up I ever went through. But if they hadn’t forced me out, I’d probably still be there, tied up in that dysfunctional relationship. And how many executions would I have seen by now? 340? 350? I’d still be telling myself that this was my life’s vocation, what I was put on earth to do: watch people die on a gurney.
When I was going through all those disciplinaries at TDCJ, when I was demoted and thought I was going to be fired, I’d pray for it all to stop. I’d think, “Well, apparently God hates me. Why would He let this happen otherwise? He knows these people are doing me wrong, He knows these people are lying, so why is He doing nothing to stop it?” But sometimes God tries to push you in a direction you refuse to go in, by making things as shitty as possible.
It had to happen the way it did, because I was too scared, stubborn and loyal to leave of my own volition. I’d become institutionalized, no different to some of the inmates. In hindsight, it would be wrong to say I was comfortable, but I was set in my ways. I didn’t want to be released, because life on the outside seemed so alien and scary.
My execution journal from years earlier tells me that things were never neat, and they got messier and messier as time went on. But although there were all these threads that were itching away at me, I didn’t expect them to add up to this big patchwork quilt that would eventually start suffocating me. So as much as it peeves me to say it, TDCJ did me a favor. I still think about the injustice sometimes, because I did this really tough job that had an impact on me and that I will never be able to escape or wash my hands of, and these people tried to destroy my reputation and received no punishment.
For a while after I left the prison system, I wondered if I was partly to blame for how it all ended. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut? Maybe I should have toed the line? But eventually I thought, “Fuck that. That’s not who I am. They were doing me wrong and I stood up for myself,” and the bitterness eventually began to subside. Like Robert Coulson once told me, “you bring sunshine to death row.” Maybe that was my role, to make things better for some of those inmates and move on.
I miss what the job was when I first took it; I miss Fitzgerald; I miss working with the media; I miss visiting the units; I miss interacting with the correctional officers, the wardens and even the inmates. I do not miss executions in any way.
Some people thought I deserved what I got, because they saw me as part of this machinery of killing. Some of the comments were scathing, but they didn’t bother me. I read a letter in The Huntsville Item, in which someone called me “the puppet of TDCJ.” I thought, “Well, yeah, that might not be the most flattering depiction, but I was kind of paid to be their puppet.” But most people were more sympathetic and saw me as somebody who had worked for the company in a company town, with not a lot of other opportunities. It turned out that I had more opportunities than I thought, I just didn’t see them at the time. Besides, I never thought I was doing anything wrong. I didn’t lie, but neither did I tell everything I knew. It was just my job to be TDCJ’s mouthpiece. And the longer I was out of the prison system, the more I realized I’d done my job well.
I kept in touch with Larry, who never sent me a Christmas or birthday card, but did get in contact on St Patrick’s Day, Dorothy Parker’s birthday and the date that Prohibition was repealed. And I don’t think there’s a single reporter I haven’t kept in contact with, whether from Texas or further afield. Some of them enjoy sharing the little problems they have with the TDCJ public information office, in its current, opaque form. Five years after I left, new reporters are told to seek me out, by their predecessors and even inmates, so I can help them get the real story, because the guy who replaced me, who is earning 21 grand more than I did, isn’t helping.
Most of these crime reporters are sharp as razors. Larry always used to say to me, “If Mike Ward from the Austin American-Statesman calls and asks you a question, he already knows the answer. If he asks about a new policy and you say it doesn’t exist, he’ll pull the policy out of his ass. So never try to be dishonest with him.” But the new breed were terrified of saying something wrong, so they started saying nothing instead. Now, you’ll often see the line in articles: “A TDCJ spokesperson said in an email.” That’s their little jab at the system, them telling their readers: “Hey, I tried to get them to talk to me, but they didn’t want to.”
TDCJ has also passed a rule whereby they no longer let reporters from outside the community where the crime took place witness executions. When I started out at TDCJ, there would be a waiting list, reporters from all over Texas would be scrapping for a spot in the witness rooms. Toward the end, budget constraints meant newspapers weren’t sending local reporters and were relying on Graczyk’s story for the Associated Press instead. There were even a few occasions when The Huntsville Item blew off an execution, which pissed me off. A person was being executed in their town and they didn’t think it was important enough to cover? What could possibly be happening in Huntsville that day that was more important than someone being executed? But now, even if you wanted to witness, they might not let you. One journalist told me they applied to witness, only to be accused of having “a morbid curiosity.” They wouldn’t even let him into any of the prisons. The guy was writing a book about the death penalty and asking for guidance, but TDCJ wasn’t interested in helping. That goes against everything Larry taught me, which is why it is so upsetting.
We felt it was important to have all of those spots filled in the witness rooms and not to build walls, because we didn’t have anything to hide. We held back things we needed to, but we genuinely tried to be helpful. TDCJ is a state-funded entity, carrying out a death sentence handed down by a state district court, yet they don’t seem to think the people have a right to know what’s going on in their death chamber. As Paul Watler, a board member of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas, put it, “It does not serve the public interest and is certainly not transparent to have seats for the news media that are not utilized because the department will not permit, in some cases, accredited news organizations to attend.”
TDCJ’s decision to restrict witness spots came on the back of botched executions in Ohio, Oklahoma and Arizona in 2014. In Oklahoma, an inmate named Clayton Lockett was injected with an untested mixture of drugs and took about 45 minutes to die on the gurney. It was determined he died of a heart attack rather than the chemicals, which is undoubtedly a cruel and unusual way to die, no better than burning up in the electric chair or being left hanging and still breathing on the scaffold. In Ohio, Dennis McGuire was convulsing on the gurney for 25 minutes before he finally expired. In Arizona, Joseph Wood was said to be gulping for air for almost two hours before finally being put out of his misery. All three states were using a new cocktail of drugs because companies, whose pharmacies were often based in Europe, either decided to stop manufacturing the drugs or selling them to states with the death penalty.
Texas switched from a three-drug protocol to a one-drug protocol in 2012. From whom or where Texas was buying its drugs was anybody’s guess, because TDCJ was allowed to keep it a secret. TDCJ claimed that revealing its suppliers would put those companies at risk of retaliation, which is bullshit. Why shouldn’t people know? Tax dollars pay for those drugs, which are being used to execute people. The public needs to know those drugs are coming from a safe place, and it’s absurd that TDCJ has fought that. I suspect the real reason they’re not telling people is that if they did, the companies would stop selling the drugs for the sake of their reputations, and then Texas wouldn’t be able to execute anybody.
After I left, I didn’t pay much attention to executions and never had the sense I was missing a game. I was like most people in Huntsville, unaware they were happening on my doorstep. I’d occasionally get calls from reporters, who wanted my knowledge as a prison expert, although I’d usually turn them down if they were from Europe, because they were only going to twist things.
In December 2012, I left the Israeli Consulate after landing a public relations job at a law firm in Houston. I gained petty satisfaction from the fact I was now earning more money than I had at TDCJ, and it was a blessed relief not to be disseminating bad news about hostage situations or suicides or prison “disturbances.”
My daughter knew I’d worked for the prison system and understood the concept of inmates from a young age. She would see them in their white outfits, picking up trash on the streets of Huntsville, and say, “Mama, those are the bad men.” And I’d say, “No, they did a bad thing or got lost in life, that doesn’t necessarily make them bad.” I thought it was important to make that distinction.
I was watching a piece on TV about Anthony Graves, who was convicted of murdering a family of six in 1992 and spent 12 years on death row, before being exonerated and freed in 2010. My daughter asked me what “execution” meant, and I tried to explain. But I didn’t want to tell her I had been in that room when they died and that I knew that room so well. When she was about ten, a TV crew came down from Houston to interview me and I let her sit in on that. She would have figured it out eventually, so I wanted to beat people to the punch, any kids or parents who might have said, “Your mom used to watch people die for a living.” She’s an easy-going kid and feels the same way about me as I feel about my mom. I’m her rock, and as long as I’m there for her, she doesn’t ask many questions about why I did the things I’ve done.
It was during the long commutes from my home in Huntsville to my office in Houston that the zipper finally jammed and my mental suitcase burst open. Whenever things happen to me that don’t make sense, I go numb, before eventually coming out of it and sorting through things. I had to try to make sense of all these thoughts that were flooding me or I was never going to escape them, and those long drives gave me an awful lot of time to think. Out of nowhere, I’d see the unknown inmate on the gurney, with one tear rolling down his face, or the wrinkled hands of Ricky McGinn’s mother pressed against the glass. Whenever I saw those hands, they made me cry. Imagine watching your child die in front of you and not being able to do anything to stop it. Then I might remember one of the mothers from a victim’s press conference, sitting silently, almost in a daze, while her husband fielded questions about what it was like to witness the execution of their daughter’s murderer. And again, that fear would rise within me, because the worst thing you can imagine had actually happened to them.
One morning in 2013, having just dropped my daughter off at school, I called Larry. We got to talking about our time together at TDCJ, and I suddenly felt compelled to ask if he ever thought about the executions he’d witnessed. I’d never had that conversation with Larry before, it wasn’t a road I was prepared to go down. I’d wanted him to think it was no big deal, just like I’d wanted everyone to think it was no big deal. I was a tough chick, and watching men die was just something I did to make a living, so when people asked me about it, I’d tell them the funny parts and leave out the rest. But now I’d thrown it out there, Larry told me that he had nightmares about the executions all the time.
I only ever had one dream about an execution. In it, my grandma was being executed, for murdering her husband. I was really close to my mom’s mom, and named my daughter after her. But in the dream, even though it was my grandma on the gurney, I kept telling myself I couldn’t cry, because I had a job to do. When I told my grandma, she thought it was the funniest thing ever. So it surprised me that Larry was having these nightmares, because he had been gone for so long. I thought, “God, for ten years he’s been having these bad dreams—is the same thing gonna happen to me?”
It was scary, because Larry seemed like such a strong person. In my mind, he had never stopped being that badass who impressed me so much as a young reporter, the hard-nosed, wise-cracking public information guy from central casting. At the same time, I’d always assumed Larry was anti-death penalty, and would therefore have more trouble than me dealing with what he’d seen. I used to tease him, call him a “fucking hippy,” because he was this liberal guy out of Austin. But now he told me he wasn’t as anti-death penalty as I thought he was, which bothered me, because it suggested I had plenty of nightmares of my own to look forward to. But mostly I felt sad that he was still struggling, and bad that I hadn’t realized.
Larry Fitzgerald
When TDCJ offered me that retirement package, I just thought, “I’m out of here, man.” I was ready to go. But shortly after leaving, I got a call out of the blue from a lawyer I knew from my time at the State Bar of Texas. The next thing I knew, I had all these attorneys sitting around my kitchen table, asking me about my relationship with a death row inmate named Thomas Miller-El: what kind of guy was he, how did he spend his time in prison, what did you speak to him about? Thomas committed a horrible crime in Irving in 1985 when he and his wife held up a motel, shot a clerk dead and paralyzed another. They fled to Houston and were involved in a gunfight with police, before being arrested. Thomas stood trial in Dallas and was sentenced to death.
The first time I met Thomas, he was being interviewed by a pretty little blonde journalist from Denmark. I introduced myself and we hit it off immediately. Because he’d always come down and talk to any reporter who wanted to talk to him, he made my life easier as a result. He always told the same stories, but he gave a pretty good interview. I’d sit on his bunk with him, chat with him in the garment factory. He was an avid basketball fan, and I’d shoot hoops with him in the recreation area, before Martin Gurule ruined it for everybody and death row was locked down. I always joked that he should wear handcuffs, to make the game more even. I liked Thomas a lot. I soon got past the fact he was an offender, he was just a person.
Back in the 1980s, Dallas wasn’t a good place for black people to be accused of murder, because of an explicit instruction from District Attorney Henry Wade to keep minorities off jury panels. My old attorney friend, who it transpired was a special prosecutor and not a regular defense attorney, contended that Thomas had an unfair murder trial, because the jury had been stacked against him through the deliberate exclusion of black people. I explained to these attorneys that Thomas was pretty much a peacemaker in prison and had resolved some touchy situations between other offenders. There’s an old adage that the best prisoners are murderers, because with most of them it was a one-off crime, and it wasn’t planned, it just happened. Often, they turned out to be no problem at all, and that’s what Thomas was like. He was pretty much a member of “The Broke Dick Club,” which is a prison term for old inmates who can’t work much and get assigned jobs like crushing cans for recycling. Time in a penitentiary is going to change you, and some of these guys became better people. Thomas was one of them, he was no longer a threat to society.
These attorneys took my stories back to the judge, and Thomas’ sentence was commuted to life in prison. Thomas turned down the opportunity of a second murder trial, because the guy he paralyzed was still around and would have testified against him.
I never asked Thomas if he was guilty or not. I knew what he was supposed to have done, and he knew I knew. But I was never convinced he was the trigger man, I always suspected he took the rap for his wife Dorothy. But it didn’t matter to me whether Thomas had done the crime or not. What mattered to me was that Thomas was not given due process in court. Getting him off death row made me feel good, I felt wonderful about it. But after a while, I started thinking, “Did I do the right thing? Have I done Thomas any favors? Probably not.” Thomas will never get out of prison alive, he’ll be taken out feet first.
In my eight years at TDCJ, I became very aware of the suffering offenders went through, not just on death row but in the general population. It’s not a good life in prison. In fact, it’s a horrible existence in one of those hell holes. In Texas prisons, the rate of attempted suicide is incredibly high, but the amount of successful suicides is low. That tells me two things: first, prison in Texas is a very bad place to be; second, the prison system is ruthlessly efficient.
Word soon got out that I was a good expert witness, and I suddenly started getting emails and phone calls from defense lawyers all over Texas. I never considered myself to be an expert in anything, and all of a sudden I discovered I was. I guess I left TDCJ with a PhD in prison life. I’d stand in court and explain how the system worked, what an offender’s existence would be like if he got life instead of death. It was essentially my job to explain to that panel of 12 people that there was an alternative to killing the offender. What’s really funny is that I started working alongside a guy named Dennis Longmire, who was a criminal justice professor at Sam Houston State and staunchly anti-death penalty. Dennis protested outside the Walls Unit on the day of every execution, come rain or come shine. I respected him a lot, and now we were on the same team.
In a couple of trials I testified at, the jury voted for capital life rather than capital death. But I didn’t do it out of any ethical considerations, I did it because it kept me busy and was good money. And I never really thought that I was testifying against the death penalty, to the extent that I always wondered why I never got approached by any prosecutors, because the information I provided could have just as well been applied by them.
I experienced love from offenders’ families and a lot of hate and hostility from victims’ families, as well as some of my old colleagues in the prison system. I went back to Huntsville for a retirement party, and one of the wardens called me a traitor. I thought, “Piss on him if he thinks I’m a traitor, I don’t give a shit what he or anybody else thinks, because I’ve always been loyal to the prison system, despite all its flaws.” I was proud of my duty with TDCJ, I did not do them a disservice.
At a murder trial in Livingston, I was asked how I felt about the death penalty, and I gave my stock reply: “It’s not germane how I feel about the death penalty.” This attorney jumped up and said, “Mr. Fitzgerald, it is germane when I ask you under oath!” So I said, “Yeah, I favor it, but we use it too much in Texas.” The offender had killed his girlfriend, who was considerably older than he was, and seemed truly remorseful. But it was a slam-dunk for the prosecution, and he ended up getting the death sentence.
As time went on, I started to question the point of the death penalty more and more. Certainly, revenge had a lot to do with it. In Texas, a lot of prosecutors have a notch-on-the-belt, cowboy mentality. Being a district attorney in Texas is a political job, and they like to be seen as tough on crime and protecting the community. Henry Wade, who was Dallas County District Attorney for 36 years, had a 93 percent conviction rate, and defense attorneys who managed a rare win against him called themselves “The 7% Club.” That’s the mentality.
There is also the question of cost. It’s very expensive to execute somebody, and most people don’t understand that. If you get the death penalty in Texas, the appeal is automatic, so you then have to go through the federal appellate court, and with an assortment of other appeals you can file all the way up to the US Supreme Court. By the time that person is strapped to the gurney, millions of dollars will have been spent. When Lawrence Brewer and John King were sentenced to death in the Jasper dragging case, Jasper County had to hike property taxes to pay for it.
But what worried me more than cost was the spate of exonerations. In the seven years after Wade died in 2001, there were 19 in Dallas County alone, two-thirds involving black people, usually as a result of DNA testing. Michael Morton was in a Texas prison for almost 25 years after being convicted of beating his wife to death. His attorneys fought for six years to get them to test for DNA, and when the results came back, Morton was found to be innocent. Not only that, there was some suggestion that the Williamson County District Attorney had withheld evidence that allowed the actual murderer to go free and kill again. Ernest Willis spent 17 years on death row after being found guilty of setting a fire that killed two women. He came close to being executed in 1991, before being cleared of all charges and released in 2004. They’re still arguing over whether Cameron Todd Willingham set the fire that killed his three daughters, and he was executed the same year Willis walked free.
A number of people have been let off death row, which tells me the system has flaws. Testifying in capital murder trials, I saw some real questionable things done by prosecutors. They’d bring in expert witnesses who’d testify that a guy given a life sentence would likely kill again, so he should be executed instead. One of them made it sound like there was blood flowing down the aisles of the prison units. I found it somewhat troubling that one of the criteria for getting the death penalty was “future dangerousness.” These are people who would have no contact with people on death row, eat their food in their cell, have one hour of recreation a day. How could they possibly be a future danger to anybody? And having worked for an agency that committed the ultimate bureaucratic act, it made me think, “Did they always get it right?” I didn’t feel guilty, I didn’t do anything to put those people on death row, but I hated to think I’d seen people executed who were innocent.
I kept up friendships with former inmates, which is not something I thought would happen. We’d write back and forth and occasionally I’d get a phone call out of the blue. They were like the conversations you’d have with someone you went to school with—“hey, what’s going on?”—and I thought it was great that these people were managing to live lives outside of prison. There was one young inmate I knew who had a car wreck on the day he graduated high school and killed some teenagers. Before that night, he’d never had a drink in his life. There but for the grace of God go I. During his time in prison, I got to like him a lot. He was just a frail human being like me who made a mistake, but at least it wasn’t a mistake he had to die for. When he got out, me and Marianne even went on a tubing trip with him and his family. He earned a college degree in prison and wound up working as an attorney. After I retired, I once tried to visit Thomas Miller-El, but they said I wasn’t allowed in. I’m not sure why, I only wanted to see an old friend.
In 2015, I got a call from the BBC in England. They wanted to make a documentary about me watching all those executions. One day, the director asked me, “Would you consider talking to Napoleon Beazley’s parents on camera?” I said, “Sure, but they won’t do it.” He called me back the next day and told me they wanted to. On the way out to their house in Grapeland, it suddenly occurred to me that I had no real idea about Napoleon’s background. I knew he was bright and a star footballer, but I didn’t know if he lived in a shack or something more salubrious. It turned out they lived in a beautiful big house in the country, which surprised me somewhat.
I was apprehensive, because I thought they’d be angry or upset. But it turned out they were a real nice couple. It was a heck of an afternoon. Napoleon’s father Ireland seemed real bitter at the system, but after the interview was over, he told me he was a correctional officer. The irony of that floored me. His wife Rena was a real sweet person. She described Napoleon as “a son that everyone would want to have,” who used to treat her like a queen and introduce her as “his woman.” The whole time he was on death row, they never missed a visit. When I told her how attached I was to Napoleon, she started crying and really opened up. I was surprised when she told me she was not opposed to the death penalty, for the worst of the worst. Then again, that wasn’t what Napoleon was. She told me the fact I was there for Napoleon’s execution gave her comfort, which was nice to hear. That’s how I wanted to be remembered, as a guy who treated everybody fairly.
When TDCJ put the big squeeze on Michelle, it made me angry. She didn’t deserve what happened to her. Michelle and I were very close, I liked her an awful lot. She treated the inmates like human beings and the reporters as equals, just like I did. That’s why they stabbed her in the back and got rid of her, because they saw her as belonging to the old way of doing things. She was open and helpful and curious, while the TDCJ wanted to close things down. After Michelle left, they stopped telling the public about riots and escapes and hostage situations. Did all those nasty things suddenly stop happening? Or did they just start hiding things? As one of my old TDCJ colleagues said to me, “It’s like they turned off the faucet.” I guess Michelle gave the prison system in Texas more honesty and publicity than it wanted.
When we were both there, we’d walk up this little flight of stairs that led from the parking lot and I’d sweep my arm across the Walls Unit and say, “Miss Lyons, one day this will all be yours…” But I felt guilty about hiring her, not only because of how it ended, but because of the effect watching all those executions had had on me. After I left, I couldn’t stop thinking about the things I’d seen. And when a beautiful carol like “Silent Night” makes you think about death, something’s definitely not right. I’d have dreams about Karla Faye Tucker and Gary Graham and Kenneth McDuff. Kenneth McDuff is not somebody you want to be dreaming about, but that man was etched on my mind for all time.
I’d dream about things that were said in last statements, like the guy who recited that long passage from Corinthians. I’d dream about eating bing cherries in the death house with James Beathard. I’d dream about a kid they named “Sweat Pea,” a harmless-looking guy who killed a cop. He’d been involved in a shoot-out and had complications from his wounds, so they sent him to hospital in Galveston, gave him an operation, brought him back and executed him. I’d have these dreams several times a week, but I didn’t talk about it a whole lot. I might tell my wife a funny convict story, but not the bad stuff. I kept that locked up.
I didn’t have hobbies, didn’t play golf. I joined a gym once but never went. Work was what I did and what I liked. I enjoyed retirement for a while, because every day was like Saturday. But as I got older, I had more and more spare time on my hands, and spare time means thinking. And thinking all those thoughts made an addiction worse. I started drinking more and more, medicating myself earlier and earlier in the day, before heading to a bar. That was partly out of boredom, partly to forget.
There was a time when I read scripture, I was even an altar boy as a kid. I drifted away from organized religion, but kept my beliefs. When I became ill, Jim Brazzil would call and we’d have long talks about God and what might happen when I died. I often asked him, “Could you feel the inmate’s soul leaving their body, when you had your hand on their knee?” Brazzil said that it was a deeply intense moment, and assured me that he could feel the inmate entering the presence of God. I saw 219 inmates die on that gurney, but it wasn’t the executions I remembered that bothered me the most, it was the executions I’d forgotten…
I was upset when I discovered Larry felt guilty about hiring me, because I didn’t blame him at all. He was the most wonderful man, and the best spokesperson the prison system ever had. We were both members of this weird little club, which nobody asks to join.
There aren’t too many people on the planet who know what it’s like to see that many executions. The wardens came and went, members of the tie-down team came and went, members of the IV team came and went. Everybody came and went, except for me, Larry, Chaplain Brazzil and Graczyk. But even Graczyk wasn’t an active member of the club, because he was still witnessing executions, and was never going to discuss his feelings about them until he retired.
When my executive director had asked how I walked into that death chamber to watch a man die, I thought, “You think you couldn’t handle watching an execution? Then why aren’t you concerned about sending me in there almost 300 times?” But I can’t really be mad at him for that. I didn’t want to share my duties with anyone, because I didn’t think that anyone could do it better than me. I don’t know if that sounds arrogant or not, but it never even crossed my mind. And even if they’d offered me professional help, I would have declined, because accepting help would have been a show of weakness. And if you admit any kind of weakness in that job, they’re going to pull you out of the firing line.
Nevertheless, one day it occurred to me that I’d seen an awful lot of executions and had nobody to talk to. How could any therapist help me, when they’d never seen any executions themselves? So I started recording voice memos during my commutes. I’d fish my phone from my bag, press the red button and just start talking. I didn’t know what I was going to do with the recordings, or even why I was making them. But I guess it was a way of cataloging my thoughts, just as I’d done with my execution journal. When I’m lying in bed at night, thinking of all the things I need to do, I have to switch on the light and write them down, otherwise I’ll worry they’ll just lurk instead, in the nooks of my mind. It was a similar process with the recordings. I’d accepted that I’d never forget some of the executions I’d witnessed, but at least if I knew they were filed away neatly, they wouldn’t be able to creep up and spook me.
“I thought being away from the prison system would make me think about it less, but it’s been quite the opposite. I think about it all the time. Now that I’m gone, it’s like I’ve taken the lid off Pandora’s Box and I can’t put it back on.”
Michelle’s voice memo, November 2012