NO MONOPOLY ON GRIEF
“If you come to Texas and kill somebody, we will kill you back.”
Ron White, Texan comedian and actor
“I don’t wear no Stetson,
But I’m willin’ to bet, son,
That I’m as big a Texan as you are.”
Terry Allen, Amarillo Highway
I always just wanted a normal life—a good husband, kids, a dog, a nice house, a job that pays me enough money that I can travel further afield than Texas. Some of that I have now, some of it I don’t. I read a quote once: “People always ask me, ‘Why do you always take the hard road?’ And I replied, ‘Why do you assume I see more than one road?’” That resonated with me, because that’s always the way it seems to be in my life. It’s not that I want to do things the hard way, it just ends up being like that.
I ignored red flags before my second marriage, and plowed on regardless. Once again, I only saw the hard road. As with my job in the prison system, I don’t expect or want anybody to feel sorry for me, because I knew what it was going into it.
I have a beautiful daughter, great parents, a wonderful brother who I’m very close to, great families on both sides, but I wasted too much time on certain relationships. My child knows how to read me like a book and I have some great friends who know just about everything there is to know about me. But in my romantic life, I’ve tended to fall short, ending up with men who didn’t understand me and my quirks and the various traits that make me who I am. I don’t really get it, other than maybe they weren’t really paying attention, because I give all sorts of clues that a good detective would spot, if only they were looking.
Take my tattoos. I got my first when I was 18, stone-cold sober and all by myself, a fleur-de-lis on my big toe. The fleur-de-lis was the symbol of my college sorority, but what’s funny is, I wasn’t a very active member. I didn’t live in the house like many of my pledge sisters, and I missed a lot of meetings because of my job at the local newspaper, yet I was probably one of the only members who got themselves inked. Other tattoos include an evil eye, a nod to my Hispanic and Greek heritage and to ward off bad energy, jealousy and negativity; the Chinese symbol for strength; and a flaming heart that speaks to the fact that I love wildly and deeply. I also have a butterfly, which I got for a little poem I read, which was actually a Japanese Geisha song:
I know she is light and faithless,
But she has come back half-repentant
And very pale and very sad.
A butterfly needs somewhere to rest
At evening.
On my side, in gothic cursive, is the phrase, “Alea iacta est,” or “The die is cast.” I got that one during a particularly stressful time in my life, when I was spending a lot of time worrying about how things would turn out. That tattoo was a way of reminding myself that worrying was useless, because fate had already decided the outcome. On my other side, I have an anchor, with a banner across it that reads “Mother.” I got that one shortly after my beloved grandmother died, and it’s a tribute to all the strong mothers in my life: my own mother, my grandmothers, my aunts and cousins, and the next generation—my daughter, niece and my cousins’ girls. The anchor also speaks to my Galveston Island roots—a nautical symbol for my nautical home.
I have not one, but two black widow tattoos. In 2002, I started the tongue-in-cheek “Black Widow Club,” which is made up of a bunch of strong women I know and love—not man-haters or women who plot to kill their mates, like Betty Lou Beets, but women who are tough and fierce. The club has eight members, and we all have the tattoo. I like being president of my own club, even if it’s one I had to invent myself.
Since most of my tattoos aren’t visible in public, a person trying to figure out who I am should simply look at the tangled clutter of bracelets that adorn my wrists: an anchor, that matches one I gave my father, who is the giver of so much advice; one that reads, “Rebellious When Restricted”; a string bracelet with a little gold snake, that is actually a wish bracelet—you put it on, make a wish and when the string wears away and falls off, your wish is ready to come true; a bracelet with a heart, which matches one worn by my mother, who does everything she possibly can to lift me when I’m down; a silver bear claw, matching one worn by my brother, who is one of my best friends and fiercely loyal; a silver cross, which is a gift from my daughter; an assortment of evil eye bracelets; and a silver bracelet, on which is stamped, “I will try again tomorrow.”
The clues aren’t exactly buried in the undergrowth, but maybe that’s part of the problem. Sometimes I worry I’m too much: too honest, too deep, too expressive, too loving, too worried about appearing strong. But I don’t know how to be anything else: if I don’t say the things I feel when I feel them, then I am not being me. Will the real me have a happily ever after? Or is that just not in my cards? But apart from the odd twinge of regret, I wouldn’t change a thing (except perhaps that Today Show interview, in which I sounded like an insensitive hick), because every decision I’ve made has brought me to this point in my life, in which I’m happy and content.
Had I not worked for the prison system for all those years, I might have had more peace, but I wouldn’t have the amazing job I have now, working with great people, taking trips to London, rather than a baking hot prison in the wilds of Texas, meeting rapists and baby killers. And I might not have my daughter, the most important thing that will ever happen to me.
If there is nothing else I ever get right, I am so proud of my daughter. I needn’t have worried that the darkness would rub off on her when she was growing inside my belly and I was listening to the last words of the inmates—their anger, their despair, their fear. She is so light and funny and kind-hearted. I think that’s what you most hope for as a parent, that your child will be better than you in every way. We were on a cruise and I watched as she began talking to this kid who looked miserable and alone. She brought him into her group and soon they were running around like the oldest of friends. I am so proud that she is without limits or judgment, and embraces and celebrates everyone for who they are.
But my daughter also brings into sharper focus how the women who walked into the death chamber must have felt—both those watching their sons die, and those watching their children’s killers go to sleep. I have an eager anticipation to see how her story unfolds, whereas the inmates’ mothers watch as the story comes to an end. Every single hope and desire they had for their baby is snuffed out, right in front of them. And I’m sure they question where they went wrong, as irrational as that might be.
Come to my house and you’ll see lots of crosses, skulls and santos dolls dotted about, which some people might find macabre. When I was working for the Israeli Consulate, a colleague brought his son in and said, “This is the woman who used to work for the prison system,” and made me show him all this memorabilia that was on my desk, including a shank I used as an envelope opener, and these tiny dice made out of compacted toilet paper. And I still find crime as fascinating as I did when I first joined the prison system. My ideal Sunday evening’s viewing is a combination of Dateline and 48 Hours, with maybe a show about ghosts and the paranormal, after my daughter has gone to bed. But I don’t come across as a weird or dark person, even though I might think some weird, dark things.
Sometimes, when I’m in a crowded bar, I’ll look around and think, “You know, statistically, someone in here has committed a murder.” Or I’ll look at someone and think, “Hmmm, he looks like a sex offender.” There will just be something about someone that makes me suspicious. Working in the prison system also made me more cautious of people. I’d sit in on reporters’ interviews with burglars and muggers and pick up all kinds of tips. One guy, who was really funny to listen to, said that if he was walking past your house and the garage door was open, he was leaving with something, whether it was a set of golf clubs, a lawnmower, your tool box or a bag of charcoal.
I’m not afraid to go anywhere, but I’m constantly looking behind me and locking doors. When I arrive at a parking lot, you won’t see me digging around in my bag for my car keys, they will already be in my hand. I was relieved to discover that my new car had an escape lever in the trunk. I thank my lucky stars that I have small hands and wrists, so that if I’m ever snapped in handcuffs, I’ll probably be able to squeeze out of them. I don’t want to make my daughter paranoid or afraid to leave the house, but I probably think about kidnapping and sex trafficking more than the average mom, and I want her to be cautious. But it’s a fine line. I’ll be watching a crime documentary and she’ll be looking up serial killers on the internet—“Mama, look at this one! He killed 20 people!” Is that right? Probably not. But I want her to realize that just because somebody looks nice, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are nice. There are so many people who do so many bad things in the world, and because of the job I did, I know exactly the kinds of bad things they do.
On January 6, 2016, my husband and I were watching television when he said something that made me laugh so hard I could barely breathe. About two minutes later, my cell phone rang. It was my husband’s oldest daughter, Lacey, but because we were in the middle of watching a show and having so much fun, I decided to ignore it and call her back. About a minute later, I got a text which read: “Please. Kristine is dead.” Kristine was my husband’s youngest daughter. My stomach knotted up. I thought perhaps that Lacey was being dramatic, that she couldn’t get hold of her sister and was assuming the worst. I asked my husband where his phone was, and he said it was in our bedroom on the charger. When he asked me why, I read him the text, he ran to the bedroom, grabbed his phone, called Lacey and then all I could hear was her screaming. That’s when I knew it was true.
Soon, the story of a 17-year-old girl from Houston being shot dead in a Los Angeles parking lot was all over Twitter. People were posting pictures of this girl who had been in my house six months earlier, celebrating her birthday. From covering all those murders as a reporter, to seeing 280 people executed, now I was part of the story, watching it from almost the opening page. I wasn’t particularly close to Kristine, had not been around her a ton, because she had only come back into my husband’s life a year or so earlier. But it’s not like it didn’t affect me. My worst fear as a parent was being played out in front of me. And watching my husband go through all that pain and suffering was harrowing and heartbreaking in equal measure.
Kristine was shot in the face by a drug dealer in Marina del Rey, after a botched drug deal involving Lacey’s boyfriend. I knew the death penalty wouldn’t be on the table, because California hasn’t executed anybody since 2006. But my husband struggled to grasp that, and it was stressful trying to get him to come to terms with the fact that it was never going to happen. Death was all he and Kristine’s mother wanted, the only palatable outcome.
In July 2017, Kristine’s killer was sentenced to life without parole. I knew it was coming and yet I felt angry at the injustice. God only knows how my husband felt. For years I’d been arguing about the death penalty at parties, with people for whom it was an abstract concept. But if I thought it was a concrete issue for me while I was working for the prison system, my stepdaughter’s murder only hardened my position. While there were executions I saw that I didn’t agree with and executions I saw that I wish I had not, I maintain that there are instances when the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for the taking of a human life. And if anyone has the balls to stand there and tell me why the death penalty is wrong, they should be prepared to hear my very personal take on why I think they are mistaken.
If their 17-year-old daughter was shot in the face and killed, how would they cope knowing that her killer’s life was spared? I know, from personal experience, that it is a bitter pill to swallow.
When I think it’s all dealt with, I’ll suddenly find myself crying at something seemingly innocuous. I went to see Murder on the Orient Express, which is one of my favorite Agatha Christie tales, and started sobbing in the theatre. Who the hell cries during an Agatha Christie movie? What I took away from this new adaptation is that sometimes one murder can cause everything around it to unravel—even if only one person is physically buried, they might not be the only person who died. That’s exactly what happened when my stepdaughter was murdered, because my husband never recovered. I loved him dearly, but he became a different man. Not long after Kristine’s death, I discovered he had developed a serious drug habit, which I would not tolerate in my home. We divorced in no time at all, and I haven’t seen him since.
When I got back from seeing Murder on the Orient Express, I opened up my laptop and started drafting a letter to the man who shot my now ex-husband’s daughter. I wanted him to know that he didn’t just kill her, he killed my husband’s spirit. And over what? Some fucking weed. I didn’t end up writing the letter, let alone sending it, because I’m not sure he would have cared.
Around the same time, I received a message on Facebook, from a friend of a man I saw executed. I didn’t remember much about him, so I had to pull his notes from the filing cabinet in my office to jog my memory. He was sentenced to death for a carjacking and murder in Houston in 1992. The offender was 19 at the time. In the news articles, the victim’s daughter was quoted as saying she really lost both her parents that day, because her mother went into a deep depression that she never really came out of. But here was this message on my phone, reminding me that the offender’s execution altered the lives of his family and friends, too. These were people who didn’t commit a crime, but were still scrutinized and judged as if they did. And then their loved one was executed.
Her message read:
“I am writing to you in hope that you can help me put my heart and mind at ease. I believe that you witnessed the execution of someone who was like my family. I knew him since I was 12 years old. I just want to know that he went quickly and that he did not suffer. I love him now as I loved him then. I hope that you answer. His name was Willie Marcel Shannon #999086. He was executed Nov 8 2006. If you don’t answer I will understand. Thank you and God bless you.”
I wrote back to Shannon’s old friend and told her he died quickly and without pain. In fact, I told her what I’d told so many people down the years, that it looked like he went to sleep. I also told her that he was smiling on the gurney, said he would ask for the victim’s forgiveness when he saw him in heaven and that he would be waiting for his mother when she got there. Shannon wasn’t afraid of dying, and his faith was very much intact. I don’t know if my reply was too stoic, or whether it brought her peace or comfort, but it seemed like the right thing to do. There is no monopoly on grief.
If I had been veering toward an anti-death penalty position, the murder of my stepdaughter sent me swerving the other way again. But there are signs that Texas is losing its appetite for the ultimate punishment. Harris County, which includes Houston, America’s fourth most populous city, was known as the “capital of capital punishment,” having sent 126 convicts to death row since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. However, in 2017, Harris County executed none of its death row inmates for the first time since 1985, and did not sentence anybody to death for the third year in a row. Seven executions took place in Huntsville in 2017, the same as the previous year and down from the record 40 in 2000.
Among the reasons for the dip are the 2005 introduction of life without parole; reformist district attorneys and prosecutors; better defense lawyers; jurors who are more understanding of mitigating circumstances for an alleged killer’s crime, such as an abusive childhood or mental illness; the school of thought that it can’t possibly be a deterrent, given that there is still so much violent crime; a host of recent DNA exonerations; botched executions in other states; the difficulty in acquiring the necessary drugs; the huge cost of pursuing a death penalty; and a growing belief that execution should be spared for the worst of the worst.
But while a 2017 Gallup poll suggested that public support for the death penalty for murder across America was down to 55 percent, the lowest in 45 years and way down from the 1994 peak of 80 percent, the last major poll in Texas, in 2013, suggested that public support remained strong, at 74 percent. So long as Texas has so many crazy people committing so many crazy crimes, no Texas politician will be campaigning on an anti-death penalty platform, at least not one who wants to be elected. Crime and punishment is big business in the state, Texas has its own way of doing things, and it doesn’t really care what anybody else thinks. It’s like that saying: “Texas is like a whole other country.”
“I support the death penalty. I believe there are some crimes that are so heinous, the only way you can truly pay your debt to society is with your life. But in other cases, I feel very conflicted. There are men I watched die that I don’t think should have. But I have that luxury, because they didn’t take something from me.”
Michelle voice memo, November 2012
Maybe I participated in too many things I shouldn’t have. Maybe you can’t be so close to so much badness and negativity without it tainting everything you do in the future. Maybe I’ll never escape the things I saw. I used to think that when I died, I’d want them to play the Green Day song “Good Riddance,” because I like the words and the message, and thought it would look funny printed in the funeral program. But on one commute home, Eva Cassidy’s “Songbird” came on the radio, and I realized that was the song I wanted at my funeral instead. But you know what made me sad? There’s a line that says, “And the songbirds keep singing like they know the score,” which I must have heard a hundred times. But this was the first time I realized it meant score, as in melody. I’d always interpreted it as the score in the game of the life—your score against the universe. Why would I think that? Why is that what I hear? Why am I so afraid that the universe is keeping score and that, no matter what, I’m going to lose? As I listened, I cried, because I want people to know that I really did try to do right and not cause any hurt. And, for the first time, I got the feeling that I wasn’t going to live to be an old woman, that I was going to die young, with so many things undone and so much unredeemed. Suddenly I knew the score, and it wasn’t a melody at all.
When I was younger, I thought that witnessing people die would have no lasting effect on me. I didn’t consider that life is fluid, you’re constantly growing, and just because you feel a certain way about something one day, it doesn’t mean you’ll feel that way for ever. That Rolling Stone journalist was wrong, but kind of right at the same time: it’s not that I saw too much death for somebody of my age, but that I saw too much death for anyone. I can’t figure out if I was strong for doing it for so long or I’m weak for the feelings I still harbor. Maybe it’s both.
Sometimes I wonder if instead of trying to file things away, it might be a better course of action to shout it from the rooftops. Before I started writing this book, I didn’t really know why I was doing it. But perhaps that’s it: I’m trying to desensitize myself to the things I’ve seen. My husband and I had a song, and I loved that song so much that when we separated, I didn’t want to retire it, shut it away in a box, close the lid and never listen to it again. So I kept listening to it after he was gone, over and over again, so I could desensitize myself to it. Eventually, I’d listened to it so often that it didn’t mean anything any more. It just went back to being a song I really liked. Maybe this book will achieve something similar.