A few days after I had been sent back into solitary confinement on A-Block, I was lying on my bed just drifting through endless thoughts of my world being crushed, when suddenly, without any warning, a bucket of filthy mop water was thrown over me, and three inmates let out of their cells for exercise attacked me through the cell bars. When I leapt to my feet in response, one of them threw powdered scouring bleach at my eyes while another tried to poke me in the face with a broom handle sharpened into a spear. The third was the one who had thrown the mop water over me. At first I didn’t understand what it was all about.
‘You’re all nuts!’ I screamed. ‘You’re crazy! What’s this shit all about?’
‘You’re a fucking snitch!’ they shouted. ‘We know you are a police informant and that you’re trying to rat on someone over a murder to get out of prison!’
‘You’re gonna die, you fuckin’ rat!’ one of them yelled as he tossed urine from a plastic jar into my face through the bars.
I tried to grab my mattress and barricade my door to defend myself.
All the while, the guard on duty in the cell block acted as if he were telling them to stop what they were doing while standing safely inside his office thirty yards away. He couldn’t care less what happened to me; the only thing he cared about was that he didn’t have to do all the paperwork that would be generated if they succeeded in hurting me seriously.
I realised that the world around me had just turned to complete shit, and I was scared. These inmates were all members of a motorcycle gang that had a history of murder and violence. In prison, a ‘snitch’ is considered one of the lowest forms of life. Right down at the bottom, along with child molesters, corrupt police officers and rapists.
I was to learn months later that, on the day prior to this first attack, the leader of the motorcycle gang had been transported to the prison from court. Some police officers were discussing my case in front of this gang member, knowing that details of my trying to implicate Jimmy Brisbois in the murder of Mrs Craig would filter back into the prison. The officers must have known that the gang members would torment me and expose me as an informant and that I’d be attacked by other prisoners as well. They no doubt hoped this added stress would push me into telling them what they wanted to hear.
This little ruse almost cost me my life at the hands of men made miserable by their own lives. For these inmates saw hurting me as a way of venting all their own anger. I was a symbol of every reason why they were there and I was going to pay for it.
During the week that followed that first attack, it seemed as if everyone on the cell block had declared war on Nick Yarris. I had urine, bleach and worse thrown all over me again as I sat huddled on my bed. I was constantly threatened and called a ‘rat’. The other prisoners beat me up if I came out of my cell to shower off the filth they had thrown on me. The gang also kept telling me how I was going to die as soon as they got to me when there were no witnesses around. At the time I didn’t realise that I had been set up. All I knew was that somehow they knew what I had tried to do to Jimmy Brisbois and they were determined to get me for it.
I quickly decided that I had little left to lose. The guards were not going to be able to stop every attack and I had had enough of the constant abuse. I simply went to war. From then on, every time my cell door was opened, I went out fighting. Early on, it seemed as if the fighting might never end. I got hurt trying to punch two or even three guys at once. Yet I also hurt some of my tormentors enough for them to see that I didn’t care how many of them I took on and I feared no one.
But after only a week of fighting off every guy who wanted a piece of me, I could take no more. One night, the haunting thoughts in my head just got the better of me and I gave up. I wrapped a sheet around my neck and hanged myself from the radiator mounted to the top of my cell wall. I was hanging there when a guard found me after a few minutes and cut me down. The guard later told me that he thought I was a sick-minded person who had actually done the murder but that he wanted me to live only so that I could suffer more by being in prison for the rest of my days.
I was twenty years old and this was my first attempt at taking my own life. I had been reckless and wild in the past, but never before had I made a serious effort to kill myself outright. I felt like something inside me was dead, that I really had stopped caring. When I was cut down from my homemade noose, the guards took me to the hospital, where I was put into four-point restraints and placed on suicide watch.
A few days later, Sergeant Murphy came to see me there in the hospital wing. Although he only talked to me briefly, there was something about the way he spoke that made me believe he really cared about me. I was so miserable that I just lay there shackled to the bed, crying for hours. At that time I had no friends, no one I could talk to. My family still hadn’t visited or made contact.
All I could think about was that I might be spending the rest of my life in prison and there was no help coming. I wanted to believe there was someone who cared, but I kept seeing everyone there as just another user or liar.
Sergeant Murphy arranged for me to be transferred back to A-Block, where he swore he would have me placed in protection and separated from the other inmates during the time I was allowed out of my cell. He told me that he would personally get rid of any officer who let inmates throw things on me. Despite his assurances, though, I knew that he was powerless to do a whole lot for me. But I didn’t care. I didn’t give a damn about anything at that point. I was just empty inside.
As soon as I was placed back on A-Block the verbal abuse began again, although I did my best to ignore it. After my return from the hospital they had put me in what is called a ‘strip-cell’; that is, a cell with no sheets or towel and no clothing that could be used for a noose. I was allowed only a very thick, coarse ‘horse blanket’ to protect me from the freezing cold. As I lay there naked on my plastic mattress, inmates walked by during their exercise time, mocking me and taunting me.
After four days of this I requested to see Sergeant Murphy and asked him for my belongings back. I wanted my transistor radio, my sheets and some clothing so that I could deal with the cold and have something to listen to that would drown out the noise of all the inmates nearby.
He looked at me for a long moment. ‘Nick, are you telling the police the truth?’ he began. ‘Look, I can get your stuff back but you’ve got to promise me not to kill yourself. You’ve also got to tell the truth about this murder because you must get this off your chest.’ He appeared genuinely concerned.
At this I broke down. I simply couldn’t take it any more and I began to weep.
Murphy began gently: ‘Why don’t you just tell me what happened? Then I can go to the police and help you,’ he said.
This time I thought that maybe if I just told him I knew who had committed the murder and I had been involved somehow to a lesser degree, but more than what I’d said earlier to police, he might just be able to help me. I knew it was going to be another lie, but what choice did I have? In my misery, I felt I had none.
‘Well, hypothetically,’ I said, ‘what if I participated in the crime but I didn’t actually do the murder? Would that help?’
‘Absolutely!’ he replied. ‘That’s what we could use. We could go to the police with that.’
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘Maybe if I said I did the rape but didn’t do the murder. Is that good enough?’
‘That’s excellent!’ he went on. ‘We can bargain with that.’
I broke down again.
‘OK, if that’s what you want, I’ll tell them that.’
He immediately called the warden to tell him what he had just gotten out of me and to ask him to call the detectives again so I could be picked up and taken back to their offices.
During the ride to the prosecutors’ office, I suddenly realised the craziness of my situation and decided once and for all to tell the truth.
‘Look,’ I told the detectives when I got there, ‘this has gone too far. I know nothing about the murder. I didn’t have anything to do with it.’
I tried to tell them that I was going crazy in the cell with the cold and the noise from being teased and I just wanted my radio and my clothes back. But they would have none of it.
‘You’ve confessed to Sergeant Murphy,’ they said. ‘That’s good enough reason to have you arrested right now.’
‘This is insane!’ I replied, but no one wanted to believe anything I said now. After what seemed like endless hours of interrogation, during which I still made no confession, they angrily took me back to prison.
I had no idea what they were going to do. Everything was all twisted and bent and I was lost mentally. I lay there that night just exhausted, listening to the men nearby taunt and tease me for having been taken out of the prison and returned so late. They were convinced I had been out with the police pinning crimes on others, for which they were promising me all sorts of reprisals.
The next morning I was awoken early by the guards, who told me I was going to court. When I explained that I was not due for any court hearing, they ignored me and dragged me out of my cell to the prison entrance. Here I was met by a smiling Detective Martin, who cheerfully announced that he was there to take me before a local judge to have me charged with the kidnapping, rape and murder of Linda Mae Craig. It was 2 February 1982.
I never even said a word during the entire ride down to the courthouse. I just sat with my face pressed against the glass of the car window and wept in utter despair. With me were two policemen. One was an officer from Trainer, Pennsylvania, as the murder of Mrs Craig had happened over the county border in his precinct. The other was the lead detective in the Delaware County homicide division, Randy Martin. He kept taunting me as we drove along, for the amusement of this other officer.
When the judge read my charges in the courtroom, he kept asking me if I understood them and that each charge carried a punishment of life imprisonment or a possible death sentence. Since they were such serious charges, there was no chance of bail. I could not even bring my eyes up to look at him.
After the brief hearing, I numbly went back to jail and collapsed on my bed, oblivious to all the shouts of the men who thought I was out testifying against others. I just lay there, not even bothering to block my cell door with my mattress, as I’d done before when men threw things on me. I didn’t even move when they threw mop water at me as they passed by. I thought that this was going to be my day-to-day existence for ever. That I had been consigned to a hell of my own making and nothing was going to save me. I just went blank inside.
Somewhere in each of us is the blackest pit from which few ever return. I had found mine, lying there that day in the urine and filthy mop water that had been tossed on me like I was a human sewer.
It took a few days for the inmates to begin leaving me alone. Once the newspapers came out and the local television and radio broadcast the news that I alone had been charged with the rape and murder of Mrs Craig, they realised that I couldn’t have been an informant as there was no co-defendant involved. Now they just saw me as some mental deviant who had gone out and stalked an innocent woman because she looked like my ex-girlfriend. So, although I felt temporarily better because I was no longer being viciously attacked, my spirits were not lifted for long.
What really began to pull me down was how the prison staff treated me. It stole all my self-confidence to be treated as if I were psychotic. It was so demeaning when the guards or nurses or counsellors all talked to me as if I were a true deviant. I could hardly stand it. I stopped communicating and just sank deep into myself.
What happened next was all part of the homicide detectives’ attempt to seal their case against me. They had the prison staff place a man called Charles Catalino in the cell next to mine. I had already been charged with the rape and murder of Mrs Craig based on the statements I was alleged to have made to both prison guards and police.
But the police were up against a huge problem: Mrs Craig had last been seen at the shopping mall at 4.05 p.m. on 15 December 1981 – and a co-worker of Mrs Craig claimed that she had seen me at the mall. But four people – my mother, my father, my sister Sissy as well as a local shopkeeper from whom I had bought a cold drink and some chewing gum – were prepared to testify that I had been at or near my home between 4.30 and 4.45 p.m. on the afternoon of the murder.
That made it near impossible for me to have committed the crime and then driven the twenty-plus miles (in December rush-hour traffic, no less) from the murder scene back to my house within the given time frame.
Now, when this Catalino guy moved into the cell next to mine it seemed no big deal. Cell moves in small county jails like Delaware County’s are common as prisoners are either released or make bail. In fact, before he moved, Catalino had been stopping by my cell door for a few days talking to me and saying how messed up it was that I had been charged with rape and murder and he thought I was being framed.
He said he knew all about William Ryan, the district attorney assigned to prosecute me, as the reason he was in jail was that he had burgled this man’s home. I did not believe him initially, but Charles showed me the news clippings about his case and he laughed at how he’d degraded the prosecutor’s home. Apparently, he faced ten to twenty years in prison for this, in addition to the four to ten years he was serving for other burglaries. Charles claimed, with near glee, that he was the prisoner most hated by the local authorities as he had stolen all sorts of secret documents from the prosecutor’s home. He even tried to imply that there was a bounty on his head. I just took his talk as what guys in prison do to impress others.
In his mid-thirties, Charles was a heroin addict who even had needle marks on his neck as he had burned out his arms from so many years of drug abuse. Tall and lanky, he had once been good-looking, but years of taking drugs had ravaged his face and made it look real gaunt. He was the first prisoner to file a lawsuit against Delaware County for not having any sort of methadone treatment for heroin addicts.
But Charles Catalino also had a plan, which I never saw coming, what with everything else that was going on. This man saw me as his possible way out of an endless jail sentence, just as I had done with Jimmy Brisbois. He had watched from afar as all the drama around me had unfolded. And then he had come up with a plan to inveigle his way into my confidence by showing me his ‘credentials’ and making himself out to be as hated as me. All the while he and his girlfriend were coordinating a deal with detectives that in return for his freedom he would befriend me and get me to confess that my concrete alibi was a lie. That was all they needed him to do and then the case against me was a slam dunk, the prosecution felt. By the time I found out about the deal between the detectives and Charles, I was already in a new cell inside the Chester County jail.
Although there were continued tensions between me and some of the other prisoners in Delaware County jail, I had no clue why I had been transferred. I had not been accused of any crimes in Chester County, so I had not been put there to face criminal charges. I knew something was wrong; I just had no idea what it was. One morning in April 1982 I was simply told to gather up my stuff as I was being moved. It was that quick. Once in Chester County jail, not only was I put in solitary confinement because of the seriousness of the charges against me, but the new jail staff treated me as if I were mentally deranged and so violent that Delaware County could not deal with me. Only a few staff knew the real reason that I had been sent there: that Charles Catalino was cooperating with detectives and they wanted to keep me apart from him. I had no idea my old cell was being photographed as the location of my so-called confession to Charles, made, he claimed, when he had been standing at the next-door cell window. He also claimed that I had confessed to him that I was afraid that my alibi witnesses would be caught in a lie and that, further, I was sure they had found my blood on the victim.
I learned about this ‘confession’ when a sheaf of documents was passed to my defence attorney as they began swearing in the jury at my trial for the attempted murder and kidnapping of Officer Benjamin Wright. I remember the prosecutor, a man named Barry Gross, handing them over boldly to my lawyer and adding: ‘Read it and weep, counsellor!’
Having read it, my trial attorney, Sam Stretton, turned to me and asked who the hell this Charles Michael Catalino was. Then he added: ‘How come the police have these statements from him in which he claims you made all these admissions about the murder case?’
I sat there, my head spinning and the blood drained from my face as I read Charles’s detailed account of how I had told him that I had gotten my mother and father and sister all to lie about where I’d been on the night of the murder. Up until that moment, at least I had been able to defend myself to others by pointing out that four people had all given me an alibi. But suddenly I could feel my will to defend myself dissolve inside of me.
My mind raced through each time this man had come by my cell and all the many different reasons he had given for doing so. I realised my initial instincts about him had been right, but he had duped me into overriding them with his deceptively passive manner.
When the courtroom was called to order for proceedings to start against me I just sat glued to my seat, my eyes devouring each page of the statements. I felt hands yanking me up out of my chair as the judge ordered me to stand. Two deputy sheriffs had grabbed me by either arm when His Honour had become annoyed at my lack of respect in not standing with everyone else when he came into the courtroom. As he banged on his podium with his gavel he glared at me for my defiant act. I do not even recall much of what he said as my head was just swimming with all sorts of thoughts.
This was getting really terrifying. The police were prepared to let a junkie who had been the most hated man in jail go free just for saying that I was worried my family would be found out as liars at my murder trial. And if they were willing to let this man go free for just one lie, then how far were they willing to go to get a conviction?