I met Jacque in December 1987. I married her on 1 July 1988 in a prison visiting room. The bridegroom wore handcuffs and two guards acted as witnesses. When it looked possible that DNA testing could prove my innocence and give us a realistic chance of being together, we decided to marry in the hope that we would be able to move on to happier times.
We honestly believed that DNA would set me free. For ten years Jacque drove the 225 miles from her world in Pittsburgh to mine in Huntingdon, six days a month, as we engaged in protracted legal battles to have the testing carried out.
Jacque left me in 1997, unable to take any more denials by the courts. Five inconclusive DNA tests meant there was not going to be a happily ever after. She divorced me finally in 1998, having found someone new in her life. In the ten years of our relationship, we experienced one hell of a ride through every emotion a couple could feel, locked as we were in our huge legal battle.
In 1988 the only known uncontaminated DNA evidence had been taken by Detective Davidson; it was later destroyed.
In December 1989 my direct appeal against the death sentence was denied and all claims that my original trial had been unfairly held were dismissed by the State Supreme Court of Pennsylvania.
In June 1990 the victim’s clothing, worn at the time of her murder, was finally located by a former evidence custodian in the Delaware County courthouse evidence room.
In June 1991, a year after Mrs Craig’s clothing had been found, we finally persuaded a lab to extract samples of sperm taken from her underwear.
In November 1992 all my appeals in the federal courts were dismissed and I was forced to accept DNA testing of the samples by an inexperienced newly opened police laboratory in Alabama.
In July 1993 the first DNA testing by the Alabama laboratory came back ‘inconclusive’ due to degraded evidence.
In September 1993 I discovered that not all the evidence had been sent to the Alabama lab and there were six tubes of extracted sperm-based DNA still held by Cellmark laboratories. I finally got the Federal Defenders Office to support my DNA efforts, including having Michael Wiseman and Christina Swarns to take over the DNA costs from the federal courts.
In January 1995 Huntingdon’s Death Row was finally shut down and I was sent to Pittsburgh.
In June 1995 I was allowed representation by the Federal Defenders Association through the help of Peter Goldberger and was given access to their capital defence funding in order to appeal in the federal courts.
In 1996 I sought to have the unshipped evidence at Cellmark labs finally sent to a properly qualified DNA laboratory.
In August 1997 I won the right in the federal courts to have all of the tubes of evidence at Cellmark sent to the highest qualified lab in the USA, Forensic Science Associates in California, for PCR-enhanced DNA testing.
In September 1997 the killer’s gloves were finally released by the prosecutor and sent to Cellmark for shipment to FSA, along with six tubes of DNA.
In November 1997 the package sent to FSA by Cellmark broke open, rendering the evidence useless.
Despite this long battle, between the years 1988 and 1998 I was as happy as anyone on earth, because I was totally convinced I was not alone. I was no longer meandering through life by myself and I believed that the power of love would help me find all my best qualities. Not only that, but I would try to live by everything I now held most dear. For ten years I was able to feel no hurt if this person or that person attacked me for why I was in prison. I had a whole other world, which I had made with another person, Jacque. In every letter, every phone call, we shared my ordeal, and that gave me a sense of protection that I had never felt before.
I was so grateful to Jacque for witnessing how my battle for DNA testing had become such a test of will power. I might have stayed happy if it were not for the fact that as time went on I realised that our fight was eating into her and was in danger of tearing down our love. This wonderful person, who was my lodestone on every step of my way through the legal maze, had become trapped in my world – and it was me who was holding her there. But time ignored both of us. I blinked and ten years, thousands of miles driven, hundreds of letters written and greeting cards with photographs tucked inside them sent, were suddenly yesterdays for me. I watched horrified as the stupid desperate mess I had made of my life as a young man came back to cause her so much pain. That is still the most terrible thing I have ever done in my life: I let someone keep coming to see me for years and years when I now see that I was using her to carry me.
I remember vividly that day in December 1997 when Jacque walked into the prison visiting room for the last time. By then I had been transferred to the Western State Penitentiary at Pittsburgh, as a commission had recognised what a hellhole Huntingdon’s B-Block was and had had it shut down. We just sat there the first few moments, but I knew what was coming. The previous month, my nine-year attempt to have tested both the killer’s gloves and all remaining DNA recovered from the sperm found on the victim’s underwear had failed when it had been damaged in shipping. Cellmark had screwed up badly and seemingly lost all known evidence. They had not prepared the package properly and it had split open on its way to a lab in California. Six centrifuge tubes full of evidence were deemed contaminated. Edward Blake, the director at Forensic Science Associates in California, who were due to test it, would not test the spilled evidence, so any realistic chance I had of having DNA testing was over.
That day, none of this mattered. Jacque had warned me on the phone that there was something she wanted to tell me and I knew what that something was going to be. And now here at Western State she just laid it all out, saying, ‘Nicky, I cannot do this any more! It is stealing the life out of me. I have a house full of legal boxes on this case. My mom is now gone and I am so alone. I have met someone else and I think I want to be with him. He don’t want me to see you any more, so I can’t come back after today.’
It was so lame that we were having such an important and intimate conversation in the communal visiting booth used by both Death Row and high-security prisoners. It was just a twenty-foot-long aquarium-like glass enclosure with, on the prisoners’ side, four stools bolted to the floor. And right next to me was another inmate, cooing to his ‘boo’, as he kept calling his overweight, scantily clad female visitor.
It so crushed me that my last moments with the person to whom I had clung so hard were to be shared with such a cheap example of humanity. I was holding on to the thick black phone receiver on my side of the glass so fiercely that Jacque could see I was likely to do something drastic and implored me with her eyes not to. When you spoke into the phone it magnified your voice in this cheap, tinny way as it transmitted your every word over a small network to a guard sitting in a booth fitted with one-way glass, just twenty feet away. It was so degrading to know that there was this faceless witness to the dying moments of our love. It took every bit of my willpower to do nothing. To just sit still and hold back the tears was a huge effort. I was so grateful I was holding the phone at the far end of the visiting room, so I could hunch down to my right and talk without too many other people seeing my face.
Jacque and I laughed awkwardly and for a moment we were both filled by the warmth of our old roles in which we shined brightly as a united couple. But then I broke down, I let it out, I sobbed, and the asshole next to me, who had been rubbing himself under the counter while his girlfriend talked to him, stopped long enough to look at me. I blazed him to incinerated dust with the expression on my face. He ducked sideways and whispered a few things to his girlfriend before moving to a phone further away from me that barely worked at all. He kept whispering and casting nervous glances at me to see if I was going to cash his chips in for him early. I needed someone to take out my hurt out on and, handcuffed or not, I would have beaten him until all my strength had gone if he had said a single word to me. Luckily for him, he did not.
Now I looked again at Jacque and how time had taken such a chunk of her youth. If only I had had the courage to look in the glass I would also have caught a glimpse of my own time-stolen image.
But I was proud, too, of what we had achieved together. Back in 1988, I had become the first man on Death Row in the USA to ask for DNA testing. In the beginning we had no idea what it was we were asking for, but we had learned so much. And for ten tireless years Jacque had been my partner in our battle to be heard, wearing my death sentence like a badge of honour.
Finally when I could talk I began: ‘I have all the resources that federal court funding has allowed me, I have five lawyers lodging appeals on my behalf because the evidence was spilled, and now you wanna quit?’
We both cracked smiles as we slipped into the trademark joking style of our relationship. I continued the jocular mood with: ‘Yo, you remember back in 1993 when we were forced to use the Alabama Police Department of Forensic Services for our first DNA tests and they used up what we thought was all the evidence on their “inconclusive” results?’
Jacque got into the spirit of our performance by adding in this pseudo-female TV reporter voice: ‘Let’s not forget how it took six long years to get the District Attorney to hand over the killer’s gloves that were, oh by the way, hidden from your lawyers during your trial!’
I added to the hamming-up with an imitation of an old 1970s TV show, Rowan Martin’s Laugh-in: ‘And now, a word from our sponsors, “Grind ’Em Up and Kill ’Em All Prosecutors”, proud makers of elected officials all over the United States of America . . .’
Those were our last few moments of real laughter before I jumped into talking about the real business of why she was here. I tried to be upbeat and positive. I told her that I was glad for her that she had met someone else, even as it made me cringe inside.
I told her how grateful I was that she had been prepared to come and hear me bitch and whine about my crappy life – which drew a small laugh as she tried to hide her now-flooded eyes. I said everything I was supposed to say. And I did everything I could to reassure myself that it was all true. That I could go on without her. I may have had feelings of bitterness that she was leaving, but I tried so hard to spare us both this hurtful truth.
Even though I realised it was our constant fight that had brought us closer together, I saw too that it was this final spillage which had just stolen Jacque’s will to go on. It sickened me that, in the end, it was my own rotten luck that had cheated us out of a new life. I could not visualise the lab assistant who had packed the box improperly; I could not conjure up hate for the innocuous delivery person who had knocked the package about. All I could see right now was the face of someone who had had enough of this endless nightmare and who knew that only more madness followed if she stayed.
We sat in that visiting booth for a little while not really saying a whole lot. I tried discreetly to look at Jacque’s watch as she held the phone up to her ear. Over an hour had passed already. And yet I could not imagine another hour in my life that would be filled with so much human emotion or go so slowly.
I could tell from her face I hurt her by asking if she loved this new man. And I hurt her some more by asking if she thought he loved her as much, or if they were going to get married. She said she really did not know. But we both knew she was lying to try and spare us both. As we bounced away from this line of questioning, I broke down and pleaded with her to ‘just go now, please’.
I turned to look away and she got up and moved off towards the door. I stood up and banged the hell out of my knees on the lip of the counter, but at least I was filled with the warmth of pain as I saw her pick her way speedily through the chairs filled with visitors. I knew it was pointless to shout, as I was behind two inches of security glass, so I just let the phone slip on to the countertop and clang there on the metal. When I could no longer see her, I pressed my face into the cold concrete wall and wept like a child who had lost its comfort blanket.
I don’t even remember how I got back to my cell that December day. I just recall staring out of my window, up on the fifth floor, and watching the snowfall under a streetlight as I sat there transfixed by the thoughts that played out in my head. Had she ever really existed? Had I really been in love or had I just been using her? How would I ever face everything without someone else there to carry my burden? I sat listening to WYEP, a Pittsburgh radio station, endlessly on my headphones. It was all I could do just to listen to music and hope to hear a song that would help me recall the good things Jacque and I had once shared. I heard the song I wished for, ‘Ten Years Gone’ by Led Zeppelin. I cry even when I hear it now.
No words can explain what Jacque’s leaving did to me. I had to face the fact that I had once been so close to a chance at life, but it had been snatched from me. And I had to carry on by myself, without the one person who had said that, no matter what, she would never leave me to die here alone. She had sworn she would sit by me to the end and watch me be executed. She lied. I had sworn I would always love her. I lied, too.