When Walter Ogrod asked for my help, he spoke in such a timid and nervous way that his words came out all jumbled: ‘My name is Walter. Can you read me this help please?’ He was sitting in a metal cage used as the Death Row law library at the time and I was outside, mopping up.
Two thoughts came into my mind. First: ‘I have dyslexia, so maybe I’m the best person to re-flip his words back into order so they make sense.’ Also, because, like everyone in Greene, I knew what he was in prison for: ‘This man is an overweight, unkempt, bespectacled child-killer who put a little girl in a TV box and left her on the sidewalk like she was garbage.’
I was mopping the floor out in the main H-Block hallway one morning and Walter was alone in his cage in the law library as no one wanted to spend two hours locked up with such a repulsive creature. There were two chairs bolted down on to the floor of the cage and Walter was seated on the one nearest to the door. He was holding out a law book to me in both hands through a slot cut into the door, indicating for me to take it. He was obviously having some trouble understanding part of the text and he wanted me to read it for him.
I looked at him and snorted in disgust that he would even speak to me. I had read about his case in both the law books and the newspapers, and I had no time for him or his horrible crimes. Also, I had helped men with their legal work in the past and the last thing I wanted right now was to take on another case. I knew I was acting cold towards someone who had been assaulted and such by other prisoners, but that was only to be expected if you murdered a child. ‘None of my business,’ I told myself silently, and moved away without even responding to him.
Walter seemed to expect it. He just meekly pulled the book back into the cage and said nothing. But as I walked on down the hallway to finish my work I could not shake off this strange feeling. The next time I saw him I was going to ask: Why? Why had he just accepted how I dismissed him when he asked for help?
As well as being allowed out of my cell and to have extra showers, the other privilege I had was the use of the phone. It was at the discretion of the guard on duty, but I could have extra phone calls if I did all my work quickly. I was so grateful to be able to use the phone a few times a week in order to re-establish my efforts to get the spilled DNA evidence tested. I can be a real dogged individual sometimes and, despite my own lawyers and others telling me to leave it, by now I had decided that, as long as there was a shred of evidence left to test, I owed it to myself to see that much through.
In a review of the total evidence, a lab technician at Cellmark laboratories revealed that lab protocol called for them to cut and keep a portion of the evidence they had shipped to California.
I rang up the Federal Defenders Office to talk everything through and all it had taken was one simple phone call from one of the attorneys there, Christina Swarns, to the lab to establish this breakthrough fact. Not all the DNA evidence had been destroyed!
A whopping ten per cent had been retained. This represented a tiny part of a very small amount, but at least I was in with a chance. And when she found out about it, Christina got on an airplane to deliver the evidence personally to California – this time we were not going to entrust my freedom to an error in packaging.
In order for reliable testing to be done, however, we needed at least enough material for both a test and a back-up test. There were less than 3,000 identifiable cells in this scrap of material. A match head would have dwarfed it in size. Of those 3,000 cells, I now had to hope that enough were still intact to be replicated, thus producing traceable prints of the strands of DNA that each contained. It was that simple.
I knew enough about the current levels of DNA amplification technology to realise that my chances of success were not great. But advances on working with badly degraded evidence were being made all the time. None of that mattered, though, if there was not enough material to work with. What else is new? I asked myself as I tried to pursue this.
That May of 1998, I tried to keep things simple. On my birthday, 17 May, I called home twice, ate some extra food including some cake from the lunch tray, took a nice long shower and slept soundly all afternoon. Even in jail you can become so exhausted that you sleep blissfully. Right then I wanted no more tense battles over evidence abuse, no more rollercoaster rides of love; I was willing to trade all that for just being able to coast along and exhaust myself through physical work. I was prepared to leave all the thinking up to my lawyers.
Maria decided to point me towards the one thing that I loved to do, which was write. She encouraged me to place an online advertisement asking for pen pals. We were not allowed internet access, so I mailed my details to the website manager and it wasn’t long before I got my first replies. People wrote to me from as far away as England, China, Peru and Australia. By filling my mind up vicariously with all my pen pals’ different worlds I hoped to distract myself from thinking too much about the current round of DNA testing.
One of the people I wrote to regularly was Professor Alec Jeffreys, the British geneticist at the University of Leicester in the UK who had pioneered DNA fingerprinting. I had written to him asking his opinion on what my chances were, based on current evidence levels and the types of test available. I may have lost my taste for fighting, but at the very least I had a friend I could turn to for the best advice. Never once did he ignore my requests. I was so grateful that such an important scientist was willing to listen to me. As he joked to me, ‘Once you’ve done something like create DNA fingerprinting, everything else that you do brings you down to earth.’ You have to love a man who is that humble.
The weird thing was that the more I acted like I had given up hope, the more I wanted to feel hope. I wanted just to let the lawyers handle things for me, yet the more I tried, the more I got caught up in it. I started to dwell on what it would be like if a miracle happened and I managed to pull this off. I mean, I’d feel so stupid if I virtually gave up on the testing and it then turned out to work! I remember telling Maria soon after I received a letter from the lab in California stating that 2,000 out of the 3,000 cells were ‘useable’ that I had to remind myself what my research had told me: Forty to sixty per cent chance of success, no better.
I was wrapped up in just such thoughts one morning as I was cleaning up the breakfast tray spills when, on the tier above me, I saw a guard who was doing a head count stop outside one particular cell. I was standing under the opposite tier, near the bottom of the stairs, so basically I was in the shadow. The guard lifted up the metal flap covering the crack through which could be seen the slim features of the inmate – a middle-aged black man – talking to him. Then, as soon as he’d finished, and without a single word, the guard tossed the entire contents of his coffee cup into the prisoner’s face and slammed the slot shut as the scalded inmate screamed in agony. Next the guard looked around quickly to check if anyone was watching before exiting through an upper-level door to the control booth.
Other inmates started banging on their cell doors calling for the nurse to be brought over. A few moments later, I was ordered into my cell by three officers who had come to investigate the disturbance. Once inside my cell I stood by the door and continued to watch as the three officers – one of whom was the guard who had tossed the coffee – stood in front of the black inmate’s cell as he kicked wildly on his door and screamed in some Afro-Caribbean language. When he saw the guard who had scalded him he went completely berserk. The two other officers seemed to tacitly acknowledge what the inmate was trying to tell them about their colleague, but all three took it in turns to yell at him to shut up. But the more they told him to stop, the more he went off. Once the guards had given three un-responded-to commands, they went to get the ‘sticks and shields’, so that they could enter his cell for extraction and forced medication by injection.
The prisoners in the surrounding cells yelled at full throttle as the three guards retreated down the stairs. As the one who had begun it all passed my door I looked him right in the face and read the name on his breast pocket: ‘Graner’.
I had no clue who this man was, but I had just witnessed him not only burn the inmate with coffee but also become unhealthily excited about getting out the riot clubs and electrified shields.
I knew his type. He was an instigator who was happy to leave work having spent the day tormenting inmates who then went on to assault other staff who had nothing to do with the original incident. So many times I had seen defenceless staff be attacked for what their cruel colleagues had done. Graner was not a regular guard on my unit and I vowed to stay clear of him. All I wanted was to be left alone to get on with my renewed efforts to have that tiny sample of clothing DNA-tested and hide in my letters to people on the outside.
I would have gone without any further contact with this guard had it not been that the inmate whom he assaulted filed a complaint against him, citing me as a witness. I had no clue he had done any of this until I was confronted by a very angry Mr Graner. Had I anything to contribute, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway, as the officer sent to investigate claims of abuse is usually a co-worker of the accused staff member. Which is what happened here. The investigating officer ‘pulled’ the complaint slip. But not before he had let Mr Graner read it and keep a copy.
I was cleaning the common area just beside the shower stalls when Graner approached me. The man he had scalded with the coffee had assaulted a 62-year-old female nurse without any provocation, he told me. As he said this I was filling a bucket with water from a small utility closet with my back to him. I turned around nervously at the sound of his angry voice.
As I straightened up and wiped my hands dry on a towel torn to rags for cleaning the showers, I suddenly felt unsure of myself. Someone yelling at me when I was not wearing handcuffs made me feel very vulnerable. Anger is a free man’s luxury. Any prisoner knows that. If I hit him in anger, I would get time added on to my sentence, a beating and a year’s disciplinary time. If he hit me, I would just bleed a little and hope he would find someone else to go after. I had managed to get transferred once as a result of abuse allegations; there was no way it would happen again. He could have owned my world.
So, I just stood there looking at him as neutrally as I could before replying, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’ He then ran through the complaints made by the scalded inmate. When he’d finished, he asked me if I was a ‘rat’ whom he had to watch every second to keep me from running to the administration with each new incident. I replied that I was not going to get involved in anyone else’s complaints and I was on no one’s side.
He challenged me, but I just said I was staying out of things. He retorted that I had no room for error now and any sign I showed of being a ‘rat’ would be punished severely – as would my getting involved with things that were none of my business. I said nothing and tried to get back to my work. But I could feel him standing there looking at me and thinking about what to do with me. I hoped I was projecting the right mix of neutrality and fear for him to let me pass without further incident. I had seen how he enjoyed dragging that man out of his cell. I had seen the grin on his face when he’d ‘stepped’ on the prisoner’s back as they had hauled him down the metal stairs. I waited quietly for him to act and then, finally, he left.
I did not have to wait long for my chance to talk to Walter Ogrod to ask him why he had allowed me to treat him so badly when he was seeking my help. He came into the exercise cage next to mine one warm May afternoon and sat down in the corner furthest away from me. I was sitting cross-legged with my back up as straight as I could make it. Years of sitting in bed makes your spine ache for correct posture. I was also on a regime of running around for about three hours a day working, which was exhausting me. I told myself it was the aftermath of the rocky times I had just been through, but I was feeling tired all the time and I thought this might help.
So, I was sitting there leaning against the exercise cage post, which made a nice firm support for my sore back. The sun was out and there was a pleasant warm breeze in the air. Sometimes Pennsylvania can be the sweetest place in the world. I was feeling too tired to do much more than chill out from the spent energy and gentle breezes that take your thoughts away.
Now, without intending to, Walter was making noises like he was struggling to breathe – I think his nose must have been broken sometime – and when he started doing this I got really angry for about two seconds. The noise he made was breaking into my emptying thoughts. Yet, when I looked over at him fiercely, he just put his head down. He wore these thick, dark-framed prison glasses, and his dark hair, which was uncombed and greasy, lay across his head at odd angles from where he’d been lying on his bed. Indented into the skin on the left-hand side of his face were also marks from the ridge on his pillowcase.
I knew he was doing a lot of sleeping, as he was taking medication four times a day. I regularly saw the nurse stop at a lot of the Death Row cells to hand out the ‘little blue express’ pills – that was the phrase used to describe the tranquillisers or psychotropic medicines some men asked to take in order to blur their worlds. We’d say that a man zonked out on these drugs had ‘checked out’ and gotten on the ‘little blue express’ to Rockview prison, where the execution chamber is located.
In the minutes that I sat looking at this man, he never moved. He was slumber-drowsy, sure, but he was also obviously on medication. His hands trembled and there was a white resin on his parched lips. He was over six feet tall and he weighed more than 240 lbs. Doping someone that size takes a lot of little blue pills. So I said to him, ‘Those Haldol pills you’re taking, combined with that Prolixin, they’re making you too groggy. Are you getting headaches all the time?’
He looked at me a long moment and nodded before saying, ‘The nurse is giving me something for them.’
I told him that, no matter what they gave him, as long as he lay in his bed and didn’t drink any water while recycled air was pumped into his cell he would dry out like a prune. And if he just lay there all the time he was bound to feel awful when he moved around as the pills were slowing down his heart rate.
‘I don’t have a TV and my radio can’t get reception.’ Walter’s reply was so meek that I barely heard him.
Now the reality hit me. The reason this man had allowed himself to be turned to mush with a handful of pills was because he could not escape his daily life through television or music. But I still felt no pity for him. He was like so many others – even the so-called gangsters watched endless soap operas and daytime chat shows, filling their every waking thought with television. Having spent the previous fifteen years chain-smoking and watching TV, one Death Row inmate dying of lung cancer in Graterford prison refused medical treatment unless he could take his television into hospital with him. He died a few months later, aged fifty-one, but only after they had given in and taken his television to him.
This man, Walter, just wanted something easy to rid his mind of what he had done to that little girl, I reckoned. I had told him that he needed to get off those pills, and that was all I was going to say to him.
Then another inmate in a cage across from us spoke up.
‘Walt,’ he said, ‘tell him about the guys over on Death Row on G-Block who almost killed your brother!’
I recognised this man as a fellow inmate who had arrived not long before. I didn’t know his name, but we were on nodding terms and he seemed friendly enough. I turned to him and said, ‘You don’t go to Death Row for “almost” killing someone.’
The man then crouched down to the same level as me and said in a no-nonsense way, ‘I told Walt he should talk to you because you helped some other guys get their cases flipped on appeal.’ Then he added, ‘Walter said you ignored him when he asked for help with his book.’
I didn’t like being called out like that; even on Death Row no one wants to act like they are better than everyone else. I especially did not want to give the impression of superiority, as within weeks of my arrival I had been given a job while other men who had been here for three-plus years just sat locked up in their cells.
‘I didn’t feel like being yelled at by the guard for passing things to anyone in the library,’ I retorted. ‘Is that OK with you?’
The other inmate was a young white guy of about twenty-five, who had committed a robbery-homicide. He had tattoos all over his body, most of them white-supremacist related. He kept to himself usually, spending hours in his cell drawing complicated pictures of dragons and bare-breasted women. I had seen the works of art he had created on his wall and on his desk when I was outside sweeping up. Lots of anger.
Walter spoke up as if the flow of conversation had not moved on from what he had last been thinking about. ‘They didn’t kill my brother, but they sure tried!’ he said. ‘He was stabbed over and over.’ Then he paused before adding, ‘My sister-in-law-to-be, she was the one they murdered.’
There was this pleading expression in his eyes, which got me on the defensive. I couldn’t bear to look at him, so I glanced over to the other inmate instead.
‘I guess you’re innocent, too?’ I said sarcastically.
The other guy sighed before replying, ‘I ain’t playing you, Nick. That man’ – pointing towards Walter – ‘is living a nightmare. Those men who tried to kill his brother are next door on G-Block and they’ve been grinding him up for years.’ Then he added, before straightening up, ‘I have been in the cell next to Walt for a year now and not once have I caught him in a lie.’
He stood up and walked towards the rear of his cage before turning back to talk to me. ‘I tried to catch him like I was the prosecutor. Look at him. Do you really think he would make a good liar?’ Then, addressing me over his shoulder, ‘Do me a favour and just listen to what happened to him. Then maybe you’ll see what I mean.’
Again, not wanting to become caught up in the misery of others, I replied sternly, ‘I am not here to put anyone on trial. If you’re so convinced he’s innocent, why don’t you tell me the story, Mr Big Mouth?’ I knew he would stop walking then.
Kevin, as it turned out he was called, sat down cross-legged on the side of his cage nearest to me and addressed me face-to-face.
The story of Walter Ogrod began with the violent attack on Walter’s brother Gregory in the home they shared with his brother’s girlfriend. The boys had been raised by their lone mother in the north-east section of Philadelphia, in a rough neighbourhood, which had fallen helplessly apart during the crack epidemic.
Walter was neither a drug addict nor an alcoholic, but he had a low IQ and was deemed socially inadequate. This, coupled with his physical appearance, meant growing up was not easy for Walter.
Now, Walter’s brother worked with a man who did landscaping in the area, and sometimes Walter helped too. It was physical work Walter was able to do, for a fair rate of pay. But one day in April 1992 a money squabble erupted between Walter’s brother and the other man, Hackett, during which they nearly came to blows and Hackett left for the evening swearing vengeance. Later that same night he and another man, Spence, broke into the Ogrods’ house while they were all asleep. Walter’s brother’s 16-year-old fiancée was later found dead from multiple stab wounds, and his brother nearly did not survive the attack. The police investigating the murder of the girl asked Walter to come in and make a statement, as he had been witness to the arguments between his brother and Hackett. So, he walked in the front doors of the Philadelphia police headquarters as a family member helping with a police inquiry and a few hours later he had confessed to the murder of a child, which had happened on his street several years earlier.
As I sat listening to what Kevin was saying, in my mind I pictured Walt walking into the police building. They call it the ‘Round House’ locally because it’s shaped like several large Pringles potato-chip cans stacked next to each other. Hard to break out of a place like that as you’re always going around and around, either up and up or way down, into the cells at the bottom. I had been beaten up in that place and I remembered well the copper taste of blood on my swollen and broken lips. I was not happy thinking that far in the past, so I drew myself back into the unfolding horrors of Walter’s story.
Now, Kevin had all my attention by this point, as I really believed that he had made a considerable effort to separate fact from fiction. I also simply wanted to know what happened next.
The police in charge of the Hackett murder investigation had noted that a little girl who had been murdered years before, back in July 1988, had lived across the street from Walter. At one point they said to him, ‘Did you have anything to do with the abduction of Barbara Jean Horn, the little girl they found dumped by the kerbside in an empty TV box?’
Walter answered honestly: ‘Yes.’
He intended to tell them that he had once been questioned on the matter. But he never got the chance. As soon as he said the word ‘Yes’, the investigating policeman stood up and went to get his partner. By the time they came back into the room he had already told his partner that Walter had just confessed to the murder. Now he demanded that Walter repeat what he’d just said about killing the child to the second officer. Walter tried to make out he’d said no such thing, but they kept pressing him.
Eventually Walter made a confession. But it was like this man confessing to blowing up the Hindenburg airship back in 1937. As Kevin pointed out to me, ‘Look at him. Do you really think that someone with a documented childhood mental disorder would have fifteen minutes of lucidity and brilliance during which he outwits the entire law enforcement community and cleans up after his crime, then falls back into being a retard?’
At which point, Walter spoke up. ‘I’m not retarded. I’m just slow because I can’t talk right.’
His interruption made me cringe as suddenly I realised we had been having an entire conversation about him without ever really acknowledging his presence. But he was not so much concerned with our pondering his guilt; he just wanted us to know that technically he was disabled, not retarded. I wished he would stop making that noise, though, as now I felt so ugly and shallow for having gotten so angry at him for it.
I started trying to show this man more respect as Kevin continued. ‘Walt, tell him what happened at your first trial.’
In rote-like fashion, Walter began, ‘They said “not guilty” to all the charges . . . then five minutes later this man on the jury yelled out that I was guilty.’
I remembered that the newspapers had highlighted another issue. ‘I thought his trial was argued over the use of jailhouse informants? Wasn’t there this guy they called “The Monsignor” because he’d heard more confessions in prison than a priest!’
‘That all came out at his second trial,’ replied Kevin, ‘when they let the state re-try him for the same charges after that jury had voted to acquit him.’
I couldn’t believe it. No way would a jury vote eleven to one to acquit a man of murder and then one juror rescind so they could retry him. No way would they put someone on trial a second time using a jailhouse informant to convict him.
Kevin looked at me as if I should be the last one to disbelieve that abuses in court happen. ‘It gets worse,’ he continued.
When I asked what he meant, he gave me a bullet-point list of what had happened to Walter in between the first and second trials:
1. Having his medication stopped after the first trial which then made him unable to talk calmly in court.
2. His mother dying while he was in prison awaiting trial, but he only found out a week later as that same prosecutor had withheld the information from him so he could not attend the funeral.
3. Having his fate decided by two jailhouse informants who made up a series of so-called ‘jailhouse confession gatherings’ to get themselves out of jail.
4. His only discovering in the courtroom at his second trial that the woman who had just died was his adoptive mother, not his biological mother.
5. His own brother running out of the courtroom at the revelation and Walter becoming so stressed that he laughed out loud nervously – which was interpreted as the heartless mocking of a cold killer.
By now both Kevin and I were fighting back the tears as the harsh reality of Walter’s situation began to sink in. Then Kevin said out of nowhere, ‘Fuck you,’ before adding quickly, ‘I never said I wasn’t guilty. I gotta live with what I did, not what you think of me.’
I had to respect him for at least not being one of those men who go around saying the usual ‘Oh yeah, I am innocent, too!’ I felt bad that I had hit him with that line earlier and yet I was too unsettled by Walter’s story to care.
Meanwhile, Walter just sat there, watched and nodded as Kevin recounted each part of his story. He sort of physically rose up and then settled back down again to the flow of the story, reacting whenever Kevin nearly told it wrong. I knew I was watching him relive each moment vividly. I have studied the complexities of human development and no one is that good an actor, especially not someone of Walter’s limited capabilities. Now, sitting in that cage next to him, I realised that Kevin was telling the truth. But not only was Walter innocent, he was trapped in a mental illness far worse than anything I had had to overcome.
I looked over to Kevin and said, ‘You paying me for the work?’
He never batted an eyelid before replying, ‘Fuck you, white boy. Be like that if you want. I did my part.’
I went back into my cell from the yard, washed my face and looked at myself in the piece of metal bolted to the wall, which served as my mirror. It’s like looking at your reflection in a blurry set of eyeglasses: you sort of know what you look like. Maybe. I knew I was being sucked into Walter’s story. Why else was I crying now as I imagined how screwed up you have to be to sit there for a whole hour as two men discuss your every humiliating moment? You are so deadened to new hurts that you stay hopeful that someone will finally understand you enough to tell your tale correctly. So that maybe, after years of constantly being asked ‘Why?’, the truth will emerge.
I felt so ashamed that I had intended to do exactly what Kevin had accused me of doing. It was not as if I were in any way superior to Walter. I was a self-absorbed person who had had the nerve to look down at others while I myself sat condemned for being a sick rapist-killer. I never did ask him my question.