In June 2001 I volunteered to take some expensive new medications to fight off the hepatitis C infection given to me back in 1993 after some dental work at Huntingdon. I’d only found out I had it when I went into hospital for the food poisoning in 1998, but not until new blood tests were taken in 2000 was it confirmed. The cost of these new drugs was to be nearly $1,000 a month for twelve to eighteen months of treatment.
Western medical philosophy in treating an infection like this is: ‘Nearly kill the host and the virus will die first.’ So they gave me a powerful cocktail of Interferon and Ribavirin. But I did not react well. I became lethargic, sleeping fourteen to eighteen hours most days; I had constant colds and flu; I lost nearly thirty pounds. My eyes looked like someone had punched me repeatedly and my skin became sallow. I was taking poison and it showed.
My pee smelled like the stale urine in a rail station stairwell. Everything I ate or drank tasted like copper. My kidneys had been permanently damaged by previous drug and alcohol abuse and my system became so toxic that, after months of agony, I went blind for three days. I told the staff they were giving me too much medicine, but they said that, based on my body weight, I should be able to handle it. They were wrong.
One evening in August 2002, I was sitting by my window in yet another new cell, in L-Block, thinking about how far my life journey had taken me. By now there were over 220 Death Row men in Greene County prison, spread over three cell blocks, in contrast to the twenty-seven men I had started with in 1982. It was horrifying to think how many people they were prepared to kill for crimes committed decades ago. I had the radio on in the background, as it was my only enjoyment – watching television gave me a headache, and, though my sight was back, my eyes ached so much I could not read. While the world outside baked in the heat, the vented air pumped into my cell made it so cold that I could breathe on the window and write in the mist on the glass. I was writing ‘Adinoe’ over and over again – the name of my childhood imaginary friend, an expression of ‘I don’t know’. Then on to the radio came a song, ‘Let Him Fly’ by the country singer Patty Griffin, which seemed to pull me right out of my thoughts. It was the third time or so I had heard it that day but suddenly its words gave me direction. I was not prepared to go through life in a cell in the full realisation that the life I longed for was not going to be. I knew what I had to do.
I had lived as free mentally, and was as well adapted emotionally as anyone could be, having spent over twenty years locked up alone in a cell. I did not want to die in agony from my illness and I felt proud of what I had achieved as a person, despite everything. But even I knew when enough was enough. So I decided to make peace with the world and say goodbye. After that very beautiful song had finished, I turned off the radio, went over to my desk, took out a legal pad and pen and began to write.
My letter was addressed to Judge James T. Giles, the judge in charge of my appeals, beseeching him to understand that I wished to terminate my appeals. I knew what I was doing: seeking to have my records transmitted to the Governor of Pennsylvania for me to be executed. As I poured out the words on paper, seeking to let go of my life, I felt so many horrible things inside. I was letting my family down, I was selling out, I was quitting. And yet while feeling all of this, I also felt so much compassion for myself and how I could stop my torment. I could be sure, one way or the other, that things were definitely over. Either I was going to die in their hands, or I was somehow going to change it all. I had no way to know this was the lone act that would set in motion my release. All I knew as I wrote the words was that I had suffered enough and I was done paying for what I had not done.
I put the letter in an envelope addressed to Judge Giles in the federal courts in Philadelphia, sealed it and placed it in a candy box alongside some loose photographs. The envelope was longer than everything else in the box, I noted, so I would be able to lay my hands on it easily, without sight if need be. Then I put the box in a paper bag under my bed and started making my plans.
I had a great sense that I was finally taking control of my life in a way that no one else had either the ability or the nerve to do. There were a lot of things to wrap up with some important people in my life.
I had a confession to make and I had a situation to deal with that would be brutal on both my family and myself. I realised that many others were going to pay for my decision. Yet both my heart and my brain kept screaming over and over: end this madness.
I decided to cease all medical treatments and begin trying to heal myself with just food and rest. And I knew that I would have to forgo helping anyone else, as I was about to choose ‘the back door’ for my own exit.
For by this time I had also promised help to the Death Row barber, Ernie Simmons. Sadly I gave Ernie back his legal work, asking him to please understand that I was just too overwhelmed by my brother’s death and my own illness to take on anything else. I even let things go with Walter, as I was too sick to visit the library with him.
Ernie said that he understood and even made a joke about me being part of the white men’s conspiracy to rob him of both his youth and his beauty because a black man like him was just too pretty to be set free.
I looked him right in the face and said, ‘If I ever were to get out of here, I swear to God I’d come back for you.’ We each made light of the moment, but he had no idea how much I truly meant it.
By that time I had known Ernie Simmons for nearly twelve years, but not the details of his case until we were housed opposite each other on L-Block and he began to cut my hair. Ernie had spent most of his adult life in and out of prison for petty crimes to which he had always pleaded guilty, but in 1992, despite no evidence linking him to the crime, he had been sent to Death Row for beating an elderly woman to death – something he strenuously denied.
Long before reading his case, I had a gut feeling he was innocent as in all the years I had known him he had never once lied to me about the case. And I mean not on any level. I could not say that of any of the others in there. That told me a lot about the man.
Back in my cell, I drifted into mindless hours of radio and televised sports and let ‘time’ go by. I had learned over the years to use this sort of switch in my head just to get lost in my daydreams. I could blink away a week or a month with very little effort at all. I still can. The only problem was that, after a while, I began to realise that whatever I was hiding from only acted as a sort of bridge to the bigger moment I was headed towards with each lost day. I could play my little game but time never loses.
It wasn’t until mid-December 2002 that I sent my letter to Judge Giles. I also had this photo of myself taken, which I wanted sent out after my death to show what I looked like at the end. I knew that it would be a minimum of sixty days before I was brought to court to be put through a competency hearing, so if everything went according to plan I would be killed by the state in either February or March 2003.
The day I mailed out that letter, I had been lying awake on my bed from early morning. I was wearing only boxer shorts and a T-shirt, the air in my cell was brittle and dry, and the heat made it hard to sleep on the plastic mattress: you roll around all night while your body sweats on to the sheet, which then becomes clammy and wet because nothing is absorbed by the mattress. I made up my mind mid-turn to send the letter. I was feeling annoyed and agitated as I knelt down to fish it out of its paper bag.
Then, having stuck it in the slot of my door, I got back into bed and lay there, thinking, waiting, listening.
The morning shift officer finished taking the head count and then I heard the ‘pfft’ sound of envelopes being pulled out of thin slots in metal doors. I sat up in recognition. It was the guard collecting the prisoners’ mail. I peered through my door down on to the officer walking along the tier of cells below mine, then making towards the far stairs. I nearly pulled the letter out of its slot, but then I went back to bed and lay down. I heard the guard’s footsteps coming closer and closer, followed by the sound of the envelope being pulled. I’d really done it. I promptly went to sleep.
Over the next few weeks, though I was sorely tempted, I never once checked in that box to see if I had actually sent the letter. I left it all to this kind of make-believe chance, so that somehow what I’d done was not real. Maybe I didn’t want to acknowledge that I had quit fighting and that I would go to my grave branded a rapist-murderer.
I often wonder if the other three men who volunteered to be executed in Pennsylvania before me had dealt with such feelings. The first had been Keith Zettlemoyer, who had been put to death by lethal injection at his own request on 2 May 1995. The first man to be executed in Pennsylvania since 1962, he had been in constant physical pain from the broken hip he had sustained after a guard had pushed him down a flight of metal stairs in Huntingdon during shower movement. He was also in constant mental anguish from his crime – he had killed a childhood friend.
The second man I had also known personally: Gary Heidnik. This man was insane. He’d held six female captives chained up in his basement, killed one of them and then mixed her flesh up with dog food and fed it to the others in order to make them super-fertile to his ‘seed’, as he thought that God had sent him to kill and then create life.
I was four cells away from him in Pittsburgh prison and I remember how he used to wait until there was a power cut – so there was no ‘interference’, as he put it, from radios and TVs – before performing this hideous rendition of the last hours of his victim’s life and his power over her. In the silence he would also provide a simultaneous voiceover to his falsetto imitations of his captives discussing his own insanity. I still get a chill thinking of this man and his Christ complex. You tell me, how could the courts have accepted his word that he was sane and allowed him to be executed? He also died by lethal injection, on 6 July 1999.
I never met the third volunteer, Leon Moser, a mental patient who had been sent to Death Row for killing his entire family in a bloody shooting rampage. He was executed on 15 August 1995, before the results of his competency hearing had even come through.
These men’s stories therefore left me with no real navigational aid with which to face my own chosen end. I did not tell any of the other prisoners of my decision, as it could make them suddenly feel very vulnerable. Death Row is a brutal, cold world in which men act as if your personal choice to die does greater damage to their survival than the fact that they themselves have killed other human beings.
My one major concern was telling my mother. I wanted desperately to tell her face-to-face why I felt it was better to die on a single day of pain than continue to live until all the suffering ate up what was left of me. I also owed it to her to tell her before she found out from the lawyers or the press. So I wrote asking her to come and see me before the year-end holidays, nothing else. What with Marty gone we would have enough to say.
I sat in my cell in frustration as the hours passed on the day my mother was supposed to be coming. She was driving nearly 500 miles from Philadelphia to Greene County and by 3 p.m. she wasn’t there. I was upset, as visiting hours ended at 3.30 p.m., and I was just wondering why she hadn’t turned up when two officers arrived to ‘dress me out’ for a visit.
Thankfully, I had two decent guards. I flew through the routines and by about 3.15 p.m. I was in the visiting booth. In the few moments I sat there waiting for my mom, I felt so stressed. And then, just like that, I stopped caring. What could have taken hours to explain would now have to be said in a few minutes. When she came in she apologised as she’d thought holiday visits went on until 5 p.m., so had left home later than usual and then got caught up in traffic. I said it did not matter, I was just glad she was OK. Then, ‘I have something very important to say, so please forgive me for doing it like this.’ We both sat still for a second. ‘I made such an effort to be good for you, Mom.’ We looked each other in the eyes. ‘I have kept this from you for years now, but I have hepatitis C. I had some treatment but it failed and I have been diagnosed as terminally ill.’
She said nothing, so I went on, ‘Mom, don’t be angry with me. You have to promise to forgive me.’
‘Forgive you for what, sport?’
Her use of that old pet name made me falter, but I continued, ‘Mom, I’m gonna die anyway so I’ve asked to be executed.’
She just ignored me. ‘You know, you really don’t look good . . . you feeling OK, Nicky? I bet you’re tired and you could use some of my cooking!’
Then she started telling me about this fantastic meal she’d prepared last week and how she’d cook the same for me when I was set free. But I interrupted her.
‘Mom! I said I’m gonna die!’
She looked at me and, again ignoring everything I’d just said, continued, ‘You look tired, honey.’ Then, with a very forced smile but warm, tender eyes brimming with tears, ‘Don’t worry. I’ll be back to see you for your birthday next May. I’ll make sure I come early next time and we can talk about it then.’
The guard approached and politely told her that visiting time was over. I pressed my fingers into the metal screen in order to feel the tiny ‘bubbles’ of her flesh for the few moments her fingertips were held there. Then, as she turned to go, I brought my fingers to my lips and felt the warmth from her touch leave them as I pressed them to my mouth. They tasted of the chemicals they used to clean the showers with back on the housing units.
I had just hurt someone so badly that she had gone into complete denial. I wished I could have taken back the last ten minutes of her life. Then I realised that, now I had told the one person to whom I owed it to say that I was giving up the battle, I no longer needed to bow my head in sorrow. Ten minutes later, when the guards came to bring me back to L-Block, I was composed and ready to see my plan through to the end.