A Saint on Death Row (6 page)

Stefania found a translator, who helped her overcome the language barrier, and the correspondence grew quickly into
“questa bella e profonda amicizia”
(this beautiful and profound friendship), as Stefania called it.
“Lui era come mio figlio. Lui era come mio fratello.”
(He was like my child. He was like my brother.) Two people with what might have seemed an ocean of difference between them managed to connect almost immediately.

Stefania began to tell other members of the Community about her discovery of this engaging correspondent trapped on Death Row in Texas. Other members of the Community wrote to Dominique, as well as to other Texas Death Row inmates, to offer friendship. Soon enough, Dominique, as well as some of his fellow prisoners, had a growing circle of friends.
Surely, thought these new friends, there must be something more we can do for these men. As time went by, members of the Community began to visit the prison—not an easy thing to do because the State of Texas restricts severely visits to its Death Row. But a young priest of Sant'Egidio, Marco Gnavi, was able to visit as a religious counselor; and the resourceful Mario Marazziti was able to visit as a member of the press.

In November 1999, Mario attended a San Francisco conference of Americans working to end the death penalty. He had been invited to this conference by Sister Helen Prejean, the author of
Dead Man Walking.
There he met Sheila Murphy. Not long after—in June 2000—I met Sheila for the first time in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere. Sheila, a retired judge from Chicago, who is never to be found without some project in hand, had brought a class of Chicago law students with her to learn something about Roman law, ancient and modern. Of course, she would soon rope me into giving them all a tour of historic Rome—with an emphasis on legal aspects, please. That summer, just before she returned to the United States, she herself would be roped in: Mario would ask her to represent Dominique in his final appeals, for which the Community of Sant'Egidio had begun to collect contributions.

When we were introduced, Sheila Murphy put out her hand in a frank, comradely way, as if we were already old friends. She knew more of me than I of her. A few years older than I, she had grown up Irish Catholic in the self-congratulatory Protestant community of Colorado Springs and had suffered
the taunts and disdain that accompany minority status in a hidebound town. She had read my book
How the Irish Saved Civilization
and felt it had finally justified her before that community of her childhood.

The handshake also told me that she believed herself the equal of any man but that she was a genial woman who got a kick out of male carryings-on, in other words a woman with a bunch of brothers. How can one gesture tell you so much about a stranger? It sometimes can, especially when the stranger has a lot of red hair piled on top of her head and a smile that is both open and crooked.

Despite her upbringing in the Rockies, Sheila speaks in an enviably credible Chicago accent, as if she'd been born in the Windy City and the winds themselves had flattened her vowels. Sheila is also a confessed alcoholic with a long history of success against addiction. One of the things I have come to admire most about her is her wanton openness on this subject. “Oh, you're a recovering alcoholic, too!” she will exclaim merrily to a fellow sufferer.

When the Community of Sant'Egidio invited her to represent Dominique in his final appeals, she signed on immediately. This would not be a cakewalk, not by any means. Before being called to the bench, Sheila had handled capital cases as a defense attorney, and none of her clients had ever been sentenced to death. But she was not a Texas lawyer, the commute between Chicago and Houston alone could do her in, she was supposed to be living in leisurely semiretirement. What on
earth was she doing? she had to ask herself. She didn't really have an adequate answer to her own question.

So what. Sometimes there are things we have to go through, anyhow. Sheila forged ahead instinctively, as she often had in the course of her life. Where this would end she had no idea. Then, in the fall of 2003, I had lunch with Sheila in Chicago while on a publicity tour for one of my books. Where was I going after Chicago, Sheila asked. I gave her my schedule, which ended in Houston not long before Christmas. “Then you can visit Dominique,” she exclaimed. Book tours, which may sound glamorous to those who have never gone on one, are grueling exercises, a little like forced marches. I had already been out for many weeks and was looking forward to that last day in Houston, the return trip to my family in New York, and putting up my Christmas tree. Except for an unlikely accident—that the publicist who had arranged the tour was a Texan—I doubt Houston would have been on my schedule at all. Almost the last thing I wanted to do was visit a man on Death Row with whom I would have nothing in common. I foresaw an extra day in Houston and an embarrassing hour of trying vainly to find enough conversation.

But, looking across the table at Sheila's expectant face, I found I could not say no.

The first meeting between Dominique and Sheila Murphy gave off no adumbrations of instant karma. Dominique, a prisoner now for nearly eight years, had learned to be distrustful of lawyers; and even this late-middle-aged one, a woman whose sympathy is so effortlessly engaged that it seems to spill from her like mother's milk, was going to have to work hard to earn the confidence of this young convict, who had come to be skeptical, even cynical, toward outsiders who came to visit him. Many, both lawyers and sometime supporters,
^∗
had come and gone by this point; many more had shown themselves
to have their own self-serving agendas unconnected to Dominique's crying needs.

Dominique did exempt some repeat visitors from his silent scorn, especially occasional visitors from Rome, exotic to him at first, then gradually welcomed for their evident seriousness and solidarity with his suffering. And he had come to have positive feelings toward David Atwood, founder of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, who turned up regularly, offering books and other simple services, and seemed unlikely to go away. Dave, a retired chemical engineer, has dedicated his retirement to the service of Death Row inmates, their families, and the families of their victims. He is an even-tempered, mild-mannered man but quietly unswerving, even relentless in his dedication. He would help bridge the gulf that yawned between Sheila's good heart and Dominique's distrust by insisting to Dominique on more than one occasion that this ebullient female judge with the Chicago accent was O.K.

Sheila first met Dominique in the summer of 2000 on her birthday, August 18. She was not his chief attorney, nor could she be; that role had been awarded to court-appointed lawyers Mike Charlton and Gary Taylor, who could not be removed from Dominique's case except by a judge's order. Sheila was initially surprised to find Dominique especially keen on retrieving the videotape that he assumed had been made automatically by the security camera of the store in front of which Andrew Lastrapes had been shot nearly eight years earlier.

Dominique understood that whatever had been videotaped that night had long since been taped over. But he had also read
that it was possible to restore by electronic manipulation some semblance of the taped-over images. He had not been able to get Charlton and Taylor's investigator, nor the investigator who had preceded him, to look into the matter. However hopeless such a quest might have proved, Dominique's urgency proved to Sheila that, although Dominique was unwilling to rat on the real murderer, he was eager to let the evidence speak for itself.

Sheila, however, could find nothing: the store manager looked at her blankly and shrugged. No one worked there who had worked there in 1992; no one knew what had become of the old tapes; no one knew anything that could give Sheila the least help. She returned to Dominique empty-handed.

But gradually, almost without realizing that it was happening, Sheila overcame Dominique's suspicion of her by leaving the subject of his case and talking about her family, especially about her husband and her children, a son, Patrick, and a daughter, Brigid, both a little older than Dominique. It was an intuitive strategy, one that any law school would advise its students against: under no circumstances do you open your personal life to your clients! But Sheila, a refreshingly open woman, impelled to candor by her own temperament as well as by her experience of fighting her addiction, can talk about her family members almost as if they are there with her in the room. Dominique was fascinated and amazed: here was a mother who had an easy and natural relationship with her grown children, a mutually respectful relationship that knew no rigidity, no strictures, but was full of humor, elasticity, love,
and… pleasure. To Dominique, the casual chat of this woman on the other side of the glass hit him with all the impact of a revelation.

Tentatively, Dominique began to ask Sheila questions— about how she talked to Brigid and Patrick and how they talked to her. Though only dimly realizing what she was doing at first, Sheila was holding up to Dominique a dream beyond all his imaginings: she was giving him a practical education in the nuts and bolts of healthy family life, a realm that lay outside anything in his experience. Finally, Sheila succeeded in closing the circle that was slowly uniting her and Dominique: she asked Dominique about his family. He told her briefly of the many horrors and of his concern for his brothers, but then he found himself concentrating on the paternal grandmother he had loved and lost—the one person who had always believed in him—and the immense loneliness that had overwhelmed his nine-year-old world when she died. That day, Sheila realized, Dominique was trying to keep her there, prolonging her visit with whatever conversational gambit he could come up with. His decision earlier in that visit to cross the line into his private suffering—to tell her about his grandmother—had sealed their new relationship.

Sheila found herself giving Dominique as much attention as she gave her own children, sending him postcards and phoning when she couldn't visit. Eventually, she asked her son to visit Dominique. Sheila would always think of that visit as miraculous: the on-duty staff unaccountably allowed Patrick to remain far beyond the customary hour, and in that time an
irrevocable transformation occurred. By the end of the visit, Dominique and Patrick were calling each other “brother”— and they both meant it. Dominique now knew himself to be a member of a family a family that wanted him.

There was another person whom Sheila was able to introduce to Dominique: her law clerk, Andrew Lofthouse, three years younger and three inches taller than Dominique, a middle-class, midwestern white boy with the rangy body of a tennis player (as opposed to Dominique's slightly squatter, more earthbound appearance), with whom Dominique could have expected to have little in common. Livingston was the first prison Andy ever found himself in—though he lacks the least hint of straight-laced rectitude and will refer obliquely to “my youthful indiscretions.” It was precisely Andy's zany playfulness, the dance of lights in his eyes that says, “I'm not always a good boy,” that appealed to Dominique, who possessed an obvious and irrepressible naughtiness of his own. Much of their bonding revolved around the usual male talk of sports and girls.

But if the predictable interests of men in their twenties helped the two to reach some common ground, Andy was perhaps the first person to get a fix on how intelligent Dominique was—and how manipulative he could be. “He figured this guy flew all the way down here, drove all the way up here, waited in line, this guy obviously wants to see me. It's just what people do to go on visits there. It's not easy to get to Livingston, Texas. And Dominique knew it and he had been having visits for eight or nine years by the time I got there; and so when I
got there, I was one of a long line. And he knew how to manipulate every interview that he had. And he'd say in his letters, ‘Well, I'm going to have a visit’ or ‘I need a visit,’ and it was almost like his visits were his business meetings and he was the CEO. And I didn't recognize that until the second or third time I went down there. Because at first I thought he was desperate to meet me but the second or third time I went down I realized that the guy had a plan for this. These are his only outlets to an outside world. And I think Dominique over time certainly learned to trust me but I think he also respected me [because] I didn't really fall for a lot of his bullshit that a lot of the other visitors do.”

By calling some of Dominique's initial bluffs, Andy was rewarded not only with Dominique's respect but with a mutual friendship that became deeply rewarding for both men. We can almost listen in on their evolving conversation:

“Why did you lie to me the first time?”

“Down here you don't know who you can trust, and I didn't know if I could trust you. I didn't want to invest everything in you if you were going to just walk away. I didn't want to get any false hope that people might really care about my case this time.”