Authors: Michael W. Cuneo
On the face of it, then, Darrell’s conversion was hardly exceptional. In southwest Missouri, no less than elsewhere across the country, outlaws were always finding religion after landing in prison. Sometimes they’d lose it just as rapidly if they were lucky enough to get released and then find it again during a subsequent stint behind bars. Among detention officers at the Taney County jail, clanging-door salvation of this sort was something of a standing joke. “Most of us never took it too seriously,” one officer recently said. “We had a judge say to us once, ‘God must be working right in your jail because there sure are a lot of people getting converted in there.’ But don’t ever think we were fooled about how long these conversions usually lasted.”
More than a few people in local law enforcement, however, saw Darrell’s conversion in a rather different light. Like Michelle Beth Katzenell, they believed that it was authentic—or at least gave every appearance of being so. One day Jack Merritt, in the vicinity anyway, decided he’d stop by the jailhouse and check up on Darrell’s spiritual condition. Jack was not necessarily averse to doing a little religious witnessing on the side.
“Darrell, your life’s not looking very good right now,” Jack said. “You’re probably going to get convicted on this and there’s a good chance you’re going to get the death penalty. Now I’ve always been taught, and I’ve always believed, that God is merciful and loving
and that if you truly repent, truly ask God for forgiveness, then God will forgive you, even for a triple murder.”
Darrell sat on his bunk quietly for a few minutes, looking straight at Jack.
“I know this to be true, Jack,” he finally said. “I know you’re right. I’ve already done it. I’ve already begged forgiveness of God and I know that God has forgiven me.”
Years later, Jack was still able to recall the scene in vivid detail.
“Now there’s lots of jailhouse conversions and I’m generally suspicious of them,” he said during a conversation at his church one evening. “But Darrell spoke with such amazing peace and tranquility and confidence that I honestly believed he had it in him to repent and seek God’s forgiveness. Had he truly done it? I can’t say for sure but I wouldn’t be surprised. It was really amazing. It left an impression on me.”
F
OR LEXIE THERE
was no doubt whatsoever: she knew that Darrell was saved and she also knew that God was his lawyer. Her prayers had been answered. Her first-born son, her golden boy, the son she’d believed would one day become a preacher—he’d finally come home. After twenty years of running lost and wild, Darrell had come back to God. She’d always known God would take care of him, this is what she’d prayed for, and now, after more than twenty years, her prayers had been answered.
God is your lawyer
. Lexie believed Roscoe’s message every bit as much as Darrell did but this didn’t mean she was content simply sitting back and watching events unfold. The way she saw it, pull out all the stops, do everything possible—let God take care of the rest. She had a distant relative who was an attorney in Oklahoma City and she found out from him that the best criminal defense lawyer in the Springfield area was Bill Wendt. She then contacted some friends and family members who’d had personal dealings with Wendt and they vouched for him also. Finally she met with Wendt in person and he agreed to take on the case for a fee of
twenty-five thousand dollars. Lexie and R.J. had to reach deep but they succeeded in coming up with a substantial retainer. For someone of Wendt’s stature it really wasn’t an exorbitant price.
Bill Wendt certainly wasn’t God, but in southwest Missouri—insofar as lawyers were concerned—he was widely regarded as the next best thing. He was a local legend, the most celebrated criminal defense attorney of his generation. In more than thirty years of practice he had represented close to a hundred people accused of murder or manslaughter. He hadn’t always won but he’d never gone down without putting on a good show. He had a reputation as a courtroom gunslinger, feisty and fearless, but as often as not it was his folksy charm, which he could call up with a wink and a smile, that won juries over to his side. Wendt prided himself on knowing juries, their prejudices and vulnerabilities, how far he could risk pushing a point, dissecting a witness, without losing their attention or confidence. He also prided himself on maintaining good community relations: after more than thirty years thrashing it out in court, he was still handshaking friendly with just about every judge in southwest Missouri, and most prosecutors as well. But the thing that made him proudest? Fifteen death-penalty cases under his belt to this point, and so far an unblemished record. Fifteen lives hanging in the balance, and not a single execution.
To those who knew him, it made a certain sense that Wendt should take Darrell as a client. He’d always been attracted to the big draw, the high-profile case, and in recent years especially, with retirement looming on the horizon, he’d found it increasingly difficult settling for anything less. He enjoyed a tough challenge, and Darrell’s case, given the strength of the state’s evidence, looked like it could be one of his toughest to date.
Wendt met with Darrell at the Taney County jail a few days after Michelle Beth Katzenell’s visit. He didn’t bother asking Darrell if he’d actually killed the Lawrences. In his long career he’d never asked clients if they were guilty of the crimes with which they’d been charged. “A waste of time,” he’d inform anyone curious about his approach. Darrell told Wendt he was grateful for his help but
that he was still counting on God to see him through. Afterward Wendt told the
News-Leader
, “He has done a great deal of soul searching and I’m very pleased with that.”
Darrell was indeed grateful but he was also supremely confident that victory was already in the bag. With God as his lawyer, as Roscoe had assured him, he had nothing to worry about. Having Bill Wendt on board was simply an added bonus, someone to help keep track of the paperwork.
What Darrell was most concerned about these days wasn’t his case, but rather his maddening inability to make contact with Mary. After being rebuffed by Barbara Epps the first time he’d tried phoning, he’d called again weekly but with no better luck. He kept getting Barbara on the line and no amount of pleading or cajoling would convince her to turn the phone over to her daughter.
“I love Mary and I only want to help her,” he told Barbara at one point.
“Well, there’s nothing you’ve done to help Mary,” she said.
“I confessed to get her just a slap on the wrist.”
“Your confession hasn’t done nothing for Mary.”
Barbara had a point. Mary was still facing a charge of hindering prosecution and she was also under a fair bit of emotional distress. Her first month or so after coming home from jail, she’d seemed almost shell-shocked to Barbara and Fred. They’d set her up for counseling at a clinic in Hollister and she’d also been prescribed antidepressants by a psychiatrist in Springfield. She was confused, conflicted. She felt intense love for Darrell but she was also afraid of him. Try as she might, there was no way she could simply wash away their bittersweet times together.
On the legal end Barbara and Fred had enlisted the help of local attorney Peter Rea. They’d known Rea for years. He was a colorful guy, funny, voluble, opinionated, the kind of guy Ozarkers usually referred to as a “character.” He had a large repertoire of offbeat stories, some of which may actually have been true. Years earlier, for example, when he was working out of the local prosecutor’s office, an older colleague apparently showed up one morning and
said, “Son, I’ve got bad news. I just learned there’s a contract out on you.” “That’s terrible,” Rea said, genuinely concerned. “Wait a minute,” the older colleague said. “It’s worse than you think. I found out the contract was only for fifty bucks. I felt so embarrassed for you, son, I threw in another ten bucks of my own.”
Right off the top Rea had strictly forbidden any communication between Mary and Darrell. No phone calls, no correspondence, no jailhouse visits. He confiscated the first nine of Darrell’s letters and deposited them, unopened, in his office. Darrell suspected something might be up when he didn’t hear back from Mary but he continued writing at a furious rate, most often to Mary, occasionally to Barbara, too. Concerned that his correspondence was somehow being intercepted, he would sometimes—much to the chagrin of Barbara and Fred—have his mother or his sister, Rita, hand-deliver letters to the Eppses’ household. Barbara had never seen such a torrent of letters. Inside of a month she had accumulated enough to fill a grocery sack. Darrell pouring his heart out on the written page: professing his undying love for Mary, crying for forgiveness, pleading for understanding—there seemed no end to it.
In mid-February, about a week after Darrell’s initial meeting with Bill Wendt, Peter Rea unaccountably eased up on the communication embargo. He said that Mary could read Darrell’s letters so long as she didn’t write back and that she could even speak with him occasionally on the phone.
Their first couple of conversations were a bit of a letdown for Darrell. He was thrilled to get Mary on the line at last, but she seemed distant and wary, frightened, perhaps, of her own feelings for him. He suspected that her parents might be hovering in the background, dampening the spirit of things, so one evening he called quite late, hoping to catch her after Barbara and Fred had already gone to bed. For Darrell it was thirty minutes of pure bliss. Mary seemed warmer, more relaxed. He thought they were almost back to where they’d once been. He breathed in every word she said, holding it, holding it, not wanting to exhale, trying to absorb everything to its fullest. He told her about his
conversion and asked if she’d seen the article in the
News-Leader
. She laughed and admitted that when she first read it, Darrell going on about God being his lawyer, she thought he’d gone crazy.
The next week Darrell phoned late again and it was more of the same. For twenty minutes he thought they were on a really good vibe, but then Barbara took the receiver and cut the conversation short, saying, “That’s it—no more phone calls.” She told him that she was afraid of him and that she hadn’t wanted him calling Mary to start with. But now with his preliminary hearing and depositions coming up, Mary’s talking to him any more was absolutely out of the question.
So that was it: the communication lines were shut down again—tighter, apparently, than even before. Darrell saw no point in fighting it. For the time being he resigned himself to making do with whatever tiny glimpses of Mary might come his way. The glimpses weren’t many, but he milked them for all they were worth. One time she dropped off some new underwear for him at the front desk of the jail—jockey shorts, the kind she’d always encouraged him to wear when they were on the road. Another time she sent him a store-bought card engraved with a verse of Scripture (Acts 20:32) that he’d talked about in one of his letters. She sent him a short note with some biblical passages condemning fornication and, sometime later, an envelope containing three blurred photographs. These were the shots Mary had taken, six months earlier, of the gorgeous sunset in Cherry Creek, Nevada. They hadn’t turned out very well, maybe because it had taken her so long to get the film developed. The quality of the photographs, however, was hardly the point. On the back of each one Mary had printed a single word, spelling out, in heartrending ambiguity, the message, “DON’T EVER FORGET.” Three words, each of which for Darrell might just as well have been an endless volume.
One day in late spring a highway patrolman named Vernon Cole was escorting Darrell through the courthouse. Cole had been transporting Darrell quite a bit to and from hearings and whatnot, and
the two men had gotten to know and like one another. Darrell appreciated Cole’s courtesy and kindness (“Anything you need, just let me know,” the patrolman had once told him), and Cole knew he could always count on Darrell for a good old country quip or two. (Darrell might have found religion again but that didn’t mean he’d lost his sense of humor.) On their way down the main corridor, Darrell spotted Mary through the window of a door leading into a small courtroom. She may have been there for a hearing herself; it was tough to tell. Cole stopped and waited while Darrell pressed his face up against the glass, hoping to get her attention. When Mary looked over, he grinned and mouthed, “Baby, I love you.” From where he was standing, it appeared that she mouthed the same thing back to him and then started crying. Seeing this, he raised his cuffed wrists and, still grinning, gave her the thumbs-up sign. Someone snapped his picture while he was stuck in this pose, and, sure enough, in the next edition of the
Taney County Times
there was Darrell in all his grinning glory, thumbs brandished, looking for all the world like he couldn’t be happier in his jail-issue jumpsuit and handcuffs.
In early July Darrell’s jailhouse celebrity shrank somewhat when Marty Strange was booked into the last cell down the corridor of the maximum-security unit. The Lawrence killings were grisly enough but Strange had considerably upped the ante in local horror, inexplicably slashing his wife, Melanie’s, throat and strangling their two young sons after the family returned home from a July 4 outing on Bull Shoals Lake. A couple of Darrell’s mates in the unit had been planning a welcoming party for Strange, thinking they’d lay a whipping on him, but nothing came of it. Strange seemed so utterly mortified by what he’d done, and so genuinely bewildered, that they decided to leave him alone.
Not long afterward Darrell was driven to Springfield by two deputies for psychological testing. Along the way the men were talking about local outlaws and the conversation eventually shifted to Marty Strange. The deputies had been hit hard by the murders. They had known Melanie Strange; they had kidded around with
the two young boys. They were still horrified by what had happened.
“I can’t see how he can live with his conscience after what he’s done,” Darrell interjected.
That ended it, right there. Nobody said another word. They drove the rest of the way in silence.