Authors: Michael W. Cuneo
D
ARRELL WAS TRANSPORTED
to Potosi Correctional Center on June 1, 1990, after a formal sentencing hearing in Judge McGuire’s courtroom earlier the same day. The vehicle he was riding in turned off I-44 at St. James and cut southeast through thickly forested country for fifty-five miles before hitting the sad-sack town of Potosi. A left at a county road past the far edge of town, then half a mile more—and there it was. A low-slung stone structure with tiny window slots, recreational yards at one end, and a gigantic water tower standing off to the side, the whole complex enclosed by perimeter fences and coils of razor wire. Darrell’s first hard look at the place that was supposed to be his final mailing address.
If there were ever such a thing as a good time for entering a maximum-security prison, Darrell was hitting it just about right.
Potosi had opened for business only the previous year and state corrections people weren’t too far off the mark in proclaiming it the cleanest, brightest, and best-equipped facility of its kind in the entire country. Compared to the ancient and decrepit Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City, it was practically lush living. MSP, or “the Walls,” as hard-timers usually referred to it, was cramped, squalid, and violent, the kind of place where simply making it through dinnertime without getting raped or stabbed generally counted as a good day.
No sense, however, pressing the point too hard: although definitely a step up in class from Missouri State Penitentiary, Potosi was hardly a bed of cheer in its own right. Despite its well-stocked law library, two music rooms, and impressive gym facilities, despite its brightly lit visitation center and central air-conditioning—despite all of its frills and conveniences, the place was marked by a fundamental gloom. Everyone knew that Potosi was the end of the line. Each and every one of its three hundred inmates had been sent there either to be executed or to rot away with no chance of parole. Brand spanking new, sure, but also the most forlorn of institutions—no exit, no mercy, no return ticket.
Not by accident, moreover, was it located in one of the most forlorn parts of the state. At one time a national leader in lead mining and shoe manufacturing, the Potosi region was now depressed and rundown. The mines were long abandoned, the factories shuttered or razed. Little wonder then that the local citizenry had actually lobbied for the new maximum-security prison to be built in their very own backyard. Better this than nothing—at least some jobs would come of it, and maybe some collateral benefits down the road. As for the Missouri Department of Corrections, the idea of putting the facility in this remote and rural corner of the state, sixty-five lonely miles southwest of St. Louis, held a certain appeal. The new prison was where state-sanctioned killings would henceforth be carried out, and the lonelier and more remote the location, the better. Opponents of capital punishment would think nothing of staging protests if the execution site was conveniently situated
somewhere just off an interstate; only the most dedicated would bother venturing all the way down here.
Darrell spent his first two weeks quarantined and under observation in One House, standard procedure for any newly arrived capital-punishment prisoners. An additional fortnight of observation on the top floor of Two House, and he was finally let out with the fellows. Not that he was exactly chafing for company. He wasn’t planning on sticking around very long anyway; no sense chumming it up too much. The best approach was to play it cool, keep a low profile—and, above all, avoid altercations.
Easier said than done. At a place such as Potosi altercations have a habit of sneaking up on you. On the top walk of Two House there was only one other prisoner for a while—a white guy about ten years younger and twenty pounds lighter than Darrell. The guy had a TV in his cage and since he spent most of his time downstairs playing cards anyway, he told Darrell, “Be my guest, man, feel free to go in and watch it anytime you want.” Darrell was grateful for the offer. He was looking for ways to pass the time and wasn’t much interested in weathering the strife and cheating of the interminable poker games. Later the same week the guy walked into his cage while Darrell was watching television and said, “What would you do if I raped you, old man?”
Not the best way of endearing yourself to a onetime hillbilly hooligan from Stone County. Darrell instantly flew mad—and not just because of the physical threat. The guy actually had the temerity to call him an old man. He jumped to his feet saying, “I have no sexual desire for your body at all,” and stormed out of the cell. The guy must have seen the anger in Darrell’s eyes. He stood back and let him pass without saying a word.
Darrell didn’t stay angry for long. Over the next couple of weeks, as he learned more about the guy with the TV, he actually found himself growing sympathetic. He learned that the guy had been sent to prison as a kid and had been turned out as a punk at Missouri State Pen. His cellblock daddy would pimp him out for cigarettes and whatnot and charge people to watch while the kid,
who was inordinately flexible, performed sexual acts on himself. Daddy-o eventually killed a couple of fellow cons and received a death sentence. He told the kid to follow suit so he could join him on death row. The kid obliged, murdering the fellow who happened to be his cell mate at the time, which is how he came to be at Potosi when Darrell arrived—no longer a kid but still lost and confused, still desperate for respect and belonging. Darrell never went back to the guy’s cage to watch television after their run-in but the two of them got along pretty well from then on—right up until the time the guy was executed.
Darrell was transferred to Four House after a few months, which was the unit with the largest population of death-row prisoners. All around him he saw guys who, one way or another, had made their peace with prison life and settled in for the long haul, trying to make the best of a situation they assumed they couldn’t change. Even their griping had a ritualistic quality, like it was something they figured they were supposed to do but couldn’t quite muster the proper enthusiasm for. Darrell was different. From the moment he arrived he was determined that he wouldn’t become acclimated to life on the inside.
Keep your eye on the door
, he’d say to himself.
Don’t let them break you. Stand firm
.
Standing firm came relatively easy to Darrell. He detested everything about prison life—truly and fully detested it. The sexual squabbling and the constant one-upmanship, the stall-feeding at meal times, the nighttime screaming and muttering—every inch of it a stone-walled hell. Where other guys were finding niches for themselves by joining the prison band, hitting the weight room, or boning up on case law in the library, Darrell was gritting his teeth and counting the days. There was no relenting on his part—just because he happened to be in prison didn’t mean he was obliged to cash in his manhood. Any way he could stand apart, so much the better. Shortly after arriving in Four House he even tried setting his own schedule. By this point he had his own television, courtesy of the folks back home, and he took to staying up most nights watching reruns of the old
Bob Newhart Show
, doing some reading, and
then grabbing snatches of sleep during the day. Not the most conventional of prison routines, but then again Darrell was hardly known for playing to expectation.
N
EITHER, FOR THAT
matter, was Robert Maurer. A smallish, chain-smoking man in his late thirties, Maurer wouldn’t have met anyone’s expectation of a public defender. Crusader for justice? Champion of the underdog? Youthful idealist? Forget about it. Robert Maurer was none of these things. He’d taken a job in the capital appellate unit of the public defenders office in Columbia, Missouri, for two basic reasons. First, it was a high-stakes job that promised plenty of action. Second, it was available when he needed it. All things being equal, he would have been just as happy taking a gig in a prosecutor’s office somewhere. Come to think of it, this probably wouldn’t have been such a bad idea. Working out of the public defenders office, he sometimes felt like a marked man. Maybe it was his witty and acerbic manner that had turned some of his oh-so-earnest colleagues against him. Or maybe it was his politics, which he didn’t mind advertising as being “somewhere to the right of Barry Goldwater.” Or maybe it was his permissive views on capital punishment. Whatever the reason, it definitely wasn’t a comfortable situation. Never mind that he was one of the sharpest lawyers on staff: in the view of some of his co-workers he didn’t quite fit the bill—not righteous enough, not pious enough, certainly not left-lib enough. No sense kidding himself: he knew that his days in the office were numbered. If he listened hard enough, he could almost hear the knives being sharpened.
Right now, however, office politics weren’t Maurer’s chief concern. He’d recently been assigned the toughest challenge of his career: representing a hillbilly named Darrell Mease in post-conviction relief. For death-penalty cases in Missouri, post-conviction relief was one of the earliest and most critical stages of the appeals process. Maurer was determined to make the most of it, though he was too much the realist to be excited by his chances of success.
Darrell’s case hadn’t actually been his to start with. After Bill Wendt’s motion for a new trial was denied and Wendt had withdrawn as attorney of record, the case had gone to the public defenders office where it had been assigned to a young woman named Leslie Delk. But then Delk had left the office under hurried circumstances and the entire business had landed on Maurer’s desk.
In the two or three months since then Maurer had covered a lot of territory. He’d dropped down to Potosi a couple of times and met not just with Darrell but also with a prison buddy of Darrell’s, Doyle Williams. Williams was a near-legendary figure in Missouri public defender circles. A native of North Carolina, he’d received a death sentence some years back for allegedly handcuffing, pistol-whipping, and generally terrorizing a guy named Kerry Brummett to the point where Brummett, in a frantic effort to escape, threw himself into the Missouri River and drowned. In his years on death row Doyle had immersed himself in legal studies and become one of the best jailhouse lawyers in the entire country. He’d assisted more than a dozen inmates, guys otherwise lost and helpless, with the early stages of their appeals. On March 20, 1991, just a few months prior to Maurer visiting, Doyle had taken what was supposed to be his last meal and bidden farewell to his family and friends when the U.S. Supreme Court gave him a last-minute stay of execution. While waiting for another execution date to be set, he’d been helping Darrell gear up for post-conviction relief.
The meetings at Potosi had gone well. Maurer was pragmatic and unsentimental, definitely not a lawyer prone to bonding with his clients. Nevertheless, he’d come away impressed with Darrell.
“I found Darrell somehow appealing and sympathetic,” he recalled. “This wasn’t necessarily my initial impression but it was the impression I walked away with. It’s tough to say why. He spoke about his religious conversion, which seemed to me completely genuine, but this wouldn’t have swayed me one way or another. I’ve always prided myself on being agnostic about this sort of thing. I’m not the easiest guy to win over. Force me to pin it down, I’d say he struck me as being very modest and very honest, not a conniving bone in his body. You see some guys in prison, they strike you right
off as manipulative and malicious. But not Darrell—he didn’t fit the profile. I thought to myself, ‘Something terrible has happened here, but this guy doesn’t have the makeup of a murderer.’ I was intrigued, and really motivated. I wanted to do everything I possibly could to help him. I was working solo at the time, the woman who was supposed to be my investigator had just gotten fired, so I went down by myself to the area Darrell was from and started digging around.”
Maurer spent about a week in southwest Missouri, sleeping most nights at a twenty-dollar motel in the tattered old resort town of Rockaway Beach. His second day in the area, a broiling hot afternoon, he dropped by to see Lexie, who was working as a cook at a Christian summer camp on the rim of Lake Taneycomo. They sat and talked in the camp’s screened-in cafeteria, perched high atop a cliff overlooking the lake. It was an encounter Maurer wouldn’t soon forget: the aching contrast between the idyllic setting and the grim subject matter of their conversation; Lexie so strong and hopeful, so grateful to Maurer for his efforts on Darrell’s behalf; and Maurer himself, wishing he had something more to offer than merely good intentions, something concrete, a promise he could keep.
The next day he drove over to Reeds Spring. As an outsider, a guy who’d grown up in the St. Louis area, it was like entering a storybook world. The breakdown bend on Route 13 smack in the center of town, the walled-in spring and the small weather-beaten stores, the crumbling motel next to the take-out dairy joint, the wooden houses jutting crazily out of the rocky hills: the place looked like it had been frozen in time for fifty years. He visited with Lexie and R.J. at their house in the hollow, and then with a dozen of Darrell’s old school chums at a house on the edge of town. Sitting with these folks, listening to them, Maurer felt almost humbled.
Salt of the earth
—for the first time, he felt he truly understood what the phrase meant. Darrell’s long-ago school friends: authentic Ozarkers, people with legacies, people of few words and nothing to prove—if they didn’t fit the bill, it wasn’t likely anyone did.
After digging around some more over the next few days, Maurer
started to get a clearer picture. Darrell had been a good and lovable kid, everybody’s favorite hometown son. But then Vietnam, marital calamity, and drugs had worked their nastiness, pushing him closer and closer to the edge. Hooking up with Lloyd had finished the job. One thing Maurer was now virtually certain of: Darrell hadn’t carried out the Lawrence killings in a state of cool reflection or deliberation. He may have been legally responsible for the killings, but not to the point where he deserved the death penalty. This, he decided, was the main angle he’d pursue in post-conviction relief. Darrell was mentally unhinged when he shot the three Lawrences, and if Bill Wendt hadn’t given up so easily on the idea of a psychiatric defense the trial might have had a different outcome. He gave Mary a call, hoping she would be willing to elaborate on Darrell’s mounting paranoia prior to her dropping him off on Bear Creek Road. No dice: Mary was cordial enough but left little doubt that she wasn’t interested in picking at the scabs. Maurer, no sentimentalist, couldn’t pretend that he was surprised. No matter—he still had his ace in the hole: William O’Connor, a crackerjack psychologist out of Kansas City. He’d arrange for O’Connor to evaluate Darrell at Potosi. Forget about the two local yokels Wendt had signed on: the true expert was coming to town.