Authors: Michael W. Cuneo
On his way back to Columbia, Maurer stopped by the old courthouse in Springfield for a sit-down with Judge Tom McGuire. McGuire was slated to preside over Darrell’s post-conviction relief hearing in October, less than two months away. Why not get to know the judge beforehand, Maurer reasoned, maybe rack up some schmoozing points? They sat together, smoking cigarettes in McGuire’s second-floor courtroom. Maurer found himself liking the judge, a brassy and candid old boy, the kind of guy you’d enjoy having a drink with after work. Darrell had told Maurer that McGuire had tried tempting him with an unloaded pistol during the trial, the judge banking on him making a grab for it and then being gunned down by troopers ringing the courtroom. Now Maurer ran the same story by McGuire—as good a showcase as any other, he was thinking, for Darrell’s runaway paranoia.
Crazy or what? he said.
The judge laughed. Maybe not so crazy, he said. He’d always kept a pistol under the bench, so Darrell wasn’t just imagining it. But you can be damned sure of one thing, he added, the pistol would have been fully loaded. This was where Darrell was dead wrong. The pistol was always fully loaded.
A
S OFTEN AS
not, the dominant issue in post-conviction relief proceedings is ineffective assistance of trial counsel. To some extent, this is what Robert Maurer was planning on arguing in Darrell’s case: that Bill Wendt had fumbled the ball and cost his client the game. He was planning on arguing it, even though he wasn’t entirely convinced of it himself. In truth, as he would recall more than a decade later, Maurer believed that Wendt had actually done a decent job.
“The guy was facing incredible odds. Forget the confession, the corroborating evidence, and all the rest of it, and just consider the videotape of the crime scene. I have never—
ever
—seen anything that matched the devastating impact of this. You cannot explain evidence of this sort away. The prosecutor plays a few minutes of this to a jury, you’d need a miracle to save Darrell. No way a jury could look at this and not give death. But having said this, Wendt still fell short in a couple of areas. For one thing, he failed to present Darrell as a real flesh-and-blood human being. Read the trial transcript, and where’s Darrell? Darrell is the missing element of the trial. Wendt didn’t succeed in bringing Darrell to life—a fatal flaw in a murder case. What’s more—and here’s where I really wanted to push—he could have done a much better job working the psychological angle. If only he’d arranged for someone such as my man O’Connor to evaluate Darrell, it could have been a different story.”
If only, indeed. A trim, soft-spoken, and articulate man in his early fifties, William O’Connor was a criminal defense attorney’s dream. Not only was he a top-notch diagnostician and an accomplished researcher, with enough publications on his résumé to
match the output of many a tenured professor, but he was also as thoughtfully impassioned an opponent of the death penalty as one was likely to come across in the state of Missouri. He’d started evaluating defendants in death-penalty cases in 1983, motivated in equal measure by moral indignation and a strong sense of professional obligation.
“It was something I felt I had to do,” he said at his offices in Kansas City, where he still maintains a private practice with his wife, Sharon, a first-rate psychologist in her own right. “A lot of the psychiatric and psychological evaluation that was being done at the time was grossly inadequate—really terrible, incompetent work. There were guys on death row who hadn’t even been assessed for mental retardation. So I was troubled by this, but by other stuff, also. In Missouri it was always black guys and poor white guys who were getting charged with the death penalty, quite often—and not just coincidentally—when county prosecutors happened to be up for reelection. Where’s the justice in that? I was also convinced, and I still am, that capital punishment is destructive to the families and friends of crime victims. It doesn’t provide genuine resolution—it traumatizes and brutalizes. So I started doing evaluations and also serving as an expert witness, quite often at the request of people such as Rob Maurer in the public defenders office. This is how I came to be involved with Darrell.”
O’Connor met with Darrell four times at Potosi prior to the post-conviction relief hearing, in one of the small windowless rooms in the visiting area that were reserved for such occasions. He gave him a battery of tests, everything from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) to the Hare Psychopathy Checklist. Darrell submitted cheerfully enough to all this mental poking and prodding, but not without telling O’Connor the same things he’d already told Robert Maurer, and before Maurer, Bill Wendt. He’d come back to Missouri to kill Lloyd out of sheer necessity. Lloyd was gunning for him, and for Mary, too. Lloyd, being Lloyd, undoubtedly had a contract out on them, with no shortage of lowlifes itching for the chance to deliver on it. They had nowhere to run,
nowhere to hide. Going to the law for help was out of the question; everyone knew that Lloyd was tight with the authorities in Stone County and probably half a dozen other local counties. Everyone knew that law enforcement in the Ozarks was bought and paid for. Darrell had only one option: take care of business the old-fashioned way, the way people had traditionally taken care of it in the hills of southwest Missouri. Somebody’s threatening to kill you, you kill him first. This was his one viable move, and once he’d fixed on it there was no turning back. It was as simple as that, he told O’Connor. He’d done what he’d done because he had no other recourse. There was nothing crazy about it.
O’Connor wasn’t buying it—at least not entirely. He didn’t doubt that Lloyd was a nasty guy and that Darrell and Mary had good reason to feel threatened by him. Nor did he doubt that the legal system on Darrell’s home turf was due a vigorous spring-cleaning. Nevertheless, there was something about Darrell’s account that didn’t quite ring true. It sounded almost biblical, Manichean—a dualistic epic of absolute good locked in fateful conflict with absolute evil. Was the real world, O’Connor wondered, ever so starkly black and white? Was it not possible, moreover, that Darrell had exaggerated in his own mind certain elements of his saga? Lloyd’s criminal omnipotence, for example: in Darrell’s telling, the backwoods, cockfighting bully was every bit as dangerous and well connected as Al Capone. And what of Darrell’s conspiracy theories, such as his unflagging conviction, which he’d also run by O’Connor, that his trial was rigged and that even his own attorney had been party to a plot to destroy him. Going just by his interviews with Darrell, O’Connor strongly suspected that something was amiss.
The test results didn’t cause him to think otherwise. The MMPI clinical profile, the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale, the projective testing—they all pointed in the same direction: Darrell was suffering from a chronic and deeply entrenched mental disorder, more specifically, a delusional disorder of the persecutory type. “This is a longstanding disorder which would have been present at the time of the alleged offense and at the time of [the] confession,”
O’Connor wrote in his formal mental health report. “In the opinion of the examiner, the degree of incapacity was not sufficient to render Mr. Mease incapable of knowing or appreciating the nature, quality, and wrongfulness of his act; however, the degree of incapacity is, in the opinion of this examiner, sufficient to substantially diminish his capacity to conform his conduct to the requirements of the law. While Mr. Mease was not out of touch with reality or poorly organized, his Delusional Disorder did not allow logical consideration of alternatives. Further, it is the opinion of the examiner that this condition would have obtained at the time of his statement; while he was undoubtedly fully aware of his rights, his beliefs allowed him no alternative but to ‘sacrifice himself’ because of complex events which he constructed into a fixed and rigid belief system compelling his behavior.”
And so here it was—not the most glamorous of diagnoses perhaps, but a diagnosis nonetheless. O’Connor knew that Maurer had been counting on something along these lines; he was pleased that he’d been able to deliver the goods. Now came the supremely more difficult task of trying to sell it at the hearing.
T
HE POST-CONVICTION RELIEF
hearing (or, more technically, the hearing on Darrell’s 29.15 motion to vacate the verdict and the sentence) was held on October 9, 1991, a typically hot and cloudless early-fall afternoon in Springfield. The presiding judge wasn’t Tom McGuire, after all, but rather a colleague of McGuire’s in the Circuit Court of Greene County, J. Miles Sweeney. For reasons still not entirely clear, McGuire had recused himself at the eleventh hour. There was one other significant roster change. Representing the state of Missouri was Donald Clough, a lawyer from Rockaway Beach who’d just recently taken over from Jim Justus as prosecuting attorney for Taney County. According to some folks, Justus had come up short in his reelection bid because he hadn’t moved fast enough to shut down a male strip club that had opened in Branson. According to others, it was due to voter unhappiness over the expenses he’d run up going after the death penalty for Darrell.
Darrell had been transported to Springfield the day before and given a temporary cell in the Greene County jail. He’d have enjoyed the five-hour drive a lot more, his first real scenery in sixteen months, if not for the black box, a little contraption that locks on between the handcuffs and holds them rigid. The box was ostensibly a security device; Darrell saw it more as a mechanism of torture. Halfway along I-44 the two officers charged with transporting him stopped at a roadside toilet and asked if he needed to relieve himself.
“Sure do,” he said, “but I can’t see pulling it off strung up to this box. Would you fellas mind taking it off for a minute or two?”
They shook their heads no.
“In that case, I’ll try holding off until we reach Springfield.”
As anticipated, the highlight of the hearing was O’Connor’s testimony, which took up almost half the afternoon. Wearing a blue suit and striped tie, cool and polished, a veteran at the expert-witness game, O’Connor described Darrell as a bright and articulate individual (“well above average” in intelligence) who had been laboring for years with “delusional or paranoid beliefs.” Some of these beliefs might very well have been based in fact, O’Connor conceded, but Darrell had stroked them and stretched them and then stitched them together into a fabulous plot of conspiracy and persecution. It was a plot that Darrell believed in absolutely, indeed, one that he was powerless to question. It held him in an iron grip.
“What happens with a delusion is, you are compelled to believe it,” O’Connor said. “If someone presents to you absolute positive evidence that it’s not true, you have to find other evidence that it is. You have no choice about whether you believe it or not. And you are then compelled to act on that information.”
“So, compulsive and obsessive behavior and thinking is part of this process?” Maurer asked.
“Yes. It does not impair your ability to know reality. You know what you’re doing. You don’t misidentify people. You are not hallucinating. What it does is compel your behavior. It—it impairs your capacity to—to appreciate alternatives and make decisions with respect to your behavior, and it impairs your capacity substantially to
conform your behavior to any external standard that’s not consistent with your delusion.”
O’Connor, pulling out all the stops now, also testified that Darrell was suffering from chronic post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as a result of his experiences as a combat engineer in Vietnam. This had been a “major contributor in the development of his delusional disorder,” he said.
“As do almost all individuals with significant PTSD, Mr. Mease has what’s called ‘survivor guilt.’ He’s rather unhappy that he’s been alive. He can’t exactly justify it, and so he tends to want to do somewhat grandiose or great things. He’s prone to want to get into great struggle between good and evil to somehow undo the survivor guilt that traumatized combat veterans have.”
“How about the post-Vietnam experiences, the marriage and the failed marriages?” Maurer asked. “Would that have been a contributing factor?”
“All of these things contribute because when someone comes out of a situation like that, disturbed, guilty, with a rather confused view of life, then the more failures you accumulate, jobs, marriages, et cetera, the more that’s going to affect your mental status and the more you have to compensate. What a delusion does is give you some way of compensating for a life and world, I suppose, that you just can’t accept. You adopt a set of beliefs with a certain amount of grandiosity, because you have to think you’re important if everyone’s plotting against you, that somehow explain away the unusual degree of failure and guilt that you experience.”
“How about—how would the history of drug abuse fit into this?”
“Well, that can’t do anything but make it much worse, particularly with amphetamines since they tend to disorganize thinking and produce a lot of paranoia and extreme emotional reactions anyway.”
Late afternoon now, the natural light beginning to fade in Judge Sweeney’s second-floor courtroom, Maurer led his expert witness into the murkiest territory of all. If Darrell had come back to Missouri to kill Lloyd, his great scourge and nemesis, why hadn’t he
stopped there? Why hadn’t he simply killed Lloyd when the opportunity arose and then left it at that? Why the extra killings?
“It’s a hard question to answer,” O’Connor said. “Anything that happened in the situation would have been an act of the moment. It’s rather like being in a combat situation where you’re fighting the enemy but you don’t particularly think the individual soldiers on the other side are bad guys; they’re just the people that you have to shoot at so that they don’t shoot you. So there’s kind of a two-level belief: you’re fighting forces of absolute evil but you don’t really consider very much individual soldiers—it’s not your plan to kill individuals, only to fight evil in general.”