Authors: Michael W. Cuneo
But this, of course, was probably asking too much. In the Sunday, December 6, edition of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, the editorial page featured an eight-panel cartoon of a supreme court judge standing beside a corrections official and waving farewell to a departing jet.
“Goodbye, John Paul!” the judge is crying out. “Thanks for visiting Missouri … We’ll never forget your message of love … peace, brotherhood … and forgiveness!” A two-beat pause while the jet disappears from view, and then the judge, big smile dissolving into a scowl, rips out an execution order and says, “He’s gone now—let’s fry Mr. Mease.”
The papal visit was still almost two full months off, and already the press was tuned in to the deal.
O
N THE SECOND
Saturday in January, Darrell’s brother drove over to Potosi with a pep talk in his pocket. Actually, more like a get-real talk. Larry figured it was long overdue. All this stuff about God-is-my-lawyer and divine intervention, about Darrell miraculously escaping the death chamber: for almost a decade now, he’d gone along for the ride. If it gave Darrell hope, and their mom hope—hey, where was the harm? But enough was enough. Time
to check out of fantasyland and come to grips with reality. The death warrants had convinced Larry. There’d be no sudden burst of thunder, no hand from heaven plucking Darrell to safety. The execution was due to come off on February 10, and wishful thinking wasn’t going to stop it. If not for his own sake, then surely for their mom’s sake, Darrell had to accept the inevitable and start making his peace.
Right now Lexie was the person Larry was most concerned about, and he wasn’t alone. A lot of folks back home were concerned about Lexie. Darrell’s execution was as sure as tomorrow, but she’d refused to prepare for it. She’d refused even to consider its possibility. There wasn’t a chance in the world of it happening, she’d say. They can take Darrell in and strap him to the gurney—it doesn’t matter. It won’t happen because God won’t let it happen. She’d bought completely into Darrell’s fantasy. She was as convinced as he was that the death clock would be stopped by one of God’s “suddenlys.” But where did this leave her when the execution went off as scheduled? Larry and his wife, Sophia, had tried coaxing her into reality the past few weeks, even to the point of talking about the need to make funeral arrangements, but she hadn’t heard a word they’d said.
So that second Saturday in January, Larry did his best to get through to Darrell. He tried talking with him about final farewells, about family burial plots, about all the sad and somber details of impending death. It was like running into a stone wall. Don’t be planning any funeral services, Darrell said. Don’t even be thinking in that direction. It would only betray a lack of faith.
Back home, a couple of days later, Larry quietly got down to work. With Sophia’s help, he began making the necessary arrangements. Time was running short. Somebody had to take charge.
T
HE STATE OF
Missouri managed to sneak in one more execution just two weeks prior to the scheduled papal visit. On Wednesday, January 13, at one minute past midnight, a thirty-seven-year-old
hard case named Kelvin Malone was lethally injected at Potosi. Malone had been convicted of killing three people, including a St. Louis cabdriver, during a cross-country crime spree almost two decades earlier. A dozen people showed up outside the prison for a candlelight protest. It was tough keeping the candles alive in the cold wind, however, and by the time Malone was officially pronounced dead, shortly after two, most of the protesters were already long gone.
T
HE REVEREND LARRY
Rice certainly hadn’t meant any harm. At the time it had seemed the decent thing to do, sending a goodbye card. His plan all along had been to go down to Potosi and hang out with Darrell the eve of the execution. Time and again since starting his death-row ministry, this is exactly what he’d done with guys on the brink. Show up at the prison around eight, sit with them an hour or two, talking, praying, singing, and holding hands, anything they wanted. Anything that might bring some solace during those last few hours before strap-down time. He’d intended doing the same thing with Darrell, but when the court set the final execution date he knew he wouldn’t be able to make it. Larry was scheduled to be in India on February 10, visiting orphanages and spreading the Gospel, and there was no way he could get out of it. The trip had been in the works for months. So he’d sent the card, a heartfelt gesture of affection and regret. He certainly hadn’t meant to upset Darrell. He’d simply been trying to do the right thing.
Larry Rice was widely known for trying to do the right thing—especially since moving to the St. Louis area from his native Texas years earlier and, as a newly ordained Pentecostal preacher, starting up a hugely ambitious street ministry. In two decades on the beat, working the grittier and more forlorn sections of town, he’d been the guy you’d most likely turn to if you were broke, despairing, or otherwise down on your luck. If you had nowhere to stay, nothing to eat, or nothing to wear, you could always turn to Larry. Show up
at his New Life Evangelistic Center, housed in an old YWCA building on Locust Street in downtown St. Louis, and chances were you’d be taken care of. Or if your needs leaned more toward the straightforwardly spiritual, you couldn’t go wrong tuning in some religious programming on one of Larry’s television or radio stations. One way or another, Larry would have the answer.
Not everyone, however, was always open to listening. For someone so manifestly well intentioned, Larry had built up quite a list of detractors over the years. It was partly a matter of style. Always in a rush, talking a mile a minute, and preternaturally self-confident, Larry was simply too overwhelming a presence for some people. Among his fellow social activists, the biggest complaint was that he wasn’t a team player. Try working with Larry on some issue, they’d say, and you’d be lucky getting a word in edgewise. Larry knew what he wanted done, and how he wanted it done, and he wasn’t one for considering alternatives. If you worked with Larry, you did it his way—or not at all.
If fighting poverty was Larry’s greatest social passion, fighting the death penalty ran a close second. He’d embraced the abolitionist or anti-death-penalty cause in the mid-1990s, and he hadn’t eased up a bit since. Nobody in Missouri was more fervently opposed to capital punishment than Larry Rice. Not that his high-energy style always played well among other leading abolitionists. For the most part, veteran death-penalty opponents in Missouri were a ragtag band of old-time peaceniks, left-leaning academics, and social-justice Catholics who prided themselves on knowing the political ropes, knowing what could be accomplished today and what might need putting off until tomorrow. But then along comes fast-talking, hard-praying Larry, who had no time for compromise and little patience for negotiation. And then there were his political ambitions, which he certainly made no secret of. Larry was planning on making a run for governor, and he seemed always to be plotting his course, calculating the odds. He was a tough guy to figure out—an anti-death-penalty Pentecostal preacher in cowboy boots with glory on his mind. More than a few
old-line death-penalty activists weren’t sure he was worth the trouble.
One thing nobody could deny: the guys waiting out the clock down at Potosi had nothing but good to say about Larry. They loved his commitment and his sincerity and, above all, they loved his personal touch, the way he took the trouble to get to know them and their families, the way he published their stories in his
Cry Justice Now
newspaper and filmed their death-row testimonials for broadcast on his statewide television network. Larry was real, they’d say.
Larry took pride in his good relations with death-row prisoners, which made his falling out with Darrell all the more troubling. The two men had exchanged frequent letters since the mid-1990s, and the depth and quality of Darrell’s faith had impressed Larry. So he’d sent the card when Darrell’s execution date came down, thinking it was a final chance to say goodbye and lend some pastoral support. Larry knew that Darrell had always insisted that God was his lawyer and that he’d never be executed. Now that the execution was a foregone conclusion, he didn’t want Darrell falling into despair. “Don’t for a second doubt God’s love for you,” he’d written on the card. “Believe with all your heart, even as you prepare to be executed, that God has not abandoned you.”
Larry had been pleased with the card, thinking that it hit just the right tone. He hadn’t anticipated getting a chiding, chastising letter from Darrell in return. For almost a decade now, Darrell wrote in the letter, he’d been holding fast to his God-given belief that he’d be spared execution and eventually freed from prison altogether. And now this card? What had Larry been thinking? What had he been hoping to accomplish? Was he trying to tempt him into doubt? Throw him off course? The card was shameful. It betrayed an astonishing lack of faith. How could Larry, a Pentecostal preacher, have sent such a thing?
“Do you realize that sending me a ‘goodbye’ card is shooting a fiery dart of doubt at me?” Darrell wrote. “It’s about like throwing a rock at a man who is swimming for the shore. Satan uses
Christians, at times, as well as his own. I’ve caught him using me on occasion. I say what I say to you with sadness and in a spirit of love and I pray that you receive it that way, that your eyes are opened to the truth.”
A lesser person might have been offended by an upbraiding like this, but Larry seemed to take it in stride. He dashed off a note of apology to Darrell the first chance he got, hopeful of patching things up.
M
ONDAY EVENING, JANUARY 25
, Laura Higgins Tyler attended a meeting of her Christian women’s fellowship group. She’d always looked forward to these get-togethers, never more so than now. The truth was, she needed some patching up herself. A couple of weeks earlier she’d submitted a petition for executive pardon to the governor’s office. This was the last thing she could do on Darrell’s behalf, and she wasn’t exactly brimming with optimism. Though she’d worked long and hard on the petition, she suspected it wouldn’t make a whit of difference.
Not a whit of difference: this, Laura confided to her fellowship group, was what it appeared all her efforts had amounted to. She felt guilty for letting Darrell down, and guilty also for not fully subscribing to his belief that there’d be some sort of miraculous intervention. She felt a shortcoming as a Christian. Next to Darrell’s, her own faith seemed timid and frail. Try as she might, she couldn’t match his confidence—his sublime, unswerving confidence—that the execution wouldn’t take place.
Laura unburdened herself for a good hour, the other six women in the group, all members of the same Disciples of Christ congregation, giving her a sympathetic hearing. Then, just before the meeting broke up, the women shared several minutes of silent prayer, which Laura closed by saying aloud, “Thy will be done.”
Driving home, Laura could already feel the difference. The guilt, the sense of failure, the pressure—all gone, evaporated. She felt stronger and more at peace with herself than she had for
months. The closing prayer had done the trick. She’d put everything in God’s hands. There would be no more second-guessing, no more scolding herself for weakness of faith. She was through agonizing over whether or not Darrell would be executed. God’s will be done.
Part V
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
C
HARLES JACO WAS
dying for a cigarette. Knocking elbows with the other journalists on the papal flight to St. Louis, an hour out of Mexico City, he was having a tough time fighting back the urge. Maybe it was the boredom. For a guy who’d made his reputation covering war and mayhem on three continents, this was pretty tame stuff. Two weeks on the beat, all the way from Rome to Mexico City, and now finally zeroing in on St. Louis—no bullets to duck, no death squads on his tail, nothing, nothing at all. It almost made him nostalgic for the good old days of tromping around the jungles of Nicaragua.
Still, Jaco knew something was in the works. He’d been picking up the signals for months, ever since November when the Missouri Supreme Court set January 27 as the date for executing Darrell
Mease, then four days later switched it to February 10. “These clowns screwed up and now they’re counting on nobody knowing the score,” he’d thought at the time. But Jaco knew the reason for the change in date, and just to make sure others caught on, he’d talked it up on his KMOX radio show out of St. Louis. “What happens when the Vatican gets hold of this?” he’d said. “When the pope finds out they’ve been playing games with the execution date? This thing isn’t done yet.” Then two weeks earlier in Rome, a Vatican functionary had told him: “Certainly we’re aware of the Mease case. We’re aware of the entire situation regarding execution in Missouri. We’ve been keeping tabs on it ever since Glennon Paul Sweet wrote the pope asking for help.”
So Jaco knew something was up. This thing wasn’t close to being done. Chances were the pope was going to reprimand top state officials for their trigger-happy approach to capital punishment. Or, better yet, he might even make a pitch for sparing Darrell Mease, a guy Jaco wasn’t alone in regarding as tailor-made for execution. One way or another, it was shaping up as an interesting visit.
Seventy-five minutes into the flight, a guy from one of the news services pulled back the curtain separating the journalists from the bigwigs up front. Sure—it figured. Some of the people up in “Bishops Class” were puffing away. That’s all Jaco and the other journalists needed to know. They took down the cardboard no-smoking signs and lit up. He still would have preferred Mozambique or Panama or Kuwait, but Jaco was starting to enjoy himself. That story at the end of the trail was smelling sweeter all the time.
Through plumes of cigarette smoke, Patricia Rice spotted Joaquín Navarro-Valls, director of the Vatican press office, come through the curtain out of “Bishops Class” and start hobnobbing his way down the aisle. She waited for him to get closer, deciding this was an opportunity she couldn’t afford to pass up. As chief religion correspondent for the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, Rice had been on top of the story for months. She figured she had as good a line on what was happening as anyone else.