Authors: Michael W. Cuneo
Nine months later a friend showed me the
Times
article where I
was quoted, uneventfully, on the commutation. I’d completely forgotten about it. I was intrigued, especially by what was missing from the piece. I looked up other news articles and found much the same thing. Darrell was missing. The articles were strong on the pope and the governor but curiously stingy on Darrell. There were sketchy details about his crime, stray quotations from people who knew him—nothing that truly brought him to life. The pope and the governor had stolen the show; Darrell appeared in the articles as little more than a stage prop.
I eventually came across a small piece in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
that quoted fragments of a letter Darrell had sent Michelle Beth Mueller. “When I come out of here, I’ll come out a talkin’,” one fragment read. And another: “Fasten your seatbelt, it’s fixin’ to get wild. What a ride, God, what a ride.” Here finally was Darrell, bursting out of the wings, if only for a line or two, full of bravado, not sounding surprised by the commutation, or particularly grateful, not sounding in the least like a guy who’d just been brought back from the dead. Now I was really intrigued. I wanted to learn more about Darrell. I wanted to investigate the story behind the headlines.
I drove to southwest Missouri and met with dozens of people in local law enforcement. I hung out at backwater taverns, clapboard churches, and sad-eyed strip clubs. I tracked down cockfighters, crank dealers, and old-time hillbillies. I dug up information at tiny county libraries and drank coffee with grizzled outlaws in dusky cafés.
Before long I was hooked. I’d spend a week in southwest Missouri, sleeping in my ’89 Pontiac, sometimes grabbing a seventeen-dollar motel in Springfield, and then I couldn’t wait to get back down again. Some people weren’t pleased having an inquisitive outsider spending so much time in their midst. I was warned off, and occasionally threatened. A guy pulled a knife on me; somebody else opened his jacket and showed me a gun. Two guys in a pickup stopped me on Route 13 south of Kimberling City and said I was either too stupid or too brave for my own good. They said they were pretty sure which one it was.
On the whole, however, people were hospitable. They invited me into their homes and workplaces and answered my questions with refreshing candor. As often as not, they remembered Darrell with real affection. This was true even of some people in law enforcement. “Have you talked with Darrell yet?” Tom Martin asked early on in my research. I said that I hadn’t. “Well, I know Darrell and now I know you,” Tom said, “and if you get a chance to talk with him, I’m sure you’ll like him.”
For the first month or so, I seriously doubted that I’d get a chance to talk with Darrell. I wrote requesting an interview and he wrote back graciously declining. I sent a second letter saying that I respected his decision. Even if he’d said yes, I wrote, complete control of the project would still be mine. This time he replied suggesting that I drop by.
Tom Martin was right. Once I actually got around to meeting Darrell, I did indeed like him. I found him bright and funny and honest. Though inclined toward skepticism on such matters, I became convinced that his religious convictions were entirely sincere. I visited him often at Potosi, and he also sent me richly detailed letters elaborating on answers to some of my questions. Darrell insisted (convincingly) that he didn’t care how he came out in the book. He asked only two things of me: that I include just one small passage on the spiritual angle to the story, and that I not be unduly rough on Mary. These were easy requests to honor: I was already committed to exploring the spiritual angle, and I had no interest in being unduly rough on anyone.
Darrell set no conditions on my work, and neither did any of the criminal justice professionals connected to the case. Jim Justus, Chip Mason, and Chuck Keithley gave me candid and lengthy interviews, with no strings attached. The Missouri Highway Patrol, asking nothing in return, afforded me complete access to their investigative files. Tom Martin, Jack Merritt, Harley Sparks, Doug Loring—all of these men spoke with me freely and forthrightly.
I conducted roughly three hundred interviews in Missouri and about thirty more elsewhere across the country. I turned over every stone, pursued every lead. I wasn’t, however, able to speak face-to-face
with everyone I’d hoped to. Mary Epps and her parents called off an interview at the last moment, leaving little doubt that they weren’t keen on rescheduling. For Mary’s involvement in the story, I drew heavily on trial testimony, police reports, depositions, interviews with lawyers and investigators, and, of course, my conversations with Darrell. I also spoke with a former schoolmate of Mary’s and about a dozen other people variously acquainted with her.
I spoke personally with two of Lloyd’s nephews and briefly by phone with his youngest son, David. David told me that he and his siblings had been advised by lawyers not to discuss the case with outsiders. I decided against pushing hard on this front, especially since I wasn’t buying the whitewashed version of Lloyd that some people seemed intent on selling. I’d done my homework. Lloyd was what he was.
Bill Wendt was retired by now, and unavailable for interviewing. I spoke at length with one of his close associates, and I also obtained the complete legal dossier for the case.
I personally retraced every move that Darrell and Mary made on their two road trips. Everywhere they went, I also went. My conversations and correspondence with Darrell were enormously helpful in this regard, as were the Highway Patrol’s investigative files, the trial transcripts, and the taped statement that Mary gave Jack and Chip in Phoenix.
Only one topic was off limits during my talks with Darrell at Potosi. He refused to discuss the crime itself, promising that this was something he’d go into at some other time and place. I reconstructed the triple homicide largely on the basis of Darrell’s detailed confession and the extensive crime scene materials, which included still photographs, pathology reports, police files, and a reenactment video made by investigators for instructional purposes.
Much of the dialogue that appears in the book I re-created with the help (whenever possible) of multiple sources. For the crucial scene at Archbishop Rigali’s residence, I had the benefit of interviews with direct participants from both the pope’s side and the governor’s.
Two sections of the book proved especially difficult. The first of
these was Darrell’s conversion, or spiritual epiphany, in the Taney County jail. Seeing this as the fulcrum of the narrative, and anxious to do it justice, I sent several draft pages to Darrell for his comments. He recommended one or two minor revisions. This was the only part of the manuscript reviewed in advance by Darrell or anyone else.
The other troublesome section came at the very end, where I attempted a final reckoning. Why had Darrell done what he’d done? If I hadn’t gotten to know Darrell personally and seen for myself his positive sides, this section likely would have been easier to write.
Darrell’s commutation was an international story, with wideranging implications for the debate over capital punishment in the United States and elsewhere. But it was also a resoundingly local story. While not everyone in Darrell’s home environs approved of the commutation, most of those with whom I spoke seemed unwilling to dismiss it as a mere accident of history. In the intensely religious culture of the Missouri Ozarks, there are no mere accidents. Events of every sort, but especially extraordinary ones, are believed to reverberate with divine purpose. To suggest otherwise would betray not only a lack of faith but also an astonishing lack of imagination.
Executions in Missouri are customarily scheduled for just past midnight. As the clock wound down for Darrell, he stood virtually alone in believing that his life would be spared by miraculous intervention. In death-row time, it was almost midnight when the pope paid his historic visit to St. Louis. Not even the pope could have realized the full extent of the drama awaiting him.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As background to the story, I consulted the following works: Mary Hartman and Elmo Ingenthron,
Bald Knobbers: Vigilantes on the Ozarks Frontier
(Gretna, Louisiana: Pelican Publishing, 1996);
History of Stone County, Missouri
(Marionville, Missouri: Stone County Historical Society, 1989);
The History of Reeds Spring
(Reeds Spring Historical Society, 1998); A. J. Bannister,
Shall Suffer Death
(Brunswick, Maine: Audenreed Press, 1996); Stephen Trombley,
The Execution Protocol
(New York: Crown Publishers, 1992); and Robert Jay Lifton and Greg Mitchell,
Who Owns Death?: Capital Punishment, the American Conscience, and the End of Executions
(New York: William Morrow, 2000). I also consulted various reports published in the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
, the Springfield
News-Leader
, the
Kansas City Star
, and other local Missouri newspapers.
I am grateful to everyone who agreed to speak with me throughout the course of my research. A special word of thanks to Darrell Mease, Lexie Mease, and Larry Mease; Archbishop Justin Rigali, Joe Bednar, and Chris Liese; Terry Ganey, Michelle Beth Mueller, Dennis Graves, Tim Block, Patricia Rice, and Charles Jaco; Roscoe and Wanetta Keithley; Doug and Anna Loring; Chuck Keithley, Theron Jenkins, Jim Spindler, Jim Justus, and Chip Mason; Tom Martin, Jack Merritt, Jerry Dodd, and Harley Sparks; Laura Higgins Tyler, Robert Maurer, and Kent Gipson; William O’Connor, Larry Rice, and Morris “Spank” Page; Amy Langston and Michael Glenn; the men and women of the Missouri State Highway Patrol; and Fred Pfister, the editor of the
Ozarks Mountaineer
.
Special thanks also to Margaret J. Cuneo, Rebecca E. Keenan, Brenda M. Cuneo, and the inestimable Shane D. Cuneo for their critical feedback and constant encouragement.
The Department of Religious Studies at the University of Dayton—and especially Terrence Tilley; James Heft, S.M.; Maureen Tilley; Sandra Yocum Mize; Una Cadegan; Bill Portier; and Joe Jacobs—provided crucial support during the early stages of the project; and the Missouri Department of Corrections and the staff at Potosi Correctional Center extended me every professional courtesy. Patricia Sharma, Marilyn Vitale, Marvin Reznikoff, Leanne Lowes, and my Fordham undergraduate students lent me valuable insight at various junctures of the research and writing.
Thanks most of all to my editor, Andrew Corbin, for his indispensable guidance every step of the way; to Siobhan Dunn, Sean Mills, and Karla Eoff of Doubleday Broadway; and to my agent, Claudia Cross.