They couldn’t pretend any longer.
Helena didn’t try to avoid it, to hide away. She cried for the first time since they’d come to Ohio, while her son watched. Maybe it was his right to see, maybe she didn’t care.
She sat on the flowery sofa in Ruben’s sitting room and read a long and well-written article in the
Cincinnati Post
about how the twelve members of a special execution team at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility had for the past month been preparing to carry out the execution of John Meyer Frey at nine the following evening. She didn’t know why she was reading it—she had previously avoided all information of this sort on purpose—but it felt like she’d given up now, as if he really was going to die, and if that was the case, she had to know, maybe for John’s sake, maybe for her own.
The most difficult thing, according to the journalist who had drawn on research from several executions and had met all the members of the execution team, was getting the needles in the right veins. Since the first execution by lethal injection in nineteen eighty-two in Huntsville—a black man called Charles Brooks—several had turned into a shambles when the execution team couldn’t find a usable vein. The journalist gave several examples where the convict was lying strapped to the bed while they tried to find a suitable vein for thirty-five minutes, forty-five minutes, in front of the waiting witnesses. In a couple of cases, the prisoner had a long history of drug abuse and had eventually offered and been allowed to identify a suitable vein. In another case, the execution quite simply had to be abandoned when the needles came loose and the shunts pumped chemicals out into the room and on to the glass window in front of the shocked viewers.
“Mommy?”
His pajamas were blue, different colored crocodiles in something that presumably was supposed to look like water.
“Yes?”
“I want to come too.”
“Not this time. I’m going to meet Daddy by myself this evening.”
“I want to.”
“Tomorrow. You can come with me tomorrow.”
He snuggled into her, curled up on a cushion. She stroked his cheek, his hair. One of the local channels—she could never differentiate between them—was on the TV. A reporter standing in front of the solid wall of Marcusville prison spoke excitedly about the fact that there were only twenty-four hours to go until Ohio’s third execution of the year, about John Meyer Frey’s escape and return, and the sentence that now, many years later, was about to be fulfilled. Then a short clip from a press conference with the governor of Ohio that was interrupted when a group of activists opposed to the death penalty had leapt onto the stage and handed over hundreds of letters of protest, long lists of names and signatures.
Helena Schwarz listened but wasn’t sure that she’d understood.
That it was her husband they were talking about. That it was for real.
When a Catholic priest was interviewed and condemned the death penalty as a
barbaric relic in a modern society
, she looked at her son again, wondered whether he understood, if he knew that his father was going to die, that it was him who all these people they didn’t know were talking about.
She watched him for a few minutes without saying anything, then stood, lifted up her son and held him in her arms, explained that she had to go, that Granddad was going to stay at home with him.
It was cold out, windy, and more snow.
She was on her way to the prison, she would soon see him alone for the last time, in a new cell and for two hours.
She knew that it was unusual to be allowed to go there at this time of night and she was grateful to Vernon Eriksen, who had made it possible, and yet she resented every step she took, wanted to turn around, go home, close her eyes, and wake up when it was all over.
John heard them before they’d even passed through central security. Not because they said anything—they weren’t talking—not because their keys were rattling, it was the footsteps of the five men in the corridor, black boots with hard heels on dirty concrete. He was lying on the bunk with his face turned toward the bars and he waited until they were outside, until Vernon Eriksen cleared his throat and John felt the words on his skin.
“Are you ready, John?”
He stayed lying there for a few minutes longer, the newly painted ceiling, the light that was always on, the smell he couldn’t bear to swallow anymore. He got up and looked at the senior corrections officer, whom he respected, at the four others standing a bit farther back, whom he didn’t know.
“No.”
“We have to go now, John.”
“I’m not ready.”
“You’ve even got someone waiting for you there.”
Handcuffs, leg irons. He’d seen others being taken away. He knew what it looked like. They were on their way to the Death House, an even smaller cell with a red floor that sat next to the chamber where he would be strapped to a gurney twenty-four hours later, while people watched on the other side of the glass window.
twelve hours left
THE UNREST IN THE CORRIDORS OF MARCUSVILLE PRISON INCREASED
during the night, loud cries for help, the uncontrollable fear that a long wait might stop; someone was going to be executed and every time that happened their own end came closer. It was not unexpected, the unrest was a malignant tumor that could never be removed, the prison staff had often experienced it since the state of Ohio had resumed capital punishment a few years back.
That was why none of them even questioned the prison management’s decision to keep all cells in all corridors locked for twenty-four hours from nine o’clock that morning. The unrest could escalate into protests and riots, and keeping the doors locked until an execution was over and the anguish of the following night had eased was the simplest way to guarantee continued security.
John Meyer Frey sat on a stool in one of the cells of what was called the Death House. Even smaller than a normal cell, clean to the point of sterile, there was nothing personal here, there was no smell here, a stool and a washbasin and a pot to shit in, a red floor covering that did the hating for the prisoner who no longer had the energy to do that himself. He had been informed that the camera on the wall opposite was constantly on and the images were transmitted to a monitor in the observation room that was watched by no fewer than three people at any one time. With only twelve hours left to live, the likelihood of a breakdown was acute.
John had a piece of paper on his knee, a pen in his hand.
He had been trying to write the instructions for his funeral and a will for a couple of hours now, but found it impossible; he couldn’t formulate the consequences of his own death.
He looked up at the camera, threw up his hands, asked in a too loud voice for those watching to come to the cell and take away the paper, to throw it away, things could run their own course.
Anna Mosley and Marie Morehouse had been two very young law school graduates when they had worked with Ruben Frey and Vernon Eriksen six years earlier in the Ohio Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, which had used the prayer room in a hospital in Columbus as its base. They were now partners in their own firm with an office on the ground floor of a dilapidated building on North Ninth Street.
They had been devastated the day that John was found dead on his cell floor.
They had for the past six years known absolutely nothing about the escape that a small part of the pressure group had planned and carried out.
They could therefore have been justifiably angry about not being told, but if they were, it was not something they showed. Since John had been returned to Marcusville prison, a great deal of their shared—and unpaid—work was dedicated to appealing for a reprieve, bombarding all legal institutions in Ohio with arguments for a stay of execution.
With only twelve hours to go, they were sitting close together in a large waiting room in central Columbus. They needed each other, as everyone needs someone when all they want to do is lie down and give up. They were tired, they had been working all night and knew that their chances of influencing the decision were as good as next to nothing; John Meyer Frey’s execution was a matter of concern for the whole of Ohio, his death would mean that justice had been served.
They sat on a bench clutching a bundle of papers, almost alone in the imposing, over-the-top waiting room, green marble floor and something that resembled classical Greek pillars down the main aisle.
They hadn’t given up.
They were prepared and would very soon make their last appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court. They would then jump in a car and drive to Cincinnati and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit. John Meyer Frey had already died once and survived, he could do it again.
It wasn’t over. It was never over.
When John stood up and looked at the camera with his will in his hand, the observation group had alerted Vernon Eriksen. A prisoner who was about to be executed had to be healthy and uninjured, but death had already started to eat away at this one. Vernon had run down the bare corridors lined with all the locked doors and when he got to the Death House, he had asked one of the guards to let him into the cell, to the man who had only twelve hours left to live. He had sat down on a stool next to him and they had talked about everything except what was going to happen, their voices quiet, and Vernon had put his hand on John’s shoulder several times.
All that the people watching them on the silent black-and-white monitor in the observation room saw was a senior corrections officer calming down a condemned man who was panicking. They couldn’t feel their closeness, nor even register John’s surprise when Vernon admitted the major role he had played in John’s escape. It was therefore also impossible to hear the prisoner suddenly start to thank the man who was responsible for looking after him unto death, for the days that had passed and become six extra years, for what had been an extended life, all because a person who he didn’t really know had risked everything to give him the opportunity to continue breathing.
Ewert Grens was not in the least bit tired. Sleep was overrated. He had continued to get cups of coffee as night lightened into dawn into morning, and his very being had been consumed by a restless energy that came from the anxiety and anger that he no longer had room for but had to go somewhere. He had picked up Sven, who had been drained by too many sleepless hours, and asked him to go with him to the County Communications Center: two months of intense media coverage of
a political decision to deport a person in custody with an impending execution for which the date had already been set
would culminate today. Great organized demonstrations and violent unorganized clashes thirsting for the attention of every extra police officer who had been called in. When he arrived, Grens offered to relieve one of the operators, and when the first call came from the American embassy, requesting police reinforcement to help control the swelling crowd that was about to break into embassy property, he picked up the receiver and calmly explained,
sorry, no cars available
. He ignored Sven Sundkvist’s shocked face and went on to the next call, and when a frightened embassy official described the demonstrators as an increasing threat, he gave the same answer,
sorry, no cars available
. The third time, when the demonstrators’ shouts could be heard on the receiver and the officer was hysterical and pleaded for help from the police, Ewert Grens smiled as he whispered,
then call in the marines
, and hung up.
Helena, her son, Oscar, and her father-in-law, Ruben, were given permission by Vernon Eriksen to see the waiting prisoner in his cell in the Death House for their last family visit. They could then see him sitting behind a wall of thin steel bars instead of the square of steel-wirereinforced glass that visitors were normally shown to in the final twentyfour hours.
It was hard to make out from the closed-circuit camera why they didn’t seem to be talking at all, they just seemed to be sitting there, John Meyer Frey with his stool on the inside of the locked cell, his family in the corridor outside, as if that was all they wanted, to be near each other, no more words when everything had been said.
Thorulf Winge had walked from his home on Nybrogatan to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs on Gustav Adolfs Torg long before dawn. Yet another long day, he’d understood that much, yet more cameras, yet more questions.
A day he had been looking forward to.
When it was over, when night and dark had fallen, the two months of hell would be behind them. He had spent all his adult life in the halls of power, he had fended off a good deal of stupidity, hidden dozens of scandals in the shadows of diplomacy, negotiated a way out of both national and international crises before they had had a chance to grow beyond the embryonic stage. But everything paled in comparison to this damn girl killer.
Winge had sometimes wondered, when he was on his own in the evenings, when the hate had taken a break, whether he was getting tired, if he didn’t have the energy anymore, he was perhaps just too old. Every day! New claims, interviews, opinion polls, demands for his resignation. All over the deportation of a criminal? The papers, the TV channels, they loved it. The readers, the viewers loved it. It went on and on, but maybe it would ease off once Frey was dead, maybe it wouldn’t be as much fun then to be involved.
He heard the shouts from the demonstrators—
Sweden! Murderer!
—that filled the big square outside. They had been chanting without interruption—
Sweden! Murderer!
—since lunch, he wondered how they could be bothered, if they didn’t have work to go to.
He left the window and went back to his desk. He wasn’t going to answer any questions today, he would stay in his office in the ministry, wait them out and go home about the time that the execution was due to take place.
The three officers who were observing John Meyer Frey’s cell in the Death House via a camera had just started to relax slightly when one of the three visitors, a child of five, pulled himself loose from his mother’s arms and ran toward the wall of bars that separated him from his father. It was clear on the black-and-white monitor that the senior corrections officer rushed forward and tried to prevent the child from holding on to two of the bars, that he pulled at one of the child’s hands and that the mother hurried forward and pulled at the other. The recordings were without sound and so it wasn’t possible to hear the voices, but the boy screamed, his face twisted; it took two or three minutes before he let go and then curled up on the floor like a fetus.