Authors: Helen Prejean
Thursday, May 29, and Friday, May 30, passed. The sheriffs office formed a search party. Vernon joined. It was a formidable undertaking to search in this expansive countryside with its massive patches of wilderness areas full of underbrush, thickets, and gulleys.
On Sunday, June 1, a family picknicking near Fricke’s Cave in a remote wilderness area south of Franklington found a purse, clothes, and a wallet and turned them over to the Franklington Sheriffs Department. Someone called the Harveys to tell them they had heard that some of Faith’s things had been found.
“We got that information from our own resources, not from the police,” Elizabeth says. “They never called us. We called them.”
On Monday, June 2, Elizabeth continues, the search party from the sheriffs office went out to comb the area where the clothing had been discovered, but they found nothing. Vernon says how he had noticed “a real bad smell” in the area where they were searching, and thought there must be some kind of garbage dump or dead animal nearby.
On Wednesday, June 4, eight days after Faith’s disappearance, two investigators from the district attorney’s office found her body behind a log in the vicinity of Fricke’s Cave. She had been stabbed seventeen times in the neck and upper chest.
Vernon is crying. Elizabeth, recounting the gruesome details, does not cry. Somehow she’s found a way to leach out the horror. Their daughter’s badly decomposed body was nude, supine, legs spread-eagled.
Vernon says, “Faith didn’t know the animals she was dealing with when Willie and Vaccaro offered her a ride home. She had been with friends all night. You know, young people, they think everybody’s their friend. We think somebody must have slipped some
thing into her drink. The coroner’s report said her vagina was all tore up. The electric chair is too good for Robert Willie and Joseph Vaccaro.”
He can’t stop crying. He says a couple of sentences and cries, says some more and cries again. Listening and knowing he is reliving it all over again, I want to tell him, “Stop. Please stop.” I want him to be oblivious, to forget, to let all the horrible details fade. I can’t find any words. I am crying too.
“At first they couldn’t find the graduation medallion around her neck because it was embedded so deep from the stabbing,” Elizabeth says. “She had been so proud of that medallion. She wore it all the time. It said: “Class of ‘80, Dawn of a New Decade.”
The police would not let Vernon and Elizabeth come to the morgue to identify the body, explaining that it would be too traumatic for them. But Elizabeth says that she could not bear for the body to be buried forever without being “absolutely, positively sure without a doubt” that it was Faith they had found. “What if, because of the decomposition and the circumstantial evidence of the clothes nearby, they only thought it was Faith? I had to be sure.”
So she had telephoned her brother in Richmond, Virginia, a dentist, who had done some dental work for Faith in April. On the evening before the funeral he had gone to the funeral home and made a positive identification from the dental restorations.
Vernon says, “Elizabeth’s brother was pretty tore up when he came back from the funeral home. Before he reached his hand into that bag with all the lime in it and fished out Faith’s jaw, he said he had always been against the death penalty. But, boy, after that, he was for it.”
“I knew it had to be Faith, that’s what my mind told me, but I just had to be sure,” Elizabeth says.
Young Lizabeth, the fourteen-year-old-daughter of Vernon and Elizabeth, dashes into the living room. She leans close to her mother and whispers something. Elizabeth introduces me and she turns toward me and says politely, “How do you do.” I calculate that she was ten years old when Faith was killed. Her life here in this room is tangible. She is pretty and whole and unharmed. I’m glad that Vernon and Elizabeth have her. Maybe she is what keeps them going. Perhaps for her sake they have not allowed themselves to dissolve in grief. Lizabeth bounds out of the room as quickly as she came in.
Vernon recounts the scene and the murder. Both Willie and
Vaccaro, he says, gave basically the same account in their confessions, except that each blamed the other for the stabbing.
Sometime in the early-morning hours of May 28 the two men met Faith outside a bar and offered her a ride home. Instead, they drove her down gravel roads to a remote place, made her take off all her clothes, blindfolded her, and led her down a ravine where they forced her to lie down and raped her. Then one of them stabbed her to death while the other held her hands. Some fingers of her right hand were missing where the knife had cut as she raised her hand to protect herself.
“The SOB, Vaccaro, got a life sentence,” Vernon says, and he is crying again, “and it’s been four years and they haven’t fried Willie’s ass yet. We’ve been waiting and waiting for justice to be done. I can’t rest until justice is done. All you hear about these days is the rights of the criminal. What about our rights? Don’t we have a right to see this chapter closed?”
I wonder hew Vernon and Elizabeth would have fared emotionally if Robert Willie, like Vaccaro, had been sentenced to life imprisonment. He would have slipped into anonymity behind Angola’s walls, his fate sealed, his crime punished, and maybe these grieving parents could, over time, have laid down their grief and carried on with their lives. But now they are like two deer paralyzed by headlights in the road. All they can think, all they know, all they want is the death of their child’s murderer that the state has promised them. So they follow the case in the courts. They hold their breath each time there’s a new appeal. They wait and wait, reliving their daughter’s murder again and again. And the hope is that when Willie’s death does come, it will ease their pain and their loss. At last, they will have
justice
.
The pale October sun has been sliding steadily downward and through the window I can see the trees turning into dark purple silhouettes. Inside, darkness has been slowly seeping into the room. Elizabeth gets up and turns on a lamp. I know I have to drive back across the lake, but time is standing still. In the presence of such suffering, it doesn’t matter how late I get home.
“Let’s go to the kitchen and I’ll make us some coffee,” Elizabeth says. As we walk to the kitchen, Vernon keeps talking, “Willie and I met face to face in the hallway during his trial. He was cocky. He said he’d never go to the chair. I told him I’d see his ass fry.”
Then he picked up on the point he had made to me when I met him on the capitol steps — that the only way to be sure we get rid
of someone like Willie is to kill him. Elizabeth agrees. “That’s the only way we can be sure that he’ll never kill again,” she says. “In prison he could kill a guard or another inmate. Someone like Willie can escape from prison.”
I disagree with these arguments, but the intensity of all the sorrow silences me. I do not offer counterarguments. I just let all the torrents of rage and loss and sorrow tumble over me.
“He’s a mad dog, that’s what he is,” Vernon says, and he tells how Willie and Vaccaro, after killing Faith, had continued their reign of terror, kidnapping a teenage couple, raping the girl, tying the boy to a tree, stabbing him, shooting him, and leaving him for dead. “Miraculously he lived,” Vernon says, “but he’s partially paralyzed from the waist down.”
Vernon has stopped crying. It’s his anger talking now, which I welcome. At least he’s not dissolving in grief and loss. I want him to survive this terrible sorrow. I want him to make it.
“Before their rampage was over,” Vernon says, “Willie and Vaccaro drove through five states, stole four cars, robbing, raping, and killing all the way. The law had a bulletin out on ‘em for the kidnapping, and that’s what they first arrested them for. They had turned the young Madisonville girl loose, and she had gone to the police and described them. When the law arrested the two of them in Arkansas for the kidnapping,” he says, “they didn’t yet know they had killed Faith. That only came out as they confessed to the kidnapping.”
I think of the young man I have just visited with the neatly combed hair and the quiet voice. I think of how he exhaled his smoke downward so that it didn’t blow into my face.
“I am going to be Robert Willie’s spiritual adviser,” I tell them quietly. I have to say it. I have to let them know. We have made our way to the kitchen and now sit at the small table there. Elizabeth is pouring the coffee into our cups.
“He needs all the spiritual advisers he can get,” Vernon says. “He’s an animal. No, I take that back. Animals don’t rape and kill their own kind. Robert Willie is God’s mistake. Frying in the electric chair is the least of the frying he’s about to do when God sends him to hell where he belongs,” and he jabs his finger downward.
On two occasions, Vernon says, he almost “took Willie out.” One was during a recess at the trial. In the small courtroom Vernon was standing close to Willie and within inches of a deputy’s unstrapped, holstered pistol. “In three seconds I could have slipped that gun out and blown Willie away,” Vernon says, “but there was
the deputy there and other people. I might have hurt somebody else, so I didn’t do it.”
The second opportunity came, he says, when he was driving to New Orleans on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway and saw federal marshals in a vehicle driving Willie to New Orleans. Vernon had rammed down the accelerator and raced after them. “Willie turned and saw me, he knew who it was on their tail,” he says, “and he must have said something to the driver. I saw the driver eyeballing me through his rearview mirror and he was gunning that Pontiac for all it was worth, but I had my Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, and his pedal was to the floor and I was still gaining on them. I could hear them over the C.B. radio. They were scared. They knew that if I rammed them at that speed they wouldn’t be able to control their car, they’d go into the lake.”
But then, again, Vernon says, he had refrained and fallen back. They were officers of the law doing their job. He didn’t want to hurt them. “Besides,” he adds, “they would have put my ass in jail and I couldn’t be here for Elizabeth and Dale” (his pet name for Lizabeth).
I am amazed at these stories. I have only seen high-speed car chases in the movies. Poor Vernon. What does he do with all this rage he feels? My heart goes out to him and to Elizabeth. These are good, decent, nice people. Here they are, inviting me into their home, offering me coffee, sharing with me the most intimate, terrible pain of their lives.
“And do you know,” Vernon continues, “that we almost didn’t get the son-of-a-bitch, Willie, to face the electric chair here in Louisiana because the feds already had him serving a bunch of life sentences in Marion
*
? Willie figured he’d beat the chair here in Louisiana because he thought that as long as the feds had him, the state couldn’t touch him. And I was talking to people — lawyers and a bunch of other folks — and that’s what they were all telling me, that Willie had to serve his federal term before the state could get their hands on him.
“No way was that going to happen,” says Vernon, and he tells how he told his congressman, Bob Livingston, about his problem and Livingston told him to write a letter to President Reagan and he would put it in the President’s hand.
“Well, Livingston must have gotten through,” Vernon says, because several weeks later the phone rang and a woman’s voice said
to hold please for the President. “Hell, I didn’t know which president the lady was talking about, the Kiwanis Club or whatever. But when I heard the voice, I knew what president it was, all right. I’d know Ronald Reagan’s voice anywhere. He told me — these were his words — ‘As soon as the U.S. Supreme Court turns Willie down, which won’t be long, he’ll be sent back to Louisiana to stand trial for your daughter’s murder, you can depend on that.’ And I liked the way he put it — ‘as soon as the Court turns him down, which won’t be long’ — that’s just the words he used, and I told him that I appreciated that.”
But I can tell Vernon’s talking to the President of the United States didn’t impress him. Only the satisfaction of getting Robert Willie really mattered, and if that took the President himself, so be it. The rage of his pain and the agony of his loss eclipse everything else.
It’s time to leave. I get up and move toward the car. Vernon and Elizabeth walk out with me and he says, “You know, even Willie’s own father, who has spent twenty-six years of his life at Angola for everything from cattle rustlin’ to murder, says his son ought to get the chair.”
I start the motor. I thank the Harveys for letting me visit. I promise to pray for them. I promise to come back to see them again sometime.
“We’re like different baseball teams,” Vernon says. “Different points of view, but we respect each other.”
It’s been a friendly exchange. Vernon and Elizabeth hadn’t batted an eye when I told them I was Willie’s spiritual adviser. I can tell they’re grateful for my visit. Friends, it seems, have dropped away since the tragedy.
A month or so later the friendliness between us will be shattered. I will meet the Harveys at Robert Willie’s Pardon Board hearing. They will be there to see that he dies, and because of my visit and the sympathy I have shown them, they expect that I also want to see him die.
*
A maximum-security federal prison in Illinois.
CHAPTER
7
D
riving back to New Orleans after my visit with the Harveys, I stop
and pay my dollar at the entrance of the twenty-six-mile causeway. Here at these toll booths is where Vernon Harvey said he spotted Robert Willie in a federal vehicle and began his high-speed chase. Night has taken hold of the sky and the lake. All I can see as I drive are the shafts of light from the headlights and red flicks of tailights in front of me. I can’t get my mind off Faith Hathaway.
She had been celebrating. No doubt the liquor had lowered her defenses. At what point did the chilling realization seize her that she was in danger,
real danger
, there in the front seat of a truck, wedged between two strangers — men, maybe with guns, whose remarks were becoming more and more sinister and who were taking her farther and farther away from the safe moorings of home and parents and friends — and help. As panic mounted, had she tried shutting her eyes tight, fighting to throw off the sluggish effects of the alcohol? It was a time when a woman needed her sharpest wits about her, a time to think clearly and keenly about escape. Or perhaps it was better that her wits were not so sharp. Better, maybe, for the anesthesia of the alcohol to dull the pain and horror soon to be hers.