Authors: Helen Prejean
“Merry Christmas,” I say to Robert.
“I tried to call you yesterday at your mother’s,” he says.
“I asked the warden to put in a call to you here but he wouldn’t,” I say.
“They don’t put calls through. This ain’t exactly the Holiday Inn,” he says, and he smiles. I see he has on his jeans and a long-sleeved blue denim shirt with a white T-shirt underneath and the black knitted hat, and I am glad he has the little hat because when they shave his head maybe he can wear it and his head won’t be cold. Would they let him wear it to the chair? No, probably not. The guards will not want to deal with any extra clothing to be removed when they get their prisoner in the chair.
All my energies move now to this man behind the screened window of the white metal door. I’ll be here with him all day and I take a deep breath and ease in. He’s glad to see me, I can tell.
“Were you able to sleep much?” I ask.
“I did,” he says. “It’s weird, it’s a lot quieter here than on the Row. Yeah, I slept. Funny, but I’ve told the truth about what happened and, like the Book said, the truth sets you free. I used to always think that the truth could hurt you, but I feel free now, kind of innocent even, knowing it, knowing the truth.”
This leads to a special request.
“Look,” he says, “maybe you can’t do this and maybe it’s too expensive or whatever, but if you can do this for me, I would really appreciate it. I want to take a polygraph test because I want my mother to know that I didn’t kill Faith Hathaway. I don’t care if nobody else in the whole world believes me, I just want my mother to know.”
A polygraph test. The quickest I could get it for him would be tomorrow. No chance of getting it lined up for today. I weigh it in my mind. There is a question of money. I estimate it’ll cost a hundred and fifty, maybe two hundred dollars, and I tell him yes, I’ll make a phone call from here, from Captain Rabelais’s office, because as a matter of fact I happen to know someone in Baton Rouge who administers these tests and maybe we can pull it off.
This leads me to ask him about a discrepancy in the physical evidence of his case that’s been bothering me. I had read it in the transcripts of the trial and Farmer had brought it up during the Pardon Board hearing. Robert claims that Vaccaro, positioned behind Faith Hathaway, her head in his lap, suddenly began stabbing her, and he, Robert, kneeling in front facing her, had held her hands. But the victim’s body was found with her arms above her head and her legs up, knees bent, feet on the ground. To hold her hands, then, Robert would have had to reach across her body, blocking Vaccaro from stabbing her.
The pathologist had testified that the victim’s hands and feet had to have been held in spread-eagled fashion before she died.
“When we left her, her hands were laying on her stomach and her legs were down flat and her knees together,” Robert says.
He states it simply and without remonstrance and exhaustive explanation. That’s all he says.
There are three possible explanations that occur to me:
Faith was not dead when Robert and Vaccaro left her, and she moved her limbs into the position in which she was found.
Someone else moved her arms and legs into the position before pictures were taken at the scene of the murder.
Robert is lying.
But if Robert is lying, why this last-minute, privately administered
polygraph test for his mother? And why, after arrest, the offer to take a polygraph test for the authorities?
“So, what’s all this I hear about you admiring Hitler and wishing you could come back as a terrorist and bomb people?” I say to him, referring to the stories appearing over the last couple of weeks.
“Not the people, just the buildings,” he protests. “I didn’t say I’d bomb the people. I don’t have any love for the U.S. government. The CIA goes around thinking they can assassinate anybody they damn well please, anybody that doesn’t agree with their ideology, and look at the death penalty. You never see rich people on death row. They can buy government officials off because the almighty dollar determines what kind of justice you get here in the good ole USA.”
I tell him I can agree with some of his criticisms of the U.S. government, but that his violent response is no solution. Our Sisters serving as Latin American missionaries have urged us to write letters to congresspersons protesting U.S.-backed militarist policies in Central America, and I had visited Nicaragua in 1983 and talked to too many people who had had innocent loved ones killed by the Contras — children, women, teachers, health-care workers — to trust U.S. government officials who called such terrorists “freedom fighters.”
“So how is bombing buildings going to change anything?” I ask. “That’s a pure testosterone solution if ever I heard one.”
And he argues that the destruction of government buildings will “at least get the government’s attention and they’ll have to put a lot of money out to rebuild and
money
is all they understand.”
And I say that if our government is doing things we disagree with that it’s only we, the people, that can hold them accountable and demand that they change because we’re a democracy, and democracy is hard work, a lot harder than the one-act shoot-’em-up solution he’s suggesting.
“Violence is such a simplistic solution,” I say. “Like these people trying to kill you now. What is your execution going to accomplish other than show that the state of Louisiana can be as violent as you were? And what’s this you said about admiring Hitler? People are reading these interviews and thinking you’re some kind of nut. It’s going to make it easier for people to say ‘good riddance’ when you’re executed. You’re not helping yourself or anybody else on death row by saying things like that.”
“Hitler was a leader. He advanced things,” he says. “He was a supreme being in one way and maybe a nut in another because he
went a little overboard. But I admire people who do something, who act, and you gotta say that for Hitler — he acted.”
He asked for it, saying something dumb like that, and I tell him what I think — we’ve got all day to talk — and then what really comes out as we talk is that the Aryan Brotherhood in the federal penitentiary in Marion was a family to him.
“I’ve got two tattoos here underneath my sleeve,” he says, pointing to his arm, “the swastika and the skull, membership badges for the Brotherhood. A dude I had met in Terre Haute had sent a letter of recommendation for me to the brotherhood before I got to Marion, and when I got there, as soon as I arrived, they took me in, gave me cigarettes, drugs, the shirt off their backs. Everything they had they was willing to share. That was the best part of it, the sharing. You belonged, man. Once I got hold of a hundred Valiums and I shared them with the brothers. And when the other brothers got stuff, they shared with me. It was one for all and all for one. Once you’re in the brotherhood, it’s for life — you can’t get out until death. That’s what the skull represents.”
“What would have happened if you decided not to share the Valiums?” I ask.
“They would’ve killed me,” he says.
“Cozy family,” I say.
“It was. It really was,” he says. “And there’s mostly just whites in Marion, not many blacks, and, truthfully, the Aryans run the place. There’s not many fights or killings or much homosexuality.” He explains that Marion is the highest-security prison in the country, built in 1963 to replace Alcatraz, a “tough pen,” he says, where inmates get their heads shaved and wear Army uniforms and boots. “Being there taught me a lot about handling things, prepared me to handle things better here. They have better programs there and it’s easier to do your time. Here, it’s hard to do time. And in Terre Haute, where I was before I went to Marion, you get a dollar an hour for your work. Here you get two cents. At Marion you could join educational programs and play group sports. I liked football. You got to choose the group you wanted to play with. Here, those on the Row can’t play group sports. It’s one of our demands in the lawsuit.”
He talks about Marion as if it were an alma mater. He talks about the Aryan Brotherhood as if it were a fraternity.
He tells me about the time in Marion when he and a bunch from his tier went to the “hole” because of his “cold baked potato.” One day when he was served his lunch tray in his cell, he felt the baked
potato and it was cold and he asked the guard to heat it in the microwave but the guard refused, and he threw the potato onto the tier, followed by his tray. Then other inmates threw their trays, followed by soap, toilet paper, books — and some set fires in their cells and everybody was yelling about “messing over Robert.” He chuckles. The memory of it pleases him — all the guys getting into the act like that, all protesting together over the cold baked potato.
“I must have been in the hole thirty-eight days or so for that baked potato. The hole there ain’t nice like the one here. You’re kept naked and you have terrible food, I mean
terrible
, and they come and hose you off every three days and you have to lather right away because they only give you a few seconds and they only give you one book to read, like one of those ‘See Dick run’ books.”
Obviously he had made it through all these experiences and lived to tell the tale. Obviously he is one tough dude. He takes a long draw from his cigarette, and for a good long time he talks about Marion. Captain Rabelais brings us cups of coffee, and I drink one cup to Robert’s three. It reminds me of Pat, being here, the coffee, the cigarettes, the talking and talking to keep the terror at bay.
He’s going to die, he’s definitely going to die. Just follow the stream, let him take the lead, accompany him. But be honest, don’t condescend because he’s going to die
.
And I have to keep positioning myself inwardly to grasp the reality of imminent death, because Robert Willie, through mysterious resources of his own, seems to have a firm foothold in the present moment and is calm and obviously enjoying this conversation very much.
Captain Rabelais brings lunch in heaping amounts, a tray for each of us, and I tell Robert about the fainting episode and the one rule in the prison I succeeded in changing, and Captain Rabelais keeps saying, “Eat, young lady, eat” and tells us there’s more where this came from and there’s this “Eat hearty, mates” spirit in his voice. Robert is eating with gusto and saying that this food is so much better than what they get on the Row, and I find myself eating all the meat loaf and mustard greens and half of the huge slab of corn bread.
Robert tells me of the “blowout” that happened in Marion last October when two guards and an inmate were killed. “They get real upset when guards are killed,” he says, and I recall having seen a newspaper article among his papers, a letter to the editor by an inmate at Marion, giving his version of the incident.
Robert says that after the guards at Marion were killed, a large
contingent of guards, the “A-Team,” “systematically dragged out every member of the brotherhood and beat the shit out of them.” I remember the inmate’s article had talked about the beatings and that afterward even lawyers were barred from the prison and the whole prison was put on lock-down, with educational and recreational programs curtailed.
He pauses and is quiet awhile and says to please excuse him but he has to use the “can,” and I figure this is a good time to telephone and check out the possibility of the polygraph test. Amazingly, by the second phone call I reach Don Alan Zuelke, a family friend, who says he’s available and can come to the prison early tomorrow morning to administer the test. As we are lining it up, he says he must honestly say that if this test is to be administered in the death house on the very day of the client’s execution, there is a high probability that the sheer stress of the situation will skew the results because the test measures emotional stress. I weigh what he is saying. The cost of the test, about two hundred dollars, is a lot of money in this work where we scrabble even to pay telephone bills. Two hundred dollars for a test which is probably not going to be accurate anyway? Against that, I weigh a man about to die who wants to assure his mother that he’s telling the truth. “Let’s do it,” I say, and we make tentative plans, which I explain must meet with the warden’s approval. I tell him to make the test as early in the morning as possible and I give him directions to the prison.
I’m in Captain Rabelais’s office, and just as I finish the phone call I smell a cigar and in walks Warden Blackburn. Robert’s execution will be his third. I wonder if the deaths are starting to “get next to him.” I wonder how long it will be before he talks to Major Coody.
“How’s he holding up, Sister Prejean?” (He says “pree-jeen,” as most people do who don’t know French.)
“Amazingly well,” I say, and immediately, wish I hadn’t said that. I don’t want to grease the wheels. I want to jag, jar, and jimmy this death process any way I can. I know that’s what this warden wants more than anything else — for the execution to go as “smoothly” as the others have gone. Above all, he doesn’t want a Leandress Riley scene — any warden’s execution nightmare.
Riley was a black man executed in San Quentin’s gas chamber on February 20, 1953. He was small, only eighty pounds or so, and he was terrified. The guards had to carry him screaming and struggling into the gas chamber where, with difficulty, they strapped him into the metal chair and bolted the door. But just before they dropped
the cyanide pellets into the vat of acid, Riley managed to pull his slim wrists out of the restraints and jumped up, racing around inside the chamber, beating frantically on the glass windows where witnesses and media watched horrified. Prison officials had to stop the process, open the chamber, and strap him in again. This happened three times. And then he screamed in terror right up to the end, right up until he inhaled the gas.
2
Word has it that most of the guards who worked on Riley’s “tactical unit” could never work another execution. I think Blackburn knows that if any inmate is a “fighter,” it’s Robert Lee Willie. I know he wants to get any kind of reassuring signal he can that this man is going to go “peacefully.” It is a reassurance I cannot give him.