The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (13 page)

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Bob Dark said in his closing, “this is a very dangerous, vicious man shown by the videotape. Mr. Patel didn’t have a chance. I’m sure when Mr. Patel awoke that morning on October fourth of 2001, he had no idea what was awaiting him when he got to that store. He probably figured it was just another day at work. Said good-bye to his wife. Children were probably still asleep; thought he’d be seeing them later on in the day. But, lo and behold, he was about to meet Mark Stroman. Ladies and gentlemen, you can take back the videotape with you when you go back to deliberate and look at it again. I know it’s a very shocking, very emotional thing to watch for the first time. But it just shows you what this man is capable of doing and what he did. The state will ask you to find this defendant guilty of capital murder, because that’s the only just, honest, and fair verdict in this case. Thank you very much.”

Jim Oatman then rose and gave his closing, which was also his first real statement to the jury. He suggested that they find his client guilty of murder but not capital murder, which could bring the death sentence: “No doubt there’s a brutal crime, no doubt he deserves to pay, and I’m not asking you to acquit him. He is guilty of knowingly causing that man’s murder. He is a murderer. There’s no justification or excuse for that. When he fired that gun he was reasonably certain
to have caused that result, which was that man’s death. But he didn’t have a specific intent. And as hard as that choice may be for you, if you watch that video and listen to yourself and stay true to your oath in this case to render a verdict based upon the law and the evidence, he is not guilty of capital murder. He is guilty of murder. I wish you well.”

The jury departed for its deliberations and came back in less than an hour, around 11:15 a.m.

“Has the jury reached a verdict?” the judge asked.

“Yes, we have, Your Honor,” the foreman said. He passed a sheet of paper up to the bench.

The judge read the verdict aloud: “We, the jury, find the defendant guilty of capital murder, as charged in the indictment.”

The judge called a fifteen-minute break. At 11:30 a.m., the parties were to return to decide if Stroman deserved life or the Death.

F
OR THE JURY
, the harder work now began. The set of facts in the case—the whodunit—was straightforward enough. The judge’s instructions, in the phase just ended, asked the jurors if they believed, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the defendant was indeed the man who strode into that gas station, robbed, and killed. There was that complexity about specific intent to rob and capital murder. Still, by and large, a juror could feel fairly confident that Stroman was guilty as charged.

Now the court wanted something more demanding from the jurors. They had to decide if Stroman should continue living. “He’s sealed his own fate,” Bob Dark said. “He’s walked himself to the death house. He’s like a cancer on society. And you twelve jurors have to be impersonal, as a surgeon is with his knife, and remove that cancer. It’s just like when you have gangrene of the body. You have to amputate that portion and save the person.”

The jury would not make this decision in the way one might imagine. It had little to do with seeing crime-scene photos or watching lawyers bicker and witnesses sob. The jury had to decide if Stroman met certain conditions, and to do so by asking itself perhaps unanswerable questions about a man’s life and making and character. The jury would have to mull over what shaped this Stroman, what made him what he was. It would have to consider whether he could have become anything else—and whether, if allowed to live, albeit in prison, he could still.

The court referred to these more speculative questions as “special issues.” First came Special Issue No. 1: “whether there is a probability that the defendant, Mark Anthony Stroman, would commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society.” To answer yes, the twelve jurors would have to be unanimous. To answer no, at least ten would have to agree. Saying yes kept open the possibility of the Death; no guaranteed a life sentence. It was not an easy question, in part because the jury had to decide whether a man can pose a threat to “society” when confined to prison for the ensuing decades.

If the first question yielded a yes, the jury would move on to Special Issue No. 2: “Do you find from the evidence, taking into consideration all of the evidence, including the circumstances of the offense, the defendant’s character and background, and the personal moral culpability of the defendant, that there is a sufficient mitigating circumstance or circumstances to warrant that a sentence of life imprisonment rather than death sentence be imposed?” Here the jury had to be unanimous to say no, nothing mitigated the crime, which would then lead to a sentence of death; if ten jurors found something mitigating in Stroman’s history, that would be enough to save him.

This had ceased to be a trial about a crime and instead become a trial about a man’s nature—about whether there was any good reason to grant Mark Stroman the fortune of another act.

The grist for this second phase of the trial would be fragments from the story of Stroman’s life. Like Tom Boston, who thought he knew Stroman intimately but didn’t know about three of his four children; like Tena, who had always loved the man but had never been able to hold him; like their children, who thought about Stroman far more often than they actually saw him; like the parade of police officers who would testify about Stroman’s arrests going back to boyhood in Plano—like all those who’d crossed his path, the jurors would come to know the defendant only in peeks. It hadn’t been the sort of life that anyone could wholly comprehend.

It was hard for either side to turn the defendant into a fully realized character. Stroman was, in court as elsewhere, a screen for the visions of others. All that could be offered—one witness at a time, and in the accompanying documents submitted to the court—was a scattered portrait of where Mark Stroman had been and what he had known, and a panoply of theories about how a man like this is manufactured. For the juror, there was no clear way to separate verities from falsehood in this retelling. There was no straightforward guide to who was lying and who was telling it as it had been. Even so, the portrait might give a feeling for the man, and a feeling could perhaps grow into a verdict.

T
HE JURORS WERE
asked to picture him, this little boy with a stutter ripe for teasing and wisps of red hair and ears as big as his cheeks. He comes into the world on October 13, 1969. His birth certificate contains a secret that would not be revealed to him for years: he was not Mark Baker, as he would long assume; he was, in fact, Mark Stroman. His father was not that sputtering old truck of a man called Wallace whom Mark would grow up with but some old consort of his mother’s whom he would never truly know. In the corner of America he entered, it was more and more like that.

Tena Stroman, Mark’s maternal aunt, and the defense’s expert-witness psychologist all argued to the jury that the Bakers’ home in Plano was not a good place to make the mistake of being young. Tena put it simply enough: “They didn’t want nothing disturbing what was going on with their life.”

Jurors heard story after story about Mark’s early years on Latham Drive and later Kidwell Circle in Plano. Not long after Mark’s birth, his mother, Sandra, ran off without explanation, leaving the three children with her mother. The family had supposedly gotten a call some months later from a hospital in Shreveport, Louisiana, saying that Sandra had been found pregnant and lying feebly in a gutter. Her own sister, Sue Carlson, testified that she returned, expecting twins, lived at their father’s place until the delivery, gave the twins away for adoption, and finally returned home.

The jury heard from her sister that Sandra was a neat freak, with a “compulsive disorder on cleanliness,” whose own children—Mark and his two sisters—were “never allowed to sit on the furniture.” Carlson also described the heavy drinking whose air filled the household like turned milk: the “happy hour” that Sandra and Wallace regularly threw themselves around 4 or 5 p.m., which invariably led to fighting and calling each other “every name under the sun”; the requirement that when such drinking began, the children keep themselves to their bedrooms, because Wallace just wanted to have his drink, chew on his dinner, and be alone with his wife, however much they quarreled. Carlson even remembered a Christmas dinner at Wallace and Sandra’s when Wallace insisted that the children eat in their bedrooms. She had heard Wallace calling Mark “stupid,” “ignorant,” “dumb,” “worthless.” She claimed that Wallace kicked Mark in the head and thumped him in the ear and forehead.

“Sandra and Wallace lived, and still live, in their own world. They have a confined life to where nothing is important to them except them,” Carlson testified. Later she added of Mark Stroman:
“He didn’t have a chance, sir. He didn’t have a chance that most children have. He was put out from his own parents, not feeling welcomed or loved. He didn’t have the nurturing that a child deserves.”

Tena, who had married Mark when she was fifteen, seemed to share this idea of Stroman as a victim of fortune, a man who couldn’t be expected to transcend his parentage. She told the jury of a principle by which Wallace had raised him: “If Mark would get into trouble, or if he had somebody was picking on him, he would tell Mark if he didn’t go back and whip him, that he was going to get whipped—that Wallace was going to spank him.” Tena also claimed that “they would put him in his room for days and make him read the dictionary.” A psychiatric evaluation from 1983 noted another punishment used in that home: because Mark was allergic to grass, he was often required to cut it.

“Mark stayed grounded most of his life when he was there,” Sue Carlson said.

The defense’s psychologist, Mary Connell, testified that Mark’s mother once said something to him about having been $50 short of the money required to abort the fetus that became him. She told him this story with regret at having been so broke. “She said she wished she had had a dog,” the psychologist told the jury. “That it would have been better if she’d had dogs instead of children.”

The jury also heard—from Tena and the psychologist and others—of an important escape hatch in Mark’s boyhood days: his grandparents. They were his maternal grandmother and stepgrandfather, to be precise, and they had a construction business of their own. They were somewhat more prosperous than Wallace and Sandra and lived on Old Seagoville Road, in an almost bucolic corner of southeastern Dallas. Their house was wide and low, set on a five-acre property where they kept horses that young Mark loved to feed. It was surrounded by quiet lanes, shaded by a canopy of trees, on which he loved to ride his bike. Several witnesses
spoke about how Mark would bolt to Old Seagoville whenever he fled Plano on two wheels.

“Mr. Cox loved Mark,” Tena Stroman said of the grandfather. “He always told him to be a good man, to grow up, take care of his family, work and be there for his family. He loved Mark. Mark loved his grandpa.”

The facts of Mark Stroman’s early life, dreary as they seemed, were not altogether unknown in his social milieu. It was a familiar cycle: a boy born to a tired, scattered father who wasn’t really his father; passing through some combination of childhood misdemeanors, extra hours on school tests, special ed, visits by probation officers, stints in boys’ homes and juvenile prison; and landing at last on the giving end of tired, scattered fatherhood.

Over the years, Stroman would develop a loathing of state interference in people’s lives and of the idea of dependency. He believed that people and their families should be left to decide how to live and spend their money, and that they should take advantage of that opportunity and make no excuses. One of the things that Stroman’s trial showed was how this attitude might have grown out of a concrete knowledge of government intervention: Stroman had been in and out of the state’s supervision since before he shaved. For all his reverence for family and contempt for the state, the trial record also suggested that the state had tried at least as hard as, if not harder than, Stroman’s family to fix what afflicted him as a boy.