Life Without Parole: A Kate Conway Mystery (3 page)

“Kate?” Lauren asked. “You in?”

I was in, and a little giddy about it. I said yes quickly, before she could change her mind. After we hung up, I made coffee and waited for the e-mail Lauren would send giving me information on the show. When it arrived, I took a deep, cleansing breath and read through the backgrounds of the two men I’d be interviewing. I don’t watch the creepy reality shows about drunken twentysomethings or spaced-out housewives, but I understand their success. We all like to feel superior to someone. And while it’s easy to feel superior to guys serving life in prison, I was just excited to talk to two people who wouldn’t care about throw pillows or paint chips.

Dugan Correctional Center, a large facility about thirty-five miles southwest of Chicago, is a legend in the prison system. Since its construction in the 1920s some of Illinois’s most famous criminals, from Leopold and Loeb to Richard Speck, have spent time there. It’s maximum security, with about half its population in for murder and the other half hitting all the other big felonies, from rape to kidnapping.

I’d been to a few prisons over the years as I worked on various true crime shows, but Dugan was different. In Dante’s
Inferno
there’s a line, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.” It was written about hell, but by all accounts it could have been written about Dugan.

Driving up to it, I almost missed the entrance. I don’t know what I was expecting, but what I found was a magnificent driveway with trees planted on either side and a large sign in stone that read,
DUGAN CORRECTIONAL CENTER
.
It had an almost welcoming feel, until you got to the barbed wire fence and the armed guards. I wondered what the newly convicted felt as they were riding up to it for the first time, getting their last look at trees for decades, if not for a lifetime.

I parked in the visitor’s lot and looked around for my cameraman’s van. It wasn’t there. My car sputtered even after the key had been removed. Frank and I had bought it more than ten years ago. It had nearly a hundred and forty thousand miles on it, a crack in the rearview mirror, and gunk all over the backseat from too many spilled cans of pop. But it still worked, and I wanted at least another year before I let it go.

After a few minutes of waiting, I got out. I felt a tightness in my chest. Winter in the Midwest is brutal: snow, cold, dark days, and long, empty nights. With six days still left in January, we had nearly two months to go before the first warm day, and it was getting to me.

I left my purse in the trunk of my car, as I’d been told to do, along with my gloves, hat, and scarf. Taking only my identification, I walked toward the visitors entrance. I nearly froze during the short walk, but the look of the place didn’t exactly make me want to head inside. It was a long, tall, gray concrete wall with a battered steel door in the middle, dwarfed by the size of the building it allowed access to. There was a long list of rules posted just to the right of the entrance. Among them: no weapons, no fighting, and no drugs allowed on the premises. I wasn’t reassured.

I’d been in several prisons before, but despite my familiarity with the routine, I always tensed up when I approached the door. Not that I was afraid. The security is tight and the inmates themselves are, at least in my presence, fairly agreeable. But there is an otherness about prisons, a place to hold the forgotten and unwanted. When I’d toured Alcatraz, long after it had gone from a penitentiary to a tourist attraction, I heard a story about how, on New Year’s Eve, the inmates could hear the music and laughter wafting across the bay. I don’t know if the story is true, but just hearing it saddened me. It was out there—life, happiness, celebration—but it was forever unreachable.

I let go of whatever momentary sympathy I felt. I’ve spent many
years working on true crime shows, and I’ve sat with the mothers, fathers, husbands, and wives of murder victims. I’ve combed through the happy family photo albums and seen it all shattered in hundreds of crime scene pictures. I’ve breathed in the secondhand smoke of grief and anger that comes from losing a loved one to violence. I’ve lain in bed in the darkest hours of the night and wondered about the last moments of people I’ve never met, wondered if they were scared, if they understood what was happening.

Whatever excuses these guys at Dugan could come up with, it wouldn’t be enough. Whatever stories they told about bad childhoods or love gone wrong, I didn’t care. People were dead and they were responsible. It was nice, for once, to exploit people and feel good about it.

I
walked into the main building at Dugan Correctional and stopped at the long, high counter that took up most of the room. Behind it was a second metal door, which separated the inmates from the outside world.

“I’m Kate Conway,” I said. “I’m here to see Joanie Rheinbeck.”

The guard, a black man of about thirty, called Joanie’s extension. After a few moments of friendly chatting, he hung up the phone and smiled. “You’re the TV lady.”

“I am. I’m waiting for my crew. They should be here any moment.”

“No problem. I just need some ID.”

I handed over my license.

“We have TV folks here from time to time. Network shows, cable crime shows. We even had a religious show in here once. Everybody wants to peek inside.” He laughed. “But nobody wants to stay.”

A woman in her midfifties entered the visitors area from the prison side. “Kate?” she asked.

“You must be Joanie. I’m really grateful you’re letting us shoot here.”

She walked toward me and I could see her sizing me up. She had the boxy shape and sensible shoes of a woman who doesn’t want to remind anyone of her gender.

“I’m not sure it’s a good idea to let these guys have media exposure,” she said. “It tends to go to their heads. But the warden seemed to think it would offer people insight, so…” She bit the inside of her mouth. “The two men that are being interviewed have low points, but that doesn’t exactly make them good guys.”

“Low points meaning they haven’t broken any rules in prison?”

She nodded. “Not recently. But they both kicked up a fuss years ago. I guess they’re getting used to the place now.”

“I read in the background materials that they’ve been here for about twenty years.”

“Not just here. They’ve
been transferred a bunch of times for issues at other prisons, but I think they’ll be our guests for a while, if they behave,” she said. “They were both on death row at Pontiac until the whole Ryan thing.”

The “whole Ryan thing” was ex–Illinois governor George Ryan, who in 2006 had been convicted of corruption in a bribery case that had inadvertently led to the deaths of six children. But that wasn’t the only thing he was famous for. While he was in office, thirteen death row inmates were released from prison after evidence proved them innocent of the crimes. The rest of death row had their sentences reduced. Ryan was either a hero or a cynical politician looking to remake his image, depending on your point of view.

Either way, a hundred and sixty-four people who had been facing the death penalty were now living a lifetime in prison without any hope of parole, which for some of these men could mean as much as fifty years behind bars. Since Ryan’s successor had abolished the death penalty in the state, there would be a steady stream of people joining them for the long haul.

“I haven’t spoken to either of them myself,” I admitted, “but from what I gather, at least these two don’t bother with a lot of talk about how they’re wrongly convicted.”

The guard behind the counter laughed. “We have a lot of those guys. I’d say at least half the population claims to be in here as a result of police incompetence or witness errors.”

“And the other half?”

“They’re bragging about crimes they didn’t commit, just to look tougher,” he said. “It’s an interesting crowd.”

“Well, that’s why we’re here,” I told him. “We want interesting.”

Just as I was running out of small talk, my crew arrived. Andres Pena, my cameraman, and Victor Pilot, who did audio, burst through the door with a cart full of equipment and a rushed explanation of why they were late. I waved them off.

“Let’s just get in there,” I said. “We have to stick to the prison’s schedule, so set up quickly.”

After being buzzed through three security gates, we were led into a small cement room painted a sherbet green. There was a cheap
oilpainting on the wall, a ship at sea in the middle of a storm. To the left, quite high up, was a window. There was a thick pane of dirty glass in the window, with no way to open it and bars across it.

“This is one of the conference rooms we have for when the inmates have meetings with their lawyers,” Joanie said. “I hope this works, because it’s all we have available today.”

“Then it works.” I smiled. “Thanks so much.”

“Anything you need…” Her voice trailed off as she left the room.

“This is going to be a bitch to get any kind of depth,” Andres said. “It can’t be more than ten feet.”

“Do the best you can, Andres.”

He grunted. Then he walked around the room talking to himself. Even at forty, Andres had a strong, athletic build. He wasn’t tall—we stood eye to eye and I’m barely five feet seven—but he seemed larger than his height. He was also the best cameraman I’d worked with in more than ten years as a television producer.

He stopped at the painting of the ship and tapped the frame. “You want the painting in the background?”

“No. We want it to look like a prison, not a Motel 6.”

Andres looked around. “I guess I could position the camera so we get the corner of the window, in the wide shot. Just a hint of bars. The window is dirty enough that it’s not going to let in too much light.” As he talked, he moved equipment around, nearly dropping a C-clamp on Victor’s foot; Victor had to jump to get out of the way. “Grab that Arri 300, will ya, Victor? Or are you going to stand around all day?”

Victor looked at me, and I shrugged. He wanted me to come to his defense. Victor was in his midtwenties, with a ninety-eight-pound-weakling body, a part-time career as a drummer, and a whole host of neuroses. He was deeply sensitive to slights, both real and imagined, despite the heavy metal clothes, tattoos, and piercings. But he was a good sound man and a decent guy, and he didn’t deserve to have Andres take his bad mood out on him. Under other circumstances I would happily have told Andres to lighten up. But I needed my cameraman to get the lights up and ready for taping in thirty-five minutes. If it meant I had to live with a sulking Victor all day, then so be it.

We had a killer waiting.

T
he information I’d been sent on Joseph “Brick” Tyler was pretty limited. He was forty-one, African American, had grown up on Chicago’s West Side, and had been in and out of the prison system since he was fifteen. He was now in for life for the murder of three people in 1990, and while he had been known for prison violence in the first ten years of his sentence, lately things had been quiet and his record was clean.

When Andres was ready with the lights, after a tense and silent thirty minutes of prep, I asked Joanie to bring Brick to the room. He arrived a few minutes later, his hands cuffed in front of him. With a nickname like Brick, I was expecting a large man, something in the three-hundred-pound range. And while he was tall and muscular, he was surprisingly slim. His head was shaved and he had tattoos peeking out from the rolled-up sleeves of his blue denim shirt. He didn’t look threatening, exactly, but he didn’t look like a man to cross.

“I’m Kate Conway,” I said, sounding warm and casual in hopes he’d be the same.

Brick slowly lowered his eyes, taking a long look at me from head to toe and then back again, resting his gaze on my breasts. I was dressed like the world’s most conservative librarian: tan dress slacks, green cashmere turtleneck with a matching cardigan, and my hair in a ponytail. But the outfit wasn’t deterring his interest.

“If you want to take a seat,” I said, “Victor, our sound man, will put a mic on you and we’ll make a few adjustments to the lights.”

Brick glanced behind him at the chair. He looked to the guard, who nodded. Brick, apparently satisfied with the situation, sat down and stared at each of us as Victor put a mic on him and Andres turned off the room’s fluorescents, leaving us in darkness, and turned on the lights we’d set up for the interview. Brick blinked a little at the sudden brightness aimed at him, but he sat quietly. When we were ready for
the interview, he held out his wrists for the guard to uncuff. As soon as he was free of the restraints, he reached out a hand toward me, and we shook. I could feel his strength and was, probably as intended, intimidated by it. People always assume a killer looks different somehow, and that being in the same room must be a frightening experience for me, but the killers I’ve met are normal, or seem to be. That’s the only part that scares me.

“I’m Joseph,” he said. “You should probably call me Brick, since I don’t really answer to Joseph no more.”

“Even with your family?”

“I don’t talk to family. Not ones outside. I got a cousin here. But he calls me Brick.”