Love Her Madly (27 page)

“You are goin' to think we were a bunch of dumbbells in there when I tell you we didn't know anything about Lloyd's turn on the witness stand as bein' part of a plea bargain. Well, we didn't. Nobody told us. And we
wanted
to believe what he had to say. Easier that way. Just, Here's the story, here's what happened, now let's get the hell outa this miserable place. I mean, we had no air-conditionin' and the bathroom was filthy. We were never asked to consider if maybe Lloyd was lyin'. Somebody on the jury said, ‘I don't believe that guy.' Suggested maybe he did it while Rona Leigh stood out in the truck.

“But we ignored him. It would have forced us to think. We didn't want to think. We wanted to get away from those pictures and that damn jury room.

“Durin' the sentencin' phase, after we found her guilty and then had to go back to determine her sentence, we got more testimony from the doc. That's when he told us she left the smell of her hands on the ax. We laughed at him. In the jury room we were sayin' things like, He must've gotten a medical degree from Grasshopper U. We made jokes instead of deliberatin', and then our foreman says, ‘Looks like the death penalty.' We said, ‘Looks like it.'

“And so we sentenced her. We sentenced her based on a load of horseshit, and nobody sentenced Gary Scott to nothin'. I am seein' past those terrible pictures and now I'm thinkin', We all did that Glueck girl wrong. We never gave her a fair trial.”

*   *   *

Out on the road, Scraggs tried to be rational. “Poppy, killers are folk who have short fuses, like Fred there said. You and me know that. A whole lot of murders happen because a victim eggs on the killer. In this case, the victim didn't egg on the killer, her miserable husband did. But killing is killing. They still did it.”

“We don't know that. What if Rona Leigh did stay outside in the truck?”

“Lloyd didn't want Melody dead; she did.”

“So we got the testimony of a short-fused fellow in a plea bargain. And what kind of plea-bargain arrangement was that? He was sentenced to die too. What the hell happened there?”

“Judge found a loophole. Judge was considered a hero.”

I opened my window. I needed real air, even if it was dry and hot. Scraggs shut off the AC and opened his window too.

“Max, how the hell can you stand living in this stupid place?”

“Every place has its stupid parts.”

“I want to see Lloyd's warden.”

“What for?”

“The story is that Lloyd confessed in prison to committing the crime himself. Let's go hear if that's true from the horse's mouth.”

“I see no point.”

“Then stay home.”

“I'm coming. No way I'm dropping you off all alone in Huntsville.”

We just drove along, listened to the wind instead of our voices. Then I needed to know something. “Scraggs?”

“What?”

“If you come to see things differently, if you become convinced that Rona Leigh shouldn't die for this crime … will you do anything?”

“What the hell could I do? I only do my job as I know it's meant to be done.”

Stubborn man. I let it go. I was wrung out.

12

Scraggs called the warden, who told him he had all the time in the world for us. We drove back out of the city, north to Huntsville. Again, the cavalcade of billboards. In half an hour the buildings of Huntsville crept up over the horizon at exactly the point the biggest billboard of all welcomed tourists:

VISIT THE MUSEUM OF THE TEXAS PRISONS
—
Wonder at Old Sparky, the Country's First Hot Squat.

The words were superimposed on a photograph of an electric chair constructed of a couple of two-by-fours and strung with BX cables.

I said to Scraggs, “I rest my case.”

“Which one?”

“The one where I wondered how a rational person can live in Texas.”

“DC is rational?”

He took the exit just short of Huntsville, and we headed out on a forty-mile trip to the new death row. The old one was bursting at the seams, 459 men, and there was no more room for construction in the city. Huntsville could only contain so many prisons, had to leave room for a Starbucks or two. A week before an execution, the condemned man had to be driven forty miles to the death house—still in Huntsville—from death row. The Terrell Unit had been built in suburbia.

Terrell was a bright and shining outpost of walls and towers and floodlights and razor ribbon. Every guard working the outer wall had a dog accompanying him. We went into the administration building and were escorted to the warden's office. All Texas wardens have mansions. Maybe his was back in Huntsville and he commuted.

His secretary was not a prisoner, wasn't in farm togs. She wore a navy blue suit and white blouse, greeted us with a big smile and handshake, and then apologized: Something important had come up, and the warden wouldn't be able to see us till later in the afternoon. “How would y'all like to speak to Lloyd Bailey's chaplain in the meantime?”

Was this an unwritten procedure? To be pawned off on the chaplain in hopes that visitors to the warden would pack their tack and go home after being bombarded by scripture?

Scraggs said, “What exactly came up? I just spoke to him a couple of hours ago.”

She smiled harder. “Warden's nephew is in town unexpectedly. Warden is taking the opportunity for a few hours of duck hunting.”

Scraggs seemed to find that completely acceptable.

I said to the secretary, “Excuse me, is the season terribly short?”

“What season?”

“Duck hunting season.”

She laughed and winked at Scraggs. “You can always tell a hunter from up north. Agent Rice, hunting season is year-round here, no matter what it is you want to shoot. Now let me just ring for a conveyance. The chaplain's office is right around the corner.”

Around the corner meant around the corridor corner. The conveyance was a golf cart. The driver wore orange. Scraggs and I climbed in and I asked the prisoner, “What are you in for?”

“Fraud.” He looked at me with tired eyes. “I meant to give it back.”

I said, “I know.”

Scraggs laughed out loud.

White-collar criminals in Texas get to drive golf carts so they won't lose their touch before returning to the country club.

I asked him how he got the job.

“Minimum security holds a lottery. I won.”

All Texas wardens have slaves of one kind or another.

I looked over at Scraggs in the backseat and smiled. He gave me the finger. Now I laughed, guessed he'd been wanting to do that for some time.

Lloyd's chaplain was not unlike Vernon Lacker in that he was soft and calm, but he was quite a bit older. According to the certificate on the wall, he'd graduated from the Christian Ministries of America, no degree bestowed.

He had thick glasses and watery eyes. He welcomed us and blessed us and then he said, “Warden told me to tell you all I can about Lloyd Bailey. All he might have said concerning Rona Leigh Glueck. Is that what you came for?”

I said, “Yes.”

He took off the glasses, wiped them off with a fold of his shirt, and gazed into the ceiling. “Lloyd Bailey,” he said softly, as if he were perusing an invisible Rolodex. “Lloyd told me first time I met him that he'd meant to hang onto Rona Leigh for as long as he could, which amounted to as long as she'd let him. He said to me she was the one precious thing he'd ever owned in all his life, even more precious than his chopper, which he blamed for getting him into the trouble he was in.
Trouble
was what he deemed the crime of murder.”

I said, “He referred to his part in the relationship with Rona Leigh as ownership?”

He smiled a little bit. “That's the vernacular among people like Lloyd Bailey. You've got a woman who's true to you, why, then you own that woman. There is a strong pride that goes along with it.”

How nice. I thought that Gary Scott wasn't able to take much pride in ownership. I asked the chaplain how else people like Lloyd Bailey were alike.

“I'd have to say they're the world's biggest losers, ma'am. Low intelligence. Addicts. Ugly. Unloved, mostly.”

“Are you aware of the plea he struck to avoid the death penalty?”

“Yes, ma'am, I am. I have just reviewed his file.”

The warden may have asked this chaplain on the spur of the moment to fill in for him, but at some earlier time he'd had him review Lloyd's file.

Scraggs said, “Was he the kind of man who would have invented a new version of the murders to guarantee himself a life sentence rather than the death penalty?”

“I believe every man here is that kind of man. But when Lloyd was first arrested, he felt free to tell anyone who would listen that his victim deserved what he got. For stealing his bike and refusing to hand it back when confronted. Told everyone he gave James Munter a chance to make him happy. Lloyd never said anything about Rona Leigh taking part in the crime, told the police it was not the thing a real man would do when they'd asked him. But then, once the police convinced Lloyd that Rona Leigh, being a girl, a very young girl, wouldn't be sentenced to death no matter what, and that he would be, sure as hell, he eventually came to believe them. To believe that it was in his best interest to say he killed James because Rona Leigh made him do it and he only hit Melody the one time to put her out of her misery once Rona Leigh was through with her. But he couldn't get it right: Rona Leigh tried to kill her but Melody wouldn't die, Rona Leigh never touched the ax after all, Rona Leigh was out in the truck.

“His story changed again and again. Finally, he said Rona Leigh did it all. She went crazy, he said, and axed both the victims. He signed a witness report describing in great detail Rona Leigh's ferocity when she killed James with one blow and then attacked Melody with the intent to hurt her before doing away with her. The report ended with his saying the whole thing was her idea. He didn't even know for sure if James was the guy who took his bike.

“My understanding is that they made up a confession along those lines for Rona Leigh to sign, and she signed it.”

“By ‘they,' you're talking about the police.”

“Who else would I be talking about? They're the ones feel the pressure. Made no matter in the end, though. Lloyd Bailey drew the death penalty. But he was to escape his execution.” He looked to the heavens again. “Same as Rona Leigh, turns out, though in his case Lloyd died of prison-contracted AIDS. Or it could have been hepatitis, as so many of the men pass that on to each other along with the AIDS. They're puttin' cause of death as AIDS pretty much with every death here. Further humiliates the convict's family.”

“What is the point in further humiliating the convict's family?”

“Feelin' is, you raise a child to be scum, you're likely scum yourself. We're in a paranoid and punishin' culture, ma'am.”

I caught Scraggs's eye. He stared me down. “Reverend, did you get to talk to Lloyd personally?”

“Many times. He confessed to me as how he made up all that stuff up about Rona Leigh in order to live. In the infirmary, he told me how his plea bargain was all a lie.”

“What was the truth? Did he tell you that?”

“Yes, he did. And I told him to repent not just for the crime but for not telling the truth to the court.”

“Will you tell me what he said to you?”

“He said he killed James Munter and Melody Scott.”

“Meaning he alone?”

“Yes.”

“He said that Rona Leigh took no part in the killing?”

“That's right.” He shook his head.

Scraggs said, “Did Rona Leigh and Lloyd carry on a correspondence?”

“She wrote to him, yes. Right till he died. But he couldn't read or write. His fellow inmates read the letters to him. I read him a few. He did send several letters back to her that he dictated to his cellmate.”

“As far as you know, did her letters influence him?”

“Her letters were mostly reminders, descriptions of the sex they'd had.”

Scraggs crossed his arms over his chest, his line of questioning over.

I asked, “Did you attempt to make Lloyd's revised confession known to the authorities?”

He smiled. “The revised confession of a condemned killer holds no weight with the Board of Pardons and Paroles. But God in his infinite mercy took Lloyd with him into paradise from a hospital bed rather than our death chamber.”

“Dying of AIDS-related afflictions doesn't sound much like mercy to me, Reverend.”

“Everything is relative, ma'am. I'd say a death certificate that reads cause of death is AIDS has a kinder ring than
STATE-ORDERED LEGAL HOMICIDE
.”

“Death certificates for the executed really say that?”

“If you're executed in Texas that's what they say, and correctly so. When these men are executed, they show all the terror and fear that you or I would show if someone was pointing a gun at our heads and we knew we would be shot no matter how we might beg for our lives. The men plead with us. They cry and grovel and then they scream, all the while insisting they are innocent. They beg the warden, the guards—me—to understand they're innocent, or they're sorry, or they didn't mean to do it.”

“In executions I've witnessed, the prisoners have been sedated.”

“Where was that?”

“Florida.”

“Not so in Texas. About half the time we're required to call in a cell extraction team.”

He looked at me and saw he needed to explain.

“Group of corrections officers chosen based on the shape they're in, their strength. They come in and pry the prisoner out of his cell. In one case, we had ourselves a killer who truly should have been sedated. Not to calm him but to prevent him from his last slap at the face of the law. He insisted he wasn't going to let anyone kill him. Took a dozen men to drag him out of Terrell, and then on the day of his execution it took a dozen more Huntsville officers to get him out of the holding pen and on down the corridor to the death chamber. Corrections officer who's supposed to announce they got a dead man walkin' was too busy wrestlin' with him to say the words.