Serial Killer's Soul (3 page)

Jeff was someone you watched on the news, heard about on the radio, read about in the newspapers, or talked about with your friends, all agreeing that he was “a crazy son of a bitch.” At church the pastor delivered extra sermons to his flock on evil and Satan.

Jeff was the type of person you’d hear about and you were
glad
you didn’t know him. You were especially glad you weren’t his lawyer or his parent or his grandma or the family member of a victim or even his next-door neighbor who didn’t think to call the cops.

Jeff was a man I never thought, not in a millions years, I would ever meet. He was someone I never
wanted
to meet. But there I was, Inmate 139891, temporarily in solitary confinement, sharing a cell wall with Inmate 177252, the infamous Jeffrey Dahmer.

People say the Lord works in mysterious ways and has a plan for all of us. I never would have guessed that God had this kind of a plan for me.

Don’t be teamed with those who do not love the Lord, for what do the people of God have in common with the people of sin? How can light live with darkness? And what harmony can there be between Christ and the devil? How can a Christian be a partner with one who doesn’t believe? (II Corinthians 6:14-15
, TLB)

Prisoners and officials know me as Calvin Earl Martin, Inmate 139891. I used other names during my life of crime, but my
real
name is Herman Lee Martin.

According to police reports in most of my recent criminal records, I’m a five-foot-nine, two hundred twenty-pound black male. Beyond my unflattering mug shots and those basic criminal descriptions, I have light brown skin, keep my black hair short, and usually look clean cut and shaven when I go to work or church.

I want to tell this story because I hope people who read it think more about the amazing power of the Lord and forgiveness. First, I need to explain how I became Inmate 139891. Then, I want to share why I believe God has the power to save the soul of any man or woman, no matter how empty and corrupt their actions on earth.

I’m not proud of the way I’ve lived most of my life. It started with truancy in school, shoplifting, alcohol, and pot. As a teenager, I moved to hard drugs, burglary, armed robbery, car theft, cheating the government, running from the law, fathering three children out of wedlock, and spending years in and out of prison. It was an unholy mess of a life.

I was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on May 3, 1958, into a very poor family. My mother is Ollie Mae McGraw; my father, Thomas James Martin. I have six sisters and two brothers and we lived in various Memphis projects until
I was six or seven years old.

My father was an alcoholic who worked off and on as a general laborer, doing janitorial work or cleaning diesel trucks. Mom cleaned a jewelry store and worked as a maid in the home of the people who owned the store.

Dad lost jobs often because he was drunk so much. Since there wasn’t enough money to support the family, when I was seven, the five of us living at home went to Arkansas to live with my Dad’s aunt for a short time. My aunt was old and blind and raised hogs. I remember I stole candy from her and once even set fire to her front yard.

Not long after that fire, my father came back to get us and we moved to St. Louis, Missouri. At Cole Elementary School in third and fourth grade, I remember being a scaredy cat; I was even afraid of fire trucks. I avoided fights at all costs. I guess it showed because I got my lunch stolen often during those years.

At first, we lived in a tiny place on Finney Street in the central part of downtown St. Louis. There was a kitchen, living room, one bedroom, and one bath for the seven of us. By now, a few of my siblings were already living on their own. The kids all slept on the floor in the living room–no mattresses, just a blanket on the floor.

I
hated
being poor. There was never any money for school pictures and my clothes all came from Goodwill. I was embarrassed to go to school in those clothes.

My parents were always fighting and drinking. I remember watching them and thinking that I never wanted to be like them. I told myself that when I grew up, I would get out of this hellhole and wouldn’t make the same mistakes.

Life was hard. The neighborhood was rough and, when I was only eight years old, I remember seeing a few stabbings near our house. Sometimes I look back and realize that I had no childhood innocence. I saw too much and knew too many bad things about the world around me.

We moved to another house on Finney Street, but this one was actually worse than the last. It had cockroaches and rats. By now, we were on welfare. I
slept on the couch in the living room. I remember waking up because rats were crawling on me.

When I was in fifth or sixth grade, I got a job at Powell’s Confectionary. My boss drank and whenever he got drunk, I’d sneak into the back room and steal two or three dollars out of his money box. I was afraid I’d get caught, but the idea of having that extra money made it worth the risk.

After a time, we moved to the west side of St. Louis, into an apartment not far from Forest Park. That apartment was better; at least I had a bed.

By now, I was about twelve years old. I got a job working with a guy who did home improvements. I learned a few skills, but the best part was that he paid in cash. I spent my earnings on clothes and movies almost as fast as I earned it.

Not long after that, we moved again; this time to a place on the north side of town. My folks always thought things would be better somewhere else. I enrolled in Enright Middle School.

That was about the time when my older sisters, Bessie and Peggy, started letting my brother Calvin and me light their cigarettes. Calvin was a year-and-a-half younger than I was. We spent a lot of time together and caused quite a bit of trouble.

Bessie worked as a bar maid at a tavern and she’d bring booze home for us. Once Calvin and I had a contest to see who could drink the most Sloe Gin. I had forgotten my promise to myself that I wouldn’t go down the same road as my parents. I won the contest, but got really sick.

Eventually I started smoking pot with my school friends. Seven of us formed a gang and dubbed ourselves the very original title of the “guys in the hood.” One guy’s parents sold pot and my friend stole it from them for our own recreation.

We got together at night to drink, smoke pot, and stay out late. By the time I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I was riding around in stolen cars and snatching purses. I was caught taking a woman’s purse once, was sent to a juvenile detention center for a month, and then was released on probation. That was my first real experience in a jail-like setting.

I wasn’t afraid of jail. Everyone around me seemed to get caught doing
something and end up arrested and put in jail. When I was released from juvenile, I felt like I had somehow earned the status of tough guy, and told all my friends about my “experience in the joint.”

Another time I was busted and went to the Missouri Hills Reformatory, an institution for delinquent boys from the city of St. Louis. It was about thirty or forty miles from my home. I escaped from there after one week. I felt like a fugitive in a movie–running from the law and outsmarting those trying to keep me locked up. Nothing could hold me back.

That same night I went right back to the old gang and started back at the same routine, drinking and smoking pot again. Mom was still drinking heavily and now, we were told, she had diabetes. She wasn’t happy to see me, so I left. I was a tough man, I didn’t need her and I didn’t look back. I didn’t really have anywhere to go, so I moved in with friends. My freedom didn’t last. A month later I was picked up for escaping the reform school and returned to Missouri Hills for eleven months. I was angry and frustrated, but after some time I realized the school wasn’t all that bad.

During my stint there, I did something I was proud of for the first time in my life. I ran track. I came in first place in the relay races–more than once, too. I also played flute at the reformatory. Imagine tha–“Mister Tough Guy,” playing a flute. I liked playing a musical instrument, creating something pretty.

We also took nature walks and helped with flood control by making sand bags and stacking them up along the river. I remember I enjoyed those kinds of things.

Friends and family visited every Sunday, but my folks only came once a month and they were usually drunk. I lived with two house parents in a house on the grounds with twenty other kids. When my parents showed up drunk, my house parents turned them away.

I graduated from grade school during those eleven months at Missouri Hills. Yet, as soon as I got out, I got in trouble again for helping steal a car. I was fifteen years old. This time it was determined that I would spend some time in the Boonville State Training School near Kansas.

After a month, I transferred to a halfway house in St. Louis. I enrolled
in Lincoln High School and resumed smoking pot and drinking. This is how I spent my sixteenth year. I had no outlook. Teachers and cops would often ask me if I ever thought about my future, but I don’t think I
understood
what they really meant by that question. Not a lot of teenagers do. I know I didn’t. I didn’t care because I was young, unafraid, and felt invincible. I didn’t need responsibility or long-term commitments. I just lived from one day to the next.

By the time I was seventeen, I enrolled in a different high school because I’d been kicked out of Lincoln. During that year, I was always stoned. So stoned, in fact, that I did some shoplifting and couldn’t even remember doing it. I also was cutting classes, taking acid and angel dust, and staying with friends for days and weeks at a time. I tried helping around the house when I’d stay with friends so I wouldn’t have to pay rent. Most of the time, the people I stayed with were selling pot on the street and, if I’d bring them customers, they’d let me stay at their place for free. If I was lucky, they’d give me pot.

That same year, one of my old gang members and I used pistols to rob a drug house. We got one hundred dollars and an ounce of weed. A week later, my partner died after a shooting in his brother’s pool hall. You’d think that would be an eye-opener, but it didn’t stop me. I was too far under. There was no beginning or end in sight. I lived each day as it came. Life as a hustler was all I knew.

About that time my cousin, “Homey,” came from Binghamton, New York, for a visit. He was a few years older than I was and worked in a foundry. My Mom and my aunt decided Homey would be a positive influence on my life, so my oldest brother and I moved to New York with him. I was excited about New York and couldn’t wait to start a new life.

However, it wasn’t much of a life. The three of us did a lot of drinking and pot smoking. My brother and I, it turned out, were bad influences on Homey.

I took a job cleaning the parking lot at Philadelphia Sales, a garment company. While there, I stole ten dresses, each worth about thirty-five dollars. I sold them on the street for fifteen to twenty dollars each. I kept the money in a box on the front seat of our car. Once when the police stopped me, they saw the box. When they saw the money, they became suspicious. We made up a story and they let us go. After that, I realized I had to avoid the cops. The cops just caused
problems.

I felt like the cops were always after me. I decided to move out of Homey’s place and move in with some other guys so the cops couldn’t find me. Six months later, tired of looking over my shoulder all the time, I moved back to St. Louis.

Back in St. Louis I found a temporary job in a restaurant. It was good for a little while; but, once again, I started up my old habits of drinking, smoking pot, taking pharmaceutical pills like Valium. Eventually, I got back into heavy drugs like acid, cocaine, Christmas trees (a green methamphetamine produced using Drano crystals), and angel dust (PCP); I even started selling weed and angel dust. The money was great but it never lasted. I turned around and used the money to buy more drugs. I was selling drugs to fund my own habit.

I often showed up late for work because I partied all night. I didn’t like work; I always wanted to be somewhere else.

My life was different than many other’s, I guess. At the age of nineteen, many of my friends were already dead. For me, that was normal life. It didn’t faze me enough to change my lifestyle. I believed death was just part of the life I lived. But I was tired of all the trouble, and now my girlfriend, Anita, was pregnant with my child. I was tired of St. Louis and, despite a baby on the way, I moved back to New York to live with Homey, who had a job driving a truck.

I don’t know what made me think that things would be different in New York this time. They weren’t. Right after I got there, I picked up right where I left off. Parties, drinking, and smoking pot consumed my life. Homey, a friend named Red, and I went to Atlantic City for a taste of the bright lights. We added gambling and prostitution to our list of things to do. I wanted a job in one of the casinos and thought I might be able to pick something up from the trip. Instead, right after we got there, we started snorting heroin.