The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas (28 page)

He collected himself and started over. Speaking now just to Robert, Amber, and Erica, he apologized for leaving the way he had. He begged them to stay out of trouble. He hoped that their dreams would come true. Then he addressed Cassandra and Shawna, and said they were the best things that ever happened to him.

A third take, calmer still, retreaded much of the same territory, but a new sign-off appeared: “Love your country, and you know that’s true. God bless America, and don’t forget September 11. I love y’all. Good-bye.”

Ziv’s interactions with Stroman rang in his mind for a while every time he left Texas. Soon Stroman became the leading man of the entire documentary. It ceased to be about hate crimes in general;
it was now about Mark Stroman. The blog Ziv set up for Stroman in 2008 connected the prisoner with a whole array of people from around the world, many of whom shared Ziv’s generous understanding of a convicted murderer. Between the commenters on the blog, his other visitors, and his pen pals, Stroman was connected to a wider world than he’d ever known living on the outside.

Small details defined a man’s days on the Row. They were also the common ground between Stroman and his far-flung correspondents: all of us, whatever else we lack, have details. So his letters were full of questions about the little particulars of life on the outside. “So tell me about the parking in New York,” Ziv remembers Stroman asking. “It’s really lousy, right? So you pay $400 to park in a garage? My God, you guys are crazy. Why do you need a car in New York?” There was no factoid too small for him, Ziv said: “Mark was intrigued by elevators and doormen—how does it work? Mark was living in a cell, creating a universe through letters and a universe through all these people who were describing in detail their lives in other countries, what they go through and what they do. And that became sort of his travel, you know?” Stroman’s blog went from a few dozen hits a day to several thousand over time. A significant fraction of this traffic came from Europe, where the death penalty was widely considered barbaric.

One day Stroman told Ziv that he wanted him to be responsible for his ashes, when and if they carried the sentence out. Ziv felt greatly moved by the request, and he asked where Stroman wanted them scattered. The Austrian Alps, he said. He mentioned Britain and Ireland as possible backups. How the hell Stroman, who had never left metro Dallas, let alone Texas or the United States, chose the Austrian Alps was beyond Ziv.

“Mark, you’re a self-described American patriot who allegedly killed for his patriotism, right?” Ziv remembered saying to him. “You killed for your patriotism. You want your final ashes so far away from America? Fascinating.”

Stroman said, “I feel all the people who helped me live outside of the United States. This is where I think I belong. This is where I’ll be at peace.”

In 2009, Ziv began to sense a pronounced change in his subject. Stroman was becoming calmer, more reflective. A pro forma statement of remorse back in their first interview had evolved into a genuine understanding of the damage he had wrought, and of the means of redemption. “Everything I’m doing here, I’m trying to get my heart right,” Stroman told Ziv. “I ask God every day for forgiveness for the people I’ve killed. That’s not something I’m proud of doing, but that’s just something I did. There’s no turning back. That’s one thing that I’m serious about—I’ve took chances my whole life—but I’m not gonna chance my eternal life. I do fear God.”

Ziv knew that their conversations were partly responsible for the change, but he insisted that it had less to do with him and more to do with the A-B switch in Stroman’s life. From the moment Stroman entered Polunsky, everyone who had shaped him dropped out of his life. Everyone who came into his life besides his fellow prisoners—the religious advisers in prison, the correspondents from around the world, the blog commenters, Ziv, and a handful of other occasional visitors—was of a very different breed. “On the surface, we have nothing in common,” Ziv said. “However, we do. We were all outside of the world that Mark grew up in. We are politically very liberal; we are mixed ethnically; some are gay. Most of us are not Americans. In short, we are the representatives of the world that the younger Mark probably despised and looked down on—or was afraid of. We were the opposite of his redneck biker buddies from the drinking and drug binges. We were very different from his relatives and his immediate family. But the fact is that we were his most loyal supporters.” They were the ones who wrote to him, who visited, who bought him commissary items. Some of them had pledged to be in the viewing room at the end.

In one of his conversations with Ziv, Stroman himself made the
point about his family: “Not a single Christmas card, not a birthday card. ‘Do you need any help down there?’ Nothing. I’m not asking for nothing. I’m asking for a little compassion. You know, I’m on my last—if I was on the outside and one of my family members was on Death Row, I’d be going out of my way to make their life easier down here.”

For Ziv, perhaps the profoundest moment in their relationship came late in 2009, not long after the attack on the Fort Hood military base in central Texas. A U.S. Army psychiatrist named Nidal Malik Hasan, an American of Palestinian provenance and Muslim faith, had gone on a rampage at the base, killing thirteen people and wounding thirty-two. He had told relatives of his growing discomfort with serving a country at war in the Muslim world, while suffering harassment by comrades on account of his origins.

Ziv had arranged back-to-back sessions with Stroman over two days. On the first day, they spoke of a book that Stroman had been reading and had grown infatuated with:
Man’s Search for Meaning
, by the Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl. It was not clear whether he had read it because of his relationship with Ziv. When Stroman first mentioned the book to his friend, Ziv was surprised by the tastes developing beneath that swastika-tattooed exterior: “I said, ‘Mark, you realize I am the son of a Holocaust refugee. That was the popular book of my youth. I was supposed to read it like eight times, and now you’re telling me about the fucking book and how you find it so fascinating.’ ”

They spoke at length about the book that first day. There was much in the work—born of Frankl’s years in Nazi concentration camps and his investigation of how people survive in the direst circumstances—to calm a man in Stroman’s situation: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Stroman, who used to spout terms like “nigger-loving Jew,” now found himself drawn to one
Jewish man’s story of inner transformation: “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” After Stroman’s years of pondering what the world had done to him, the Frankl book traced a different line of thinking, centered on responsibility and on the future rather than the past: “Even though conditions such as lack of sleep, insufficient food and various mental stresses may suggest that the inmates were bound to react in certain ways, in the final analysis it becomes clear that the sort of person the prisoner became was the result of an inner decision, and not the result of camp influences alone.”

Stroman especially liked this passage about living for others: “A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the ‘why’ for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any ‘how.’ ”

As he and Ziv spoke that first day, Stroman said the book had, among other things, filled him with guilt about his swastika tattoo. “When I read this book—the swastika, my God, I never understood what that means,” Stroman said. “You have to tell me, Ilan!”

On the second day, the subject of the Fort Hood attacks came up. Mark told Ziv that news of the attack had reawakened the specter of 9/11 for him and roused his dormant hatred of Muslims, whom he still thought to be evil. “You know me and Muslims,” Stroman snarled.

“I looked him in the eye,” Ziv said, “and I say, ‘You know what, Mark? You’re a fucked-up person, and now I see how fucked you are,’ because that’s the way we talked. I said, ‘I see how fucked-up because you know what your problem is? You don’t see people. You see groups, right? You see groups, and I see people. And that person who did this killing is a very fucked-up individual. From everyone’s perspective, you’re a very fucked-up person. Nobody would say you’re white and you’re Christian, and all white Christians are fucked up.
You’re
fucked up.’ ”

Stroman looked at Ziv for the longest time and finally said, “So this is what they did to the Jews, right?” For a moment, it all seemed to flow together: his Holocaust reading, his conversations with an Israeli visitor, the post-9/11 history of terror and profiling, and, of course, his own crimes.

“I had tears in my eyes then; I had tears telling it to my wife,” Ziv said. “At that moment,” he added, “I really felt he got it.”

I
N LATE 2010
, Stroman could find himself severely backlogged with letters. That plus the blog posting and the legal papers he had to review—it took more time than he had. He knew it was a good problem: “I am an extremely lucky man. I can count on both hands the ones I love and still need many more fingers.” His correspondents seemed genuinely to care for him. More than that, they gave him a chance to test out different iterations of the new man he was striving to become.

One of his new correspondents was Michael, a Briton who was a police officer of some importance over there. Like many others, Michael had come to write to Stroman through an organization that matched Death Row prisoners with pen pals. The one he used was called Human Writes, based in the English town of Wetherby. For pairing you with a prisoner, its website listed a membership fee of £18 a year. (“The organisation needs some money behind it for unavoidable expenses,” the site says, including an annual conference and occasional “socials.”) The fee also bought you access to the local Human Writes representative in the state where your pen pal would be executed: “Typically, your co-ordinator would be in touch with you several times before the date and would try to be available to you on the evening of an execution. They will then inform you if it has gone ahead. In the following days and weeks they are there for you too.” Should grief overwhelm a pen pal, the group had a network
of trained counselors—a perk that it noted gave it a competitive advantage in a crowded market: “It is worth mentioning that the support we offer is obviously not available on the more impersonal internet sites for pen friends.”

Michael, like other pen pals, found in the letter-writing an intimate form of charity. “My particular motivation was to provide some contact with the outside world to any person who has to tolerate being stuck on Death Row,” he wrote. “I’m against the death penalty, but was more motivated by simply wanting to hold out a hand of friendship than by crusading against another countries’ penal code and policy. I had expected to be allocated some petty criminal who used a gun badly or domestic violence perpetrator so was surprised when I learned of Mark’s profile, but we did hit it off, and we exchanged over 15 letters each way in the brief time we corresponded. I genuinely came to like the guy, he was respectful, gracious and well mannered, but I was not blind either to the fact what he had done, whether by madness or character fault or just shear stupidity was horrific.”

As in his long-ago letters to the Templetons, Stroman liked to adorn his letters to Michael with stickers. His handwriting was greatly improved by the years inside. His language had far fewer mistakes of spelling or grammar. His reading and corresponding appeared to have borne fruit. And his tone, as on his blog, was now unrelentingly positive:

Oct 11, 2010—3:50
AM

Dear Michael,

As always, this letter is being ‘sent’ and ‘wrote’ with respects and my kindest regards and my hopes and prayers are that you and all the loved ones are in the best of health and the highest of spirits and safe from all the evils of this world. As for myself, I’m just trying to make the best out of a bad situation. But I’m alive and where there’s life there’s a small glimmer of hope.

There were complaints here and there, of course, but he was a man who sounded almost unaccountably at peace with himself—and bordering on saccharine: “Thank you for your awesome and kind letter and I was pleased to see that my last one reached you safely and that you had enjoyed the photos.”

He told Michael all about himself. How his life began in Dallas but had ended, as far as he was concerned, with the faraway events of September 11, 2001. He wrote of having spent all his life “in the 50-60 mile range of the Dallas area—and to me, it’s the best town in Texas
.” He wrote of turning forty-one in a matter of days and commiserated with Michael about getting older, about how fast the years crept up on a man.