True Crime

By the same author

AS ANDREW KLAVAN

Son of Man

Darling Clementine

Face of the Earth

Don’t Say a Word

The Animal Hour

Corruption

AS KEITH PETERSON

The Scarred Man

Rough Justice

The Rain

There Fell a Shadow

The Trapdoor

SCREENPLAY

A Shock to the System

“Good people are always so sure they’re right.”

“I’ll tell you briefly what I think about newspapermen: the hand of God, reaching down into the mire, couldn’t elevate one of them to the depths of degradation.”

T
his is not one of those modern works that mingle fact with fiction. All the events and conversations I’ve described here were either witnessed by me or reported to me by one or more of the participants. That said, the reader will quickly become aware that I have not restricted myself to the description of events and conversations alone. This story would not be complete without at least some reference—and sometimes a lot of references—to people’s inner thoughts, feelings and motives. And, where I’ve sought to describe such things, I confess a certain amount of deduction has necessarily come into play. That is, I’ve had to guess sometimes at what was going on in people’s heads.

The reason for this is obvious. Excluding maybe God, there’s only ever one witness to a person’s inner life. When that witness is not self-aware or is untrustworthy or is deceased, it becomes very difficult to get at the truth about his emotional world. So with the blind, the dishonest and the dead—and I encountered all three in researching this—I’ve recorded my own impressions. Sometimes I’ve made these deductions explicit, often I hoped the context made them so. In the end, the reader will have to measure the degree to which my understanding of individual human nature is biased or flawed.

All this, I should add, I take to be a serious breach of the rules of journalism. I’m a newspaperman, a day-to-day reporter.
My job, as I see it, is to record what I witness and what people tell me. I try to save my brilliant insights and perceptions for the barroom, where I can impress members of the opposite sex with my depth and sensitivity. But writing a book is different from writing a news story. A book ought to be about something. And wherever I’ve deviated from my usual methods of reporting—wherever I’ve played fast and loose with the literal truth—it had to do with what I think this book is about, and what it’s not about.

It is not, first of all, about the “issue” of capital punishment. My opinion on that—and on the concept of “issues” in general—is expressed early on in the text, so I won’t repeat it here. Suffice it to say, I leave the whole question to those writers who are done impressing the opposite sex and still have some brilliant insights left over.

Second of all, this book is not about the law. The legal ins and outs of the Frank Beachum case are well detailed in two books by the attorneys involved. Tim Weiss and Hubert Tryon’s
The Jaws of Death
gives a passionate description of the authors’ efforts for the defense. Prosecutor Walter Cartwright’s
The Thirteenth Juror
takes a different approach and attacks American journalism in general, and yours truly in particular, for using cheap emotionalism to distort the public’s view of the facts in an attempt to supplant the courts in their proper function. My personal feelings about Cartwright aside, I must admit he makes an excellent argument. In any event, all three of these authors know a lot more about the law than I do, and all three were much closer to that aspect of the story than I ever was.

Finally, and most important, this book is not a detailed examination of the murder of Amy Wilson. The series of articles I wrote for the
St. Louis News
and the piece I wrote for
The New Yorker
that was based on the
News
articles have pretty well exhausted me on those subjects. Nor will I attempt to refute the recent attacks on my “character” by
certain self-styled minority leaders and by columnists on both the religious right and the feminist left. I haven’t tried to hide my “character”—read what follows and I promise you’ll get a face full of it—but my many faults don’t change the facts of the case in the least.

So that’s what the book is not about. What is it about? It’s about Monday, July 17, of last year: one brutally hot day, and what happened on that day, the day Frank Beachum was rolled into the death chamber at Osage State Correctional Facility.

The reader might well ask why—when there are such important matters as capital punishment, the law and murder to discuss—why I would choose to tell such a simple story and a story—that of the last hours before a condemned man’s execution—that’s been told so many times before both in journalism and fiction. Well, partly it’s because it’s true and I was there and they paid me to do it. But also, on this day, in these hours, under these circumstances, I found myself an eyewitness to a remarkable confrontation between a number of people—their ideas, their theories, their feelings and perceptions—and an incontrovertible outward reality: Death, destroyer of worlds, jolly muncher of our philosophies. In a business—in a society—so overwhelmed with images and words, with pundits, spin-doctors, experts and jumped-up cultural interpreters of all persuasions, I find it important to remember that such an outward reality exists, that such confrontations do occur, and that even our best ideas, theories, perceptions and feelings may count for exactly nothing in the big old scheme of things.