Cell 2455, Death Row

by Caryl Chessman

  “Go ahead! I don’t care!”

  She apparently didn’t. We had been driving. I slammed down on the accelerator and jerked the steering wheel to the right; my little Ford careened and headed to an unguarded place where I could send us hurtling down almost two hundred feet. She stared straight ahead, saying nothing. At the last instant I decided I wasn’t yet ready to destroy myself and my defiant, voluptuous darling. I slammed on the brakes, barely stopping in time. She coolly appraised me and smiled mockingly. I pulled her to me and kissed her fiercely. Her arms encircled my neck, fingernails digging into my back like talons.

  “There are other ways of killing us,” she whispered.

  Slower, subtler, more terrible ways.

  Friday, October 13, 1939, wasn’t my day. I stepped into a stolen car the Glendale police had staked out and was promptly arrested by two detectives with drawn guns. Handcuffed, I was placed in the front seat of a radio car parked nearby. One detective drove, gun in hand, while the other went ahead on foot, hoping to capture a confederate of mine they believed had entered an auto agency up the street. I lashed out with the handcuffs, striking the detective. The gun flew from his right hand; the horn honked; the radio car swerved. I elbowed the door open, jumped, stumbled, caught my balance and ran down a side street. The detective who had been walking ahead ran back, took careful aim and squeezed the trigger. The gun failed to fire. I ducked down an alley. Several minutes and some distance later, a slight, male citizen leaped on my back when I lost my balance vaulting a fence. Still handcuffed, I was unable to dislodge him. He clung like grim death and shouted mightily for help. Assorted citizens and the two detectives came on the run.

  Each detective seized me with a free hand. “Run now!” growled one of them. “Come on, let’s see you run now!” A gun waved under my nose.

  A lady dashed forward. “Don’t you dare hurt that poor boy!” she scolded. “And put those awful guns away this instant!”

  Again, custody, jail, a cell, interrogation, suspicion, interminable back-room sessions, tough talk. “Next time we’ll shoot first and ask questions afterward. Next time my gun won’t fail to fire. Next time you’ll wind up in the morgue.” “All right, Chessman, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll come clean, and no funny business. We know what you’ve been doing, but we want the story from you.”

  Again, a visit from the parole officer with the radar ears. “We’ve got you this time!” Smug triumph. “You’re on your way to San Quentin without fail!”

  We’ve got you this time!

  But for what? I insisted I hadn’t done anything. I claimed they—the cops—were just trying to roust me.

  The police were convinced that I was guilty of committing any number of felonies—but all they had was smoke and suspicion, plus scraps and fragments of evidence and some hearsay that wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law. All they could definitely pin on me was the fact they had caught me in a stolen car. However, I actually hadn’t stolen that particular car and could prove I hadn’t. That left the lesser offense oi driving the vehicle without the owner’s permission.

  Would the arresting officers testify I had been driving the car? I knew they would. They stated in the arrest report that I had started to pull away from the curb and had driven the machine two or three feet. I flatly denied even being behind the wheel; but assuming the statement of the detectives was accepted over mine, and that the “two or three feet” constituted “driving” within the meaning of the law, the prosecution still would have to prove with some kind of credible evidence that I had driven those thirty-six inches with the intent of depriving the owner of possession, which in turn would require proof that I had known the car was stolen. That was where they might run into a snag.

  But what if I beat that charge? Then the police were sure to charge me with escape from the lawful custody of an officer. The escape carried a ten-year maximum sentence and if I was convicted, San Quentin was a certainty. The police would see to that. But a driving-without-the-owner’s-consent conviction carried only a five year top and I very probably could get off with probation and a few months in the county jail if I “cooperated” with the authorities by pleading guilty to the charge and thus saving the county the time, trouble and expense of a trial. That way I would be quietly taking myself out of circulation and it appeared a solution that would satisfy all concerned—except, of course, my parole officer. He had his heart set on seeing me behind San Quentin’s grim, gray walls.

  I got hold of some money and hired the attorney I wanted. Through him, I entered a plea of guilty to the charge and filed an application for probation. The attorney had a talk with the judge who would sentence me. When I stood before him, the judge lectured me scathingly; he warned me that if I got into trouble again he would throw the book at me. Then he ordered me on three years’ probation, the first year to be served in the county jail, with six months suspended. Next case.

  Thus I exchanged three years of juvenile parole for an equal amount of adult probation, and was then wholly beyond the reach of my former parole officer, whose control over me terminated the instant the probation order was made. The Fates indeed were kind. And they became kinder still. Not more than three or four days later, I happened to be in the Attorney Room of the jail when, much to my delight, Cerberus put in an appearance. He was seated not far from me and in a couple of minutes he had some scared kid seated across from him, giving the youngster the benefit of his righteous social indignation. As I was leaving I paused briefly in front of him, grinned and proceeded to tell him exactly what I thought of him. When I got through the air was blue.

  I did my time in Road Camp No. 7 in the mountains high above the fabled Malibu Colony. The food was good, the mountain air was a tonic, and the feel of the sixteen-pound sledge hammer as it smashed into rocks was pure joy.

  The personnel at the camp were decent people with one notable exception, the head man himself, a soured, cranky, too tough old character who had a nasty way of making things miserable for all of us in a hundred petty ways. I vowed to find some way to give the old boy a good time of it when I was released, and I did.

  Sometimes, in the evenings, talk in the barracks would get around to crime. Mostly I listened. Did I have any ideas on the subject?

  “Yeah, I do. I’ve discovered that all my trouble always begins in a police station. So I don’t think after this I’ll be paying any police stations a visit.”

  Those listening understood what I meant.

  Night counts weren’t made too often in the barracks and on several occasions I had business elsewhere. I would slip off to Santa Monica or even Los Angeles. Once the California Highway Patrol mistook me for a burglar who had been prowling the area, and the pursuit was lively. I spent over an hour in a rough ocean, dodging bullets, spotlights, rocks, seaweed. It was a miracle I got back to camp before the morning check.

  The months passed swiftly. I was taken to the County Jail in downtown Los Angeles and released on a Sunday morning. The date, I believe, was June 30, 1940.

  Where do I go from here? I asked myself. That depended, I decided. It depended on many things. . . .

  “Go away,” my voluptuous darling said, after I had scratched on the window screen to wake her. But I wanted to talk to her. “There’s nothing to talk about.” It was all over between us; she insisted it was no more. I should go away. Yes, there was another. So would I please leave.

  A baffled, angry young villain left. Suddenly, she had become a hideous sickness. Yes, there was another! Perhaps a casual succession of others. I could see them all, these lovers; I could see her giving herself to them, casually, indifferently. And I suffered.

  I knew that her father had learned about us shortly after my arrest, and that he had wrathfully taken his daughter to court. I knew he had gone so far as to have her put on probation and threatened with being placed in an institution for incorrigible girls if she so much as saw me. But this should have strengthened, not destroyed, our need and desire for e
ach other.

  And it would have but for one fact—she and I were the dark night’s children.

  Ding an sich—ultimate reality. Where was it? Where was it to be found? Certainly not at the wild, drunken parties I attended. Nor in the eager arms of young matrons with sophisticated ideas about the institution of marriage. Nor in free-swinging brawls with jokers who, for one reason or another, threw their weight around. Nor at a typewriter, capable only of suggesting to its operator that the sole goal of life was to distract oneself by furious, reckless activity of one sort or another and thus prevent recognition of life’s meaninglessness.

  I didn’t fit. I tried to join the Army, but the Army wanted no part of me. I attempted to get a job at one of the booming aircraft plants and was turned down cold. My record made them shudder. So I kept on working for my father, and marking time.

  Crawling, walking, staggering, running, I had come a long way. But all the while I had been traveling in a circle. Now I was back where I started. I had completed my own odd Metonic cycle, and I felt as old as though I had been born in Meton the Athenian’s time. I felt as old as time itself. Yet I was only nineteen. Nineteen winters.

  I marveled at the fact, for I also was a man, a very old man, whose life had been lived. My youth surely was a lie, a mockery. It existed, had entity, persisted still, only to please a mordant Fate with its capacity for torment.

  Then Judy entered my life and I thanked the gods for my youth. A truly beautiful girl, Judy was all I could ask for in a voung woman. Indeed, with her unaffected innocence, her tinkling laughter, and her warm, tresh beauty, she was a dream come true. I told her so and we fell in love, wholly and we thought for all time. My past, she assured me, made no difference to her; all that counted was our future together. First we would be married, and as soon as possible; then we would finish school together. When I graduated, I would go to work —and really work. Ultimately I would establish myself as a creative writer. Meanwhile we would raise a family; there would be babies. And, of course, we would live happily ever after in a world without menacing shadows.

  Everything appeared perfect. At last I had found myself; at last I had regained my sense of balance. Then one afternoon I called on Judy and she told me there could be no marriage.

  I begged her to tell me what had happened.

  “I . . . I can’t tell you,” Judy faltered, avoiding my eyes.

  “But you must,” I insisted.

  And finally, after much urging, she did tell me. She was visiting at a girl friend’s one evening, approximately two weeks earlier, when two boys called, one of whom was the boy friend of Judy’s chum and the other a boy she had been out with two or three times. Judy’s girl friend talked her into going for a ride with the two boys, who were drinking. Over Judy’s strenuous protests, they drove to a local lover’s lane and parked. Judy jumped from the car and ran, pursued by the boy she had dated in the past. Panting, he caught up widi her, seized her roughly. The drink and her attempt at flight made him ugly.

  “What’s the matter, think you’re too good for me?”

  He tried to kiss her, to fondle her.

  “Let me go!”

  She wrenched an arm free and slapped him. He cursed her, struck her, once, twice, three times. She fell to the ground, only half conscious. He tore off her undergarments and attempted to rape her, possibly succeeding. . . .

  Now my poor Judy burned with shame. She feared she might be pregnant (she wasn’t, it developed), and she believed, in any event, that she had been horribly soiled, forever rendered unfit for marriage. She felt I would recoil at the sight of her if I were to learn what had happened.

  I swam in a red haze, and some voice within screamed soundlessly in anguish. I wanted to kill, to smash. Never again would the malignant gods get a chance to hurt me or those I loved. For I would put them to rout; I would make them flee in terror. I would build a bastion. Hate and Guile would help me. God have mercy on the next “good” one, the next “righteous” one to inflict his goodness or his righteousness on me or mine. I was holding Judy in my arms, and at the same time planning how I would beat the life out of the vile animal who had ravaged her.

  “I love you, Judy! I love you more than life! And all the fiends in Hell aren’t going to stop me from marrying you!”

  One Thursday, we drove to Las Vegas, and were married.

  I do no more than faithfully relate the simple, if violent and bizarre, truth.

  With diabolic cunning, my mind synthesized and plotted, waiting, watching, a cold, coiled, venomous thing biding its time. First the stage had to be set; the dramatis personae had to be selected and groomed for their roles.

  An idyllic summer had passed, and its exquisite, intimate perfection was ours, Judy’s and mine; it could never be taken from us. Here was the fall of the year, a golden autumn. We had begun school together but I had clashed with Pompous Officiousness and had been obliged to check out. Now I was attending another high school in the morning and a university in the afternoon. Judy and I were living in a luxurious third floor front apartment in Glendale, and I had acquired a new Ford coupe. As the saying goes, I was doing all right for myself.

  Then an article in the back pages of a newspaper set off a chain reaction. The article told of recent advances made in neurosurgery and mentioned the name of a famous neurosurgeon. I arranged for this surgeon to visit and examine my mother. Then I had a talk with him privately.

  Was there a chance, any possibility at all, surgically, to give my mother the use of her legs? Yes, there was a chance, the surgeon said. It would take at least one and more probably a series of delicate operations. The cost of hospitalization and the operations would be almost prohibitive. The specialist quoted a figure in the thousands. And he warned there was grave danger the operations might prove fatal.

  I told my mother what the surgeon had told me.

  “Do you think, Mom, you should risk your life against a chance to walk again?”

  My mother nodded her head emphatically. “Yes,” she told me. She was positive she should. All these years she had prayed for such a miracle.

  But a question troubled her. Where would the money come from?

  I had anticipated the question. “I believe I know where I can borrow it, Mom.” My smile reassured her. And it forestalled the asking of a second and more embarrassing question, touching where I could possibly borrow such a large sum of money.

  Adolf was pounding London to bits. The R.C.A.F. had set up an unofficial recruiting office in Hollywood, and was crying for skilled pilots. I made arrangements to go to Canada within sixty days and join that country’s air arm. (Later, circumstances obliged me to extend the time another sixty days.) I was assured that if I had sufficient flying experience I would be promptly transferred to England. I began taking flying lessons.

  I intended to let society pay for my mother’s operation. Then I would pay society back in my own way—not by going to jail, but by going to England and fighting hell out of Adolf’s Luftwaffe, until I found myself blown into eternity’s tomorrow. Right then I wanted from life (and death) two things above all else: to see my mother walk again, and to give her, my father and Judy a reason to be proud of me. Never knowing the meaning of it, never truly possessing it, I nevertheless wanted to fight and was willing to die for what men call freedom. My motives were personal, arbitrary, and selfish.

  I wanted peace and I unhesitatingly declared war to find it. I wanted to get even, to have one last defiant fling, and then to go out in a blaze of ironically stolen glory. The dialectics of psychopathy are subtle and romantic indeed. When driven, confused and acutely dissatisfied, find some reason or excuse to fight. Raise hell! Cunningly charge off in three or four different directions simultaneously.

  • 20 •

  A Game of Cops and Robbers

  I was back in business again, the opportunistic business of taking people’s money at the point of a pistol. Pimps, gamblers and others of similar persuasion I regarded as targets as legit
imate as any to be found, and their cries of anguish at being “beat” were sweet music to my ears. Most often during the first few weeks I worked alone but occasionally I would team up with one or more other guys laboring in the same perilous vineyard.

  From the start I was determined to forge an outfit that could and would get the work at hand done swiftly and efficiently, even artistically. This scheme involved recruiting a fearless soldiery, planning, specialization, and the acquisition of the requisite materiel—no small task. Still, life was not all work and no play. With the aid of tough, loyal Little Andy and his burglarious South Side crew I stocked an arsenal. I cultivated the acquaintance of a vain, snake-eyed comer in the local rackets, the Duke. Through Bob and Rabbit, a couple of boosters, I contacted a fence willing and eager to handle hijacked merchandise. Gabriella (so I’ll call her), a girl with a penchant for gambling and a fancy charmer who felt she owed me herself and her life because I had extricated her from some really bad jams with an ugly element, did some fronting and fingering for me.

  My friend Bill had been released from camp and we found the time to return, unseen, one Sunday afternoon and sabotage the road-building machinery on the grade near camp and drain off hundreds of gallons of gas. We were sure that would make our old friend, the lemon-faced captain, very happy. The bastard who had mistreated Judy had an accident. Tim showed up; he had just been released after serving a one-year jolt at another camp and had a suspended one to five San Quentin sentence hanging over his head. I had been willing to overlook if not entirely forgive his snitching but, nonetheless, would have run him off except for Judy, who felt sorry for this weak, brooding boyhood pal. So I told him straight, “You’re welcome to stick around, Tim. But don’t ever betray either of us, and especially Judy. God help you if you do.”

  Tim introduced me to Tuffy, an amiable, sandy-haired young giant he had met at camp. In no time at all, Tuffy and I became fast friends. Through me, Tuffy met a school chum of Judy’s, a vivacious young lady as full of the joy of life as he was. They wasted no time in falling in love. Today they are happily married and have two fine sons. But thanks to Chessman, as we shall see, they faced many trials and tribulations before marriage was possible, and even now, more than a decade later, Tuffy is still paying dearly for that friendship and for being loyal.