Acid West

by Joshua Wheeler

  It’s sure a lot. A lot of food here.

  Terry bangs on the cell door twice. Waits for it to crack. Hands the dishes through. You boys enjoy, Terry says behind the grub. Them guards always have an appetite.

  They’re real linebacker sorts, aren’t they?

  Brother Maxey will tell me these guards sobbed when Terry died: Everyone who knew him at the end knew he was changed. They sit together on the concrete bench. Concrete was chosen by the State of New Mexico out of cheapness but maybe also, however unconsciously, for its aesthetic value: the gravel and impenetrable-seeming sand, the fly-ash-and-slag cement. Concrete takes time to cure, a decade or more to reach full strength. Steel would be the impenetrable alternative. But nobody escapes the death house. This one was built for Terry, has been waiting for him for fifteen years, the concrete hardening imperceptibly as he learns the lesson of grace, slowly convincing himself to die. Bibles are the only possessions allowed in the tiny death-house cell and now that the food is gone, Terry and Brother Maxey can’t help but have those books, at all times, in their laps. And they can’t help but be knee-to-knee and face-to-face. And they can’t help but hold hands.

  Bone Graffiti

  The notebook is called “In Prison.” I know it’s called “In Prison” because a cutout from a newspaper headline is glued to the front cover and that’s what it says: “In Prison.” The scraps inside are from Old Man Sam’s time spent both as a prison employee and a prisoner. The title is a pun. Sam was a library associate for the penitentiary in Santa Fe. His Corrections Department ID is here along with all kinds of correspondence with different inmates. And Sam’s sketch of a bare-breasted woman and a receipt for $3,000 bail from some mix-up back in San Jose and the Christmas cards Sam drew for inmates in the mideighties and the evidence tag for Sam’s Colt .25 pistol that he once whipped out during a spat at El Patio Cantina and a document called “Instructions for How to Survive in Mexican Prison.” Sam’s real name, it turns out, is not Sam. Sam is the name of a murderer who once helped Old Man Sam get out of prison in Juárez and that’s why he uses it now. A tribute. There’s one page from one chapter in a book about a prison riot that Old Man Sam will never finish writing: “The glorious sun brown days of Indian summer had passed. Now the wind blew from the north and the mountain peaks above Santa Fe were capped with snow. As usual, getting up in the morning was a bitch. Too cowardly to negotiate the cold wood hallway to the bathroom, I stood on the bed and pissed out the window.”

  Old Man Sam is full of stories. Out front of El Patio is a wooden post with one chomp’s worth of bite marks sunk almost full tooth into the pine. Sam did a little too much of that Mexican cocaine cut with everything under the kitchen sink and couldn’t resist the feeling in his jaw that urged him to gnaw. Or he couldn’t help his gape as he flew mouth-first when his motorcycle hit a spot of missing bricks in the plaza road. Or he was trained in a circus freak show and his talent was hanging from things by his chompers. Sam has a new story each time he tries to impress a lady by fitting his teeth into the post. Says it’s his bone graffiti. He’s hunched from falling off a roof and breaking his back. Says there’s graffiti all up and down his spine too.

  In my living room is a Barcalounger I’ve decided to pass along to Sam because he says his graffitied spine sleeps better at a slight recline. I load it up in the truck and drive it to his house and move it to a bunch of different spots in his living room while he watches. He cannot lift much anymore. Once we get it vibing with the feng shui, he plops down, tells me how much better it feels than a lethal-injection table. At first I don’t believe there’s any way a librarian snagged the execution chamber for siestas. But the timeline fits. And Sam’s rare consistency on the matter makes it, in my mind, likely.

  New Mexico started building a death house specifically for Terry Clark shortly after he was sentenced in 1987. He was the only man on death row because at the end of 1986 the outgoing governor commuted all death sentences to life in prison. Terry pled guilty in 1986 on the belief that, if he received a death sentence, it would be commuted too. But the judge in the case took his time with the sentencing, lollygagged until there was a new governor in 1987 who believed in eye for an eye. So Terry was alone on death row. Then they started pouring the concrete. Terry wrote to his lawyer in 1989, “They’re building a new death house up here and I’m not really interested in breaking it in.” This was the beginning of years of vacillation on Terry’s part. Wanting to fight to live. Then sane and ready for heaven. Then back again. And back again. The death house sat unused and largely unfinished for many years. Terry could see it from the rec yard, where he was allowed to loiter for an hour a day. Old Man Sam was in there snoring.

  Even as Sam carries on about the cold hard table and scratchy sheets and the shiny buckles of the restraints and the way the table’s arm extensions don’t quite rise to ninety degrees—To keep it from looking like a crucifixion, he says—he hands me a stack of papers. They are administrative forms from the penitentiary and daily roll calls from the North Unit, where Terry Clark was housed. On a roll call from September 1995 there’s a note: Terry is out for exercise in the rec yard and someone needs to contact the Catholic Church for him.

  Terry’s death sentence was once briefly overturned on a legal technicality—from September 7, 1994, to March 18, 1996, he lived without execution looming. That he still sought religious counseling in this period where it seemed he might escape death and someday get out on parole seems some evidence that his conversion was genuine. More and more I think the reason I’m compelled to keep poking at this story is to somehow prove that Terry didn’t change, that the world is black-and-white, that there is no slippage between Good and Evil. That’s an easier world to navigate. As Sam sits in the Barcalounger miming twitches from an IV feeding poison into his veins, he says, Oh, no. You didn’t know? That’s when Clark was asking to get married.

  A Leper to These People Lord

  My first phone conversation with Terry Clark’s death-row fiancée lasts three hours. There is much sobbing on her end. Jean Ortiz says she hasn’t hardly thought about all this in a decade. She sets the phone down so many times, to get more crying towels, she says, that by the end of our conversation I imagine her perched atop a nest of them. He made me swear to never look back. I don’t know why I’m talking to you.

  Before calling Jean I spent many hours at the microfilm machine in the library reading up on her. She first got involved with this mess just days after Terry was arrested for the rape and murder of nine-year-old Dena Lynn Gore. Terry committed the crime while out on $50,000 bond as he appealed a conviction for the 1984 kidnapping and rape of six-year-old Donita Welch. At the time he was also a suspect in at least three other incidents of sexual predation in Roswell. But no charges had been brought in those three cases and the bond release was granted after his conviction for rape, in part, because the only evidence was the testimony of the victim; the court was hearing arguments about whether the six-year-old witness understood the difference between a truth and a lie.

  Jean Ortiz was one of the first to team up with Jayne Willis and Betty Williams Lehrman, two other Roswell residents, to spearhead a years-long campaign to change the laws that allowed convicted rapists to go free on bond during appeals. Their campaign was successful largely because Colleen Gore, the mother of Dena Lynn, joined the efforts and testified several times before the state legislature, explaining to them the obvious: that her daughter’s death could have been avoided if only convicted rapists weren’t immediately set free. During these trips to lobby the legislature in Santa Fe, Jean Ortiz and Colleen Gore traveled together, ate together, cried together. They shared the same goddamn motel room.

  We were friends, says Jean. Now she’ll say she hardly knew me. But that’s a lie.

  Jean is a traitor in the worst way, Jayne Willis told The Albuquerque Tribune after Terry’s execution. She stabbed Colleen Gore and her family in the back.

  On May 17, 1994, eight years after Dena Lyn
n’s murder and six years after the women from Roswell succeeded in passing the Dena Lynn Gore Law to keep convicted rapists from going free on bond during appeals, Jean wrote her first letter to Terry Clark. I just wanted to know why he wasn’t dead yet, she says. But then he started writing back. He wasn’t monstrous or anything. He was sincere. In fact, he was sweet. Then she began to visit him on death row.

  We fell in love, says Jean from atop her nest of crying towels.

  Back in 1996 she testified on Terry’s behalf in his resentencing hearing: We haven’t had an engagement party, but we’d like to get married someday if they’d ever give us permission. I love Terry as a best friend and a man … I believe he loves me.

  On March 17, 1996, the Roswell Daily Record printed the headline “Woman Who Protested Murder Wants to Wed Clark.” The headline was maybe their most shocking since 1947’s “RAAF Capture Flying Saucer on Ranch.” Jean Ortiz seemed the least likely person to wed a child rapist and murderer, if anyone at all can be said to be predisposed toward that sort of thing. Besides being an advocate for the Dena Lynn Gore Law and a friend of Dena Lynn’s mother, Jean was Roswell’s director of ChildFund International, was often on the evening news or in the papers raising money and organizing events aimed at finding and punishing people exactly like Terry Clark. She was a prodigious writer of letters to the editor, complaining about the salaries of city employees or announcing a new stop sign erected on her street or warning people to be on the lookout for intoxicated hot-air balloonists. She was what you might call an engaged citizen. Though, in retrospect, she also seems the kind of citizen my granddaddy would say sits down in a fire so people can see her better.

  After our phone conversation, Jean sends me a flurry of e-mails. If she ever had any reticence about sharing her story, it quickly evaporated. Her e-mails are long, full of digressions and emojis. She spends much time defending her actions, asserting often, without my ever asking, that she was not a publicity hound. I mostly believe her. She gave only one interview immediately following Terry’s execution. In it she says Terry just wanted to be left alone, by both the media and his lawyers, be allowed to make his own decisions about ending his life. So then I’m surprised when I arrive at this paragraph in one of her Hotmail tomes:

  One reason that I “don’t care for” Al Maxey is this FACT. Terry had until his time of death to pick up his appeals. Gail Evans [his attorney] made SURE that he had her cell phone # with him, in case. She waited & waited but her phone never rang. We were all in the waiting room upstairs [at the prison] & I wasn’t sure why she had her phone with her. I didn’t know all of this until later. Upon good authority, Gail was told in the days following [the execution] that Terry wanted to call her one hour before they gave him the pain pills or whatever they gave him (not the death cocktail, Joshua!). His “spiritual advisor” successfully talked him out of the call, although it is now known, Terry REALLY wanted to make that call.

  When Terry volunteered to die, he had not exhausted all appeals, including to the U.S. Supreme Court. There is no way to know if there would have been enough time, on the day of execution, to get any of those appeals restarted. His attorney, Gail Evans, will never agree to talk to me about the case or exactly what transpired in the hours just before the execution. By all accounts she tried everything to stop it, but could never overcome her client’s belief that he was born-again. Terry wrote to Jean about his arguments with Evans, “I told you she don’t believe, so she can’t get it that there is a better life after death. She even tried to tell me I wasn’t sure what to expect … There really is nothing to gain from her anymore…” Brother Maxey tells me he gets the sense Evans feels guilty, as if she failed to save a life, which is the opposite of how he feels. Other lawyers tell me it’s possible, if unlikely, that a last-minute change of mind might have prompted a delay in the execution. I tell Jean it might not have mattered if he had a last-minute change of heart. But her talk of coercion and drugging doesn’t stop. She keeps saying the arc of this thing bends toward sinister. But then that’s exactly where it started, and I tell her that too.

  She takes to writing poems when she thinks her tomes are not getting through to me, all verses about her pain, all addressed to Jesus. She sends them to me and signs off with a prayer: I love you Lord ❤ Please tell My TC, Mom & Dad I sent my heart … 15 minutes ☺

  Fifteen Minutes

  Texas. 2:30 or 4:30 a.m. June 13, 1983. Karla Faye Tucker, Danny Garrett, and James Leibrant leave Tucker’s residence after some partying. Tucker wants to go to Jerry Lynn Dean’s apartment to collect some money, intimidate him a little. Two weeks prior, Tucker had talked about offing Dean. Tucker and Garrett enter the apartment bedroom. Tucker puts a pickax to Dean’s head. Dean begs for his life. She strikes him with the pickax twenty-eight times. She has twenty-eight orgasms, one with each fatal blow to the head. Deborah Thornton is hiding under some sheets in the bedroom. Tucker decides to kill her too. Leibrant enters. He hears a gurgling noise in the bedroom and follows it back to where he witnesses Tucker pull the pickax out of a body, smile big, and hit the body again. Orgasms. The bodies are discovered the next morning—a pickax lodged in the chest of Deborah Thornton.

  Karla Faye Tucker is sentenced to death for the murders. While on death row she finds Jesus, is converted, reborn, becomes feverishly devout. Linda Strom writes a book called Set Free: Life and Faith on Death Row, in which she details her role as Tucker’s spiritual adviser. In the book, Karla Faye Tucker claims that from the moment the lethal injection stops her heart to the moment she arrives in heaven, exactly fifteen minutes will pass. Fifteen minutes and then she will be reunited with everyone who loves her because, in heaven, one day is equivalent to a thousand years on earth. Tucker is executed by lethal injection in 1998. Set Free hits shelves in 2000.

  Beasts/Sunsets

  October 10, 2001. Terry sits at a typewriter with his Bible. Alone. Outside of his cell for the one hour allotted each day. He types a letter, labors with a single heavy finger over the stubborn keys. He’s been pondering a question about whether or not humans and animals have the same spirit. He’s been researching. He’s found Ecclesiastes 3:18–21. “Check it out,” he writes to Brother Maxey. “We do come from or have the same Spirit, but it does not talk about the soul for animal … I guess we will have to wait till that time to find out for sure. Love In Christ, Terry.”

  Terry reads again from his Bible. For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts. King James Version. There is a helpful footnote. In dealing with human beings it is God’s purpose to test them. This seems right to Terry. He marks the spot in his Bible with a small leaf he smuggled in from recreation hour last week.

  November 4, 2001. Terry writes another letter. This one to Jean. Handwritten. Today he ponders a different book, one called Set Free.

  Heya Babe: Remember me?? I was reading parts of Karla Faye again. I got it marked out, the part about 15 … You just be careful when all this is over + done with. It will take awhile for people to forget. I want you safe. Your prayers should be for the Gores, so they will + can have peace … I always like the Fall, the colors in the trees … Its a time of CHANGE and soon Ill be changed too … Look for me in the STARS + in the SUNSETS … Thank you for being my friend. PROFOUND WASN’T IT??

  Moral Vegetable

  Brother Maxey shows me the dried gold leaf but quickly presses it back into Terry’s Bible, placing the Bible on the most prominent shelf in his office. You can’t have that. He laughs. It’s just an old leaf, but … I guess it’s pretty neat. He has a file cabinet full of memories connected to Terry. He opens it with a smile, shows me letters, news clippings, Terry’s drawing of a dove.

  When I ask Brother Maxey about Jean Ortiz, he says he doesn’t remember all that much about her. She was an older woman. He sensed she genuinely cared for Terry. She fell apart at the execution. But he’s not interested in talking about Jean’s resentment of him or her accusations. He says it all sounds like nonsense. He remembers t
hat Terry needed to be sedated in the hours before the execution, was given some kind of drug to calm him down. But his heart was already made up. The drugs didn’t matter, Brother Maxey says.

  I’ve come back to the warehouse chapel to ask Brother Maxey if he feels like he helped kill a friend. He recasts the question several times. Terry was ready to atone, accept the punishment Christianity requires. I’m asking all the wrong questions, Brother Maxey says. And I am starting to feel that way. My desk is covered in articles and photocopies and letters and many pictures of those unsettlingly deep eyes. Terry looks familiar—none of his features prominent. He’s got the ambiguous characteristics of Odo, the shape-shifting humanoid from Star Trek. Terry could be anybody.

  At his original sentencing Terry said, I knew what I was doing. I have a five-year-old boy and four-year-old girl. The crimes that I’ve committed or have done, that’s what they depict me as. But I don’t see myself as a child killer or rapist. I just can’t come to terms with myself being that, knowing how I was before.

  The district attorney responded by calling Terry a moral vegetable who should be executed.

  After the execution Brother Maxey is penned as the spiritual adviser to whom Terry confessed all the gruesome specifics of his sins. The state’s most prominent papers printed his picture on the front page, hugging Terry’s Bible, saying Terry confessed all the awful things he’d never shared with anyone else, saying he was sure Terry had got right with his god. I wonder how Brother Maxey can sit so still with all those images in his head. His mustache is the same as Terry’s. I’ve seen pictures of my father with a mustache like that. I could grow a mustache like that. I don’t ask Brother Maxey about Terry’s detailed confessions. I know these few facts and they are already too much: