Salvation on Death Row

by John T. Thorngren

  We walked up Commerce Street and into the main entrance of the bus station on Lamar. The entry featured an elongated greyhound in relief over the door. I gazed absently at this creature. I had always liked animals. And then it moved. I jerked my head down into reality and noticed a Dallas Police black-and-white parked out front, and then I remembered one just around the corner. This one next to me had an officer in it, and he glared at me. I grabbed Mike’s elbow.

  “Mike, there’s a cop over there. They’re looking for us…and there’s another one on the other corner.”

  “Cops and bus stations—they’re like refrigerator magnets. There is no way they could have found out already. Pretend you don’t see them. Look straight ahead and don’t make eye contact with anyone.”

  While Mike purchased our tickets and checked in his duffel bag, Linda and I sat in the waiting area, a crowded room with countless others carrying their belongings in various containers: paper sacks, canvas bags, and worn-out leather suitcases. Many were almost prone in their chairs, with their eyes closed, attempting sleep. The room was warm, body-heat warm, and stuffy with the smell of unwashed skin and a low-lying cloud of cigarette smoke that floated just above the heads of those standing, threatening to rain down tar and soot. “Where are we going?” I asked Linda.

  “Who knows? Mike calls the shots.”

  Mike walked back from the ticket counter and sat next to me.

  “We won’t leave until around 7,” he said.

  “Why so late?” grumped Linda.

  “Because that’s when the bus boards, Linda. What am I, the dispatcher?”

  As they got more into it, I went to the water fountain, took a chill pill, and left through one of the many doors leading to the buses. It was a giant garage with three wide lanes, three bus lengths deep. A half-dozen buses filled the lanes, some of them idling, waiting to start their appointed journeys. Each end of the garage opened onto a downtown, one-way street. Buses came in through one end and left through the other. Grating-covered holes, the mouths of large snakes, interspersed the dark concrete and swallowed black, melting icicles from buses arriving from the north. One grating near me was gulping down a spilt cup of coffee. Even with cold air slithering through the garage from the gray mist outside, the heavy stench of diesel fumes and dead oil burning squeezed the air from my lungs.

  “I hate that stink,” I mumbled. “At least inside the bus I won’t have to smell it.”

  I went back inside, sat next to Linda, and gazed at one of the Greyhound emblems on the wall above the ticket counter—another out-of-proportion dog flying through the fourth dimension. I guess I dozed off, because I jumped at Linda’s nudging.

  “You almost fell on the floor, Pam.”

  “Let’s get something to eat,” said Mike.

  In another large room, about half the size of the waiting room, we each ordered a steak, baked potato, and salad. Conversation was nonexistent. I tried to break the ice: “You know…we’re eating on blood money.” Linda looked upward and to her left. Mike stared at me, his classic stare of a thousand dead stars, black holes that spoke of nothing. Afterward we retreated to the waiting area. Then the now-familiar muffled, whining, monotone voice of the announcer bounced from the walls, saying again that one of the hounds was ready to run: “All boarding Greyhound service to Denver, Colorado, with stops at Fort Worth, Wichita Falls, Vernon, Childress…”

  “That’s ours,” said Mike. “Let’s go.”

  I don’t remember much about the trip except that it was long, with stops in every town and an hour layover in Amarillo, Texas. I think I slept most of the way. The Denver station was similar to that in Dallas except the waiting area was larger and the tiles on the floor, smaller.

  When we walked out of the Denver bus station, it was snowing. Mike motioned us into a cab.

  “Is there an inexpensive place where we can stay?” he asked the driver. “I mean real inexpensive.”

  “Yeah, just a few blocks from here, a hotel on California Street.”

  The lobby we entered had all the trappings of being a “real inexpensive place to stay”—dim lighting and threadbare, grease-smudged overstuffed chairs and a sofa leaning toward one broken-down end. The few low-wattage light bulbs gave a warm, orange glow to a cozy area, a falsehood quickly exposed when one exhaled smoke without a cigarette. It wasn’t much warmer than outside.

  “No,” I shouted, “this can’t be.” For there in the lobby, by trillion-to-one odds, were two of my brothers, David and Ronnie. “What are you two doing here?”

  “We’re just passing through. We have day work promised to us in Iowa. Why are you here?”

  “Oh…just seeing the world. You know I have never been out of California.”

  Mike quickly wedged himself between us and turned on the charm. He was good at that, at talking eloquently, smoothly, and softly. I had a feeling that he was feeding his illusion of increasing a Manson following, his wanna-be-Charlie dream. (Unfortunately, my brothers received a large dose of guilt by association from their chance arrival here, especially since they remained with us until our departure.)

  Linda got a job the next day at a nearby cafe. “We can use the extra cash,” she said, but I felt that she got the job because she wanted to get away from Mike as much as possible. I could appreciate her position.

  When Linda wasn’t working, we scoured the downtown Denver bars near the hotel for drugs. One such excursion brought forth a demonstration of the other, less-than-sweet side of Mike, the side Linda and I tried to avoid. Mike had gathered Linda and me in a parking lot across from a bar on one of the streets that crossed California. “These gentlemen are going to get us some good stuff,” he said, while never removing his glare from the faces of the two in front of him.

  “Oh, yeah, dude, just give us the bread that we agreed on, sixty bills.”

  “And how do I know you’ll deliver our Dillies?”(28, 29)

  “Like, where we gonna go, man? It’s in that bar, just a few hops across the street.”

  Mike handed them three twenty-dollar bills, and they hopped across the street, got into their car, and screeched off through a back exit. Mike imploded with a hiss and then exploded in a volley of curses. If he could have gotten hold of them, I am sure he would have pulled out their jugular veins with his bare fingers. Over the next several days, he silently dogged the area around the bar, hoping he could wreak his vengeance. If the thieves had been black, I am sure Mike eventually would have tracked them down and brought them to a slow and painful demise. I don’t know if it bothered him so much about the rip-off or the fact that he was conned for somewhere near the same amount he got for selling the pistol to a patron in the same bar.

  After a day or so into the beginning of March, I felt an overwhelming need to end this meandering, a turbulence of conscience, and a mother’s yearning to get back to her son. I snuck down to the telephone in the lobby and called the Denver police.

  “Yes, I want to confess to murdering two guys in Houston. There were three of us involved. You can find us at the hotel, me and Arthur Day, and his girlfriend, Sheila Davis…I don’t know the name of the hotel, but it’s downtown…What street? I don’t know, but it’s a big hotel; I think it’s the Marriott.”

  Someone walked into the lobby; frightened that it might be Mike, I hung up the phone. All lies, but an opening cry in the dark. I just wanted to get as far away from Mike and Linda as I possibly could. I didn’t like them from the start, and now they were unbearable. As I turned around, I saw that it was indeed Mike. From his hateful look, I knew he had seen me using the telephone.

  “Who were you talking to?”

  “I…I…Listen, Mike, I’m tired of this place. I don’t like the cold. I never have liked cold, and I want to leave. I want to go with my brothers to Iowa. We’ve got relatives there, and I’d like to see them.”

  He reached for the telephon
e, jerked it from its cradle and hit me on the side of my head.

  “If you leave, I promise you that I will kill one of your brothers. Would you like to pick which one now?”

  I walked rapidly away. I knew he would do what he said.

  The next day, in a state of desperation, I trudged around downtown Denver. Denver was cold. Black snow-slush clung to parked cars and clumped in piles along the gutter. When snow lies in new birth as I saw it in a blanket covering the field of a nearby ballpark, it is pretty. When it dies on a city street, it turns ugly. I noticed a patrol car stopped at a traffic light and knew it was time. He turned with a startled nod when I knocked on the passenger-side window.

  “My friends and me killed two people in Houston.”

  ***

  The next morning, I signed a twenty-six-page confession condemning Mike and me and exonerating Linda, not that it mattered under Texas law or the law in most other states. If five people are involved with one person who shoots another, they are each as guilty of homicide as if each of them had pulled the trigger. They continued to question me even after I signed the confession.

  “I’m curious,” said one of the detectives, “why did you confess? Houston Police had no suspects at all. You could have stayed on the lam for at least—oh, I don’t know—maybe another week.” And he smiled as if he had told some sort of joke.

  “I’m tired of running, and I want to see my two-year-old son.”

  The Denver Police immediately arrested Linda and Mike, along with my two siblings. I have always felt that they traced my phone call from the day before, because I never told them where we were. My kin were, of course, quickly released having solid proof that they weren’t anywhere near Houston in February.

  Linda and Mike opted to delay the inevitable and fight extradition. I didn’t. I wanted as far away as I could get from both of them. However, with the normal legal proceedings involving any extradition, even an uncontested one such as mine, I didn’t leave Colorado for two months.

  On April 30, I left for Stapleton International Airport, handcuffed to an Officer West, and we boarded a plane to Houston Intercontinental Airport. Things were moving fast. Shortly after we were airborne and not climbing an invisible hill, I said, “You know, the confession I gave them in Denver isn’t the truth. Actually I killed them both. By myself. Mike and, of course, Linda had nothing to do with it.”

  He nodded slowly. “We’ll take care of it when we get to Houston,” he said.

  This was a spur-of-the-moment ploy because I did not want Mike or Linda to come back to Texas. I wanted rid of them for good. But it was a naïve ploy of youth and guilt.

  In less than three hours, we taxied into the Houston airport. Houston Intercontinental, renamed George Bush Intercontinental years later, is some twenty-plus miles north of downtown Houston. We rode in a patrol car along Interstate 45, the same highway on which I had left, but we didn’t exit on the infamous Loop 610. We headed straight into the heart of the city, to the Harris County Jail, my new home for months to come. After being searched, re-searched, and assigned a cell, they sat me in a little room with Officer West, several hardened-looking men, and a stenographer. I told them again that I was solely responsible. Sometime later, they asked me to sign the new confession. I didn’t. By then, prudence had digested the fruits of stupidity.

  The Harris County Grand Jury had already handed down an indictment, in absentia on March 5, in the 248th District Criminal Court, of capital murder under Section 19.01 of the Texas Penal Code:(30)

  …while in the course of committing and attempting to commit the robbery of ROBERT BANKS [Robert K. Banks, Jr.-Texas Death Certificate], hereafter styled the Complainant, intentionally caused the death of the Complainant by strangling the Complainant with a rope.

  It is further presented that in Harris County, Texas, PAMELA LYNN PERILLO, hereafter styled the Defendant, heretofore on or about, FEBRUARY 23, 1980, did then and there unlawfully while in the course of committing and attempting to commit the robbery of BOB SKEENS [Bobby Glen Skeens-Texas Death Certificate], hereafter styled the Complainant, intentionally caused the death of the Complainant by strangling the Complainant with a rope.(31)

  Although I was indicted for both murders, the prosecution eventually charged me just for Skeens. My arraignment occurred on May 5, and I met my two court-appointed attorneys, Robert R. Scott and William W. Burge. In Texas, the court appoints two attorneys for the indigent in a capital case. Remanded to the Harris County Jail without bail, I awaited my “right to a speedy and public trial” as required by the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. It was soon in coming.

  CHAPTER 8

  After leaving the courtroom from the indictment, my attorneys and I met in a small room where they told me that the Harris County District Attorney’s Office would seek the death penalty.

  “The death penalty?” I swallowed.

  “Yes, we have a new district attorney, Johnny Holmes, and he seems to show no mercy in capital cases.”

  I felt as if I were lashed to a bull in a stampeding herd of cattle—no control, all voices and events taking place in another dimension, a surreal experience. They tried to comfort me, but I was just a balloon in a breeze, slowly floating away, unattached.

  For several months, the legal system played out its script of motions: a motion to dismiss, a motion to set aside, a motion in limine. Both the defense and the prosecuting attorneys agreed to have me psychoanalyzed. I assumed the defense was hoping for a position of mental incapability and the prosecution, for no such possibility. As if I were a frog in a biology class, my brain was examined at Ben Taub Hospital for over a month. From a long list of foreign-sounding words, the single phrase I remember from one of the psychiatrists was “currently suffering severe depression.” Yes, I suppose you would call it depression. I was terrified, and I was alone. I had committed a brutal crime, and I was looking at death in a foreign country called Texas. I was never a violent person. I had never committed a violent act. How could this have happened?

  They started me on 150 mg of Elavil(32) twice a day (a total of 300 mg) and 5 mg of Valium.(33) At least I could sleep, and that is all I wanted to do. The drugs dulled the filth and smell of the Harris County Jail on Franklin Street, a facility that must predate the American Revolution. Sewage seeped down the walls all the way to the first floor.

  Whether from broken lines or upset inmates stopping up their toilets, I don’t know, but I do know the sewage produced a population explosion of “Houstonian” cockroaches. The Houstonian cockroach is a nonevolving, prehistoric monster. Compared to a buzzard, this cockroach is just as large, and like a buzzard it can fly. Woe to anyone in its flight path. It attacks, clinging to your clothes and necessitating a repugnant, hands-on grip to rip it off, but the most repulsive act is having it land in your hair. Velcro™-type legs, all six of them, tie square knots in every surrounding strand of hair. Pulling this nasty bug out takes great strength and great intestinal fortitude not to hurl. Creepiest of creeps, however, is to step on one. Ugh! A crunch that can be heard cells away followed by a squish and a cupful of orange-yellow goo.

  While taking the “antidepressants,” I didn’t hear those roaches that occasionally landed in the toilet, went for a swim, and made the sound of surf hitting the piers of the Pike in Long Beach, California—a lifetime away. Some call them water bugs, which makes you think of a graceful underwater bug ballerina. What a euphemism. They only like filthy water.

  Voir dire (jury selection) started August 4. Selecting a jury took eleven days, far longer than the trial itself. An officer escorted me to the Harris County Criminal Justice Center, a giant skyscraper several blocks from the jail. The court never saw me in handcuffs or jail attire, clothing that might bias a jury. Inmates could buy makeup from the jail commissary, but with no money whatsoever, I borrowed from others who helped me to look like anything but a criminal, and the secretarie
s of my attorneys lent me dresses.

  Still groggy from antidepressants, I rode the elevator to the sixteenth floor, to the 248th Criminal District Court. Entering the courtroom was like stepping out into a noonday sun from a darkened room. Intense fluorescent lighting bounced unmercifully from blonde-paneled walls. We sat down at a large table reserved for the defense; the prosecution had its own table, sort of like two forts ready to wage war. I dozed off but awoke quickly when the bailiff boomed out as Judge James entered, “All rise. The 248th District Court is now in session, the Honorable Judge Jimmy James presiding. Be seated, please.”

  Since watching Bonanza on TV with my dad, I’ve always enjoyed Westerns, but this was surreal. Lawyers, the D.A., assistant D.A.s, so many men were wearing cowboy hats and boots. They spoke in a foreign dialect. My ears could only understand the fast-clip, amplified up-and-down song of the Californian language. These people spoke in a soft monotone like cold syrup straining to leave a bottle. If there were any melody to a sentence, it started high and fell like stones in a well. I half expected the judge to raise his robe and withdraw one of a pair of holstered six-shooters and lay it next to his gavel.

  And the judge’s name? Jimmy? I understand that this is a frequently given and recorded name, especially in Texas, but at the time I thought it peculiarly similar to movie cowboys such as “Hoppy” or “Gabby.” The district attorney was most notable, a Wyatt Earp persona with a handlebar mustache as wide as the horns on a steer. It was a scene from a bad Western, and when they started questioning prospective jurors about their having any qualms about my lethal injection, I knew they were out to lynch me.

  The Harris County attorney general with the intimidating mustache was John B. Holmes, Jr. He was the interim replacement for Carol S. Vance, who resigned before the end of his term in 1979. Had Vance remained and been re-elected, it is speculated that the D.A.’s office might not have moved for the death penalty. This is conjecture, of course, but it should be noted that Vance was both the son and grandson of Methodist ministers and noted to have become involved in the evangelical Christian ministry during his later years as a prosecutor.(34) In 1996, Carol Vance, then chairperson of the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, asked the state to create a Christian faith-based prison program at the old Jester Unit outside of Houston. This prison later officially became the Carol Vance Unit.(35)