At the end of the day, I once again begged my attorneys, Skelton and Pelton, to let me testify on my own behalf.
“I can explain all of that behind the second confession. I wanted Mike and Linda to get away while I was in jail. I was so young—the rope-and-gun statement was just a flippant remark. And I want to set the record straight about Linda’s testimony. She’s lying. She wouldn’t know the truth if it smacked her upside the head.”
“No,” they chorused, “if you testify, they’ll dig into your past and make you look even worse.”
“Worse? I’m not a bad person. Other than being a child runaway and involved in drugs and a robbery, I never did anything really bad before this,” I said, but they would not yield.
My sister, Joanne, testified on my behalf. My dad, stepmother, half-sister, and son already had returned to California after the jury selection. Since my dad said he couldn’t handle it anymore, we all agreed they should leave.
I couldn’t have known that would be the last time I would see my father. He died in 1987. None of my family contacted me. I found out about his death sixteen days after he had passed, from Christina.
Joseph and Pamela’s father, circa 1984
Warden Plane(58) from Mountain View, a witness for the state to testify against me, turned it around by saying that I was a Christian convert and a model prisoner.
Then the state brought up the fact that I had been written up at Mountain View for a flagrant violation of the rules. They never disclosed the “heinous” details of this crime: I had held back two small boxes of cereal from my breakfast tray to eat later. “If Ms. Perillo can’t follow the rules in a state institution, how could she follow the rules in society?” And Skelton sat there with his face etched in cement.
The prosecution introduced the details of my robbery with Mike Briddle and the still-outstanding warrant from California. The robbery victim had since passed away, or I am sure the state would have treated him to another Houston vacation in return for his testimony. Members from both the victims’ families, the Skeenses and the Bankses, testified. Prior to their testimony, Jim Skelton told me that he planned to interview the Skeens family. I begged him to let me talk to them. I wanted so badly to say I was sorry and ask for their forgiveness, but he wouldn’t allow it. I never heard what transpired in that interview. On November 14, my attorneys and I rose for the punishment verdict.
“Mr. Foreman, has the jury reached a verdict?” asked Judge Densen.
“We have, your honor.”
“And how do you answer for the first special question: whether there is a probability that the defendant would commit criminal acts of violence that would constitute a continuing threat to society.”
“We unanimously answer in the affirmative.”
“And the second question regarding mitigating circumstances for a life sentence instead of the death penalty?”
“We unanimously answered in the negative.”
After the noise in the courtroom subsided, Judge Densen pronounced the sentence: death by lethal injection. As the words fell, Robert Pelton and I embraced and cried together.
CHAPTER 13
Not all good comes free of the bad, and not all bad comes free of the good. A miracle did take place before the bad part of my trial. Christina and her husband asked me if I would like them to bring Joseph to Texas to live in their home. After I readily responded, “Yes,” we asked Joseph the same question as we all gathered in the visiting room. I will never forget his reply, “You don’t want to miss me anymore, do you, Mom?” Then he turned to Christina, “I knew I had a momma, and I’ve been waiting for her to come get me.”
Joseph returned with the rest of the family before formal testimony, but when he came back to Texas, through the action of the courts, I now had another mom. I had two before then: my biological mom, Wuanita, long passed away, and my stepmom, Helen. My third mom, Christina, is my adopted mom. She and her husband legally adopted me so they could raise Joseph as their grandson. Joseph would still be my son and would be living in Texas near me. I thought my heart would burst with joy.
My dad and Helen were not happy with this new arrangement. I can understand, because Joseph was a sweet and loveable child. But he was my son, and it was my decision. I knew he would have a better life in Texas than with them. My insight was correct; Joseph has grown into a straight and righteous Christian man.
Joseph’s new grandparents, Christina and her husband, arranged a medical correction for his limp. They sent him to the best of private schools, then to Baylor University, and finally to Texas A&M, from which he received his college degree. Joseph is one hundred percent “straight arrow,” as they say in Texas. He doesn’t smoke or drink, is married with a family, and best of all, he is a good Christian man. My spirit quivers when I think about what might have happened to him if it hadn’t been for Christina. Christina is the God-woven, golden thread that borders the tapestry of my life.
“My life is just a weaving,” a tapestry woven by God, as taken from the poem “The Weaver.”(59)
The Weaver, Verse I
My life is just a weaving
Between my Lord and me.
I cannot change the color
For He works most steadily.
My blanket started out as a dog’s blanket—dirty, frayed, and full of ticks and fleas—but now that I am redeemed, it has been made new and made whole. I wrote this poem for Christina one Mother’s Day.
Christina
A Mother’s Day Poem
Pamela Perillo
I praise you on this Mother’s Day
For all that you have done
Choosing me and Joseph
We knew you were the one
Mothers usually shop for kids
With smiles all aglow
Christina went against the grain
And took one from Death Row
Joseph only six years old
Not knowing what was wrong
Your loving arms around him
He knew where he belonged
You raised him up and on your own
Today an Aggie man
He’s all grown-up and happy
This was Christina’s plan
Today, years have passed
Two trials gone astray
Now we face another one
And by my side you stay
You said where you come from
Mothers never go away
You always proved your love for me
In a very special way
I think when God made you
With love as pure as light
Sent you to me with hopes and dreams
To help me win this fight
After my trial, I tried hard to get some badly needed dental work performed in Houston. Mike Barber tried to get a court stay, so I could get this done, but the judge thought otherwise. Mike Barber was a prominent NFL football player who retired early to minister to prison inmates through Mike Barber Ministries.(60) I learned a lot from him, and he has been a help and a blessing to me all these years.
When I arrived back at Mountain View in Gatesville, Karla Faye and I had a long, bittersweet reunion with many tears. She was so glad to see me and yet so sad to hear about my sentence. Her cell was across from mine and we could talk at will. My cell looked out on the rec yard, whereas Karla Faye’s looked out on the parking area. She said she could see three crosses (actually telephone poles) and knew which one was hers—“next to the one in the middle, the Penitent Thief who will see paradise.”
As noted earlier, Death Row was at the end of a hall housing cells for Ad Seg, and we were also close to the cells reserved for psych patients. Often one of the girls in Psych would tie her sheet to the door to impede entry, spread flammable bedding, paper, etc., in the middle of her cell, and start a fire—
inmates could smoke then and had matches. Karla Faye and I, of course, could not leave our cells and had to lie on the floor with a blanket over our head to keep from coughing up our innards. For extra spite came the usual excrement tossing at the guards on some sort of prearranged signal. Their mess always seemed to land in front of our cells. One of our neighboring Ad Seg and Psych inmate’s favorite diversions was the blanket party. Again, on some unknown signal, they would stuff their blankets down their commodes and flush repeatedly until water ran ankle-deep everywhere. We were constantly dry-docking our belongings from the floor during one of their high-tide parties.
And was it ever hot! Texas summers never relented except sort of in the early morning—sometimes. In the morning, if the temperature was exceedingly warm, expect a noonday scorcher. If the day began unbearably hot and muggy, expect the afternoon to be boiled up from the center of the earth.
It was still lava-hot time when my distinction of being the oldest female on Death Row ended. In the fall of 1985, Betty Lou Beets came to Mountain View. Betty Lou Beets was forty-eight years of age when she joined Karla Faye and me. She was pretty, with bleached hair and a good figure, but she was bitter and obviously not a Christian. Karla Faye and I knew when we first met her that we had a divinely prepared mission before us.
Betty Lou Beets (née Dunevant) was born in North Carolina from, as they say, “humble beginnings,” in a cabin without water and electricity. Measles almost killed her at an early age and left her with very little hearing. At age five, she remembers being raped, but she didn’t know by whom and didn’t understand why she “was hurting and my mother and aunt tried to help me. I remember them trying to put something back into me as if my insides were falling out.”(61)
Betty Lou Beets, mugshot, 1985
When Betty Lou was twelve, her mother suffered a mental breakdown and was institutionalized for several months, so Betty Lou quit school to help raise her younger brother and sister. Gradually her mother improved, returned home, and resumed working until she retired at age sixty-five. Later in life, Betty Lou learned that mental or physical abuse by a long line of males started with her grandmother and progressed through five generations, past herself and on to her grandchildren.
“Where does it stop and where does it end? I wish it could with me, but it has already gone on ahead of me.”(62)
She married at fifteen and had six children. Longing for something missing from her teens, she started frequenting bars. Her disgruntled husband of seventeen years filed for divorce. Betty Lou soon married another man who often abused her. Following their divorce and amidst contradictory testimonies, she shot him several times as he entered their back door. After a lengthy stay in the hospital, he dropped all charges and they remarried, a reconciliation that lasted one month.
Soon she found another man at a bar, and they lived together for four years before marriage. That marriage lasted a little more than a year. Betty Lou’s next marriage, one of constant fighting, lasted less than her last one. However, her ex begged her to take him back; they remarried and moved to Cedar Creek Lake near Gun Barrel City, located in the transitional geographic region between eastern Texas (Big Thicket and swamps) and central Texas (Hill Country). Betty Lou bought a lot near the lake, and her new fourth husband bought a two-bedroom trailer for their home. This marriage soon culminated in a familiar pattern of physical abuse. After the abuse began, Betty Lou shot her husband as he lay sleeping in their bed. After a long struggle to stuff him into a sleeping bag and drag him into a closet, she called one of her daughters, who agreed to help bury him. They dumped him into a pre-dug hole in the backyard and later covered him with patio stones.
Betty Lou met her final husband, Jimmy Don Beets, while tending bar at the Cedar Club on Texas State Highway 274 about five miles from Gun Barrel City. Jimmy Don was a fire captain in Dallas and made the long commute (fifty-plus miles) from Cedar Creek Lake because of his obsessive enjoyment of boating, drinking, and fishing. Betty Lou became Betty Lou Beets in 1982, and her new husband moved into her trailer, the one her previous husband had purchased before “disappearing.” Jimmy Don never abused Betty Lou; she decided to kill him for a $100,000 insurance policy and his fire department retirement benefits. Using the same modus operandi for killing her fourth husband, she shot Jimmy Don in bed and this time had her son help bury him in a sleeping bag under a wishing well in the front yard. This repeat performance earned Betty Lou the moniker of the “Black Widow Killer.” Killing Jimmy Don for money bought her a capital murder charge and the death penalty.
Betty Lou Beets entered the cell next to me on my right. It was a most fortuitous location, because we didn’t look directly at each other, and we bumped heads from the start. I don’t know why—maybe just one of those feelings you get when you first meet someone and know you are not going to be friends. She could become hysterical rather easily. Late one warm autumn night, the alarms went off and the lights pulsed. The smell of burning paper wafted through the ventilation system.
“We’re on fire!” she screamed. “We’re gonna be burned alive!”
“Get down on the floor and cover your head with a blanket!” yelled Karla Faye.
“Help! Save me!”
We heard her muffled cry and intense sobbing for the duration of another one of our Psych bonfires.
From the details of her life history, Betty Lou obviously needed male attention. And if not from a male, then she needed attention as a victim—especially from the media—for being handicapped with a hearing loss or serving as a poster child for the abused wife. But her hearing handicap didn’t hamper our conversation because she now had hearing aids, and regardless of whatever sort of love-hate relationship we shared, she always seemed to come to me in a crisis, to cry on my shoulder.
Her I-am-a-victim attitude was clearly expressed when the state turned down one of her appeals. In a screaming rage, she grabbed an 8-by-10 picture of Jimmy Don taped to her wall, shredded it into little pieces, and flung it into the hall. “It’s all his fault!” she yelled. She was cold and aloof. It took a long time to get her to warm up to Karla Faye and me, and even then, she still kept her distance. I think she had some events in her early life that caused her never to trust women in general. She always seemed to think another woman was trying to steal her husband.
She did find salvation, but Karla Faye and I felt her relationship with God was not as joyful as it could have been. Whenever there was a crisis in her life, she never would let go and trust God. It was always poor, poor, pitiful me. But our desire for her peace and joy was not in judgment, for we all must “work out our own salvation…”(63) and we all shall worship the Savior in our own way.
CHAPTER 14
When the New Year of 1986 arrived under a blanket of wind and cold rain, we three—Karla Faye, Betty Lou, and I—moved to a new Death Row unit—a move we compared to one from hell to heaven. The new Death Row was air-conditioned. When summer came to Texas, words crumble in describing the comparison between with and without air-conditioning. Our new unit had a separate rec yard, day room, workroom, and eight cells (three for us and five empty). Perhaps the elected politicians were expecting a lot more females in their quest to be tough on crime.
In our workroom, we made Parole Pal dolls. These resembled the popular Cabbage Patch Dolls made from yarn and cloth patches. The prison would sell these to the guards and other state employees. Warden Plane, who had testified for me at my second trial, had retired, and we now had Warden Pamela S. Baggett.(64)
***
Frances Elaine Newton joined us on Death Row in the fall of 1988. Three weeks prior to her alleged murder of her family outside of Houston (Harris County), Frances purchased an automobile insurance policy. An aggressive salesperson suggested life insurance as well. Frances had recently lost three infant cousins in a house fire, and her relatives did not have enough money to bury them. Frances, because of her recent loss and on the advic
e of her father, was very amenable to the concept of life insurance and purchased a $50,000 policy on her husband and another on her daughter. This simple, emotionally based act became the motive for a capital murder charge in the execution-style shooting of her husband, Adrian; her daughter, Farrah; and her son, Alton. The state “clearly” had a motive, the first of the three criteria (motive, means, opportunity) for criminal guilt, but could not explain why Frances shot Alton, who had no insurance policy.
On the evening of the murders, Frances left her apartment when all three of her family were still alive and drove a short distance to visit Sondra Nelms, her paternal cousin. Frances and her husband were having severe marital problems, primarily because he was a user and a dealer of narcotics. They were, however, trying to reconcile, a fact that Frances shared with Sondra when she left Sondra’s home. Before the two cousins returned to Frances’ apartment for a visit, Sondra saw Frances deposit a blue bag in a burned-out, abandoned house next door—the same house where her three infant cousins died, a house that belonged to Frances’ father. Frances placed this blue bag while Sondra watched. Sondra did not ask for an explanation, and Frances did not volunteer one. Frances and Sondra returned to Frances’ apartment and found Adrian, Farrah, and Alton dead. Frances went into hysterics and appeared visibly shaken.
Later that same evening, Sondra led police to the blue bag that contained a .25 pistol. When questioned, Frances said she found the pistol in their home, and that since her husband, Adrian, had been involved in a drug dispute over $1,500 that he owed his dealer, she didn’t want a strange gun in the house. The police later found that this gun belonged to Frances’ high school boyfriend with whom she was having an affair. Adrian was having an extra-marital affair of his own.
On the day following the murders, the police examined the gun for a ballistic match and reported it to be the murder weapon. In an unexplained and abnormal delay, the police did not arrest Frances until two weeks later. On that same day following the murders, the police took Frances to her apartment, where she pointed out the clothes she had worn the day before. Immediately, they examined her hands for gunshot residue using an atomic absorption test and found none, but they did find nitrate particles on the lower part of the dress that she had worn. Nitrates occur in gunpowder and also in fertilizer. From the position of the particles, she would have had to have shot her family with her hands on the floor. The nitrates could have been from fertilizer that her twenty-one-month-old daughter, Farrah, touched on the day of the murders. Her daughter might have grabbed the hem of her dress. The state, however, used a destructive test, thus compromising verification of the type of nitrates and, further, stored the dress with other clothing, thereby cross-contaminating it beyond use. For all purposes, the state destroyed exculpatory evidence.
Salvation on Death Row Page 11
