God'll Cut You Down : The Tangled Tale of a White Supremacist, a Black Hustler, Amurder, and How I Lost a Year in Mississippi (9780698170537)

by Safran, John

  Excellent. I press record on the Dictaphone and point the mic at Tim and Wayne.

  “So, what happened?”

  What Happened, According to Investigators Tim Lawless and Wayne Humphreys

  When they arrived at the scene of the house fire, Tim Lawless, investigator Trip Bayles, and patrol captain Doug Holloway saw a body on the grass, flat on its back. It was basically smoking. The three men rolled the body over and saw what appeared to be numerous stab wounds around the neck and the back area.

  “So he was stabbed in the back?” I ask.

  “If I remember right, it was in the back.” Tim turns to Wayne. “Wasn’t it, Wayne? In the neck?”

  “It was sixteen times,” Wayne says. “Starting at the shoulder and going all the way around his head.”

  “Oh, gee!” I say. “For some reason, just because I had incomplete information, I assumed it was going to be in the front.”

  “And Mr. Barrett,” Tim continues, “didn’t have any clothes on.”

  “Not even underwear?” I ask.

  “He had his underwear. That’s all he had on. Just his underwear. It is something we call . . .” Tim stops and herds up his thoughts. “With that many stab wounds and, it appeared to us, someone had intentionally set the body on fire . . . And myself and Captain Holloway—he looked at me and I looked at him—and we basically said, at about the same time, ‘That’s what I call overkill.’ And Captain Holloway said, and I was thinking the same thing, ‘This is consistent with a homosexual murder.’”

  That’s quite the quote. I double-, triple-, quadruple-check the Dictaphone is running.

  “I mean, we’ve seen many murders like this before,” Tim says, squaring up the folders in front of him. “Where there’s multiple, multiple stab wounds or overkill.”

  “And mutilation,” Wayne says.

  “And mutilation,” Tim agrees. “And that’s consistent sometimes with homosexual murders.”

  “What does that mean? ‘A homosexual murder’? Why would that be different from a non-homosexual murder?”

  “I can’t explain it,” Tim says. “I don’t have an answer for that.”

  “I think they get excited.” Wayne takes over. “Or maybe a rage. They get overemotional. You know, there’s been lots of times where appendages have been cut off and placed in other parts of the body. And once the person’s killed—let’s say they shot him—then they shoot them twenty more times, or something like that.”

  “Could it also be the case,” I ask, “where the killer is not the partner or is not a homosexual themselves, but they’re in a rage?”

  “It could be,” says Tim. “It could be a homophobic-type thing. It doesn’t mean both parties were homosexual.”

  I’m a bit confused as to why a first look at a stabbed, burned body would have all this homosexual subtext.

  Richard’s Body

  Tim Lawless opens a cream folder and fans out black-and-white photos of Richard’s body.

  Richard is lying on a sheet outside his home in his underpants. His arms are stretched above his head. One charred arm and one charred leg. In some photos he’s on his back, with a little curve of a belly visible; in others he’s on his front. The skin on his back is hard and crispy, like roast chicken skin. Every smear of blood, every drop of water on his body twinkles. Richard is cooling down from the fire, but the sun is heating him up again. My arms and neck goosebump. I met this guy.

  A cloth covers his face in some shots, but not in others. His face isn’t burned.

  “His head was in good shape,” Wayne says.

  “Except for the hair,” says Tim.

  When Vincent lit him on fire, he was facedown.

  Richard smelled of gasoline.

  Wayne says there wasn’t much blood on his body. Most of the blood was inside the house, in the kitchen, in the laundry, all the way to the back door. By the time the fire department pulled him out of the house and washed him off with the fire hose, most of the blood had gone.

  “How long do you reckon he was burning for?” I ask.

  Wayne says no longer than twenty minutes.

  “And how did you identify it was Richard?” I say. “Just by his face?”

  “Well, we knew he lived there,” Tim says. “It was common knowledge that he was a resident in that area. But, you know, we’ve never really had any complaints, believe it or not, from anybody there. With him being white and living in a predominantly African American neighborhood, he got along with everybody in the neighborhood. Everybody liked him, believe it or not. He was well received there. Kind of felt he lived a double life.”

  “One final question about the neck,” I say. “It’s not like his head was falling off or anything?”

  “It was not,” Tim tells me. “The head was not severed.”

  “I think that was his intention,” Wayne adds. “But he just wasn’t good enough to do it. He didn’t know how.”

  “Also, Michael Guest talked about a belt,” I say, “around one of his hands?”

  “I think he was bound or taped,” says Tim, “and had been tied up with that belt.”

  “Either that,” says Wayne, “or he used it to drag him from one spot to the other in the house.”

  “Why would Vincent want to drag him?” I ask. “Maybe closer to the fire?”

  “Vincent moved him from the kitchen to the bedroom,” Wayne says.

  “And why do you think he did that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  If Vincent did drag Richard to the bedroom, he must have later dragged him back to the kitchen, because that’s where everyone’s telling me—Wayne and Tim included—the body was found. Is it possible they’re confusing the bedroom and the kitchen because that might be what would happen in a homosexual murder?

  The Welcome Mat

  A welcome mat lay at the back doorway. The welcome mat was soaked in blood.

  The firemen told Tim, Wayne, and the other investigators it was safe to enter.

  Inside the back door was a little laundry area containing a paint tin, a glass bottle of methylated spirits, and on the wall, a framed picture of a unicorn. The laundry floor was glazed in blood.

  Blood glazed the kitchen floor, too. A patch in the floor was deeper red, where Richard Barrett had lain for at least ten hours, blood seeping out and blotting into the floorboards. Fireman shoe prints patterned the blood. Tim could make out a streak from this patch to the back door, like one giant paintbrush stroke, where the firemen had dragged Richard out.

  Wayne peered down the kitchen, deeper into the home. Vincent had screwed up burning down the house. He’d left the doors and windows shut so there wasn’t enough oxygen.

  “If he had done it correctly,” Wayne says, “he would have opened all the doors, opened some windows, so you’d get a cross blow of air, so it would help with the fire.”

  Vincent McGee, failed head-severer. Failed evidence-destroyer.

  The house was still smoldering. Gray flakes were still alive in the air, most white spaces were grayed by soot, and everywhere smelled of gasoline. Furnishings not burned were waterlogged by the firemen’s hose.

  “The house was well kept,” Wayne says. “If you had walked into it not burned, you wouldn’t have known anybody like Richard Barrett, and the views he had, lived there.”

  “What do you mean?” I ask.

  “You know,” Wayne says, “you would’ve expected literature and pictures of people hanging or something in there.”

  “Or things against black people,” Tim says, “or Jewish people.”

  The kitchen led to a small dining room. A TV tray rested on a coffee table—an unwashed dish and some crumbs of food. Two rooms ran off the dining room, dedicated to a video camera and other recording equipment.

  Tim and Wayne brushed past an antique cabinet in the dining room, stock
ed with china and candelabras, and reached the master bedroom.

  “I remember looking in,” Tim says. “We looked in the master bedroom and there was a closet. And we opened the door, and the only thing I remember in the closet, hanging on a coat hanger, was a Nazi uniform.”

  I squeak.

  Tim points to his arm.

  “With a swastika on there.”

  “Was it a brown uniform?” I ask.

  “If I remember,” Tim says, “it was dark Nazi black. Like the Gestapo or the SS.”

  “If you’re going to play,” says Wayne, “why not be the king, you know?”

  Vincent’s Story, According to Tim and Wayne

  Vincent slumped in a gray chair, on the other side of the wall, not four meters from where I sit.

  To sit in that interview room was to be sealed inside a white cube. A video camera stared down at Vincent from the ceiling as he picked yellow threads from his yellow prison jumpsuit.

  “We just talked to him,” Tim says. “And told him we pretty much knew what he had done. And probably just after a few minutes, we gave him something to drink. We gave him a soft drink, a soda.”

  Vincent drank and began to tell his story.

  Vincent was not two months out of the state penitentiary and living at his mother’s house. “He told us he knew Mr. Barrett when he got out of prison,” Tim says. Mr. Barrett had a property, his Nationalist Movement headquarters, an hour’s drive away. He and Vincent would go over and keep the lawn cut, and Richard would pay him cash. Apparently this happened several times. On the day of the killing, Vincent had worked all day. Yet, Vincent told Tim bitterly, that day Mr. Barrett had only paid him twenty dollars.

  I scribble on my notepad. There’s already something different in this version: a much more sustained relationship between Vincent and Richard.

  That day, Mr. Barrett dropped off the bitter Vincent at his mother’s home.

  “If you like,” Richard said as Vincent slid out of the big black pickup truck, “tonight you can come back down and get on the computer. You can get on your Facebook account.”

  At around ten thirty that night, Vincent jumped his mum’s back fence and skulked through the moonlight and black woods that linked the McGees’ back door to Richard’s back door. This wasn’t faster than walking out the front door, down the road, to Richard’s front door. The woods wasn’t a shortcut. It was the secret way.

  The back door creaked open. Richard’s little moonface poked out. Vincent stepped over the not-yet-blood-soaked doormat, passed the unicorn painting, and headed up into the kitchen. Pushed against the wall in the dining room, on a cane table, a computer glowed. Vincent punched into Facebook and profile-picture Vincent sneered back at real Vincent. He typed his first message, and Richard approached.

  “Mr. Barrett basically made a sexual gesture toward him,” Tim says. “And Vincent said, ‘That’s when I just snapped. Here it was, he worked me all day for twenty dollars, and then he wants to turn around and have sex with me to boot.’”

  Wayne says Vincent had brought knives from his mum’s. “So I guess,” Tim says, “in his mind he intended . . . he maybe was going to kill him anyway. But he said basically he went into a rage and that he murdered him.”

  No one has mentioned before that Vincent was pre-armed.

  Vincent darted out the back door, through the secret woods, throwing a knife to the moon on the way.

  “You said Richard made a sexual gesture,” I say, trying not to sound tabloid. “What does that mean?”

  “Well, I asked him about that,” Tim says. “I said, ‘Well, what do you mean, a sexual gesture?’ And he said basically, Mr. Barrett said, you know, ‘Do you want to have sex?’ So I said, ‘Were you ever engaged in any sexual conduct with Mr. Barrett previously?’ And he said he had been. He said that he and Mr. Barrett had been involved in sexual conduct. And I said, ‘Well, what do you mean? What do you mean, sexual conduct?’ And Vincent went on to tell the story.

  “He said that Mr. Barrett was attracted to black men. He said Mr. Barrett told him this. And he said that Mr. Barrett had had an older black man that worked for him years before, and they were working partners. And this older black man and him were intimate in a homosexual relationship. But the older man had passed away. The older black man had died. So Mr. Barrett was trying to get into an intimate homosexual relationship with Vincent. And Vincent had had actual sexual contact with Mr. Barrett a few times prior to this.

  “And I said to him, ‘So what you’re trying to tell me is, you’re trying to say that you and Mr. Barrett engaged in homosexual activities?’ He said, ‘Yes. Several times.’ You know, previous dates. And I’m just getting the details, and I said, ‘Well, what do you mean? Explain.’ And he said that Mr. Barrett normally would pay him around two hundred dollars for Vincent to have sex with him. And I said, ‘What do you mean? Oral sex? What are you talking about?’ He described that Mr. Barrett liked to be taken from behind. Sodomized, basically. And Vincent would say, ‘I would sodomize him and that’s what Mr. Barrett liked.’

  “And I said, ‘You expect me to believe this?’ And Vincent said, ‘I’m telling you, I’m just telling you the truth.’ He said, ‘I wouldn’t just sit here and make this up. I’m confessing to murder and I’m not just going to add this.’

  “And I said, ‘Well, did Mr. Barrett ever sodomize you?’ He said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Mr. Barrett always wanted me to sodomize him.’ So he said he would sodomize Mr. Barrett for money. And that’s what happened.”

  I’ve stopped taking notes. I quadruple-, quintuple-check the Dictaphone is recording. Tim and Wayne have just described the money shot of my whole “race” career: a white supremacist paying to be sodomized by a black man.

  We all pause and swig down water from our polystyrene cups. Tim, Wayne, and I are so white that in our hands and running up our arms you can see the blue veins glow.

  “Now, I don’t know why anybody in their right mind would confess to murder and admit they’re having homosexual relations with somebody when they’re not a homosexual, do you understand?” Tim continues. “You know, I love women. I’m married.” His gold wedding band attests to this. It glistens in a boardroom that is otherwise plain white (polystyrene cups), off-white (walls), or cream (manila folders). “I’m sure not going to make up a story that I’m having sex with a man. That would demean me—ruin my reputation, as it would any man’s.”

  I can see that Vincent might have had trouble saying this in court. I can see that he would have had trouble with fellow inmates knowing this. That potential trouble could well have led him to disagree with the legal advice to use the sex element in this crime as his defense.

  A career of wanting this to be true makes me get greedy again, and I ask if Richard wore the Nazi uniform while being sodomized by a black man.

  Wayne tells me Vincent never said anything about a Nazi uniform.

  Richard’s Head

  “I can’t explain, you know, the psychological, in Mr. Barrett’s head,” Tim says. “I can’t explain what was going on. Why he openly hated black people or Jew people, but then he was having homosexual relationships with black people. I don’t know.

  “Now, speculation, okay? You know Vincent went to extremes to burn that computer, and we tried to retrieve that data. It was beyond obtainable. We don’t know what was on that computer because it was burned up. We don’t know if there were pictures, images. We don’t know, but we know that Vincent went to extreme effort to destroy that computer. More than anything else.”

  “Poured more gas on it,” adds Wayne.

  “And the bed also,” Tim says. “That was the only bed that was destroyed. The other beds were neatly made up in the house. But he made it a point to burn Mr. Barrett’s bed. He went to extremes. Why? I mean, if you want me to play psychologist, I could only guess—maybe that’s where they would have their relationsh
ips. I do not know that. I don’t know that firsthand. It could be that there may have been a better reason why he went to extremes to destroy the computer and the bed. I do not know.”

  Rifles

  “We had trouble figuring out why the rifles were on his chest,” Wayne volleys in.

  Rifles?

  When the firemen splashed through the blood pooled up in the kitchen and dragged Richard out, three guns rolled off his chest: a semiautomatic rifle, a semiautomatic shotgun, and a lever-action rifle. They were Richard’s. Vincent had scooped them up from somewhere in the house and rested them on Richard’s chest. He hoped the heat from the fire would set off the guns and somehow that would make the whole scene look like a suicide.

  “He wasn’t thinking rationally,” Tim says.

  “He asked me, ‘Did the rifles go off?’” Wayne says. “I said, ‘No, the rifles didn’t go off.’ I said, ‘If you wanted to make it look like a suicide, then you use one rifle, not three.’”

  “Yeah. So he wasn’t thinking right,” Tim says.

  However, Tim thinks Vincent was thinking right in the interview room on the other side of the wall. He didn’t appear drunk or drugged or anything like that.

  “He was very coherent,” Tim says. “He’s a very flashy guy. I said, ‘Do you realize that the man you murdered was a very well-known self-proclaimed racist against black people?’ He looked at me like, What? And when we told him that he’d killed pretty much a famous person, that really kind of made him excited.”

  “What he thought,” says Wayne, “was that he was going to be famous in prison because this happened, and then when he went back to prison he’d be a celebrity. And he told us that he’d go ahead and plead guilty to it that day if we’d buy him a pimp suit with a hat with a feather in it.”

  “It sounds like he had a sense of humor,” I say.

  “Oh, he was funny. He was funny,” says Wayne. “I could say that it was a conversation like me and you are having a conversation and we’re making jokes about this. But he’s talking about a guy that he’s just killed—and he killed him with a passion, because I sat through the autopsy, and there were holes in Mr. Barrett’s shoulders that were about eight or nine inches long and deep, and it was about an eight-inch knife. So that means he plunged it all the way to the handle, several times, in the top of his shoulder.”