Ghost of the Innocent Man

by Benjamin Rachlin

  The problem was political. Democrats owned a majority in the state senate—and Democrats, Chris knew, were unhappy with Lake. Three years earlier they’d tried remapping local voting districts, a ploy Republicans had challenged, and the case had made it to the state supreme court, which had ruled the plan unconstitutional. The controversy this provoked had ensnared nearly the entire court. In 2001, the state’s Academy of Trial Lawyers had named Bob Orr, one of Lake’s fellow justices, its appellate judge of the year. In 2002 the same group had refused to endorse him at all.

  But it was Lake who had authored the opinion, and Democrats had resented him ever since. Now, three years later, they saw a chance for reprisal. The IIC legislation amounted to Lake’s twilight achievement. They refused to consider it at all. Instead, they put the bill on hold until next session, when Lake would no longer be in office.

  They also wanted a promise from Chris. Back in 2004, around the same time the commission had finished with eyewitness ID, Chris herself had campaigned for a seat in the state senate, and lost. Now Democrats wanted a promise that she wouldn’t try again. Otherwise they’d prevent the IIC bill from ever appearing on their senate floor—even once Lake was gone.

  The threat made Chris livid, and she considered taking her chances. But she also knew something Democrats didn’t. She’d spent more than three hundred thousand dollars on her failed campaign, so much money that afterward she’d wondered whether she had broken some record. A Republican like her stood no chance in Durham, she’d finally realized. To be elected, she would need to run as a Democrat, or move elsewhere. Neither was in her plans. This meant she didn’t intend to run again, anyway. What harm was there in letting Democrats think they’d made the choice for her?

  19

  A Situation Not of His Making

  He checked the activities board at Lincoln Correctional and found a notice for meetings of Jehovah’s Witnesses: six o’clock on Thursdays. He met his new teachers that same week. “You must be Willie Grimes,” the two men told him, shaking his hand.

  He was, Willie agreed.

  How were the guards treating him? How long had he been at Cleveland County before his transfer? Where was his family from? Tom and Eddie were both elders in the local congregation, they explained. Tom himself had first visited Lincoln to meet with a particular inmate, discovered unexpectedly that he liked it, felt he could do good there, so he had asked the warden for permission to visit regularly. From then on he’d come every Thursday evening to host a Bible discussion or just sit with any inmate who wanted to chat. Often this meant he sat there alone, so Eddie, a friend, had offered to come along for company. The pair had been visiting Lincoln together for several months before a call had come from down in Cleveland County, about Willie.

  From that Thursday on, Willie met with Tom and Eddie each week. With Eddie especially he felt a nearly instant friendship. A trim, shy white man, with a soft voice and a neat snowy mustache, Eddie smiled so often that Willie wondered if his mouth simply rested that way. For how much Eddie knew about Scripture, Willie had assumed Eddie was older than him, but it turned out both men were nearly the same age. Eddie had been a Witness his entire life, he explained, like his parents and even his grandparents, who’d once offered Bible classes out of their home up in Statesville. After high school, in place of college, Eddie had studied at Watchtower Farms, a kind of seminary for Witnesses up in New York. Now he lived nearby in Cherryville and worked as a site superintendent for a construction company. His cell phone’s ringtone was a car engine revving.

  Because Eddie had been visiting prison for only a few months, he hadn’t met as many inmates as his friend Tom had, and privately he felt sure he’d never met one like Willie. The others were boisterous, and didn’t always listen; he couldn’t help suspecting they cared more about visitors than they did about Jehovah. But Willie preferred quiet, like Eddie. When the men read Scripture, he sat as still as a monument. No one concentrated this way unless he was sincere, Eddie knew. The two got along so well that Eddie began mentioning Willie to his wife, who startled him one day by announcing she’d like to meet this Willie in person. Virginia had never visited the prison before, but Eddie wasn’t about to tell her she couldn’t, so she joined him at Lincoln the following Thursday, and took to Willie at once. He was so gentle, she told Eddie on the drive home, so kind, she could just tell. The couple gave Willie their home number, and encouraged him to phone whenever the prison would let him. Virginia began writing him letters.

  He asked his case manager about returning to his job at the canteen, thinking he could handle the service window again. Until then, he went to work as a baker. He met with a psychiatrist, who scheduled a follow-up in twelve weeks. But Willie wouldn’t remain long enough to keep the appointment; five days later, he was transferred back to Craggy.

  Through the summer and early fall he avoided the head programmer who he remembered had schemed against him. Eddie and Virginia, when they could, drove the ninety miles from Cherryville to visit, but they couldn’t make this distance every week, as they had at Lincoln. In November he met with another psychiatrist. “During the interview, Mr. Grimes was pleasant and cooperative,” the psychiatrist noted. “Appeared mildly depressed but was not all that remarkable.” Together the pair filled out a worksheet called “Measurable Goals,” to help Willie guide his own treatment. To monitor his progress, they planned to meet every three months. Before the chance for their second meeting, however, Willie was transferred again, back to Lincoln.

  Lincoln reinstated him as canteen operator, but he was on the job barely a month before trouble struck. In December a supervisor noticed conflicting invoices and ordered one of the guards, Officer Mull, to close the canteen and verify his math. On a table beside the register, Mull discovered two five-dollar bills and a little over eight dollars in coins, which he noticed didn’t appear in any receipts. He asked Willie what had happened. Those five-dollar bills weren’t being hidden, Willie answered—he’d simply placed them aside until he had twenty of them, to make a neat hundred-dollar bundle. He always did this, to keep revenue organized; it was why the bills were so near the register. The eight dollars and eight cents in spare change was from tips other inmates had given him. Often, when an inmate bought something, he let the canteen operator keep a spare nickel or dime or even a quarter, and in a good month, these tips added up.

  Mull was skeptical. The following day, under orders to conduct a full inventory, he marked a total shortage of $141.20. Willie must have stashed this amount in his pockets, or in his bunk, Mull decided. Neither he nor other guards could find it in either place, but he ordered Willie to segregation.

  When his case manager visited on his second day in segregation, to ask what he’d done, Willie still didn’t know what he was being charged with. No one had explained to him exactly what had happened. All he knew was that it had something to do with the canteen.

  More than a hundred dollars was missing, his case manager told him. Did he have any idea where the money might have gone?

  Willie, bewildered, shook his head. Then he remembered something. Part of his job was to help open and stack large boxes of merchandise, and his last time in the warehouse, he’d seen a shipment of coffee sitting uncounted. A day later it was gone. A full shipment of coffee equaled about the amount that was missing.

  Did Willie have any idea where that coffee had gone?

  The only person he’d seen nearby was Officer Mull.

  But it was Mull who’d been put in charge of the investigation, and Mull had blamed Willie. He spent two more days in segregation. When he was released, he discovered he’d also been assigned ten hours of extra duty, and been suspended for half a month from organized yard sports, which he didn’t play anyway. And he’d been demoted from canteen operator back to assistant cook. He asked his case manager for a transfer away from Lincoln, so was added to the backlog. “Feel inmate got caught up in situation already existing in the canteen,” his case manager noted, pointing out t
hat it had been two years since Willie was charged with any infraction. That same afternoon Willie filled out a sick-call request, asking to see the psychologist. “I am having problems,” he wrote. “He ask me to fill this out if I need to see him.”

  “He had been doing well until an incident which had upset him,” the psychologist observed, when they met the following week. “He feels that he has been treated unfairly. This has caused an increase in some tension and anxiety and depressive feeling. He, however, anticipated that if he is transferred to another unit, he would do much better, and he has requested a transfer.” He scheduled a follow-up in another month, and told Willie he agreed it would be good for him if he were removed from the environment that had caused the problem. This Willie relayed to his case manager, who agreed to look into a transfer again. “Inmate is no problem,” the case manager reiterated in Willie’s file. “Simply got caught up in situation not of his making.”

  The following day he was transferred. Instead of Cleveland County, he landed at Pasquotank, out in Elizabeth City, in the northeast corner of the state—nearly four hundred miles from Lawndale, so he knew at once he had no hope of any visits. Before long his insomnia returned. He was referred for a mental-health assessment, which began poorly; a psychologist asked whether Willie was married, and Willie replied that he wasn’t sure. He hadn’t seen or heard from Towana in two decades.

  The psychologist referred him to psychiatric services. “Lately he had been down because he was transferred farther from his home,” a psychiatrist observed. She admitted she didn’t fully understand why; Willie claimed there had been “some problems coming up short with money in the canteen,” but also that his own name had been cleared, which she didn’t entirely follow. She also noted Willie’s expansive medical history. In his file, nurses had written asthma, but Willie himself doubted that diagnosis, since nurses had also told him variously that he had COPD, for which he was taking theophylline, or allergies, for which he was taking an antihistamine. For an inflamed prostate he was taking Cardura and Bactrim. He also suffered from stomach problems, which seemed distinct from the prostate problem, and for which he periodically took Tagamet, in case it was acid reflux, or tetracycline and Flagyl, in case it was an infection. “He is a quiet man,” the psychiatrist observed. “He is cooperative. He is depressed about being far from family.” She diagnosed him with “major depressive disorder, recurrent and moderate,” as well as a list of other maladies: alcohol dependence (“in remission”), prostatitis, possible benign hypertrophy of his prostate, migraine headaches, history of peptic ulcer disease, history of asthma or perhaps COPD. Possibly all the medication he was on was only making things worse, she wrote. Under a column for additional problems, she added, “Poor coping mechanisms.”

  He asked for a transfer back to Lincoln, or, if there were no beds there, even to Craggy, but since he’d just been transferred his case manager told him it would be at least six months before he was eligible again. Instead, he was assigned to work as a janitor. In August he met another psychiatrist. The pair of them agreed to meet twice monthly. At the end of that week, however, he was transferred back to Lincoln.

  As soon as he arrived, he told his case manager he hoped to stay this time. “Always has a pleasant demeanor,” she noted in his file. But seven months later, in spring, without explanation, he was transferred to Craggy.

  He asked his new case manager there what had happened, since he’d expected to stay at Lincoln, but his case manager didn’t know, and listed what jobs and classes Craggy offered, which Willie knew already from having been shipped there several times. The case manager also suggested Willie think about what his goals were. He already knew his goals, Willie replied. As he listed them, his case manager wrote them down: “1. Get his medical condition straightened out. 2. Transfer back to Lincoln to continue working in the kitchen there. 3. Attend Jehovah Witness service weekly. 4. Get out of prison.”

  Even when Willie was at far-off Pasquotank, Virginia Moose had continued writing him letters, and now she and Eddie drove Route 40 out to Craggy as often as they could. Most Saturdays Willie still phoned them collect, though the prison cut off their calls after fifteen minutes. She and Eddie had never had children of their own, Virginia confided, but she imagined this was what it felt like to be a mother. “I’ve got a son now,” she told him, and this settled things.

  He hung up the phone each week feeling uplifted. He saw clearly that Jehovah had put Eddie and Virginia in his life, and felt grateful, only now it occurred to him they still didn’t know his entire story. Neither had asked what he’d done to end up in prison, and Willie had never offered to tell them. Eddie was visiting to teach the Bible, he knew, not to listen to Willie’s legal problems. And, in the past, when he’d tried telling guards he didn’t belong there, they had laughed in his face. “Right,” they’d scoffed. “No one in prison really belongs here.” That, plus his natural shyness, had taught him quickly to keep his mouth shut, except rarely with his case manager or a psychologist.

  But it also meant withholding from Eddie and Virginia, something he knew friends didn’t do. Over the phone one Saturday, Virginia asked how he’d spent his afternoon, and he told her he’d been studying law books, as he usually did on Saturdays.

  “Oh? What are you studying for?” Virginia asked.

  “I have been in here for something I didn’t do,” Willie admitted. “I’m trying to learn law, to try to help myself.”

  Virginia believed him. Since Willie’s first transfer between Cleveland County and Lincoln, meanwhile, word of him had spread across several congregations, and Eddie had met others who knew him, including a friend of Willie’s from Douglas High who had known him before his arrest. Today that friend happened to be a Witness, and she told Virginia that she, too, felt certain Willie was really innocent, as did everyone she still knew from Douglas High. Eddie asked around, and everyone he knew in the friend’s congregation agreed that the friend was trustworthy. He told Virginia that he believed Willie, too.

  That winter he was transferred back to Lincoln once more, and once more his case manager tried persuading him to attend SOAR, the rehabilitation program for sex offenders.

  I thought I wouldn’t have to go to SOAR, if I didn’t want to? Willie pressed her.

  That was true, his case manager granted, since SOAR was elective. But she wanted Willie to understand what he was turning down. SOAR was his best chance at release, since it led to a custody promotion and then to parole, and if he enrolled, he increased his chance at certain privileges. In minimum custody, an inmate with a good record could go out to lunch with his family, as long as the restaurant was nearby and they signed him in and out of prison. Eventually he could wear his own clothes and apply for a work-release job on the outside. All Willie had to do was sign a form, admitting responsibility for his crime, and sit through a course.

  He was willing to do one of those, but not the other. It was fine with him to sit through a course. But since he’d never raped anyone, signing the form amounted to lying, and he couldn’t do that—it was against Jehovah, which He would see, as He saw everything. Prison was nothing compared to His blessing. For thirteen years, Willie had held on to his word. He could see what he’d be left with if he gave that away. As a liar he’d be nothing on the outside, even if it worked and the prison released him, a promise he distrusted anyway. He’d watched other inmates take deals with the DOC, for a reduced sentence or to avoid incarceration at all. Sometimes it worked, but other times it didn’t, and either way now his guilt would be stamped on him forever. He would die there in prison before signing some form, pretending he was someone he wasn’t.

  That spring he decided he felt ready to be baptized. By custom, Witnesses didn’t baptize infants, since they regarded this rite as a freely chosen thing and a child, obviously, wasn’t equipped to choose it. Instead, a Witness simply chose to be baptized, once he or she grasped what the ceremony represented. Willie told Eddie he did. Normally this meant a ceremony
at Kingdom Hall, but Willie couldn’t leave Lincoln Correctional, so instead Eddie and Tom found a third elder from their congregation, then gathered in one of the prison’s visiting rooms, the four men their own audience.

  Eddie didn’t see how the logistics would work; how were they going to submerge Willie in water? But guards, when he asked, told him they kept a folding tub for this purpose exactly. They unfolded it and helped Eddie fill it halfway with water. Eddie asked Willie again if he felt ready. He was. He stripped to his underwear, climbed in, and laid himself back.

  And Eddie saw a problem. His friend had gained back the weight he’d once lost, so when Willie lay back, a dry island of his belly protruded. Witnesses believed in full submersion. “We’re going to have to try this again,” Eddie observed. “We need more water.”

  Guards helped Eddie haul more water from a bathroom sink, filling five-gallon plastic buckets, topping each load to the brim. After each trip Willie tried reclining again, and slowly the island of his belly sank below the surface. Finally it disappeared entirely, water splashing over the edges of the tub. When he rose again Eddie was standing beside him, water sloshing onto his sneakers, smiling broadly and welcoming him to Jehovah’s family.

  Midway through June 2001, an inmate named John Minton begged guards for protective custody, complaining that Willie had struck him in the face while the two worked in the kitchen and threatened his life. “If you tell anyone, I will hurt you,” he recalled Willie threatening. But neither guards nor nurses could find any marks on Minton’s face. They asked Willie for a statement, or any witnesses he wanted to gather on his own behalf. “I don’t have any statement, because I don’t know what’s going on,” he told them. A guard wrote this into his report. A brief investigation revealed that a separate pair of inmates had recently borrowed money from Willie, then hadn’t wanted to repay, so instead they’d paid Minton a smaller amount to try framing him, hoping this would shunt Willie off to segregation or, better, a different camp, where the two inmates couldn’t be expected to repay him. Minton’s charges were dismissed for lack of evidence. Two weeks later Willie met with his case manager. “He as always had no complaints,” he wrote in Willie’s file.