The True American: Murder and Mercy in Texas

by Anand Giridharadas

  By that time, Amber was no longer with Tena. Right after the birth, Tena’s mother had behaved as though unperturbed, even relaxed, about her fifteen-year-old daughter’s destiny. Tena remembers her saying, “Go out. You’re a kid. Do what you do. I’ll take care of the baby.” Tena accepted the deal and went out a few times. She returned one night to discover her mother gone. She had taken Amber with her, to a town a few hours’ drive away called Stephenville. Amber would spend the rest of her childhood there, away from Tena. Years later, Tena would explain it to Amber like this: “I was a kid. I was chasing your dad, and I couldn’t just jump in a car and go to Stephenville and get you.”

  Tena’s idea of Mark was different from her own children’s, or from Tom Boston’s, or from that of the psychologists who had testified at his trial. Her struggles colored her vision of him—and could be clarifying or occlusive, depending on your own. She thought of him less as a man divided against himself, ricocheting between states of rage and levity, and more as a man whose good traits were also his bad ones.

  Mark was sweet, Tena said; was homey; was a rebel; was a fighter: “He’d go through spurts. He’d be at home and then get a ‘wild pair,’ like my grandmother called it, and he’d wanna take off.” He wouldn’t have appealed to every woman, but he might have to a woman raised on honor-culture ideas of a man’s love as being fundamentally about protection, about the cultivation of a fearsome reputation that kept trouble at bay.

  “He was that type that if he loved you, if he cared about you and loved you, then you didn’t want to mess with this” was how Tena put it. If her sister came home telling of a stolen purse or busted eye, Mark took care of that. If someone looked at Tena at the wrong angle, Mark took care of it. It became possible for Tena to think of his violence and love and sociability and life-lust as being cut from a single cloth: “He always said his two favorite things in life was fighting and F-ing—but not in that order. Everybody loved to be around him. If the party was boring or whatever, as soon as he got there, it would lighten up. Everyone would start laughing, having a good time. People thought they were cool to be around him.”

  When more children came along, Mark showed little interest in fatherhood. Tena, instead of condemning him, became a master of making excuses for him even more articulate than those he made for himself: “I think Mark loved as much as he knew how to love. Part of the reason that I don’t think he wanted to settle down and be a family man after we got married and stuff was because he didn’t know; he’d never seen it. You can’t be something that you don’t know about. I cook hamburgers and work at a hamburger joint. You couldn’t put me in an office and expect me to do any secretary work. If I don’t know nothing about it, I can’t do it, and Mark never had that. He never had a dad to learn to be a dad.”

  There had always been harbingers of his fate. Tena saw much of it. Most of the time, it didn’t rise above the level of drinking and fighting. But there were instances when he just evaporated for days, and she knew he was up to something, and she’d find out all about it only when he returned. There was, obviously, the drug use. It started, as it so often does, with pot. Then it evolved, as it was starting to do in these parts, into meth. Mark had already done it but was angry when Tena told him she tried it. The drug blew her away: “Just gives you this euphoria, this energy, makes you think everything’s OK, makes you feel good about yourself, gives you lots of energy. And it’s like that for a while, until—I guess, after using it for a while, it becomes to where you have to have it.”

  Meth conquered Tena more fully than it did Mark. “It’s not a good life,” she said. “It makes people live a hard life. A lot harder than their lives were supposed to be.” In Tena’s case, the meth stripped her of basic functionality and left her no better than a vagrant at times. Mark’s problem was always his resilience. No matter how much he did, how much he drank and smoked, he never became a helpless junkie. Everyone who knew him said they couldn’t remember him without work, which in his milieu was a trait more commonly associated with rich people.

  Tena’s pride over this latter attribute of Mark’s was still palpable: “Always worked. Always had money. Always had cigarettes. Always had beer.” (It was a defining line where they lived—who had ready stocks of such things, and who bought as they went.) “Always had nice apartments in Garland-Mesquite area. You know, he never lived in any slum. Or one time he had an apartment at Lake White Rock that had a fence around it—so it was, you know, a security gate. Always had nice apartments with nice furniture.”

  These were the things that made Tena feel safe and valued, and that somehow distracted her from everything else—including the things, like stealing and living in other people’s property, that contradicted the nice things. Mark knew how to play a woman like this, knew how to be doting in the ways that would satisfy Tena. Like when he convinced the court, in the autumn of 1988, to delay the start date of his prison term so that he could see his baby Erica being born. That she wasn’t, purely speaking, his baby didn’t curb his desire to be there—nor cause him to treat the child any differently thereafter. The court delayed the term as long as it could, and then at last he turned himself in. Erica was born shortly after he surrendered.

  Tena, in bearing another man’s baby, was violating the letter, but hardly the spirit, of their marriage. Mark was, as she tells it, a worse offender: “There was no problem with mine and Mark’s sex life. He just wasn’t always getting sex with me—that was the only problem.” She was from a world where women often accepted that the talents by which men won them were portable—that what worked on them would naturally work on others. “He charmed them women,” Tena said. “He could talk to them and make them feel like they were pretty.”

  When he came out of prison the first time, after a matter of months inside, they were still together. But between then and returning for a second stint, Mark’s runaway “F-ing,” as Tena called it, which she had tolerated, graduated into that other thing that women like her mortally fear, and the fear of which makes them tolerant of mere F-ing: love. He fell for a waitress named Shawna, whom he would eventually marry and have a daughter with. “It was out of nowhere,” Tena said. “I thought that we had worked on us, and I just had Erica and everything.” They drifted asunder. By the time he returned from prison the second time, his beloved grandfather had died—and Tena had finally gone.

  All these years later, it wasn’t lost on Tena that—as far as she heard, at least—Mark Stroman proved a stabler father and husband to the next woman, despite all they’d gone through together. She heard that with Shawna he was regularly at home, that he changed diapers and made bottles—that he became, unhesitatingly, a dad. But Tena heard that eventually he also ran around on Shawna, and he didn’t stop with the drugs, and one day she just left. (“Karma’s a bitch,” as his daughter Amber said.) Tena and Mark spoke from time to time after that. She knew how broken up he was about the split, about Shawna’s not wanting her daughter to grow up around his lifestyle and friends and antics. “I think Mark thought that everything he cared about and loved left, whether he had anything to do with it or not,” Tena said. Betrayal was something Mark had struggled with since boyhood, and now it flared again: “He just put on that ‘screw-it’ mode—either I’ll hurt you first, or I get hurt. Life’s all about hurt or get hurt.”

  Yes, Tena loved Mark Stroman. Yes, she would lie down in a puddle to keep his boots dry. But when she got that phone call from her sister, telling her that Mark Stroman had killed someone, it was as though she finally got it. So Mark waited year after year to be called to Visitation to see his Tena. His Tena never came.

  “NO, MAN—DON’T WORRY about your tears. Don’t worry about the tears. Few tears makes you very human. We’re going to start with some very simple questions.” The camera was behind Ilan Ziv, rolling, pointed at the prisoner on the other side of the glass. Stroman, with little else to occupy him, had prepared for this encounter for a long while. “Believe it or not, I had a good speech
planned for you when I come out here,” he told the filmmaker. But his tears were betraying him.

  “Just be yourself—that’s fine. So you really feel remorse,” Ziv said, his words more calming than his appearance. He looked like a well-aged version of the Israeli paratrooper he once was: bald-headed, thick-chested, with an intense, skeptical stare. He was naturally combative—the kind of man who begins many of his thoughts with “No, no, no,” even when he’s about to agree with you, just to make sure you hear what he’s about to say.

  Ziv—the son of a Holocaust survivor, a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces, now a documentary filmmaker consumed by questions about why people hate—had ambled into Stroman’s life almost by accident. He had been commissioned to make a film about grassroots peacemaking initiatives. As he did the research, he grew convinced that his subjects were “wonderful people with zero impact on society.” In his discouragement he cast around for alternative projects and became interested in the string of hate crimes committed after 9/11 around the United States. He encountered a woman in Chicago who was connected to the family of Vasudev Patel, which led him to write a letter to Mark Stroman sometime in 2004, asking if he might interview him. Stroman turned him down, saying that he was in the middle of his appeals and had been advised to stay away from the media.

  They continued to correspond, though, and Ziv’s description of the project began to change Stroman’s mind. He wrote to Bob Templeton that he had had Ziv “figured all wrong.” The filmmaker had convinced Stroman that the project’s aim was to “show the complexities of the situation, to create an anatomy of the events and to humanize it.” It wasn’t long before Ziv received a second letter from Stroman. The appeal in question had failed. Stroman wanted to tell his story. “He put a condition,” Ziv said. “The condition was, could I help him to buy a typewriter?”

  One hundred or so dollars later, Ziv was sitting across from Stroman at Visitation. Though inches apart, they were separated by glass and were speaking to each other through black phones attached to metallic cables.

  Stroman was a sea of red skin, green ink, and white cloth. He still wore the cross above his “187” tattoo. He sat opposite Ziv, bouncing with nerves. He explained that he had been waiting for a while and was “real hyperactive.” The guards had asked him to remove his crucifix for some reason, which unsettled him. After a minute, he decided he wanted it on and refastened it.

  Stroman was full of concern at the beginning. “You look very different from your picture,” he said to Ziv. A friend had sent him a printout about Ziv from a website. He asked his visitor to repeat his name, to make sure it wasn’t some impostor. “I like your barber,” he said a moment later, bald man to bald man, to ease the tension.

  Stroman began by confessing how suspicious he’d been of Ziv at first. He was expecting the usual portrait of him as a racist hater. “My wife’s Spanish. I’m not a racist. That wouldn’t make me a very good racist, now would it?” Stroman said.

  Stroman wanted Ziv to know that he had lived well, that this present situation was the exception, not the rule. “I’ve got four awesome kids,” he said. “I’ve always worked my whole life.” His jail terms before this had been minimal: “My whole life, I was locked up six months at one stretch for an eight-year sentence and then three months. So nine months before 2001, September, have I been incarcerated. I’ve had a good life.”

  Ziv asked about the chaos of Stroman’s childhood and how it had affected his life.

  “No, I know what affected my life,” Stroman said. “It was September 11.” He asked if Ziv had been in New York on that day.

  “Oh, absolutely,” Ziv said. “I saw it from the roof of my building.”

  “Then you’ll never—then you know what I felt,” Stroman said, gesturing toward Ilan, hoping not to be left hanging.

  “I know what I feel,” Ziv said. “You tell me what you feel.”

  His voice cracking and preparing for a cry, Stroman explained how it had “trickled down all the way over here.” His eyes were wet. They searched Ziv’s face for any evidence of agreement, or at least understanding. Stroman said he still couldn’t forget those days: the hatred he felt toward the Arab world, the sight of people jumping from the towers, the stories of people trapped in Flight 93. “I’m very patriotic, and my country was attacked, so I kinda …” He snapped his fingers. “I took it personal.” He was sobbing now, and almost whispering.

  Ziv tried to focus him. What actually made him leap up on September 15 and begin his attacks?

  He blamed it on the looping reruns on television. “It’s just boiling up and boiling up, and I just snapped,” Stroman said. He acknowledged that, like so many other vigilantes, he had failed to target the people he thought he was going after. “I guess I’m that dumb Texan redneck where everybody from the Middle East is an Arab to me,” Stroman said, his face now brightening, a smile breaking open. “In my view, that was my stupidity. Even the man from India, I thought he was an Arab.”

  He told Ziv that he’d never killed before, and that he’d felt almost possessed at the time of the shootings. He wasn’t in his own body, wasn’t in his own mind, he insisted.

  Whenever Ziv tried to get more specific, to ask what Stroman was thinking during each shooting, he stared back blankly. He seemed vague on the details of his own deeds, and appeared unable to go beyond generalities and television-derived platitudes.

  It was the shock of “the worse atrocity in American history,” he said. He recited again the tale, make-believe or imagined, of a half-sister who worked at Windows on the World: “Last thing I heard was that she still worked there. Well, I’m watching the bodies jump. I’m watching people hold hands jumping off the buildings. I’m traumatized. I can’t get ahold of anybody and”—he shook his head for a moment—“I just snapped.”

  That no such woman had actually died in the World Trade Center no longer much mattered.

  Talking with Ziv, Stroman lurched back and forth between self-justification and shame. He said it still haunted him, everything he’d done. Even when he closed his eyes, he couldn’t escape. “My whole life, I’ve kind of been full of—I’m more on the wild side,” he said. “You can tell by looking at me. I’ve enjoyed life. But I’ve never killed anybody. And that’s something that’s hard to explain.” As he spoke, he was thumping the table in front of him every few seconds for emphasis.

  Ziv asked how he explained it to himself.

  Stroman said that he was only just now coming to terms with it. He was coming to terms with his own looming end as well. He had been on the Row a little more than two years—long enough to know he wasn’t getting out.

  “My appeal?” he said. “I got about as much chance as a snowball in a hot skillet.” This line he hammed up for Ziv, putting on his best incredulous face. Ziv obliged with a gush of laughter and a table slap of his own. That laughter made Stroman smile.

  He said he was trying to have a good outlook on things. He knew, without a doubt, that he would die by the state’s hand. Just today, his neighbor had gotten his date and broken down in sobs next door.

  The deaths of neighbors were the bluntest kind of foreshadowing. “I seen a lot of people walk that final walk and not come back,” Stroman said. “I’ve seen people drugged outta here, being pepper-sprayed, gassed, kicking and fighting on their way to their execution.”

  Ziv asked if Stroman believed in God.

  “Oh, yes I do. This is kinda weird to say, but if I wouldn’t’ve come to Death Row, my eternity would’ve been lost,” Stroman said.

  It was one kind of solace Stroman could take. In his understanding of Christianity, his long trail of sins could be washed away if he got his heart right with Jesus before the end. In fact, Stroman was persuaded that but for the commission of these murders, he would not be heaven-bound: that it required his utter bottoming-out, which prompted these years of isolation and undistracted one-on-one time with God, to earn salvation.

  Ziv didn’t entirely follow this logic
, and asked Stroman to explain.

  “If I’da died out there on the streets, and my lack of faith—I’d have been screwed for real, for an eternity,” Stroman said. The crimes that he claimed to regret had bent his trajectory toward paradise.

  Frequent-Flyer Miles

  In the America of the aughts, nothing said you belonged like buying a car you couldn’t afford. A year before quitting the Olive Garden in 2007, Rais treated himself to a Nissan. The burnt-orange 350Z, at close to $40,000, was a splurge, even to lease. But those curves that gave it the look of a high-tech, Japanese-made egg; those vast, road-devouring wheels; those prowling, vicious headlight-eyes … It had won the Most Sex Appeal Award from Road and Travel as well as the more buttoned-up Most Significant Vehicle of the Year honor from Edmunds. Rais was the farthest thing from flashy, wearing simple clothes and living in a modest home. But if he could manage the lease of $500 or so a month—and, with debt out of his life and his software career taking off, he thought he could—it might remind him each time he drove that he was safe, that all was well.

  He drove his little rocket around for two years. He quit the Olive Garden in that period and began to work full-time in IT—as a database administrator for a local energy company called Crosstex. He stayed a few months, then moved on to similar work at the University of Texas at Dallas, and then, the following year, found a gig at the Zale Corporation. To the outside world it was a diamond store. But it needed people like Rais because on the inside, like just about every other business in America, it had become a technology company, maintaining large and growing libraries of data that had to be constantly updated and instantly retrievable, so that when a dumped man in Phoenix returned a ring, the next minute an agent in Boston could tell a customer yes, that one is still available. Rais loved the work, loved the firefighting and problem-solving: a server outage here—hop on the conference-call bridge to fix it; a slowdown there—allocate some more memory. In material things, at least, all was well with the world, except for that car, which was a financial drag. “My eyes were bigger than my pocket that time,” Rais said. It had been a rare mistake for him, and a very American one. He was assimilating. After twenty-four months, he was free of the car, and relieved.