Dead Man Walking

by Helen Prejean

A full moon has come out and is shining its white metallic light on the capitol steps. People are drifting down the steps toward waiting yellow school buses and cars.

  A young man, one of the marchers, touches my arm and points to the bottom of the steps where the counterdemonstrators are and says that a man says to tell me “to watch out or someone is going to hurt you.” The man down there wants to talk to me. He says his name is Vernon Harvey. My heart tightens. Oh, God, not here, not now. “Someone wants to hurt me?” What does that mean?

  I look down the wide rows of white steps — forty-eight steps, to be exact, each engraved with the name of a state and the date it achieved statehood. At the age of ten with my Girl Scout troop, my green skirt swishing across my bony knees, I had skipped and run up and down these steps, saying the name of each state in singsong. Now I am all too glad to have forty-eight states between me and Vernon Harvey.

  I don’t have to respond to the invitation, I reason with myself. With the crowd milling about, I could pretend the message never reached me. Besides, maybe another time less confrontational than this would be better for our first meeting. Any time would be better than this.

  The young man delivering the message looks at me expectantly. I know it would be cowardly not to respond to the invitation. I thank him for the message, my heart racing, and walk down the long, white steps to Vernon Harvey.

  I introduce myself. He’s a short guy with close-cropped gray hair, black-rimmed glasses. I brace myself for attack. He says he’s heard I visit with death-row inmates and that I’d better watch myself with those “scum.” “They’ll just as soon slit your throat as look at you,” he says. He’s not shouting and he looks at me when he talks.

  Relief. I was prepared for apoplectic rage, and here he is expressing concern about my safety.

  We must have executions, he tells me, because it’s the only way we can be sure these “mad dogs” don’t kill again. He ticks off his favorite pro-death-penalty arguments, just as I tick off mine for abolition. I have to respect that he’s out here at the foot of these capitol steps because he believes in his cause as strongly as I believe in mine. Maybe even more. I haven’t had anyone close to me murdered. I tell him that I’m terribly sorry about his stepdaughter and ask if I may come to visit him and his wife. “Sure, come on over,” he says, and he writes his telephone number for me on a piece of paper.

  The next week I call him and get directions to his house in Covington, a small town on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. I go in early November on a Sunday afternoon. The first feel of fall is in the air. I bring a sweater along. I don’t know how long I’ll be, probably late, and the evenings are getting cool. This is one visit that can’t be rushed.

  I turn into the driveway of a cozy-looking little house surrounded by tall trees. There is a swing on the front porch. A happy enough looking house, I think, as I climb the front steps and reach for the doorbell. As a child, riding in the family car through neighborhoods, I used to play a secret game of looking at houses and trying to guess from the outside appearance whether or not the people inside were happy. Bright, cheery houses: happy people inside. Sad, bedraggled houses: sad people inside.

  Great as the sea is thy sorrow. Words well up from a prayer to Mary, mother of Jesus, who watched her son dying on a cross.

  Vernon comes to the door and invites me in, asking good-naturedly if we’re planning to do any more walks against the death penalty any time soon because he’d sure like to be there at the end of it to welcome us. Elizabeth, his wife, comes into the living room and introduces herself. She’s younger than Vernon and more reserved, not the tease that he is. Faith’s graduation picture hangs on the living room wall. A pretty girl with some of Elizabeth’s features. Same facial structure, same nose, same eyes. In her blue graduation gown she looks happy, her eyes gazing past the camera into her bright, young future.

  We sit in comfortable chairs in the front living room. I sit where I can see their faces and ask them to tell me about their daughter. They seem to want to talk. Maybe it’s cathartic for them.

  Tragedies have a date and time. Tragedy in the Harvey family happened on May 28, 1980.

  Faith, eighteen years old, had graduated from Mandeville High School in early May and planned to join the Army on May 28. She wanted to study a foreign language. She hoped to be stationed overseas.

  “With me having a long career in the military,” Vernon says, “I had told her about the travel, the educational opportunities plus — this is a big thing with me — patriotism; it’s good to give a few years of service to your country, even if you don’t plan to make it a life career.”

  Elizabeth, calm, her voice without emotion as though she is describing someone else’s tragedy, tells how on May 28 a recruiting sergeant was to meet Faith at her apartment to drive her to New Orleans for induction. (At the time, the Harveys lived in an apartment complex that Elizabeth managed and Faith had her own apartment in the complex.) A few days earlier Elizabeth had taken her shopping to get things she would be needing. “You know, practical things,” Elizabeth says, “new bras with plenty of support, a case for her contact lenses, medicine for menstrual cramps.”

  The recruiting sergeant would not be coming until early afternoon, so Elizabeth had planned to go over to Faith’s apartment to help her with last-minute packing in the morning.

  On May 27 at five o’clock in the evening, Faith headed hurriedly out the door of her parents’ apartment on her way to Bossier’s Restaurant, where she waitressed. After work she planned to visit with friends to say good-bye and to celebrate the beginning of her new career. As Faith was leaving, Elizabeth had noticed her sandals — the one on the right foot was torn — and had suggested that she ought to change them, but Faith had been in a hurry and said she’d be late for work.

  The next time Elizabeth would see the sandals they would be in a cellophane bag as state’s exhibit number 10 at the trial of her daughter’s murderer, and she would identify them along with other objects: a purse, a blue skirt, a blue blouse, a driver’s license, a ring, a medallion, a Timex watch with a blue face.

  “You don’t know when you see your child leave through a door that you are never going to see her alive again,” Elizabeth says. “If I had known, I would have told her how much I loved her. My last words to her — the last she ever heard from me — were about sandals.”

  On the morning of Wednesday, May 28, Elizabeth and Vernon waited for Faith to come through the front door. The big day had finally arrived. After today they would have to rely on letters and an occasional phone call. Letting Faith have her own apartment had been one step toward independence, but today would be the really big venture. Faith had promised to write.

  “She would’ve, too,” says Elizabeth. “We had a close relationship. She’d always talk things over with me. And she and Vern were close. Faith was four when Vern and I met, seven when we got married. He wasn’t just a stepfather; he loved her every bit as much as I did.” And I look over at Vernon and see his head down, tears rolling down his cheeks. It’s been four years since Faith’s death and he still cries when he talks about her. I wish I could take away some of his pain. I feel helpless, overwhelmed. All I can do is listen.

  But Faith was late that May 28th morning. Elizabeth called her apartment. No answer. She waited and called again. No answer. No footsteps at the door. No telephone call to say that she was a little late but on her way. No Faith.

  Concerned, Elizabeth and Vernon had gone over to her apartment, but it was empty, the bed still neatly made. Elizabeth describes how she held the terror at bay, thinking of possible scenarios: maybe she had overdone the drinking a little and gone home with a friend to sleep it off; maybe it had been late when the partying had ended and she had decided to spend the night with one of her girlfriends …

  “But it was strange that she did not call me,” Elizabeth says. “She would always telephone me and tell me where she was. I kept telephoning her friends one by one. I just couldn’t acce
pt that I didn’t know where she was.”

  When Faith did not appear by 3:00 P.M., Elizabeth called the recruiting sergeant, who was supposed to drive Faith to New Orleans. He said he had already been by her apartment twice. Vernon then went to the Mandeville Police Department.

  “I told them our daughter was missing,” he said, “but they said someone had to be missing at least forty-eight hours before they could do anything.”

  Later the same evening Vernon drove to the St. Tammany Parish Sheriffs Office to file a report on their missing child.

  Thursday, May 29, and Friday, May 30, passed. The sheriffs office formed a search party. Vernon joined. It was a formidable undertaking to search in this expansive countryside with its massive patches of wilderness areas full of underbrush, thickets, and gulleys.

  On Sunday, June 1, a family picknicking near Fricke’s Cave in a remote wilderness area south of Franklington found a purse, clothes, and a wallet and turned them over to the Franklington Sheriffs Department. Someone called the Harveys to tell them they had heard that some of Faith’s things had been found.

  “We got that information from our own resources, not from the police,” Elizabeth says. “They never called us. We called them.”

  On Monday, June 2, Elizabeth continues, the search party from the sheriffs office went out to comb the area where the clothing had been discovered, but they found nothing. Vernon says how he had noticed “a real bad smell” in the area where they were searching, and thought there must be some kind of garbage dump or dead animal nearby.

  On Wednesday, June 4, eight days after Faith’s disappearance, two investigators from the district attorney’s office found her body behind a log in the vicinity of Fricke’s Cave. She had been stabbed seventeen times in the neck and upper chest.

  Vernon is crying. Elizabeth, recounting the gruesome details, does not cry. Somehow she’s found a way to leach out the horror. Their daughter’s badly decomposed body was nude, supine, legs spread-eagled.

  Vernon says, “Faith didn’t know the animals she was dealing with when Willie and Vaccaro offered her a ride home. She had been with friends all night. You know, young people, they think everybody’s their friend. We think somebody must have slipped some thing into her drink. The coroner’s report said her vagina was all tore up. The electric chair is too good for Robert Willie and Joseph Vaccaro.”

  He can’t stop crying. He says a couple of sentences and cries, says some more and cries again. Listening and knowing he is reliving it all over again, I want to tell him, “Stop. Please stop.” I want him to be oblivious, to forget, to let all the horrible details fade. I can’t find any words. I am crying too.

  “At first they couldn’t find the graduation medallion around her neck because it was embedded so deep from the stabbing,” Elizabeth says. “She had been so proud of that medallion. She wore it all the time. It said: “Class of ‘80, Dawn of a New Decade.”

  The police would not let Vernon and Elizabeth come to the morgue to identify the body, explaining that it would be too traumatic for them. But Elizabeth says that she could not bear for the body to be buried forever without being “absolutely, positively sure without a doubt” that it was Faith they had found. “What if, because of the decomposition and the circumstantial evidence of the clothes nearby, they only thought it was Faith? I had to be sure.”

  So she had telephoned her brother in Richmond, Virginia, a dentist, who had done some dental work for Faith in April. On the evening before the funeral he had gone to the funeral home and made a positive identification from the dental restorations.

  Vernon says, “Elizabeth’s brother was pretty tore up when he came back from the funeral home. Before he reached his hand into that bag with all the lime in it and fished out Faith’s jaw, he said he had always been against the death penalty. But, boy, after that, he was for it.”

  “I knew it had to be Faith, that’s what my mind told me, but I just had to be sure,” Elizabeth says.

  Young Lizabeth, the fourteen-year-old-daughter of Vernon and Elizabeth, dashes into the living room. She leans close to her mother and whispers something. Elizabeth introduces me and she turns toward me and says politely, “How do you do.” I calculate that she was ten years old when Faith was killed. Her life here in this room is tangible. She is pretty and whole and unharmed. I’m glad that Vernon and Elizabeth have her. Maybe she is what keeps them going. Perhaps for her sake they have not allowed themselves to dissolve in grief. Lizabeth bounds out of the room as quickly as she came in.

  Vernon recounts the scene and the murder. Both Willie and Vaccaro, he says, gave basically the same account in their confessions, except that each blamed the other for the stabbing.

  Sometime in the early-morning hours of May 28 the two men met Faith outside a bar and offered her a ride home. Instead, they drove her down gravel roads to a remote place, made her take off all her clothes, blindfolded her, and led her down a ravine where they forced her to lie down and raped her. Then one of them stabbed her to death while the other held her hands. Some fingers of her right hand were missing where the knife had cut as she raised her hand to protect herself.

  “The SOB, Vaccaro, got a life sentence,” Vernon says, and he is crying again, “and it’s been four years and they haven’t fried Willie’s ass yet. We’ve been waiting and waiting for justice to be done. I can’t rest until justice is done. All you hear about these days is the rights of the criminal. What about our rights? Don’t we have a right to see this chapter closed?”

  I wonder hew Vernon and Elizabeth would have fared emotionally if Robert Willie, like Vaccaro, had been sentenced to life imprisonment. He would have slipped into anonymity behind Angola’s walls, his fate sealed, his crime punished, and maybe these grieving parents could, over time, have laid down their grief and carried on with their lives. But now they are like two deer paralyzed by headlights in the road. All they can think, all they know, all they want is the death of their child’s murderer that the state has promised them. So they follow the case in the courts. They hold their breath each time there’s a new appeal. They wait and wait, reliving their daughter’s murder again and again. And the hope is that when Willie’s death does come, it will ease their pain and their loss. At last, they will have justice.

  The pale October sun has been sliding steadily downward and through the window I can see the trees turning into dark purple silhouettes. Inside, darkness has been slowly seeping into the room. Elizabeth gets up and turns on a lamp. I know I have to drive back across the lake, but time is standing still. In the presence of such suffering, it doesn’t matter how late I get home.

  “Let’s go to the kitchen and I’ll make us some coffee,” Elizabeth says. As we walk to the kitchen, Vernon keeps talking, “Willie and I met face to face in the hallway during his trial. He was cocky. He said he’d never go to the chair. I told him I’d see his ass fry.”

  Then he picked up on the point he had made to me when I met him on the capitol steps — that the only way to be sure we get rid of someone like Willie is to kill him. Elizabeth agrees. “That’s the only way we can be sure that he’ll never kill again,” she says. “In prison he could kill a guard or another inmate. Someone like Willie can escape from prison.”

  I disagree with these arguments, but the intensity of all the sorrow silences me. I do not offer counterarguments. I just let all the torrents of rage and loss and sorrow tumble over me.

  “He’s a mad dog, that’s what he is,” Vernon says, and he tells how Willie and Vaccaro, after killing Faith, had continued their reign of terror, kidnapping a teenage couple, raping the girl, tying the boy to a tree, stabbing him, shooting him, and leaving him for dead. “Miraculously he lived,” Vernon says, “but he’s partially paralyzed from the waist down.”

  Vernon has stopped crying. It’s his anger talking now, which I welcome. At least he’s not dissolving in grief and loss. I want him to survive this terrible sorrow. I want him to make it.

  “Before their rampage was
over,” Vernon says, “Willie and Vaccaro drove through five states, stole four cars, robbing, raping, and killing all the way. The law had a bulletin out on ‘em for the kidnapping, and that’s what they first arrested them for. They had turned the young Madisonville girl loose, and she had gone to the police and described them. When the law arrested the two of them in Arkansas for the kidnapping,” he says, “they didn’t yet know they had killed Faith. That only came out as they confessed to the kidnapping.”

  I think of the young man I have just visited with the neatly combed hair and the quiet voice. I think of how he exhaled his smoke downward so that it didn’t blow into my face.

  “I am going to be Robert Willie’s spiritual adviser,” I tell them quietly. I have to say it. I have to let them know. We have made our way to the kitchen and now sit at the small table there. Elizabeth is pouring the coffee into our cups.

  “He needs all the spiritual advisers he can get,” Vernon says. “He’s an animal. No, I take that back. Animals don’t rape and kill their own kind. Robert Willie is God’s mistake. Frying in the electric chair is the least of the frying he’s about to do when God sends him to hell where he belongs,” and he jabs his finger downward.

  On two occasions, Vernon says, he almost “took Willie out.” One was during a recess at the trial. In the small courtroom Vernon was standing close to Willie and within inches of a deputy’s unstrapped, holstered pistol. “In three seconds I could have slipped that gun out and blown Willie away,” Vernon says, “but there was the deputy there and other people. I might have hurt somebody else, so I didn’t do it.”

  The second opportunity came, he says, when he was driving to New Orleans on the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway and saw federal marshals in a vehicle driving Willie to New Orleans. Vernon had rammed down the accelerator and raced after them. “Willie turned and saw me, he knew who it was on their tail,” he says, “and he must have said something to the driver. I saw the driver eyeballing me through his rearview mirror and he was gunning that Pontiac for all it was worth, but I had my Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, and his pedal was to the floor and I was still gaining on them. I could hear them over the C.B. radio. They were scared. They knew that if I rammed them at that speed they wouldn’t be able to control their car, they’d go into the lake.”