Dead Man Walking

by Helen Prejean

  “But look what these parents are going through,” I say. “Their daughter raped and stabbed and left to die in the woods. What if someone did that to your mother? What would you want to do to them?”

  “Kill ‘em,” he says. “I sure as hell would want to kill ‘em.”

  I’m quiet then for a while.

  I’m hoping he can take in his own words so he can feel the Harveys’ pain. The quiet does not last long. He says, “I’m gonna be honest with you, ma’am, I believe in the death penalty in some instances, like for people who rape and torture little children. Messin’ over adults is one thing, but little innocent kids? I’d pull the switch on them myself.”

  I have heard that prisoners are hardest on child molesters. I guess everybody’s got a code of evil, a line beyond which they consider redemption impossible. But the irony jolts me. Here’s a man condemned to death by the state and here he is defending the death penalty — not for himself, of course, only for truly heinous killers. And I think of what Camus said, that every murderer, when he kills, feels innocent, that he always feels excused by his particular circumstances (p. 191).12

  I tell him that I think the state shouldn’t have the power to kill anybody and that if the state is allowed to kill those who torture children, then why not those who kill old people, the mentally retarded, teenagers (close to home, but he doesn’t get it), public officials, policemen? Where would it stop, I ask him, and who would decide?

  He says he’ll think about it, but he doesn’t cede the point.

  “Have you ever been close to death before?” I ask.

  “Had someone shooting at me once,” he says. “I was hiding behind a tractor in a barn and ping, ping, ping the pellets were hitting the metal on the tractor. That was a close call. My heart was racin’ in my chest.”

  “Why was somebody shooting at you?”

  “Well,” he says, “he was the husband whose wife I was in bed with. He was supposed to be at work, but he walked in on us in their house one day, straight into the bedroom, and there we were. Me, I jumped up, grabbin’ my pants and boots in my hand, and ran like hell for the barn, and there I am behind that tractor pullin’ on my pants with one boot on and struggling to get the other boot on and bam, bam, those pellets were comin’.”

  And Robert Willie moves into a warm stream of memories now, telling of a woman seven years his senior who was “mature” and how he could have a real conversation with her. “Those younger ones, they couldn’t sit still, they were too active, you just couldn’t sit and talk.” He admits that in the beginning he was partly drawn to “the adventure of loving a married woman.”

  “We’d go to the woods with a bottle and a blanket. She liked what I offered her. I used to come and see her when her old man would be at work and she’d cook for me, you know, a romantic meal, and we’d sit there for hours and eat and talk. She had a lot of real good thoughts about things and she drew ‘em out of me, plus my real feelin’s about things, I could share them with her and she was the only one.”

  He tells me how one night she and her “old man” were at one of the lounges and he was there too. “I went up to their table casuallike, not even looking at her directly, talking to her brother-in-law, when I feel this foot under the table touchin’ my leg and here she is askin’ me if I want to dance. Well, I plumb liked to fell out. I was nervous. We danced. Her old man was mad as hell.

  “I left town for a spell to work on some barges and when I got back my friends told me, ‘Your woman moved out of state.’ Well, I tracked her down. I got her address and me and my cousin drove two days and arrived at her house at 6:00 A.M. and there was her truck parked in front, but we didn’t know if her old man was in there with her. My cousin, he was nervous, and he said we’d better back our car into the driveway so we could get the hell out of there if her old man showed up.”

  He chuckles and he is taking his time telling me all this, like someone who has some rare coins in a box and who opens the box and takes each coin and holds it in his hand and turns it over and looks at it and then clinks it back into the box. I don’t rush him. I let him have his moment.

  “So we checked out the scene and didn’t see the guy and went in and she fed us, and my cousin fell asleep, and I was hoping she and I could have us a good, long hunk of time, and the phone rang and it was her old man and he was in jail, and I breathed easy and knew we had some time. Now that is one real good feeling, to know you’ve got a good-sized chunk of time with somebody you love. You’re kind of like on this little island all by yourselves and nobody can get to you. I never experienced love with anyone like I did with her. It was when she moved away and I didn’t have her to talk to anymore that I really started goin’ heavy into drugs. I guess I was trying to fill the gap she left. I phoned her collect when I was in the federal pen in Marion a couple of years ago and she accepted the charges and we talked. I just wanted to hear her voice again. I had heard she was living with another man. I told her I just wanted her to be happy.”

  When he finishes I tell him that I don’t know how much time we will have together but I want to make the most of it and share my best with him and that I am going to do my level best to invite him past some lines he’s drawn — like not apologizing to the Harveys.

  “If you do die,” I say, “as your friend, I want to help you to die with integrity, and you can’t do that, the way I see it, if you don’t squarely own up to the part you played in Faith’s death.”

  He is looking straight into my eyes. He is no whiner, and I appreciate that. Not much time. Have to talk straight and true.

  I ask him if he has a Bible and if he ever reads it.

  He says yes he has one and yes he reads it.

  “Like W. C. Fields read his Bible?” I ask.

  “Who?”

  I explain that Fields was a famous comedian who claimed he read his Bible every day. When a skeptical friend asked, “Every day, Bill?” Fields said, “Yep, looking for loopholes.”

  He gives a little smile and says, no, it’s more than loopholes he’s after and that he reads his Bible late at night “when things settle down.” He admits he never “got much religion” when he was growing up, but says he believes that Jesus died for him on the cross and will “take care” of him when he appears before the judgment seat of God.

  I recognize the theology of “atonement” he uses: Jesus, by suffering and dying on the cross, “appeased” an angry God’s demand for “justice.” I know the theology because it once shaped my own belief, but I shed it when I discovered that its driving force was fear that made love impossible. What kind of God demands “payment” in human suffering?

  But I figure now’s not the time. Later, Robert and I can sort out theology.

  To be truthful. To accept responsibility. Is this possible for Robert Lee Willie? I see at least one promising sign: he is pressing for better conditions for death-row inmates even though he’ll probably be dead by the time the changes come about. I don’t doubt that his motives are mixed. It’s not pure altruism at work in him here. He likes to defy authority and the suit gives him new turf to “take ‘em on.”

  I say, “You may want to check out some words of Jesus that might have special meaning for you: ‘You shall know the truth and the truth will make you free.’ It’s in the Gospel of John, chapter 8.”

  “I’ll do that. I’ll check it out,” he says.

  Then he says, “I have a whole lot of stuff about my case — transcripts of my trials and newspaper clippings and legal papers — and maybe they would help you get a hold of things about me and my case faster.”

  I tell him I appreciate the trust.

  “I tell you what, ma’am, I sure as hell don’t trust nobody around this place — and that includes the chaplains who get their paychecks from the state just like other employees — but I do trust you. You’re a fighter. I can’t stand people that act like victims. That’s why I don’t much like niggers. They’re always actin’ like somebody owes ‘em somethin.’
Not just niggers. Chinks and spies, too.”

  Niggers? Chinks? Spies? We’ve got a long way to go, Robert and I. But I file it away for another day, another time. Not now. I am standing up to leave. He stands, too. I see that he has tattoos: L-O-V-E on his fingers and a string of skulls across his wrist.

  “Appreciate your visit, ma’am,” he says.

  I put my hand up to the mesh screen and he raises his handcuffed hands toward the screen but he can’t quite reach. He’s much smaller than Pat.

  Several days later I get several hefty manila envelopes in the mail from Robert, and I start to sift and sort through trial transcripts and newspaper clippings. This man’s organized, that’s certain. File folders are neat and tagged. Newspaper articles are arranged chronologically. Here is a whole set of papers on the inmate suit to improve conditions on death row. I wade in.

  The complaint is carefully typed. The grammar and spelling aren’t perfect, but decent. Plaintiffs in the “Complaint for Declaratory and Injunctive Relief declare themselves — three death-row inmates, Robert Willie among them — versus the defendants — the secretary of the Department of Corrections and the warden. It’s a class-action suit and lists, in part, these grievances:

  Confinement in a six-by-eight-foot cell twenty-three hours a day.

  Inadequate lighting; in each cell there are no light fixtures; all light must come from lights on the tier.

  Telephone calls limited to one five-minute personal phone call per month.

  Inadequate heating and ventilation (in summer, one fan is turned on at the end of a hundred-yard tier with no cross-ventilation; the heat index in Louisiana can reach 115 degrees in July and August).

  Bill Quigley, as it turns out, will be the attorney to see the suit settled for the inmates, eight years or so after Willie’s initial filing. By the time the suit is settled the original plaintiffs (Robert Willie among them) will have been executed and the improvements gained will be modest: contact visits with attorneys and increased use of the telephone, plus a few other minor changes.

  Once, when talking to Millard on the telephone, I mention the lawsuit to improve death-row conditions, and he says, “The prison officials consider these guys dead meat, anyway, know what I mean? Why worry about someone going to the dentist or having fresh ventilation or adequate recreation when they’re planning to kill him anyway?”

  Robert has told me that in Marion, the federal penitentiary, he had an excellent law library and he was “always in there digging into those books.” Looking at the work he did on the suit, I can see — maybe for the first time in his life — he is honing his mind and his organizational abilities. Freed of drugs, he can read books, reflect, articulate his thoughts and opinions. True, there’s self-interest in it, but maybe something more. Maybe for the first time in his life he has acquired knowledge and gained some authority and, perhaps, the satisfaction of being of service to others. He tells me how other inmates, out on the tier for their “hour,” wend their way to his cell, asking him about legal issues in their “case” or how to go about getting their trial transcripts or how to use the Freedom of Information Act.

  Then I read the newspaper articles.

  Enter Robert Lee Willie, who addresses the judge as “Cap,” smirks when the jury finds him guilty of murder, tells his mother to “dry up” when she weeps during his sentencing trial, and draws his hand menacingly like a knife across his throat when Mark Brewster appears in the courtroom. When Brewster’s girlfriend appears, a young woman Robert raped, he winks and blows her a kiss.

  And here are photographs: Robert when first arrested, with wild, long tangled hair; Robert, head shaved, hands and feet cuffed, looking at Vaccaro and grinning as they walk into the courthouse; Robert with a bandana on his head, caught close up by the camera, sneering.

  Some incidents draw my attention:

  An officer had to write Vaccaro’s confession because he could neither read nor write.

  Vaccaro, after first claiming Robert had shot Brewster, admitted in a second confession to shooting Brewster himself because he “wanted to put him out of his misery.”

  One file marked “Juvenile Record”13 has a thick stack of papers in it. I leaf through and watch Robert Lee Willie go from boy to outlaw.

  When he’s fourteen he shoplifts a bottle of wine from a convenience store.

  A few months later he and his cousin steal two horses. Then he’s picked up for truancy, and there is this account: “While on patrol Sergeant Chatellier found RLW on the Tchefuncte Bridge. He took him to his aunt’s house but he got smart with Sgt. C. and he brought him to the station. While Robert was sitting in the office, he stated he wanted to go to jail and told me he didn’t care where his mother was and didn’t want to go back.”

  Then, at the Tasty Donut Shop at two o’clock in the morning, Robert, now sixteen years old, is picked up by police for threatening bodily harm with a broken Coke bottle to his uncle, who was telling him he ought to be home.

  He serves five months in the Louisiana Training Institute, the juvenile correctional facility.

  He returns and the offenses mount: theft of a checkbook; burglaries of Jim’s Chickentown, United Utilities, a neighbor’s summer home; unauthorized use of “moveables” (a neighbor’s truck); carrying a concealed weapon; driving while intoxicated; aggravated assault on a police officer …

  He’s in and out of jail. When he’s twenty years old, he gets a suspended sentence of three years’ hard labor for burglary and serves six months in the St. Tammany Parish Jail. He escapes by jumping from a third-story window. Shortly afterward he turns himself in to authorities. The report reads:

  Subject was in the woods behind Wymers Store. Subject came out to the store and called the sheriffs office and said he would like to give his self up, that he was at the store and would wait for the deputies. Deputies arrived and arrested the subject … subject was transported to Charity Hospital in New Orleans because he could not walk on his feet [he had jumped three stories] and had cuts and scratches on his feet and arms.

  Between 1972 and 1979, when he was twenty-one years old, Robert Willie was arrested thirty times. His last year of schooling is ninth grade. A tattoo of “Pam” appears when he’s sixteen, “Peggy” at seventeen, and at nineteen, a skull and crossbones. One of the reports gives his name as “Little John Willie.” During one of his stints in the St. Tammany Parish Jail he meets Joseph Vaccaro.

  I review Robert’s trial transcripts and other legal documents. I see that Robert had been awarded a new capital sentencing trial by the Louisiana Supreme Court on grounds of improper arguments by Assistant District Attorney, Herbert R. Alexander.14 Urging the jury away from a life sentence, Alexander had argued that later in time a governor, who would “not know the facts of this case,” might release Robert from prison. He also argued that if the jury decided on death, the final responsibility, in fact, was not theirs because there would be numerous appeals and reviews of the case by state and federal courts. “So the buck really don’t stop with you. The buck starts with you.”15

  I read the appeal petition to the Federal Fifth Circuit Court, filed by Ronald J. Tabak, an attorney whose Wall Street firm has volunteered to collaborate with Millard on Robert’s appeal. I am struck by the substance, the thoroughness of the arguments. It’s a thick document, 170 pages, bound with a blue cardboard cover. On the front page in large black letters is stamped “Pauper Case.”

  In the brief Tabak puts forth fourteen arguments on Robert’s behalf.16 I don’t understand some of the fine-tuned legal points, but several of the claims seem startling and obvious.

  One is that pretrial publicity before Robert’s second sentencing trial was so prejudicial that it required a change of venue. (Robert’s second sentencing trial was held in the same parish courthouse as the first.) Tabak recounts the intense media coverage surrounding the first trial. The media had referred to the case as “the worst crime in the history of Washington Parish … the trial of the decade.” The distri
ct attorney was quoted as having referred to Willie and Vaccaro as “animals.” Some newspaper articles reported that Willie had “confessed” to having raped and killed Faith Hathaway and included reports of prior arrests and the fact that his father, who had previously killed another man, was in jail for attempted murder. After trial and sentencing, the media repeatedly referred to the fact that Vaccaro had received life and Willie death, “leaving the impression,” Tabak points out, “that Willie was more culpable than Vaccaro.”

  At voir dire for the second sentencing trial forty-seven of the fifty-two prospective jurors admitted to hearing of the case. In an affidavit, a jury expert brought in by Tabak’s firm to study the possibility of bias on Robert’s jury testified that people, convinced of the defendant’s guilt, might lie at the voir dire out of a feeling that they could “get justice” by getting on the jury. She then cited cases of two such jurors, who first admitted to having an opinion on the case but within a few hours denied they had an opinion. There was one pool of jurors for both Robert and Vaccaro; and jurors who had been struck from one trial presented themselves for the other.

  Tabak argues that the Louisiana Supreme Court, which reviewed the case and agreed that no change of venue was warranted, did not have the benefit of the jury expert’s findings about biased jurors because she had been hired only after Tabak’s firm — with financial resources to hire experts — took on the case.

  But perhaps the most telling instance of impropriety during jury selection was this: “At least four members (one third of the jury) that convicted Petitioner were present when the attorney for Joseph Vaccaro stated [during Vaccaro’s jury-selection process] that Robert Willie had killed Faith Hathaway. These assertions were made in the upstairs courtroom in which Vaccaro was being tried, only minutes before these jurors were sent to the downstairs courtroom to participate as jurors in [Willie’s] trial.”