When you imagine women writing to murderers on death row it is difficult not
to think of Catherine Tate’s tragi-comic figure in her wedding dress
preparing to tie the knot with a doomed penpal. What sort of weird,
vicarious reason, you wonder, drives them do it? But when you meet someone
who has done it, and she describes attending the execution of an inmate who
was afraid of dying alone, all such thoughts seem terribly smug and cheap.
Jenny is a young-looking, 50-year-old secretary from Staffordshire, a mother
of three with two grandchildren. Jenny is not her real name: like many
correspondents, she keeps her pastime a secret believing her friends
wouldn’t understand. In 1999, she began writing to condemned convicts in the
US after reading an article on prison pen friends in a magazine. One of the
men to whom she wrote had been found guilty of murdering an elderly person
in Texas, a crime that he always denied. To protect Jenny’s identity, we
will call him John.
“I had been writing to John for some time when he told me he was afraid there
would be no one there for him at the end,” Jenny says. “He asked if I would
consider being there for his lethal injection. Well, it took me by surprise.
I discussed it with my family and thought long and hard and, after about a
week, I wrote to him at the Polunsky Unit — that’s Texas’s death row in
Livingston — and said I would. It wasn’t explicitly mentioned again, but
every now and then he’d write: ‘Do you remember your promise?’ And I’d write
back: ‘Yes’.”
According to the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center, there were
3,297 people on death row in January. Although no precise figures are
available, it is thought that more than 2,500 Britons, at least 80 per cent
of them women, have a convicted American pen friend, most of whom are
convicted murderers.
Thirty-five of the 50 states in the US use the death penalty and since 1976,
when it was reintroduced after a brief hiatus, 1,178 people have been
executed. By the time you read this, that figure will probably be out of
date. Four people are scheduled to be killed this month in Texas alone.
The Lone Star state has executed more than any other (442 since 1976). Before
John’s execution, Jenny was able to spend time with him at Polunsky. “We
laughed a lot and he spent time making me feel less awkward about the
situation. There was a lot of uncomfortable small talk, but he seemed calm.
Then, at noon, two guards walked up behind him and he must have seen the
look on my face because he said: ‘They’re here, aren’t they?’”
While John was taken to the Walls Unit in Huntsville, 45 minutes away, to be
prepared for the execution, Jenny was escorted to the chaplain’s house. They
were allowed to speak with each other by phone for the rest of the day. “It
is difficult to know what to say,” Jenny says. “There tends to be a lot of
cheerful kidology. Frankly, it was unbearable. Then they told him to get off
the phone and he said: ‘See you in 20 minutes’.”
After a walk to execution that “seems like miles”, Jenny found herself in a
tiny waiting room with plastic chairs and vending machines. Guards came in
to buy Coca-Cola and she remembers how incongruous it seemed for them to be
chatting and laughing. Finally, she was taken through “a palatial office”
with a picture of George W. Bush on the wall, then steered through a door
into a room with a glass window. On the other side of it, she says, “I saw a
table and John was strapped to it”.
Since the reintroduction of the death penalty, execution by lethal injection
has been the most popular method, used on 1,002 occasions; the remainder by
electrocution, gassing, hanging and firing squad.
Three chemicals are used in the lethal injection process. Sodium thiopental is
a barbiturate that is supposed to render the prisoner unconscious, although
many witnesses claim that it doesn’t always work. Pancuronium is a muscle
relaxant that causes paralysis, including of the diaphragm, so even if the
third chemical, potassium chloride, wasn’t used, this would most likely
cause death by asphyxiation. The third chemical causes death by cardiac
arrest.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice says that the cost of the drugs used
in lethal injection is $86 (£52). The real cost of killing an inmate varies
from state to state, but it isn’t cheap. During an average stay of 14 years
on death row, the cost, including one legal challenge after another, has
been estimated at up to $3 million an execution.
Unlike the Ohio child-killer Romell Broom, who was recently sent back to, and
remains, in his cell after jailers spent two hours trying to find a vein in
which to administer the lethal injection, John’s death was relatively quick.
(Doctors are not allowed to give lethal injections).
“There is a microphone above the prisoner’s head, so when he turns to try to
say something, it doesn’t pick up the sound and you can’t always hear him,”
Jenny says. “But he thanked all the people who had written to him and
supported him and he tried to smile at me and then he looked away. They put
the drugs into him and after a while there was a horrible gasping noise and
that was it.
“I remember going outside and feeling angry that the sun was shining and cars
were still going by and dogs were barking and prison officers were getting
into their vehicles and shouting ‘Bye, y’all’. Somehow I hadn’t expected
life to go on.”
Jenny insists that she had no romantic feelings towards John, but
organisations such as LifeLines and Human Writes, which facilitate pen
friendships with individuals and prisoners, face a battle against the
stereotype of love-lorn women drooling over muscle-bound inmates.There is no
denying, however, that romances occur. One British death row bride, now in
her forties, married a condemned prisoner 15 years ago — even though she
knew he had killed a woman. “A friend of mine introduced me to him as a pen
friend and I began writing,” she says. “I found his letters fascinating and
I went to visit him, and then everything changed. I found him attractive and
I remember leaving and thinking ‘This can’t be right’.”
The murderer proposed and, after discussions with her family, she accepted.
“We were married in the prison chapel,” she says. “I wasn’t in a wedding
dress and the marriage was never consummated but it lasted almost a decade
before I divorced him. We would speakthe phonewrite to each other, but
looking back I must have needed certifying. I am a level-headed person — not
a Catherine Tate-type at all — but I somehow got drawn in.”
She divorced the killer after finding out that he had advertised for other
women on a prison penpal website.
Kay Murphy, 66, the spokeswoman for Human Writes, says: “Of course, no one can
determine what will happen when two adults begin corresponding, but for the
vast majority forming that kind of relationship is simply unthinkable.”
Murphy, a former advice worker and great-grandmother, wanted to get involved
in care or charity work that she could do from home when she retired. She
has since helped several pen friends and is the group’s co-ordinator for
Kentucky (there is a co-ordinator for each state).
“You mostly write about everyday life and let the prisoners know that they’re
not forgotten,” Murphy says. “I wrote to one chap every month for about four
years and got nothing back. Then I got a letter — he was in McAlester State
Penitentiary in Oklahoma — and he said he hadn’t replied because he was
depressed and ashamed of what he had done and assumed everyone must hate
him. He said I was the only person in the world who seemed to care.” In
common with all death row pen friends, Murphy remains non-judgmental and
stresses that she understands that on the other side is a victim and his or
her family. At each annual meeting of the group, two candles are lit: one
for executed prisoners, one for their victims. The group says that it
operates in the knowledge that victims’ families are given support from
other quarters. Members don’t raise money for prisoners or their families.
“We occasionally send money orders for a few pounds so that inmates can
buy writing paper and stamps,” Murphy says. “They do sometimes try it on. I
had one who asked me for money for a TV. I wrote back that we were just
ordinary working people and had no money to spare. Later, I sent him a few
pounds for paper, pens and stamps. He wrote back and said I should make sure
I had paid all my bills before I ever sent him any more money. To me, that
was a sign of character blossoming.”
When a prisoner is executed, it can be traumatic for the pen friend. In
September last year, Jessie James Cummings — Murphy’s most prolific
correspondent — was executed for the murder of his sister and niece (he
claimed that he was innocent until the end but, again, this is irrelevant).
“Human Writes has three counsellors who help people if they are affected by
executions,” Murphy says. “It was very traumatic after Jessie’s death, but
then a network of people emerged who had been writing to him from Italy,
England, Germany and Australia. We decided to contribute money so that he
could get a decent burial.
“People ask why we do this and some won’t understand. But it is about showing
the most wretched in society that people can care. Some of these people have
never had a proper home, or loving parents. They may have been caught up in
poverty, gang warfare or drugs. They may never have had an education or been
taught to write, but when they want to improve, when they learn to feel
remorse, then they can earn your respect and even admiration.”
You get the impression that Jenny may never truly get over the death of her
friend — because that is what he was, a friend whom she believed was
innocent. But she can find comfort in the last letter that he wrote to her:
“I’ll stop writing now as it looks as though I’ll be seeing you tomorrow,
both in the morning and then again later for my final journey. I’ll get
through this. Take care through life and thank you for listening to me for
all these years and for the friendship and strength you’ve given me, even to
the very end. May God bless you with eternal joy. You’ve touched my life
more than you’ll ever know.”
Details have been changed to protect identities.
humanwrites.org lifelines-uk.org
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