Bloodsworth (3 page)

But by April 1993 the results were long overdue. It had been eight months since the lab had first received the evidence and five long months since the semen had been discovered. Kirk was scared and anxious. He called Morin almost daily. Morin tried to calm him, to reassure him. With each passing week, though, Morin had grown more worried himself. What test could possibly take so long to complete? Had the semen stain even yielded a testable DNA sample? Would the results ever come? And what might they show?

It was the telephone number of Dr. Edward Blake that Morin dialed late on the afternoon of April 27, 1993. He'd run out of excuses to give Kirk, run out of his own wick of patience. The phone rang just once. Morin was taken aback when Dr. Blake answered it personally. Morin introduced himself. He asked about the Kirk Bloodsworth test results.

“Bloodsworth?” he heard Dr. Blake say. “Bloodsworth? Yes, Bloodsworth . . . Yes, yes, I have him right here.” Morin could hear Blake rustling through papers on the other end of the line. The DNA scientist seemed to take forever. Morin closed his eyes, held his breath, and waited.

A
T ALMOST THE SAME MOMENT
, about fifty miles away, Kirk Bloodsworth entered a room in the Maryland Penitentiary designated as the prison library. He'd been lifting weights with Stanley Norris, known as Bozo because he had hair like the clown's, and Big Tony, who had once been a Hell's Angel and could bench press 500 pounds. Kirk, himself, had pressed 380 that day. He was burly, overweight from the prison food, wore a bandanna around his head and his dark sunglasses. His faded purple T-shirt was damp with sweat from his workout. On his way to the library, he'd been listening to his Walkman radio through the earphones. The disc jockey had been playing hard rock and heavy metal hits from the past. Kirk had listened to one of his favorites, Guns N' Roses playing “Welcome to the Jungle.” Music that touched on his world, that sought to reflect or capture his mean existence, had become an important source of both solace and escape in the prison. A few years before, when inmates had rioted and taken over Dormitory C, near where his cell was located, and he'd heard the incessant screams of an inmate who was beaten and raped sixteen successive times, he'd played a Guns N' Roses tape over and over to drown out the terrible sound.

The DJ that afternoon followed up with a song by Ozzy Osbourne, known as the grandfather of heavy metal. The song was called “Mama, I'm Coming Home.” Hearing it, Kirk had stopped in his tracks and leaned against the tier wall. Kirk considered himself a religious man, but in a waterman's way—drinking, smoking pot, womanizing—these were just part of his life as a Chesapeake Bay crabber. Along with his faith in God, he also believed in portents, dreams, and mysticism. He'd been born on Halloween and was convinced that spirits inhabited an invisible world connected to this one. In prison he'd converted from Protestant to Catholic. He liked the ritual, the symbolism, the mystical side of the Catholic Church. Hearing Ozzy Osbourne that afternoon sing “Mama, I'm Coming Home” gave him a jolt. He had always liked and admired Osbourne's music. He'd only heard this song a few times, but its refrain was the wish and hope of his life. Kirk felt it might be a sign. Hearing the song made him both hopeful and afraid.

Once in the library, Kirk sat at a steel table in the center of a small windowless room around which a couple of hundred books were stacked on institutional shelving crumbling with rust. The books were all secondhand, old law books mostly, some dime store mysteries, some true crime accounts; a few were hardbacks with their covers still intact but most looked ragged and dog-eared. Kirk had spent thousands of hours in this room. He believed that he had read nearly every book on the shelves. For a waterman's son, he thought to himself humorlessly, he'd become damn well read.

He had entered the library to begin drafting yet another of the hundreds of letters he still wrote and sent out regularly protesting his innocence in the crime of raping and murdering Dawn Venice Hamilton. He signed each and every one “Kirk Bloodsworth—A.I.M.—An Innocent Man.” He set a sheet of paper on the table and started writing a letter, this one to Lou Ferrigno, the Incredible Hulk. Kirk tried to write to everyone he admired. He began each
letter with a description of who he was and where he'd come from. Halfway through this letter he stopped and set the pen down. Writing about his past made him think of his mother, Jeanette. Kirk had lost her to a massive heart attack three months earlier, the day of President Clinton's first inauguration. Kirk had been taken—in handcuffs, a waist chain, and leg irons—to view her body for five minutes alone in a closed room, though he had been refused permission to attend her funeral. He'd convinced himself that she'd died of a broken heart over what had happened to her son, over what he'd gotten himself into. He thought of her as his angel and knew if spirits ever helped people, she would help him. Since her death, he'd thought of her constantly, missing her with a physical ache. He could see her there, in their home in the small town of Cambridge, Maryland, where he grew up. He shut his eyes to picture her more clearly. And then without meaning to, he drifted off.

Kirk would remember later that he dreamed that day of himself as a boy, free on the marsh, running his skiff on a silver river, a dream that was both momentarily peaceful yet troubling. In the dream he was at first small, just five or so, wearing the snowsuit his mother had sewn for him and helping his father tong for oysters on the broad Choptank River. The near shore was pocked with ice and foam, the gray green waves chased by the wind, and his father smiling as the boy culled the oysters, his father strong and the white workboat safe and sturdy. Then he was maybe ten and was in cutoff waders, sloughing through the gum thickets off Blackwater Marsh, setting his muskrat traps in the predawn quiet, the air expectant, the horizon glowing lilac in the flat oval of his water-bound world, the waves lapping the marsh grass, the first sound of the birds. And then he was nearly full size, the year he first started crabbing. He saw his silhouette in the mist, rowing a boat on water that was flat and smoky. His mother was there standing on a dock. She waved to him, then beckoned. His dream was interrupted by a
tug on his arm. A prison guard, Sergeant Cooley Hall, stood over him.

Sergeant Hall, a dark Trinidadian with a wide grin and a penchant for whistling, had always been friendly to Kirk. Hall had a message for him written on a piece of scrap paper. He waited for Kirk to wake fully and adjust himself and then he handed it to him. It was from Kirk's lawyer, and it was marked urgent. Kirk focused more closely. He read the word
urgent
again and read that Bob Morin wanted him to call immediately. Kirk's eyes opened wide and he sat up straight. He looked at Hall, then back at the message. Then he placed a hand over his face to hide his emotion, to keep himself from shaking.

Kirk Bloodsworth was thirty-two years old and would ever after remember the date and the time he got that message. The offspring of generations of Chesapeake Bay watermen, he'd grown up crabbing and fishing the rivers and creeks on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and trapping the Dorchester marshes, as befit the descendant of an independent, free, and proud breed. His ancestors had emigrated to Maryland from Great Britain and Ireland in the 1600s and an island in the Chesapeake Bay just below Cambridge, Maryland—Bloodsworth Island—had been named for his forbearers. A high school graduate, he'd been a marine and a champion discus thrower. But for the past nine years he had lived a nightmare that he could not understand, account for, or articulate.

For nine years of his life he'd been locked up in prison, most of it in the hellhole known as the South Wing of the Maryland Penitentiary—nine years of eating inedible food, shivering in a dim cold cell in the winter or sweltering in what became an unventilated sweatbox in the summer; nine years of being cursed as a child rapist and killer, of being threatened daily by other inmates, of having to lift weights with the Pagans and the Hell's Angels in order to stay
fit and able to fight for survival in the shower, of having to fend off shanks and clubs made of batteries crammed into socks, of hearing at night toothbrushes being sharpened into knives on the prison floor; worst of all, nine years of being despised by the outside world, of being mistrusted by his family, of being embarrassed about what he'd become and the way he had to live. Nine years of this before the afternoon Sergeant Hall tapped him on the shoulder and gave him the message.

The first time Kirk had met Sergeant Cooley Hall, back in 1985, he'd told him that he was being held hostage, that Hall was holding an innocent man. When Hall heard this he laughed aloud. He had a deep bass laugh that he seemed to exhale like a shout. He was one of the few people who Kirk ever heard laugh inside the prison. “Everyone in the pen is innocent, mon, don't you know?” Hall had told him. “You just one more innocent lamb, Mister Bloodmon. One more innocent lamb . . .” And he had continued to laugh as he walked away. But Kirk had reminded Hall nearly every day of the fact that he was innocent and that he was being held hostage. “You know you got an innocent man, here?” Kirk would say when Hall would walk with him to the commissary. “You holding an innocent man hostage, now. I just want you to know it.” Sometimes Hall, in that accent of his, would say quickly, “No, no, no! I don't hold you nowhere! Da' government got you, not me.” Kirk had repeated his claim of innocence, though, so often and so regularly through the years, that Hall had stopped laughing about it and stopped denying it. And then Kirk had stopped repeating it. It had become an unspoken token between them. Hall was just one of many in the prison who thought Kirk might be speaking the truth.

While Hall had been standing there, the blood had drained from Kirk's face as he'd reread the piece of scrap paper, then stared at it as if mesmerized. Kirk's hand trembled as he asked Hall if he could
use the phone. Hall smiled. His grin was gleaming white against his dark face. “Sure, mon,” he said. “Maybe your crab boat done finally come in this time, Mister Bloodmon.”

Kirk could hardly see as he walked down the tier. The world seemed to squeeze itself into one small circle of gray, the place he had to step next. He rounded the corner, got to the phone, dialed the operator, and asked to make a collect call. He had the number memorized. He'd called it enough. The telephone rang and rang and finally Bob Morin's secretary answered. When Bob Morin got on the phone Kirk asked him for the test results.

“How are you, Kirk?” Bob asked first.

“For christsakes, Bob, tell me the goddamn news.”

Morin paused.

“Please, Bob. What did the test say? It is back, ain't it?”

“It came back, Kirk, yes.”

“Well, what did it say?” Kirk braced himself. His life had become one terrible disappointment after another.

“The sperm stain on Dawn's underpants, though small, was good enough to use. The new test worked, Kirk.” Morin couldn't hide his own emotion. His voice was cracking. “They found the DNA, Kirk. The DNA said it couldn't have been you. You're excluded. The man who raped and killed that little girl could not have been you.” Morin felt the tears well up in his own eyes. “The DNA said it's not you,” he repeated.

Time passed. Several seconds of silence. “Well, I told you so, didn't I!” Kirk finally shouted into the phone. He felt a rush of blood. “Goddamn it, of course it ain't me! Didn't I tell you? Ain't I been telling you?” Kirk felt a flood sweep through his head. “Didn't I tell you? Over and over? But no one believed me? Didn't I . . .” Kirk stopped speaking because he realized that his hand shook so hard he could barely hold the phone. He felt lost suddenly and began to cry. He tried to control himself. Down the tier an inmate had
stopped his mopping and was watching. Kirk had learned never to show weakness in front of other inmates in the prison. He tried to hold the phone still and steady to his ear and speak again. “Didn't I tell you?” And then he couldn't anymore. He just broke up, let the phone drop, and began to weep both with shame and without shame, covering his face to hide himself at first and then just letting himself be seen. Down the row of cages, three or four more inmates were peering out their cell doors watching him. Kirk no longer cared. The phone dangled on its aluminum cord. He stood then and whispered, “It's over, it's over . . .” Then he repeated it louder to no one in particular: “It's finally over, ain't it?” Then he raised up on tiptoes, threw his hands high in the air mimicking a touchdown, and started screaming it: “Sweet Jesus, it's over! It's goddamn over, Bob!” He leaned down and yelled it into the dangling phone. “It's over, Bob! This is fucking great! It's finally over, man!” He raised up on tiptoe again, his arms stretched high. Tears streamed down his face. He started hopping in place, then started running down the tier, his arms still up, turning one way and then another, jumping, crying and screaming. “It's over! It's over!” He kept hollering it. “The DNA says it ain't me! It ain't me! The DNA says it ain't me. It's over . . .”

Bob Morin could hear all this through the phone. As he listened, he shivered with emotion. What would happen next to Kirk, how long would it take to actually free him, would the real killer ever be caught? He bowed his head thinking about how such an injustice could occur.

Sergeant Cooley Hall was not surprised. He just leaned back against the tier wall shaking his head and whistling over this strange inmate, his friend, this Mister Bloodmon, in whom he'd come to believe.

May the bad not kill the good

Nor the good kill the bad

I am a poet, without any bias,

I say without doubt or hesitation

There are no good assassins.

—P
ABLO
N
ERUDA