Death Sentence (16 page)

John Henry Lee had hardly been sick a day in his life. He had farmed until he was seventy-five, and even at that age he boasted that he could outwork a twenty-five-year-old. At eighty he still rode his tractor and raised a big garden each year. He was planning to paint his house as soon as the weather warmed a little.

On Wednesday, April 27, only a couple of weeks after John Henry Lee had called the sheriff’s department about the forged check, Velma called Margie Pittman to tell her that her father was sick and vomiting. He was worse the next day, and Margie came to check on him. He thought it was something that would pass, but his daughter wasn’t so sure. If he hadn’t improved by the next morning, she said, she wanted Velma to take him to the doctor.

On Friday morning, before eight, Velma called an ambulance. The medics were unable to obtain a readable blood pressure as the ambulance sped to Southeastern Hospital.

John Henry spent four days in intensive care and gradually improved. His doctors had no idea what had caused his illness. A virus perhaps. He was released on May 2, weak, shaky and minus several pounds but thankful. His daughters came to the house that afternoon to celebrate his recovery. It was a warm day and they sat outside and talked. Velma served ice cream and Coke. The doctor had recommended soft foods and lots of liquids.

Throughout May, John Henry continued to be sick. For a few days he would be perfectly okay, then the vomiting, the diarrhea, the cramps, the cold sweats, would start again. His weight continued to drop drastically. His daughters were very grateful for the attentiveness that Velma showed him. She was so sweet to him, so caring. They felt themselves lucky that she was there.

On Friday, June 3, Velma called Margie just as she was about to leave work to tell her that her father was at the emergency room. She’d had to call an ambulance for him again. Her father’s condition was critical, Margie learned when she arrived at the hospital. The prognosis was not good.

Years later, Margie recalled a few moments of the time she spent with her father that night for
Fayetteville Times
reporter Priscilla Brown.

“It was late. He was blue up to here,” she said, drawing a line across her chest with her finger. “He was limp and cold, and I put my hand in his and said, ‘Daddy, squeeze my hand if you can hear me.’ He didn’t squeeze.

“Somewhere in the back of my mind I remembered the thing about eyes blinking. So I said, ‘Daddy, blink your eyes if you can hear me.’ His eyes were locked open in that—you know, that death stare. With the greatest effort, they came down so-o slowly. Then they flew open again.

“I said, ‘He can hear me! He can hear me!’ Frieda and the nurse were standing there. I leaned over him, and I said, ‘I love you, Daddy. I love you and the Lord loves you!’”

A short time later, at 1:55 Saturday morning, June 4, John Henry Lee died.

Velma was comforting to the family at the funeral, and they were particularly taken with the wreath she sent. It had feathered doves on it, winging toward heaven, one representing each member of the family. After the funeral the Lee daughters thanked Velma for the love and care she had shown their father. They gave her a small bonus and told her that they wanted her to continue to look after their mother. Velma agreed to stay.

A couple of weeks later, Velma saw a bright green pickup truck turn into the concrete drive of the Lee house. She thought she recognized it, and she did, a pleasant surprise. Stuart Taylor got out. It had been nearly eight months since Velma had seen him. She hurried to the door with a smile to greet her final victim.

9

Stuart Taylor was a true son of Robeson County. If it wasn’t in Robeson County, he didn’t want it or need it. The farthest he’d ever gone was to Washington, D.C., to visit one of his daughters, but he only went once. While he was there he slipped on ice and broke his arm.

Stuart had grown up on a tobacco farm in Robeson County, one of five children. His mother had died when he was five and he was reared by a stepmother. At eighteen he married Leola Bentley, who had grown up on a nearby farm. She was three years older. They settled in a three-room house on his daddy’s farm. Their first child, a daughter, Elizabeth Ann, was born three months after he turned nineteen. A son, Billy, followed fourteen months later. A second daughter, Alice, came two years after that.

Stuart was thirty when he got his first motor vehicle in 1951, an old Chevy pickup. Not until 1954 did he move his family out of the tiny, primitive house in which they had lived for fifteen years. The new house was bigger and nicer, with three bedrooms, but it had no bathroom. Stuart didn’t think a toilet should be in the same structure where food was cooked, and his children would all be teenagers before he relinquished that point.

That same year, he took an eleven-year-old nephew, Marvin Bentley, into the family and made him a second son.

Stuart was a man devoted to family, his children later would say. Except for hunting, fishing and farming, he had no other interests. As his children grew older and moved away he doted on his wife. When she developed kidney disease and died at fifty-two on April 11, 1970, he was devastated.

“When my mom passed away, he fell to pieces,” his daughter Alice later would say. “Everything just crashed. I don’t think there ever was a love like he had for my mom. My mom was his life. My daddy didn’t even know where his underwear was. He didn’t cook. Mom took care of him. And he didn’t adapt to change too well. Daddy was the most unhappy person I’ve ever seen after my mom’s death.”

Leola never allowed alcohol in her house, but Stuart enjoyed drinking now and then. A few times a year he would go off hunting or fishing with buddies and drink his fill, but he never touched a drop the rest of the time. After Leola died, though, he sometimes drank for two or three weeks without letup.

Within six months of his wife’s death, Stuart went to Dillon, South Carolina, and married a woman he’d known most of his life. His children saw it as an act of desperation, a hopeless attempt to replace the love and contentment he had known with their mother, and they were soon proved right. Within six months, the second wife was gone for good.

Stuart always had an exuberance for life. He was a man who rose singing every morning. He loved to pull practical jokes and tease his children. But that spirit was now gone, and as he sank deeper into loneliness and despair, his drinking binges grew longer and more frequent, causing his children great concern.

Several years after his divorce, Stuart’s children saw signs that he was beginning to find some purpose in life again. He was dating the widow of an old friend, drinking less, and his children began to see the father they always had known. They were pleased when he married for the third time in 1975, hopeful that his loneliness and unhappiness might now be behind him. But that union, too, soon proved volatile and fraught with separations. And now it had come to an end.

Velma was unaware of this when she greeted Stuart at the Lee house on a June day in 1977. She really knew very little about him, had no idea even that he drank, despite having gone out with him several times the previous fall. Now they caught up on the months that had passed since. Stuart told her his marriage was over. Official separation papers had been filed in May. His divorce would be final a year from that day. Velma enjoyed his visit, and before he left, he told her he’d like to see her again. She’d like that, Velma said.

Stuart showed up again the next day. And the day after that. And every day for nearly three weeks. Several times Record Lee granted Velma time to go to supper with him. Then suddenly Stuart stopped coming. Velma heard nothing. When she called his house, she got no answer. After several days with no word, Velma called his stepmother.

Stuart wasn’t well, his stepmother said.

Velma said she hoped it wasn’t anything serious.

Well, to tell the truth, said his stepmother, Stuart was on one of his drinking binges.

That, Velma later would say, was the first she’d heard of Stuart’s drinking problem.

Within a few days Stuart showed up, acting as if there’d been no break. He made no mention of his absence. Velma said nothing about his drinking.

By late summer, Velma was spending all of her weekends off with Stuart. “We would go on trips,” she wrote two years later. “We would spend our nights together in a motel. But I kept this quiet. No one knew this was going on. I was attending church, and I mean regular, too. I was playing the role again of an ideal church member. The wrongs I was doing, I kept quiet, very quiet.”

Although Velma didn’t want others to know of her trysts with Stuart, both he and she were happily telling others of their relationship. He had introduced her to his family, and she took him to meet hers.

Velma’s brother Jesse was living then in Hamlet, fifty miles west of Lumberton. His brothers John and Tyrone were visiting one Saturday afternoon when Velma arrived unexpectedly with Stuart. Her brothers had heard that Velma had a new boyfriend, but none had met him. They stood in the yard and talked. Stuart seemed a nice enough fellow, and Velma’s brothers had to wonder if he knew what he was getting into. They were aware of Velma’s many problems, and they knew, too, that every man she’d had anything to do with had come to a tragic end.

“He’d better watch it,” Jesse remarked drolly to his brothers as Stuart and Velma departed, smiling and waving, “he might be next.”

Stuart’s friends knew that he was serious about Velma when they found out that he was taking her to gospel singings and even attending church with her. They couldn’t believe it. They’d never known Stuart to go to church. “Going out with my Christian woman tonight,” he’d tell them, laughing.

Early in September, Record Lee fell ill, vomiting, her stomach cramping. Velma called Margie Pittman, who took her mother to the emergency room. Velma couldn’t take her because she had destroyed the Lees’ Cadillac when she ran a stop sign and was hit by another car while coming back from church. Not until much later would Record’s daughters learn that their mother, like their father, had been poisoned. But they had no reason to be suspicious when Velma told them soon after Record got out of the hospital that she could no longer care for their mother.

Had Velma become concerned that she was pushing her luck and might be caught? Later, she would never admit to poisoning Record Lee. At the time, she said that she quit the job because she found staying with others too confining and she didn’t want to do that kind of work anymore. Ronnie thought there was another reason: that she wanted to have more time with Stuart Taylor.

Velma rented a trailer in the same park where Pam and Ronnie once lived and within a month she had found a job on the third shift at United Care, a nursing home within walking distance. Joanna was on the administrative staff and suggested she apply.

Before Velma started to work at the end of October, Ronnie stopped by for a visit. His mother met him smiling and holding out her left hand. On it was a diamond engagement ring.

“Are you sure about this?” he asked.

She was.

Ronnie had never seen Stuart drinking, or even under the influence of alcohol, but his mother had told him about his binges and he knew that they had argued about it. If she could not abide his father’s drinking, if she had fought with Al Smith over his, how could she expect to live with a man who might regularly disappear on week-long drunks? But Ronnie didn’t say that.

“What about his drinking?” he asked.

She was working on that, she said. She was sure he could overcome it. He went days, even weeks without touching a drop. Didn’t that prove that he didn’t need it?

“Does he know how much medicine you take?” Ronnie asked.

She resented the question, telling Ronnie she was taking no more than she had to have. Hadn’t she been proving that she could control it? Hadn’t it been nearly two years since she’d been hospitalized with an overdose?

Ronnie acknowledged that was true, and he was proud of her, but he pressed on anyway. Did Stuart know how much medicine she had to have?

He knew she took some, she said defensively, but she hadn’t told him about the amounts or how long she had been taking it.

Ronnie was wary of this proposed marriage and didn’t hesitate to say so. “You just need to be careful,” he said. “Take your time. Make sure.”

It would not come about until May, when Stuart’s divorce became final, she told him. They’d have plenty of time before then to deal with any problems.

“Do you love him?” Ronnie asked.

She did, she said, but in only a few years she would admit that had been a lie. “Deep down inside I never really cared for him,” she would say. “I never felt close to him at all. I can’t comprehend why I wanted to be with him. Sometimes we’re just lonely. Somebody to talk to, you know.”

Whether she loved him or not, she clearly intended to get herself moved into his house. Velma got off work at seven in the morning. She usually walked home, showered, and slept until mid-afternoon when Stuart would come by. Early in November, Kirby stopped to check on her on his way to work one morning. She had just arrived home and seemed fine. He was pleased that he would be able to give Pam a good report.

But at a little before five that afternoon, a call came to the Lumberton Police Department about an assault at Rowan Trailer Park. A uniformed officer was the first to reach Velma’s trailer. He was met by a man who identified himself as Stuart Taylor. Stuart had gotten no response to his knock when he arrived to see Velma. He knew she should be there, and when he tried the unlocked door and called Velma’s name he heard moans from her bedroom.