Death Sentence (17 page)

He found her on her bed in her underwear, feet and hands bound with duct tape, another slash of tape across her mouth, he told the officer.

Detective Benson Phillips arrived a few minutes later and questioned Velma. She had been crying, and she fought back tears while he pried information from her.

She had gone to take a shower that morning, she said, and as she stepped into the bathroom, a man tossed a towel over her head and forced her back to the bedroom. He bound and gagged her as she begged him not to hurt her. He left her there and departed. Later, she passed out.

She didn’t see her assailant, couldn’t identify him.

Did he say anything?

Nothing.

Neither had he molested her sexually.

Had he hit her, choked her, hurt her? Was anything missing? Had she seen or heard anybody inside before she went to the bathroom?

No to all.

Phillips checked the trailer and could find no signs of forced entry. How could somebody have gotten in?

Maybe with a key, Velma suggested. An earlier tenant perhaps. She didn’t know.

But why would somebody lurk inside just to bind and gag her without doing any further harm or stealing anything? It made no sense, and Velma could offer no explanation. Phillips doubted that a crime had been committed. He suspected that Velma had bound herself, and he thought he knew why when he noticed how solicitous and reassuring Stuart Taylor was being. “You’re not staying another night in this trailer,” Phillips heard him say. “You’re going home with me.”

Both Ronnie and Pam were shocked when they learned that Velma had moved into Stuart’s small white house on a country road near St. Pauls, ten miles north of Lumberton. They couldn’t imagine their mother living with a man out of wedlock. How would she explain that at the Pentecostal Holiness Church?

Velma clearly was concerned about that as well, and she asked Ronnie what he thought when she next saw him. Times change, he told her. If she felt comfortable, she shouldn’t worry about what others thought.

Later Velma would say that she and Stuart argued almost from the moment they began living together, usually about his drinking, which became more open and frequent after she moved in. Several times she felt threatened enough to call Pam and ask her or Kirby to come and get her, but every time she left, Stuart soon showed up, asking her to come back. She always returned.

Among the belongings that Velma had taken to Stuart’s house were several letters she had received from acquaintances she made in prison. Velma often drove Stuart’s truck to work, and one morning she came home to find him holding one of the letters and demanding to know why she hadn’t told him she’d been in prison. Because she didn’t want him to know, she said. She didn’t want anybody to know. She was ashamed of it. And furthermore, she didn’t like him snooping in her possessions; she had a right to some privacy. It was his house, he said, and he had a right to go through whatever was in it. He had a right, too, he claimed, to know that the woman he was planning to marry had been in prison. Velma realized that he had been drinking and an argument was inevitable.

From that point, she later said, every time they argued. no matter the reason, he always brought up her prison time, always found a way to use it against her.

Other ominous signs were also quick to appear. Soon after moving in with Stuart Velma wrote two checks to herself on his account without telling him, one for $100, the other for $95, and used the money to pay bills and buy prescriptions. When Stuart’s bank statement came in December, he discovered the forged checks and another argument ensued. He demanded immediate repayment, Velma later claimed. If she didn’t pay, he would turn the checks over to the police and have her returned to prison. She pleaded with him, promised to pay back the money, she later said. She went to work distressed that night, and the next morning, instead of returning to Stuart’s house, she went to Pam’s apartment.

Stuart showed up before noon, banging on the glass door.

“I think he was drinking,” Velma later recalled. “I was asleep, and when I woke up he was there. He was upset and wanting to talk. He threatened me.”

Later Alice would say that after her father learned about the checks and Velma’s past, he cancelled his wedding plans, although Velma continued to wear her engagement ring. He wouldn’t say that he would never see Velma again, he told his daughter—he was, after all, a man. But he would never marry her, he said. Never.

Despite his seeming resolve, Stuart asked Velma to come back soon afterward. Each seemed unable to stay away from the other. Later, Velma would say that Stuart had forgiven her and told her to forget about the checks. But early in January another fight erupted.

On a Saturday morning Velma turned up unexpectedly at Ronnie’s apartment. She was upset, and she obviously had taken more of her medicine than usual. She had left Stuart, she told her son, and was never going back. She had no place to live. She couldn’t keep moving in and out with Pam. Kirby was getting fed up with it. Couldn’t she stay with him and Joanna for a while?

Ronnie and Joanna had struggles enough in their marriage without adding his mother to the mix. For a few moments he said nothing. Then words came from his mouth that he later said were among the hardest he’d ever spoken.

“Mama, I can’t let you do that.”

Velma looked shocked. She started crying. Ronnie moved to put his arm around her.

“If it was just me,” he said, “it would be different. But I’ve got Joanna and Michael to think about. I can’t do that to them. I’m gone a lot. Joanna can’t look after you and Michael, too. I can’t put that kind of burden on her.”

“She won’t have to look after me,” Velma said, sobbing. “I can help out.”

Ronnie reminded her of the time he and Joanna had gone out one night and left her to tend Michael, who was now twenty months old. They had returned to find her passed out on the couch and Michael crying in his crib. Pam and Kirby had had a similar experience with her and Beverly.

“You know how you are with that medicine,” Ronnie said.

“I won’t take too much medicine,” she said plaintively.

“Mama, I can’t trust you not to do that. I wish I could.”

Velma pleaded, but Ronnie held firm. “It doesn’t matter what you say, you’re not going to stay here,” he said.

He promised to help her find a place.

“I know you’re my mother,” he told her, “but I’ve got a family of my own now, and I’ve got to put them first.”

“Fine, if that’s the way you feel,” Velma said, her anger suddenly flaring. “I just can’t believe you’re treating me like this.”

She whirled and was out the door, then turned and, saying nothing more, gave Ronnie a look he would never forget.

“It was a mean, mean look,” he later recalled, “real angry, unlike any I’ve ever seen before.”

As Ronnie watched his mother drive away in Pam’s car, he was overcome by guilt. He had promised her that she always could count on him, and now he had turned her away.

Pam took her mother back in, and on Wednesday, January 25, Velma entered Southeastern Hospital for minor surgery. She had been complaining of pain in her left shoulder and an enlargement of her left breast. A reduction mammoplasty was performed.

Velma was released from the hospital on Saturday with new prescriptions for painkillers. She had called Stuart before going to the hospital to tell him about the operation, and he came for her and took her home with him.

Velma was scheduled for a checkup on Tuesday morning, January 31, and Stuart drove her to Lumberton. After leaving the doctor’s office, they stopped at Eckerd’s Drugs to get a prescription filled. While they waited, Stuart went to look at the fishing tackle. Velma picked up a can of hairspray and a few other items.

As they were leaving, Stuart suggested that they drop by Alice’s house. He wanted to see her baby. Alice suffered from multiple sclerosis and wore a steel brace on one leg. Her pregnancy had been difficult, but she had delivered a healthy son, William Norman Storms IV, her first child, on October 9.

Alice knew that her father and Velma had broken up again, and she had thought that it might be permanent this time.

“Look who I found,” Stuart announced when he got to his daughter’s house, and Alice was surprised to see Velma smiling behind him.

Alice had the flu, was feeling terrible, but she sat to chat. Both Stuart and Velma held the baby. Alice showed off snapshots, and that led to looking at old family photos and reminiscing. Velma laughed and told Stuart she wanted to see his “dead” picture. He’d told her about it, but she’d never seen it.

At a family gathering when Alice had her camera out, her father, as a joke, had stretched out on the couch, folded his hands across his chest and closed his eyes as if he were laid out in a coffin. Get a picture of him like this, he told Alice, he’d always wanted to see what he would look like dead.

Now Alice fetched the photo for Velma, and they all laughed about it, although Alice soon would view the incident in a totally different light.

A nationally known evangelist, Rex Humbard, was holding a crusade in Fayetteville, and Stuart had promised that he would take Velma to hear him that night. A little after five, he put on his good clothes and got ready to drive the twenty miles to Fayetteville. He had a beer before supper, but Velma didn’t object. After eating, they drove to the Cumberland County Civic Center. Soon after the service began, Stuart said that he was feeling sick—maybe it was something he ate. Within a half hour, he needed to go outside. Don’t worry, he told her; stay until the service is over, but he was going to the truck and lie down.

Stuart was having such severe pains that Velma had to drive home. Before they got there, she had to stop so he could vomit.

By 2:30 in the morning, Stuart was so sick that Velma called Alice’s house. Her husband, Bill, answered groggily, and Velma told him she hated to call at such an hour but she thought they ought to know that Stuart was very sick. She didn’t know if it was worth bothering Alice. She knew Alice was sick herself.

A short time later, Alice called for details. Did she need to come? No, honey, Velma told her, no sense in coming out in the cold in your condition. She was on leave from work because of her surgery, so she could care for him. He probably just had the same flu Alice had.

If he gets worse, Alice told her, do whatever you can to get him to the doctor. Her father hated doctors, and he had to be nearly dying before anybody could convince him to see one.

Alice called Velma again as soon as she got up the next morning. Stuart was no better. He hadn’t eaten anything, hadn’t slept at all. But he didn’t want to go to the doctor. Velma assured Alice that she was looking after him and would call if any problems developed.

Later in the morning, Velma appeared at the home of Stuart’s good friend and neighbor. Sonny Johnson. Johnson had known Stuart for forty years and had lived only a hundred yards away for the past fifteen. During quail season they hunted together almost every pretty day.

On Monday the two friends had gone together to check their tobacco beds. Soon the seeds would be sprouting. The young plants would grow under white muslin until the weather was warmer and they could be set in the fields. Both men looked forward to spring when they could get back to the fields. Stuart had been fine when they had separated that day.

Now Velma was telling Johnson that Stuart was sick and wanted to see him.

“I went down and he looked terrible,” Johnson later told
Fayetteville Times
reporter Dennis Patterson. “Had a wash basin there by the bed and he was throwing up and seemed real weak. He asked me if I’d take care of his pigs for him till he got over this touch of flu he had.”

Alice called several more times Wednesday to check on her father, always to be told by Velma that there was little change.

At 9:30 Thursday morning, a cold and rainy day, Velma and Stuart showed up at the emergency room at Southeastern Hospital in Lumberton. Stuart complained of pains in his chest, stomach, arms. He was dehydrated, his blood pressure low. The emergency room physician started him on intravenous fluids and vitamins. The doctor questioned Velma about his medical history. She knew of no previous illnesses, nothing chronic except his drinking. He was an alcoholic, she noted. The doctor questioned Stuart about his drinking. Stuart acknowledged it but said he hadn’t been drinking recently.

Velma called Alice from the emergency room, frightening her. Alice knew her father had to be desperately ill to go there. She was too sick to come to the hospital, but she called her brother Billy, who hurried over.

Stuart remained in the emergency room for nearly three hours while tests were conducted. When they were completed, the doctor came out to talk to Velma and Billy. His diagnosis was gastritis. He suspected it had been triggered by Stuart’s drinking. He prescribed Mylanta and lots of fluids and told Velma she could take him home.

Sonny Johnson came by to see him that afternoon. “He said he’d gone to the hospital and gotten a shot and some fluid,” he later recalled. “He was sitting up on the edge of the bed and smoking. I just stood in the doorway and talked to him because he thought it might be the Russian flu.”

When Alice called on Friday, Velma told her that Stuart was doing better. He was talking, sitting up some. He’d been able to go to the bathroom by himself. He hadn’t eaten anything yet, but he was thinking about it. He’d said he’d like to have some oyster stew.