Death Sentence (20 page)

Reporters had discovered that Velma had worked at a nursing home, where an official called her “very neat, conscientious, intelligent, a good, dependable, capable worker,” while being careful to emphasize that no questionable deaths had occurred during her employment. Reporters also had learned that Velma previously had worked for John Henry and Record Lee and for Montgomery and Dollie Edwards, but no officials would acknowledge any of the other deaths to which Velma might be linked.

That morning, Velma was taken to the hospital in Raleigh, and late that afternoon Joe Freeman Britt drove through a blinding rainstorm to Fayetteville to get Superior Court Judge Maurice Braswell to sign exhumation orders.

The story grew daily in the newspapers for the rest of the week, anonymous courthouse sources being the most widely quoted, and TV crews chased futilely after Joe Freeman Britt, who refused all comment.

On a chilly Saturday morning, work crews, funeral home employees, sheriff’s deputies and medical examiners descended with backhoes, shovels and hearses on two cemeteries in Robeson County and a third in Fayetteville, and, under the watchful eyes of Page Hudson and Joe Freeman Britt, unearthed the graves of Lillie Bullard, Dollie Edwards and John Henry Lee. The three bodies were taken to the University of North Carolina Medical Center in Chapel Hill.

On Sunday morning, the
Robesonian
offered no news about the Velma Barfield case for the first time since Tuesday, but it did contain two stories noting the beginning of National Poison Prevention Week.

The barrage of reports about their mother’s case on radio, TV and in newspapers made Ronnie and Pam want to hide, yet even worse were the tormenting questions thrust upon them by the revelations that came with their mother’s arrest.

Why had he not seen? Ronnie kept asking himself. It was he, after all, who had thought himself closer to his mother than anyone else. How could she have looked him right in the eye and lied to him? He had always trusted her so completely, had been so devoted to her. How could she have fooled him so? Had she done so all of his life? Were there signs that he had not recognized that might have led him to intervene in some way, to have stopped this nightmare before it started?

As he wrestled with these questions, he had trouble sleeping. When he did sleep, he was sometimes jerked awake by disturbing dreams—dreams of fire.

Despite his questions and his haunting dreams, Ronnie remained determined to support his mother and do whatever he could to save her.

“I knew I’d be behind my mom, probably even if it wrecked my marriage,” he later would recall. “I knew I’d be behind her whatever it took.”

Pam, like Velma’s brothers and sisters, found the knowledge that Velma had killed Lillie particularly difficult to handle. Accepting her grandmother’s death had been hard enough, but to know that the life of such a gentle and loving spirit had been taken by her own daughter was almost more than heart and mind could bear.

Pam received an even more troubling shock when Kirby reminded her of the time three weeks earlier when they both had been sick. Her mother had been staying with them again after Stuart’s death, and she had been reverting to old patterns, taking her medicines in greater quantities than before. One afternoon after Pam and Kirby arrived home from work, Velma asked to use the car.

“Where do you need to go, Mama?” Pam asked.

Velma wouldn’t say. Pam knew, of course, that she likely wanted to go for pills. She had that panicky look about her.

“If you need to go someplace, we’ll take you,” Pam told her, “but we can’t let you use the car. We don’t want you hurt and we don’t want the car tore up.”

Velma was indignant. They didn’t have to take her anywhere, she huffed; she was sorry she’d asked. She sulked.

Pam was working at a shirt plant then, Kirby at a textile mill. Both went to bed early because they had to be up early for work, but before midnight both awoke with severe cramps and stomach pains. They spent the night retching and running to the bathroom with the diarrhea that soon hit, growing sicker and weaker by the hour. By daybreak they were so sick that they went to the hospital emergency room.

Flu was suspected.

“I thought I was dying,” Pam recalled years later. “I’d had the flu before, so I knew it wasn’t the flu. I couldn’t lie still in the emergency room bed. I was just moving from side to side. It was really just excruciating pain.”

They were kept for a while, administered fluids, given shots and released with pain tablets. Velma had returned from work when they got home, and she showed concern. Had to be the flu, she said. There was a lot of it going around.

Pam and Kirby had remained sick, unable to eat and out of work for three days. They even had to return to the hospital once during that time. And in the middle of it Velma announced that she had found a new place to stay. A woman from her church had offered her a room. The church van came for her, and she took her clothes and left.

Not until Kirby brought it up after Velma’s arrest, though, did Pam even think about the illness. Remember the tea? Kirby had said. Instantly Pam realized that her mother had poisoned them.

Velma had cooked for them that night, and Kirby had noted that the iced tea seemed different.

“Oh, that’s saccharine tea,” Velma had said. “We’re out of sugar.”

It had to be the tea, they knew, because that was the only thing they consumed that Beverly didn’t—she had milk—and Beverly had not gotten sick.

Clearly, Pam saw, she and Kirby barely missed being her mother’s final victims.

The question she now had to answer was this: How do you forgive a mother who attempts to kill you for no greater reason than petty spite?

In time, both Pam and Ronnie would come to the same conclusion about the questions that troubled them. Although they knew she had done evil things, they could not accept that their mother was evil. They were certain the drugs were at fault. Who knew what awful chemical reactions were set off in the brain when a person combined so many drugs in such great quantities over so long a period? Who knew what bizarre thoughts they created, what instincts they released, what qualities they suppressed? Pam and Ronnie simply could not believe that the mother they had known before their father started drinking, before she turned to doctors and drugs for relief from her stresses, could have done these horrible acts. They had to honor the mother who had nurtured, loved and encouraged them, the mother who had read to them, taken them on their class trips and made certain they were in church every Sunday, the mother they credited for every virtue they possessed. They would stand by the mother who had made their lives miserable for so many years because they could not abandon the mother who had given them so much. And they could only hope that the mother they once had known might yet return, might still be saved.

Velma’s brothers and sisters also struggled with some of the same questions that troubled Pam and Ronnie, as well as with their anger over their mother’s murder, but in the end most of them, too, would stand behind their sister. Velma’s brother Tyrone would sum up their thinking succinctly: “If the Lord could give his life to forgive us, how could we not forgive her?”

On March 26, Joe Freeman Britt went before the grand jury and, using Wilbur Lovett as sole witness, got an indictment against Velma for only a single count of murder, that of Stuart Taylor.

One month later, Velma was released from Dorothea Dix Hospital and returned to the Robeson County Jail. On Friday, May 5, she stood before Judge Hamilton Hobgood for arraignment.

“The defendant is charged with murder in the first degree,” said the judge. “How does she plead?”

“Not guilty,” replied Bob Jacobson. “Let me add to that plea, not guilty by reason of insanity.”

Jacobson requested that an independent psychiatrist examine Velma, and that was granted. He also asked that Velma’s trial be moved to the western part of the state, where public attention had been slight and potential jurors would be less likely to know any of the people involved. The judge, however, set the trial in Laurinburg in adjoining Scotland County in the same judicial district. Earlier, Jacobson had asked for additional counsel to assist in Velma’s defense, but that was denied.

Ronnie spent many hours with Jacobson, providing background and gathering information and evidence that might prove helpful. When he had gone to clear his mother’s belongings from her room at Mamie Warwick’s house, he discovered dozens of empty medicine vials and delivered them to Jacobson (he also had found among her possessions Dollie Edwards’ driver’s license and checkbook). Although his mother’s arraignment came during his final exams, he made time for both.

He was determined that nothing would keep him from getting his degree, however. Just as he long had dreamed, he donned cap and gown and was awarded his diploma at Pembroke State University on Sunday afternoon, May 14, honored as a dean’s list student. But one important aspect of his dream was missing.

Sunday was the only visiting day at Robeson County Jail, and after the ceremony Ronnie rushed to Lumberton, diploma in hand, hoping to get there in time. He was waiting at the big, thick window where visitors congregated when his mother was brought down from her cell. As she was being led to one of the tiny visiting cubicles, he held his diploma up against the window, grinning broadly. Velma saw him, gazed at the document as if she were momentarily puzzled, realized what it was, and for the first time since her arrest, Ronnie saw her smile.

A few minutes later, peering through the glass in the cubicle, Velma broke into tears.

“Ronnie, you know I wanted to be there,” she said.

“You were,” he told her. “I felt your presence.”

Part Three

A Death-Qualified Jury

11

Joe Freeman Britt hadn’t intended to become “the world’s deadliest prosecutor,” or even a prosecutor at all, for that matter. He hadn’t even planned to be a lawyer.

A dozen years earlier, if anybody had told him that he would be living out his life in Robeson County, the place that in his youth he had found so bleak, dreary and boring that he couldn’t wait to leave, he would have laughed.

Only the sky had ever truly called him. At twelve, he had taken a paper route—the biggest bicycle-delivered route in the county, he later would boast. At fourteen, he had become a bag boy at the Colonial Store in Lumberton. And his only goal was to earn and save money for flying lessons. He soloed at fifteen.

He couldn’t explain this yearning for flight. Neither could he fully explain the satisfaction it gave him—the serenity, the security, the sense of freedom, command, order, and, yes, beauty; for from the air even Robeson County took on a resplendence he’d never imagined. He just knew that flying always would be part of his life.

He didn’t finish high school. After completing eleven grades, he discovered that he already had enough credits to go to college so he enrolled at Wake Forest, a small Baptist college near Raleigh, his father’s alma mater. His would be the last graduating class before the college moved to Winston-Salem and, with Reynolds tobacco money, became a major university.

Even after college, he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life. His father was a prominent lawyer in Lumberton, his mother a teacher, but he was drawn to neither field. Because he had been an ROTC student, he had a two-year military obligation, which would give him a chance to decide what he wanted to do. He spent a year in New Orleans and another with the Twenty-fifth Infantry in Hawaii, and all he got from it was a desire to live out his days with palm trees, sunshine and balmy breezes.

An unexpected scholarship allowed him to attend graduate school at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He studied business, but found it boring, and after holing up in the Smoky Mountains town of Gatlinburg to sweat out his thesis, he fled to the palm trees and sunshine of Florida, enrolling in law school at Stetson University.

One reason he had shied from law was that public speaking flustered him, but he forced himself to face it. After graduation, he took the Florida bar exam and, to please his father, flew immediately to North Carolina and took its exam. He passed both and returned to work for a big law firm in Tampa.

After a year and a half, his father’s health began to fail, and he had to go home. His plan was to stay maybe a year, get things under control, and return to palm trees and balmy breezes. But family problems kept him in Robeson County, and he opened an office in Lumberton where most of the lawyers were long established and fiercely territorial. Still, he picked up a few cases.

“First time I walked into a courtroom I didn’t know when to stand up, when to sit down or what the hell to do,” he would recall with a chuckle.

He learned quickly, though, and discovered that he liked it. After he’d won a few cases, the solicitor, John B. Regan, came to talk with him. Regan was an elected official, but his job was only part-time. He was paid twenty-six weeks a year to prosecute all the criminal cases in Robeson and Bladen counties. The job was getting to be more than he could handle, and he was trying to talk the county commissioners into hiring a part-time assistant. Would Britt be interested?

Britt had been uncomfortable having to defend guilty people, and he was more than happy to move to the other side. As a prosecutor he found his calling. It was as natural as flying.