Death Sentence (31 page)

“I wouldn’t want anybody to hate me,” Britt said, and thanked him. The two shook hands.

“I think respect sent me over there,” Ronnie later would say. “I respected what he was doing. I had been taught some good qualities in my life, and strange as it might seem, it was my mother who had taught them to me.”

Ronnie remained silent on the long ride home. He wanted no supper. He sat in his favorite chair, staring into space.

“Are you okay?” Joanna asked.

“Yeah,” he said, “I just need to let it sink in, I guess.”

The week had seemed unreal. His whole life was beginning to seem unreal. How had it come to this point? he kept asking. And what might he have done to change it? A pointless exercise, but he couldn’t stop himself.

At eleven, he turned on the TV to see the news about the trial, and as he watched, it was almost as if it really didn’t involve him. It seemed like every other awful event he saw on the news. It was happening to somebody else.

On Sunday morning, Ronnie took Michael and drove back to Elizabethtown to visit his mother. Velma broke into tears when she saw them, and she didn’t stop crying. She was upset that she wouldn’t get to see her grandchildren as often, upset that she wouldn’t be allowed to return to the Robeson County jail to pick up her things and to say good-bye to people she’d left behind, to thank the jailers who had been kind to her. She seemed to be upset about everything but the thing that should concern her most: that she had just been sentenced to death, which she never mentioned. Ronnie couldn’t help but wonder if she was truly aware of what had happened.

He hadn’t expected to find her like this, and it hurt.

“That was a tough, tough day,” he would say years later.

Velma was to be taken to Raleigh the next day, and Ronnie returned with Michael to see her again Monday morning. She was still upset, still crying when Ronnie was told that their visit had to end.

He went outside and stood on the sidewalk, waiting for his mother’s departure. She soon emerged with two deputies, still crying. She looked up and saw Ronnie holding Michael and raised her cuffed hands in a sad attempt at a wave.

The car pulled away from the jail at the back of the courthouse. Ronnie could barely make out his mother’s head in the backseat as he hurried to the corner and stood watching until the car disappeared.

“Daddy,” Michael asked, “why are you crying?”

“I’m crying for your grandmother,” he said.

“Where’s she going?”

“She has to go away,” he said, “but you’ll see her again. She still loves you.”

Part Four

A Mother Again

17

The North Carolina Correctional Institute for Women did not look like most prisons. A collection of low, red-brick buildings in east Raleigh, its grounds blooming with dogwoods and azaleas each spring, it might have been mistaken for a community college if not for the high, barbed-wire-topped fence that surrounded it.

The state’s only prison for women, it had no death row, the need for one usually being scant. Instead, those sentenced to death were housed in Dorm C, which held prisoners on lockup for disciplinary infractions or emotional problems as well as new arrivals being processed into the open dormitories where most inmates lived.

The cell to which Velma was assigned was designed for four but she occupied it alone. Steel bars separated it from a common area where inmates—residents, they were officially called—who were not on lockup could mingle and watch TV at certain hours.

John Frazier, the prison chaplain, came to call on Velma on her first afternoon there. He held a master’s degree in clinical psychology and had studied therapeutic counseling of the mentally ill at Oxford University in England. Frazier, who was black, realized that some white inmates of Velma’s age and circumstances were reluctant to talk with him, but Velma was not. She was very talkative, although not particularly coherent. She would be speaking about one thing, then suddenly go to something that was completely disassociated. She frequently would forget what she was about to say. She would start talking about her childhood without prompting or logical transition. She told Frazier that she had bizarre feelings that she couldn’t control and that her mind and body sometimes seemed to be separated. She clearly was depressed and confused. She’d been accused of killing people, she said, but didn’t remember much about it and didn’t think that she had. She’d only tried to care for people. Her confusion seemed sincere and he thought Velma showed signs of serious psychological disturbance. He suggested to the prison physician that she be evaluated for schizophrenia.

What Frazier didn’t realize on that first visit was that Velma was beginning withdrawal from drugs she’d been supplied in jail. Shortly after her arrest, Alf Parnell had called Dr. Anthony Sainz and he had prescribed the tranquilizer Tranxene and the sedative antidepressants Sinequan and Elavil, which she had taken until she was sent to Dorothea Dix Hospital two days later.

During her six weeks at the hospital, she had complained daily of headaches, nervousness and insomnia. Initially, she had been given only buffered aspirin, the antidepressant Tofranil, Dalmane for sleep, an occasional shot of Benadryl (an antihistamine), and infrequent dosages of the heavily sedating antipsychotic agent Thorazine. Six days after her admission she was trembling, dizzy, complaining of headaches, back pains, cold sweats and blurred vision, and she was diagnosed with acute drug withdrawal. For the next three days she was given heavier dosages of Thorazine and the barbiturate Phenobarbital. For the last four weeks of her hospitalization, however, she was allowed only buffered aspirin and Tofranil.

Back at the Robeson County Jail, Velma was taken on several occasions to the emergency room at Southeastern Hospital with severe headaches, nausea and other signs of withdrawal, and Dr. Sainz again gave her Tranxene, Sinequan and Elavil. In July he started her on the tranquilizer and antispasmodic drug Librax, along with the Elavil and Fiorinal, a painkiller. From the first of September, she had been given all that plus Tranxene and Equagesic, a sedative painkiller, and during her trial she was also given Gantrisin for a urinary tract infection.

But Velma’s drugs were not transferred with her to prison, and she soon was complaining of nausea, severe headaches, cold sweats. She was unable to eat or sleep. When Frazier went to see her again, she was trembling uncontrollably, her eyes darting wildly. He recognized drug withdrawal, and she was taken to the infirmary and started on Tranxene, Librax, Endep, a highly sedating antidepressant, and Vistaril, an antianxiety drug. Later, she would receive only Valium and Vistaril in gradually decreasing amounts, but it would be sixteen months before she would be completely free of drugs.

That didn’t stop her from telling a reporter she was “drug free.” Three days after her arrival at the prison, Velma agreed to an interview with Ginny Carroll of Raleigh’s
News & Observer.
The story appeared across the top of the front page on Sunday a week after her conviction. In it, Velma spoke not only of being free of drugs and filled with the Holy Spirit, but proclaimed her readiness for the gas chamber.

“I am guilty,” she told Carroll. “I don’t want an appeal. Personally, I’d rather go ahead. The day is February ninth.”

The story was picked up by the Associated Press and appeared in other newspapers across the state. It came as a shock to Ronnie as well as to Bob Jacobson.

“All I could think was Gary Gilmore,” Ronnie later recalled.

Gilmore had been the first person executed after the U.S. Supreme Court had approved the resumption of capital punishment in 1976. He had died early in 1977, within months of the holdup murders he committed. He had dropped all appeals and demanded that the state of Utah put him before a firing squad. Utah had accommodated him.

Could his mother actually do this? Ronnie wondered. Might she end up going to the gas chamber on his anniversary after all?

Ronnie called Jacobson, who assured him that under North Carolina’s new capital punishment laws, an appeal to the state Supreme Court was automatic and Velma couldn’t stop it. Her execution date was a fiction. The court had appointed Jacobson to handle her appeal, and he hadn’t even begun getting it together. He wouldn’t complete it for months, and more months would pass before the Supreme Court ruled on it. Velma was in no immediate danger, no matter her public pronouncements. But Jacobson wasn’t pleased about them.

Once again Velma was undercutting him and hurting her own chances. If he should win a new trial or new sentencing hearing, her admissions to a reporter could be used against her, and she had for the first time professed vengeance as a motive, telling Carroll when asked how she felt while giving poison to her victims, “It was kind of like something they have done to you and you want to do something back.” Jacobson also was keenly aware that the Supreme Court sat in Raleigh and its members likely read the
News & Observer.

Jacobson immediately wrote to Velma: “I have read in several newspapers where you have said that you did not want to appeal this case and that you were guilty of four murders. An appeal in a capital case is automatic. In order for me to do the best possible job that I can for you, please do not make any more statements to the press.”

Velma’s profession of her newly found religion in the
News & Observer
was the first time she had made that public. She had come to know the Lord, she later would reveal, on a hot and particularly desolate Saturday night at the Robeson County Jail in July. She had been at her lowest ebb, she said, wanting desperately to die, but she couldn’t figure out how to kill herself. She was alone in her cell. No other women were prisoners. At nine o’clock, the guard turned out the light, and she lay on her bunk in abject despair, unable to sleep.

The guard had a radio tuned to a gospel music station in Laurinburg. At eleven, Velma heard what she later would describe as “the sweetest sounding music” coming from the radio and she began to weep. Then came a man’s strong and enthusiastic voice saying, “No matter where you are tonight or what’s happening to you, somebody loves you!”

The man was J. K. Kinkle, who operated a Christian bookstore in nearby Laurinburg. His weekly radio program was called “The Way of Jesus Broadcast.”

“Yes, somebody loves you and His name is Jesus! He loves you tonight no matter where you are or what you’ve done. That same Jesus is standing at the door of many hearts tonight, knocking, waiting to come inside, and wanting to put a new spirit within you.”

Those words struck Velma as none ever had, she later would say. Could she be forgiven despite all she had done? Could she actually be freed of guilt, anger, bitterness, hatred? Could she truly know peace? She had gone to church for years, had proclaimed herself a Christian, but she knew it all had been a facade. She had never truly opened her heart to Jesus.

Now she realized that Jesus was there in this awful place. His arms open to her, willing to forgive, to love her without reservation, prepared to grant her a whole new life, ready to accompany and comfort her through whatever lay ahead. As undeserving as she felt herself to be, all she had to do to receive that was to open her heart to Him. She began to pray as she never had before, begging forgiveness, reaching out, and while J. K. Kinkle preached on, she began to feel a new presence within her. She started to cry again, but this time the tears were from joy, and she knew that she would never be the same.

At first she didn’t say much about this experience. When Ronnie visited the next day, she asked him to bring her Bible, and she read from it for hours at a time, understanding for the first time, she later claimed, verses she had recited emptily before. She wrote to J. K. Kinkle, and he sent material for her to study. She wrote, too to the Billy Graham ministry, never dreaming that a day would come when this famous man, this friend of presidents and the rich and powerful, would take a personal interest in her. His group, too, sent material, including several books that helped her along her fledgling path toward redemption.

No mention of Velma’s newfound religion was made at her trial, and she didn’t carry her Bible to court, as defendants often do. This, she later would claim, was deliberate, because she didn’t want anybody to think that she had grasped religion in a desperate attempt to get a lighter sentence.

At one of the low points of her trial, Velma told Ginny Carroll, she had returned to the jail to find another packet of materials from the Billy Graham ministry and that had helped her through that dark time.

“I had strength I didn’t know existed,” she said. “It lasted even through the trial. I didn’t shed a tear through it all. When the jury came in with the death penalty, the lawyer had my two kids at the table. I begged the Lord to help me hold up for their sakes. When they announced the death penalty, my daughter broke. I hated so much to see her hurt like that.”

Velma’s religious conversion would quickly gain strength in prison. On her second Sunday, she met Sam and Gales Roane. Sam was retired from his hospital supply business. He and Gales had four daughters and nine grandchildren, a fine home in Raleigh and an apartment in Myrtle Beach. Their good fortune and their many years at Raleigh’s First Presbyterian Church had convinced them that they needed to give something back, to conduct Sunday school classes in Dorm C. Sam a big, white-haired man with a huge voice, conducted the Bible studies and prayers, and his bubbly wife played a portable organ while Sam led hymns. The Roanes wrote to Velma each week, encouraging her, and their Christian friends around the country began writing as well.