Death Sentence (32 page)

Because she was sentenced to death, Velma was not allowed to attend chapel services (she could only leave her cell to shower and to exercise for an hour alone each day on a small, fenced concrete pad). John Frazier, a Unitarian, realized that he could not adequately minister to Velma’s fundamentalist beliefs. He suggested that she might want to have a minister from outside the prison, and she agreed. Since she had been a member of a Pentecostal Holiness church in Lumberton, Frazier asked Tommy Fuquay, the pastor of Trinity Pentecostal Holiness Church in Raleigh, to call on her. He came for the first time in January.

Fuquay, who was forty-five, had previously ministered in prisons. Sometimes prisoners had fooled him, and he was wary of them. But Velma impressed him as genuine in her faith from the beginning. “I don’t think I had ever seen anybody who had the repentant spirit she had,” he recalled years later.

Fuquay began visiting weekly. “I could see her growing and her attitude changing,” he said. “The faith in her just grew and grew each time I would see her. I would feel refreshed when I came out.”

In their talks Velma expressed concern about her children and family and the pain and disgrace she had brought them. She worried too, about the families of her victims. She asked Fuquay’s advice on making amends. Did he think the families might reject her if she wrote asking forgiveness? She could only try and see, he suggested.

Velma did write to Alice Storms. “I hardly know the right words to say to you,” she began. “I am truly sorry for all the hurt that I have caused all of you. When you wept, you didn’t weep alone…” She went on to ask forgiveness and signed the letter, “May the God of love shine upon you. Velma.”

She got no response. The Velma Alice knew before her father’s death had been just as pious as the Velma who wrote the letter, Alice said later. She couldn’t believe that Velma had undergone meaningful change. Velma was a person without a conscience, she thought, and the only reason she would seek forgiveness had to be self-serving.

In May, five months after she had entered prison, Velma’s youngest brother, Ray, was killed in a traffic accident, sending her into despondency. The following month, she got another blow. Tommy Fuquay accepted a new pastorate in Stanley, in the western part of the state, 150 miles away. For nearly two months he made a three-hundred-mile round trip to minister to Velma, but the strain grew too great, and he asked his replacement at Trinity, Hugh Hoyle, if he would consider becoming Velma’s pastor. Hoyle agreed and Fuquay took him to see her in August. The two hit it off, and Brother Hoyle, as Velma called him, not only became her closest spiritual adviser but a good friend as well.

Hoyle was thirty-five, a man of high intelligence, vigor and enthusiasm. He was a preacher’s son who had committed his own life to God at the age of fifteen and had gotten his license to preach upon his graduation from high school in Greensboro. He had graduated from Guilford College, a Quaker school, and had pastored a church in Greensboro while doing graduate work at the University of North Carolina. He had married at thirty-three, and had come to Raleigh from a church in North Wilkesboro, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Hoyle felt an obligation to be up front with Velma from the beginning about one matter: he was not opposed to capital punishment. That didn’t matter, Velma told him. She understood; she’d always favored it herself. She wanted him to be her minister, and he began coming to see her every Thursday afternoon.

Hoyle guided Velma in her Bible studies, prayed with her, listened to her problems, gave her communion, and soon started her on a long term, eight-step, self-examination study program that was designed to allow her to discover her defects, accept herself, deal with her problems. He found her to be an eager and receptive student, and he looked forward to their visits.

As Velma’s outlook changed, so did her attitude about her sentence. She found new reason to live and placed hope in her appeal. So far, five other cases under the new death penalty law had come before the state Supreme Court, and it had found error in all, granting a new trial, a new sentence, or a new sentencing hearing in each.

Hugh Hoyle was returning from a funeral on Tuesday, November 6, 1979, three months after becoming Velma’s minister, when he heard on the radio that the Supreme Court had upheld her conviction and sentence.

Bob Jacobson had focused his appeal on two main issues: whether the insanity plea should have been allowed, or the evidence of the previous deaths admitted. He also raised ten other points, but the court, in a twenty-one-page opinion, rejected all, finding sufficient evidence to uphold the conviction and justify the aggravating circumstances.

“We find nothing in the record which would suggest that the sentence of death was imposed under the influence of passion, prejudice, or any other arbitrary factor,” stated the opinion. “The manner in which death was inflicted and the way in which the defendant conducted herself after she administered the poison to Taylor leads us to conclude that the sentence of death is not excessive or disproportionate.”

Hoyle drove straight to the prison after hearing the news. He knew Velma would need him, as indeed she did. She was concerned about how Ronnie and Pam would take the news, but she was especially worried about Pam, who was expecting her second child.

Hoyle consoled Velma—“He always has just the right words to say for everything,” she later would say—then prayed for Ronnie and Pam and the safe delivery of Pam’s baby.

The baby was born, healthy and strong, a day and a half later on Thursday morning. Pam and Kirby named her Sarah Sue.*

“I will never forget how my heart ached to see this child,” Velma later wrote. Pam would bring the baby for a visit two Saturdays later. “I held her almost the entire two hours,” Velma scribbled afterward in a notebook where she kept a record of important events. “To me she was a living doll. As I looked at her I cried inside because I couldn’t be home with her.”

Ronnie had received word of the Supreme Court’s decision before it became news, and it meant a new source of worries. Jacobson, in calling to tell him, said that he would be happy to continue with additional appeals, but the family would have to pay. The state had paid him $3,500 dollars for Velma’s defense and another $3,000 for the appeal. But that was all the state allotted. From this point Velma was on her own.

There was no way the family could come up with the money, Ronnie told Jacobson, who would be filing for a stay of execution pending an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court (it would be granted on November 14), then would be finished with Velma’s case—or so he thought.

Ronnie had no idea what to do. He fretted for two days, uncertain where to turn. He was to play in a Putt-Putt tournament in Greensboro that weekend, and he drove there early Friday and called the local office of the American Civil Liberties Union from a telephone booth, explaining the situation to director George Gardner.

“Don’t worry,” Gardner said to Ronnie’s immense relief. “We’ll see that your mother has a lawyer.”

That lawyer, Ronnie later would learn, would be Richard Burr III, who knew little at the time about appealing death penalty cases, although Ronnie didn’t know that. He was just pleased to know that his mother had somebody to defend her.

Velma, too, was pleased, and she went into her second year in prison with renewed confidence. But she confided to Hugh Hoyle her fear that she was losing close touch with her son. In the beginning, either Ronnie or Pam had gone every week to see their mother, then a couple of weeks passed between visits. By the end of Velma’s first year in prison, she sometimes went a month without seeing either of them. Ironically, it was her very improvement that was keeping her son away.

Year after year, Ronnie had fought to get his mother off drugs, had dreamed of the day when she would be free of bitterness, anger and despair. As Velma was weaned off drugs, her disposition grew brighter by the month, the rancor and resentment dissipating as her mood improved. When Ronnie visited now, his mother seemed cheerful. She giggled and laughed.

“She was my old mom,” he later said. “It was like she had been taken out of her body and returned.”

But the change did not bring him the happiness he had imagined it might. Instead he left after each visit with a profound sadness. “Seeing her trapped, it kind of sank in what had happened. She wasn’t the same person who had done what she had done. I began to wonder if she didn’t understand the gravity of what was going on, if she just didn’t know. Every time I left, I knew I was leaving her on death row, and it was getting harder to handle.”

But Velma did understand. Several years later, she would write about that period when so many changes were taking place.

“As I began to dry out, I began to have a clear mind and started remembering and facing reality and I began to think of the horrible nightmare experiences that brought me to prison. It was so frightening. I would lay on my bunk for long periods going over and over the past ten years, crying really wanting to scream…

“I relived days, months, and years that all the deaths had occurred, how I had hurt not only the victims, but how I had crushed the lives of the victims’ families and brought so much hurt and disgrace to my own family. I kept praying, asking God to help me overcome these bad memories. I knew He had forgiven me but at this period of my life I had not forgiven myself, and this is why I couldn’t rid myself of these thoughts.”

Velma would not slip back into despair this time, though. She would reach out to others. Combining a mother’s instincts and her newfound religion, she would start making a difference in the lives of other prisoners.

“There are lots of girls here who cannot read or write,” she wrote in her first year in prison. “I couldn’t believe this to start with. I mean, these girls tell me that they finished through nine, ten, and eleven grades and still cannot read or write. It’s really sad. I write a lot of their letters home for them…

“Another sad thing is that such a small number claim Jesus as their Savior—very few. My heart goes out to them because I know the feeling of living with bitterness and hatred inside. The feeling of being unwanted, unloved and lonely—not caring if they live or die. … I just want to reach out to them.”

Although Velma had begun remaking herself, finding new strength in religion and new purpose as she reached out to help others around her, none of this would yet be of concern to the courts that would be deciding whether she would live or die. Still, her new lawyer had given her great reason for hope.

18

Richard Burr was thirty and brimming with idealism. He had grown up in Lake Wales, Florida, and graduated from Vanderbilt University in Nashville before going to law school at the University of Kentucky. He was committed to the great social issues of the time, and in February 1979, he had become the sole, underpaid lawyer for the Southern Prisoners Defense Committee in Nashville, an outgrowth of the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons started by a North Carolina minister, Joe Ingle. His job was to work on prisoners’ rights cases but a greater need quickly presented itself.

Many cases tried under the new death penalty laws were just reaching the end of state appeals, and those defendants, almost all without resources, were finding themselves facing death with nobody to carry on their cases. Within a matter of days in November, Burr got three calls from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund about such cases and he decided he’d better learn something about death-penalty appeals.

A seminar on the death penalty was being held in Charlotte by North Carolina trial attorneys in early December. Burr attended, then drove to Raleigh to meet Velma, the first of more than two hundred death-row inmates he eventually would defend. Nice lady, he thought, pleasant and sweet, hard to picture as a murderer. She talked freely and seemed happy to have his services. After their visit, Burr drove to Lumberton and introduced himself to Bob Jacobson, who gave him free access to his files on Velma.

Burr’s first official act on Velma’s behalf was to appeal her case to the U.S. Supreme Court, but in June, 1980, the court declined to hear it, indicating that it found no fault in the constitutionality of North Carolina’s new death penalty statutes.

In response to the ruling, Burr told reporters that despite earlier press reports, Velma wanted to live.

“She is resolved to fight,” he said, “and she and I both believe that she will get a new trial at some point and won’t get the death penalty.”

Although he asked the Supreme Court to reconsider its ruling, Burr had concluded that the best chance to save her lay in the state courts. There he had a problem. He was not licensed to practice in North Carolina. He needed a local lawyer to be her attorney of record, and in September, seeking help, he called Mary Ann Tally, the public defender in Fayetteville, whom he had met at the death penalty seminar in Charlotte the previous December.

Tally called her friend Jimmie Little, the former public defender, who now was a partner in his own law firm in Fayetteville, and explained the situation. If Little had heard of Velma Barfield, he couldn’t remember. He had been living in Fayetteville during her trial, but he had paid little attention to the news coverage.

Later, Little would marvel at how casually he stepped into a role that would come to dominate his life. “I didn’t think a whole lot about it,” he said. He agreed to help until another lawyer could be found, and he assumed that one would be. He and Burr began talking about the case by telephone.