Death Sentence (38 page)

Another state employee had joined Little in his fight. She was Mary Teresa Floyd, who had worked as a counselor to long-term inmates at Women’s Prison for seven years. Although she didn’t counsel Velma, she talked with her often and Velma valued her advice. “She is the one who taught me trust,” Velma said. “She taught me to care, to reach out.” A nun of the Good Shepherd Order, Sister Teresa was a native of Robeson County who had been affected by its tradition of violence. Her father had been murdered by a tenant on his farm in 1935, shortly before her birth.

Sister Teresa became the support committee’s most energetic member, organizing fund-raising and letter-writing campaigns and preparing brochures to be mailed nationwide.

Easter came late in 1984, on April 22, and Jimmie Little put it to use for Velma. He called her family urging as many as possible to visit on that Saturday because he needed to talk with them. He also had another purpose. He and the support committee were planning to make a videotape to present to the governor during the clemency plea, and he wanted to do it on this weekend so it would show Velma with her family, especially her grandchildren.

Velma’s brother John was driving from Hartsville, South Carolina, stopping in Red Springs to pick up his older brother, Olive, and in Fayetteville for their longtime friend Wade Holder. Pam and Kirby would be there with their daughters. Ronnie was coming from Charleston with Faye and her two daughters, but he was not able to bring Michael.

Little and volunteers from the support committee set up a video camera in a prison conference room to record an interview with Velma before her family arrived. Several times she fought back tears while answering their questions. Asked how she felt after her mother’s death, she started crying and paused to lift her glasses and dab at her eyes before answering.

“I was so drugged at the time I don’t even remember part of the funeral. There have been times when it’s been almost unbearable to think about, but it’s there. If I could undo any of it I would. I would gladly take it on myself. Nobody knows. When I look at my family and think about what I’ve done to them—and that’s only the beginning of what I’ve really done. …”

She couldn’t go on and asked that the tape be stopped until she could recover.

Had she sought her family’s forgiveness, she was asked, when she was able to resume.

“I feel they just haven’t wanted to talk about it,” she said. “They have never talked with me about it. I know it would be painful. I believe it would be good for all of us.”

Asked what she would say if she could speak directly to the governor, Velma replied, “I would ask Governor Hunt to please spare my life, to leave me here with my children and grandchildren…” Once again she paused, fighting tears. “They’re my life,” she said, her voice choking.

Velma’s family had arrived outside, and as she waited for them, her mood brightened. She chatted easily with the guards and volunteers.

Laughing, Velma said that on a recent visit her granddaughter Beverly, now eight, had asked, “Ma-ma, why do you wear the same dress all the time?”

“I told her, ‘I guess you could say because I love brown,’” Velma said to laughter.

Suddenly, the door opened and Beverly burst into the room, racing for her grandmother.

“My baby!” Velma cried, her face aglow.

Sarah, now four, was close behind, both dressed in new yellow Easter dresses trimmed in white lace. Velma gathered them into her arms as Pam and Ronnie entered and hugged their mother.

“The Easter bunny is coming,” Beverly was excitedly telling her grandmother. “We’ve got to go to sleep so he can come.”

“Can Ma-ma show you what he left here at her house?” Velma asked, reaching for a cardboard box beside her. From it she took big-eyed, fluffy-tailed Easter bunnies she’d made, a pink-faced one for Beverly, lavender for Sarah.

“Oh,” said Beverly, hugging the bunny. “Can I kiss him?”

“Tell Ma-ma what you’ve been doing,” Velma said.

“Playing,” said Beverly.

“Getting in trouble mostly,” Pam put in.

Velma was running her fingers through Sarah’s hair.

“You are really getting to be big babies,” she said wistfully.

Velma’s visit with her family lasted several hours—all of them trying to keep it as light and happy as possible, denying the reality that lay so heavily over them—and when her family left, they hurried to wait outside the prison fence to watch as Velma was returned to the building called Single Cell, where she had been moved after the aging Dorm C had been closed the previous year. She emerged holding a pale orange orchid corsage that Faye had brought, accompanied by a guard. She was fifty-one now, and she had gained more than forty pounds in prison, a short, plump, sweet-faced woman. Faye clung to the fence looking sadly at her sister. There had been something she had wanted to tell her on this visit but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. “Bye, Velma,” she called in a small voice.

“I love y’all,” Velma called back with a forlorn smile as she walked slowly past pink azaleas.

“We love you, too,” several responded, as the children stood waving.

“Oh, Lord, oh, Lord,” Faye said and burst into tears, Ronnie taking her into his arms. Pam began to cry, too, burying her head in Kirby’s chest.

Velma had to pause to pass through a gate, and she looked back over her shoulder and gave a little wave. As she walked past a dormitory, voices began coming from the windows.

“Miss Margie, Miss Margie … We’re praying for you, Miss Margie.”

The tough part for Jimmie Little came now. While others watched the children, he took the adults to a nearby house on the prison grounds for a talk about reality.

He thought that perhaps some of the family had grown so accustomed to the seemingly interminable appeals that they believed they could go on forever. He explained the situation and said he expected the Supreme Court to reject the appeal filed two weeks earlier. That could come within weeks. And it could be the end. Reality was that Velma could be dead at the hands of the state before summer’s end.

The only recourse would be clemency. He would arrange for all who wanted to meet with the governor to do so in the final two weeks.

“So this is serious now?”

“Yes, it’s very serious.”

He wanted them to be thinking about what they would say to Governor Hunt when the time came.

“What we have to do is show the governor that not only has Velma turned her life around, but that the compassion he could show her would not be misplaced. We have to convince him that if she spends the rest of her life in prison he could expect her to have a positive influence. And lastly, we have to convince him that the Velma her friends and family love today is the Velma they knew and loved before all of this happened.”

There was one more thing that they needed to be thinking about, Little said. If clemency failed, family members could witness the execution.

“I know Velma would like some of you to be near her if this happens,” he said, and Faye was crying as he spoke. “But you all ought to talk about this. I want to deal with it only when it’s necessary.”

Little had invited a reporter to be present this day. Her name was Elin Schoen. She wrote for the
Village Voice,
a weekly paper in New York. Schoen remained in Raleigh over the holiday and later spent several hours interviewing Velma in Little’s presence.

The Hutchins execution five weeks earlier was still much on Velma’s mind, and she talked at length about it. “It was just such a sad occasion,” she said.

She was thinking mostly of Pam at the time, she said. Pam was having an extremely hard time accepting the possibility of her death, and she knew that Pam had to be identifying Hutchins with her.

Velma had been as saddened by the bitterness the Hutchins execution had stirred as by the execution itself. So many people had said so many bad things, she said, and some even cheered when it happened. “I really did pray for those people,” she said. “And I prayed for his family. I don’t know if you can take the hurt and sting of death away. I think death is bad any way you look at it, but when someone is sitting there waiting, you know the very hour that it’s scheduled by man…”

Little allowed Schoen to probe deeply into Velma’s life and crimes, and Velma later would say that she found the experience, coupled with the emotional strain of seeing her family for the holiday, especially wrenching. Several times she broke down during the interview.

Perhaps the most difficult burden of her life had been the guilt that she had carried for so long, Velma told Schoen.

“I think that that’s the most horrible type life to live, loaded with guilt twenty-four hours a day. To me the number one pain in getting a life straightened out is admitting guilt and ridding yourself of it.”

Velma talked about her unhappy childhood, but she said that she could not hold that experience responsible for her present situation.

“We sometimes have a tendency to lean on what happened, life as a child. It does have a lot to do with our adult lives, but I think we all become responsible for our own lives, and we’re accountable for it. I don’t blame my childhood. I realize that it fed into me a lot of hatred and bitterness. And it’s not easy to break out.”

When she had spoken with Faye earlier, Schoen told Velma, Faye said that when she was fifteen and her mother was away visiting Arlene that her father had made a pass at her, and she had locked herself in her bedroom and gone the next day to stay with Velma until her mother returned.

“Did anything like that ever happen to you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Do you want to talk about it? It would really be important. This happens to millions of women, girls, all over the country. It’s a horrible thing, and I think if you could tell me about it it would help me to understand you.”

“I think I was maybe thirteen when he came to where I was in the bedroom and I knew what he was after and he was forceful and I was frightened, but this I had never said to you all”—she turned to Jimmie Little—“but this happened a few times when we were swimming.”

“Like what, for instance?” asked Schoen.

“Feeling, you know. And I was so frightened of him, so I couldn’t tell anybody. I had nobody to say that to. My aunt who lived next door would never have believed that.”

She hadn’t told anybody about it until she told her lawyers before her hearing for a new trial three and a half years earlier, she said.

“And that was the first time you told anybody in your life?”

“My minister, I had told him, but I had never told anybody else.”

“Did he actually rape you in the bed?” Schoen asked, turning back to the incident.

“Yes, he did. My minister used to ask me if I had ever thought of telling my mother, but I never did. I just couldn’t make myself do that, and I don’t think she would have believed me either, she just wouldn’t have believed.”

“Did your mother know what had happened to Faye?”

“Faye told her.”

“But you never told her what happened to you?”

“I never told her.”

“Did you feel angry at your mother?”

“Yes I did feel angry at her. I couldn’t understand why she could not protect us. As a child, I could not understand that. After I got grown, I began to see and especially since I have been here and just took my life apart, I know that she was just as afraid of him and more so maybe than we were. But I do feel bitter toward her.”

Schoen asked only one later question about sexual abuse: Had there been more than the one incident? No, Velma said, but she never mentioned that she also had told a psychiatrist, Selwyn Rose, prior to her 1980 hearing, but that she had told him a different version, that a noise had frightened her father away before he had done anything to her.

Later, what Velma had told Schoen about her father would send angry reverberations through her family.

Velma had not asked Ronnie about Michael during the Easter visit. She knew it was a sore subject. Ronnie’s fear that Joanna might prevent him from seeing Michael had come true, and Velma had not seen her only grandson for nearly a year and a half. His absence tore at her, but not nearly as much as it troubled Ronnie.

After his arrival in Charleston in January of 1983, Ronnie stayed with Arlene for three weeks, then moved in with Faye, her husband, Clifton,* who was in the Navy, and Faye’s two daughters. He soon found a job at an interior decorating company, but it was a while before he had enough money coming in to send any to Joanna. Their every attempt at communication had ended in bitter arguments about money and Michael. After Ronnie started sending money for Michael’s support, he later claimed, Joanna still wouldn’t allow him to see his son. He stopped the payments hoping to force Joanna’s hand, but that only resulted in more bitterness and acrimony.

In January, Ronnie filed for divorce on grounds of a year’s separation. In his complaint he claimed that he had been prevented from seeing his son for a year and sought a regular schedule of visitation. Ronnie’s lawyer advised him to resume sending support payments, even though none had formally been agreed upon, and Ronnie did. Joanna denied in her answer to the complaint in February that she had kept Ronnie from seeing Michael, and when next they talked by telephone, her attitude seemed to have softened.