Death Sentence (40 page)

After the warden departed, Velma collapsed onto her bunk in despair.

Jimmie Little was informed about Velma’s move Monday night, and he was furious. He had been repeatedly reassured by the Department of Correction that Velma would not be transferred to Central Prison until three days before her execution. He drove straight to the prison and demanded to see his client.

Prisoners on deathwatch were allowed to see their attorneys in a parole hearing room adjoining the execution chamber. The room also served as a staging area during executions.

A rusting hospital gurney with a black vinyl-covered cushion and olive drab restraining straps was parked in the hallway when Velma was escorted the short distance—only twenty feet or so—to the hearing room to see Little. She thought the gurney was there in case of a medical emergency—perhaps they feared she’d have a heart attack. Actually, this was the gurney on which James Hutchins had died. Usually it was kept in the chamber’s preparation room. Later, after she realized what it was, Velma could only wonder if it hadn’t been deliberately left in the hallway as a macabre reminder of what lay ahead.

Little had never seen Velma as despondent as she was that night. “I don’t think I’m ever going to see my grandkids again,” she told him tearfully. It hadn’t been so bad for them at Women’s Prison, where she could hold them, but this would be much different. “I just can’t let them see me here and wonder why Ma-ma is in a cage,” she said.

Little could only reassure her that he would do everything possible to overcome this outrageous act and see that she was returned to Women’s Prison where she belonged.

Phil Carter did not learn of Velma’s move until the next morning. He called the chaplain at Central Prison, Julian Moorman, to arrange to see her. Moorman told him that wouldn’t be possible. Henceforth, he said, Central Prison was assuming all responsibilities for Velma’s welfare, including her spiritual guidance.

Carter was flabbergasted. “In other words, you’re telling me she’s going to be cut off from everybody she’s spent the last six years with?”

“That’s right.”

“I’ve got one thing to say to that,” Carter said. “All hell’s going to break loose. I will resign and go to the press about being denied access to a parish member.”

Carter stormed into Jennie Lancaster’s office only to discover that she was as angry and upset as he.

Word was not long in reaching the prison administration about the disgruntled staff at Women’s Prison, and the command manager, Gene Cousins, was sent to meet with them. The staff’s primary concern was that Velma was isolated from all the people she knew and trusted, that she had been put into conditions that amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

Carter was certain that the embarrassment Velma was bringing to Governor Hunt’s campaign was the reason she had been moved, and he made it clear that he intended to add to it if he were not allowed to continue ministering to her.

After that meeting, the prison administration changed its position and allowed the people who had been working with Velma at Women’s Prison to continue seeing her at Central. But all were instructed that they were to say nothing about the situation to anybody.

“We got a gag order,” said Carter.

It had not escaped Jimmie Little’s attention that Velma’s move to Central Prison had come just days after she had appeared on two national TV networks causing embarrassment to the governor. What he didn’t know was that Secretary of Correction James Woodard had called a meeting of his top subordinates, and the following day, the warden of Central Prison had been summoned back from vacation to create a plan for isolating Velma. If higher political pressure hadn’t been at play, he might have asked, why such urgency?

But he could not voice his suspicions. If the move had been ordered by the governor’s office, he couldn’t prove it. And he didn’t want to make Velma’s situation any worse by making wild charges. He also had to be especially sensitive not to offend Hunt, who was, after all, not only his boss but his only real hope for saving Velma.

On the morning after Velma’s move, Little met with James Woodard to appeal for her return to Women’s Prison, but he had no success. “It doesn’t look good,” he told a reporter at noon. “We’ll talk some more this afternoon. This whole thing just makes me sick.”

When later talks provided only more frustration, Little called the governor’s legal counsel, Jack Cozort, to ask for intervention. Cozort called back, Little later said, to tell him that the governor could not involve himself in a matter that was strictly up to the Department of Correction.

On Tuesday morning, a press release from the Department of Correction announced that the reason for Velma’s move was security. Patty McQuillan, the department’s spokesperson, reminded reporters that an inmate had escaped from Women’s Prison earlier in the year. That prison had no guard towers, she noted, but nobody had escaped from the new Central Prison since it had opened a year and a half earlier. “Central is much, much more secure,” McQuillan said.

This was patently absurd to Little. Velma had never been cited for a single infraction in her five and a half years in prison. And unlike other inmates at Women’s Prison, she did not have the run of the yard and potential access to flee. To escape, she would first have to break out of lockup—something that had never happened. Then she would have to scale a twelve-foot, barbed-wire-topped fence—which seemed unlikely for a fifty-one-year-old woman who stood five feet three and weighed 168 pounds.

The real reason for Velma’s move became clearer on Wednesday when the Department of Correction announced that, henceforth, reporters wanting to interview Velma would be restricted to a one-hour press conference on Friday mornings. Only eight reporters would be allowed, two from newspapers or other print media, two from wire services, two each from TV and radio.

Jimmie Little had been carefully arranging and controlling all of Velma’s interviews. Now he had been cut out. And he was not about to take it quietly. He called a press conference and charged that Velma was being held under conditions unlike those for any other prisoner.

“I’m sure that there are people who could care less how Velma is treated,” he said. “The question is: Should the state make her go through these extraordinary conditions under a cloak of security concerns that have never before come up until Velma’s side has finally begun to emerge?”

Little followed up by calling the presidents of the state press association and the association of radio-TV news directors. Both withdrew from the plan for interviewing Velma. The Department of Correction announced that it would choose the reporters itself. But when the first press conference was arranged for Friday, June 22, Velma refused to participate.

On Saturday, Ronnie and Pam came to Central Prison and spent two hours with their mother in one of the tiny booths in the visiting area on the top floor. They had not seen her so depressed in years. Pam left crying, and both talked with a reporter afterward.

“I’m not sure she has hopes of getting back to Women’s Prison,” Ronnie said. “I understand that she’s a death-row prisoner and she’s not going to get treated nicely all the time. But to move her this far in advance, that’s what gets to me.”

Pam said that she didn’t want her children to remember their grandmother locked in a concrete and glass box and wouldn’t be bringing them to see her for now. Beverly, she said, had seen a TV news report about Velma’s recent hearing and had come to her to ask what “execution” meant.

“I told her it meant her grandmother might die,” she said. “She sat in my lap and we both cried for about ten minutes. There’s very seldom a day goes by I don’t cry. It’s on my mind in the morning when I get up and in the evening when I go to bed. I’ve tried to prepare for it, but how can anyone accept the death of their mother?”

Little’s efforts to get Velma’s story known not only got her moved into isolation, they also produced other unexpected results.

On the morning of Velma’s hearing on June 13, relatives of Stuart Taylor and John Henry Lee gathered in Lumberton to watch the two reports scheduled that morning on CBS and NBC. Alice Storms, Margie Pittman and Sylvia Andrews watched tensely, gritting teeth and suppressing tears whenever Velma’s face appeared on the screen.

Both reports used snippets of the videotape shot at Easter of Velma and her granddaughters supplied by Jimmie Little. Everybody at the gathering was resentful at seeing Velma happily playing with Beverly and Sarah. Stuart Taylor had grandchildren he’d never seen because of Velma, and John Henry Lee had great-grandchildren who would never know him because of her. That Velma could be playing happily with her grandchildren was an insult to the families of these two of Velma’s victims, prompting anger and disgust.

They did not trust her supposed religious conversion— she had pretended to be just as religious when she had stood watching their fathers’ agonizing deaths. They thought her professions of sorrow for all the hurt she had caused were self-serving and insincere. They did not believe that Velma had killed because she was so addled by drugs that she didn’t know what she was doing. They thought that she had killed because she enjoyed it, that she took pleasure watching the agonies of her victims as she feigned caring for them, enjoyed the pain of their families while playing out her spurious role as comforter.

To them Velma was a person without a conscience, a charmer and manipulator who was now fooling a whole new set of people, just as she once had fooled them.

They had seen the pamphlets put out by Velma’s support committee, and they thought them naive and deceiving. They had seen the story in the
Village Voice,
and more stories about Velma in other newspapers that had hardly mentioned her victims or their families. Several stories, all highly favorable to Velma in their eyes, had appeared in the
News & Observer
in recent weeks, written by Ginny Carroll, who had been the first reporter to interview Velma after her conviction, and who now appeared to be crusading to save her. Yet Carroll had never called them, had never written one word acknowledging that their fathers were innocent people who had more right to live than Velma.

If the people who were working on Velma’s behalf were successful, these families were certain that a day would come when she would be paroled, and they had no doubt that it would only be a matter of time until some other innocent person would be dead at her hand.

Something needed to be done to prevent this, they believed, to show the other side of Velma, and to see that her sentence was carried out as the jury intended. And they became even more convinced of it later that day at the hearing in Elizabethtown when they saw all the reporters and camera operators swarming around Velma’s family while paying little attention to them. Why so much attention for the criminal and her family, they wondered, and so little for her victims and their families?

They spoke with Joe Freeman Britt, and he suggested that they launch their own media campaign to counter Velma’s, that they organize and fight against clemency as hard as Velma’s supporters were fighting for it. That galvanized them, and Alice Storms, Margie Pittman and Sylvia Andrews began planning their own offensive.

Alice’s resolve to act was only strengthened when the June 24 edition of the
North Carolina Catholic
arrived at her home. On the cover was a full-page photo of Velma taken before her transfer to Central Prison. She was standing forlornly by a window at Women’s Prison. A line across the bottom of the photo said, “Velma Barfield does not presume to ask the state for forgiveness or freedom—just her life.”

Alice’s family was Catholic. Velma was not. Why was the undeserved pain Velma had brought to them not meaningful to the
North Carolina Catholic
?

With the story was a column urging clemency for Velma as “a statement that we have the ability to separate the crime from the criminal, that we can be merciful, kind and lenient toward one who has demonstrated the ability to live a fruitful life.”

Why should the crime be separated from the criminal? Alice wondered. Certainly Velma had shown no mercy, kindness, or leniency to any of her victims, all of whom might well have continued to live fruitful lives if she had allowed them. But the
North Carolina Catholic
appeared not to place as much value on their lives as it did on the life of the person who had taken them. Something clearly seemed skewed.

Alice began calling newspapers and TV stations. She, Margie and Sylvia began planning demonstrations for campaign visits in the area by Governor Hunt. They started a petition drive, began organizing people to speak to the governor against clemency, and sought help from a group in Fayetteville called People Assisting Victims.

Results were not long in coming. Before the end of June, Larry Cheek, a columnist for the
Fayetteville Times,
had written two columns on Alice and her campaign. And even Ginny Carroll of the
News & Observer
felt obligated to talk with Alice and Joe Freeman Britt for a long story about clemency for Velma that appeared on July 1, even if she did give more space to Velma’s proponents than to her opponents. But a long story that appeared the following day in the
Sentinel,
Winston-Salem’s afternoon newspaper, focused completely on the victims and their families’ campaign to counter the attention Velma was receiving. With it was a photo of Alice showing off posters to be used at appearances by the governor.