Death Sentence (43 page)

Ronnie knew the governor’s decision before his mother. Little called him at work soon after getting word. Ronnie was not surprised, but the sudden certainty of his mother’s execution sapped him of spirit.

For more than a year, he’d shared an apartment with a coworker, but now he was again living with Faye and Cliff in a new house they’d bought. He wanted to be there before Faye got home to break the news to her, and he left work early.

Nobody was there when Ronnie arrived. He turned on the TV and saw the first report about his mother’s fate on a local station. Soon afterward, the phone rang. The voice caught him off guard. It was Joanna and she was crying.

“Ronnie, what are you going to do?” she asked.

“I guess I’m going to have to prepare for this like I have all along,” he said.

“You really think it’s going to happen?”

“I’m sure it is.”

Ronnie had just hung up when the phone rang again. It was Pam, and she could hardly speak.

“Have you heard?” she asked, sobbing.

“Yes, Jimmie called.”

“I was so sure that he would see our side of it,” she said.

“Pam, I think he did. It was just that the other side outweighed ours.”

“What can we do now?”

“I don’t know that we can do anything except to spend as much time as we can with Mama and try to make the most of it. This is going to take place and there’s nothing we can do to stop it. I’ve tried to make you see this was going to happen.”

“I can’t accept that,” she said.

“You’ve got to prepare yourself for it,” he told her. “If you don’t it’s going to make it even harder.”

“I can’t,” she said, still sobbing.

“Just think of it like she’s been sick, and she’s not going to recover.”

“But it’s not like that,” Pam said, and Ronnie knew she was right.

His mother’s death would be well planned and expertly carried out in the name of justice and the people of North Carolina. It would be among the rarest and most unnatural forms of death, and she and they would know the exact minute it would take place. To make it even more unnatural, a single person could have stopped it with nothing more than his signature, and he had made a political decision not to do so.

Faye and Cliff arrived soon after Ronnie had talked with Pam, and Ronnie pulled Cliff aside to warn him. But Faye sensed what had happened as soon as she saw Ronnie.

“He’s decided, hasn’t he?” she said, her face paling.

Ronnie nodded. “He denied clemency.”

“Oh, no!” Faye screamed. “Oh, my God!”

She ran sobbing to her bedroom, and Cliff followed, trying to console her.

Velma called shortly afterward, and Ronnie, who was trying hard to be strong and composed, fought back tears when he heard her voice. He would remember later that she kept telling him, “We’ve just got to accept this.”

Velma wanted to speak to Faye, and although Faye tried, she couldn’t control her grief to conduct a conversation.

Ronnie didn’t go out that night to drink as usual. Instead, he lay on his bed letting reality settle over him, remembering when he had done much the same nearly six years earlier, sitting in his apartment staring into space after his mother had been sentenced to death. Even after all these years, it still seemed unreal. Yet it was real. And worse moments were to come.

He tried to push such thoughts aside, tried to ignore what was now destined to happen just five weeks from this very night. He concentrated on summoning images of good times instead. His mind drifted back to grammar school days, the best time of his life, when his mother had been grade mother for both his and Pam’s classes. She had been so happy then, helping with class parties, working on school projects, driving on field trips—all of his friends had wanted to ride with his mom, because she was the most fun.

His seventh-grade class trip to Raleigh came to mind, and suddenly he remembered that, along with visiting the state capitol, the legislature, the historical museum, they had gone to the gothic old Central Prison, had been taken to the gas chamber and shown the squat, walnut-stained, oak chair with its leather manacles where criminals—murderers and rapists—actually had died, and now he saw his mother being strapped in that chair, the very chair she had gazed upon while standing beside him in those happy days so many years gone, and he saw the hood being pulled over her head, the cyanide capsule dropping into the acid vat below, the foggy fumes rising, his mother straining, gasping for her final breath, and he rolled onto his stomach and cried into his pillow.

So many people came to see Velma Saturday, in the wake of the governor’s decision, that nobody got to spend much time with her. Ronnie and Faye came together, and both had only brief sessions alone with Velma.

Faye was nervous, determined that this time she would tell her sister what she could not confess earlier, that just after Stuart’s death she had called a detective in Lumberton to reveal her suspicion that Velma had killed not only him but their mother and others. When reality had proved her right, Faye had felt relief that Velma’s killing had been brought to an end, but she couldn’t escape feeling that she also had betrayed her sister, who was practically her second mother. Then she and Velma were in each other’s arms, crying, and when she looked into her sister’s eyes she knew that she no longer had to feel guilt for what she had done, nor even to speak it, for each had forgiven the other for whatever lay in the past, and now the only thing necessary was to profess their love.

Pam had a similar session with her mother that Saturday. They talked about the hurts each had brought the other over the years—and their regrets. Both cried. Velma said that her shame for the pain she had inflicted on her children was almost more than she could bear.

“Mama, please don’t say that,” Pam told her. “You were there when Ronnie and I needed you.”

But later, in her cell, Velma wrote in one of her notebooks: “I didn’t feel that I had been with them when they needed me.”

Velma also discussed her funeral arrangements with Pam. She wanted Hugh Hoyle to conduct the service, she said, and he already knew the verses she wanted read, the hymns to be sung. As Velma went on with other details, Pam had difficulty believing that this conversation was actually occurring. Here they sat, calmly discussing her mother’s imminent funeral, and she was alive and well. It was too bizarre to imagine.

One thing about the funeral had been decided weeks earlier during another visit with Ronnie and Pam.

“There was one thing I wanted to ask y’all about,” Velma told them. “Have you thought about where I should be buried?”

Pam answered without hesitation. “Whenever it comes, I want you to be buried beside my daddy.”

Ronnie agreed. “That’s the way I’ll always think of us, as a family,” he said, “our mother and our daddy together.”

“I was hoping you would feel that way,” Velma said.

She was concerned that Thomas’ family might raise objections. The rift that had developed between them after Thomas’ death had never been healed. Ronnie pointed out that the cemetery plot belonged to her, and if she wanted to be buried there, nobody could do anything to stop it.

Another source of comfort for Velma was her religious friends. One of the closest was Anne Lotz of Raleigh, the daughter of Billy and Ruth Graham. Her mother had asked her to visit Velma after her move to Central Prison, and Lotz had become a regular visitor. She had been one of the first to offer support after the governor’s decision.

Velma could make collect calls from prison, and Lotz arranged for her to call her mother on Tuesday, October 2. Although Velma had been corresponding with Ruth Graham for years, she never had spoken with her. They chatted like sisters, Velma thanking her for her friendship and support, and for sending her daughter to become her friend.

Velma never dreamed that she would talk with Billy Graham, but he came on the line to encourage her and pray for her. Billy Graham praying personally for her! She couldn’t get over it. “It was wonderful—uplifting,” she later wrote in her notebook. “I felt as though I was then in the heavenland.”

She was almost giddy when she told Jimmie Little about it later. “You know what Billy Graham told me? He said, ‘Velma, in a way I envy you, because you’re going to get to heaven before I do.’”

As for Velma’s favorite minister, Hugh Hoyle, he could not get through to her after the governor’s decision, but he had been on the phone with Jimmie Little, Sister Teresa, Sam Roane and Phil Carter. He was already planning to come to Raleigh to minister to Velma before the execution and to conduct her funeral, as he had promised. The support committee was working on getting his airline tickets. Unable to talk with Velma, he wrote instead.

“Velma, this letter is very difficult for me to write because of the depth of meaning and emotion you are going through. I want you to know that His Grace is sufficient. He will give you the strength when you need it. ‘On Christ, the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand…”

He went on to quote from I Philippians:

According to my earnest expectation and my hope, that in nothing I shall be ashamed, but that with all boldness, as always, so now also Christ shall be magnified in my body, whether it be by life, or by death.

For me to live is Christ, and to die is gain.

For I am in a strait betwixt two, having a desire to depart, and to be with Christ; which is far better…

“Remember,” reminded Hoyle, “Paul wrote this from death row.”

In a way Ronnie dreaded the visit he had planned with his mother on October 6. It was his weekend to have Michael, and he picked him up late Friday and spent the night with Pam and Kirby. When he and Michael got to the prison Saturday, Ronnie wanted a few minutes alone with his mother first.

Velma was always eager to see Michael. She had spent precious few hours with him in the past two years, and those only in recent months, since Ronnie had won visiting rights.

“Where’s Michael?” she asked, her face showing surprise when Ronnie walked in alone.

“He’s here. He’s over in the administration building with Sister Teresa.”

“Is he okay?”

Ronnie hugged his mother and sat beside her.

“He’s fine. I just wanted to talk with you for a minute before I brought him over. You know he’s not had an easy time with everything that’s gone on. He was crying last night and calling for his mama. He doesn’t understand a lot of what’s happening, and the situation is just going to get worse from now on. Joanna and I talked about it. There has to be a time when I don’t bring him back, and this is that time.”

He choked on those words, and tears came to his eyes.

“I can understand that,” Velma said, patting him on the knee. “I don’t really like to think of any visit as being my last, but I can prepare myself.”

“I’ll bring him on over,” Ronnie said.

His mother was all smiles when Ronnie returned with Michael.

“Come here and give your Ma-ma a big hug,” she said, taking her grandson into her lap. “How’s my boy?”

“I’ll just let y’all have some time alone,” Ronnie said. And as he slipped out he could hear his mother’s cheerful laughter echoing through the vocational building.

After forty-five minutes Ronnie rejoined them for the remainder of the visit. Leaving that day, he said later, was one of the hardest things he’d ever done.

“Give Ma-ma a big kiss,” Velma told Michael, and she pulled him to her and held him tightly.

“Always remember that Ma-ma loves you,” she told him, kissing his forehead.

Ronnie fought back tears as he took Michael by the hand and led him away.

“Be a good boy,” Velma called.

“Did you have a good time with your grandmother?” Sister Teresa asked Michael when they returned to the administration building.

“Yes!” Michael said. “We played games. And she read to me.”

“When Michael left, I really felt crushed,” Velma wrote in her notebook that night.

Yet another source of pain for Ronnie was the dream that had first come soon after his mother’s arrest. It had interrupted his sleep many times since, and it was always the same. The flames began in a trash can beside a bed, tiny at first, but steadily flickering higher, fueled by wadded paper, soon reaching up to the wall and out to the bedcovers, and as they climbed higher and spread farther, Ronnie had clawed himself awake, frantically trying to escape their grasp.

The memory had returned soon after the dream first came to him. It was a few weeks before his father’s death. His daddy had come to him, said he wanted him to see something. He took Ronnie to his bedroom and showed him a plastic waste basket close by the head of the bed. Something had been burned in it. The bottom and one side had melted. The wall above the container had been slightly charred and discolored by smoke.

“Your mother set that fire while I was sleeping,” his father told him.

“That’s crazy,” Ronnie said. “You were drunk and smoking and you went to sleep and dropped a cigarette.”

“Your mother put that there. It wasn’t there when I went to bed. It’s never been there before.”