Death Sentence (45 page)

What if it truly never got better for him?

From the time of her conversion, Velma had talked to Ronnie about taking God into his life. She stressed it when he had come to her with his marriage problems. “Trust in God, but do your part,” she told him. As the possibility of her execution had grown more real, she had become more emphatic. The only way to find true peace and happiness, she told him, was through God. It was the only way, too, that they could be together in eternity.

Ronnie wanted to believe that. He’d always believed in God, even if he had stopped going to church and hadn’t been living in a way that some might think pleasing to God. In recent months he had turned back to his roots and started occasionally attending a Baptist church in Goose Creek. He prayed but somehow got the feeling that nobody was listening. He tried to find solace in reading scriptures his mother suggested, but they seemed hollow, and more often than not he put down his Bible and went out to the bars for solace.

In truth, Ronnie had begun to wonder whether God actually existed. And if He did, why would He allow somebody to go through an ordeal such as he and Pam were now enduring? Why would He allow some people’s lives to be so charmed, while others, no less deserving, got only misery?

His doubt only fed his guilt, and his guilt had never been greater than when he left the meeting in which— no matter Jimmie Little’s disclaimer—he had told his mother that he wanted her to accept her death. He could never have dreamed that he would be in such a situation, or that he ever would tell his mother that he wanted her to die. Why had God, if He existed, put him in that position?

On Sunday night, Ronnie, Faye, Cliff and Faye’s children gathered before the TV to watch a
60 Minutes
report about Velma. Jimmie Little had agreed to allow her to be interviewed, he later said, because the producer had assured him that the report would be anti-capital-punishment, although it turned out to be anything but that.

After the introduction by Diane Sawyer, the scene cut to a close-up of Velma’s plump face. She nervously licked her lower lip, rolled her eyes, giving her a look of sneakiness.

“How many were there?” Sawyer asked softly.

“Three…” Velma said in a tiny voice, then cut her eyes away, as if she were having difficulty remembering how many people she had killed. “Four … four … three …”

She looked back, settling on three. A long pause followed while Velma stared calmly at the camera.

“Who were they?”

“My mother.” She rolled her eyes again, as if searching her mind for other names. “Uh, Dollie Edwards. John Henry Lee, and Stuart Taylor. There was four.”

The scene suddenly switched to a photograph of Stuart Taylor, and Alice Storms was there telling about her father’s dying agonies.

Ronnie didn’t want to watch anymore. He was disgusted. Not with the direction the report was taking, but with his mother. Here she was only days from execution, and she was being coy, pretending she couldn’t remember how many people she had killed, or who they were, clearly enjoying the camera being on her. And how could her sincerity be trusted when she was practically staring God in the face and still being less than truthful? She had killed five people for certain, likely six.

She had never admitted killing Jennings Barfield, but she had acknowledged to Ronnie during the trial that it was possible. He had been troubled by testimony that arsenic had killed Jennings and asked her about it. Despite her sharp denials from the stand, Velma told him, “Ronnie, I may have done it, but if I did, I don’t remember it.”

Unknown to Ronnie, though, she had recently admitted this murder as well. Cecil Murphey, a Presbyterian minister in Atlanta who had written twenty-five religious books, had begun working on a book with Velma. The idea had been Ruth Graham’s. She had proposed that Velma allow a book to be written as a testament to her faith. It would help so many others who were down and out and in need of Jesus, she suggested. Velma agreed, and Graham called her friend Victor Oliver, president of Oliver-Nelson Books in Nashville, Tennessee. After visiting Velma, Oliver assigned Murphey to write the book.

For the past three Fridays, Murphey had been interviewing Velma for at least six hours at a time, then returning to Atlanta and writing like mad getting material ready for her to review. He had asked Velma outright if she had poisoned Jennings.

“Oh, no,” she had told him. “He had emphysema, diabetes and cancer.”

Something about that answer didn’t set right with Murphey, and he played the tape several times.

“It was something about her voice,” he later recalled. “I knew it wasn’t right.”

At their next session, Murphey told Velma, “Before we start on the new stuff, I want to go back to one thing. Tell me again about Mr. Barfield’s death.”

“When she finished,” he later recalled, “I said, ‘Velma, it’s not right.’ She said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘You killed him.’ There was this shock on her face. She looked at me for a minute, then she nodded slowly. She said, ‘I’m so glad. Now there’s nothing left to confess.’” She had put the arsenic in Jennings’ medicine, she told him.

Her admission caused him to question her more closely about Thomas’s death as well. She stuck to her earlier story that he had passed out and dropped a cigarette. But she admitted that she knew it had happened, and she had closed the bedroom door and left the house.

“I didn’t kill him,” Murphey would remember her saying, “but I allowed him to die.”

Neither of these admissions would appear in the quickly produced paperback that Murphey would write under Velma’s name. He included them, he later said, but they were cut by the editors. Velma’s book was to be about faith, not about murder, and later hundreds of thousands of copies would be distributed free by the Billy Graham ministry.

Velma would turn fifty-two on Monday, October 29. By then she likely would be back on deathwatch at Central Prison. A week before her birthday, with her execution only ten days away, Velma was taken from her cell without being told why. She soon learned the reason: a surprise birthday party attended by almost all the inmates and many staff members. There were two birthday cakes, balloons everywhere, lots of party food. Velma’s birthday card was two feet long and bore so many signatures that other pages had to be attached to it. Many inmates who had left the prison also sent cards.

As inmates crowded around, hugging her and wishing her well, Velma fought back tears. She did cry when she spotted one face: Beth, the teenager who had been put in the cell beside her years earlier. Beth had spent most of the past four years at two youth institutions but had been returned to Women’s Prison in February and now worked in the canteen. She rarely got to see Velma but regularly sent her messages and still called her Mama Margie.

Later, Velma would write that a single word kept coming to mind as she greeted everybody at her party: family. Family and love could be found anywhere, she realized, even in prison.

Richard Burr flew from Palm Beach to Raleigh that Monday. Soon after clemency was denied, the controversial defense attorney William Kunstler had attempted to enter Velma’s case. Burr had cut him off by asking his help in finding new issues to raise. He had spent part of the weekend with a lawyer from Kunstler’s office, Ron Kuby, reviewing the case. Now he was bringing the recommendations back to Raleigh.

Kuby had found six issues that might be the basis of further litigation. But two of them—ineffective counsel and the improper exclusion of a juror—already had been argued all the way through the courts to no avail. Two others—that Velma had not properly waived her rights when she confessed to the police, and that her execution had been set just four days before the election—probably weren’t strong enough to save her. But the other two had potential.

First was Velma’s incompetence to stand trial because of her addiction to Valium and other drugs. At the time of her trial Valium’s addictiveness was still largely unknown. This had been the focus of Little’s clemency plea to the governor, but it never had been brought up in court.

Second was prosecutorial misconduct. “Britt’s comportment was challenged only briefly on direct appeal, and apparently not at all in federal habeas corpus,” Kuby wrote. “He does not deserve to get off so lightly. His summation was replete with inflamed calls for vengeance, discourses about victims in general, ridicule and viciousness.”

“What you got to say, Jimmie?” Velma asked teasingly when he, Burr and Tally got together with Velma late Monday afternoon.

“I’m going to ask Dick,” Little said. “Let him talk.”

Velma looked expectantly at Burr.

“Well,” he said, “I think we’re here to recommend that we try to stop it.”

He told her about the two new issues that he considered to have special merit.

Velma still had not recovered from her disturbing session with Ronnie and Pam on Saturday, however, and she was reluctant to commit. “I think Pam will be okay,” she said. “I don’t live with her so I don’t know. I hear two stories. I don’t know what’s going on.”

Little noted that nothing would be expected from Pam and Ronnie in a new appeal, except for their forbearance of the strain of delay and continued uncertainty.

But Velma remained hesitant, clearly torn, and there were long silences. When Velma still couldn’t come to terms with her reluctance, the lawyers took a break to give her time to think.

“Well, what do you want us to do, Velma?” Little said when they returned. “You want us to stay around?”

Clearly, she wanted to give them the go-ahead, which was what they were hoping to hear, but she wanted to talk to Ronnie and Pam again first.

“It’s just not good to not have hope,” she said. “I think you have to hang onto hope. I believe in that strongly. I have hope and I’m going to continue to have hope.”

“Of course, I don’t want you to have so much hope that November 2 is no longer a reality,” Little told her.

He reminded her that four other death penalty cases had been at the same stage as hers at the same time, and three of those people were now dead. Her odds were not good, even if she decided to proceed.

He wanted her to call after she’d talked with Ronnie and Pam. Time was of the essence. The lawyers would have to begin preparing their case if they were to have any chance at all. Much work had to be done.

Velma did talk to Ronnie and Pam that night, telling them that the lawyers wanted to seek another stay, that they had solid issues. Neither gave an endorsement. Both told her that she knew how they felt, but it was her decision. Ronnie could tell that she was being beguiled by false hope, and he wanted no part of that.

Velma still hadn’t reached a decision when the lawyers returned to the prison Tuesday morning. But she agreed to a proposal made by Little. She would allow them to draw up the new motion for appropriate relief, but she would decide later whether they could actually file it.

Meanwhile, another decision had to be made. Did she want to die by gas or by lethal injection? The warden at Central Prison would be coming on Wednesday to explain the differences between the two methods. Little would be there to help her decide.

If Velma chose cyanide gas, she would have to sit facing the witnesses until the leather restraining hood was placed over her head. If she chose lethal injection, she would be rolled into the death chamber already strapped to a gurney. She could turn her head if she chose and would never have to look toward the witnesses. If she chose lethal injection, she would first be given sodium pentothal to put her to sleep, than a paralyzing agent, Pavulon, would stop her heart.

She picked lethal injection. Drugs had ruined her life. Now, years after she had spurned them for good, they finally would end it.

On Friday, with her execution little more than six days away, Velma told Little and Burr to proceed with the new appeal.

But Ronnie did not know that when he arrived Saturday for what he thought would be his last visit with his mother at Women’s Prison before her removal again to Central. He noticed that she seemed nervous. And she wasted no time in letting him know why.

“Jimmie and Dick think they’ve got some really good issues this time,” she said, “and I’ve told them to go ahead.”

Ronnie sprang to his feet. “Goddammit!” he yelled. He had never used that word in front of his mother, but he was outraged. He was furious. He stared his mother straight in the eye. “You’re going to die next Friday morning,” he told her, his voice as filled with thunder as Joe Freeman Britt’s ever had been. “I’ve accepted that. And it’s time that you and your goddamned attorneys accept it, because nothing’s going to change it!”

He could no longer be a part of this charade, he said. He only hoped that Pam survived it. As his mother burst into tears, he stormed out.

He would not be back.

Part Six

Dying Grace

24

The call came shortly before nine Sunday evening. Phil Carter was needed at work. He didn’t have to ask why. He had been alerted Friday that Velma likely would be moved over the weekend, but for security reasons the Department of Correction was keeping the time secret.

By the time he got to the prison, Velma’s cell in Dorm C had already been emptied. She was handcuffed and waiting for a caravan of beige DOC cars to deliver her again to deathwatch at Central Prison. This time the move had been expected, and Velma was prepared.