Death Sentence (51 page)

No such feelings were being spoken at another gathering that was going on at the same time at the Howard Johnson’s at I-95 in Lumberton. In a hospitality suite donated by the motel, family members of Stuart Taylor and John Henry Lee were mingling with supporters and reporters. At one end of the room was a large TV with several rows of stack chairs aligned before it. Whenever live reports about the execution came on, people clustered in front of the TV.

The gathering had been organized by the group called People Assisting Victims that had worked with the families to see that the execution came about. Alice Storms told reporters that it was for the benefit of the press. After the execution, she said, she would read a statement that would be her last.

“The press had been good to us,” she said, “but they’ve been a pain, too.”

An air of discomfort and tension was clearly evident in the room, and Sylvia Andrews spoke the reason for it: “I’ve got this deep feeling that something is going to happen to stop it.”

When the marchers from Sacred Heart Cathedral reached the prison they were directed to an area that had been set aside on a rise on the far side of Walnut Creek under giant spreading oaks, less than two hundred yards from the front gate. Some demonstrators had been there when the marchers arrived, and others would join them later, until the crowd numbered about four hundred. Those supporting capital punishment would be in a separate area on the opposite side of Western Boulevard. Only a handful were present as the first marchers filed onto the hillside across the road, but their numbers would grow, too, as the night went on. A solid line of Raleigh police cars parked bumper-to-bumper separated the two groups.

Among the protesters on the far side of Western Boulevard were four members of a family dealing with their own sorrows, holding signs citing Bible verses in support of capital punishment. They had been at the capitol earlier in the day. William R. Gilmore spoke for the family. His twenty-five-year-old son, a police officer in the town of Clayton, had been murdered in January 1982, and the killer was now serving a life sentence in Central Prison and no doubt would one day walk free. “He’s over there right now watching TV,” Gilmore told a reporter. To Gilmore, a killer should suffer the same fate as his victims. “It upsets me that people would have any feeling to save a woman’s life after she killed that many people and after the way she killed them,” he said.

Among the crowd standing vigil for Velma were many people who knew her, including Sister Teresa.

“I just don’t see that North Carolina has anything you can call clemency,” she told a reporter. “I hope the new governor will see clemency differently.”

“Our state is committing premeditated murder,” said Becky Fields, a psychologist who had worked with Velma at Women’s prison.

Phyllis Tyler, the ACLU activist who had visited Velma weekly for more than four years and had served on her support committee, was clearly upset. “I was sure until last week that something was going to come through to stop this,” she said, noting that Velma had not believed that. “She felt it was going to come. It still seems so unreal to me.”

Ronnie had gone to his room after his visit with his mother. He called Joanna to tell her about the funeral arrangements, which the family was trying to keep out of the press. He got no answer and called her father to give him the information.

He did not turn on the TV. He knew that the execution was dominating the news, and he wasn’t sure that he could stand to hear any more about it. He tried not to think about it but found himself trying to picture the execution chamber. What did it look like? What would his mother be thinking as she was led to it? Would she be scared? What was she thinking at this very moment?

The phone rang, and he heard Joanna’s voice asking, “Ronnie, how are you doing?”

They talked for several minutes, and he was touched by her concern. It would mean a lot to him if she attended the funeral, he told her, and he knew his mother would want her there, but he didn’t want her to feel obligated. She would be there, she assured him, and she would be at the funeral home tomorrow night with Michael. She knew Ronnie would need to see him.

After talking with Joanna, Ronnie went downstairs to check on Pam. She was in such a stupor from alcohol and Valium that she could hardly stand up. (“I just wanted to numb the pain,” she explained later. “I was just trying not to hurt so bad.”) Ronnie saw that she was going to be in no shape to return to the prison, and he knew he had a job on his hands. He draped his sister around his shoulder and led her to his room. He called room service for a pot of coffee and tried to get her to drink. “I can’t, Ronnie,” she pleaded, “I’ll throw up.”

“Drink it,” he said.

He got wet cloths for her forehead and began walking her back and forth.

“I promised Mama that we would be there,” he told her firmly, “and we’re going to be.”

26

After her visit with Jimmie Little and Dick Burr, Velma was looking forward to seeing the Roanes again at ten o’clock. They sang every hymn she wanted to hear, she joining in, and ended with her favorite, “Amazing Grace.”

Sam was an emotional man, and he had a hard time finishing that final hymn. He and Gales thought they had said their final good-byes that morning, and now, more than twelve hours later, they found the second round just as difficult. Yet years later they still would see this as one of the most glorious moments of their ministry, for they were convinced that they were singing with someone who in only a few hours would be joining a chorus of angels.

Velma returned to her cell at ten-thirty and took a shower, lingering under the warm water for nearly ten minutes. While she was bathing, Jennie Lancaster came with her boss, Rae McNamara, the director of the Division of Prisons. McNamara felt an obligation to be present with the prison employees who had to carry out the execution. She also wanted to offer whatever comfort she could to Velma, whom she had met earlier on visits to Women’s Prison.

She would never forget how sweet Velma smelled when she emerged from the shower, powdered and cologned, in her pink robe. Velma seemed pleased to see her, and McNamara saw no signs of fear, distress, worry, concern. Clearly, Velma was far more relaxed than anybody around her.

“I think she had come to terms with dying,” McNamara said many years later. “I think she was at peace with it.”

McNamara, Lancaster and Velma sat chatting in Velma’s cell as if they were sitting around somebody’s kitchen table having coffee. The guards would note how casual it seemed. Velma showed her visitors the cards she had received and spoke about how kind everybody had been to her. Then she asked a guard to bring her brown dress so that she could get a “God loves me” pin from it. She wanted to give it to Jennie. She also wanted Jennie to take her jewelry and other belongings when she left.

Just after eleven, with Velma’s execution less than three hours away, Jennie said good-bye, and she and McNamara left. “One of the last things I said to her,” Lancaster later recalled, “was, ‘I think your life and death are going to have meaning for a lot of people afterward.’ She said, ‘I hope so. Please do something about that if you can.’”

Velma finished her mail and handed a stack of cards and letters to Carol Oliver to be taken to the mailroom.

“Are you ready to see the chaplains?” one of the guards asked at 11:25.

“Anytime,” Velma said.

“Which one do you want to see first?”

“Chaplain Carter.”

Phil Carter entered the cell at 11:30, and never since becoming a minister had he been so nervous and uncertain, fearful that he might fail to bring the comfort and reassurance that he should at this moment. But he quickly realized that he shouldn’t have feared, for Velma’s concern, he saw, was not for herself, but for her children, her family, her lawyers, for Jennie Lancaster and himself and others who cared about her, even for the people who were about to carry out her execution.

“That’s all she talked about,” he recalled later.

Velma did have one request, though. She’d like to have communion again. She’d already had the service once this day, with Hugh Hoyle, but midnight would mark the beginning of a new day, and he said he’d arrange it.

Skip Pike had taken Carter on a tour of death row before they came to see Velma—and they had found the men there somber, silent and tense. Pike wanted Velma to know that they were thinking about her. “Mrs. Barfield,” he said, “I was on the row just a little while ago, and I can’t begin to tell you how many people there are lifting you up at this minute.”

“Chaplain,” he would remember her telling him, “don’t worry about me. God has been so good to me, and now I’m going to be with Him. You do your best to love those guys because they need you.”

Ronnie felt as if he were trapped in some surrealistic dream from which he could not awaken as he and Pam arrived at the prison in Mary Ann Tally’s car. The eeriness was beyond anything he had ever experienced—the crush of traffic, the police cars lining the road, the flashing lights, the milling people, the prison glowing in the distance, the mist rising from Walnut Creek, the TV trucks with anchormen seated on their tops, illuminated in the night.

All of this
, he thought,
just to kill my mother.

He saw the death-penalty supporters—there must have been fifty or more by now—and one held aloft a sign that said, BYE BYE VELMA.

“Burn the bitch!” he heard somebody shout.

“Look at how many people are over here supporting your mother,” Mary Ann said, trying to distract his attention, and Ronnie saw the throng on the hillside holding candles. The word “HOPE” was spelled out in lights among them, but it was a word by which he felt abandoned.

Photographers surrounded the car as it approached the prison gate, lights flashing, lenses held up to the windows.

This was a circus, Ronnie thought, a bizarre, state-sponsored circus in which the main act would be hidden from view, held in the dead of night to attract the least attention possible, as if the state were ashamed and embarrassed by it.

Ronnie had told Jimmie Little earlier that his mother had wanted him to make a statement to the press, and Little had arranged this time for it. Pam was crying and had a splitting headache. Ronnie, dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved dress shirt, put his arm around her. TV lights bathed them as they stepped onto the platform erected for the press. Little addressed the reporters first, then Ronnie stepped to the bank of microphones and in a quavering voice spoke about his and Pam’s visit with their mother a few hours earlier.

“Her last request to us was that we be here at the prison tonight. Even though we won’t get to see her anymore, she wanted us to be present, and that’s why we’re here. We’re going to be here until it’s over with. She did want the public to know that she didn’t hold any anger or hatred toward any of the people who fought to bring this about, that she hoped that her death would allow the victims’ families to begin to put some of the pieces of their lives back together.”

He was fighting back tears, and he paused as if having difficulty continuing. “I want people to know that she wanted to live very badly and that she never gave up hope until today. She wanted to live mainly for her grandchildren. We both miss her already.”

At the Howard Johnson’s in Lumberton, a silence fell over the meeting room as Ronnie’s image appeared on the TV. Earlier, there had been talk of him and Pam.

“I feel sorry for her children,” John Henry Lee’s granddaughter, Teresa Britt, had told a reporter. “That’s their mother and they’re sticking by her, and I admire that. But that doesn’t change anything.” Velma, she said, still deserved to die. “I don’t feel sorry for her one bit.”

“Of course, we feel sorry for her family,” Alice Storms had told another reporter. “We know what they must be feeling, because we’ve been through it, too, losing a loved one. We will have them in our prayers and hope the best for them.”

But that changed nothing for Alice either. “I think there are four kinds of death,” she said. “Natural causes, accidents, a life that is taken without permission, and execution. To me, Velma Barfield deserves to be executed. She literally pulled the switch herself.”

As Ronnie spoke, Alice sat watching with Sylvia Andrews and Margie Pittman, and all three began to cry.

At midnight, the guard in the control room noted in the log that Velma was kneeling beside her bunk in prayer.

While she prayed, the vigil keepers on the hillside and the reporters by the gate heard the first of several waves of muffled, rhythmic pounding coming from within the prison, as the inmates mounted their own protest to what was about to happen.

Her prayer finished, Velma sat on her bunk, her legs folded beneath her, looking at her mail. She wrote a quick note, sealed it in an envelope and addressed it. Then technicians were there to tell her again about the procedures she soon would be facing. Only minutes after they left, the chaplains returned.

The communion set that Skip Pike carried was a camouflaged military field kit that had been left at the prison by a former chaplain who had used it in Vietnam. Pike and Carter began setting up for the communion on the stainless steel table in the day room. At twelve-thirty, an hour and a half before the execution, the heavy door of Velma’s cell slid open and she stepped out for her final, formal religious ceremony.