Death Sentence (52 page)

Later, both Pike and Carter would call this one of the most profound religious experiences of their lives. They used a common chalice, each sipping after the other, the chaplains, both opponents of capital punishment, well aware that while they administered this liquid representing the blood of Christ, they also were taking part in the planned killing of a human being, albeit one who had killed others, yet one who—they both were certain—had been redeemed.

“It was like a meeting of the holy and ultimate evil,” Phil Carter would later say.

As soon as the chaplains had departed, Carol Oliver brought an adult diaper to Velma’s cell. Velma had earlier been told that she would need to wear it—the drugs would relax her sphincter, and nobody wanted a mess, least of all Velma, who lighted Salems to keep from offending her keepers when she used the toilet.

Velma put on the diaper beneath her pink panties. Then a guard brought new cotton pajamas that Gales Roane had bought and told her she needed to get dressed. Male prisoners were executed wearing only their boxer shorts, but Velma had asked to be allowed to wear pajamas and her request had been granted. The pajamas were pink, like the dress her father had bought her when she was ten, with flowers embroidered around the collar and above the pocket.

After getting dressed, Velma returned to her bunk and sat reading her mail. Ten minutes later, at one o’clock, with an hour of life remaining, she got up and began flushing down the commode the cigarettes left in her pack. She returned to her bunk and her mail, only to have the door to her cell slide open a minute later.

Rae McNamara was back. Because Jennie Lancaster had allowed herself to become so close to Velma, McNamara had told her that she could not be present at the execution, and Lancaster had gone to the first floor to be with Pam and Ronnie. Still, McNamara had thought a woman should be with Velma and she had appointed herself.

Carol Oliver was in the control room when the telephone rang at 1:10. The tension was so great, the silence so eerie and foreboding that the sound startled her and she jumped before she reached for the receiver.

“You have fifteen seconds,” she heard a voice say.

Oliver hurried into the deathwatch area and strode determinedly to the open door of Velma’s cell.

“Velma,” she said, “it’s time.”

Velma stood. So did McNamara. For a moment nobody said anything. Then Velma turned to McNamara.

“Do you think it would be all right if I wore my robe?” she asked.

“Sure, Velma,” McNamara said.

Velma pulled on her robe and, after pausing at the small stainless steel mirror to check her hair, she stepped through the doorway, freeing herself from prison cells for evermore.

A ghoulish party atmosphere had taken over among the death-penalty supporters alongside Western Boulevard. Chants broke out sporadically. “Down with Velma! Up with victims!” “Burn! Burn! Burn!”

A steady stream of cars crept past, some drivers honking horns, some occupants whooping and hollering.

“Give her a shot!” came the shout from one car. “Hang the bitch!” a young man yelled from another.

“There are a lot of creeps around here,” observed John Snow, a North Carolina State student who stood with the death-penalty supporters. “This isn’t a public hanging, but it’s pretty close. She could be hanging from a tree right over there,” he said, pointing to the trees on the prison grounds where the silent vigil keepers stood.

Nathan Rice was waiting at the open door of the deathwatch area as Velma exited her cell. Carol Oliver walked alongside Velma, Rae McNamara behind. At the door, Rice directed Velma to the small preparation room, only a few feet away on the left.

The gurney standing near the center of the room had been covered with a pale aquamarine sheet, its corners tucked in neat military folds. Velma stopped by the gurney, removed her robe and handed it to Oliver. She stepped out of her scruffy blue bedroom shoes, and Oliver stooped to pick them up.

“Thank you,” Velma said.

The gurney was too high for Velma to climb onto easily, and guards reached to help her.

Carol Oliver left for the adjoining parole hearing room, the staging area where the rest of the execution team was waiting in strained and solemn silence.

Phil Carter and Skip Pike sat beside one another, Bibles in hand, places marked, awaiting their turns. Carol Oliver knew Pike well and she noticed that he seemed more ill at ease than she had ever seen him. Her heart went out to him, but everybody in the room felt a professional obligation to keep emotions to themselves. Carter was nervous, too, worried about what he would say to Velma. As he fidgeted, he couldn’t take his eyes off the “crash cart” parked near the door. A crash cart normally was loaded with life-saving paraphernalia and was used in hospitals, rushed to patients in crisis. But this one carried the syringes filled with deadly chemicals that soon would take a life.

One of the vigil keepers standing on the hillside in front of the prison was Mattie Lewis, a laundry worker from Winston-Salem, who had switched shifts with a fellow employee so that she could be there. “I was determined to come,” she said. “I was determined. I don’t think no man has the right to take another’s life.”

Not far away stood Wade and Roger Smith, brothers and prominent lawyers in Raleigh.

“You can’t just stay home,” said Wade Smith, a leader of the state Democratic Party, who had defended Green Beret doctor Jeffrey McDonald in his widely publicized trial for the murder of his family. “You don’t know what to do.”

Roger Smith, who had worked on the final appeals to save James Hutchins, had been among the anti-death-penalty protesters outside the capitol when Governor Hunt had returned to his office Thursday afternoon.

Wade Smith looked at his watch. It was 1:35.

“I guess she’s strapped on the gurney by now,” he said. “She’s awake, conscious. I wonder if at this point anyone is talking to her. Isn’t it incredible that there’s a human being in there with twenty minutes to live? Could there be anything more—more premeditated and deliberated?”

Somebody was indeed talking to Velma. Phil Carter had just begun to read to her from Romans 14: “For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself.

“For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s.

“For to this end, Christ both died, and rose, and revived, that he might be Lord both of the dead and the living.”

His voice was breaking, and there were moments when he wondered if he could go on, but he did.

Pike had entered the preparation room first, Carter close behind. Velma was covered by a second sheet that reached nearly to her neck. She was wearing her big glasses with brown, speckled frames, and her hair was perfectly coiffed. The saline solution was already flowing into veins in both her arms from IV bags mounted on the gurney. Velma smiled when she saw the nervous chaplains.

“Mrs. Barfield,” said Pike, “Phil and I would like to share these words from the scriptures.”

Because he’d known Velma for such a brief period, Pike wanted Carter to have most of their time. He read from Psalm 21, then prayed that God would hold Velma gently through her journey. When he finished, he later recalled, she smiled and looked him straight in the eye.

“She spoke very directly,” he said. “She said, ‘Thank you for the kindness you’ve shown me and for the times you’ve shared God’s love with me.’ She said, ‘I know you are filled with the spirit. I could tell by the way you prayed the first time you prayed for me.’ I said, ‘I just try to serve the Lord.’ She smiled again and said, ‘Chaplain Pike, God’s people are the bestest kind.’ It just blew me away.”

Pike stepped back, and Carter moved into his place. He would never forget how fearful he was of losing control, but he kept telling himself that he had to hold together.

One look at her, he would later recall, told him he would do it. “She had a glow on her face. She looked to be at utter peace. She smiled at me. She said, ‘Well, it’ll soon be over. I’ll be in a better place and I’m glad.’”

“The kids send their love,” Carter told her.

“They’re great kids,” she replied.

He opened his Bible and began reading from Romans 14.

Two guards escorted the witnesses from the ground floor conference room to the elevators for the short ride up one level to the execution chamber. The official witnesses numbered eight, all law enforcement officers except for two assistant D.A.s from Joe Freeman Britt’s office. Four witnesses had been chosen by press organizations to represent the media. Jimmie Little and Anne Lotz were there as well, witnesses out of love.

The view offered by the witness room window was plain and grim. The chamber had six walls, none more than six feet long, all of them at odd angles. Against the parallel wall from the window was the dark-stained oak chair with its gruesome leather straps that had been in the service of death by cyanide gas since 1936, although nobody had died in it for more than twenty-two years.

Two rows of numbered blue plastic chairs had been set before the window for the official witnesses. Those seated on the front row would be no more than three feet from Velma.

The witnesses began entering the chamber at 1:40. With the two guards who would remain with them, the group numbered sixteen. The official witnesses took their assigned seats. The media witnesses stood behind with Jimmie Little and Anne Lotz, who held hands.

The lights in the witness room were turned off so that the only illumination came through the window from the chamber. The effect was that of a movie theater, the chamber window serving as the screen; only the people inside would be real, and the action deadly.

Later, Anne Lotz, who did not think of herself as a witness but as a friend standing by a deathbed, would remember thinking how small and sterile the chamber seemed. She had to keep reminding herself that what she had told Velma was true: that it really was the gateway to heaven.

“It didn’t look like the pearly gates,” she said, “but it was. We just couldn’t see the other side.”

In the preparation room, Phil Carter had just finished reading scripture. He shut the Bible and began to pray.

“God receive this our sister. We love her. Forgive her. Be with her children and comfort them and help them know the peace that only can be found in Thee…”

He prayed at length, and when he had finished, he put his hand on Velma’s shoulder and searched for the right words to say.

“You’ve touched a lot of people’s lives,” he told her—and felt the sudden tap on his own shoulder, telling him that time was up—“and you’ve changed many of those lives forever.”

He wouldn’t realize the double meaning of those words at the time, but he knew from Velma’s answer that she understood them as he meant them, that the lives she’d changed in recent years had been for the better.

“To God be the glory,” she said. “God did it all.”

“We’ve got to go,” he told her, letting his hand linger just a moment more, absorbing her warmth.

She thanked him for the worship and love they’d shared, for the times he’d sneaked her into the chapel against the rules, for the times he’d listened patiently when she’d been upset.

“I’ll see you in heaven,” Carter told her.

“I’ll be waiting for you,” she replied, and smiled for the last time, a smile that Carter would carry with him forever.

As soon as the chaplains departed, Nathan Rice stepped back into the preparation room. This time he carried a mini-cassette recorder.

“Velma, if you would like to make any final statement,” he said, “this is your opportunity.”

“I would,” she said, and he pressed the “record” button and held the device close to her mouth.

Her voice was strong and did not falter. “I want to say that I am sorry for all the hurt that I have caused. I know that everybody has gone through a lot of pain—all the families connected—and I am sorry, and I want to thank everybody who has been supporting me all these six years.

“I want to thank my family for standing with me through all this and my attorneys and all the support to me, everybody, the people with the prison department. I appreciate everything—their kindness and everything that they have shown me during these six years.”

She paused, then said no more.

“Is that all?” Rice asked.

She nodded.

For some in the witness room the wait seemed interminable. The heat was stifling, the tension intense, the silence unsettling, broken only by the sound of somebody shuffling feet, shifting in a chair, clearing a throat, and by a guard near the door who kept nervously jangling the change in his pocket.

Then at about 1:50, the big locks on the chamber door began to turn. Slowly, the door swung outward and open, and for the first time the witnesses caught a glimpse of Velma.

A uniformed guard stepped to the end of the gurney where Velma’s head lay. Velma turned her head for a quick glance into the chamber, then looked away, and the guard began to steer the gurney toward the door. A second guard appeared at the foot of the gurney, the two maneuvering it carefully past the chair into the suddenly cramped room.

Black open-ended rectangles painted on the floor marked the spots for the gurney’s wheels. And as the guards guided the gurney alongside the window, Velma turned her head toward the chair and closed her eyes. The guard at the foot of the gurney stepped back. The other guard moved around the head of the gurney and took hold of a beige plastic curtain hanging from hooks on a steel rod that stretched the length of the chamber, sixteen inches below the ceiling. As he departed, he pulled the curtain out to its full length, leaving the gurney sandwiched between the curtain and the observation window. A slit in the curtain made it possible for technicians to reach through to the IV leads.