Death Sentence (55 page)

He read a religious poem, “Step by Step,” that Velma had in her pocket on the night of her execution.

“Her concern even in the last moments was for those she loved,” he said. “She said that her days on death row had been the fullest and happiest of her life because of God … and she ministered even in her dying.”

The entire congregation rose to sing Velma’s second-favorite hymn, “Blessed Assurance.”

Then Hugh Hoyle returned to the pulpit.

“When you remove all the front-page, sensational press hype, we see that Velma was just a human being like all of us,” he said. “She loved her children, her grandchildren, her brothers and sisters…”

She had the same fears, anxieties, angers, insecurities, frustrations that everybody experiences, he pointed out, but hers led to drugs and evil.

“There is in all of us that dark potential,” he reminded.

But while Velma had slipped into the darkness far deeper than all but a few ever would, he noted, she also had climbed far higher back toward brightness and love.

He read from a letter that she had written him early in their relationship. “‘When I think back over my life and see how I wasted it, it makes me tremble…’”

The most dramatic event in Velma’s life, he said, was not her execution, but that moment in the Robeson County Jail six years earlier when she had accepted Christ.

“She was a changed person, and she was not afraid anymore to point out to others where she had gone wrong. She was motivated by faith, not by fear.”

He went on to tell of her deep need for forgiveness, and of all the good times and bad they had shared when he had been her minister. He remembered that he always left her at Women’s Prison by saying, “Come and see me sometime.” And she would laugh and say, “I’ll drop by next time I’m in the neighborhood.”

“Now,” he said, “the roles are reversed, and she’s saying, ‘Come and see me sometime.’”

He read from one of Velma’s favorite scriptures, Psalm 139.

“Weep not,” he said, in closing. “She is not dead. She is resting in the bosom of Jesus.”

Sam Roane sang another of Velma’s requested hymns, “He Giveth More Grace,” and for the benediction, Hoyle read a poem that Ruth Graham had written for Velma but that had not arrived until after her execution. She called it “Welcome Home, Velma,” and it was based on Psalm 116:15.

As the eager parents wait

the homing of their child

from far lands desolate,

from living wild;

wounded and wounding along the way,

their sorrow for sin ignored,

from stain and strain of night and day

to home assured.

So the Heavenly Father waits

the homing of His child;

thrown wide those Heavenly Gates

in welcome glorious wild!

His, His the joy by right

—once crucified, reviled—

So—

Precious in God’s sight

is the death of His child.

The funeral procession stretched for as far as Ronnie could see as it rolled down U.S. 301 toward Parkton under a slate gray sky. State troopers were stationed along the way, and a TV news helicopter flew back and forth overhead. As the procession passed through Parkton, by the Baptist church his family had once attended so faithfully, past the Parnell house where he and Pam had spent most of the happy years of their early childhoods, Ronnie’s mind swarmed with memories and with wonder that it all could have turned out this way.

State troopers and Robeson County sheriff’s deputies stood with hats over their hearts as the hearse and family car turned into the cemetery, just yards from the Parnell house.

At the graveside, Phil Carter read from Psalm 27. Then, as Pam and Faye sobbed audibly, Hugh Hoyle stepped forth for the committal. “We gather here to commit to this resting place the body of our beloved sister whose spirit we know is already with the Lord…”

Gales Roane’s organ broke into song, and Sam led the group in singing “Amazing Grace.”

Then it was over, and all that was left were the goodbyes and thank-yous, and returning after the grave had been closed to look at the flowers and pluck selected blossoms to be pressed in books as tangible memories.

Ronnie remained with Pam Saturday night and slept without nightmares. As he was leaving Sunday for Charleston, where he would try to put his life back together quickly, as his mother wanted, he backtracked to Parkton for a final stop by the town cemetery.

The flowers adorning his mother’s grave were already fading. He stepped beneath the funeral canopy and remembered all the occasions that he had stood by other graves with his mother, never realizing, time after time, that they held people whose lives she had taken. He could not escape a feeling of responsibility for those lost lives and an even greater burden for his mother’s.

“I’m sorry, Mama,” he whispered and broke into tears. “I should’ve done more. I should’ve done more.”

He sank to his knees and lingered, crying, as if waiting for word that he had been forgiven his failures, his weaknesses, his guilt. But no such message would ever come.

Epilogue

Pam was filled with anger after her mother’s death and sensed that she had to do something about it. When she went to pick up her mother’s belongings from Jennie Lancaster, whom she and Ronnie had come to care about deeply, the two had a long talk and Pam decided that she needed psychological counseling, which she began in January 1985.

Two weeks after the execution, Pam vented some of her anger publicly in a long letter to the
Robesonian
in Lumberton. After all that she had endured because of her mother’s drug addiction, she had been especially galled that, in their campaign to see that Velma’s sentence was carried out, some family members of her mother’s victims had questioned whether Velma truly had been under the influence of drugs.

“I will say very honestly that I did have bitterness in my heart against the Victims of Barfield for the things they were saying,” Pam wrote. “After all, this was my mom they were talking about. The reason I don’t have bitterness for them today is because my mother had long talks with me about this and asked me to please not feel this way because the Bible teaches love and forgiving, not hating.”

Two years after the execution, Pam’s marriage failed. She went to Charleston to stay with Faye for a while, then moved to another state to start a new life. Kirby retained custody of the children, until Beverly came to live with her mother at age fourteen; later Sarah, too, came to live with Pam. Not until five years after their separation were Pam and Kirby divorced.

In 1997, Pam had a new relationship, a managerial job with a large company, and she owned a nice house with a screened back porch that looked onto a schoolyard where children played. Only a couple of people in her new life knew that her mother had been a serial killer, the only woman to be executed in the United States in thirty-five years, and she saw no point in bringing it up to others.

“There’s just so many things that we’ve lost out on,” Pam said as she sat on her back porch late one evening, looking back on her life. Many times she had wished that her father could have known his grandchildren, she said. “I would just loved to have seen how spoiled he would’ve made them. I guess my biggest envy comes when I see a mother and a daughter together with their grandbabies and they’re laughing and having fun.

“I’m just glad I did the things I did for my mom and that I was there for her. I knew that if she was put to death, I could live out my life without any guilt. I did everything I knew I could do for her. I don’t feel pity for myself. I’m just glad I recognized that I needed some help and picked myself up. It’s made me tougher. And for the first time in my life, I’m happy.”

After his mother’s funeral, Ronnie returned to Charleston determined to take her advice and get on with his life.

“I had high expectations, believe me, that I would be able to resume some sort of normal life,” he said, but that was not to happen.

“People expected too much of me. I felt so robbed and cheated by life. I had lost my wife. I was separated from my son. I didn’t have any parents left alive. Somehow during my mom’s execution, I had made myself go from being a weak person to being a strong person to endure what I had to go through. I thought that my mom had given me strength enough to get through whatever I had to face.”

But that proved not to be true. He suppressed his thoughts and feelings and found his only strength in alcohol. He could hardly remember a sober day in the next few years. He spent almost every night in bars, and when he wasn’t in bars, he was drinking alone in his room. It was not unusual for him to knock off a fifth of Jim Beam in an evening. Almost every night he drank until he passed out, got up still drunk to go to work, and fought his hangovers with surreptitious drinks during the day. In the first two and a half years after his mother’s death, he once calculated, he spent $23,000 on alcohol.

He rarely returned to see Michael, rarely called him. He made regular support payments until 1987, when he began missing some, then stopped making any at all. After that, he saw Michael no more and cut off all contact.

“I was just trying to block out everything that was hurting,” he said. “I wouldn’t allow myself to experience emotions that hurt me. I was scared of being pushed over the edge, worried about a total collapse.”

One thing he couldn’t block out was the nightmares. They came with haunting regularity. One was the dream he’d had the night before his mother’s funeral, that she had somehow survived the execution and the state was coming after her again. In the other, he was seated in the witness room of the execution chamber, and his mother suddenly rose from the gurney, turned to the observation window, reached out her arms and called, “Ronnie, help me! Please, Ronnie! Why won’t you help me?”

The nightmares would grow fewer with the years, but they would never stop, and whenever they came he knew that sleep was ended for the night.

Ronnie went out with many women and a few times came close to serious relationships, but he always ran from them, afraid to trust. “I cared so little about life,” he said, “gave so little thought to anybody close to me.”

By 1988, Faye and Cliffs marriage had begun to crumble. When Cliff received assignment to a new base in Florida that fall, the marriage ended. Ronnie moved with Cliff, gaining Faye’s enmity. They settled in an apartment in Jacksonville, and Ronnie found a job in construction.

In Jacksonville, Ronnie’s drinking and his feeling that nothing mattered led to violence. He was cut in one barroom fight, nearly losing a finger. Later, he wondered how he survived this period, for he was not only getting into fights but constantly driving drunk (and only once was arrested for it). Often, he would wake with no memory of what he had done the night before, or how he had gotten home.

Cliff, too, was an alcoholic, and the two had trouble getting along.

“You and your whole damn family are nothing but a bunch of killers,” Cliff told him one night.

Twice, Ronnie and Cliff got into fights over trivial matters and ended up beating each other bloody.

Ronnie began thinking of leaving—he had been dreaming of returning to Parkton, or to one of the places where he, Joanna and Michael had lived in their happier times—but he had only been working sporadically, had no money and no place to go. At one point, he wrote to Jimmie Little asking for money to return to North Carolina. Little sent it, but instead of leaving, Ronnie spent the money on liquor.

It had been five years since his mother’s death, and he had neither seen nor communicated with any of his mother’s family. He called several, seeking help, but all were wary. Finally, he called a friend, an older woman he’d met in a bar. She had been transferred to New Jersey in her work. She invited him to come and stay with her and sent him money to get there. He remained only a few weeks before he understood that he hardly knew this woman and she realized that she had invited a dependent drunk into her life.

Again Ronnie called Jimmie Little, who told him that if he came to Raleigh, he would help him. Ronnie had never wanted to see Raleigh again, had never dreamed that he would willingly go there. But he saw no other option.

This time Little sent a bus ticket instead of money. Ronnie arrived on a Saturday late in November, carrying his only belongings in a duffel bag and a battered suitcase. Little had rented a room for him near North Carolina State University, less than a mile from Central Prison, and Ronnie took a cab to the address. The room was on the third floor of an old house, tiny, dark and shabbily furnished, but he was grateful for the haven. Little came by to see him later that day, and Ronnie couldn’t help but think how ironic this was. His mother had told him that Jimmie might need his help after her death, but all the time it had been the other way around.

That night Ronnie didn’t drink, and he lay in his room feeling desperate and lonely, a total failure. He was a drunk, estranged from everybody he’d ever loved; he was penniless, owed thousands of dollars in back child support, and if not for the graces of Jimmie Little he would be just another homeless person on the streets.