Love Me To Death (17 page)
Authors: Steve Jackson
Fifteen
July 28, 1999, Jefferson County Detention Center
William Lee Neal walked into the interview room with a grin on his face and his hand extended. “I’m Cody Neal,” he said, shaking hands with this writer like a used-car salesman, warm and ingratiating. “Cody’s a nickname. . . . My friends call me Cody.”
He glanced to the left, then smiled and exchanged nods with another inmate through the glass partition separating the tiny room from the cubicle next door. “He’s a great guy . . . brings me my food every morning,” Neal said of the younger man, who had been laughing wildly at whatever his weepy mother was telling him through the thick Plexiglas that separated her from her son.
There was no such barrier in this room. Neal demanded a contact visit to tell his story because, he said, he didn’t want “other people” to hear. The request was at first denied by jail authorities; he was, after all, a confessed mass murderer. When he complained to jail higher-ups, the request was quickly granted—“Whatever Cody wants”—so long as he behaved himself and there were no delays getting to his death penalty trial in September.
There had been a number of “special considerations” that he’d been given by the district attorney’s and sheriff’s offices due to his choice to represent himself.
Pro se
defendants were allowed a certain number of hours in the jail’s law library to prepare their defense. In Neal’s case, the jail brought in extra personnel so that he could spend entire nights in the library, sometimes with a fellow inmate hired to help him make copies and collate his material. The court ordered that a tape recorder be purchased for him so that he could listen to taped interviews and make duplicates (as well as pass the time listening to his music). He had a VCR and television so that he could watch videos, such as those of his confessions; he was allowed to keep law books, legal materials, and all sorts of writing materials—provided by the court—in his cell.
Pro se
defendants were allowed a certain number of hours in the jail’s law library to prepare their defense. In Neal’s case, the jail brought in extra personnel so that he could spend entire nights in the library, sometimes with a fellow inmate hired to help him make copies and collate his material. The court ordered that a tape recorder be purchased for him so that he could listen to taped interviews and make duplicates (as well as pass the time listening to his music). He had a VCR and television so that he could watch videos, such as those of his confessions; he was allowed to keep law books, legal materials, and all sorts of writing materials—provided by the court—in his cell.
He even had a cell phone, which he was allowed to call out on for a total of one hour a day, including long distance. He’d entered a motion saying that he had a lot of people—friends and family—out of state that he might need to summon as witnesses. The phone was supposed to be so that he could prepare his defense, but he used it for a variety of reasons, including calling a new girlfriend in Arizona, and contacting the press. He’d run up monthly telephone bills, including one for nearly $1,000, talking on a daily basis to the one sibling in his family who would speak to him, his sister Sharon.
In the interview room, he leaned forward conspiratorially and said in a stage whisper that he did his best to use the phone on the Q.T. “I don’t want these other inmates trying to take advantage of the folks here at the jail, who’ve been real good to me.” But ten minutes per call wasn’t enough, he complained, so he planned to petition the court for more airtime.
Manipulating, always manipulating—that’s Wild Bill Cody Neal, the forty-three-year-old charismatic killer who threw money around on strippers, limos, and parties like it was sand at the beach. He took a seat on one of the two plain stools that rose out of the floor like gray mushrooms; between them an equally drab and secured table jutted from the wall. Mass murderer or not, he didn’t look dangerous. His blue eyes were a bit too pale and widely spaced on his round face—and therefore somewhat disconcerting, but really only if the viewer was aware of what he did.
Otherwise, he was rather unmenacing, five-foot-eight and a bit pear-shaped, with short, undefined arms and soft, damp hands. His thick brown hair perched uncombed on top of his head like an unkempt cat. He now had the pallor of a corpse—he didn’t want much recreation time and avoided most opportunities to socialize with other inmates. The skin around his eyes was puffy, as if he weren’t sleeping well with his death penalty hearing looming. The muted light of the single fluorescent tube in the ceiling of the interview room and the gray cinder-block walls and blue-tinged institutional carpeting did little to improve his complexion. Only the bright orange jail jumpsuit that he wore and his voice—a gravelly baritone with a western rumble that one might expect from an old cowboy—gave him any color or substance.
Neal began by saying how he wanted to tell his story and to keep telling it along the road to his expected execution. But some parts, he confided, needed to be kept quiet for the time being. He said that he didn’t want his court-appointed advisory counsel, Randy Canney, to use his story to try to save his life, or the prosecution in its efforts to kill him. So he hadn’t told any of them much about his life, he confided, and would now have to be careful how much he revealed. “There’s family members who’s ill or don’t know the situation I’m in, and I don’t want them contacted or subpoenaed.”
With that he was ready to talk. His modus operandi with the press was to call, flatter—“I’ve read your stuff, and you’re the only reporter in this town who can do this justice”—say what he hoped would find its way into a newspaper or television report, then move on to the next reporter: “I’ve read your stuff, and you’re the only reporter in this town who can do this justice.” He always claimed to have something “new,” something to add, but it was always the same old story. . . . Always something to do with how he was struggling mightily to represent himself in court, against all legal advice, so that “the truth” would come out and his victims and their families would be spared further pain. . . . Always as though there were some sort of nobility to his “sacrifice.”
The truth, he complained, was being “twisted by lies in the press.” Inaccuracies about what he did that—“bad as it was”—were “sensationalized,” especially in regard to Suzanne Scott. “They said I made her watch,” he whined as he had to sheriff’s investigators Jose Aceves and Cheryl Zimmerman in September 1998. “In fact, I told her not to. . . . I told her to turn her head so she couldn’t see. . . . But after she heard the sound from the first time I hit Angie, she looked and saw the rest.”
Considering the circumstances, he said, he behaved like a gentleman when he sexually assaulted her. “Rape is rape,” he conceded. “But she even told the detectives that I was real gentle with her.”
Despite the carnage and sorrow that he had caused, Neal saw himself as “owning up.” It’s why, he said, he pleaded guilty in February to three counts of first-degree murder, three counts of sexual assault, and seven other counts that included felony menacing and kidnapping.
“We need to end the violence by taking responsibility for our actions,” he said. “But as some old Turk once said, ‘No matter how long you’ve gone down the wrong road, turn back, turn back.’ ”
Part of his turning back, he said, was to “protect the good names” of the women he’d butchered. But at the same time, he hinted—as he had to the investigators—that there were aspects of his victims’ lives that his attorney could exploit. “My counsel’s saying I’m hurtin’ the families more not goin’ to trial ’cause there’s no closure for ’em. . . . But they’ll get their justice in the penalty phase. I still say I deserve to die for what I done, and I can’t see puttin’ ’em through more’n what they been through already.”
Neal quickly added, however, that the people who contended that he was representing himself because he wanted to die had it wrong. “I want to live and contribute,” he said, admitting that it had also crossed his mind that “owning up” might persuade the panel of three judges who would hear his case to spare his life. “It’s my only chance.”
Right now, he said, he was having difficulty with Canney. “He wants me to reverse my guilty plea and is threatening to petition the court that I’m not competent to represent myself.”
He sighed. It was exhausting trying to do the right thing. “I’m fightin’ more with my defense counsel than the prosecution,” he noted. “I get along real well with Tingle. He’s been helpin’ me protect my rights to self-representation and to accept responsibility by pleadin’ guilty. And I’m thankful for that.” As if part of a team headed to the Super Bowl, rather than a man whom the prosecution would like strapped to a steel table and given a lethal injection, he said that he was “workin’ hard” with the prosecutors and jail authorities to “avoid any sort of snags.”
On the other hand, he conceded, Canney didn’t think that he was prepared for the hearing, “and that could be true.” There were some ten thousand pages of discovery to read—including the transcript of the seven-and-a-half-hour confession that he gave Aceves and Zimmerman. He complained that he still hadn’t received some of the addresses and telephone numbers that he needed to implement his “strategy” (which he wouldn’t reveal) for the hearing.
With all that said, he turned to what he claimed one of his jailers told him was “ ‘an extraordinary life . . . from livin’ with the rich and famous . . . to the dregs . . . and through all kinds of employment.’ ” Not even his family knew his tale, he said. “I’ve lived a private life . . . where I didn’t want them involved in it.”
At his death penalty hearing in September 1999, Neal knew he would be asked to present “mitigators”—reasons countering the prosecution’s arguments, called “aggravators,” that he should be put to death. In many death penalty trials, mitigators include tales of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse in childhood, or addictions to drugs and alcohol that left the defendant unable to assess the impact of his behavior, or a lack of criminal history, or even past good deeds that might show the defendant wasn’t
all bad.
all bad.
Neal said that he’d have few, if any, such mitigators. “I grew up in an all-American family.” His father was “a good man, a disciplinarian. . . . It was ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and ‘No, sir,’ and ‘Don’t you raise your voice to your mother,’ or you’d find your lip on the wall.” His father was also a very honest man who taught his two sons and two daughters the difference between right and wrong. “Don’t steal. Don’t lie. Do what’s right, tell the truth. . . . And if you do something wrong, ‘You better come to me before somebody else does.’ ”
Despite the lectures, Neal said, he was a boy when he got his first taste of the sort of petty crimes that would accelerate in his adult life. He was ten years old when he and a friend were caught shoplifting toy cars at a local five-and-dime by the woman who owned the store. Brought to her office, where a security guard loomed over them menacingly, the woman threatened to call their fathers. “I was cryin’ and beggin’, ‘No, anything but that,’ ” he said with a laugh.
He and his friend talked their way out of trouble, promising that they’d never steal again. “She thought she was givin’ me a break,” he said. “And we thought we had really put one over on her. . . . But she should have called my dad and had him whip the tar out of me. . . . Maybe if she didn’t give me a break, things woulda been different.”
Still, it wasn’t like he suddenly “went bad.” He didn’t start committing other crimes until he was an older teenager, he said. Nor was he rebelling against his parents. He said how he was proud that his father was a decorated World War II veteran, a radio operator in a bomber who flew missions all over the South Pacific. “He won the Distinguished Flying Cross. If it looked like it was going to be a bad run, he’d fly for the married guys with kids.”
Neal said that he got his “passion” for country music from his dad. “You know, Hank Williams Sr., Johnny Cash.” There was even a little Rick Nelson from 1961. . . . “ ‘Hello Mary Lou, Goodbye heart,’ ” he sang, breaking out in an impromptu serenade. He wasn’t sure but believed that his dad retired from the service “when I was nine or so.
“Some of these dates are hard to pin down,” he said. “I have a lot of places where the memory just isn’t there.” After retirement the old man’s alcoholism got worse, and he was quicker to lay it on his son’s backside with a leather belt. But it wasn’t the occasional beatings that his son minded so much as the efforts to embarrass him in front of the other drunks at the bars that he’d drag young Bill to: “He’d think it was funny. Then he’d black out and forget all about it.”
For comfort Neal turned to his mother. “I absolutely loved my mother.” The mention of her and a glance at the mother talking to her son in the next room brought tears to his eyes and his voice grew even huskier as he tried to describe her. “Mom was awesome,” he said. “The definition of love was my mom.
“She was beautiful, a gorgeous brunette. She looked like a movie star. But she was very much the mother . . . devoted to her family.”
Neal said that his parents never fought. One word from his soft-spoken mother was enough to let his dad know he had stepped over the line. “And he would do anything to make it right.”
It would be better for him, Neal acknowledged, if there was some dark secret—some evil done to him by his father, or some twisted relationship with his mother—that caused a brooding anger that might explain to the panel of judges why he did what he did in June and July of 1998. But no, he said, there was nothing there.
“So what if I got beat when I did something wrong, ‘Spare the rod, spoil the child,’ ” he said, but added that there was something that “turned out the light” of an active, friendly boy.
Neal said that as a child he’d known what he wanted to be when he grew up, or at least had a couple of ideas; neither of them included being an ax-murderer. One possibility was becoming an FBI agent; his father had taken him to the agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., and he looked through the museum with its histories of Eliot Ness and J. Edgar Hoover. A G-man sounded like a fun and exciting career, and he could do a lot of good, catching bad guys and all.
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