The Road Out of Hell (35 page)

All Mr. Kelley did was to breezily reply, “Sorry, boy-o.” He winked at him. “Can’t tell all my secrets. I wouldn’t want to lose my aura of mystery.”

Sanford did the closest thing to laughing that he did any more, which was to smile and exhale hard a couple of times. Kelley smiled and nodded, then lowered his voice again. “It’s like your situation here, where you can’t discuss your case. Everybody has a story that you can’t know. That goes for the rest of the boys here, but it pretty well goes for everybody else outside the gate as well. All you need is a little healthy suspicion to help you weed out the bad apples. With everybody else, it’s pretty safe to assume that because of the story they have—which you can’t know—they might deserve your compassion. Northcott occupies the extreme end of the scale, but we’re all on it at some point.”

“But I just…. Do you really think I can do this? What if the people here are just too nice to realize what I….” He sighed. “I know I don’t deserve this.”

“Hey, listen up—don’t get into the business of trying to decide who deserves what. Bad territory, that. Now, you’re likely to feel afraid about any number of things while you’re here. You’re lucky, you get to be brave. Great exercise. Can’t be brave unless you’re afraid first.”

Mr. Kelley placed one hand on his shoulder. Sanford noticed a slight recoil when his fingertips landed on the large burn scar. It would forever cover a fourth of his back, courtesy of Uncle Stewart’s pot of boiling water followed by his twisted treatment of the wound with nothing other than petroleum jelly. Sanford was so self-conscious about it that he wouldn’t remove his shirt in front of anyone, even when he worked outside in the desert heat. Now when he felt Mr. Kelley’s touch, Sanford’s desire to avoid offending his guardian angel was so strong that he made himself stand still without backing away. Of anything that was said that afternoon, he felt the greatest wave of reassurance from the simple fact that his guardian angel’s hand stayed in place for a few more seconds before he pulled it back. Mr. Kelley did not prod Sanford about the scar, the way people do with a boy who has to be questioned about everything. He said nothing at all, as if understanding it as part of Sanford’s burden. He left him his dignity, the way men do among men they respect.

Gordon Stewart Northcott was a dead man walking for the next few months, while he played out his appeals. Nobody cared to hear much of what he had to say. He fell into a behavior pattern that is familiar to homicide detectives who deal with sociopathic personalities: alternating between confessions and denials, mixed with theatrical expressions of remorse for himself and arrogant assurances of his vindication. He tormented the parents of Walter Collins and Lewis and Nelson Winslow, alternately offering to tell all about the fate of their sons and then refusing to say a thing.

On October 2,1930, not quite two years after being found guilty, he was carried up the steps of the hangman’s scaffold, already blindfolded at his own request. He blubbered and begged for his life throughout it all, up until the instant the warden pulled the trigger on the trap door. Just as the trap door was sprung, Northcott blurted out: “No, don’t!” These were likely to have been the same words he had heard from more than one of his victims.

Northcott’s neck did not break when he hit the end of the line, even though hangmen have had highly accurate weight-to-rope-length tables available to them for many years. Northcott was left alive and strangling at the end of his rope. One of the guards then rushed forward and grabbed him around the legs and hung on, pulling him downward so that he could not do any air dancing. The guard did it with the speed and efficiency of a man who has been given instructions and knows what to do. He hung on to Northcott’s legs for twelve minutes while the body completed the strangulation process. Society made its final statement to Gordon Stewart Northcott by committing the “mistake” of using a rope that was too short so that he did not die an instant death—while fortunately having a man standing by who was willing to accept the idea that part of his job was to spend those long twelve minutes feeling the death quivers run down the dying man’s legs. This was noted in the newspaper accounts of the execution, but nobody said a word to publicly question the incident.

Exactly one month after Gordon Stewart Northcott’s neck was well and truly stretched, the town of Wineville officially changed its name to Mira Loma, California. The locals buried the dishonored name like an overripe corpse, giving the impression that they might have lined up to take turns hanging on to Northcott’s legs themselves.

In January 1931, slightly less than twenty-three months after Sanford began his term at the Whittier School for Boys, he was called to the administration building and informed that he had earned an early release. He was being discharged three years early by order of the trustees, because he had impressed them all with his conduct during his nearly two years there. His private reaction was one of baffled amazement—they either did not or could not see how badly he was stained. Still, he kept his eyes on the floor and employed his skill at keeping his mouth shut.

In accordance with the order of the court, driven by the efforts of Loyal Kelley, he was immediately deported back home as the final act of his prescribed sentence. The action was legally justified because he had been in the United States without a visa when he was apprehended; but the physical deportation was an act of mercy. He had nowhere to go in this country and no money to pay for the long journey back home. Kelley saw to it that, rather than put that kind of financial burden on him immediately upon his release, he was given an escorted ride all the way back home.

He left Los Angeles on the nineteenth of January aboard the steamship
Ruth Alexander
, accompanied by U.S. Immigration officers from Los Angeles. With that, the “punishment” that Loyal C. Kelley had singlehandedly pushed through for him was complete. The two said good-bye for the last time when Kelley officially turned him over to the Immigration officers.

“Mr. Kelley?” Sanford awkwardly began. “I wish….” He stopped and exhaled sharply, then said “There’s no way to repay you.”

Kelley’s face lost its usual grin. “You know, I’ve been thinking about that. Actually, you can. My bill consists of one item. It’s this: use your life to prove that rehabilitation works.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning
go prove that I’m right about you, Sanford.
Do that, and we’ll call it even.”

Sanford accidentally caught his eyes just at that moment, and he felt the power of what Mr. Kelley was telling him. His hand floated up in front of him and extended before he gave it a thought. The handshake was brief but his grip was strong. The feel of it combined with the direct gaze between them to give the moment electrical power. Sanford felt the significance of what he had been told being tattooed into permanent memory.

Then Sanford’s time in California was over and he was on his way. His physical transformation in the school over the past twenty-three months was impressive: good food, positive living conditions, tough job training, and chore responsibilities had combined to layer twenty pounds of muscle onto his frame. The effects of testosterone that had been missing from his features when he arrived at Whittier now showed in his chiseled face. His interior state was still carefully concealed. He had learned that you can’t get on with people when you show your problems. They get scared of catching whatever ails you. So he remained behind the trusty mask of benign affability—the only gift that Uncle Stewart ever gave him.

Once he stepped back into the world, his unique palate of experiences gave him such extraordinary perspective that he grabbed every opportunity that he came across and worked each one with determination. This trait was one of the reasons that the trustees saw no need to keep him until he reached the age of formal adulthood. He had proven that he had the temperament, the job skills, and the personal desire to live a productive life.

And so he arrived in Victoria, British Columbia on January 23, 1931, at the age of seventeen, resolved to make the most out of this state of grace—or of cosmic dumb luck—that had not only delivered him from Uncle Stewart’s murder farm, but had remained with him through the long process of the legal consequences.

He had carved his early release out of stone, and this exhilarating and terrifying journey was the first thing that he had ever brought into his life that was completely of his own will and creation. It was wonderful to finally make a sweeping personal change in his life without having someone else dictate it to him. He breathed air that felt oxygen-rich.

There was his debt to Mr. Kelley left to fulfill. Sanford loved the man in the way he imagined people from real families felt about each other. The thought of doing something that Mr. Kelley would approve of gave him a little happiness.

The Canadian immigration clerks had to ask him a series of formal questions, one of which was:
nationality?
It brought out one of Sanford’s rare smiles.

“Irish.”

At that moment, he knew that he had two main hurdles to clear. The first was going to be people’s reaction to him back home, since everybody had to know all about the case. He could only deal with that according to how they responded to him. If he got past the initial encounters, he figured that they would get used to having him around after a while. The second hurdle was the real challenge: preventing himself from dwelling on the question of whether or not he deserved his good fortune. The struggle to repress questions about deserving this second life appeared to have no time limit.

Uncle Stewart lingered in Sanford’s nightmares, and especially in a vitriolic little voice at the back of his head. The imaginary voice never allowed him peace for long. Sometimes he could ignore it, but he could never completely drive it out. The voice reminded him that his life was forever stained—not just by the darkness of evil, but by his sense that he had made himself ridiculous beyond redemption in the face of it. Because the simple fact was that during all that time in Wineville, he had failed to find a way to fight back. It was as plain as that, and it did him no good to remind himself that he had been acting under such extreme duress.

The heaviness would come upon him without warning. Uncle Stewart’s demon voice would torment him by repeating the twisted reasoning that a rape victim will sometimes hear from their assailant.
But you came: you must have liked it.

When Sanford tried to take in the respectful and courteous way that he was treated at Whittier, the voice countered, telling him:
good people only accept you because they’re not nasty enough to imagine what you are.
He was certain of one thing, and that was his intention to throw himself body and soul into fulfilling Mr. Kelley’s request, the only thing that he had been asked to do for the best man he had ever met, a man who believed in him. The thought of failing Mr. Kelley was intolerable. Sanford left the Whittier School for Boys resolved to go after a normal life the way that a passenger who falls off a ship will swim for the sight of land.

Jessie met him right away and gave him sleeping rights on her sofa while he looked for a place to live. She also insisted on accompanying him to a coffee shop in her neighborhood and introducing him to some of her neighbors. She sat at a booth with him and kept up a casual conversation for an hour, just so people could see who her brother was and that they were perfectly safe with him. He maintained his mask and stared out at the world from behind it, trying to get a feel for what to expect next.

He noticed a few strange looks and thought he heard people whisper behind his back a time or two, but overall it seemed as if the survival issues of the day had most people’s attention fully engaged. Sanford’s release had come along squarely in the middle of the Great Depression, whose grim effects had spread far and wide. The luxury of projecting grudges against a boy whose case had lit up the news wires two years earlier was beyond their energy. He marveled—the terrible premonitions that he had carried for the past two years about facing the people at home were far worse than the reality of it turned out to be. It was as if Loyal C. Kelley had somehow arranged this too.

So Sanford got a good night’s sleep and then put first things first by going out to look for work. The Great Depression still had North America in its grip. It was not a time for a seventeen-year-old fresh out of prison to seek a career position; most people who remained employed at anything were thankful just to have any source of income. However, even though there were no full-time jobs available, Sanford found that his youth and energy made him a desirable hire for exhausting physical day work. His handyman skills came to his aid, and he quickly picked up spot work painting houses for a dollar a day. But since many grown men could also do that work, he switched to working on the threshing crews of the farms outside town. The job was a dawn-to-dusk ordeal of heavy labor, slicing and bundling endless armloads of grain. Far fewer men could stand up to that work. Nearly all who could were very young, and child labor laws were effectively nonexistent. He was all set.

He soon found that he could keep himself employed by exploiting his own youth at a time when older and highly skilled workers were out pounding the pavement. Jessie encouraged him to stay at her place until he saved up enough to get started, since he was seldom home anyway. Like most job seekers then, he was constantly in the process of hunting for work even while he labored at temporary jobs. The effort pushed his body to exhaustion, but in return, all of the basic survival challenges gave way before him and he made steady progress. His mask smoothed the way in dealing with others.