Death Row, Texas

Inside the Execution Chamber

Michelle Lyons

• Publisher: Ulysses Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781612438764
• eBook ISBN: 9781612438900
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

"Tells the story of a traumatic life spent witnessing hundreds of people being executed in Texas' most infamous prison." — Daily Beast "I can't remember his name or his crime. What I remember is the nothingness. No family members, no friends, no comfort. Maybe he didn't want them to come, maybe they didn't care, maybe he didn't have any in the first place. It was just a prison official and two reporters, including me, looking through the glass at this man strapped fast to the gurney, needles in both arms, staring hard at the ceiling. When the warden stepped forward and asked if he wanted to make a last statement, the man barely shook his head, said nothing and started blinking. That's when I saw it: a single tear at the corner of his right eye. A tear he desperately wanted to blink away, a tear he didn't want us to see. It pooled there for a moment before running down his cheek. The warden gave his signal, the chemicals started flowing, the man coughed, sputtered and exhaled. A doctor entered the room, pronounced the man dead and pulled a sheet over his head." — Michelle Lyons, from the Prologue Michelle Lyons witnessed nearly 300 executions at the Texas State penitentiary. This "haunting, dark and hard to put down" behind-the-scenes look at those final moments of life relates shocking true stories of the inmate, his/her family members, prison officials, the death-row chaplain and the victim's loved ones—all of whom come together in the death chamber ( Houston Chronicle ).

CHAPTER 1

GOING TO SLEEP

“If a man were torn to pieces in my presence it would not have been so repulsive as this ingenious and elegant machine by means of which they killed a strong, hale, healthy man in an instant.”

Leo Tolstoy, on the execution of Francis Richeux, April 6, 1857

“This was my first execution and I was completely fine with it. Many, many people asked me if I was really okay. I really was. In fact, I felt bad, like, ‘Am I supposed to be upset about this? Do people think I’m evil or something because I’m not?’”

Michelle’s journal, on the execution of Javier Cruz, October 1, 1998

An inmate once told me I brought sunshine to death row. He’s not the only one. Do you know how many people have told me I radiate light? On a recent trip to London, a colleague told me that she enjoys doing things with me, because I have a “genuine enthusiasm.” A lot of people have told me similar things: that my enthusiasm is child-like, that I’m youthful, that I always seem happy. Some of this is true. I genuinely get excited about crushed ice, hand fans, cheese fries, light-up toys, novelty cups and pretty much anything covered in glitter or rhinestones. I get weirdly competitive at board games and never just let children win. I love scavenger hunts and mystery games and escape rooms. I let people believe that is all I am, because I hate letting anyone down, no matter how life, or the people in it, let me down. I will gather friends around a table, drink cocktails and entertain them with sarcastic quips and stories, because that is what people have come to expect of me. I joke around, because it makes me uncomfortable to talk about serious things. I am comically self-deprecating, especially about things that have brought me pain. But, in secret, I cry more than any of them would think. I have a pocket of inner darkness that sometimes consumes me and makes me want to shut out the world. That’s how I feel now, thinking about the things I saw and heard in that death chamber. I can’t get the tears to stop rolling down my cheeks.

It’s a big deal to be born in Galveston. In Texas, people ask all the time: “Oh, are you a BOI?”—meaning, was I “born on the island.” I even have a BOI sticker on my car. My brother was born off the island and I like to tell him that he’s inferior to me for that very reason.

Galveston was a cool place to grow up, very laid-back in a lot of ways. I had a summer job in one of the tacky souvenir shops and friends who worked as lifeguards or on burger stands. We had a condo right on Seawall Boulevard, with a view of the beach, and a hunting cabin up in Texas Hill Country, which my dad, uncles and grandpa built from scratch. There was no electricity, a wood-burning stove for heat and a giant rain-water tank. It was rugged and remote and there were scorpions, snakes and all sorts of freaky bugs. All we had for entertainment was this big radio that stayed on around the clock, playing old country songs. I felt so safe and content, curled up in bed in the dark, listening to the grown-ups talk and laugh and play cards with the radio playing softly in the background.

My father started his career as a journalist in Galveston, which is how he met my mom—he was a dashing young police reporter and she was this young, foxy thing working as a records clerk at the Galveston Police Department. I remember hugging him when he got home from working at the Galveston County Daily News, and inhaling the comforting smell of newspaper ink. It’s still one of my favorite scents. When I was 16, we moved to Illinois, where my dad got a job as a publisher of The Benton Evening News. Benton is a quiet little town, with a population of less than 10,000, but it’s had its brush with infamy: shortly before we moved there, four members of the Dardeen family were viciously murdered in the town. The father was found dead in a field with his genitals stuffed in his mouth, and the mother and son were found beaten to death in their trailer. Even worse, while being beaten, the mother gave birth, and the baby was battered to death as well. Bizarrely, one of the prime suspects—a guy named Tommy Sells, who they believe killed 20-odd people in total—wound up years later on Texas death row, and I ended up face to face with him in the interview room.

Moving to Benton meant breaking up with my boyfriend and losing my first love, but I soon found a new one: the Evening News needed a darkroom technician, so that became my job, even though I was still in high school. I would go to work at 6 a.m. every day, the photographers would bring me their film and I’d develop it. My hands were a mess, because of the chemicals, and I ruined most of my clothes, but I delighted in that job. I became a photographer, a 17-year-old covering car wrecks and fires. I had no issues taking those kinds of pictures, except for one time I was dispatched to a wreck involving a girl I went to school with, I got upset and refused to get close. My dad said, “You need to get in there!” And I finally snapped: “I can’t! I know her!” I shoved the camera into his chest and walked away. Later, he impressed upon me that, as a journalist, there would be times I’d witness scenes that would disturb me, but I’d have to do it anyway, in order to relay the news to the public, which was what I was being paid to do. I came to realize he was right. It taught me that I was doing a job, and if you’re doing a job, you need to do your best, even if it means having to take pictures of someone you know who might be badly injured.

Although my parents wanted me to go into journalism, I was a rebellious teenager and decided to study business at Texas A&M University instead. I didn’t know what type of business I wanted to go into, but I pictured myself wearing cute suits and making lots of money. But after a few business math classes, I realized I was awful at it. So I took a journalism class, just to see if I might like it, which I did. I switched my major to journalism, and a wonderful professor named Ed Walraven set me up with a job at the local newspaper, The Bryan-College Station Eagle. There was no going back from there.

I thought I was going to be reviewing restaurants, but was the obituary girl instead. I’d get all these forms from local funeral homes and write up these dead people’s lives, some of them fascinating, most of them humdrum. I had a stint as the police reporter, during which I covered a Christmas Day escape from a county jail and an explosion in an oil field in a little town called Dime Box. One of the workers was killed by the explosion while he was standing on a platform, and he’d died where he was leaning. Because of the flames, they couldn’t get close enough to remove his body, so I watched it burn all day, until it was a charred, black figure. It was disturbing, but somebody had to cover this stuff. Even though I was a young college student, I was also a police reporter, and I wanted to be good at it, so I never let things get to me.

Looking back, it seems inevitable that I’d end up working in death, and it’s true that I’ve always had a macabre side and a wicked sense of humor. I’ve always been interested in crime, and Texas is a hotbed of the craziest crime stories. I also like mysteries, riddles, puzzles, anything that needs to be solved. It’s probably why I’m interested in smart, complex, multi-dimensional people. What makes them tick? Why do they think in a certain way? What makes them do what they do? And in the prison system, there’s a whole population of people whose brains work differently than the norm.

After stints at the Chicago Sun-Times and a newspaper in Leavenworth, Kansas, my dad took a job as the publisher of The Huntsville Item, about 70 miles north of Houston and 45 minutes from College Station, where I was still a student. I met the editor of the Item at a job fair in 1998, found out they had an opening, interviewed for the job and got it. My dad had no idea. The managing editor went into his office one day and said, “Hey, good news, we’ve filled that reporting position.” My dad said, “Great. Who is it?” and the managing editor told him it was me. Later, my dad said he was a bit unsure about it, because either people might think I was the favored one or he would have to be harder on me. It was the latter route he went down.

My first beat was city government, with a hodgepodge of things thrown in, like covering the local hospital and writing feature stories. Because it was a small newspaper with only three reporters, it was not uncommon for me to write three to five stories a day. Suddenly, I was a big fish in a little pond, and I loved it. One day, the woman who covered the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) wasn’t able to witness an execution, so I was asked to step in—not only are a victim’s and inmate’s loved ones invited as witnesses in the death chamber, but there are also spots for five reporters, with one always set aside for the Item. My dad called me to his office and asked, “Can you handle it?” And I said, “Yeah, I’ve got this. This is not going to be a problem for me.”

The woman I replaced gave me a rundown of what was going to happen that night: I’d go to an office building across from the Walls Unit, where all the executions in Texas take place, and meet a guy named Larry Fitzgerald, who was the manager of the TDCJ Public Information Office; he’d take me to his office, where we’d hang out until we got the call. Then, I’d be escorted to a witness room in the death chamber, where the inmate would already be laid out on a gurney, with the IV lines attached to his arms. He’d make a last statement, he’d go to sleep, and I’d return to the office to write my story. That’s how it was presented to me and that’s exactly what happened.

Javier Cruz had killed two elderly men in San Antonio in 1991, so I went into the death chamber thinking, “Hmmm, this man beat two old men to death with a hammer and he’s just going to sleep? I can deal with that…” It really didn’t bother me at all, to the extent that I don’t remember much about Cruz’s execution. I got back to the office, my dad asked if I was okay, and I said, “I’m fine, I’m going to write the story.” I wrote it in less than an hour. I was 22.

“Looking to his family while repeating, ‘I’m okay,’ and waving aside his chance to make a last statement, 41-year-old Javier Cruz was put to death Thursday night—the 15th person to be executed this year in Texas…”

From Michelle’s story on Javier Cruz, The Huntsville Item, October 2, 1998

CHAPTER 2

JUST A JOB

“The death penalty is unfair, arbitrary, capricious and fraught with racial discrimination and judicial bias.”

Bianca Jagger, anti-death penalty campaigner

“One thing he kept saying to me was, ‘I’ve killed three people and I’m going to kill you…’”

Lisa Blackburn, Gary Graham’s final victim

After Kate Winslet filmed The Life of David Gale in Huntsville in 2001, she gave an interview in which she called the city “one giant prison” and talked about its “pervasive sense of death.” That was deeply dishonest. To be more blunt, it was ridiculous bullshit. I very much doubt she spent much time in Huntsville. I don’t recall seeing her in line at Whataburger, and the filmmakers certainly didn’t do much research. We only saw Kate once, when she was filming the final scene. In it, she runs what in real life would have been about 30 miles from death row to the Walls Unit, throws herself on the ground and starts yelling and screaming for them to stop the execution. I was standing there, shaking my head in disbelief. At one point, Kate got upset that there were too many of us watching and everybody had to scatter. I think we were cramping her art.

I took the criticism personally, because the city had been good to me. Huntsville, population 38,548 at the last count, is situated between Houston and Dallas, which is one of its main selling points. But it is a beautiful city in its own right, set among rolling hills and the trees that make up East Texas’s so-called Piney Woods. Huntsville is so picturesque that if you stopped off without knowing that it was home to seven prison units and had been dubbed “the execution capital of the world” by the European media, you could spend a pleasant day there and leave none the wiser. There is no heavy, negative energy in Huntsville that clings to the place like a black fog, it’s just a typical American city, with fairy lights decorating its downtown square at Christmas, American flags lining the streets during patriotic holidays and churches everywhere. When I moved to Huntsville, it was my intention to stay six months before moving to a bigger city. But that six months turned into a year, which turned into five, which turned into ten. Now it’s been 20 years and I’m quite content.

The Walls Unit—more properly called the Huntsville Unit—was opened in 1849, making it the oldest state prison in Texas. Before 1924, hanging was the preferred method of execution in the state, and individual counties were responsible for carrying them out. But since 1924, every execution in Texas has taken place in the Walls Unit’s death chamber. Between 1924 and 1964, 361 offenders were executed by “Old Sparky,” otherwise known as the electric chair. Charles Reynolds of Red River County was the first to go that way, and Joseph Johnson of Harris County the last. In 1972, the Supreme Court declared the death penalty to be unconstitutional, on the grounds that it was a cruel and unusual punishment. But Texas reinstated it less than two years later and adopted lethal injection as its new means of execution in 1977. In 1982, Charlie Brooks was the first offender to be executed by this new, less dramatic method.

Because the Walls Unit was built so long ago, the town grew up around it, and the prison system is the biggest employer in the city. The second would be the university, and even that has a significant focus on criminal justice—people come from all over the world to study corrections at Sam Houston State. They say that during the Great Depression, Huntsville was the only community in Texas that wasn’t affected, because they were still locking up a whole bunch of people, perhaps even more than usual, because poverty breeds crime.

If you don’t work for the prison system, it’s likely somebody in your family does. Around Huntsville, you bump into people all the time who work for TDCJ, or whose husband or wife or brother or sister works for TDCJ. You see officers all over town wearing their distinctive uniforms—all-gray, or gray pants and a blue shirt with a state seal on it. Stores offer discounts to prison employees and even cater to inmates who have just been released. When an inmate gets out on parole, they’re given street clothes, and they’re usually pretty crappy. But they’re also given a $50 check, so businesses will offer to cash that check and stores will sell cheap T-shirts, tank tops and bandanas, pretty much anything that inmate needs.

Even though Huntsville isn’t far from College Station, where I went to college, and I was aware that Huntsville was where executions took place, I’d never given the death penalty much thought before seeing Javier Cruz die on the gurney. In fact, I didn’t give the death penalty much thought after seeing Javier Cruz die on the gurney. I was pro-death penalty and thought it was the most appropriate punishment for certain crimes, such as rape and murder and killing children. If you rape and kill a child, there’s something fundamentally wrong with you, you can’t redeem yourself. Yet despite Texas having the death penalty, there’s not a lot of discussion about it. Like a lot of social issues, people tend not to engage with it unless it directly affects them. For most Texans, the death penalty is an abstract concept, occasionally debated at dinner parties.

But it became far more real for me when I took over the prison beat for The Huntsville Item in January 2000. George W. Bush had become Governor of Texas in 1995, and after a slow start—three people were executed in the state in 1996—the death house sprang to life again. In 1997, 37 inmates were put to death, followed by 20 in 1998 and 35 in 1999. But I couldn’t have predicted what would happen next. In my first month on the prison beat, I witnessed five men die. In 2000, 40 men and women were executed in the Huntsville death house, a record for the most executions in a single year by an individual state, and almost as many as the rest of the United States combined.

The first execution I witnessed in my new role was that of Earl Carl Heiselbetz Jr., who murdered a mother and her two-year-old daughter in Sabine County in 1991. His last words were, “Love y’all, see you on the other side.” But when I look up those early executions in my journal, it’s the mundane details that jump out at me. Heiselbetz was “still wearing his glasses”; Betty Lou Beets, who murdered two of her five husbands and shot another in the back (and was only the second woman to be executed in Texas since the Civil War) had “tiny little feet”; Jeffrey Dillingham, a hitman who had slashed the throat of a woman in Fort Worth, “had these dimples and actually was a very good-looking man.”

Quite a few of the inmates reminded me of other people. Spencer Goodman, who murdered the wife of ZZ Top manager Bill Ham, “looked like a friend of mine, Jeremy Johnson—they had the same build and there was something similar about their ankles and feet”; Odell Barnes Jr., who was executed for a 1989 rape and murder in Wichita Falls, “looked like the star of the sitcom Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper”; Orien Joiner, who murdered two Lubbock waitresses in 1986, “reminded me a whole lot of the Penguin from the movie Batman”; Thomas Mason, who murdered his estranged wife’s mother and grandmother in Whitehouse in 1991, “looked JUST like my grandfather… he kept doing this blinking and twitching that my grandpa does.” Also like Mason, my grandpa was from Tennessee and a tough old gun-toting guy who was always threatening to shoot someone. One difference: Grandpa never did.

A psychologist would probably have something to say about all these lookalikes I saw strapped to the gurney in the Texas death house—maybe that I was subconsciously trying to humanize these people who had done terrible things in order to soften the impact their execution might have on me, but I honestly think I was just being a blasé kid. It didn’t bother me that Thomas Mason looked like my grandpa—I wasn’t crying about it, because it wasn’t actually my grandpa.

When I started living alone, before I started witnessing executions, I was afraid of coming home and finding someone hiding in my closet, to the extent that I used to get really freaked out about it. People would say, “that stuff doesn’t really happen.” But one of the first executions I witnessed, that’s exactly what the guy did. James Clayton broke into a stranger’s apartment, hid in the woman’s closet and when she got home, he killed her, apparently because his girlfriend had threatened to break up with him. But straight after seeing Clayton die, I went off, wrote my story and hit the bar.

Another time, the inmate’s family turned on us reporters in the witness room, telling us we were part of “this k...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Prologue: A Single Tear
• Chapter 1: Going to Sleep
• Chapter 2: Just a Job
• Chapter 3: A Fork in the Road
• Chapter 4: That’s Just Larry
• Chapter 5: The Party Never Ends
• Chapter 6: A Strange Kind of Fellow
• Chapter 7: Look Again
• Chapter 8: Maybe the Pain Will Stop
• Chapter 9: A Horrible Place to Be
• Chapter 10: A Little Bit Darker
• Chapter 11: Stealing Time
• Chapter 12: Bursting Open
• Chapter 13: No Monopoly on Grief
• Chapter 14: A Day Without Sunshine
• Epilogue: My Job to Remember?
• Acknowledgments