Death Sentence (2 page)

For several weeks his mother had been living with an elderly woman she had met at the Pentecostal Holiness church where she was a Sunday school teacher and volunteer office worker. Mamie Warwick gave her a room in exchange for companionship and minor household duties.

Ronnie drove to the small white house in northeast Lumberton and found his mother asleep, her room dark, the curtains drawn. She stirred when he shook her shoulder, her puffy eyes slowly focusing on his face. Even in the dim light she looked pallid and worn, aged beyond her years.

“Ronnie…” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I need to talk to you.”

She sat up groggily, modestly pulling the covers to her chest. Ronnie could tell that she had drugged herself to sleep. “You seem upset,” she said.

“I am,” he replied. He sat on the foot of the bed, facing away from her. “I’m upset with the police. I got a call today at work that they’re going to arrest you for Stuart’s death.”

“Arrest me? They didn’t say anything about arresting me. Do they still think I had something to do with that?”

“Yes, they do. I just left the sheriff’s department. The detective told me they do.”

“I told you I couldn’t do something like that. You believe that, don’t you?”

How many times had she asked him to “believe” something?

“I’m beginning not to know what to believe,” Ronnie found himself saying, causing his mother to burst into tears.

“I know you’re not capable of killing anybody,” he added quickly, turning toward her. “I’m just afraid for you. I’m afraid it might make you try to do something to yourself.”

He could think of nothing else to say. He had no idea how to deal with this. He sat silent and dejected, staring at the wall while his mother cried. When she spoke again, it was in a near whisper: “I only meant to make him sick.”

Ronnie couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d been stuck with a cattle prod. This was the person who had loved and nurtured him, who had taught him right from wrong, who had made certain he’d grown up in church. She had been the touchstone and guiding force of his life, and in those few incredible words, she was admitting the unimaginable.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he would recall many years later. “I felt so hopeless. I’d never felt more hopeless.”

Instinctively, he knew that his life would never be the same, but his first thought was for his mother’s safety. If he left her alone, he was certain she would kill herself. Whatever he did, he would have to take her with him. She would have to be watched constantly.

“I think you should get dressed,” he told her, although at that moment he still had no idea what he planned to do.

Obediently, his mother climbed from bed, wobbly on her feet, and started for the bathroom. But when Ronnie saw her reach inside her nightgown and remove something, he sprang up and grabbed her arm just as she got to the door. In her right hand she was tightly clutching a wad of tissue.

“Give it to me,” he said firmly.

“No, Ronnie,” she cried.

He had to pry the tissue from her hand. Inside was an assortment of pills and capsules—more than two dozen, he would later count.

“You were going to do what I thought you might do, weren’t you?” he said angrily.

“No, no,” she protested, still crying. “I took them to work like this. I’ve got to have ’em, Ronnie. You know that.”

“I’ll keep them,” he said with finality. “You go on and get dressed.”

“Why do you want me to get dressed?” she asked, almost in a whimper.

Only when he spoke the words did Ronnie realize what his intention actually was:

“We’ve got to go talk to the police and work this out,” he said.

Deep down, he had known from the moment he heard those damning words that he had no choice but to turn his mother over to the authorities. She, after all, had always taught him to do the right thing.

Alf Parnell had known Velma Barfield for most of his life. He had been a year behind her in school, and they had attended the same church. Later, after each married and had families, they had been for several years next-door neighbors in Parkton, the tiny farm town north of Lumberton where Ronnie and his younger sister, Pam,* had grown up. For nearly twenty years a Robeson County sheriff’s deputy, Parnell had been one of the detectives who questioned Velma three days earlier. He was waiting when Ronnie, a stricken look on his face, led his distraught mother into the sheriffs department. Ronnie had called and left a message for Wilbur Lovett that they were coming, but Lovett was out running down a lead in the Stuart Taylor case, and Parnell had gotten the message.

Ronnie was relieved to see a friendly face. He had warm feelings for Parnell, whose twin sons had been his childhood playmates. “Alf,” he said. “I think Mama has something she needs to tell you.”

“Is that right, Velma?” Parnell said. “Is there something you want to talk to us about?”

She was crying—she had cried all the way to the sheriffs department—but she nodded.

“Well, y’all come on back,” Parnell said, leading them to Wilbur Lovett’s office, where, after his mother had entered, Ronnie pulled Parnell aside and showed him the pills he had taken from her, told him that he was certain she had intended to take them all and kill herself.

After they had seated themselves in the office, Velma was crying so hard that not even Ronnie could quiet her. It took a couple of minutes for her to compose herself enough to talk.

“Velma,” Parnell advised her, “you know that the rights that were read to you on Friday still apply. Do you understand that?”

She said that she did.

There was a knock at the door, and Wilbur Lovett, who had been summoned by Parnell, hurried in and took a seat.

“Now, Velma,” Parnell said, “what was it that you wanted to tell us?”

Again she began sobbing. “I didn’t mean to kill him,” she said. “I only meant to make him sick.”

Ronnie interrupted. “Does she need a lawyer?”

“That’s up to her,” Lovett replied.

“Mama, do you want a lawyer?”

Later, Ronnie would recall that at this point Lovett intervened, saying, “She’s already told us this much. It would be easier on her if she just went ahead and made a statement.” Lovett, however, would deny that.

“No, I don’t want a lawyer,” Velma assured her son.

“Are you sure?”

She nodded. She seemed to want to get this off her conscience.

Ronnie left so the officers could continue their interview. He needed to call his sister. He knew this would be devastating to her, and he wanted to be the one to break the news. Pam had a young daughter and also lived in Lumberton. Her husband, Kirby Jarrett,* answered.

“Kirby, there are some problems developing down here at the courthouse that Pam ought to know about,” Ronnie told him. “Our mother’s in trouble again.” He didn’t want to talk about it over the phone. “Just tell her I need her down here,” he said. “I’m at the sheriff’s department.”

Pam and Kirby arrived a short time later, Pam looking frightened. “What’s going on?” she asked.

“She’s confessing to poisoning Stuart Taylor,” Ronnie said. “That’s first-degree murder.”

Pam broke down, becoming almost hysterical. She demanded to see her mother, and the detectives took a break to allow her to visit. Later, Pam would only remember holding her mother while both cried, her mother saying over and over, “I’ll never get to see my grandbabies again.”

Lovett, meanwhile, went upstairs to meet with the district attorney, who had been alerted that a confession was underway. He wanted to make certain that everything was done exactly right.

As Lovett left, Parnell took Ronnie aside and explained that Velma would be charged with Stuart’s death and held in jail. The interviewing and paperwork would take several hours. Ronnie and Pam might as well go home; they could do nothing here. He would call them later in the evening. He promised to call Velma’s doctor to get whatever medicines she needed. To calm Ronnie’s fears, he assured him that a close watch would be kept on his mother through the night.

Ronnie and Pam agreed that they would meet at her apartment later to await Parnell’s call, and Ronnie left to tell his wife, Joanna,* what had happened. As he drove home, trying to grapple with the events of the past few hours, he was struck by a sudden, chilling thought: the man Wilbur Lovett had gone upstairs to confer with was none other than Joe Freeman Britt. That was when the real consequences of his actions hit him, and the irony was overwhelming. He had spent years struggling to save his mother only to turn her over to somebody who would, if his record held true, send her to the gas chamber.

Only then did he realize that he should have insisted that his mother have a lawyer before he allowed her to talk with the detectives.

It was almost ten before Alf Parnell called Pam’s apartment and asked to speak with Ronnie.

Ronnie and Pam had spent much of the evening calling relatives. Their mother had a large, close family. Her sisters, Arlene and Faye, had just arrived after a three-hour drive from Charleston.

“Ronnie, I hate to tell you this,” Parnell said, “but it’s worse than we thought.”

Worse
? Ronnie thought.
What could be worse?

“There are other people,” Parnell told him.

“Other people?” Ronnie said. “What do you mean?”

“Other people she’s killed.”

Ronnie’s pulse jumped. His stomach knotted. His brain didn’t want to register what he had just heard.

“Alf,” he responded, “you’ve got to know how unbelievable this is for me.”

“It’s the same for me,” Parnell replied. “But she’s told us this, and we’re going to be looking into it.”

When Ronnie hung up and turned to give the others the news, he looked pale and dazed.

“Y’all are not going to believe this,” he said, the words coming slowly. “She’s confessed to killing three other people.”

“Who?” cried Faye.

Ronnie named two elderly people his mother had assisted as a live-in caregiver. Then he paused, as if unable to go on. He had to force out the next two words:

“… And Grandmother.”

Her own mother.

Faye screamed and bolted for the door, running out into the rain that evening had brought, still screaming. Pam collapsed in her husband’s arms, sobbing. Arlene stood rooted.

“What is wrong with her?” Arlene pleaded. “What is
wrong
with her?”

Many people soon would be asking that question. With time even Velma Barfield herself. For after her bitter encounter with Joe Freeman Britt had sent her to death row, she would begin an examination of her life that would lead her to repentance and would cause many people to believe in her redemption. And as she fought for her life in a society torn about the death penalty, she would draw more attention to the morality of capital punishment than any other murderer to that point, her case raising issues that still were being debated two decades later. But she could not foresee that in her despair and dejection as Alf Parnell drove her the two blocks to the Robeson County jail this night. Nor could her son foresee that the death sentence his mother would receive would turn into a life sentence for him.

Part One

Escaping South River

1

A sense of desolation is inescapable in the flat, sandy farmlands that border the South River, which separates the eastern North Carolina counties of Cumberland and Sampson. The river itself is narrow, black and forbidding, often without definable banks, wandering aimlessly through cypress-studded swamps. Even in the lushness of summer, with crops at their peaks and marshlands and woods in rampant tangle, an impression of emptiness prevails.

Bullards have lived on this land for generations. John Bullard raised cotton and tobacco on the Sampson County side of the river until he swapped farms early in this century with Frank Autry, who lived on the Cumberland side. In the deal Bullard ended up with more than two hundred acres and a small house into which he moved his wife Isabelle and their burgeoning family. Here they would finish rearing their nine children, losing a daughter, Sophia Velma, to fever at the age of three, and a son, Joe Tyson, to blood poisoning at fourteen. A daughter, Annie Belle, also would precede her parents in death, a victim of the flu epidemic that swept through the country in the winter of 1918-19, dead at twenty-six.

In 1926, ten years before his own death, John Bullard began dividing his land to parcel it out to his surviving children. The house and about forty acres surrounding it would go to his youngest child, Murphy, who was expected to remain at home to look after his aging parents and crippled sister.

Murphy was a gregarious young man, boisterous and volatile, but eminently likable. Lillie McMillan likely would have been drawn to him even if she hadn’t lived in a place where choices were few, for she was his opposite.

Friends described Lillie as smart, sweet and docile. Tall and thin, with short, dark hair framing her thin, pretty face, she was from a Presbyterian clan who lived only a few miles from the Baptist Bullards. Like Murphy, she was the youngest in her family. Her mother had died when she was twelve, her father when she was fifteen. She had been left to live with her married siblings, staying first with one, then another, each for only a while. She hated that period of her life and carried deep resentments about it.