Death Sentence (49 page)

“Never have I had another moment to compare. I’ve been there when people have died. I’ve seen people die in services. I’ve worked with people who were terminally ill. But when someone has to die like that it really points out that the wages of sin is death, and even though Christ forgives, there’s still the penalty to be paid, and the scars that will always remain.”

Ronnie had slept only fitfully and was up at dawn. He peeked outside and saw that the sky matched his mood. At 7:30, he went to Pam and Kirby’s room. He didn’t know how Pam would make it through this day. She was still taking Valium and seemed to be in shock.

Jimmie Little had arranged for a television production company to produce a documentary about Velma’s execution, supposedly for HBO, although it never would appear. Ronnie and Pam were to be interviewed by the crew in Pam’s room. Lights and cameras had to be set up for the interviews. The TV was off. They were isolated from news.

The interviewer asked Ronnie his feelings about capital punishment, and Ronnie acknowledged that he had been a supporter of the death penalty.

“It would change anyone’s views on the death penalty if you had a mother or father, a brother or sister on death row,” he said. “I don’t care who you are or how strongly you feel about it. After watching on TV and going through what I know is going to happen to my mother later on tonight, I don’t know what my views will be on capital punishment. It just seems horrible, more horrible than I ever imagined.

“I’m not saying it will change my views on capital punishment, but I can certainly appreciate the people who have been executed, what they went through and their families. I had no idea it was this bad. I must have buried my mother about a hundred times in the last six months.”

Pam had trouble talking. “The toughest time for me will be at five o’clock this afternoon when I have to walk away from my mother for the last time and to know that she’s not going to be there when I need her.” Her voice was breaking and she kept dabbing her eyes with a tissue. “But so much a part of her is going to live through me.”

Then she broke down. “It’s just not fair…” she said, crying. “It’s just not fair for any family to have to go through this.”

The TV crew was finishing up when Jimmie Little came into the room about noon, a stark look on his face. Ronnie saw him and stood. They all had been awaiting news. Surely Jimmie knew. Ronnie started across the room toward him. Little met him halfway in a sudden embrace. “It’s over,” he said, almost in a whisper.

“I thought I felt relief more than anything else,” Ronnie would say many years later, recalling the moment.

The outcome had been just as he had known it would be, just as he had warned Pam to prepare for. Now his concern was for her. Although she had been acting as if she had accepted that her mother would soon die, he knew that deep down she had secretly believed the court would prevent it.

Pam was sitting on the bed, and Ronnie and Little sat by her as Little told her the court’s decision. He and Mary Ann Tally had just left the prison after talking with Velma about what she wanted to do, he said. Dick Burr had been standing by in Richmond, waiting to hear if he should go on to the Supreme Court in Washington. But Velma had decided otherwise.

“She wants to halt it,” Little said.

And Pam collapsed, sobbing uncontrollably.

Little had alerted reporters that he would be holding a press conference to announce Velma’s decision, and he went off for that. Ronnie went upstairs to his room. For the first time since his mother’s conviction nearly six years earlier, her fate was certain.

He needed time alone, time to think about what he would say when he saw her for the last time, just a few hours from now. But when he got to his room, he found that he couldn’t think. He lay on the bed stunned almost to stupor by overwhelming sorrow, wishing that he could go to sleep, wake up and find that it all had been a dream.

“I was shocked by the way I was feeling,” he recalled years later. “I thought I was prepared, and I found out I really wasn’t.”

Carol Oliver, the captain of Velma’s guard, had gone out for an early lunch and was on her way back to the deathwatch area when she encountered Jimmie Little leaving the prison and learned that the court had decided against Velma and she was dropping her final appeal.

Oliver’s heart quickened. Up to this point, she later said, neither she nor any of the guards under her command had actually believed that they would be participating in an execution. They had thought that another stay would come, just as it had before. Now she knew that Velma really was going to die and she and her staff would be part of it.

From the beginning, this had been a very different day at Central Prison. A somberness had lain over the whole sprawling complex, but as word spread of the court’s decision an almost crackling tension was added.

“It was very strained,” Oliver later remembered. “Everybody’s emotions were at a very high level.”

When Oliver got back to the deathwatch area, she discovered that the guards and the two chaplains appeared to have been more affected by Velma’s decision than had she. Velma was calm, no different than she had been at any time that week.

Lunch had been waiting for Velma. Skip Pike and Phil Carter sat with her while she ate some pea soup and crackers, drank a cup of fruit punch and went through a new stack of mail and telegrams that Oliver had just delivered.

Velma told the chaplains not to worry about her. She encouraged them to spend time instead with the thirty-nine men on death row. She knew what would be on their minds, she said, knew they would be hurting just as she had on the day of James Hutchins’ execution. It had meant so much to her, she said, when Carter and Sam Roane had come to let her know that they understood what she was feeling.

Time was short, and Velma was to have many more visitors that afternoon. Anne Lotz was returning. Velma’s brothers, Jimmy and John, were coming. So was her cousin, William Bullard. And Wade Holder, who seemed like a brother to her. Then Faye and Cliff would be there. Most would visit in pairs and have only half an hour to say their goodbyes. All would be restricted visits. But, finally, Velma would be with Pam and Ronnie for two full hours. And she would be able to hold them one last time.

Reporters had been gathering at Central Prison since early morning. More than two hundred were expected before nightfall. They would represent all the TV networks, most of the country’s major newspapers, the national and international wire services, magazines such as
Time, Newsweek
and
Vanity Fair.
They would arrive from other countries as well: England, Sweden, Norway, Germany, France, Spain, Mexico, Australia.

TV trucks with satellite dishes already filled the parking lot near the visitor reception center by mid-afternoon Thursday, and more were still to come. Lights had been erected. A platform of plywood and raw lumber had been hastily built behind the reception center next to the high steel-wire fence. A podium had been put there for those who would be addressing the assembled reporters.

Public relations officers from several government agencies had been assigned to assist the lone spokesperson for the Department of Correction, Patty McQuillan, who was spending a frantic day on the phone trying to find answers to hundreds of questions from reporters, while arranging credentials for others.

Ronnie and Pam wanted to avoid reporters and cameras when they went for their final visit, and Mary Ann Tally drove them to a back entrance. They had a long walk through many checkpoints and automatically operated gates and steel doors before arriving at the spacious visitor area on the prison’s top floor.

Velma was finishing her visit with Faye and Cliff when Ronnie and Pam got off the elevator just before three. Faye was sobbing loudly, standing in the cubicle with her hand pressed to the window that separated her from her sister. Velma had her hand against her sister’s from the other side of the glass. Finally, Cliff had to pull Faye away.

Velma had seen Ronnie watching, and she gave him a little wave and a small smile. The guards began handcuffing her to take her the short distance to the glass-enclosed visiting room next to the control center where she had met with Hugh Hoyle that morning.

Pam had gone to the restroom, but she soon rejoined Ronnie. Just as their mother arrived on the far side of the visiting room smiling at them, a guard approached Ronnie and told him he and Pam were wanted in the warden’s office.

Neither Ronnie nor Pam had any idea what this was about, but they returned to the first floor with the guard and were ushered into the warden’s office. Nathan Rice was seated at his huge walnut desk. Behind him were windows looking out onto the area where the reporters would be gathered later. Two associates of Rice’s were in the office. Ronnie and Pam were asked to take seats in the upholstered chairs.

Years later, Rice would say that he had no memory of this episode, but both Ronnie and Pam, separated by many years and many miles, would give closely similar details.

As Ronnie remembered it, Rice unwrapped a tissue in his palm, revealing a marijuana cigarette.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked.

Ronnie didn’t know how to respond. Does he want us to smoke this? he would remember thinking. Is he trying to relax us for our last visit with our mom?

“Do you have any idea what the penalty is for smuggling drugs into a prison?” Ronnie remembered Rice asking.

Ronnie had been concentrating totally on being strong for his mother, and this sudden, unexpected development sent his spirits spiraling back to despair. Was the state going to jail them while it killed their mother?

The joint had fallen from Pam’s cigarette package in the restroom. A matron who had followed her inside had picked it up and alerted her superiors.

Pam was sobbing. “That’s not mine,” she was saying. “I didn’t bring that in here.”

Years later, she would acknowledge that she had smoked marijuana in the past but was not using it then. When she was leaving her room, she had asked somebody to get her cigarettes, and that person had picked up a pack that wasn’t hers.

“What this means,” Ronnie and Pam both would remember Rice telling them, “is that you’re not going to have a contact visit with your mother.”

“I went crazy,” Ronnie recalled years later. “I just leaped from my chair and put both hands on his desk. I said, ‘There is no way I am going to stand for that.’ I was yelling. I said, ‘In just a few hours you will be responsible for taking my mother’s life. I am going to see my mother, and my sister is going with me. I am not going to let her spend the rest of her life trying to live down something like this. If I have to get Jimmie Little to call the governor, I’ll do it. And if that doesn’t work, I’m sure that I can walk right out of here and find several hundred reporters who’ll be interested in knowing that the state of North Carolina is going to kill this woman without allowing her children to see her for the last time, and we’ll see what the governor thinks about that.”

Rice conferred with his associates, Ronnie later recalled, then told them he was going to allow their visit.

Velma was waiting expectantly, a worried look on her face. Some of their visiting time was already lost. Pam was in even worse shape than she had been when they had first arrived. She engulfed her mother in a hug, her emotions now out of control.

Three plastic chairs were in the room, and Velma pulled one alongside the chair in which she had been waiting and got Pam into it. Pam put her head in her mother’s lap and curled up in the chair whimpering, her long legs extended awkwardly, this tall, beautiful woman, twice a mother, a little girl again, needing her mother’s touch. Velma stroked her daughter’s hair. Tears were in her eyes, but she wiped them away and composed herself. Ronnie had seated himself in front of her.

“Was something wrong?” Velma asked about their sudden departure and the unexpected delay.

“It was nothing important,” Ronnie told her.

The situation was awkward for Ronnie. He had thought so long and so hard about what he wanted to say at this moment, yet words seemed impotent and irrelevant. He didn’t even know how to start. Velma broke the silence.

“The liquor must really be flowing over at that hotel,” she said sharply, adding that she’d smelled it on the breaths of some of her visitors through the steel mesh in the visiting cubicle.

Ronnie was incredulous. Her death was less than eleven hours away and she was upset about people drinking!

“Mama, I’m not drinking,” he said. “A lot of people just aren’t able to cope with this. It’s their way of dealing with it. Don’t be mad at them. We’re not all as strong as you.”

“I guess I can understand that,” she said, but she clearly was perturbed.

“You’re going to have to look after your sister,” she told him. “If she needs you, you need to be there for her.”

“I will,” he promised.

“And I’m not sure how Jimmie’s going to hold up through this. I want you to do what you can to help him.”

“What about me, Mama?” he wanted to say, but he didn’t. She expected him to be strong, and he was going to be.

There were other instructions. A statement she wanted him to make. Details about the funeral, special people she wanted to sit with the family. She also wanted him and Pam to be at the prison tonight when it happened, she told him.