I was interested on who was the only other woman besides Leslie Van Houton on Death Row anywhere in the United States when the Supreme Court invalidated the death penalty as it existed in 1972 and with one stroke of the pen reduced the sentences of hundreds of men and two women to something less than the ultimate penalty. Leslie Van Houton, former member of the Manson Family who took part in the murders of Rosemary and Leon LaBianca, remains in prison almost 40 years after she was convicted. The other woman went free many years ago.
I first came across this factoid when reading an interview with John Waters who was promoting his recent book Role Models in which he recounts his relationship with Van Houton and I was reminded of it again when I ordered Mr. Waters book for the Library collection. The other woman was not named and I could not uncover her in a Google search and I wondered who this other woman was, what had brought her to death’s door, under what circumstances was she released, how did she live the rest of her life?
So I was thrilled when I came across Back From The Dead: One woman’s search for the men who walked off America’s death row by Joan M. Cheever. Unfortunately that thrill soon turned to disappointment. Sure I was warned by the title that it was about the men on death row but I thought certainly with only two women on death row in 1972 they would be mentioned by name. They were mentioned, but not by name and the book, rather unforgivably, does not include an appendix of those who were on death row in 1972 so my desire to know more about the elusive other woman remains unfulfilled.
Still, it should have been the sort of book I typically enjoy but as I was reading I came to believe that this book isn’t really the book Ms. Cheever wanted to write. I think she wanted to write about her childhood and growing up in Texas and about her parents, especially her mother, and we see glimpses of that book in this one.
Before authoring this book Ms. Cheever spent nine years defending Walter Williams on appeal from his sentence of death. Mr. Williams had murdered convenience store clerk Daniel Liepold in 1985. Mr. Liepold was uncomfortable working nights in one of the most dangerous professions in America. He had given notice to the store and was working one of his last three shifts until Mr. Williams, who had previously worked with Mr. Liepold, came in and made it his last shift. Both were nineteen years old at the time. Mr. Liepold had considered Mr. Williams his friend.
Ms. Cheever wasn’t looking to take on a death penalty case. She didn’t even intend to practice law anymore after a short stint on the Court of Criminal Appeals in Texas. She had gone back to school and earned a Master’s Degree in Journalism from Columbia University and was looking for a job as a reporter when she, a self-described “death penalty junkie” was sucked into the case.
I think this is what Ms. Cheever wanted to write about – her nine years defending Walter Williams, the fear that she would lose, the fear that she would be responsible somehow for her client’s death, and when the inevitable came, how she watched a man die, but that but isn’t here and I can imagine an editor shooting down the subject, Williams was some punk who a crime that is mundane to anyone not personally involved. It’s too boring. It has no hook. So instead Ms. Cheever’s hook is to trace the men released from death row in 1972 to see how their lives turned out but Ms. Cheever fails to deliver on this promise as well. What we are left with is Ms. Cheever’s Fear and that Fear permeates this book. Fear of meeting Walter, fear of failing Walter, Fear of contacting ex-convicts, fear of shady neighborhoods, fear of hotel rooms,
The first convict Cheever contacts is man named Robert Hayes who was convicted in 1971 at age 19 for participating in a botched robbery attempt that ended with his accomplice murdering a police officer during a botched robbery in 1971. Mr. Hayes had been released from prison in 1990 and was working as a crisis counselor for low-income women in New York City. Ms. Cheever does not question him on his description of the attempted robbery of Joes Confectionary in Queens as “Robin Hood-esque” which is an off-putting way to start. She meets Chuck Culhane who took part in an escape attempt in 1968 which a deputy was murdered and who was paroled in 1992. Mr. Culhane teaches criminal justice at a college in Upstate New York for $100.00 a week. She meets with Calvin Sellars who was on Death Row in Texas for armed robbery, one of only four men in the Country on Death Row at that time, the other two being fellow Texans and one Georgian, all dead by 2005. She meets with William “Rusty” Holland who was sent to Death Row in South Carolina for the 1970 murders of two members of a rival motorcycle gang and the attempted murder of two women associated with the victims. He spent 11 years in prison before being paroled. He started a ministry, married twice, managed to obtain three Subway sandwich franchises and manage a Bingo parlor after his release. He wouldn’t meet with Ms. Cheever until she promised her book would “Focus on Jesus Christ.”
She meets with two men, Freddie Pitts and Wilbur Lee, who were found to be factually innocent by the state of Florida. She interviews an 88-year-ols man, Moreese “Pops” Bickham, who spent 38 years in Angola Prison, often digging graves for fellow prisoners who died behind bars, before being paroled in 1996. Mr. Bickham murdered two deputies, in self-defense, he says. He was 41-years-old and out on the town with his girlfriend, Florence, in 1958 when deputies were called to a bar where a scuffle had broken out. Bickham claims one of the deputies had threatened to kill him and returned later with reinforcements to make good on that threat although Bickham’s brother-in-law testified at trial that Bickham had threatened to kill one of the deputies, Gus Gill, for messing with him in the past but Bickham maintains his brother-in-law was intimidated into testifying by the local KKK. What seems most amazing is that Mr. Bickham was married at the time he was gallivanting around with Florence and that his wife, Ernestine, waited for him the entire time he was in Prison. It would have been interesting to hear Ernestine’s perspective but Ms. Cheever doesn’t bother to ask. She is threatened by an ex-inmate and is so fearful she hides his identity in her book.
She finds Elmer Branch in Connecticut whose case, alongside that of Henry Furman, went before the Supreme Court back in 1972. He was on death row for the crime of rape and when Cheever finds him he’s back in jail awaiting trial for allegedly exposing himself to a 14-year-old girl, one of seven children belonging to his live-in girlfriend, a woman who is herself on parole for murdering her husband. Cheever even locates her Holy Grail, Henry Furman, the man whose name is attached to the Supreme Court ruling Furman v. Georgia that found the death penalty as it then stood to be unconstitutional. Furman had murdered a homeowner as Furman burgled the victim’s home in the middle of the night.
Along the way Ms. Cheever misses out on an invitation to witness the execution of serial killer Kenneth McDuff, a man who was suspected of killing 14 people after he was released from prison in 1986 after being convicted of the triple homicides of an 18-year-old and two 16-year-olds in 1966. Within three days of his release he killed again. Cheever does devote a chapter to men who have killed again after escaping Death Row in 1972 but she doesn’t actually contact any of them. She misses McDuff’s 1998 execution because she wakes up with a fever of 102.
Perhaps the saddest, and most interesting, part of Ms. Cheever’s book was when she tried to research Lester Eubanks who had been convicted of murdering a 14-year-old girl in 1965. After spared death in 1972 he went AWOL in 1973 after prison officials in Ohio gave him a pass to go Christmas shopping. When Ms. Cheever contacted officials in Ohio she was lectured and told Eubanks was in prison where he had been for a very long time. It turns out that the prison officials were wrong. Eubanks had never been captured. In fact, Eubank’s mother had recently died and Lester Eubanks was listed as a survivor, living in Columbus. Ohio.
So Ms. Cheever ended up speaking with seven men from the “Class of ’72” - hardly a representative sample and just a snapshot at best. Some of the men, like Robert Hayes, sent back to prison for a parole violation, experienced significant setbacks by the time the book was completed.
A lot has changed since 1972. After the Supreme Court’s decision States worked to correct the flaws noted by the Court. No longer could a person be sentenced to death for rape or robbery, a distinction recently reaffirmed when the Supreme Court ruled in 2008 that the death penalty for the rape of a child is unconstitutional, and a jury had to consider possible extenuating circumstances. The Supreme Court re-affirmed the basic constitutionality of the death penalty in 1976 with the ruling in Gregg V. Georgia and the first execution carried out after Gregg was Gary Gilmore who was electrocuted in January, 1977 after waiving all appeals. In 1972 some 589 people sat on Death Row in the 50 United States, Currently 37 states have adopted a penalty of death and there are 3,261 people awaiting judicial execution. Since 1976, and As of December, 2010, 1,233 people have been executed for murder since 1976, twelve of them female. As of January 1, 2010, there were 3,261 people on death rows across the nation but more have been added and 44 subtracted so far this year. Currently 60 women are under sentence of death in the USA.
In all this book reads like an act of atonement by Ms. Cheever to Walter Williams. It reads like a plea to consider redemption and rehabilitation and all the reasons the death penalty is as unfair and arbitrary today as it was back in 1972. I wish I could recommend it without reservation but it just never rises to its potential.
~ Laura Wilkerson
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