Salvation on Death Row

by John T. Thorngren

  As we headed down the highway, Mike’s ploy with the trucker became evident. I don’t remember the trucker’s name, so I’ll call him Happy. Happy and I were supposed to copulate all the way to Florida as payment for my airfare. Later I learned that not only did Mike want me with him as insurance against my possibly turning him in, but also he and Happy had made this deal before I arrived.

  I wasn’t into that, and Mike and I fought many times over his belief that both Linda and I were placed here on earth to turn tricks and give him the money. The air brakes on Happy’s mammoth eighteen-wheeler hissed as it shuddered to a stop on the interstate’s shoulder.

  “Out!” Happy yelled. “Get the hell out of my truck.”

  The moment Mike threw his duffel bag to the ground and slammed the door, Happy crunched gears in a rage and roared off into the morning sun.

  After that, hitchhiking was our mode of transportation. It wasn’t the best way to travel, and I was getting frantic: no methadone and no heroin. The winds gusting along the highways were cruel. I needed something warm in my veins. The sole substitute was pills that truck drivers gave us, and they were playing Ping-Pong with my mind. It had been several weeks now on the road without heroin. Traveling by one’s thumb is slower than taking a Greyhound that stops at every ten-mile-apart town on a single-lane back road. After five days on speed and smoking PCP, we crossed the Texas state line. The last driver had sold us a long-lasting supply of PCP.(18) One of its street names is Angel Dust, but if it’s the dust of an angel, it must be from the fallen angel, the devil himself.

  And so we fell into the world of Texas. The state of Texas revels in being unique, the best, and the biggest, such as being the only state that has flown the flags from six other countries; the state that encompasses the King Ranch, a ranch bigger than the state of Rhode Island; the state that has the world’s largest helium well; and the list goes on. Although no longer the largest state, Texas still claims to be bigger than Alaska after global warming melts Alaska’s ice. When Texas can’t be the best, then she will glance sideways and accept the last and the worst, such as a recent ranking at the bottom for health care and having the worst droughts in 2012, 2013, and 2014. Texas will never give up her cowboy-tough image. It is inherent in her history and in the land itself, from the water-moccasin-filled and mosquito-infested Big Thicket on her east to the powder-dry and rattlesnake-populated desert on her west.

  Concerning crime and punishment, Texas historically reflects the toughness of her native roots. For the years 1976 through August 21, 2001, Texas had the highest execution rate in the United States at 472 deaths, almost five times that of any of the other thirty-five listed execution states. Although Oklahoma had a higher incidence per capita, Texas still ranked second in per capita deaths.(19) Texas had the largest prisoner population of any state, 157,900, at the beginning of 2013.(20) Certainly no hint of being soft on criminals should ever be cast on the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ), nor on its governors with their seldom-if-ever-used powers of pardon.

  Surely, unless one’s mind were in an altered or non compos mentis state, he or she would not knowingly commit a crime in Texas. It is speculated that Charles Manson might have considered Texas as a home for “The Family” but changed his mind based on his experience of being arrested in Laredo in June 1960, for violation of his probation in California.(21) Compared to California, Texas is indeed a tough state, a fact of which I was not aware and couldn’t have comprehended anyway in my drug-addled condition.

  Mike had a jail acquaintance in Houston “who would take care of us.” Mike seemed always to know someone who would take care of us, so we thumbed it farther south, far out of our way to Florida, to the back side of Houston. Our truck driver needed to head even farther south and turned from Loop 610 onto the South Freeway near the Astrodome. Mike’s friend was supposed to live near that point, so we walked back north from where he let us out up to Loop 610.

  It was February 21, 1980, a Friday, and the weather was classic Houston, overcast and around sixty degrees, not particularly comfortable, especially when we stood near the freeway where two-ton bees and wasps zoomed by, flapping grit into our faces. When we neared the Astrodome, a van stopped in front of us on the shoulder. It was large and white with square corners like a bread truck. The driver, Robert (Bob) Banks, talked with us, or rather yelled over the traffic, for a few minutes and offered to compensate us if we would help him move from an apartment to his newly rented house. Money? We readily agreed. Mike’s friend could wait.

  Bob Banks motioned us into his van and insisted I sit up in the passenger seat. I glanced in the back and noticed a spider’s lair of white nylon rope crisscrossing bedposts, tables, etc. After some introductions, Bob asked, “Where you all headed?…Florida. Oh, that’s a great place to go.”

  “What do you do for a living, Bob?…The oil business…. I hear that’s rather good pay.”

  “It’s okay; at least it got me out of an apartment and into a house. I couldn’t take all the noise and being crammed up together with others like bees in a hive. My new house is just a few minutes from here, over on Hepburn.”

  Like we knew or cared where Hepburn was; besides, Banks was making me edgy. He kept directing every question and response at my chest. Between his eyes on me and his glancing at the road, it was a miracle we even got to Hepburn. The street on which his new three-bedroom mansion rested was a single-lane blacktop in disrepair and close to a railroad track. The one remarkable thing was that there were some young palm trees along the road, palm trees just like those in California.

  We helped him unload a few pieces of furniture and then returned to his apartment for another load. Because it was getting late, he decided we would resume work tomorrow. That evening, Banks took us out to a nice restaurant. We all waited behind him at the cashier’s counter. He pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his wallet. I whispered to Mike, “He looks like he has a lot of money.” Mike grunted and smiled in the affirmative. After dinner, we went to a bar. PCP and liquor were roiling in my head. I was not having a good time, especially since Banks kept sidling his chair up next to me and whispering sweet “uglies” in my ear.

  “Would you please quit nuzzling me?” I groaned.

  The party sort of died, and we left for his new home. After we slept that night, Banks treated us to breakfast, and we went to his apartment to shower and pick up another load of his belongings. While Banks was in the shower, Mike showed me what he found.

  “He has guns. Look…and we know he has money. I’m going to call a friend back in California and let him in on this one. We got a bird’s nest on the ground, a real live pigeon.”

  Mike made his call on Banks’s telephone. His California friend wasn’t interested. Mike placed the guns, a .45 revolver, an M-1 rifle, and a shotgun, into the van.

  That night we went to a rodeo at the Astrodome with Banks paying our way. I planned on a good time; Western music, Western attire, and rodeos were things I grew up with and thoroughly enjoyed. I beefed up heavily on PCP and a few pills left over from who-knew-where and who-knew-what was in them. I guzzled plenty of beer at the rodeo, hoping it would dull the pawing and groping from Banks. When he left us for more beer, I said to Mike with a laugh, “I’d like to kill him.”

  Later in the evening, Mike left for a long time, and Linda and I went to find him. He was leaning against one of the walls in a walkway looking into space like he was in another dimension.

  “What are you doing?” we asked.

  “I’m planning.”

  “Are we going to do it tonight?” I asked.

  He didn’t respond, and we three returned to our seats, where Banks continued to prod me and talk nasty.

  “Let’s go. I’m getting really, really tired of this.”

  “No, baby,” said Banks. “We’re just starting to have fun.”

  “Mike,” I said slowly and with emphasis, “w
e are going to do it tonight.”

  I don’t think—but who knows what mind I had left to think with—that I was talking about anything other than robbery and getting away from this creep. We did finally leave and went to a bar where Banks continued his sexual onslaught. I continued to drink heavily.

  ***

  Banks parked his truck in front of the attached garage at his new house, and we stumbled out, all grateful to leave the roar and bounce of his truck. I noticed a half-alive moon weakly trying to overcome the gloom that reflected the brightness of the Houston skyline. It was dropping into the 40s, a temperature I considered extremely cold. I noted a Volkswagen in the driveway.

  Another Bob had arrived: Robert (Bob) Skeens. Bob Skeens, a friend of Banks from Louisiana, had just driven up to help with the move. Banks introduced everyone, and when he got to me, he leaped to my side and put his arm around me. I elbowed him hard. I walked over to Mike and asked quietly, “Why don’t we get a gun from the van and do it now?”

  “No, it’s not the right time.”

  I smoked some more PCP-laced marijuana, drank some beer, and got the .45 pistol. Angry, paranoid, invincible, seeing strange things, and feeling not myself, I had morphed into Missus-Mister Hyde personified.

  “Linda, why don’t you go get a gun from the van, and we’ll come in and surprise them,” I said.

  I presume she declined. I faded rather quickly after that. But in the morning, the drugs and residual booze fought for what little sense I had left. I smoked another PCP-laced cigarette and got the pistol. Both Bobs had left to get coffee and doughnuts for their “guests.” I woke Mike and Linda. “They’re gone,” I said. Mike, ever with an expressionless face, got the shotgun and hid in the hall closet.

  When the unsuspecting pair returned, Mike rapped several times, quickly, from inside the closet. As Banks approached to investigate, Mike jumped out with the shotgun held chest-high and yelled, “Okay, this is a robbery!” Skeens responded appropriately in fear; but evidently, Banks thought we were playing a joke because he smiled and walked closer with his hands out and palms up. Mike hit him in the jaw with the butt of the shotgun and he fell. I came from the back with the pistol and a length of the white nylon rope from the truck and said, “This is no joke.” I also had a machete that I used to cut some pieces from the rope for Mike to tie the hands of the dazed Banks. I pointed the pistol at Skeens and ordered him to the floor. Mike tied his hands also. We went through their wallets.

  “Wow,” he shouted as he flipped through Banks’s thick pad of bills, “he’s got 800 dollars here.”

  We placed Skeens in one of the bedrooms and secured his feet and hands to the bed. Mike sat down on the floor with Banks and looped the rope once around his neck. He motioned to me to grab the other end and pull.

  Did Mike exert a Charlie Manson type of mind control over me? Did I think I was paying back Little Joe for his molestation? PCP mixed with everything else I had taken produced an altered state with demonic tendencies.(22) On PCP, there is no mind with which to think, just a dazed reaction to whatever happens.

  ***

  Unlike hemp or cotton rope that when pulled tight remains in place, this was nylon, a fiber that stretches and gives. I guess this was the reason that later, the court determined—I don’t know how—that strangulation took a long time, ten to fifteen minutes. I don’t remember much, certainly not the length of time it took for what unfolded. At one point I was in a dark cave, Mike was a giant tarantula with glowing red eyes, and he was pulling me toward him with a bright-white spider web. At another point during a similar fog, Linda had evidently entered, sat down in front of me, and began to pull, because I felt the rope give for a moment. Through a bright tunnel, I heard thunder and saw her long, brown hair moving in a storm. Red rain fell all around her. She squealed and cried.

  And then a voice echoed through moving darkness: “If you don’t have the heart for this, then go load the Volkswagen,” said Mike. “We’re leaving in it.”

  Mike motioned to me to stop and go to the back bedroom where Skeens awaited the same fate. My memory contains total absence of that incident. All three of us methodically rifled the house for small items we could pawn, taking a camera and a radio/cassette player.

  When we left, I felt the wrongness of all we had done in some deeply hidden crevice of my heart. That this was not me in my body. That I had to get loose from this high. That I had to get away from Mike and Linda.

  CHAPTER 7

  In the stolen Volkswagen, we retraced our hitchhiked entrance into Houston, heading back around Loop 610, the giant loop that circles the Bayou City. I suppose that the wise city council of every metropolis envisions a concrete moat around their perimeter to keep visiting traffic at bay. Usually, such happy circles end in just another gridlocked roadway in the path of progress as the city spills over the rim to seek its own level. Such is the situation for Loop 610, where noonday traffic yo-yoed forward at an infinitesimal speed. Where the Loop intersects Interstate 45, we turned north toward Dallas.

  I was crammed in the back of the VW bug with my feet wedged in against the front seat and my back separated by only fabric and foam from the engine’s puttering drone in the rear. I closed my eyes, preparing for a narcosis, a drug doze, but I couldn’t get there. What we had done, to take the lives of others, was so bizarre, so intoxicating, and so stimulating—so amplified by the drugs—that it was all upon which I could dwell, and it was not pleasant. The weather was an ugly, cold-gray drizzle, the same that reportedly occurred on the day I was born, and yet whenever a ray of an outcast sun broke through the grunge, I heard opioid songs, a few pretty but most raucous and sour. My addled mind was in turmoil. This was not who I wanted to be.

  Houston seemingly never stops its growth northward. Endless shopping centers and office buildings line multiple-lane, side-by-side highways separated by a continuous concrete barrier. Cars jockeyed for positions like NASCAR racers with inches between bumpers—rudeness with a vengeance.

  “Look at that black S.O.B.,” yelled Mike as a flat-bed truck driven by an African-American jumped in front, surely using the size of his vehicle to an advantage.

  Were we not on the run, I suppose Mike would have stopped him for a little Aryan Brotherhood discussion, but instead Mike continued to drive like the proverbial little old lady.

  As it neared noon, the eternal chain of urban growth dropped most of its links, and the highway split into a rolling two-lane with an island of green between ours and oncoming lanes. Tall pines dominated the island and also the sides of the interstate. Texas state troopers hid on little intersecting roads amongst the trees, the noses of their black Fords jutting outward like menacing, black spiders. An orange outline of the state of Texas bull’s-eyed the sides of their front doors, black widows that suddenly sprang out to strike an unsuspecting speeder. Every time we’d pass one, or one would pass us, a vacuum sucked out all conversation and a chill reverberated in my heart.

  Soon we entered the outskirts of Huntsville, Texas, and we all noted the tall, razor-wire-topped fence whose corner almost plowed into the right side of the highway at an oblique angle; a guard tower stood above the wire.

  “I wonder if that’s the state penitentiary,” said Mike. “We need gas. I’m going to find out if it is.”

  At the next left-turn crossover, he drove into a filling station. It didn’t take long to fill the little bug’s tank, and we crossed back through the pine-treed island heading north.

  “No, that’s not the ‘Big House’…that’s what the attendant called it. That one is downtown; I’ve heard of it. It’s the Walls Unit. It’s where they execute prisoners.”(23)

  Peckerwood Hill Cemetery, near the Walls Unit (24, 25)

  As we crossed over the median to head north again, Mike cocked his head to the right for a moment.

  “That one we just passed back there, that prison jutting out near the h
ighway, that’s the Goree Unit. It’s reserved for women…That’s where you’re going to spend the rest of your life, Pam.”(26, 27)

  I couldn’t see his eyes, but I knew they were glinting with whatever sinister thoughts he had, those that one could never decipher in their emptiness.

  “Ha,” I laughed nervously.

  Mike and Linda had been arguing since we left Houston, that is, ever since we saw buildings melting from the side of the highway. A little while after leaving Huntsville, their fighting had escalated into screaming and cursing. The air already thick with cigarette smoke became stifled with anger.

  “Stop,” I yelled. “I’ve got to have some fresh air…Why don’t we split—right here—you all give me my share and let me out.”

  Mike arched the little VW bug off onto the shoulder and jammed it to a halt. Before it stopped rolling, Linda opened her door and jumped out for several yards. I pushed the seat forward, squeezed out, and ran into the middle of a nearby field. She trotted up next to me.

  “Listen, Pam, he has the pistol and I’m afraid. I’m afraid he might use it…on either of us, especially me, if we tried to leave.”

  “Yes…I believe he would. I should have kept the pistol when I had it.”

  I resolved then that, eventually, I must get away from both of them. Two hours later, we arrived in Dallas. It was cloudy and colder, but no longer as gloomy. Asking directions whenever he decided to—certainly not when Linda barked at him that he was lost—Mike found the Greyhound bus station on Lamar. We circled it a few minutes until he ninety-degreed into a nearby underground parking garage.

  “Leave the shotgun…I’ve got the rifle in my duffel bag. Just take what we can carry,” he said softly. “And leave the windows open. Let the dust in so it will mask our fingerprints.”