God'll Cut You Down : The Tangled Tale of a White Supremacist, a Black Hustler, Amurder, and How I Lost a Year in Mississippi (9780698170537)

by Safran, John

  Mr. McGee had basically worked for him all day. And that evening Mr. Barrett had dropped Mr. McGee off at the McGee house and had returned home.

  At some point that evening—some time, nine, ten o’clock, somewhere around in there—Vincent McGee walked down to Mr. Barrett’s residence. He returned home sometime later. His parents saw him. He was covered in blood.

  He left his residence and went to a cousin’s house in an adjacent county. The next morning, he returned back to Mr. Barrett’s residence. He then set fire to the residence. That is when law enforcement became involved. They received a 911 call about a house fire.

  Law enforcement responded there to the house—mainly the fire department, but also local police there to assist, to direct traffic, things of that nature.

  When the fire department arrived, the house was not fully engaged, but fires had been set on two ends of the house. So there was a lot of smoke. The fire department entered the residence and attempted to see if anybody was inside. When they did, they found the body of Richard Barrett—there in the kitchen. He was there on the floor. He’d been stabbed—and I want to say approximately thirty times. A large number of times. And he had a belt that was wrapped around one of his hands. Mr. Barrett was removed from the house.

  They immediately notified the deputies, who were outside. As soon as the fire was under control, of course, at that time Mr. Barrett’s residence was declared a crime scene. Law enforcement noticed that there was a gas can—a plastic gas can—there outside the residence. And based on the origin of the fire being in two different ends of the house, in two bedrooms, they immediately suspected arson, in that whoever killed Mr. Barrett then set the house on fire in an attempt to cover up the murder.

  They began speaking with the people in the area, the neighbors. And one of the people who lives there in the community stated that the previous night they had seen Mr. Barrett’s truck at the defendant’s residence.

  So law enforcement went down to the house to try to see what information they could get from Mr. McGee and/or his family. And when they arrived there at the residence they saw the top to a gas can in the carport area. They had an open carport. And they also saw shoes, and on the bottom of the shoes there was soot.

  And actually no one was home at the time. So they applied for a search warrant to begin a search of the residence.

  At some point, Vincent McGee’s mother returned home. They began questioning her. And during the questioning of Vincent’s mother she admitted Vincent had come home with blood on his hands and said that he had killed Mr. Barrett the previous night. And so at that time a warrant was issued for Mr. McGee’s arrest. The family shared with law enforcement that they believed that he was at a location in an adjacent community in Pearl. Members from the sheriff’s department went to that residence, found Mr. McGee at the residence, and placed him under arrest for the murder of Richard Barrett.

  Michael’s Big Leather Chair

  Michael’s voice is always even and calm. His face and hands reveal little. But his big leather chair speaks of what’s inside the man. His level of unease can be measured by the tempo of his rocks. From total calm (no rocks) to high anxiety (rapid squeak-squeak-squeaks) and all levels of unease in between.

  The bed frame in the long grass outside Richard’s house drifts into my mind.

  “The fires in the bedrooms,” I ask, “were they started in the beds?”

  “Yes, sir,” says Michael Guest. (Minor rocks.)

  “And did he try to actually set Richard on fire or just the house?”

  “Now let me just look here and see.” Michael prizes open the fat file, careful to make sure I can’t peekaboo. “I think he did suffer some burns on his body. The autopsy report talks about injuries, multiple stab wounds, blunt force injuries to the head. It also shows approximately 35 percent of the body surface area did contain burns, the singeing of the eyebrows, eyelashes. Soot was deposited in the mouth and the nasal cavities from the fires. But did he directly set fire to Mr. Barrett? I do not know, Mr. Safran.”

  “So what did Vincent say when you arrested him?”

  “After an arrest was made, Mr. McGee agreed to speak with law enforcement. He waived his rights and has admitted the killing. He made several statements, I believe there are actually four, on various days, and in all of the statements he admits to killing Richard Barrett. Some of the details around the killing changed from statement to statement. The first statement that was made was he went down there that night to get on Facebook because Mr. Barrett had a computer. When he was down there at the house, Richard made some sexual advances toward him. Then Mr. McGee just snapped—kind of went crazy.”

  “What kind of sexual advances?”

  The big leather chair speeds up.

  “I think Mr. Barrett just basically had gone up to him . . .” Michael stumbles. “Let me see, I’m going to try to get a little information.”

  He opens the fat Richard file. I perform yoga contortions with my eyeballs, trying to peek in.

  “Out of interest, can I photocopy that or is that private?” I say, trying not to sound like a salivating rodent.

  “At this point,” Michael says, “since the case hasn’t gone to trial, we can’t release any of the report or anything at this time.”

  “I understand,” says the salivating rodent.

  “The interviews are videotaped,” says Michael, nose in the fat file, “but the report just says that Barrett began to make sexual advances toward him. He told him to stop. Barrett would not stop, and then they got into a struggle. Mr. McGee pulled a knife out, the first thing he could find, and began stabbing him with it. Almost a temporary insanity type of thing—not really sure what he’s doing. The next thing he knows, he’s got a knife, which he grabbed off of the kitchen counter, and begins stabbing him to death.”

  Michael says the fat file holds no more color or detail about the sexual advances.

  “As he begins to be interviewed other times,” Michael says, “the story begins to morph from being one of sexual advances to being one where he’s upset over the amount of money that he was paid. That he gets to the house, he begins confronting Barrett about that, that Barrett refuses to pay him the money. That they then begin to struggle and that he then stabs and kills him.”

  “So in the second statement, he’s taking out the sexual element?”

  “That’s right. The only time he brings up anything regarding a sexual assault—” Michael stops himself. “A sexual advance—I guess it wouldn’t be an assault—was during the first statement. Also during the second statement, I believe that he admitted to stealing items from the residence. We learned that Mr. Barrett’s wallet is missing. Vincent also in later statements states that, after he kills Mr. Barrett, that he takes not only the wallet but also takes a gun and a knife.”

  “Do you have an opinion on which version is true? Was he repelling a sexual advance? Or was he out to rob?”

  “If we believe that he went down there because he was upset about not being paid and that he was there trying to get his money, that to me more closely fits the facts of the case. Because we know that he did in fact kill him, and he did in fact take his wallet and any money that he had. He did in fact also take items of property from the house, being a gun and knife, things of value that he could later, if he had not been apprehended, resell to get the money back, that he believed he was owed. So to me the facts tend to more closely fit the second and subsequent versions of events that he gave.”

  This, it must be noted, is the version you need if you want to thread a lethal injection into the arm of Vincent McGee. If Vincent flipped out over a sexual advance and killed Richard, says Michael, the most he can get is life. He’d be eligible for parole at age sixty-five. Even if Vincent flipped out, killed Richard, and then, as an afterthought, decided to steal the wallet, gun, and knife, it’s still life with parole at sixty-five. The only
way Vincent can be killed by the state is if he killed Richard for the purpose of robbing him—a capital murder charge.

  “Why do you think he changed his story?” I ask. “Because an attorney told him to? Or do you think just there was some personal thing, like he is embarrassed that people might look at him . . . that he was involved in some gay thing?”

  “I have two theories,” says Michael. (His rocking speeds up.) “One is that, like you said, that he didn’t want it to be known that this white supremacist is trying to be engaged in some sort of sexual relationship with him, and that he was embarrassed by that. On the other side, did he come up with the first story, the sexual advance story, because Mr. McGee has been through the legal system before? Does he know just enough about the legal system to know that if I say that it wasn’t during a robbery then that’s going to lessen the charges?”

  Michael says perhaps Vincent morphed his story to something closer to the truth because he thought his sexual advance version wouldn’t hold up. He’s rocking pretty quickly now, wanting to ride on from the sexual aspect. I ask him about the other thing that complicates the simple robbery/murder story he wants to tell.

  “You dismissed pretty early on that it had anything to do with being a hate crime and the fact that Richard was a white supremacist, Vincent was a black man. Why are you so sure of that?”

  “A lot of that is again based on the statements that Mr. McGee has made. He at no time ever has said, you know, ‘I killed Richard Barrett because he was a white supremacist and I was aware of his politics and I was aware of who he was and what he did,’ and, you know, that that was the motive. You know, they were neighbors, they had lived in the same community together. I mean, Vincent had worked for Barrett before.”

  Why does Michael assume people who are neighbors can’t hate each other? No one hates me more than my Jewish neighbors back in Australia. But more than that, the black boys who were hired to blow up balloons at the Spirit of America Day, they knew what it was. Just because Vincent lived next door to Richard and worked for him doesn’t mean he was necessarily oblivious. Living near to and dealing with Richard might have just made Vincent hate him more.

  I tell Michael what Earnest told me. That Chokwe Lumumba and Precious Martin have taken over the case precisely because there is a race dimension. A racial dimension they felt the white public defender was dodging.

  Michael’s lips and eyes go all confused.

  “For them to make that an issue, I believe that Vincent McGee would have to testify at trial,” Michael says. “He would have to take the stand, and he would have to now give a different version than he’s previously given. And so now you are looking at a third version.”

  Michael thinks Vincent springing a third version would color him shifty to the jury.

  “Did Vincent out-and-out say he had no idea about Richard’s white supremacist history?”

  “I don’t recall exactly what he said about his history. There is just a handful left of those folks who are still in the white supremacist groups. They don’t receive a lot of publicity. They kind of—thank goodness—slowly died out. And so while there were some people that were quite aware of who Richard Barrett was, there was a great deal of people who had no idea.”

  Michael stops rocking and stops talking like a public official. The cadence of coffee-shop gossip blends into his twang.

  “Some would have thought it strange,” he says, “that here we have a white supremacist who is living in a mixed neighborhood. You know, it just really didn’t fit the bill for what you would consider your hardcore white supremacist. You know, generally those people, they want to have very little dealings with people of another race. And a lot of them, they don’t want to live in the same neighborhoods, they don’t want to send their kids to the same school. And so while Richard was involved in that movement, there were other aspects of his life that really didn’t tend to fit what you would or what I would consider to be a hardcore white supremacist.”

  Does he mean that Richard wasn’t a real white supremacist—that he was an agent, like Jim Giles says? Or is he getting at something else? His rocking’s slowed down; perhaps he’s not riding away so fast, now that he’s done his duty and stated the formal case. Maybe he wants me to do a little digging.

  “Do you think,” I say, leaning a little closer, “there’s any chance that Richard and Vincent were engaged in a longer-term sexual relationship? You know, where Richard paid Vincent?”

  “You know, the only person that would know that would be Vincent McGee,” says Michael, playing it as straight as he can. “Now, you know, Richard kind of kept to himself. He had moved down to Mississippi from up north many, many years ago, so he has no family here in this area. You know, we weren’t able to find anyone who was extremely close to Richard.”

  “What about in New York or New Jersey? Did you speak to any of Richard’s family in any other places?”

  “We’ve not been able to talk to anybody. And no one has come forward and contacted us, as a family member of Richard. We know that he’s never married, didn’t have any children.” If I ask Michael whether that’s code for gay, I’m worried he’ll clam up entirely.

  “So what happened to his estate and who took care of his property?”

  “I don’t know. I believe that he had a will, but I don’t know where the estate went upon his death. We always like to let the family members know where the case is at and get their input. And so basically this is an odd case because we don’t have close friends, family members, those people that we can consult with in this matter.”

  So, even the measly few people I’ve discovered as Richard’s connections have gone to ground in the face of the DA’s inquiries: Vince Thornton, who introduced Richard at the Spirit of America Day, and whose name was on the bill in Richard’s mailbox; Joe McNamee, the man present at my prank who I spoke to on Jim Giles’s show; and Richard’s sister, whom Joe spoke with but did not meet. Michael Guest has his secret file, and I have mine.

  Now Michael pulls out two pages from that fat file and takes me through Vincent McGee’s criminal history. Whether or not there’s a sexual angle or a race angle to the murder, there’s no question Vincent has a bit of a dodgy past.

  Five years ago he assaulted a couple of law enforcement officers. For this, he served one year in prison. Not long after he was released he was arrested again for grand larceny. So, both a history of violence and a history of robbery. Vincent was meant to serve five years for the grand larceny.

  However.

  For whatever reason—Michael doesn’t know—Vincent was released early. And within two months of his early release, Vincent was shadowing over Richard Barrett in his kitchen with a knife.

  I decide we’ve become chatty enough for me to ask the big question.

  “Even if Vincent did steal from Richard and that was his motive, don’t you, as the district attorney, have discretion to not seek the death penalty? Why did you go for the death penalty?”

  The big leather chair rocks very fast. His face and eyes soften, like the thought of snuffing out a man’s life weighs heavily on him.

  “You know,” Michael says, “what we did is we indicted with the death penalty to keep that option open.”

  I’m wrong about our chattiness. Michael won’t say any more on the matter. The conversation is clearly finished.

  “Just one final question. Tina McGee said—that’s Vincent’s mother—said she’s not allowed to visit him in prison. Is that true?”

  Michael’s eyes and lips squeeze into confusion again.

  “The family should have access to him. I would be surprised if the family would not be allowed to see him while he is here in jail.”

  Halfway down the corridor to the elevator, I can still hear the pacy squeak-squeak-squeak of Michael Guest’s big leather chair.

  How the World Works, According to Mark

&nb
sp; A local lawyer called Mark is waiting for a client outside the entrance of the courthouse. His white hands grip a leather satchel.

  “All my family is originally from Mississippi,” he tells me. Nevertheless, and not consciously, he refers to Mississippians as they, not we. He and his parents lived in New York for long stretches, so he’s an insider and an outsider.

  I tell him I just chatted with Michael Guest and his squeaky chair.

  “The district attorney is elected every four years,” he tells me. “He doesn’t want to lose a case this high-profile. There are a certain number of folks out there who are still ardent segregationists. They were supportive of Richard Barrett. If he allows Mr. McGee to be acquitted at trial, he will lose those people’s votes.”

  Mark thinks Michael Guest will try to pry a guilty plea from Vincent.

  “Honestly, I don’t think Mr. Guest wants to go to trial. And the reason he doesn’t want to go to trial is that there is that very slim, but possible, group of folks that would be on the jury pool that upon hearing of Mr. Barrett’s solicitation for sex would be so offended, they’d say, ‘He got what he deserved.’ There is a possibility that Mr. McGee could be acquitted.”

  I notice that Mark doesn’t think there’s a chance that a Rankin County jury would be sympathetic to a black man. He just thinks that there’s a chance that they’d hate gay people even more.

  Mark knows of both Precious Martin and Chokwe Lumumba.

  “Precious tends to be a more even-keeled-type person. Chokwe tends to want to cast everything in racial terms. He has a reputation for viewing every black defendant as innocent and every white victim as guilty of racism and therefore deserving of whatever happened to them. In this particular case he is absolutely correct. Mr. Barrett actually was a racist. Even a blind squirrel finds a nut every once in a while.”

  Still, while Chokwe’s routine kills in black Jackson, it could fizzle here in Rankin County, says Mark.