Ricky says this is how it happened, the two of them talking under the stars. They became friends, and when he moved in with her and her husband and the kids he became better friends with Terry. Before he moved in he told them he was on parole for molesting a child. But they could see he was trying. They accepted him. They trusted him.
Pearl? She never mentions this night. Not the smoke, not the stars, not Ricky’s talking about his dreams and not her admitting to hers. She says Ricky became friends with Terry, and that the two of them invited him to stay on account of that. She never says he told her he was a molester. Not after one of her son’s friends goes missing, and she asks him to leave. Not after they find that boy dead in her house. Not even after her son and her husband die colliding with an Amtrak train, and it’s only her and her daughter left and she flees to New Mexico, where for a long time not even the lawyers can find her.
But she never says she didn’t know, either.
* * *
For a few weeks, Ricky has the life he wants. He and Pearl and Terry rent a big white two-story house on a street the landlord calls Watson Road. The street doesn’t really have a name, the lane so far back it might as well be in the woods, and the house is run-down and strange-looking, with a staircase running out the back of the second floor, into the woods. But it’s the only two-story house in the neighborhood, and this makes it special. Pearl and Terry pay to have the phone line turned on. The only phone in the neighborhood; this, too, makes the house special. Ricky goes to his job at the Fuel Stop and looks after June and Joey and takes good care of his khakis and polo, washing them nice and even ironing them sometimes, and when he gets a little extra money saved he buys himself a bottle of schnapps and goes out to the river to do some fishing and suddenly he isn’t a loner out there, suddenly he isn’t a weirdo, but a workingman who lives in a nice house, spending his day off enjoying some much-needed downtime.
Ricky is normal.
But nothing in this life can last. One afternoon, Joey’s friend Jeremy comes over. Ricky draws a bath for Jeremy and Joey. He brings them soap, the files say. Maybe Joey calls to him that they need it. Or maybe Ricky, half knowing what he’s doing, goes to the cabinet and gets a new bar. Takes it to the bathroom, where he sees Jeremy in the bath. Says, “Oh—I thought you needed soap.”
That night, Ricky can’t sleep. He keeps thinking about Jeremy. The next evening, he and Pearl are sitting on recliners in the living room, watching a crime television show, one of their favorites. Carefully, as casually as he can, he asks, “Whose kid was the blond boy from yesterday?”
“That was Lori’s son,” she answers.
He doesn’t want to let on how curious he is, so he waits. On the screen, I imagine, the show has just shown the actress playing the victim. Next they will reenact the scene. Ricky watches. Then he asks, “Where do they live?”
“With Melissa, just down the street.”
The actress is lying on the couch now, conspicuously not noticing the man at her window. “You think Joey will have him back over again soon?”
This time Pearl gives him a queer look. She doesn’t answer.
When, the day after that, Ricky opens the door and Jeremy’s standing on the threshold, Terry Lawson off fishing with June and Joey, and Pearl nowhere to be found, he thinks, Oh, you’d better run, kid. He has a flash of what’s going to happen. There will be no turning back now.
He could shut the door. Instead he opens it wider. Jeremy steps across the threshold, into the house.
Where Ricky kills him.
Ricky will spend the rest of his life puzzling over this act. An hour after Lucky and Dixon arrest him, he confesses to the murder, but tells them he didn’t molest Jeremy. An hour later, he confesses again, slightly different details, and says he did. On three videotapes and over several months in notepads hastily scribbled on by prison guards when Ricky says he has something to add, he gives different versions of the murder. He describes undressing Jeremy to molest him. (When Jeremy was found, he was clothed.) He says he killed Jeremy in an effort not to molest him. (Possible, but Ricky’s semen was on Jeremy’s shirt.) He says the crime wasn’t sexual at all, but murder, and what he really wanted was to get a gun and go down to the elementary school, “do some shooting.” (Maybe, but it’s pedophilia that Ricky’s struggled with for decades. Not violence.) He says he killed Jeremy because he was “overcome with a feeling” of not wanting Jeremy to become like him. Ten years later, he’ll still be confessing, unable to stop telling this story different ways. He casts about for stories as if he’s casting about for an identity, trying to figure out who he is and who this means he’ll be.
When they take him locked up in handcuffs to the parish jail for his holding hearing, there’s a news van waiting for the police cruiser. Lucky gets him out, and the reporter scurries over, zooming the news camera in close on Ricky’s face. Ricky looks into the lens, grins wide, seems to realize he shouldn’t, looks down. He’s awkward in his body, shuffling along. It’s as though half of him wants to be seen and the other half wants to hide away. The sun’s clear and bright behind him, making the orange jumpsuit glow against the blue sky and the scrub grass and the trees. The jail’s a squat building of red-brown brick and institutional beige. Along one side of the building slouches a group of corrections officers, smoking. When they see the reporter their heads bob up like apples and they stare at Ricky. Among them is Sergeant Larry Schroeder, thirty-two years old and working as a transport guard for the Louisiana Department of Corrections. For the past five years he’s spent his days accompanying inmates all over the state. Today he’s responsible for a man called Jackson and a couple others. But really Larry’s a local. He lives in Lake Charles and he’s raising his children here. So he recognizes Ricky immediately. Iowa’s only eight miles away. Larry’s “not one of them local-news watchers,” he’ll say later, he prefers CNN, but everyone knows who Ricky is. Ricky’s mug shot was all over the state.
After they’ve all gone inside and the day’s hearings have begun, Larry’s sitting on a folding chair in the hallway outside the courtroom, waiting for Jackson’s case to be called, when he hears banging. The sheriff’s deputy in charge of the holding cell signals him to come over. It’s Jackson, twitchy and agitated, hitting the door of the group cell. When he sees Larry he stops. His eyes are all bugged out. “Man, you got to get me out of here,” Jackson says. “Move me or something.”
“Calm down,” Larry says. “Calm down or I’ll have you put in lockdown when we’re back.”
“Get me out of—”
“Calm down,” Larry says, and walks back to his chair. It’s as if the inmates think that because he’s not their regular guard they’ll be able to get away with something. As if he were a substitute teacher. Larry’s not having any of it.
But then the deputy asks Larry to watch the inmates for a minute. Larry walks back over and leans against the door of the holding cell. The first thing he notices is that the inmates are all in bench seats cramped on one side of the room. And on the other, in a chair by himself, is Ricky. Jackson’s in the row closest to Ricky, and he’s rocking in his seat, still agitated. “Man, leave me alone!” Jackson says. “Leave me alone.”
Then Jackson spots Larry. “Sarge, you gotta listen to what this little dude has to say!” Later that’s the phrase that will stick in Larry’s mind. “Little dude.” Because while Jackson, so much bigger than Ricky, can’t seem not to comment on Ricky’s size, what strikes Larry is his tone. Jackson’s genuinely scared. Too scared not to show it, even if the other inmates will give him grief later.
Or maybe, Larry thinks, they won’t. Look at the way they’re all on the other side of the room.
To Ricky, Jackson says, “Tell Sarge what you just told me about killing that kid.”
From his folding chair, leaning forward with his arms crossed and pitching his voice loud enough that everyone in the holding cell can hear, Ricky says that he enjoyed killing Jeremy. “Enjoyed killing the other ones, t
oo,” he says. “The cops will never find them all.” He says that he molested Jeremy and that he was molested by his father, Alcide. “But I’m not angry at him, not at all. I know he enjoyed it. I did, too.”
“That’s sick, man!” yells Jackson. To Larry, he says, “You better not lock me up with this dude.”
What are we watching, as the inmates separate themselves from Ricky just like the schoolkids used to? What are we watching, as he tells and retells the story of the murder? I have read every document I can find from Ricky’s life. I have read psychologist reports and death row reports and even his commissary order forms from the Calcasieu Correctional Center, trying to discern who Ricky might be from the detritus of the record his life has created, and he is still a hard person for me to understand, to know whether to believe. This is the only time on record that he says Alcide molested him. One other time he says he was abused—doesn’t say by whom—but every other, he says he wasn’t. This is the only time he says he killed other children. When he was first arrested, he said, “I never even thought I could, I mean, that’s the first time.”
Still, he has his consistent themes. He likes to say he only chose kids who were hurting already. That he recognized something in their eyes that let him know they’d already been abused. He claims to have recognized that in Jeremy.
He’s told the story in so many ways that it’s hard to know what to do with the telling that’s coming.
There is a grave in Louisiana that bears the body of Oscar Lee Langley, a body of a five-year-old boy decapitated along the side of a road in Arizona, a body his father accompanied home to Louisiana so the child could be interred next to the relatives he’d met only as a baby. That grave has held the dead child for sixty-three years.
But if you listen to Ricky Langley, he will tell you that on February 7, 1992, five-year-old Oscar Lee Langley appeared in an upstairs bedroom of the Lawson house to dance and skip around six-year-old Jeremy Guillory. Ricky will tell you that Oscar grinned a little boy’s gap-toothed grin at him but that Oscar didn’t want to play, he’d come to the house to taunt Ricky. Oscar told him that he was in charge now, the way he’d always been, and that he’d make Ricky molest Jeremy, molest him even though Ricky had been good for months. Ricky shouted and argued with him—and that, Ricky says, was what scared Jeremy and made the child start to run. Ricky grabbed Oscar by the throat—the throat that was Jeremy’s. He wanted Oscar to stop talking, wanted to stop that voice he’d heard in his head since he was a child—and it was Jeremy whom he choked. Ricky grabbed Oscar by the throat so hard that he lifted Oscar off the ground—it was Jeremy’s body that hung from Ricky’s hands. Jeremy stopped breathing.
Only then, if you believe Ricky Langley, did he realize whom he’d killed.
* * *
The trial is quick. The jury convicts Ricky of molesting and murdering Jeremy and, with only three hours of deliberation, sentences him to die. When Ricky arrives on death row at Angola, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, roughly eighty men are housed in the cells, across tiers of a white octagonal building just yards from the entrance gates. Each tier holds fourteen cells. The cells are concrete, with a small opening on one side that has iron bars over it. All the openings face the same side; the men cannot see one another. What they see is the corridor and the passing guards, the same concrete day after day. They hear the same sounds: the yelling, the snoring, the toilets’ endless flushing. Each man is confined in his six-by-nine cell for twenty-three hours a day. For the remaining hour Ricky is let into a small chained pen where he is permitted to stand and feel the sun on his face. He is permitted the blue sky. Then he is escorted back into his concrete cell, where the temperature in the summer is regularly as high as 120 degrees. The heat, the sameness, the noise—it is the men’s shaving mirrors that save them. If they hold the mirrors out through the iron bars, angled just right, they can see one another. The space is tight and loud and suffocating, but though it is called death row, it is where men live.
In 1995, one man, Thomas Lee Ward, is executed. In 1996, another: Antonio G. James. In 1997, John Ashley Brown Jr. In 1999, Dobie Gillis Williams, who’s widely believed to be innocent and about whom Sister Helen Prejean, who wrote the book Dead Man Walking and was played by Susan Sarandon in the film, will write The Death of Innocents. Then, in 2000, the guards come to Feltus Taylor’s cell. Feltus is on Ricky’s tier, and Ricky can hear the guards at Feltus’s grate. Every man on the tier knows whose cell the guards have come to. Every man on the tier knows why the guards have come. It is Feltus’s turn to die. Three years older than Ricky, with a shaved head and a Mr. T smile, Feltus is well liked by both guards and inmates. In the photograph taken of him when he arrived at Angola, a photograph that now hangs in the penitentiary museum alongside the photographs of every man executed there, he is a young man with tautly muscled arms and eyes that roll their whites to the camera’s every shot, as though he will not, even now that he’s caught, submit to the booking frame, to the height-measured wall. But Feltus now? Now Feltus is good-tempered and talkative, open about both his guilt in killing a coworker and also how sorry he is for it. Feltus is proof that people can change.
Then Feltus is dead. At 8:00 a.m. the next morning, the guards make their rounds of the tiers. Ricky—who has shrunken in his jumpsuit, losing weight on death row, his face gaunt and neck corded, his eyes too big in their sockets—will not move from his cot. “He is accepting the execution last night as well as can be expected,” a guard writes.
But by 10:00 a.m. Ricky crackles with anger. The guards are jerking them around, he says. Them free men—on death row, that’s what they call the guards, their defining characteristic not that they’re guards but that they are free—love this shit. When Ricky mouths off like this, other inmates get nervous. On the tiers, unruly inmates are dealt with by piping in tear gas. And the gas doesn’t stay in just one cell. John Thompson, the man in the cell next to Ricky, reaches out to rattle the bars between his cell and Ricky’s to try to get his attention, but Ricky doesn’t respond. “Ricky, please!” Thompson says. “Cool it down. Chill out.”
Ricky won’t listen to Thompson. The guards love execution days, he says. They love picking the inmates off, one by one. They’ll be happy when every man there is dead. This is Feltus’s joke, now said with bitterness: “You know, you might think I’m paranoid,” he used to say, “but I think people are trying to kill me.”
The next time a free man comes around, Ricky shouts, “You should’ve killed me instead.” He’s ready to go. He’s sick of waiting; it should’ve been him. It’s as though he’s suddenly realized that they’re being held there to die. The guard is disturbed enough at the change in Ricky to fill out a request for an evaluation. The phrase the doctors write on his chart, they will write for him again and again: “Mood appropriate to situation.” Just as in Georgia, prison may be the place Ricky’s thought the least strange.
* * *
While Ricky slides between fury and resignation, spending day after day in his concrete cell not knowing when he’ll be assigned a date to die, on the outside a lawyer fights for him. Clive Stafford Smith is a gangly six feet six with a hawkish nose and blue eyes so piercing he makes sure to take his glasses off before a photo of him is taken, lest, he jokes, the magnification make his stare look insane. Born in 1959, he had just turned six when his own country, Britain, outlawed capital punishment in 1965—just old enough to notice what all the adults were talking of. That early horror at the thought of executions had never left him. He’d received his law degree in the States and devoted his career to fighting the death penalty in the American South. Now, at forty-three, he is an unusual sight in the courtrooms here, with his clipped accent and a manner so decorously proper it can twist past propriety and land on outlandishness. Challenged on a hearsay point by the prosecution, he cites the Roman Empire. Describing an attempted execution by the state, he says, “They were doing something unkind to one of my clients.” Once—the tables turned at a hearing,
him on the witness stand for a change—a lawyer asks him, “Now, where are you presently employed?” and Clive begins his answer with “Beside the abuse of the word presently…” until the lawyer has no choice but to cut him off to demonstrate he knows the right word. “Currently.”
His record, too, will make him a rarity. In two decades in the South, and after more than three hundred death penalty cases, Clive will lose only six clients to execution. For his efforts, he has an Order of the British Empire from the queen herself—a medallion he keeps strung around the neck of a plaster cast of Zeus, mounted on the burgundy wall of the home he and his wife, Emily, have made not in the well-heeled Garden District of New Orleans but in the Lower Ninth Ward. It is still years before Hurricane Katrina will ravage the area. The Ninth Ward is no longer the more rural side of the river it began as, no longer the place of backyard farms. Crack cocaine has flooded in, and with it gangs. The streets of the Ninth still lack functioning streetlamps. In a city with a famously high murder rate, the Ninth has the highest. In choosing to live in a place many are left to live in by circumstance, Clive is a man not just dedicated to his work, but defined by it.
And he is determined to save Ricky’s life. He begins to dig and learns that the jurors at the trial took a Bible into the jury room and prayed together before deciding to sentence Ricky to death. That’s unconstitutional, but in Louisiana it’ll be a tough sell for appeal. Instead he has Ricky’s conviction and death sentence overturned on grounds never before raised in the state: Though Ricky is white, he was entitled to have blacks on his jury, and there were none. The state supreme court justices who rule in his favor practically hold their noses as they do so. Fortunately, here, Langley will probably not go free. Ricky is taken off death row and eventually transferred back to the Calcasieu Correctional Center to await retrial.
The Fact of a Body Page 18