The Fact of a Body

by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

  The road dead-ended at the prison gates. Just beyond them, yards away, stood the white octagonal building that was once death row, before it was moved deeper into the prison grounds. I got out of my car and stood in the heat, watching the light strike its high walls. Dragonflies circled me, the sun knifing off the brilliant blues and yellows of their bodies. The prison grounds, once stitched together from old plantations, are larger than the island of Manhattan. Angola has lush fields and streams that burble down embankments. It has thick woods and thicketed bushes; wild pigs, rattlesnakes, and bears. Named for the homeland of the slaves who once worked its fields, for decades it was so violent that the federal government took it over from the state. With its size, its terrible beauty, and its terrible history, comes inmate rumor that a moat rings the prison, stocked with hungry alligators ready to eat anyone who tries to escape. Never mind that every inmate who arrives here does so through the gates I stood in front of, and is then driven through the fields. Never mind that they’d have seen there was no moat. The myth blotted the memory out.

  At security, a guard patted me down, and I boarded one of the old school buses the prison uses for transport, white with ANGOLA STATE PENITENTIARY stenciled on its side. We drove through fields of long, swaying grass, to a building painted peach. Then another guard led me down a corridor of fencing to a door. Through the door was a gray-walled room with small, round tables and plastic chairs. Along one side of the room ran a series of Plexiglas partitions to which chairs had been pulled up. “Sit,” the guard said, and pointed to a chair.

  What happened next is a memory as vivid as anything imagined. Through the Plexiglas I watch as a man walks through a distant door, turns to the guard, and holds his hands out for the cuffs to be unlocked. The man wears the same chambray shirt and blue jeans all the inmates do—Angola blues. He is older than he was on the tape. His glasses still just as thick. His ears jut out from his head, the mark of Bessie’s drinking so long ago.

  He is thirty-seven that day. But as he walks down the corridor toward me in my memory I don’t see him as thirty-seven. He is the baby being lifted from a slash in his mother’s stomach, lifted through the cut-out moon in the cast. He is the brown-haired boy with freckles and buckteeth, who crouches over the roots of a yellowwood tree and talks to a black-and-white picture he holds in his grubby hand. He is eighteen, sitting in his friend’s pickup truck, the stars an explosion outside, and he sucks on the sweet glass neck of a bottle of schnapps and tries to get up the courage to walk into the mental health center and speak the name for what he knows he is. He is twenty-six, and his arm goes tight around Jeremy’s neck. Jeremy’s legs kick so hard in the air his boots fall off. Then the boy’s body falls limp, and as the boy dies the man becomes a murderer, who he now will always be. He is forty-nine and he writes the last page I have in the files, a note so new it hadn’t yet been put into a box like the others, but was handed to me loose by a clerk. It is a letter to a judge. “Well you know I do family research and I greatly enjoy it!” He has spent many years finding his ancestors’ records, he writes, but there are still holes in the story. Can the judge please help him dig back further?

  I know that need. If he goes back far enough, maybe he’ll understand.

  In this memory, I wear my too-heavy suit. I am twenty-five in the visiting room, but I am also three, and my grandfather’s fat palm slides over my mouth. Eight, and my hands stick together from the swing-set polish and I laugh. The air smells of turpentine and cut grass. I am twelve and I close my eyes and rise onto my tiptoes to make my dress twirl—and when I open my eyes, my grandfather is watching me, staring frankly. Sixteen with a can of black paint, trying to write myself a new life on my bedroom walls. Thirty-seven and standing for the first time on what used to be the crushed shell of the Fuel Stop, determined to go where the past is, go there so I can leave it behind and find my way home.

  Waiting, as the man walks toward me, I flick my tongue over my lower lip. An old habit. I do it, I feel my lips wet—and then I shudder in recoil, the same way I do every time. Because I know this gesture I do unconsciously. It’s what my grandfather did when he was concentrating on a drawing. I watched him do it when he taught me to draw. I carry the memory somewhere inside my body I can’t control, can’t even access to reach inside and edit the memory out. I still want to edit it out. I still want to be free of it. But I know I’m bound in ways I’ll never see, never understand. We carry what makes us.

  Across from me, Ricky sits down. The problem of this day, the problem of this meeting, the problem that starts this story inside me and the only way it can end it is this: The man who sits down across from me is a man. He’ll never be all one thing or the other. Only a story can be that. Never a person.

  So I try something new. Not turning my back to the past, not fleeing it, but extending a hand. I say to the past: Come with me, then, as I live.

  “Hello, Ricky,” I say.

  Sources Consulted

  TRIAL TRANSCRIPT, 2003

  Darlene Langley: They told mom and dad that because of all the medications that she was taking and you know, having surgeries, that he would probably be—

  Prosecutor: Objection, Your Honor, unless she has personal knowledge.

  Judge: Oh, I don’t know.

  Defense attorney: Your Honor, it’s not for the truth of the matter asserted, but base—this is family lore that they had been raised with all their lives, that everyone has repeated and been told. Whether it’s true or not, it’s what everyone acted on.

  Judge: Objection overruled.

  For the sections involving my family, I have relied on my memory, and have at times confirmed dates with family members or had conversations with them about these events. For the sections from Ricky Langley’s life, I drew mostly from court records and newspaper articles, as outlined below. That said, the specifics needed to bring the scenes to life—what people were wearing, where they stood, etc.—I sometimes imagined onto the scaffolding of the documents. At times, I needed to imagine what people were thinking or feeling, and there, whenever possible, I drew inspiration from other things they said or did that were documented.

  CHAPTER ONE

  This description of the murder comes from a mix of Lorilei Guillory’s testimony in the 2003 trial (her 1994 testimony differs slightly) and the transcript of Ricky Langley’s February 10, 1992, confession, which was the confession I watched in 2003. Two confession tapes were made that day; this was the second, though other details in this account come from the transcript of the first tape. The timing of when he possibly molested Jeremy Guillory—whether before the child’s death, after, or not at all—is presented differently in the different confessions, and here I have chosen the simpler version, while also indicating the dispute. I have chosen to indicate that he gave three confessions because those are the meaningful videotape transcripts I have, but, as referenced elsewhere in this book, he told the story of the murder many different times and ways.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I have based my description of Lorilei Guillory’s search for her son on her 2003 trial testimony, though I have tried to imagine her feelings, drawing from her 1994 testimony and the play Lorilei by Thomas Wright, which has been performed in the UK and internationally, and aired on the BBC. It was written in collaboration with Nick Harrington, who conducted research for it, and relied in part on Lorilei’s own words. More about the play can be found in Clive Stafford Smith’s piece “From Hatred to Forgiveness,” published December 11, 2015, on TheNation.com. For her surroundings, I have drawn upon photographs published in the American Press and taken on my own trips to the area. The photograph of Lorilei and Jeremy Guillory referenced here was published in the American Press. Transcripts from the 911 calls were destroyed over the years, but I used 911 records custodian Gary Hayes’s testimony during the 2003 trial to reconstruct their content. The description of Ricky Langley’s bringing Lorilei a drink on the porch is drawn from the play Lorilei. Upon the bare information about t
he drink in the play, I have layered my imagination of what the moment must have been like. That said, the drink does not occur in other descriptions of the search, and should be considered disputed. My description of Lorilei’s past comes from Lorilei, the American Press, and court records searches. That Jeremy was on a school trip to the science museum comes from Lorilei Guillory’s testimony in the 1994 trial.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  This description of the search is based on Deputy Sheriff Calton Pitre’s testimony in the 2003 trial, articles that ran in the American Press at the time of the murder, and KPLC-TV and KYKZ-96 transcripts that are in the court record. That the Fuel Stop donated coffee is from Lanelle Trahan’s testimony in the 2003 trial. That the woman I have called Pearl Lawson knew Ricky Langley was a child molester and told him to leave that night while the search was happening is based on the transcript from Ricky’s second February 10, 1992, confession, though I have imagined the conversation’s specifics. That Ricky’s parents asked him whether he was involved with Jeremy Guillory’s disappearance is also in that transcript, but again, I have imagined the specifics.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  This chapter is based on Lanelle Trahan’s testimony in the 1994 and 2003 trials. The description of the motorcycle crash is based on the accident report, which is in the court record.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Don Dixon described the goose-hunting trip he and Lucky DeLouche took in his testimony during the 2003 trial. The phone call the probation officer makes to Lucky is a composite of many different phone calls and meetings that took place between the probation officer Elizabeth Clark, Dixon, Lucky, and other law enforcement personnel. Accounts of these phone calls and meetings vary. In Dixon’s 2003 testimony, he says he and Lucky interviewed Lorilei Guillory first, before talking to the probation officer. Clark gave a much longer and more complicated description of events in the 1994 trial. The account presented here is closer to that in the play Lorilei. In all versions, it’s consistent that they learned about Ricky Langley because of the probation officer’s putting clues together, though he was not formally under her charge. The account of the arrest here is taken from Dixon and Lucky’s testimony in the 2003 trial, though I have omitted a third law enforcement officer at the scene, Neil Edwards. I have imagined what Ricky was thinking in the police car, though that he covered his bedroom windows in foil is in the court record. The account of finding Jeremy Guillory’s body comes from a February 10, 1992, videotape transcript. Again, I omitted other law enforcement personnel who were at the scene. The deputy who did the videotaping was not new to the job, but that information is in the 1994 transcript, not the 2003 transcript. I have retained my initial imagining of it and flagged it as imagined in the text.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The domestic violence incident described here is a simplified and imagined composite. On March 29, 1993, the American Press ran an article stating that the father of the boy I’ve called Cole was arrested for trying to run over a woman and her baby. Based on the address where the incident took place and its timing, I believe this woman to be Lorilei. The DA later dropped the attempted murder charges because the woman refused to cooperate with police, saying that she had no other means of support for herself and her baby.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  This description of the crash—and the note that the lawyers transposed the time of it—is based on opening statements in the 1994 and 2003 trials, as well as newspaper accounts from 1964. Minor conflicting details exist, and where I have not highlighted the conflict I have chosen among them. Notice of Oscar Langley’s birth, before he had a name, ran in the American Press. For my description of Charity Hospital, I have drawn upon the opening statements from the 1994 and 2003 trials, Dr. Robert Maupin’s testimony in the 2003 trial, and the book New Orleans’ Charity Hospital: A Story of Physicians, Politics, and Poverty by John Salvaggio, MD. Throughout, I have also drawn upon Ricky Langley’s sisters’ testimony in all three trials. I have compressed Bessie’s hospital stays for clarity and narrative flow. During the period after Christmas, she came home for stretches, and Ricky was born at Lake Charles Hospital.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The scene of Ricky Langley’s helping his father build the house is imagined. I have built Ricky’s dream of being led by a ghost to the scene of the crash from a 2003 statement by Heather Regan, a reporter for the Southwest Daily News, who was present at the 2002 seminar described in chapter thirty-one. She recalls Ricky’s saying a ghost led him to the crash site; other attendees understood Ricky to be saying that Oscar Langley was that ghost. I have chosen Regan’s account for clarity. Ricky’s seeing his father cradling and singing to Oscar’s head at the crash site comes from other occasions in the court record on which Ricky told psychiatrists of his vision of the crash. Ricky has repeatedly told psychologists, psychiatrists, and law enforcement officers that he began molesting children at the age of nine or ten, and in the statements taken after the 2002 seminar people remember hearing him say this. Other descriptions of his childhood are drawn from his sisters’ testimony in the 1994 and 2003 trials, the opening statements in both trials, 2003 testimony by his sixth-grade teacher, Josette Melancon, and elsewhere in the court record. The night he tried to get treatment at the Lake Charles Mental Health Center at eighteen, but was turned away, is from Patrick Vincent’s testimony in the 2003 trial. I have simplified the scene by having Ricky go in alone. In the text I have used the words boys and teenagers, but they come from the imagined point of view of the worker looking out the window at the car. Vincent was in his thirties.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  This chapter is based on Ricky Langley’s records from the Lake Charles Mental Health Center and testimony in the 1994 trial, in particular that of Dr. Paul Ware. The allegation that Judy once had to pull a gun on the man I have called Lyle comes from Dr. Ware’s testimony, but has not, to my knowledge, been corroborated by the parties. What Ricky says and feels here comes from notes taken by caseworkers in those records, though I have imagined the scene with the unnamed female caseworker. The “approved visitor list” is from Angola State Penitentiary. The list is in the court record but is not dated, though it appears to date from before 1997.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  The Indiana portion of this chapter is based on Ruth McClary’s testimony in the 1994 trial, though again, I have imagined many of the details. The Georgia portion is based on Ricky Langley’s records from the prison and on testimony by Rick Hawkins, Dr. Clark Heindel, Jackie Simmons, and Dr. Ware in the 1994 trial. The Langley family history book referenced at the end of the chapter is The Langley Family of Southwest Louisiana: A Genealogical Study of Some Descendants of John Langley (II) and Marie Willan by John Austin Young.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The description of Ricky Langley’s crime in Georgia here is based on the victim’s testimony in the 1994 trial. Ricky’s description of it is based on documents in his Georgia prison record.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  This chapter is based on Ellen Smith’s testimony in the 1994 trial. I have imagined the socioeconomic status of her family, the circumstances of her relationship, and the details of the party. The information about Ricky Langley moving back and forth, and whom he saw in Georgia, comes from the court record, as does the imagined exit interview scene. That Ricky’s parents believed he had molested a family member comes from Dr. Ware’s testimony in the 1994 trial.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  The exchanges between Ricky Langley and the woman I have called Pearl Lawson are drawn from statements made by Ricky in his confession videotapes and by Pearl in the 1994 and 2003 trials. Those accounts are minimal and conflicting, however, so I have imagined the details of the motel and television exchanges and have highlighted some aspects of their conflicting accounts in the text. Based on statements from the 2002 seminar, Ricky also told attendees there that he babysat after returning to Iowa—he must have meant the Lawson children, since there was no one else he babysat or claimed to
have babysat—and that he had first told the parents of those children that he’d molested children in the past. The various retellings Ricky gives of the murder are in the 2003 court record. The event that takes place with the inmate I’ve called Jackson is based on a February 10, 1994, statement by Larry Schroeder that is in the court record, as well as his testimony in the 1994 trial. Several attendees at the 2002 defense seminar described in chapter thirty-one recall Ricky’s claiming there that he strangled Jeremy Guillory while thinking he was killing the ghost of Oscar Langley, and the same account appears in the notes of the defense psychiatrist Dr. Dennis Zimmerman, which are in the court record. The death row portion of the chapter is based on Ricky’s Angola records and John Thompson’s testimony at the 2009 trial. The exchange between them in this chapter is a composite, drawn from juxtaposing events in Ricky’s records and Thompson’s descriptions of his interactions with Ricky over time. The quotes by Clive Stafford Smith are in the court record, as is the appellate decision. Here and throughout the book, I have drawn some of my thinking about Clive’s feelings toward his father from articles he’s written and interviews and talks he’s given, such as “My Father, Mental Illness, and the Death Penalty,” a TEDxExeter 2015 talk. The description of Clive’s house is based on my recollection from 2003. For other details in this chapter, I also drew upon Nine Lives: Mystery, Magic, Death, and Life in New Orleans by Dan Baum.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  I deduced that the man who answered the door was John Thompson based on my recollection and statements he made at the 2009 trial about the work he did at the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center, then called the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center (LCAC), during that period. The videotape described is the second one taken of Ricky Langley on February 10, 1992, and the description here is based on the transcript.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  The funeral and march scenes are based on articles published in the American Press and transcripts from KPLC-TV and KYKZ-96 that are in the court record. Ricky Langley calling to the guard is a composite moment, drawn from multiple statements in the court record that he would often try to speak with Lucky DeLouche and other officers while at the Calcasieu Correctional Center. My description of Richard Guillory is based on photographs that ran in the American Press and other photos available online. The editorial referenced was published by the American Press. My description of Lorilei Guillory after Jeremy’s murder comes from Lorilei and Clive Stafford Smith in a hearing transcript. Her thoughts upon hearing that Ricky had been sentenced to death come from Lorilei.