The Road Out of Hell

by Anthony Flacco

  “Yes, sir.”

  Uncle Stewart turned to Judge Freeman. “That is all. I am through with the witness.”

  With that, Uncle Stewart’s part in Sanford’s life was at an end. His grand attempt to control Sanford and his testimony in the presence of the authorities had landed like guano on a statue. Sanford remained on the stand while Assistant D.A. Kelley stepped forward to the judge and asked to do something that he called “redirect,” which the judge allowed. Kelley turned to Sanford with a reassuring smile and asked a few questions to clear up some minor details.

  And then that was it. The trial was over for him. The judge’s deputy stepped forward, opened the gate to the witness stand, allowed Sanford to step down, and escorted him from the courtroom. He felt no temptation to speak or make eye contact with Uncle Stewart, and he kept his back to him while he left the courtroom. He would never be in his presence again.

  Gordon Stewart Northcott came up against the same level of determination when he called his niece Jessie Clark as a witness. She smiled politely in all directions and gave testimony that completely supported Sanford’s story with words equally damning for her uncle. She did it in a clear-eyed fashion, without getting rattled by his courtroom attacks.

  Later, Mr. Kelley made it a point to visit Sanford in the hospital ward and fill him in on the testimony that he had not been permitted to watch, re-enacting the scene for him. Sanford was overjoyed on Jessie’s behalf and danced around the room for a few seconds, clapping his hands in glee before he caught himself and stopped. He stood with an embarrassed grin. The sensation of victory was something he remembered from a long time ago, but only in the form of small victories for a boy at play. The mental image of his sister, not merely alive and well but quietly killing that monster by speaking the truth straight at him—why, that was a victory fit for a grown man. He felt it charge his blood with a quiet sense of strength.

  It was over soon afterward. Uncle Stewart dragged the trial out for a while longer after Sanford’s testimony, but the tricks of deception that had been his trademark for so long continued to fail him, one by one. Finally the inevitable guilty verdict was delivered. Once it was relayed to Sanford, he understood the consolation that was involved in seeing justice meted out where it was badly needed, but he felt nothing else for it. Gordon Stewart Northcott would have been certain to note that the very first Academy Awards for excellence in film were being held in Los Angeles that year. He also knew that he would not be attending any premieres.

  When the citizens of southern California learned that there had been a child-killing monster living among them, a mob of angry men stormed the jail, demanding to have him released to them. They were driven back at gunpoint.

  Sanford’s battered immune system made slow progress against the persistent flu symptoms that had followed him from the ranch. They were no doubt aggravated by the draining effect of his recurrent nightmares. While the verdict determined Uncle Stewart’s fate, nothing was over for Sanford. The foul dreams grew so ferocious that he could no longer stand to sleep at night at all. The small amount of rest that he managed to get was by way of short naps during the daytime. He was too sick to be put into the work routine at the hospital’s prison ward, so the staff tolerated his need for this switch in sleeping hours. Or perhaps they made the exception because the newspapers had seen to it that everyone knew what Sanford had been through, whether they were allowed to talk about it around him or not.

  On Monday, the eleventh of February, Mr. Kelley came to tell him that Uncle Stewart had been sentenced to death by hanging, and that he was already en route to San Quentin prison under heavy guard. Sanford knew that relief was the appropriate response, but he still found it hard to feel much. He slept no better that night.

  Four days later, Mr. Kelley told Sanford that he had secured an entirely unique settlement to Sanford’s legal situation by having him signed into the nearby Whittier Boys School, where an experimental program for delinquent youths was under way. Mr. Kelley assured him that the place was unique because of its compassionate mission of genuine rehabilitation. The grounds surrounding the place looked like a college campus, with cathedral-like buildings of brick and stone amid a host of residential cottages and classroom buildings.

  The Whittier Boys School’s program was so tightly focused on rehabilitation that the process began during the initial intake routine. Sanford was taken to an attractively decorated reception room with furnishings that indicated the prevailing level of refinement. The intake staff spoke to him in the respectful tone they might use with a new arrival at a private boys’ academy. It was explained to him that from that moment on, he was not to speak of his crime to anyone. No one there would speak of their crimes to him. Every boy in that place occupied a place that he carved out for himself according to clearly defined behavior. It did not matter to the staff why a boy was there. There were definite rules of behavior that would be enforced with Sanford, as they were for everyone else.

  When he heard this, Sanford turned to Mr. Kelley with gratitude. He knew that the man had singlehandedly determined Sanford’s experience of this entire murder case and its aftermath. He had even succeeded in delivering Sanford to a place where his well-being would truly be the main concern.

  The clerk had a few routine questions: name, age, weight. “Nationality?” he asked. Sanford looked up at Mr. Kelley and grinned at the clerk.

  “Irish,” Sanford replied. He was not, but Mr. Kelley was. He would give his nationality as “Irish” for the rest of his life.

  Sanford spent a few days in a private cottage for personal evaluation, before being assigned to a permanent cabin and introduced to his mates there. He did not have to go through the communicable-disease quarantine, because he had come directly from the prison hospital, but he was given a personal tour and individually counseled about how to go about life there while he was in that cottage. Part of the mission was to orient him; part of it was to guarantee that he was ready for the company that he would be keeping. It was a privilege to be in this program, and Sanford was grateful. He had expected to be thrown into a prison, where he would languish as the sex toy of whatever psychopath ran the cellblock. Anything better than that was a gift. This, however, was more than he could have dreamed.

  Mr. Kelley’s kindness and tolerance were wonderful things, and there were even brief, occasional moments when Sanford could accept what they meant about him as a person. But those moments always disappeared like scared birds. The rest of the time, he felt the weight. It was not as bad as it had been, but there was still far too much for his frame to carry. The weight was always there to pull him down into a quicksand of dreadful images and sensations of foulness and doom.

  His temporary job while in the receiving cottage was down in the laundry. All the boys started out there, because it was an easy place for the staff to supervise them. His counselors at the cottage made sure to emphasize that he must not be tempted to run away just because the place had no bars and no wire fences. Escapees who got caught faced transfer to a real prison. Because there was nothing outside the gate but more misery for him, Sanford had no reason to run. Any future that he might have depended on first succeeding in the program here. He was fifteen and still the size of a thirteen-year-old. He had not stepped into a schoolroom for two years. In truth, Sanford’s largely ceremonial sentencing on minor charges was specifically designed to be just enough to keep him as a ward of the state until he reached adulthood.

  The experience became undeniably real a few weeks later, when the evaluations were finished and he was cleared to join one of the boys’ cabins. He was given a single room and allowed to decorate it however he liked. Each boy there was handled with personal dignity and allowed privacy each day, under the supervision of a married couple who lived in the cottage and served as the counselors there. There was a half day of school and a half day of work for each boy, and they were encouraged to sample a number of the trades taught there. All classes were in
employable skills, with the goal of sending the boys back out into the world qualified to stand on their feet and determined to do it.

  Once Sanford was settled into his new home, he tried to say goodbye to Mr. Kelley while wearing the mask, but he must not have kept it up as well as he thought. Kelley took him aside where no one could hear them and sat facing him. “All right, young man, I believe I’m leaving you in good hands here.”

  “Yes, sir. I know you are.”

  Kelley lowered his voice. “Last chance for you to tell me about whatever it is I’m seeing there in your eyes, partner. You just nervous about the new place? Is that it?”

  Sanford considered trying to cover up, but Kelley would know and he would look like a liar to someone who had been a true friend. He wondered where to begin at trying to put any of his thoughts into words. “I guess … I guess I don’t understand why you fought for me like you did. I mean, all this time.”

  “You wonder why I’m so damn concerned, do you?”

  “No!” Sanford blurted out so quickly that Mr. Kelley laughed. “I mean, I know you saved me from going to a real prison. You must have talked to a lot of people for me, and I’m so glad for that. I just have to wonder why it mattered so much to you.”

  All Mr. Kelley did was to breezily reply, “Sorry, boy-o.” He winked at him. “Can’t tell all my secrets. I wouldn’t want to lose my aura of mystery.”

  Sanford did the closest thing to laughing that he did any more, which was to smile and exhale hard a couple of times. Kelley smiled and nodded, then lowered his voice again. “It’s like your situation here, where you can’t discuss your case. Everybody has a story that you can’t know. That goes for the rest of the boys here, but it pretty well goes for everybody else outside the gate as well. All you need is a little healthy suspicion to help you weed out the bad apples. With everybody else, it’s pretty safe to assume that because of the story they have—which you can’t know—they might deserve your compassion. Northcott occupies the extreme end of the scale, but we’re all on it at some point.”

  “But I just…. Do you really think I can do this? What if the people here are just too nice to realize what I….” He sighed. “I know I don’t deserve this.”

  “Hey, listen up—don’t get into the business of trying to decide who deserves what. Bad territory, that. Now, you’re likely to feel afraid about any number of things while you’re here. You’re lucky, you get to be brave. Great exercise. Can’t be brave unless you’re afraid first.”

  Mr. Kelley placed one hand on his shoulder. Sanford noticed a slight recoil when his fingertips landed on the large burn scar. It would forever cover a fourth of his back, courtesy of Uncle Stewart’s pot of boiling water followed by his twisted treatment of the wound with nothing other than petroleum jelly. Sanford was so self-conscious about it that he wouldn’t remove his shirt in front of anyone, even when he worked outside in the desert heat. Now when he felt Mr. Kelley’s touch, Sanford’s desire to avoid offending his guardian angel was so strong that he made himself stand still without backing away. Of anything that was said that afternoon, he felt the greatest wave of reassurance from the simple fact that his guardian angel’s hand stayed in place for a few more seconds before he pulled it back. Mr. Kelley did not prod Sanford about the scar, the way people do with a boy who has to be questioned about everything. He said nothing at all, as if understanding it as part of Sanford’s burden. He left him his dignity, the way men do among men they respect.

  Gordon Stewart Northcott was a dead man walking for the next few months, while he played out his appeals. Nobody cared to hear much of what he had to say. He fell into a behavior pattern that is familiar to homicide detectives who deal with sociopathic personalities: alternating between confessions and denials, mixed with theatrical expressions of remorse for himself and arrogant assurances of his vindication. He tormented the parents of Walter Collins and Lewis and Nelson Winslow, alternately offering to tell all about the fate of their sons and then refusing to say a thing.

  On October 2,1930, not quite two years after being found guilty, he was carried up the steps of the hangman’s scaffold, already blindfolded at his own request. He blubbered and begged for his life throughout it all, up until the instant the warden pulled the trigger on the trap door. Just as the trap door was sprung, Northcott blurted out: “No, don’t!” These were likely to have been the same words he had heard from more than one of his victims.

  Northcott’s neck did not break when he hit the end of the line, even though hangmen have had highly accurate weight-to-rope-length tables available to them for many years. Northcott was left alive and strangling at the end of his rope. One of the guards then rushed forward and grabbed him around the legs and hung on, pulling him downward so that he could not do any air dancing. The guard did it with the speed and efficiency of a man who has been given instructions and knows what to do. He hung on to Northcott’s legs for twelve minutes while the body completed the strangulation process. Society made its final statement to Gordon Stewart Northcott by committing the “mistake” of using a rope that was too short so that he did not die an instant death—while fortunately having a man standing by who was willing to accept the idea that part of his job was to spend those long twelve minutes feeling the death quivers run down the dying man’s legs. This was noted in the newspaper accounts of the execution, but nobody said a word to publicly question the incident.

  Exactly one month after Gordon Stewart Northcott’s neck was well and truly stretched, the town of Wineville officially changed its name to Mira Loma, California. The locals buried the dishonored name like an overripe corpse, giving the impression that they might have lined up to take turns hanging on to Northcott’s legs themselves.

  In January 1931, slightly less than twenty-three months after Sanford began his term at the Whittier School for Boys, he was called to the administration building and informed that he had earned an early release. He was being discharged three years early by order of the trustees, because he had impressed them all with his conduct during his nearly two years there. His private reaction was one of baffled amazement—they either did not or could not see how badly he was stained. Still, he kept his eyes on the floor and employed his skill at keeping his mouth shut.

  In accordance with the order of the court, driven by the efforts of Loyal Kelley, he was immediately deported back home as the final act of his prescribed sentence. The action was legally justified because he had been in the United States without a visa when he was apprehended; but the physical deportation was an act of mercy. He had nowhere to go in this country and no money to pay for the long journey back home. Kelley saw to it that, rather than put that kind of financial burden on him immediately upon his release, he was given an escorted ride all the way back home.

  He left Los Angeles on the nineteenth of January aboard the steamship Ruth Alexander, accompanied by U.S. Immigration officers from Los Angeles. With that, the “punishment” that Loyal C. Kelley had singlehandedly pushed through for him was complete. The two said good-bye for the last time when Kelley officially turned him over to the Immigration officers.

  “Mr. Kelley?” Sanford awkwardly began. “I wish….” He stopped and exhaled sharply, then said “There’s no way to repay you.”

  Kelley’s face lost its usual grin. “You know, I’ve been thinking about that. Actually, you can. My bill consists of one item. It’s this: use your life to prove that rehabilitation works.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “Meaning go prove that I’m right about you, Sanford. Do that, and we’ll call it even.”

  Sanford accidentally caught his eyes just at that moment, and he felt the power of what Mr. Kelley was telling him. His hand floated up in front of him and extended before he gave it a thought. The handshake was brief but his grip was strong. The feel of it combined with the direct gaze between them to give the moment electrical power. Sanford felt the significance of what he had been told being tattooed into pe
rmanent memory.

  Then Sanford’s time in California was over and he was on his way. His physical transformation in the school over the past twenty-three months was impressive: good food, positive living conditions, tough job training, and chore responsibilities had combined to layer twenty pounds of muscle onto his frame. The effects of testosterone that had been missing from his features when he arrived at Whittier now showed in his chiseled face. His interior state was still carefully concealed. He had learned that you can’t get on with people when you show your problems. They get scared of catching whatever ails you. So he remained behind the trusty mask of benign affability—the only gift that Uncle Stewart ever gave him.

  Once he stepped back into the world, his unique palate of experiences gave him such extraordinary perspective that he grabbed every opportunity that he came across and worked each one with determination. This trait was one of the reasons that the trustees saw no need to keep him until he reached the age of formal adulthood. He had proven that he had the temperament, the job skills, and the personal desire to live a productive life.

  And so he arrived in Victoria, British Columbia on January 23, 1931, at the age of seventeen, resolved to make the most out of this state of grace—or of cosmic dumb luck—that had not only delivered him from Uncle Stewart’s murder farm, but had remained with him through the long process of the legal consequences.

  He had carved his early release out of stone, and this exhilarating and terrifying journey was the first thing that he had ever brought into his life that was completely of his own will and creation. It was wonderful to finally make a sweeping personal change in his life without having someone else dictate it to him. He breathed air that felt oxygen-rich.

  There was his debt to Mr. Kelley left to fulfill. Sanford loved the man in the way he imagined people from real families felt about each other. The thought of doing something that Mr. Kelley would approve of gave him a little happiness.