The Best American Crime Reporting 2008

by Jonathan Kellerman

  “I always wanted to be able to see the moment when the life had left the person,” Crittendon said. “Stanley went motionless pretty quickly, consistent with what you’d expect. Whereas with Manny Babbitt”—a murderer executed in 1999—“you could see a tightening in his throat, little shivers and twitches when he felt it coming on.” Crittendon demonstrated, jerking his head rapidly to the side and grimacing. “Stephen Wayne Anderson”—a prison escapee and murderer who was executed in 2002—“was looking around and saying ‘I love you! I love you!’ to his loved ones, then he laid his head back and to the side, and I could see, Oh, he’s gone. But you’re under such scrutiny there’s not time for emotions. The sniper, when he fires off that shot, there’s not time to think, I just took a human life. No, he’s got to sight on another target before someone fires at him.”

  Barbara Becnel, who felt that she had just seen a prolonged “torture-murder,” whispered a suggestion to two of the other witnesses, and as they left the chamber they cried, in unison, “The State of California just killed an innocent man!” Shirley Neal, a Williams supporter, happened to look at Crittendon at that moment, and she recalls that “he looked shocked and frightened.” Crittendon says that he was merely surprised by the outburst, and that no personal reflections entered into it. Indeed, he says that his efforts to discredit the condemned man were unrelated to the failure of their relationship: “My goal was never to reach and change Stanley. He was just a tool for me to have an impact. If you pick up a cup and it’s all dirty, do you worry about why it’s all dirty, or do you pick up another cup and quench your thirst? I put the dirty cup down and quenched my thirst.”

  ONE MORNING IN JUNE OF 2006, Crittendon introduced me to Lonnie Morris, a lean black lifer he has known for more than a quarter century. It was the day before Morris and a handful of other star inmates would be the subjects of a two-part series on “Larry King Live,” taped in the prison’s courtyard. “You’ve got to educate tomorrow, man,” Crittendon told Morris. “The public lives in generalities and paranoia, where you’re the bogeyman.”

  Just before the taping, Crittendon gathered the inmates in the chapel for a briefing. He predicted, accurately, the topics that King would raise—including drugs and violence—and explained that the inmates didn’t have to address them. “This is not about you,” Crittendon said. “It’s about the millions of incarcerated men you represent—speak for them.” The inmates stayed tenaciously on message. When King asked “What about rape dangers, male to male?” Morris said, “Honestly, you’re going to find in prison the same thing you find in society,” and then began talking about the Real Choices program.

  Many of the guards were upset that Crittendon had given murderers a national platform, and that the inmates were being taped in front of a memorial to eleven San Quentin employees killed in the line of duty. The next day, as it happened, Crittendon was the master of ceremonies at the rededication of the memorial, and he made sure he was seen scolding Morris for shaking my hand “on the day for honoring our dead.” “Vernell wears a lot of hats,” Morris told me, wryly. “If he’s walking through with the warden, wearing his ‘safety and security of the institution’ hat, I’ll just keep stepping by.”

  That same month, a new warden, Robert Ayers, Jr., took over at San Quentin, and his prison policy emphasized safety and order rather than rehabilitation. Crittendon decided to retire in December, four months short of thirty years; his deputy, Eric Messick, replaced him as the prison’s spokesman, but the innumerable other duties that Crittendon had assumed over the years were absorbed—or sloughed off—by the system. His role in executions will be divided among a number of officers, who will be guided not by a protean expert in avoiding embarrassment but by written procedures. Two weeks after Crittendon retired, Ayers banned visitors from the cellblocks, long a staple of Crittendon’s tours; he has since won praise from officers—and aroused concern in inmates—by putting an end to all Crittendon-style shortcuts and unilateralism. Ayers declined to talk about Crittendon or his legacy, but observed, “If you just pick which rules you want to follow, the prison is a very capricious place.”

  IN MARCH, VERNELL CRITTENDON visited San Francisco’s Tenderloin Community School to give a Real Choices briefing to a group of fourth and fifth graders, many of whom he would soon take on a tour of the prison. Crittendon, who by then was three months retired and contemplating an eventual run for the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors, was wearing a black San Quentin polo shirt, a black San Quentin warmup jacket, and a ring with a tiny image of San Quentin that an inmate had made for him in metal shop. But the twenty kids he met with in a basement classroom were not intimidated by the visible tokens of incarceration. And when Crittendon tried to impress them with the importance of choosing their friends wisely, catcalls filled the air. “We’ll wait for these gentlemen to finish,” he said evenly.

  Crittendon had brought two ex-cons with him. One of them, Michael Tomlinson, a drug dealer turned pastor who was wearing a jogging suit that covered white-supremacist tattoos, took the floor and said, “There’s no tough guys in the room—you’re not tough.”

  “You ain’t tough,” a boy named Tyrell, who had long cornrows and was slouched in his chair, replied.

  “There’s no one so tough the Man can’t beat him down,” Tomlinson said, and the bleak authority in his voice silenced the room.

  Afterward, heading out, Crittendon found himself in the school’s vestibule, and remarked, “Just like a prison—the sally port.” We went across the street to a Peet’s coffeehouse, where he said that the kids wouldn’t listen to him, a policeman, and that his real role was to introduce the ex-cons. “The principal would never say, ‘Come on in, Michael T., drug taker and drug dealer, killer of blacks, and talk to our kids.’ I vouch for Michael, now that he’s a pastor—but I never want to forget that he’s a bad guy.” Crittendon likes to say that he doesn’t judge someone by a single bad deed, but neither does he judge someone by ten years of good deeds. “The best analogy I can think of—and this is definitely the way I thought about Stanley Williams—is the circus,” he said. “You know how you see a five-foot-eight balding man with a potbelly walk into the lion’s cage and snap his whip, and the lion rolls over and grovels in the dirt? You put that lion back in the jungle, and if that same man walks down a bushy path he becomes lion lunch. I will always be friendly to former inmates, but I won’t be friends.”

  The conversation turned again to the executions. He’d been thinking about Manny Babbitt’s, in 1999. “That always stood out in my mind,” he said. “A war hero who saved a guy’s life in Vietnam by diving on a grenade, an African-American, and it appeared that his crime centered on post-traumatic-stress syndrome—he sexually assaulted and murdered this woman, then tied a toe tag on her body, like they did in Vietnam. When I spoke with Manny in the deathwatch cell, he stood at attention three inches from the bars and always said, ‘Sir, yes sir!’ His brother had turned him in with the caveat that the detectives would help him and not seek the death penalty, and here I was standing with his brother, watching him be executed.” Crittendon stirred his espresso. “My dad’s brother was in Vietnam, and he came back with a lot of psychological problems, and he—he ended his life early by his own hand. It connected with my life experience. I didn’t go around saying, ‘Poor Manny,’ but it was what I was thinking. You’ve got to make sense of this thing.”

  Did he ever?

  “I left it in God’s hands. There must be a purpose in the Lord putting me where He did, even though I would never have chosen for my legacy ‘He put to death people who grew up in terrible, deprived circumstances and didn’t have much chance.’ When I move in black communities, the very first thing people say to me is ‘You really handled your business well up there on TV—you were impartial.’ So I’ve shown we can do it. I was the face and the voice of a major organization. I broke down Europeans’ stereo-types—the articulate black man. Maybe,” he said, slowly, “maybe it’s not that these lives
were just sacrificed but that there was a greater good to my being able to serve as a role model on those very public occasions. But there’s all these layers on top of layers,” he continued. “Because if they were to tell me tomorrow, ‘Vernell, there will be no more executions in the state of California,’ Vernell would not be sad.”

  TAD FRIEND is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the magazine’s “Letter from California.” He is at work on a family memoir.

  Coda

  This story held my attention because I like sorting through ambiguity, and Vernell Crittendon is extremely complicated. So are the people he dealt with. During my reporting I attended some of the college classes taught inside the prison, and one evening, during a break, I spoke with Louis Branch, Jr., a courtly-seeming black man. Branch had a history of sex crimes and was serving a life sentence, but he was a diligent student. When I asked him about Crittendon—who, concerned about Branch being near young, trusting female volunteers, had unsuccessfully sought to persuade the program’s director to bar him from the classroom—the inmate picked up his pen. “Vernell Crittendon is very active in giving us a plethora of chances to improve ourselves,” he said, as he wrote on a piece of foolscap. “That’s the success side. The failure side is the philosophy of revenge. Why not challenge Tookie’s compassion, challenge him to live up to Vernell’s philosophy of restorative justice, of giving back? What would we have to lose? Our hate, our violence. That’s all.” He showed me the sentence he’d written: “Vernell Crittendon is a prisoner of the penal system, as we all are.” Several months later, Branch was committed to the prison’s Adjustment Center for allegedly trying to overpower a nurse. He subsequently earned more time in solitary for trying to seize a guard through the slot in his cell door.

  Charles Graeber

  THE TAINTED KIDNEY

  FROM New York MAGAZINE

  THE ANGEL OF DEATH LOOKS SLEEPY. His face shows nothing. His eyes are closed. Charles Cullen sits motionless in the wooden defendant’s chair of the Somerset County Courthouse as, hour after hour, his victims’ families take the stand. They read poems and show photographs, they weep and yell. If Cullen hears them, he doesn’t say; he never does. During his three years in custody, Cullen has never apologized or made excuses. He has never issued a statement, offered a public word, never faced the families of his victims. In fact, the only reason he’s in court today is because he wants to give away one of his kidneys.

  To that end, he has cut a deal with prosecutors, agreeing to appear at his sentencing on the condition that he be allowed to donate an organ to the dying relative of a former girlfriend. To many of the families of his victims, this deal is a personal insult—the man in shackles still calling the shots, the serial-killer nurse wanting to control the fate of yet another human life. But for the families of his New Jersey victims, this is the first and last chance to confront Charles Cullen. So they are here, and they are angry.

  “My only consolation is that you will die a thousand deaths in the arms of Satan,” yells the daughter of a man Cullen spiked with insulin. “I hope, with all my heart, that you are someone’s bitch in prison.”

  “You are a pathetic little man,” says the woman whose mother-in-law Cullen killed with digoxin. “In prison, perhaps someone will choose to play God with Mr. Cullen, as he has played God with so many others.”

  “Charles!” cries a round woman in a lime-green pantsuit. Her body shakes in rage and grief; her hands grip a photograph of her 38-year-old son, a picture taken before Charles Cullen stopped his heart. She is screaming. “Charles, why don’t you look up at me, huh? What are you, asleep?”

  In fact, Charles Cullen is very much awake. His shackled hands, which look from a distance as pale and still as sleeping doves, twitch slightly in his lap, counting off silent prayers, Jesus Christ, son of God, have mercy on me, as if on invisible rosary beads; the expressionless shield of his cheek still tics when “burn in hell” hits his ear. His eyes open slightly, like a child pretending to be asleep, Cullen can see only a twilight view of the table, the cups, the stenographer with her leg crossed over the other, light shining hard off her shoes.

  “The state asks for thirteen life sentences,” says the assistant prosecutor, and there is a wrinkle on Charles Cullen’s brow, a flexed cheek enunciating “thirteen,” then the blankness returns, and there is again just what Cullen can see in front of him: the wooden table, the stack of pastel Dixie cups, a black plastic pitcher, and beyond, lit by her own little spotlight of halogen, the stenographer, her hands bouncing like puppets. And then Judge Armstrong is asking if the defendant has anything to say on his own behalf, anything at all about these horrendous crimes against man and nature, and the stenographer’s hands stop and wait. Cullen has no comment. With a rap of the gavel and screeching of chairs, it is over. Charles Cullen is hustled into a back room with men in riot gear holding automatic weapons, then he is gone, leaving behind a courtroom full of questions.

  AS FAR AS THE LAW IS CONCERNED, there isn’t much left for Cullen to say. On December 12, 2003, Cullen was brought in for one first-degree murder and one attempted murder as a critical-care nurse at Somerset Medical Center in Somerville. The next day, he shocked Somerville detectives by confessing to many more murders. Cullen told detectives that he killed the sick in order to end their suffering, but at some point, as Cullen spiked bags of IV saline in supply closets and killed patients who were not terminal, his compassion became compulsion, and when his personal life became stressful, killing became his outlet.

  Exactly how many patients he murdered, we will never know: His memory of his crimes, he says, “is foggy,” and he drank heavily to make it foggier. He worked graveyard shifts in intensive-care units, largely unsupervised in a dark punctuated only by the beeps and breaths of medical machines. Many of the medical charts are missing or incomplete; the dead are now dust. His method was to overdose with drugs so common that sorting Cullen’s private death toll from the general cadence of hospital mortality is nearly impossible.

  Cullen guessed that he had killed 40 people. So far, investigators have positively identified 29 victims (confirmation of a 30th victim is currently pending). It’s unlikely that the tally will ever be complete; even Cullen’s lawyer, Johnnie Mask, told prosecutors they weren’t finished. Some investigators with an intimate knowledge of the case are convinced that the real number is over 300. By that reckoning, Charles Cullen would be the biggest serial killer in American history.

  After Cullen was arrested, New Jersey prosecutors agreed to take the death penalty off the table in exchange for his full cooperation. Cullen would help identify his dead, then spend the rest of his life in prison. He was 44 years old.

  Months turned to years at the Somerville jail, and Charles Cullen’s life assumed a regularity he had rarely known as a free man. He had his cell, his spy novels, time to exercise or shower. Uniformed men turned the light off and on, governing day from night. Once a week, he met with his Catholic deacon or the head chaplain, the Reverend Kathleen Roney, and every so often, he never knew when, the guards would escort him across the lawn to the prosecutor’s office, to pull through the case files.

  Cullen studied the scrawled medical charts, the arrhythmic EKGs, the final flatlines, and the blood work afterward—the primary investigator in the search for his own victims. There were new charts nearly every week, boxes of them, covering sixteen years of death at nine hospitals. Winter became spring and winter again, but Cullen just kept squirreling through the files with a cup of black coffee, getting thinner, getting it done; eventually, when the investigations were closed and the shouting echoed out, he could take his life sentences into a cell and disappear completely.

  Then in August 2005, an envelope arrived at the Somerville jail. By now, Cullen was inured to the interview requests and the hate mail, even the odd “fan letter.” He never answered any of them, of course, but this was something new—a story about a man named Ernie Peckham, clipped with kitchen scissors from a local
newspaper on Long Island. In the margin was a note in a girlish cursive: “Can you help?”

  Cullen knew about Ernie—a guy about ten years younger than Cullen, with four kids and a wife at home and a job shaping metal in Farmingdale. Ernie was the brother of Cullen’s estranged ex-girlfriend, who was the mother of Cullen’s youngest child—a little girl he had never seen. Maybe he and Ernie had said hi once at a wedding years ago; Cullen couldn’t recall, but they weren’t friends, they weren’t even acquaintances, they certainly weren’t close enough to share organs. But an organ is what Ernie Peckham needed.

  DOCTORS DON'T KNOW exactly how or when, but at some point in 2002, Ernie contracted strep. Probably it was just a little scratch that got infected, the sort of thing that either swells up and goes away or takes you out for a week with a sore throat that can be treated with a dose of antibiotics. But Ernie didn’t notice the infection, and it spread, overloading the microscopic filters in both of his kidneys.

  Normally, these filters would have been removing toxins from Ernie’s blood; now they were like a sink clogged with hair. Ernie’s body began to bloat with its own poisons, swelling his hands and face and turning his urine the color of cocoa. By the time he saw a doctor, his kidneys were dead. Untreated, he’d be next. Doctors could filter Ernie’s blood three times a week with dialysis, but this was a stopgap measure; what Ernie really needed was a new kidney. Unfortunately, so did 60,000 other Americans. As Ernie’s health deteriorated, the seven-year waiting list for a cadaver donor would become a death sentence.