In with the Devil

by James Keene

  Keene nodded sympathetically, but inside he was thinking, “Not if I can help it.” He had now been in Springfield for nearly two months, and his freedom was as close as Larry Hall, but mornings with the Oddfather were not helping him get out any sooner. Keene was desperate to find time alone with Hall. For a while, all he could do was lag behind in the dining hall after breakfast as the old man made his way to the boccie court with his crew. Once the mobsters were out of sight, Jimmy grabbed a tray and joined Hall at his table, but Larry was clearly bent out of shape by the new seating arrangements. Besides, they never had more than five or ten minutes together before Hall had to get up and leave.

  When Keene could break away from Gigante, he tried to shadow Hall during the day to find any other opportunities to meet him outside of the library. But if Larry had any spare time, he tended to spend it in the wood shop, where Jimmy was not yet allowed. Keene was mystified by what attracted him there. Watching Hall from the doorway, it appeared that he was always working on the same project—a small wooden bird that looked like a falcon.

  Finally, Larry again provided an unexpected opening. One day as Jimmy was jumping up from his second breakfast with Hall to join Gigante outside, he said, “Larry, I’ll see you later at the library.”

  “You know, James,” Hall replied, “if you want, you can start meeting me and my friends in the little TV room on Saturday nights where we watch America’s Most Wanted.”

  Keene nodded and tried not to look too enthusiastic, but he was bubbling inside. “As crazy as it sounds,” he says, “that show was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.”

  If Hall had not invited him first, Keene would never have thought to look for him in that room. It was hardly bigger than a cell with just a few dozen chairs crammed inside. A TV with a screen the size of an old-fashioned portable’s was bolted to a metal cart by the door. Although it blared during the day, Keene did not think that anyone bothered to watch it at night since two much larger areas had bigger-screen TVs—one was controlled by the black inmates and the other by the whites. But none of the “programmers” for those rooms liked to watch America’s Most Wanted. Larry and his friends had to make do with this tiny TV.

  Hall and the three other “Baby Killers” usually sat in the middle of the room a few rows from the front. A smattering of other inmates were scattered around the remaining chairs. The first night he joined them, Keene sat right next to Larry, but if he thought there would be any time to chat, he was mistaken. “Once the show came on,” he says, “it was like Larry was in his own little world. That screen was all he could see. When he got up to leave, I don’t think we said any more to each other than we did at the library.”

  Keene still forced himself to show up the next week. He nearly fell out of his chair after the credits rolled and he saw the topic of the week—serial killers. It was the first in a series of four hour-long shows. Hall had never talked about why he was in prison to Jimmy, and Keene could not act as though he knew. For the first part of the show, Jimmy stared straight ahead at the screen and looked at Hall out of the corner of his eye. “Larry was absolutely mesmerized,” he says. “And all the time I’m thinking, ‘How can I use this stuff to get him to open up without scaring him?’ ”

  That moment seemed to come near the end of the episode when the parents of a missing victim—like the Reitlers—pleaded for the killer to tell them where he’d buried their daughter. At the next commercial break Jimmy decided to make his move. “You know, if I was the guy that killed them girls,” he said, “I’d just tell everybody where l left them.”

  Hall, his eyes wide, turned from the TV screen to Jimmy. “You would?”

  “Why not give the families some kind of closure?” Keene replied. “Let the parents give their daughter a proper burial and ease their pain. It’s not like I’m ever getting out of prison.” Jimmy then remembered the cross on Hall’s wall and that he went to church most Sunday mornings. “At least this way I’d find some kind of peace with God and try and redeem myself.”

  Hall nodded, but turned his head back to the screen.

  Keene figured he would not push too hard. They had three more shows to watch, which were sure to give them opportunities for more discussion. When Keene arrived the next Saturday, he found the same sparse audience—the Baby Killers and a handful of other inmates. But just ten minutes into the program, a muscular black prisoner barreled into the room. Keene instantly recognized him. “He was the kind of belligerent guy who was always getting into fights over stupid things. They probably threw him out of the black TV room. When he came in and took a look at us, he decided we weren’t going to watch our show either.”

  Without a word of explanation he clicked the television off, then, in a huff, sat down in the chair directly in front of it. Keene heard Hall mumble under his breath, “That ain’t cool. We were watching that show,” but he and the others remained motionless, staring at the blank screen. Keene says, “I realized that this was my opportunity to show Larry I could be his buddy and even his protector in that place.”

  Jimmy jumped up, pushed through the chairs to the television, and turned it back on. Then the black inmate was on his feet and clicked it off again, saying, “White boy, you better not touch it or you’ll have a problem.”

  Keene looked him straight in the eye, reached over to the set, and clicked it on. As soon as the intruder pulled back to swing, Jimmy nailed him with four quick punches to the face. When he sprawled back over the chairs, Keene jumped on top of him, stomping his head and chest. He still hadn’t finished when the alarm sounded and a squad of guards bull-rushed into the room, sending stackable chairs flying in all directions. They threw Keene up against one wall and his opponent against another. After they shook Keene down for weapons, they put him in cuffs and shoved him out of the room.

  They marched him down into the tunnel, past the stairs he would take to the dining hall, then much farther than he had ever been allowed to go on his own, until they reached the double gates of the infamous 10 Building—where they kept the most unmanageable psychiatric prisoners—and, in the farthest wing, the hole. The guards opened a metal door, removed his cuffs, and shoved him inside. “Their hole,” Keene says, “is a dark, nasty cement box with no window and just a toilet and a metal slab for a bed. In Springfield, they actually had moisture seeping out of the walls, like a dungeon in the old movies.”

  He stayed up pacing through the night, wondering if he had overplayed his hand by getting into a fight. The FBI agents and chief psychiatrist had specifically warned him against doing that. In this case, it would be hard to prove he acted in self-defense. The other man in the fight didn’t land a punch, but still got hammered pretty badly by Keene.

  Shortly after dawn, the flap on the lower opening of his door was lifted up and his breakfast tray shoved through. On the other side of the door he heard a guard bark, “James, the hearing on your assault is at nine. We’ll come by and get you, so be ready.”

  Keene was happy that it came so quickly, but then, he says, “I started to get real paranoid. If an assault went on my jacket [or file folder], and if I didn’t get anywhere with Hall, they could send me back to Milan having to do more time and not less.”

  For the hearing, Jimmy was outfitted with shackles and a harness belt to go with his cuffs, then seated in front of a panel of six men and women in business attire. Before the panel asked Keene for his side of the story, a correctional officer presented them with the results of his investigation. “Lucky for me,” Jimmy says, “all of them serial killers stuck up for me and said the other guy started the whole thing.” The panel released Keene from the hole the following day with no further mention about the incident on his record.

  The next time Keene saw the chief psychiatrist, he told Jimmy that he was aware of the fight. “I won’t let anything negative get put in your jacket,” he said, “but if this happens again, they’ll look at you like any other inmate who keeps getting in fights, and they’re going to be t
otally against you. I don’t know how long they’ll keep you in the hole before they let you out.”

  But despite the potential long-term risk, Keene found that the battle for America’s Most Wanted won him major gratitude from Larry and his friends. Absolutely no one had ever stood up for them before. The dividends paid out the following Saturday night when, for the first time, Hall invited Jimmy back to his cell after the TV show was over.

  For any visitor from outside the prison, Larry’s living space would not have seemed like much, but in those tiny confines, Jimmy saw trappings that only came with longevity and privilege. He was most impressed by Hall’s atmospheric lighting. “One of the most depressing things about prison is how bright they make it in your cell—like you’re a piece of meat in a display case. But Hall had a dimmer bulb for one light and had the other one turned off completely. That really made things much more comfortable; very homey and lived-in.” To complement the soft lighting, Larry muffled the legs of his chair with tennis balls that had been sliced in half, so he could push back and forth while seated without the same screech everyone else experienced.

  Hall also had more displayed on his walls than the typical prisoner, most notably the cross. Such displays of spiritual devotion were only allowed by the chaplain if they were backed up by active churchgoing. On closer inspection, Keene could see the cross was made of hand-decorated construction paper—probably because a real crucifix of that size could have been used as a weapon. The pictures on display were mostly of family members: the identical twin, Gary, who looked nothing like Larry, and a hunched-over elderly couple, who Jimmy was surprised to learn were his parents. They appeared old enough to be his grandparents. If Hall spoke of anyone in his family, it was his twin. “My brother would do anything for me and I would do anything for him,” Larry told Keene. “If he could, he would switch places with me.”

  Keene also noticed the piles of magazines and stacks of books on Hall’s shelves, more reading material than he had ever before seen in one man’s cell. The goggles and gloves Hall needed for his various janitorial jobs hung from special hooks, and his closet was filled from one side to the other with neatly hung clothes. In comparison, Keene says, “My place looked pretty barren.”

  More than anything, Hall’s cell permitted them to have the sort of discussion they couldn’t have anywhere else in the prison. Usually Keene sat in the chair while Larry leaned back on his bunk. Conversation came easier for Hall if it dealt with any of his passions, such as the Civil War, Indian lore, or vintage cars. “I know his lawyer made him out to be a borderline retard,” Keene says, “but he was not dumb. Not at all. There were things he discussed in history that I really didn’t have a clue about. But there were more things where he was totally ignorant. He just wasn’t what you would call a well-rounded person.”

  Despite the breakthrough he had made, Keene would not report it to Butkus or the chief psychiatrist—afraid that they would think he was moving too fast. He could only confide in Big Jim, and that had its own drawbacks. Despite some lingering shakiness from the stroke, his father could not stay away from his son for long. Although everyone back home tried to talk him out of it, he drove eight hours to Springfield so he could make at least one personal visit with Jimmy and see the Medical Center for himself. Meanwhile, they continued to talk every day, but just once and usually at night. Knowing their calls could be monitored, Jimmy tried to say just enough to let Big Jim know he was making progress. “I’m finally gaining grounds on this situation,” he told him one night.

  But his worried father quickly scolded him, “I hope you’re not talking to this guy yet. Remember what Beaumont said. Son, you’re not supposed to be talking to this guy yet.”

  Keene shot back, “I’m not supposed to be talking to you about this either. I just want you to know things are moving in the right direction.”

  After a pause, Big Jim asked, “So are you really talking to this guy?”

  “Dad, please. We can’t talk about it.”

  “Well, I’m not the one talking about it,” Big Jim shot back. “You’re the one talking about it.”

  Although Jimmy had moved faster than anyone thought he could in gaining Hall’s trust, he was not going to blow it now. He would take as much time as necessary for Larry to confide in him. Mostly Keene talked about normal life on the outside the way he did at the breakfast table. If he was to bring up anything about Hall’s crimes, it would have to be prompted by something Larry said first. “Since he was the one who asked me to watch America’s Most Wanted with him, I felt I could talk to him about the serial killers and not make him suspicious.” As they sat under the cross in Hall’s cell, Keene says, “I tried to play the religion card. I’d say, ‘That guy on the show’s done what he’s done, but he can still be redeemed.’ And then Larry would ask, ‘Do you believe that somebody could be redeemed for that?’ And then I’d quote him something that I remembered from Scripture, like, ‘Let the wicked man forsake his ways, and return unto the Lord, and He will have mercy upon him.’ ”

  But Hall would just nod in response and the conversations would go no further. If anything, the Bible talk would shut him down more than it opened him up, and Keene wondered whether religion had become another hiding place for Hall instead of a way to cleanse his soul.

  Besides, the biggest problem in Hall’s life was not the spirit, but the flesh. “Larry had so many mixed and conflicting emotions about women, it wasn’t even funny,” Keene says. The mere suggestion that his magazines were porn sent him into paroxysms of head-spinning giggles. “If I said anything about naked women, he would go all weird—like a kid who just hit puberty. This was obviously a guy who had never had consensual sex with a girl in his life.”

  In trying to get inside Larry’s head, Keene thought back to a friend in high school. “He was a little outcast guy himself and everybody used to mess with him, until I took him under my wing and forbid anybody from touching him. It’s not that he was a screwup. In fact, he was pretty smart, and he could be very funny. And he wasn’t really that much of a nerd either. Instead, all of his problems revolved around girls and how awkward he was with them. Like we used to say, he was one of those guys who couldn’t get laid if he had a hundred dollars in a whorehouse. There was truly nothing he could do to make girls like him or even talk to him. Some would go out of their way to mistreat him, and I could understand how he came to hate them. So I started to think it was the same way with Larry. I tried to feel his pain.”

  With this in mind, Keene began what he called his “girl bashing.” If in a conversation he mentioned an old girlfriend, he would add how badly things turned out with her. “You know,” he told Hall, “I can understand where a guy could be pushed to the edge with a girl.” A few days later he added, “There are girls out there who use you for money, shit all over you, and then run off with your best friend.”

  Each time he said these things, he could see lights go off in Hall’s eyes. “It was like pushing buttons on a robot.” Finally, one night Larry did some bashing of his own: “Ever since I’ve been a young boy, girls have rejected me. I’d try to be nice to them, James. I really would. But they always treated me like shit.”

  None of these slights ever rolled off his back. He would go on and on about a girl who would not respond after he said hello, another he thought had laughed at him, or a cousin who had complained to her parents that he looked at her the wrong way.

  Even as Hall felt free to reveal his inner misogyny to Keene, he came nowhere close to discussing what he had done to women in return or even admitting why he was in prison. “He would just out and out lie to me,” Keene says. “He tried to tell me that he was a weapons runner—just like I was supposed to be. And you only had to talk to him for a minute before you realized that he didn’t know anything about guns. He didn’t even admit that he had a life sentence. He would tell me that he was in for forty years, which doesn’t seem like a big difference on the outside but is night and day from a life sentence
for a convict.”

  Keene now spent his mornings with Gigante stamping out the damp autumn cold on the boccie court. He had hoped to be home for Christmas with Big Jim, but as he got deeper into October, that seemed impossible. If anything, Jimmy says, “I could feel the walls were closing in on me.”

  While the Feds had preached patience, two incidents convinced him that the longer he stayed in Springfield, the more he would be in danger. The first was a fight. Like the one he had had with the alphabet gang in Milan, this scrap was totally senseless and as unexpected as a flash of lightning. Once again, it all started innocently enough. In the never-ending bazaar of prison barter, Keene had gotten a pair of wraparound Koss headphones from a six-foot-eight-inch biker. Supposedly, he had killed several people in Iowa while high on crystal meth. He had the same lanky, muscular build that Clint Eastwood had in his prime, with funky spiderweb tattoos around both elbows. His pockmarked, beet-red face looked as if it had been dragged over concrete. “The headphones were cool,” Jimmy says, “but like everything else that you get in prison, they were a piece of shit.” In exchange, Keene only had to buy the biker $10 of requested merchandise from the commissary.

  No matter their cost, the headphones still brought admiring looks from other inmates—especially a long-haired hippie who fancied himself the prison’s go-to guy for “imported” paraphernalia, like Morgan Freeman’s character in Shawshank Redemption. Jimmy readily told him where he had gotten the headphones since the hippie appeared to be friendly with the biker.

  But later that day, when Keene returned to his cell, the biker was waiting for him inside, practically blocking out one of the lights with his towering height. He poked Jimmy’s chest with fingers that felt like lead pipes. “Why’s my name coming out of your mouth?” he screamed, eyes blazing and flecks of spit flying from his lips.