by Lee Barnett
‘Who the fuck do you think you are,’ one of them snapped, ‘saying that the convicts know all about the drugs?’
Uh-oh. This queen pin was really angry and no amount of trying to explain what I had really said worked.
‘You’re a fucking liar!’ she screeched, and the other girls joined in chanting, ‘Liar! Liar!’
I went back into my cell and Sally warned me that I needed to sort this out, and soon, or else I’d get my ass kicked. I decided that bullies were not going to make me say something I hadn’t said. This was meant to test me, I thought, and I would not break.
That following week was bad. I was shoved, laughed at and bumped while in line, enough to get the attention of a few officers. I told them everything was okay. The only person I really confided in was Cliff. One night I told him I thought they might kill me in here. I really was scared, but I wasn’t going to give in.
A couple of days after that, there was a knock on my cell door. It was one of the more vocal girls who had been giving me hell. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Come in.’ I could see her shuffling around like a little kid who wanted something but was afraid or didn’t know how to ask. ‘So, how can I help you?’ I said. After much preliminary umming and ahhing she wanted to know if I would help with her statement to the judge. ‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Have a seat and read me what you have so far.’
From that moment on the women accepted me. I helped most of the girls write or rewrite their statements and I loved doing it. These were poorly educated girls who were smart but who hadn’t had access to the trinity of good schools, good food and good parenting. And I encouraged all of the ladies to say just that when speaking to the judge. It was a sometimes sad but always rewarding part of my time at Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla.
At last, on one call to Patty she told me that my release date had been posted and it was 15 May 2015. From where, we still didn’t know. According to my fellow prisoners I would have to enter a federal prison – not just a federal holding prison – before I was able to be released.
After a week of us working on her statement, Sally had her plea hearing where she was sentenced to ten years, not the twenty-five she had been bracing for. I asked her why she looked so glum when this was good news, but she doubted that she’d still be alive after ten years. It was hard to say goodbye to her but after a month I was to be moved again, and again with no idea where that place might be. We were, in fact, driven to Atlanta airport, we thought to be put on a Con Air flight to Oklahoma. (Yes, there really is an airline called Con Air, just like the movie of the same name.) We pulled up to a smaller airfield close to Atlanta airport where we stayed in the van chained to one another for hours, and were fed soggy sandwiches. Then at last the van moved out onto the tarmac and three large Greyhound buses pulled up, though these weren’t like any Greyhound bus I had ever seen before. Inside, the bus was divided into cages, two bench seats per cage. I was put into the back seat of a cage still chained to my fellow prisoner, our legs were chained to the floor.
Eventully, an old white 727 landed. The only markings on the plane were a blue stripe on its fuselage and an American flag on its tail. When the door opened, eleven US marshals emerged armed with machine-guns or rifles. They circled the plane as if protecting the President of the United States before the prisoners exited and moved towards us. Wow, I said to my fellow inmate, there must be really bad people in that plane! I received a disgusted, condescending look, then she responded, ‘Federal prisoners just like us!’ Two girls in federal prison uniforms were also placed in our cage, one was African American–Hispanic and had a half-shaven head – she looked strong, very strong – while the other girl was loud, a real know-it all and covered in tattoos – and prison tattoos at that.
After the bus filled up, one girl shouted out to the one with the head half shaved, ‘Hey! Ain’t you getting out on May fifteen?’
‘You got that right!’ she yelled back.
And at that moment, honestly, I don’t know what came over me, but I blurted out, ‘Snap! Me too!’
The entire bus fell silent. All eyes turned to me. And the girl with the half-shaven head, who was only centimetres away gave me a look of pure poison. And, like an idiot, I sat there grinning from ear to ear. The moment was only seconds but it seemed to stretch for ages – me grinning, her staring – when a smile broke across her face. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘ain’t you the lady who stole her baby?’
‘Yes,’ I nodded enthusiastically. ‘That’s me.’
‘I just love you.’
We drove back in the direction we had come many hours before and turned off to the town of Lovejoy, Georgia. We entered the Robert A. Deyton Correctional Facility. It was cleaner and newer than the Irwin County Detention Center back in Ocilla. The cells had only two bunks, a sink and a toilet. The top bunk always got the brunt of the two-hourly checks by the officers and their torches. After more than a year I was still not used to sleeping through the checks despite my makeshift eye masks and earplugs.
My cellmate was Bonnie, a lovely young woman in her mid-twenties. She was there because some man in her life had persuaded her that credit card fraud was lucrative, which it was until she got caught. This prison’s outside area consisted of a space around 100 steps in circumference, with cement walls that were about four metres high, a basketball hoop and no roof. Bonnie and I would spend all the time we could out in the cement rec room sun-worshipping. We would pretend that we were at the beach, and even went so far as to mimic the sounds of waves crashing and seagulls squawking while dousing ourselves with salt water! During one of my calls to Gail I mentioned my disappearing muscle tone; it was then that she informed me she just discovered she had breast cancer and would soon start chemotherapy. How small my complaints were in comparison.
One of our unit mates was an interesting lady called Mrs Black. She was about my age, and she was blind. Mrs Black was highly intelligent and before you knew it I had told her my entire story. When I finished, I said for the life of me I couldn’t understand how Harris had the money to pay everyone off, if that was what happened. Mrs Black was silent for a few minutes then said, ‘Have you never heard of insider trading?’
I was there a few weeks before I was to be moved again. Patty told me I was headed for Tallahassee Federal Correctional Institution. She thought it looked tough, and that lots of women were in there for life, despite it being listed as a low–medium security prison. Why would I be put in with lifers? I wondered.
Tallahassee prison is surrounded by a huge chain-linked fence with multiple strands of razor wire and guards patrolling the grounds. Home sweet home. It was a different sort of home from the others, rumoured to have once been an old horse farm. Each unit housed eighty-four women all in a huge open-plan setting. It was one vast room chock-full of bunk beds.
I was wearing a temporary uniform so stood out like a sore thumb. There were at least thirty girls sitting on the top bunks when I entered the room and they quickly started chanting, ‘Snapped. Snapped. Snapped!’
What the hell?
I picked my way between the bunks until I reached the one allocated to me, and introduced myself to a plump black girl on the bottom bunk. ‘I’m Leslie,’ she replied, and indicated that I had the top bunk. I thanked her and started making my bed. ‘I’ll do that,’ she said. I told her thanks but no thanks, I was capable of making my own bed. I had also been around long enough to know you don’t ever want to owe any inmate a favour. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘If you fuck up inspection for us then your ass is grass.’ So I quickly relented and let Leslie make my bed. I realised that it gave her some control, something in short supply there. Before lights out I asked Leslie why everyone had chanted snapped at me. ‘’Cos of the TV show. The show about ladies that look normal like you and then they snap and murder someone.’
I tried to get acquainted with the unit and the rules in there, and to reacquaint myself with the person I now saw in the mirror – yes, that’s right, an actual mirror. To my horror I
saw that in the past seventeen months I had acquired a fair amount of grey hair. I also noticed how thin and pale I was from poor nutrition, inactivity and a lack of sunlight.
One morning while washing my face in the bathroom I looked up and saw a white woman with long grey hair and dead black eyes staring at me. Her eyes even rivalled Harris’s. She stood super super close to me, as if she was going to kiss me, and wore a rather demented smile. I said hi and she said hi back to me. Then I slowly moved away but she followed me.
Then she started talking in a rush. ‘You’re from Australia? My husband and I have a house in Australia. We have houses all around the world but the one in Australia is in Cairns.’ I knew by the way she pronounced Cairns that she wasn’t familiar with the city. She then said she visited there at least once a year.
She was very odd indeed, and I wanted her away from me. I moved to the phones, but she followed me there. I moved to my bed and she followed me there too. At last she finally got the hint and left me alone. The girl on the next top bunk reassured me that this woman gave most people the creeps and that while she’d likely latch onto me for a few days, she’d soon get bored. She was a lifer and her name was Narcy Novack.
‘I’ve heard that name,’ I said.
‘You should have. She orchestrated the murder of her husband and mother-in-law. They were the heirs of the super rich Fontainebleau Hotel owner in Miami.’
‘Wasn’t there a movie about that with Rob Lowe?’
‘That’s the one,’ she said knowingly. And she told me the story of how Narcy’s husband’s eyes had been gouged out. Damn! Narcy had alleged that her own daughter was responsible for the killings, and yet that daughter and her children went on to inherit everything.
I gave a small smile and rolled over, placing my blanket over my head. So much for being in a camp, I thought.
I began to exercise every chance I could get. In a short couple of weeks, exercise, sunlight and some okay food started to make me feel more human. My supervisor also let me do some maths tutoring for my work detail, which I loved. But by doing this I learned just what little self-worth these women had. It was all so sad. Maybe it hit me so hard, because I was reminded of how I had always doubted myself – maybe I still did, despite having the resilience to keep my head above water for more than two decades. Even so, I remain utterly convinced that, except for psychopaths and sociopaths, nearly every woman rotting away in prison doubts themselves and that doubt has more often than not sprung from toxic male influence. Nevertheless, relearning old high school maths side by side with these girls was a real highlight of my time in prison. And I saw how working out the formulas to solving problems gave them a real kick and some self worth, too.
One perk of federal prison was access to email – at a price – and Patty sent through all the email addresses of my friends. We weren’t allowed to make international phone calls so I sent an email to my father-in-law via Juan’s sister Annamare as soon as I could, telling him how much he was loved by us. Much to my dismay, he passed away just a few days later. If only I had been released two weeks earlier I could have told him directly over the phone how much he was loved and heard his voice one last time.
The days turned into weeks and my release date came ever closer. A plan took shape and it featured Patty, who was going to drive down from Charleston to pick me up. On the way back we would stop overnight in Fernandina Beach outside of Jacksonville, Florida, to rest. Patty had contacted the Federal Probation department and spoken to a super nice guy who was going to be my probation officer. He said that he was expecting me and that spending a night or two driving up to Charleston was okay. We were ready. I was beyond ready.
Around lunchtime on 14 May 2015, I was told the assistant warden wanted to see me.
No one was called up to the warden’s office for something trivial, especially not the day before their release. Had I done something wrong? Shit, there was that self-doubt again.
I made the long walk up to the administration office on shaky legs and was told to sit and wait. At last the assistant warden walked in and asked if I was Barnett.
I was a mess, and I knew it. My whole body trembled as I asked her if anything was wrong.
She explained that after fielding calls from around the world for interviews she was concerned about the potential media presence the next day. She had decided on a slight change of plan to avoid any spectacle. Originally I was supposed to be released around 10 a.m., but a group of Mexican prisoners was going to be released at 8 a.m., and I would now slip out with them. We called Patty there in the office to let her know, which was all fine. Then the warden told me not to breathe a word of this to anyone else.
When I got back to my unit most of the girls asked me what had happened. I was pretty sure plenty of them thought I was a snitch and had reported on them. So I told them the truth. Not one of them had ever heard of something like this being planned before, which then only served to make me even more nervous; I well knew by this time that the only thing that could be relied on in prison was what the girls told you.
At 4 p.m., I was called again to the assistant warden’s office, and again I was shaking. ‘I’ve spoken to the warden and we’ve now decided that you’ll leave after midnight instead of in the morning. We don’t want to take any chances.’ So we got Patty on the speakerphone to let her know of this new time and to instruct her that she was to wait in the car. ‘O-kay,’ she said hesitantly.
That evening I tried to read, sitting up each time an officer walked into the unit, thinking they were coming for me. Midnight came and went, head count was done and approved. I waited and waited. A little before 1 a.m. an officer came in. ‘Barnett, come with me and bring your stuff.’ I jumped up, only stopping long enough to give my bunkee a big hug.
Finally, at around 2 a.m., I stepped out into the almost moonless night. Once I was clearly outside, a car door opened and a light flicked on illuminating Patty. She came running towards me across the car park with outstretched arms. We hugged briefly as I looked around for a trap of some sort. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ I said.
Patty’s shakes were worse than mine as she tried to put the car in reverse. She had been waiting two hours and had thought they had changed their minds.
‘Please drive,’ I said. ‘I’m holding my breath until I can’t see the lights of this place anymore.’ We moved down the long driveway and onto the main road and I turned back to see the specks of light glistening off the razor wire as the prison slowly disappeared.
I glanced up at the stars and reminded myself that the last time I had seen them properly was in Australia. It had been 556 days since my arrest on the other side of the world. This number was significant for me in another way too: from the day that Harris walked out on me on 15 October 1992 to the day that Sammy and I escaped him and his helpers on 23 April 1994 was also 556 days.
28
Tallahassee, Florida to Charleston, South Carolina, US
May 2014
PATTY AND I WERE AS GIDDY AS TEENAGERS WHO HAD JUST TOILET-ROLLED their principal’s house.
She had two phones in the car and they both kept ringing. I spoke to Sammy, Reece, Gordon and Cliff. Sammy was worried because I was two hours later then she thought. I assured her I was fine. Cliff had all our mutual buddies from college with him and everyone was drinking and full of laughs, still up partying. Reece informed me he was coming over to South Carolina that summer to be a lifeguard before attending Auburn University, Alabama. Not long to wait until I can wrap my arms around him, I thought.
The motel room was beautiful, although Patty kept apologising that we would have to share. What a silly thing to say, I laughed. ‘At least we don’t have another eighty-two women with us!’
The phones kept ringing and then Patty squealed that Bruce was FaceTiming us. There was Bruce, his wife Judy and our dear friend Keri. We were all so thrilled and began talking over each other, mostly laughing at my prison experiences – the three of them in the brigh
t Queensland sunshine and the two of us in a darkened motel room. Then Bruce asked me if I remembered the GQ article and that Hans Paul had suicided. Of course I did.
He went on to say that a mate of his with some knowledge of forensics thought it highly unlikely that anyone would put a gun behind their ear to commit suicide. It was all far too much for me at 3 a.m. I realised I was beyond tired and that we should discuss it the next day.
Patty and I toasted my freedom and then she produced a bag filled with my belongings. It felt like Christmas as I looked at my clothes, purse, brush and wallet. There was no ID in the wallet. ‘Alex Geldenhuys is now dead and Lee Barnett will have to be reborn,’ I said softly. ‘Where did you get all this?’ I asked.
‘Sammy,’ she replied. ‘She thought of everything.’
The next morning I had an appointment with the hairdresser, a surprise paid for by Susan, which took ages. After that, on the way out of Tallahassee, we stopped at a Subway. Patty was disappointed that this was my first meal out, but I was one happy girl and told her so. At last we arrived at a beautiful hotel in Fernandina Beach, Patty led me to a stunning room before heading to hers. I asked if she wanted to share.
‘Heck no,’ she said. ‘It’s your first real night out of prison and you’re going to have a room to yourself. Oh, and by the way, there’s a free happy hour with snacks and drinks at five that we should aim for.’
‘Perfect. That’ll give me a couple of hours for calls.’
I pulled back the lush bedspread and opened the curtains for a stunning view of the harbour. I’m free, I said to myself, and I’m ready. Ready to face most things at least.