The Valley of the Shadow of Death

by Kermit Alexander

  It was Ida who set up the crime for money to feed her crack habit, then “maliciously” lied on the stand to gain immunity.

  Ida and Lisa were spiders, who “weave a very intricate web so they can move about silently and feed on their prey.” Ida had the gun in the van “ready to take action.” Ida had driven the neighborhood for twenty years and wouldn’t have needed CW’s simple directions that morning. From start to finish Ida and Lisa did far more than Horse.

  CW did not kill anyone. Other than a mangled bullet that couldn’t be conclusively linked to any firearm, every intact bullet came from the rifle fired by Cox. CW did not go past the porch, and if he did, he quickly ran out. Therefore, they argued, CW had no intent to kill, and if he ever did, he abandoned it when he fled the house. They pled with the jurors not to let emotion cloud their vision as finders of fact.

  The police coerced a confession from CW, threatening him with the death penalty. Mr. Norris was dangerous, because he was “above average as a prosecutor,” and as the old adage goes, “Any ordinary prosecutor can convict the guilty, but it takes a brilliant one to convict the innocent.”

  They concluded with CW’s community service, working with “disturbed kids and people,” calling the crime “contradictory to his mental setup.” “Who could work with kids,” they asked, “and then come in and help someone put a slug in the head of two small children? That is repulsive. I don’t see how that could have happened.”

  * * *

  Norris, dismissing the Ida as Ma Barker theory, concluded:

  Now that multimillion-dollar lawsuit is the reason and the motive. CW’s statements verify that. He wants to put it on Horse and Fee. The evidence tells you that is not so, it is he who set it up, he who had the connection, and he who made the money transactions, got the rest of them the money.

  Defense counsel at one point made an argument here that this is a great tragedy that this happened, that the four of these people are dead. And I think when you look at that, the greatest tragedy would be to let any of these three escape for their acts on that August day of 1984. . . .

  They came down on an American street and annihilated a whole family. Now, that is an American tragedy.

  * * *

  Williams was convicted on December 15, 1986, on four counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances.

  On June 2, 1987, the jury, after taking three votes, recommended death in the gas chamber.

  Sterling Norris told the press that the verdict was deserved. Although it was unclear whether Williams fired any of the shots, he was the “go between, who was hired for $50,000 to $60,000 to arrange the killings.”

  Press reports from the day after sentencing stated: “Prosecutors believe that the Alexander family members were murdered by mistake, after the contract killers went to the wrong address. The individual believed to have masterminded the killings has never been charged, but the investigation remains open, Norris said.”

  Defense attorney H. Clay Jacke Jr. said his client should have been spared the death penalty.

  “I thought that his prior activities in the community were such as to have entitled him to the benefit of the doubt,” Jacke said. “He had worked with kids, and with youth movements and disturbed children and had gotten all kinds of awards.”

  As for my family, we were relieved, both with the verdict and the fact that, nearly three years after the crime, the trials were finally over. And with Williams, as with Cox, we had no doubt.

  Williams’s entire defense mirrored his taped interrogation. Everyone but him, SOD, always Some Other Dude: not CW, but Little CW, Cox, Horse, Ida, Lisa, the coercive detectives, and the dangerous DA. And even if it was him, it wasn’t really him, because that him was so high, because those drugs made him “uncharacteristically” act like some other dude.

  CW’s defense also lacked logic or consistency: He never left the van, but if he did he only went on the porch, unless he went into the house, in which case he didn’t fire any shots, nor did he intend to kill when he entered the house, but if he did, he stopped intending when Cox started shooting, and he ran out the door. Ida and Lisa clearly lacked clean hands, accomplices not angels. But this in no way cleared CW, whose own words proved his guilt.

  CW’s child care struck me as a farce or a front. Rolling Sixties Day Care. To the extent it was true, it smelled of the same hypocrisy of Cox and his mother, a gangster protecting his own while destroying others. Scraps of Tiequon’s humanity earn him our mercy, CW’s service calls for our grace. The jury may consider the killers’ finest hours, but must put emotion aside when it comes to the victims. Consider the children he served; ignore those who died by his hand.

  * * *

  The Burns case shined a light inside the “death van” and pierced the violent world of the Rolling Sixties. Cox’s trial showed the making of a killer. Williams’s case revealed the motive.

  After the Williams conviction, my family knew definitively that we were hit by complete accident. This brought at least factual clarity.

  As Los Angeles County District Attorney Ira Reiner wrote:

  We know from the admission of [Darren Charles Williams] that the killings were the result of a businessman hiring these three to kill a woman in a wheelchair only two houses from the Alexander house; the woman was paralyzed as a result of an incident in the businessman’s restaurant. She had filed a lawsuit for several million dollars. They picked the wrong house and killed four uninvolved persons.

  But despite this courtroom closure, cosmically, I was left adrift. The convictions restored no meaning to my life. In fact, following the trials, I felt more confused than ever.

  They hit the wrong house. What a symptom of a world gone mad. Armed thugs fearlessly invade a family home at daybreak, the home Madee could not bear to leave, the one that overwhelmed Gordon, brought him to his hands and knees to kiss the floor in thanks. Twenty years ago it symbolized our arrival, now our demise.

  Back on an autumn night in ’83, a fuse was lit in a nightclub on South Vermont. Unknown to us, this set in motion a chaotic chain of events that would lead a killer to our home. Had anything broken that chain—the fight in the bar, the filing of the lawsuit, Jack’s connection to CW, CW’s relationship to Cox, Madee’s refusal to move, my having overslept, CW’s misreading of the address—destiny would have been altered. Every detail had to align, fall just so, to produce this tragedy.

  By the cruel ways of fate, a succession of mistakes crashed through our door that hot August morning.

  Some kind of evil had been unleashed.

  And deep within, I wondered if I was a cause.

  Was the source to be found on that field in Watts years before, or did it all start when Valarie Taylor danced?

  33

  TO REIGN IN HELL

  ON JULY 29, 1987, a year after Tiequon Cox’s arrival, Darren Charles Williams joined him on “East Block Condemned.” Unknown at the time, this would remake the face of death row.

  Prison is a secret and insular world, marked by its own internal codes. Death row is a subculture deep within this subculture, defying even the norms of the general prison population.

  The major prison gangs operating nationwide in both the federal and state systems all started in California during the radicalized political atmosphere of the late 1960s. Formed out of the anticapitalist, black power rhetoric of the Black Panther Party, George Jackson founded the Black Guerrilla Family while in Soledad State Prison. The Black Guerrilla Family, or BGF, sought to unify black inmates throughout the California prison system. Touting Maoist economics and a militant radical ideology, the BGF became feared not only within California’s prisons, but, due to its reach, outside prison walls.

  With even violent felons serving short prison terms in the late 1960s and early 1970s (for example, during this time seven years was the average term served for murder), members of BGF were consistently being cycled in and out of the prison system and then spreading the word on the streets. And with the ab
ility to communicate with the outside, even incarcerated inmates could exert their will on the streets through a network of drug dealers, hit men, and cronies.

  At the same time that the Black Guerrilla Family formed, other races started their own prison gangs for purposes of unity, protection, and profit. White inmates organized under the banner of the Aryan Brotherhood, while Mexican inmates, depending on their region of origin, aligned with the Mexican Mafia (Southern California), Nuestra Familia (Northern California), or the Texas Syndicate. While all of these prison gangs adhered to notions of racial solidarity, they would ultimately operate as surprisingly sophisticated organized crime syndicates, with one overarching goal: monetary gain.

  Cashing in on narcotics sales, the organized prison gangs often betray racial solidarity in the name of profit. Smuggling drugs and money in and out of even maximum-security prisons, death row and supermax life-term inmates control extensive drug networks worth millions of dollars. Via visitors, compromised guards, attorneys, and outside supporters, the drugs, money, and cell phones flow.

  As many ex–prison gang members will confess when they “debrief,” telling the authorities what they know upon renouncing membership, the loyalty in prison gangs is as porous and situational as in the street gangs where many cut their teeth. If the profits and control of the high-ranking “made” members of the prison gangs are compromised, a hit is ordered. At this moment the veneer of racial solidarity shatters. Many foreswearing membership found the prison gang a violent, paranoid, and brutal façade. While the image of blacks versus whites versus Mexicans rides the surface, most prison gang assaults are committed against members of one’s own race. Race is trumped by profitable narcotics networks. It is therefore not race so much as challenges to control that trigger violent retaliation.

  While such prison gangs and their progeny infect the California prison system, death row runs by different rules. On East Block, where the majority of California’s death row inmates are housed, only a small number of condemned inmates are known to have traditional prison gang affiliation.

  On death row, condemned inmates with gang affiliations retain their street gang loyalties. East Block death row inmates are allowed four to five hours of yard time four days per week. There are six yards, each forty feet long by twenty feet wide. Concrete walls twelve feet high, topped by ten feet of metal fencing and crowned by razor wire, surround the death row yards. Armed guards patrol elevated walkways overlooking the yards. Painted numbers line the concrete walls so the exact location of shots fired at prisoners can be calculated after a shooting. Until the late 1990s death row inmates were allowed to lift weights in the yards.

  The yards are separated by metal wire fencing. This allows inmates in adjacent yards to communicate, but not physically interact with each other. The yards are segregated according to affiliation and statuses. One yard is for Bloods, two for Crips, one for the “unaffiliated,” another for pedophiles.

  In 1987, after CW’s arrival on death row, he and Cox ran Yard Two, “the Rolling Sixties Yard.” They ruled in tandem, said a prison guard. Cox-Williams was a “two-headed monster.” Stanley “Tookie” Williams, founder of the West Side Crips, in prison for a quadruple homicide committed in 1979, ran Yard One.

  In 1988 Tookie Williams sought to unite all death row Crips under one organization, the “Blue Note Crips,” to be run by him. As the number of Crips serving long sentences increased in the 1970s and 1980s, various efforts were made to fuse and politicize the gang behind bars. Titled either Blue Note or Consolidated Crip Organization (CCO), the agenda included literacy, an immersion in black history, African roots, the Swahili language, and the classics of power politics: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Machiavelli’s The Prince, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Discipline, power, respect, and control were paramount. Aspects of radical Islam also found their way into this philosophical jumble.

  In October 1988, Tookie Williams’s agenda clashed with that of Cox and CW. Through the grapevine of East Block Condemned, Tookie got word to Cox that CW was planning to put out a hit on Cox, an attempt to break the bond between his rivals. Cox and CW huddled, deriving a plan.

  On October 23, while “out on yard,” Tiequon Cox concealed a shank, a homemade jailhouse weapon. When Tookie Williams left his yard, Cox stabbed him in the back of the neck.

  The incident was seen as a blessing by death row staff. For Tookie Williams not only intended to bring all condemned Crips under his wing, but sought to do the same with the Bloods. In the unique internals of death row, Bloods and Crips may unite, or at least lay down their arms, posing together for photos or politicking on death row yards. Thus prison guards feared a consolidation of condemned black gangsters and welcomed the rift.

  The feud also marked a changing of the guard. The Rolling Sixties were the new generation. According to one prison official, “the Sixties were like the Black Guerrilla Family on steroids.” Freed from political positions, or delusions of representing a civil rights agenda or community action group, the new gangs ran without restriction. Moral codes and ideologies were abandoned. “Power to the People” became “I don’t give a fuck.” And as the suicide bomber is made more lethal with no concern for survival or escape, the lack of goal or vision frees the new-breed gangster to rage uncontrolled. And if “civilians” got in the way, too bad, “collateral damage,” or as Horse said, “just something that happened.”

  The stabbing landed Tookie Williams and Tiequon Cox in the AC. And in the upside-down world of the gang, it made Cox a celebrity. Sixties on “the row,” in the general prison pop, and back in Hyde Park cheered their young star who dared take down the king. Despite killing women and children, this cemented his legacy, OG to the max.

  Like Satan in Paradise Lost, Tiequon Cox would rather “reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.”

  34

  I CANNOT FORGIVE THE CHOICE

  AS TIEQUON COX mastered death row, I struggled to keep it together.

  In a way we shared lives again. We were both outcasts. Tiequon Cox was locked up in San Quentin. I became a loner and drifter.

  With all the defendants behind bars, there was relief, but no joy.

  I felt justice served. The shooter and the one who planned the hit had earned the death penalty, and Burns, for his role, a life behind bars.

  But nothing could bring back the departed. And nothing could bring back my old life. I had gone from professional athlete to professional victim. I was now defined by the murders. I was drained by them. I felt old.

  It was ironic. Every day as the trials plodded I couldn’t wait for them to end. Boring, procedural, passive, questions, answers, interruptions, waiting, recess, waiting, deliberations, jury questions, more waiting. It was claustrophobic, shut in that hot courtroom with the killers, uncomfortable with much of my family, listening to the killings replayed day after day. But for the last three years the trials became an obsession. And they provided a goal: do what we could to get the killers convicted.

  Now what? Now that they were finally over, I had no idea what to do with myself. I sure didn’t miss going to court. I just didn’t know how to fill the void.

  I tried coaching some youth teams here and there, and worked a series of mindless jobs. I had no motivation. I no longer saw possibilities. I just couldn’t visualize a future, or anything that could bring peace or contentment. I couldn’t imagine deliverance. Much of the time I spent brooding, cycles of anger, guilt, and sorrow.

  In the early nineties, I moved to Riverside, California, to be near my father, who was seriously ill. Madee was taken without a chance to say goodbye. I wasn’t going to let that happen again.

  This period of time, the 1990s, became my lost decade, consumed by alternating bouts of listlessness and rage.

  I was lost, stuck in an existential crisis in which nothing made sense. My lifelong pillars were gone. I fought the constant urge to call Madee. I wanted her advice on how to cope with her murder. Nor could I pray or find solace in God. The trust
was gone. How had He allowed this to happen?

  Likewise, if I thought of actually achieving anything, I looped back to how I would share it with Madee—again an impossible set of thoughts.

  And my family, the sense of anchor and camaraderie, was gone. The scars over the accusations of my role in the murders had never healed. While the family sat together at trial to face down the killers, this was just short-term unity against the common enemy. Once the trials ended, so did the contact.

  My marriage disintegrated as I grew ever more distant and unreachable. After divorce, I seldom saw my kids.

  I was walling myself off from everyone.

  In the coming years, if I did see my family it was through the DA, Sterling Norris, as he briefed us on the ongoing appeals of Cox and Williams, told us how to get copies of their trial transcripts, updated us on the state of the law, and on strategies going forward.

  * * *

  On May 2, 1991, the California Supreme Court affirmed Tiequon Cox’s conviction and death sentence.

  The court dismissed issues based upon faulty jury selection, including the claim that the prosecutor used peremptory challenges to eliminate jurors reluctant to impose the death penalty.

  As to the guilt phase, the court ruled that the trial judge erred in allowing Cox to be physically restrained. They found the error, however, to be harmless, as it did not cause the jurors to prejudicially view the defendant. The court further held that Cox’s counsel, Cook, was justified in bringing the situation to the judge’s attention, and that it did not constitute a conflict of interest between counsel and client.

  The California Supreme Court also rejected arguments that Cook was ineffective in his representation of Cox by failing to challenge the jury venire (pool), and bringing evidence of Cox’s gang affiliation before the jury. Further, the court found that allowing “gruesome” autopsy photos of the victims to go before the jury did not constitute judicial error. Finally, the court rejected the argument that Cook’s failure to present a guilt-phase defense or to even make an argument was “tantamount to a guilty plea.”